What culture is
Culture is the shared set of beliefs, values, behaviours, language and objects of a group, learned rather than inherited. A society is a group of people living in a defined area who share a culture. The two go together: a society is the people, culture is their way of life.
Parts of culture
- Material culture: physical objects, such as tools, buildings, clothing and phones.
- Non-material culture: ideas, such as beliefs, values, norms and language.
- Values are broad ideas about what is good or desirable (honesty, freedom). Beliefs are what people hold to be true. Norms are rules for behaviour.
Norms come in kinds. Folkways are everyday customs whose violation draws mild disapproval, such as eating with the wrong hand in some places or wearing pyjamas to a lecture. Mores are norms with moral weight, such as the taboo on harming a child. Laws are norms written down and enforced by the state. Sanctions are the rewards and punishments that enforce norms; formal sanctions come from official bodies and informal ones from peers, such as a frown or a compliment.
Language and culture
Language carries culture. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that language shapes how we think. In its strong form, it has little support; a weaker form, that language influences attention and categories, has more.
Variety and change
A subculture is a group with distinct norms within a larger culture (surfers, gamers, a religious order). A counterculture actively rejects mainstream values (some 1960s movements). Culture changes through innovation, diffusion (spread from one society to another) and contact. Cultural lag is the idea that material culture changes faster than non-material, such as laws that trail technology. Culture shock is the disorientation of meeting an unfamiliar way of life.
Judging other cultures
Ethnocentrism is judging other cultures by the standards of one's own. Cultural relativism is understanding a practice within its own cultural context before judging it. Relativism is a research method, not a claim that every practice is equally good; it does not forbid ethical criticism.
Worked example
A visitor from a country where people stand about arm's length apart in conversation travels to a place where people stand much closer. She steps back and feels the others are "pushy".
- The norm differs, so this is a folkway, not a moral rule.
- Her reaction, "pushy", is ethnocentric, since it uses her own norm as the standard.
- A relativist approach: ask what closeness means locally. It may signal warmth and trust.
- She may feel culture shock now, but adapt as she learns the local norm.
The skill is to separate the description of a practice from the evaluation of it.