The values, beliefs, behavior, and material
objects that together form a people’s way of life
 Nonmaterial culture
 The intangible world of ideas created by members of a
society
 Material culture
 The tangible things created by members of a society
 Culture shock
 Disorientation due to the inability to make sense out of
one’s surroundings
 Domestic and foreign travel
 Ethnocentrism
 A biased “cultural yardstick”
 Cultural relativism
 More accurate understanding
 Anything that carries a particular meaning
recognized by people who share a culture
 Societies create new symbols all the time.
 Reality for humans is found in the meaning things
carry with them.
 The basis of culture; makes life possible
 People must be mindful that meanings vary
from culture to culture.
 Meanings can even vary greatly within the
same groups of people.
 Fur coats, Confederate flags, etc.
 A system of symbols that allows people to
communicate with one another
 Cultural transmission
 The process by which one generation passes
culture to the next
 Sapir-Whorf thesis
 People perceive the world through the cultural
lens of language
Global Map 3.1
Language in Global Perspective
Detail on next three slides
 Global Map 3.1aLanguage in Global Perspective–Chinese
Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and dozens of other dialects) is the
native tongue of one-fifth of the world’s people, almost all of whom live in Asia.
Although all Chinese people read and write with the same characters, they use
several dozen dialects. The “official” dialect, taught in schools throughout the
People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Taiwan, is Mandarin (the
dialect of Beijing, China’s historical capital city). Cantonese, the language of
Canton, is the second most common Chinese dialect.
 Global Map 3.1b
Language in Global Perspective–English
English is the native tongue or official language in several
world regions (spoken by one-tenth of humanity) and has
become the preferred second language in most of the
world.
 Global Map 3.1c Language in Global Perspective–
Spanish
The largest concentration of Spanish speakers is in
Latin America and, or course, Spain. Spanish is also
the second most widely spoken language in the United
States
 Values
 Culturally defined standards of desirability,
goodness, and beauty, which serve as broad
guidelines for social living. Values support
beliefs.
 Beliefs
 Specific statements that people hold to be true.
 Particular matters that individuals consider to
be true or false.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Equal opportunity
Achievement and success
Material comfort
Activity and work
Practicality and efficiency
Progress
Science
Democracy and free enterprise
Freedom
Racism and group superiority
Are some of these values inconsistent with one another?




Williams's list includes examples of value clusters.
Sometimes one key cultural value contradicts another.
Value conflict causes strain.
Values change over time.
A Global Perspective
Cultures have their own values.
• Lower-income nations have cultures that value survival.
• Higher-income countries have cultures that value
individualism and self-expression.
•
Figure 3.2
Cultural Values of
Selected Countries
Higher-income countries are
secular-rational and
favor self-expression.
The cultures of lower-income
countries are more traditional and
concerned with economic survival.
Source: Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy
by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Weizel, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Rules and expectations by which society guides its
members’ behavior
 Types
 Proscriptive
 Should-nots, prohibited
 Prescriptive
 Shoulds, prescribed like medicine
 Mores and Folkways
 Mores (pronounced "more-rays")
 Widely observed and have great moral significance
 Folkways
 Norms for routine and causal interaction
Various means by which members of society
encourage conformity to norms
 Guilt
 A negative judgment we make
about ourselves
 Shame
 The painful sense that others
disapprove of our actions
 Ideal culture
 The way things should be
 Social patterns mandated by values and
norms
 Real culture
 They way things actually occur in everyday
life
 Social patterns that only approximate
cultural expectations
 Culture includes a wide range of physical
human creations or artifacts.
 A society's artifacts partly reflect underlying
cultural values.
 In addition to reflecting values, material
culture also reflects a society's technology or
knowledge that people use to make a way of
life in their surroundings.
 High culture–Cultural patterns that distinguish a
society’s elite.
 Popular culture–Cultural patterns that are
widespread among society’s population.
 Subculture–Cultural patterns set apart some
segment of society’s population.
 Counterculture–Cultural patterns that strongly
oppose those widely accepted within a society.
An educational program recognizing the cultural diversity
of the United States and promoting the equality of all
cultural traditions.
• Eurocentrism–The dominance of
European (especially English) cultural
patterns
• Afrocentrism–The dominance of African
cultural patterns
National Map 3.1
Language Diversity across the
United States (detail on next
slide)
Of more than 268 million
people age five or older in the
United States, the Census
Bureau reports that 52
million (19%) speak a
language other than English
at home. Of these, 62% speak
Spanish, and 15% use an
Asian language (the Census
Bureau lists 29 languages,
each of which is favored by
more than 100,000 people).
The map shows that nonEnglish speakers are
concentrated in certain
regions of the country. Which
ones? What accounts for this
pattern?
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2003, 2006).
 Culture integration
 The close relationships among various
elements of a cultural system
 Example: Computers and changes in our
language
 Culture lag
 The fact that some cultural elements
change more quickly than others, which
might disrupt a cultural system
 Example: Medical procedures and ethics
1. Invention–Creating new cultural elements
 Telephone or airplane
2. Discovery–Recognizing and better
understanding of something already in
existence
 X-rays or DNA
3. Diffusion–The spread of cultural traits from
one society to another
 Jazz music or much of the English language
Figure 3.3
Life Objectives of First-Year College
Students, 1969-2006
Researchers have surveyed first year
college students every year since
1969. While attitudes about some
things such as the importance of
family have stayed about the same,
attitudes about other life goals have
changed dramatically.
Sources: Astin et al. (2002) and Sax et al. (2006).
 Ethnocentrism
 The practice of judging another culture by
the standards of one’s own culture
 Cultural relativism
 The practice of judging a culture by its
own standards
Figure 3.4
The View from “Down Under”
North America should be “up” and
South America “down,” or so we think.
But because we live on a globe, “up” and
“down” have no meaning at all. The
reason this map of the Western
Hemisphere looks wrong to us is not
that it is geographically inaccurate; it
simply violates our ethnocentric
assumption that the United States
should be “above” the rest of the
Americas.
 The Basic Thesis
 The flow of goods–Material product trading has never
been as important.
 The flow of information–Few, if any, places are left
where worldwide communication isn’t possible.
 The flow of people–Knowledge means people learn
about places where they feel life might be better.
 Limitations to the thesis
 All the flows have been uneven.
 Assumes affordability of goods
 People don’t attach the same meaning to material goods.
 Structural-functional
 Culture is a complex strategy for meeting
human needs.
 Cultural universals–Traits that are part of
every known culture; includes family,
funeral rites, and jokes
 Critical evaluation
 Ignores cultural diversity and downplays
importance of change
 Social-conflict
 Cultural traits benefit some members at the
expense of others.
 Approach rooted in Karl Marx and materialism;
society’s system of material production has a
powerful effect on the rest of a culture.
 Critical evaluation
 Understates the ways cultural patterns integrate
members into society
 Sociobiology
 A theoretical paradigm that explores ways in
which human biology affects how we create
culture.
 Approach rooted in Charles Darwin and
evolution; living organisms change over long
periods of time based on natural selection.
 Critical evaluation
 Might be used to support racism or sexism
 Little evidence to support theory; people learn
behavior within a cultural system
 Culture as constraint
 We only know our world in terms of our
culture.
 Culture as freedom
 Culture is changing and offers a variety of
opportunities.
 Sociologists share the goal of learning
more about cultural diversity.
Applying Theory: Culture