This is an interactive lecture which includes links to internet sources, videos, and polls. This lecture on culture contains copyrighted material under the educational fair use exemption to the U.S. copyright law.
Caption: “Nacirema is an intriguing culture to anthropologists. A large part of their day is spent in ritual activities focused on the human body. For this purpose each of their dwellings has one or more shrine rooms in which the rituals are performed in secret and in private. The focal point of the shrine is a box where magic charms and potions are kept thought to be necessary for life and health. They keep so many potions that they often forget their original purpose and, presumably, keep them in the belief their continued presence will somehow protect the family. Every day, every member of the family enters the shrine, bows his head before the charm box and mingles different sorts of holy water to perform rituals. Among their daily rituals is a disgusting practice of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into their mouth. They have a fascination with the mouth and seek the wisdom of the holy-mouth-man regularly. Other cruel practices exist in which women bake their heads and males scrape their faces with sharp objects” (Excerpted from Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, Horace Miner, 1956).
Check This Out: Read the full essay titled Body Ritual Among the Nacirema
To study society and people, besides sociological theories and research methods, sociologists also need to understand culture. Within each society such as Nacirema (American spelled backwards), people share core values that are shaped by a society’s history, availability of resources, and other social and physical factors.
Your Turn: In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains how the history of the world’s societies and cultures was influenced by geographical and environmental conditions. Explore the variables that guided this process.
People in a society are united by the most important beliefs about how things ought to be. A society’s core values evolve, change over time, may contradict, and shape our own thinking, behavior, opportunities, and the type of groups that we belong to.
Values influence norms or cultural standards of behavior, including formal norms and informal norms. What may be considered normal behavior in one culture may be defined as violations of folkways, mores, or even a taboo in other cultures.
Values influence norms or cultural standards of behavior, including formal norms and informal norms. What may be considered normal behavior in one culture may be defined as violations of folkways, mores, or even a taboo in other cultures.
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Cultural values and norms are engrained in us and therefore can be wrongly assumed to be natural and universal. When faced with contrasting ideas we might face cultural shock at best and ethnocentrism at worst. We might be tempted to view diverse cultural ideas and actions as inferior and backward. When studying culture, sociologists practice cultural relativism and attempt to understand cultural values and cultural norms through the cultural lens from which they originate.
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Your Turn: Watch the videos below. What American behavior(s) might be defined by other cultures as taboo but have meaning to us in the United States?
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Your Turn: Do you think these core values are an accurate description of the American culture? What new American core values have emerged recently?
Check This Out: How do you think people in other countries describe the American culture? View this handout titled Getting Along with Americans. Below is an excerpt from this handout and a humorous look at the “American handshake” and the “American tourist” in France.
The United States is an individualistic culture, meaning individual wellbeing is placed before the wellbeing of the group. This is opposite for collectivist cultures which place the wellbeing of a group before the individual.
Example: In the United States, there is an expectation that children will move out of the house when reaching adulthood to build a life of their own rather than stay to take care of aging parents. People marry for their own individual happiness rather than participate in arranged marriages where life partners are chosen by family members for the wellbeing of the entire family. When people are successful, Americans contribute success to individual hard work and effort. When people fail to reach their goals there is an assumption that it is due to lack of effort rather than an examination of societal conditions. When people are healthy or ill we might automatically attribute this to their genetics, or personal lifestyle choices. When people discuss societal conditions, sometimes we label them as playing the "victim" or "race card" for example.
Example: In the United States, there is an expectation that children will move out of the house when reaching adulthood to build a life of their own rather than stay to take care of aging parents. People marry for their own individual happiness rather than participate in arranged marriages where life partners are chosen by family members for the wellbeing of the entire family. When people are successful, Americans contribute success to individual hard work and effort. When people fail to reach their goals there is an assumption that it is due to lack of effort rather than an examination of societal conditions. When people are healthy or ill we might automatically attribute this to their genetics, or personal lifestyle choices. When people discuss societal conditions, sometimes we label them as playing the "victim" or "race card" for example.
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Your Turn: Given that Americans place so much importance on individuality, how might this contribute to some of the social problems in society such as divorce, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, and poverty among others?
Think about how misunderstandings can emerge between people from individualistic versus collectivist cultures. |
Throughout the semester, we will study how the core values of the American culture contribute both to the positive and negative aspects of our society. Of course most Americans if asked, would probably answer that the family is an important part of their lives, yet why isn’t the family listed as a core value? Although Americans value financial success, many people are only one or several paychecks away from poverty. The core values represent beliefs about an ideal culture or what we should aspire to and hold dear in our minds rather than real culture; beliefs guiding the everyday lives of most Americans such as the family, ability to pay their bills and provide for their loved ones.
Cultural values and norms continually evolve. Often technology facilitates cultural changes. Technology is a major part of material culture as the objects that are representative of a culture often are used for tools such as architecture, furnishings, utensils, machinery, clothing, etc.
Through cultural contact; the migration of people moving from one country to another and technologies that allow global communication and travel, cultural diffusion occurs as material culture (objects) and nonmaterial culture (beliefs) are exchanged and adopted by each culture.
Through cultural contact; the migration of people moving from one country to another and technologies that allow global communication and travel, cultural diffusion occurs as material culture (objects) and nonmaterial culture (beliefs) are exchanged and adopted by each culture.
Check This Out: Read this article titled How the Taco Gained in Translation – about the transformation of the Mexican taco to the American fast food taco on the streets of San Bernardino.
Your Turn: Cultural diffusion can have both latent functions and latent dysfunctions. How do you see both latent functions and latent dysfunctions in the images below?
As cultural ideas and ways of doing things spread across the globe, similarities unite people. But there is also strong criticism of the trends related to globalization and this in sociology is referred to as cultural leveling or the spreading of the Western culture at the cost of disappearing local non Western traditions. In many parts of the world, older generations worry that young adults are losing a sense of tradition, and uniqueness related to language, cooking methods, dress, and customs that are associated with their ethnic group. In some regions, the traditions of ethnic groups are becoming extinct as younger generations no longer pass down their histories or have forgotten them altogether.
Check This Out: Read the article about the "Vanishing Languages Project" and view the two videos below about the world's disappearing bird languages and cultures.
Check This Out: Read the article about the "Vanishing Languages Project" and view the two videos below about the world's disappearing bird languages and cultures.
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Multiculturalism recognizes that cultural diversity is an important aspect of the American culture. The United States is a pluralistic society meaning there is a huge variation in the different types of groups that exist in our society.
William Ogburn coined the term cultural lag to refer to the cultural change which occurs as people adapt new ways of thinking and behaving in an effort to keep up with technological advances. What this means is that technology is first to change the material culture, forcing people to adjust the nonmaterial culture. As people sort out the ethical dilemmas created by advances in technological innovations, cultural values and norms that make up the nonmaterial culture continue to evolve.
William Ogburn coined the term cultural lag to refer to the cultural change which occurs as people adapt new ways of thinking and behaving in an effort to keep up with technological advances. What this means is that technology is first to change the material culture, forcing people to adjust the nonmaterial culture. As people sort out the ethical dilemmas created by advances in technological innovations, cultural values and norms that make up the nonmaterial culture continue to evolve.
Check This Out: Read the article, A 3-D Printed Car, Ready for the Road.
Your Turn: Examine the images above and watch the three videos below. Predict how these technological advancement will change the nonmaterial culture.
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Language or the use of symbols is another vehicle for cultural change. Subcultures and countercultures that exist within a broader dominant culture have their own ways of thinking and behaving that are extensions of the mainstream dominant culture (subcultures) or clash with it (countercultures). Both subcultures and countercultures have their own argots and gestures as ways of communicating that over time may get engrained in the dominant culture. For example, text messaging and emoticons changed the way people communicate but originated in techie and teen subcultures among others.
Your Turn: watch the two videos on hand tactical gestures in the military (example of a subculture) and gang stackin' gestures (example of a counterculture). Have any of these gestures made their way into the mainstream dominant culture?
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George P. Murdock an anthropologist identified cultural universals common in every culture however he concluded that there are no universals in how they are performed. Language is a cultural universal and for example in 2009, according to the Linguistic Society of America, there were 6,909 documented languages.
Check This Out: Read the article titled How Many Languages Are There in the World?
Check This Out: Read the article titled How Many Languages Are There in the World?
Cultural transmission occurs through language. Researchers who study sociolinguistics are making advances in our understanding of the interrelationships between language, culture, and cognition. “It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too” (Boroditsky, 2010). Through the study of culture and its components, not only are we learning about the world around us but we’re also becoming part of that world. This is related to the concept of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis we studied earlier in the semester.
Check This Out: Read the article titled Lost in Translation.
Check This Out: Read the article titled Lost in Translation.
Quiz Yourself: Complete this self-assessment related to the information in this lecture.
View Videos and Additional Resources: Culture
Next Unit: Groups
View Videos and Additional Resources: Culture
Next Unit: Groups