Chapter 4Building Order: Culture and History

Culture

• A society’s personality

• The shared, taken-for-granted values, beliefs, objects, and rules that guide people’s lives

Culture

• Usually only notice other people’s cultures

• Our own culture is usually invisible to us

• Except in times of social upheaval

• When traveling or returning home

Elements of Culture

• Non-material culture

• Knowledge, beliefs, customs, morals, symbols

• Patterns of behavior

• “Owner’s manual for social life”

Elements of Culture

• Material culture

• Stuff: clothing, buildings, inventions, food, artwork, music

• Technological achievements that shape and are shaped by non-material culture

The Chair is Cultural

• May define your status or role

• May carry symbolic meaning

• Only common to about one third of the world’s populations

Thinking Sociologically

• Cultural change

• What are some changes that you have observed in material culture in your lifetime?

• What are some changes that you have observed in nonmaterial culture in your lifetime?

Global Culture

• Transnational media, global communication, transportation systems, and centuries of international migration have made the concept of “cultural purity” all but obsolete

• People have always met, shared, and traded (but it happens a lot faster now)

Subcultures & Countercultures

• Values, behaviors, and physical artifacts of a group that distinguish it from the larger culture

• Subcultures• Culture within a

culture

Subcultures & Countercultures

• Countercultures

• Reject some elements of the larger culture

• Yet also exist in relation to it

History & Culture

• Culture’s “archives”

• Shifts in accepted behaviors

• Need to view historical acts within their cultural setting

Cultural Expectations & the Social Order

• Expected formulas: “How are you?”

• Humor: disrupted social order or cultural expectations

Cultural Expectations & Social Order

• Social order and cultural expectations are not static

• History: how we tell our cultural story

Norms

• Culturally defined “rules” of conduct or expectations for behavior

• Different levels of norms• Folkways: informal

norms that are mildly punished when violated  

• Mores: highly codified, formal, systematized norms that bring severe punishment when violated

Institutionalized Norms

• Patterns of behavior that become widely accepted within a particular social institution and taken for granted in society

• Establish ways for people to discover preferences or see the world in a particular way

Institutionalized Norms

• Make certain actions seem unthinkable:• 2010: going to

college is the path to financial success

• 1810: owning other human beings is the path to financial success

Institutionalized Emotions

• Emotions seem natural, sometimes instantaneous

• Yet, they are also culturally bounded• How should you react at

funerals?• At weddings?• When you get good news?• If the good news is at

someone else’s expense?• If you are a doctor giving

bad news to a patient?• If you a flight attendant

during turbulence?

Norms & Sanctions

• Norms provide a framework for our actions and choices

• Rarely tell us exactly what to do or how to act

• May be ambiguous or contradictory

Norms & Sanctions

• Sanctions discourage breaking social norms

• Direct social response to a behavior

• Symbolically reinforce the culture’s values and morals

Cultural Relativism

• People’s beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of their own culture

• May challenge the values of one’s own culture

Ethnocentrism

• Ethnocentrism: the tendency to evaluate other cultures using one’s own culture as a standard

• Ethnocentrism is encouraged by institutional ritual and symbolism, cultural loyalty

Managing Cultural Variation

• Doing taarof in Iran

• Hand gestures across cultures

• Forming lines

Culture in Health & Illness

• U.S. medical treatment tends to derive from an aggressive, “can do” spirit

• U.S. doctors are more likely than European doctors to prescribe drugs and resort to surgery

Culture in Health & Illness

• What does it mean to be sick in U.S. culture compared to other cultures?

• What if you don’t play the sick role correctly?

The Sick Role: Norms in Action

• The sick role is a set of norms governing how one is supposed to behave and what one is entitled to when sick.

How to be Sick in the United States

• It’s not your fault.

• It’s bad to be sick and you should try to get over it.

• You may be excused from ordinary obligations and duties.

How to be Sick in the United States

• Laws institutionalize the sick role and legitimize it.

• You may be excused from normal rules of etiquette.

• You can ask for and receive care and sympathy.

Culture and “the Sexes”

• Sexual dichotomy• Female and male• Universal• Exhaustive• Mutually exclusive

• Sex is much more complex• Transsexuals• Intersexuals

• Other cultures have defined more than two sexes

Intersexuality

• Ambiguous genetic/anatomical indicators of sex

• Often “corrected” through surgery that reinforces cultural ideal of two sexes

• Increasing protests regarding the use of “sex assignment surgery”• Surgeries seen as

mutilating and potentially harmful

• Doesn’t allow other options beyond male or female