Culture

Sociology · Culture, socialisation and groups. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Culture is the whole way of life of a society. It is learned and shared, and it is passed on by teaching, not by biology. E. B. Tylor called it 'that complex whole' of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law and custom.

Material culture is the physical things people make, such as tools and buildings. Non-material culture is ideas: beliefs, values, norms and language. Values say what is good; norms are the rules of behaviour that follow from them, backed by sanctions (rewards and punishments).

Cultures differ and change. They borrow from each other, contain smaller groups with their own ways, and their parts change at different speeds.

Rules to remember

W. G. Sumner ('Folkways', 1906): folkways = everyday customs, mild disapproval if broken; mores = norms of great moral weight, strong disapproval.
Taboo: a very strong prohibition. Law: a norm enforced by the state.
Subculture: shares the main culture but has some distinct norms. Counterculture: rejects and opposes the dominant values.
Ethnocentrism (Sumner's term): judging other cultures by the standards of one's own.
Cultural relativism (Franz Boas): understanding a culture by its own standards.
Diffusion: the spread of cultural traits from one society to another.
Cultural lag (William Ogburn): non-material culture changes more slowly than material culture.

Common mistake

Cultural lag is not one country being behind another. It is a gap inside one society, where laws, habits and values have not yet caught up with new technology.

Worked example

Mobile phones with cameras spread through a country in a few years, but rules about privacy and manners for filming people in public take much longer to develop. Which concept explains this, and which part of culture is lagging?

The phone is a physical object, so it belongs to material culture.
Rules about privacy and manners are norms, so they belong to non-material culture.
The material part changed fast and the non-material part followed slowly.
Ogburn named this gap cultural lag.

Answer: Cultural lag (Ogburn); the non-material culture is lagging.

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