Chapter 4 Building Order: Culture and History. Culture A society’s personality The shared,...
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Transcript of Chapter 4 Building Order: Culture and History. Culture A society’s personality The shared,...
Chapter 4Building Order: Culture and History
Culture
• A society’s personality
• The shared, taken-for-granted values, beliefs, objects, and rules that guide people’s lives
Culture
• Usually only notice other people’s cultures
• Our own culture is usually invisible to us
• Except in times of social upheaval
• When traveling or returning home
Elements of Culture
• Non-material culture
• Knowledge, beliefs, customs, morals, symbols
• Patterns of behavior
• “Owner’s manual for social life”
Elements of Culture
• Material culture
• Stuff: clothing, buildings, inventions, food, artwork, music
• Technological achievements that shape and are shaped by non-material culture
The Chair is Cultural
• May define your status or role
• May carry symbolic meaning
• Only common to about one third of the world’s populations
Thinking Sociologically
• Cultural change
• What are some changes that you have observed in material culture in your lifetime?
• What are some changes that you have observed in nonmaterial culture in your lifetime?
Global Culture
• Transnational media, global communication, transportation systems, and centuries of international migration have made the concept of “cultural purity” all but obsolete
• People have always met, shared, and traded (but it happens a lot faster now)
Subcultures & Countercultures
• Values, behaviors, and physical artifacts of a group that distinguish it from the larger culture
• Subcultures• Culture within a
culture
Subcultures & Countercultures
• Countercultures
• Reject some elements of the larger culture
• Yet also exist in relation to it
History & Culture
• Culture’s “archives”
• Shifts in accepted behaviors
• Need to view historical acts within their cultural setting
Cultural Expectations & the Social Order
• Expected formulas: “How are you?”
• Humor: disrupted social order or cultural expectations
Cultural Expectations & Social Order
• Social order and cultural expectations are not static
• History: how we tell our cultural story
Norms
• Culturally defined “rules” of conduct or expectations for behavior
• Different levels of norms• Folkways: informal
norms that are mildly punished when violated
• Mores: highly codified, formal, systematized norms that bring severe punishment when violated
Institutionalized Norms
• Patterns of behavior that become widely accepted within a particular social institution and taken for granted in society
• Establish ways for people to discover preferences or see the world in a particular way
Institutionalized Norms
• Make certain actions seem unthinkable:• 2010: going to
college is the path to financial success
• 1810: owning other human beings is the path to financial success
Institutionalized Emotions
• Emotions seem natural, sometimes instantaneous
• Yet, they are also culturally bounded• How should you react at
funerals?• At weddings?• When you get good news?• If the good news is at
someone else’s expense?• If you are a doctor giving
bad news to a patient?• If you a flight attendant
during turbulence?
Norms & Sanctions
• Norms provide a framework for our actions and choices
• Rarely tell us exactly what to do or how to act
• May be ambiguous or contradictory
Norms & Sanctions
• Sanctions discourage breaking social norms
• Direct social response to a behavior
• Symbolically reinforce the culture’s values and morals
Cultural Relativism
• People’s beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of their own culture
• May challenge the values of one’s own culture
Ethnocentrism
• Ethnocentrism: the tendency to evaluate other cultures using one’s own culture as a standard
• Ethnocentrism is encouraged by institutional ritual and symbolism, cultural loyalty
Managing Cultural Variation
• Doing taarof in Iran
• Hand gestures across cultures
• Forming lines
Culture in Health & Illness
• U.S. medical treatment tends to derive from an aggressive, “can do” spirit
• U.S. doctors are more likely than European doctors to prescribe drugs and resort to surgery
Culture in Health & Illness
• What does it mean to be sick in U.S. culture compared to other cultures?
• What if you don’t play the sick role correctly?
The Sick Role: Norms in Action
• The sick role is a set of norms governing how one is supposed to behave and what one is entitled to when sick.
How to be Sick in the United States
• It’s not your fault.
• It’s bad to be sick and you should try to get over it.
• You may be excused from ordinary obligations and duties.
How to be Sick in the United States
• Laws institutionalize the sick role and legitimize it.
• You may be excused from normal rules of etiquette.
• You can ask for and receive care and sympathy.
Culture and “the Sexes”
• Sexual dichotomy• Female and male• Universal• Exhaustive• Mutually exclusive
• Sex is much more complex• Transsexuals• Intersexuals
• Other cultures have defined more than two sexes
Intersexuality
• Ambiguous genetic/anatomical indicators of sex
• Often “corrected” through surgery that reinforces cultural ideal of two sexes
• Increasing protests regarding the use of “sex assignment surgery”• Surgeries seen as
mutilating and potentially harmful
• Doesn’t allow other options beyond male or female