Culture

Chapter 2 ended by saying that all three lenses assume a set of shared meanings, and this chapter looks at those meanings directly. Nobody is born knowing which side of the pavement to walk on, what a gift obliges you to do, or which words are rude. Sociologists call this stock of shared understanding culture. The chapter covers norms, values, symbols, subcultures and culture shock, and ends with the question of how far one culture can fairly judge another.

What Culture Is

Wikipedia's Culture article opens by calling culture "a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies", together with the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs and habits of the people in them. It quotes Edward Tylor's older definition of culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom" (the quotation goes on to list further capabilities and habits). The same page quotes Georg Simmel, who described culture as "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms". The word "external" is the same one Chapter 1 met in Durkheim's definition of a social fact, and that link is my own observation, not one the page makes (check).

The page also separates non-material culture (ideas such as values, belief systems, rules, norms and language) from material culture (physical objects and architecture). It says culture is sometimes described as "the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols".

Norms: The Rules of Behaviour

The Social norm article defines a social norm as "a shared standard of acceptable behavior by a group". It says norms can be informal understandings or can be codified into rules and laws, and it calls laws a highly formal version of norms. Informal norms are unwritten and are typically enforced through reprimands, warnings or social exclusion rather than legal penalties. The page also says deviance can bring punishment, including social isolation or censure and, in extreme cases, fines or imprisonment.

Two further distinctions from that page are useful. Descriptive norms reflect what people commonly do; injunctive norms reflect what people should do. And prescriptive norms say what to do (the page's example is writing a thank-you note), while proscriptive norms say what not to do. The gap between the descriptive and the injunctive is worth noticing: many people drop litter in a place where most people do, even though almost all of them would say they should not (that last observation is my own, not the page's) (check).

Folkways and Mores

The Mores article says mores are widely observed social norms that "determine what is considered morally acceptable or unacceptable within any given culture", and that violating them may bring disapproval or ostracism. It contrasts them with folkways, routine habitual patterns enforced by "gentle social pressure", with manners, acceptable dress and personal space as examples. It names William Graham Sumner as the American sociologist who introduced "mores" (1898) and "folkways" (1906) into modern sociology. Those years are 8 apart (computed in Python). The Folkway page on Wikipedia was very short in the fetch; it says only that folkways or mores are "norms for routine or casual interaction", and it gives Sumner's 1906 book Folkways with its subtitle.

The table brings together claims from three pages (Social norm, Mores, Folkway); the neat ordering from weakest to strongest is my own arrangement (check).

Values: What Is Considered Important

The Value (ethics) article defines a value as a broad preference about what courses of action or outcomes are appropriate, reflecting a sense of what "ought" to be. Its examples include "Equal rights for all" and "People should be treated with respect and dignity". It treats values as abstract and broad, and norms as specific standards for particular situations. Its own illustration is that flying the national flag on a holiday is a norm that reflects the value of patriotism, and that dark clothing at a funeral is a norm for showing respect.

Symbols and Meaning

The Culture article says the word culture is sometimes used for "the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other". It also says that cultural sociologists tend to look at words, artifacts and symbols rather than at scientific methods; the page's own wording is "Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods". Chapter 2's symbolic interactionism fits here: Blumer's first premise was that people act on the meanings things have for them, and symbols are where those meanings are stored.

The same flag, word or gesture can carry opposite meanings in different groups. That is part of why a tourist can offend someone without knowing it (my own illustration) (check).

Subcultures

The Subculture article describes a subculture as a smaller group within a larger culture that differs from the mainstream or dominant culture, often keeping some of its founding principles, with its own norms and values. It quotes the Oxford English Dictionary: "an identifiable subgroup within a society". The article sketches how the subject was studied.

• The Chicago School. Early sociological work treated subcultures mainly as deviance and delinquency; Park, Burgess and Wirth described "natural areas" or "moral regions". Howard Becker's labelling perspective added that society defines subcultures as outsiders. (Labelling comes back in Chapter 9.)
• The Birmingham school. Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts framed subcultures as "resistance through rituals", driven by class conflict between working-class and middle-class culture. They also argued that the culture industry could absorb subcultural styles into consumer goods.
• Dick Hebdige. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), the article says, Hebdige described subcultures as a subversion of normalcy, expressed through distinctive style and the recombining of consumer goods (bricolage).

The page lists examples including punks, mods, goths, skinheads, hip-hoppers, metalheads and Trekkies. It separates subculture from counterculture: Ken Gelder (2007) proposed telling them apart by degree of immersion in society, with subcultures staying within the mainstream while keeping their own characteristics, and the article ties countercultures mainly to the 1960s rejection of established norms.

Culture Shock

The Culture shock article defines it as the disorientation felt when living in or visiting an unfamiliar culture, changing social settings or starting a different way of life, commonly experienced by immigrants, travellers and students abroad. It credits Kalervo Oberg, who proposed his model of cultural adjustment in a 1954 talk to the Women's Club of Rio de Janeiro. That is 25 years before Hebdige's 1979 book (computed in Python).

The page also describes reverse culture shock (or re-entry shock), which comes on returning home and which it says can be harder than the original shock, because people idealise the past and wrongly assume home has not changed.

Judging Other Cultures

If norms and values differ, can one culture fairly judge another? The Cultural relativism article says the view holds that a culture's values, including moral ones, should be understood in that culture's own context, and it presents this as partly a reaction against ethnocentrism, which it defines as judging other groups by one's own standards. It credits Franz Boas with establishing the idea (in 1887 he argued that civilization is "not something absolute"), and adds that he never used the phrase himself. The article also records criticism: Steward and Barnett argued that moral relativism leads to contradiction, and Alison Dundes Renteln's view is described as treating relativism as procedural, not substantive, meaning it asks people to recognise how their own upbringing shapes their judgments without requiring them to abandon their values.

For a student of sociology the practical point is a habit: describe a norm in terms of what it means to the people who follow it before you evaluate it. Whether to go further and refuse all outside judgment is a debate the page shows is still open.

Where to Read More

• Pages used. This chapter draws on eight Wikipedia pages: Culture, Social norm, Value (ethics), Subculture, Culture shock, Mores, Cultural relativism and the very short Folkway page. Culture shock and Mores appeared complete in the fetch. For the rest the tool read only the first 100,000 characters: Culture (191,052 characters in all, so about 52 percent), Social norm (215,355, about 46 percent), Value (ethics) (119,783), Subculture (133,865) and Cultural relativism (113,738, where the unread remainder was the end of the page's navigation). The percentages are my own arithmetic from the character counts (check). Later sections of the longer pages are not reflected here.
• Not covered. The Social norm page as read did not explain Sumner or the folkway/more split, which is why that part comes from the Mores page.
• Primary texts. I have not read Sumner's Folkways, Hebdige's Subculture or Oberg's talk; everything above comes from the Wikipedia pages.

Exercises