Culture

What is culture?
The word culture click to hear the preceding term
pronounced has many different meanings. For some it refers
to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. For
a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other
microorganisms. However, for anthropologists and other
behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human
behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the
pioneer English anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book,
Primitive culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is
"that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by a member of society."
Culture is
Language, Beliefs, Values, Norms, Behavior
Passed from One Generation to the Next.
The Components of Culture

Although cultures vary greatly, they all have five common

components :

I. Symbols
II. Languages
III. Value and beliefs
IV. Norms
V. Material culture including technology
Symbols
Any thing that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who
share a culture.
Gestures
Conveying messages without words
Gestures’ meaning differ among cultures
Can lead to misunderstandings
 LANGUAGE
Language, the key to the world of culture, is a
system of symbols that allows people to
communicate with one another. Humans have
devised hundreds of alphabets. We can say language
 Allows human experience to be cumulative
 Provides social or shared past
 Provides social or shared future
 Allows shared perspective
 Shared goal-directed behavior
DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
Language not only allows communication but also
ensures the continuity of culture. Language is a
cultural heritage and the key of cultural transmission,
the process by which one generation passes culture to
the next.
 Values & Beliefs
Social values form an important part of the culture of the society.
Values account for the stability of social order. They provide the
general guidelines for social conduct. Values such as fundamental
rights, patriotism, respect for human dignity, rationality, sacrifice,
individuality, equality, democracy etc. Guide our behavior in many
ways. Values are the criteria people use in assessing their daily lives;
arrange their priorities and choosing between alternative course of
action. G.R. Leslie, R.F. Larson, H.L. Gorman say, “values are group
conceptions of the relative desirability of things”.
Young and Mack write, “values are assumption, largely unconscious,
of what is right and important”.
 Values & Beliefs
 The term belief is a product of the social experience that is
usually shape up by the share knowledge and idea through
the use of common sense to interpret the basic social facts in
certain ethnic group. Generally this is the definition:
 Beliefs are the ideas , viewpoints and attitudes of the
particular group of society. They are consists of stories,
proverbs, myths, folk tales ,traditions, fantasy, education and
etc. that influence the ideas, values, emotions, perceptions
and attitude of the members of the society. They also think
and decide on particular course of action which they believe
conform on the sets social experience in the society.
 Thecommon example of this term is the usage of religious belief .It
represents the shared ideas and knowledge about the existence of
supernatural order or the spirituality in the earliest time.
 Norms
Norms, rules and expectations by which a society guides the
behavior of its members. In sociology, norms are social
expectations that guide behavior. Norms explain why people do
what they do in given situations. For example, in the united
states, it is a norm that people shake hands when they are
formally introduced. Most important norms in a culture apply
everywhere and all the time e.g. Parents expect obedience from
their children regardless of the setting. Mores are norms it is
considered very serious to violate, such as the norm not to
murder. Other norms depend on the situation and vary from
culture to culture.
Norms generally are the rules and regulations that
groups live by. Or perhaps because the words, rules and
regulations, call to mind some kind of formal listing, we
might refer to norms as the standards of behavior of a
group. For while some of the appropriate standards of
behavior in most societies are written down, many of
them are not that formal. Many are learned, informally,
in interaction with other people and are passed "that
way from generation to generation.
 Material culture & Technology
In addition to intangible elements such as values and norms,
every culture includes a wide range of tangible human
creations, which sociologist call artifacts. Material
culture includes the objects or belongings of human beings,
including a wide range of physical items. Just about anything
you can see, feel or touch. Architecture, photographs,
documents, artwork, gardens, the electronic device you are
using to read this lesson are all examples. Some theorists
argue that entire cities and the surrounding geography, are
elements of material culture. Even human motion, such as
dance, may be described as material in that it has shape and a
physical form.
In addition to reflecting values, material culture also
reflects a society’s technology, knowledge that people
use to make a way of life in their surroundings. The
more complex a society’s technology, the more its
members are able to shape the world for themselves.
 Cultural Diversity

The cultural variety and cultural differences that exist in
 The world, a society, or an institution.
The existence of a variety of cultural or ethnic groups
within a society.
The inclusion of diverse people in a group or organization.
 SUBCULTURE
 Subcultures are those groups that have values and norms that are distinct from those held by the
majority. 
 The term Subculture refers to cultural patterns that set apart some segment of a society’s
population.
 Theory of cultural determinism
Cultural determinism supports the idea that our
emotional and behavioral patterns are formed and
molded by the culture we are raised in. As the study of
social development has progressed, there have been a
number of different theories that aim to distinguish the
most influential element that shapes human behavior
and social interaction. Cultural determinism theory
believes that we essentially are what we learn to be
through interacting with society. This includes a
number of different things, from how we dress to what
we eat to how we communicate.
Some believe it goes even further and is engrained in
how our government is structured and how we interact
with one another. For example, in some cultures, women
are revered, yet in other cultures, they are oppressed.
Cultural determinism states that these behaviors are
learned and enforced by culture. We can say that the
ideas, meanings, beliefs and values people learn as members
of society determines human nature. 
 LAYERS OF CULTURE
 People even within the same culture carry several layers
of mental programming within themselves. Different
layers of culture exist at the following levels:
 The national level: Associated with the nation as a whole.
 The regional level: Associated with ethnic, linguistic, or
religious differences that exist within a nation.
 Thegender level: Associated with gender differences
(female vs. male)
 The generation level: Associated with the
differences between grandparents and parents,
parents and children.
 Thesocial class level: Associated with educational
opportunities and differences in occupation.
 The corporate level: Associated with the particular
culture of an organization. Applicable to those who
are employed.
 Different cultural groups think, feel, and act
differently. There is no scientific standards for
considering one group as basically superior or
inferior to another.
 Development of Culture
The distinctive human way of life that we call culture did
not have a single definite beginning. This is to say that
human beings did not suddenly appear on earth. Culture
evolved slowly just as anthropoids gradually took on more
human form. The earliest tools cannot be dated precisely.
Australopithecus may have used stones as weapons as long
as five million years ago. Stones that have been used as
weapon do not differ systematically from other stones,
however, and there is no way to tell for sure. The first stones
that show reliable evidence of having been shaped as tools
trace back some 500,000 to 600,000 years. The use of fire
can be dated from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Tools of
bone had come into existence by 100,000 B.C.
 Types of culture
HIGH CULTURE:

The term high culture, is usually used to refer to cultural

creations that have a particularly high status. They are
regarded by arbiters of cultural taste as the essence of the
highest levels of human creativity such as the works of
Mirza Galib, Allama Iqbal, Shakespeare and Milton. 
FOLK CULTURE

Folk culture refers to the culture of ordinary people, particularly those

living in pre-industrial societies. Dominic strinati (1995) says that
‘folk culture is often taken to arise from the grass roots, is self-
created and autonomous and directly reflects the lives and
experiences of the people.’

Examples of folk culture include traditional folk songs and traditional

stories which have been handed down from generation to generation.
Folk culture has been seen by some theorists as being less worthwhile
than high culture, but nevertheless as worthy of some respect.
MASS CULTURE

For its critics, mass culture is seen as less worthy than folk
culture. If our culture is seen as characteristic of pre-
modern, preindustrial societies, mass culture is a product of
industrial societies. Mass culture is essentially a product of
the mass media, and examples include popular feature films,
television soap operas and recorded pop music. While folk
culture was created by ordinary people, mass culture is only
consumed by them. From this viewpoint of the audience
become passive members of a mass society, unable to think
for themselves.
 Popular culture

The term popular culture is often used in a similar way to the

turn mass culture. Popular culture includes any cultural
product appreciated by large numbers of ordinary people
with no great pretensions to cultural expertise; the example,
TV programs, pop music, mass-market films such as Star
Wars and the Harry Potter series, and popular fiction such as
detective stories. Popular culture is commercially produced
and includes objects, images, artifacts, literature and the
music of ‘ordinary’ people.
Global culture:
The idea of global culture implies that we are all becoming part of
one, all embracing culture that affect all parts of the world.
It can be argued that we are becoming a very small world. For
example we can communicate instantly with somebody in a
completely different part of the world through e-mail, phone or fax.
We can be in another country in a matter of hours. We can have
staff that lived in another part of the world. Cultural commodities
like clothes, music and films become more and more globally
produced, people in countries around the world increasingly share a
set of symbols that are used to create their identity. This is also
known as globalization.
Subculture:
Subculture is a term widely used in sociology to refer to ‘groups
of people that have something in common with each other (ie
they share a problem, an interest, a practice) which distinguishes
them in a significant way from other social groups.’ the term has
been applied to a wide range of groups, including communities
who live close together and have a shared lifestyle, user groups
who share a common musical tastes and enjoy the same leisure
activitie, ethnic groups, people who share the same religious
beliefs, members of the same gang, and so on.
 Cultural Variation
Different cultures vary from one another, and even within a
culture there is variation in what people believe and how
they act. For example, modern American culture is very
different from culture of Africa.
Cultures vary = cultural variation