Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted
customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior.
This chapter examines the basic elements that make
up a culture, social practices common to all cultures,
and variations that distinguish one culture from another.
Sharing a similar culture helps to define the
group or society to which we belong.
Anthropologist George Murdock has compiled
a list of cultural universals, general practices
found in every culture, including courtship,
family, games, language, medicine, religion,
and sexual restrictions.
Human culture is constantly expanding
through innovation, including both discovery
and invention.
Diffusion--the spread of cultural items from
one place to another--also changes cultures
and has fostered globalization. But societies
resist ideas that seem too foreign as well as
those perceived as threatening to their own
values and beliefs.
Language, an important element of culture,
includes speech, written characters, numerals,
symbols, and gestures and other forms of nonverbal
communication. Language both
describes culture and shapes it for us.
Sociologists distinguish between norms in two
ways. They are classified as either formal or
informal norms and as mores or folkways.
The more cherished values of a culture will receive
the heaviest sanctions; matters that are
regarded as less critical, on the other hand, will
carry light and informal sanctions.
The dominant ideology of a culture describes
the set of cultural beliefs and practices that
help to maintain powerful social, economic,
and political interests.
In a sense, a subculture can be thought of as a
culture existing within a larger, dominant culture.
Countercultures are subcultures that deliberately
oppose aspects of the larger culture.
People who measure other cultures by the standard
of their own engage in ethnocentrism.
Using cultural relativism allows us to view
people from the perspective of their own
culture.
The social policy of bilingualism calls for programs
that use two or more languages, treating
each as equally legitimate. It is supported by
those who want to ease the transition of nonnative
language speakers into a host society; it
is opposed by those who adhere to a single cultural
tradition in language.
