CULTURE, SOCIETY, POLITICS

Understanding Culture, Society, and Politics

* CULTURE
- as the sum of individual’s way of life, ranging from the food to eats, the clothes he or she
wear, and the house where he/she lives.
* SOCIETY
- as an organized groups of interdependent people who shared common territory, language, and
culture, and act together for collective survival and well being.
- The ways that people depend upon one another can be seen in different social features such
as;
• their economics
• communications
• and defense systems
*There can be no culture without a society
* POLITICS
- the theory, art, and practice of government.
- The institution of that sets up the social norms, and values that possess the monopoly of
legitimate use of physical force within a given territory, how that power is acquired and maintained and
how the that power is organized and exercise.
GOVERNMENT
-is the concrete example of a political institution.
- it exercises the power especially in relation to governance and decision-making.
POWER
- is manifested in the acquisition of statuses and functions.
- In a democratic principles, is a status granted to individuals or institutions to properly run the
government and implement the jrule of law in the society.

SOCIAL/ CULTURAL BACKGROUND

* GENDER
-It refers to society’s division of humanity into two distinctive categories based on sex.
- It serves as a guide on how males and females think and act about themselves, the way they
interact with others, and how they perform their various roles in society.
- It is a culturally learned difference between men and women.
* SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS
- refers to the category of persons who have more or less the same socioeconomics privileges in
a society.
- In the Philippines there are three types of social classes one is the upper class, second is the
middle class, and the last is the lower class.
* Upper class
- consist of the elite families.
- They are considered the most productive in terms of resources generation and often times
very successful in their respective field of interests and endeavors.
There are two types of elites
The new rich – are those who have humbled beginnings and often experienced rags-to-riches
turn of fortune.
traditional upper class – is made up of descendants of powerful elite families who acquired
their wealth through inheritance or birthright.
 * Middle Class
- is composed of small business and industry operates mostly owners and managers,
professionals, office workers, and farm owners with income sufficient enough to provide a comfortable
and descent living.
-Filipino workers also are considered.

* Lower class
-farm employees, skilled and unskilled artisans, service workers, and people who may be
unemployed or underemployed or those who belong to indigent families or informal sectors.

Subsistence lifestyle is manifested through the following conditions;

- a family could hardly eat three decent meals a day
- the daily income of the breadwinner could hardly feed the entire family
- the breadwinner does not have a permanent job.
* ETHNICITY
- is the expression of the set of cultural ideas held by a distinct ethnic or indigenous groups.
-Ethnic group refers to people who collectively and publicly identify themselves as distinct and
unique based on distinguishable cultural features that set them apart from others, such as language,
shared ancestry, common origin, customs, and traditions.
* RELIGION
- is an organized system of ideas about the spiritual sphere or the supernatural, along with
associated or ritualistic practices by which people try to interpret and/or influence aspects of the
universe otherwise beyond human control.
* EXCEPTIONALITY
- refers to the state of being intellectually gifted and/or having physically or mentally challenged
conditions concerning personality/behavior, communication (learning disability, speech impairment, and
hearing problems), intellect (mild intellectual and mental development disabilities

SOCIAL, POLITICAL, CULTURAL BEHAVIOR AND PHENOMENA

* NORMS
- serve as guides or models of behavior that influence how people behave. Are often in a form of
rules, standards, or prescriptions that are strictly followed by the people who adhere on certain
conventions and perform specific roles.
- It indicate a society’s standards of propriety, morality, ethics, and legality.
The most adhered norms in a society are the following;
1. Norms of Appropriateness or Decency
- Is common exhibited on the type of clothing a person wears in a specific occasion.
- This norm also includes the manners and behaviors that show a person’s refinement
and civility (for instance, how to treat guests cordially).

2. Norms of Conventionality
- are beliefs and practices that are acceptable to certain cultures but can be inimical to
other cultures.
* CONFORMITY/ DEVIANCE
Social control
– a set of means that ensure people behave in expected and approved ways.
Conformity
 – as the state of having internalized norms as part of the social expectations.
- to enforce conformity as a potent mechanism in the socialization process, there are forms of
behavior that are relatively or distinctly set away from a norm.
Deviant or Nonconformist
- behavioral patterns can be tolerated, approved, or disapproved depending on societal views.
- Is also seen as a form of power struggle.
- Deviance is divided into two types:
1. formal
- Includes actions that violate enacted laws, such as robbery, theft, graft, rape, and
other forms of criminality.
2. informal
- Refers to violations to social norms that are not codified into law, such as pricking
ones’s nose, belching loudly, and spitting on the street, among others.
* POLITICAL DYNASTY
- Is a tactic of self-preservation and expansion, a means of preserving the political power of
one’s self and family.

* TABOOS
- related to food are also manifestations of deviancy.

DEFINING CULTURE AND SOCIETY

* SOCIETY AND CULTURE
Society – is an organized group or groups of people who generally share a common
territory, language, culture, and who act together for collective survival and well- being.
- more comprehensive sets of culture in the sense that the group is culturall self -sufficient.
- society exists when social beings behave toward each other in ways determined by their
recognition of one another.
- Culture develops as a response to a society’s conditions and immediate solutions to the
problems of individuals and groups.
Culture – is the complex whole which on compasses beliefs, practices, values, attitudes,
laws, norms, artifacts, symbols, knowledge, and everything that a person learns and shares as a
member of society. This set of behavior and the fact that humans are characterized by them by
virtue of being born as “human beings” apart from other creatures in the animal kingdom.
Major Characteristics of Culture
- Culture is dynamic, flexible, and adaptive
- Cultural behaviors allow people to fit into and adapt to their respective environments.
- It permits people to specialize for short run activities like having a snow amusement park in the
tropics during December to stimulate Christmas in temperate countries.
-It also allows people to maintain universal and generalized affairs like settling permanently on
places where jobs are generally available and the locality is safe for residence and further improving of
one’s self.

- it is shared and contested

- it is learned through socialization or enculturation
- The person acquires the prevailing attitudes and beliefs, the forms of behavior appropriate to
the social roles he or she occupies, and the behavior patterns and values of the society into which he or
she is born. Because culture is learned rather than transmitted biologically it is sometimes called man’s
social heritage.
- Innate potential of the human infant and the inherent plasticity of the human mind, man not
only learns a culture but also has a capacity to abandon or set aside parcels of it in certain conditions
and gradually adapt new and often radically different behaviors.

- it is composed of patterned social interactions, integrated and at time, unstable

- Implies theories of reciprocity, complementarity, and mutuality of response.
- Patterns of social interaction may be viewed ;
1.As inherent characteristics of the participants merely given the opportunity to be exposed (the subject
is willing or volunteers to interact).
2.As emergent in the sense that they arise in the interaction as a product (the subject interacts because
of the introduction of stimuli to respond).

- it is transmitted through socialization or enculture

- it requires language and other forms of communication

SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND CULTURAL CHANGE

* SOCIAL CHANGE
- refers to variations or modifications in the patterns of social organization, of sub-groups within
a society, or of the entire society itself.
- Three causes of social change;
a. invention – a new combination or a new use of existing knowledge.
b. discovery – takes place when people reorganized existing elements of the world they
had not noticed before or learned to see in a new way.
- it contributes to the emergence of a new paradigm or perspective, and even
reshapes and reinvents worldviews.
- it provides something new to the culture because it becomes an integral part of culture only
after a discovery happens or take place.
c. Diffusion – refers to the spread of culture traits from one group to another. It creates
changes as cultural elements spread from one society to another through trade, migration,
and mass communication.
- it provides something new to the culture because it becomes an integral part of culture
only after a discovery happens or take place.
Culture can be spread through the processes of enculturation, socialization, association, and
integration.
a. Enculturation – takes place when one culture spreads to another through learning.
Example : Education
b. Socialization – refers to learning through constant exposure and experience to culture
which ultimately imbibes the latter to the system of values, beliefs, and practices of an
individual or groups.
c. Association – is establishing a connection with the culture thereby bridging areas of
convergence and cultural symbiosis.
d. Integration – is the total assimilation of culture as manifested by change of worldviews,
attitudes, behavior, and perspectives of looking things.
* POLITICAL CHANGE
- it is the change occurs in the realm of civil and political societies and in the structures of
relations among civil society, political society, and the state.
- It includes all categories of change in the direction of open, participatory, and accountable
politics.
Example: Youth awareness and participation during elections.
* CULTURAL CHANGE
- Refers to all alterations affecting new traits or trait complexes and change in a culture’s
content and structure.
- These change are cause by several factors such as physical environment, population, war, and
conquest, random events, and technology.
a. Physical Change
- disaster and other interruptions of the environment and even claim human lives.

b. Population movement
- brought about by migration and transnational origin whether due to dislocation,
deterritorialization or urban explosion as well as an increase or decline in population also
perpetuate change.
c. War
- constant fighting for territorial sovereignty and even recognition of one’s political
determination or identity.
d. Random event
- acts of man can also lead to change.
Example : oil price
e. Technology
- serves as one of the causes of change. The impact of science and technology on social institution
like family, school, church, and state is a major impetus for change.
Examples : Invention of the computers and internet access generated software applications that
ultimately built multi-million dollar in social networking sites such as Facebook.
CULTURAL FORMS AND THREATS

- IN STUDYING CULTURE, IT IS IMPORTANT TO DETERMINE ITS FORMS. A GOOD PORTION OF

CULTURE IS VISIBLE OR TANGIBLE AND IMTANGIBLE
* TANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE
- INCLUDES ALL MATERIAL OBJECTS SUCH AS ARTIFACTS, BUILDINGS OR LANDSCAPES, TOOLS,
FURNITURE, BRIDGES, AND ANY PHYSICAL SUBSTANCE WHICH HAS BEEN CHANGE CHANGED AND USED
BY PEOPLE.
•PROVIDES THE PHYSICAL SPACE FOR THE NON-PHYSICAL EXPRESSIONS OF CULTURE.
- THE OTHER FORM OF CULTURE IS NON-MATERIAL OR INTANGIBLE. IT IS CONSISTS OF
ABSTRACTIONS THAT INCLUDE KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, VALUES, RULES FOR BEHAVIOR, TRADITIONAL
SKILLS AND TECHNOLOGIES, RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES, PERFORMING ARTS, AND STORYTELLING.
* NON MATERIAL OR INTANGIBLE
- IT IS CONSISTS OF ABSTRACTIONS THAT INCLUDE KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, VALUES, RULES FOR
BEHAVIOR, TRADITIONAL SKILLS AND TECHNOLOGIES, RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES, PERFORMING ARTS,
AND STORYTELLING.
- IT CHARACTERIZED AS TRADITIONAL, CONTEMPORARY AND LIVING, INCLUSIVE,
REPRESENTATIVE, AND COMMUNITY BASED.
 - IT DOES NOT ONLY REPRESENT INHERITED TRADITIONS FROM THE PAST BUT ALSO
CONTEMPORARY RURAL AND URBAN PRACTICES IN WHICH DIVERSE CULTURAL GROUPS CONTINUE TO
TAKE PART.
- •IT HELPS INDIVIDUALS HAVE A SENSE OF IDENTITY AND RESPONSIBILITY.
- IT ALSO GIVES A SENSE OF BELONGINGNESS, MAKING INDIVIDUALS FEEL PART OF DIFFERENT
COMMUNITIES OR SOCIETY AT LARGE.
- IT THRIVES ON ITS BASIS IN COMMUNITIES AND DEPENDS ON THOSE WHOSE KNOWLEDGE OF
TRADITIONS, SKILLS, AND CUSTOMS ARE PASSED ON TO THE REST OF THE COMMUNITY, FROM
GENERATION TO GENERATION OR TO OTHER COMMUNITIES.
- IT BECOME HERITAGE ONLY WHEN IT IS RECOGNIZED AS SUCH BY THE COMMUNITIES, GROUPS
OR INDIVIDUALS THAT CREATES, MAINTAIN, AND TRANSMIT IT.
- THERE ARE EXPRESSIONS AND MANIFESTATION OF INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE THAT
ARE UNDER THREAT BY THE LACK OF SUPPORT, APPRECIATION, AND UNDERSTANDING OF PEOPLE. IF IT
IS NOT NURTURED, IT RISKS BECOMING LOST FOREVER, OR FROZEN AS A PRACTICE BELONGING TO THE
PAST.

THE ESSENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY, POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND SOCIOLOGY

THREE DISCIPLINES
* ANTHROPOLOGY
- is the study of human beings and their ancestors.
- it produces knowledge about what makes people different from one another and what they all
share in common.
- Anthropologists works within the four fields of discipline.
a. Physical Anthropologists
b. Cultural Anthropologists
c. Biological Anthropologists
d. Linguists
* POLITICAL SCIENCE
- is the body of knowledge relating to the study of the state and government.
- its primarily focus on the power that plays a crucial part I the struggle in which the individuals and
their groups may be found involved according to their capability and degree of interest at all levels.
- Political Power is divided into two:
1. Central Power – focused on the national government based in Manila.
- it divided into three branches of government : executive, legislative, and judiciary.
2. Local Power – is centered on local governments in the provinces, cities, and localities outside of
the capital.
- the devolution of power to the provinces is sanctioned by the Local Government Code of 1991.
- they serve as implementers of the programs of the government to their respective constituents.
* SOCIOLOGY
- it deals with social development in general and describes and analyze social life …