Sociology 12
2.1 demonstrate an understanding of the concept of culture
2.2 analyze factors related to cultural variation
2.3 analyze factors related to cultural uniformity
2.4 investigate the process of cultural change
• Why is this thing so difficult to define???
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Culture is the combined thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs of a
group of people who tend to live in the same geographic
area.
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Although cultures begin within specific geographic locations,
they can spread across the globe due to voluntary or forced
migration.
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Culture is expressed through a variety of methods including
dress, language, religion, music and food.
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Food
Geography
Language
Religion
Dress
Architecture
Music
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Maple Syrup, Lobster & Blueberry Grunt
Rocks & Ocean
Yeahohyeah & Sonyer
Lapsed Baptist
Jeans & Hoodies
Huge, old houses with the Lunenburg Bump & Widow’s Walks
Bluegrass & East Coast tunes
• Create your own!!
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An “I am…” poem is a poem that is all about you and the
things that you are.
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This particular “I am…” poem is going to be about your
cultural identity.
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Using the starter “I am…” finish the sentence with something
that describes you in terms of your culture, how you define
yourself.
• I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back
porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
I'm from Artemus and Billie's Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger,
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
• I'm from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I'm from the know-it-alls
I am from those moments-and the pass-it-ons,
snapped before I budded -from Perk up! and Pipe down!
leaf-fall from the family tree.
I'm from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.
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Get something to write on and something to write with and create your own
“I am…” poem.
Be sure to think about the tower of cultural expression (but feel free to write
about what you feel is culturally relevant to you) :
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Food
Geography
Language
Religion
Dress
Music
Architecture
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8-10 lines, no more than 15 please!
Be prepared to share! Anonymously or not?
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This is formative assessment, so I will be collecting these.
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Cultural Stereotypes, or National Character?
Are generalizations about national groups just caricatures?
• Anyone brave enough to share? 
• Culture is essential for our individual survival and our
communication with other people
• Also essential for the survival of societies
• “the common denominator that makes the actions of individuals intelligible
to the group”
• Laws, rules, norms…
• What determines your likes, dislikes, and personality
characteristics?
• Your genetic makeup or your environment?
• We are not born knowing how to treat other people
• People often think that our kindness or hatred toward other people is “just
human nature”
• What we do is determined by nurture, rather than nature
• Nurture: our social environment
• Nature: our biological and genetic makeup
• Nature V Nurture Debate
• People often think human nature is instinctive
• Instinct: a biologically determined behaviour pattern common to
all members of a species that predictably occurs whenever
certain environmental conditions exist
• Spiders building webs
• My rat terrier chasing shrews and mice
• Humans do not have instincts
• What we tend to think of as instinctive behaviour is actually reflexes and
drives
• Reflex: a biologically determined involuntary response to some
physical stimulus
• A sneeze after breathing in pepper through the nose
• Blinking when dust gets in your eye
• Drive: a biologically determined impulse common to all
members of a species that satisfy needs such as sleep, food,
water, or sexual gratification
• These do not determine how people behave in society; even the
expression of these biological characteristics is channeled by
culture
• The appropriate way to sneeze (an involuntary response) is to use a tissue
or turn away from others (a learned response)
• We sleep on mattresses
• Culture helps us survive in society since we don’t have “instincts”
to tell us what to do
• Culture is a “tool kit of symbols, stories, rituals, and world views,
which people may use in varying configurations to solve
different kinds of problems”
• The tools we choose vary according to our personalities and
each specific situation
• Our “Cultural Toolbox” is divided into 2 major parts:
• Material Culture: consists of the physical or tangible creations that
members of a society make, use, and share
• Trees, books, houses, clothes, music,
• It is our buffer against the environment
• (shelter protects us from the environment & provides privacy)
• Nonmaterial Culture: the abstract or intangible human creations of
society that influence people’s behaviour
• Language, beliefs, values, rules of behaviour, family patterns, political systems
• Nonmaterial culture is based on beliefs
• Beliefs: the mental acceptance or conviction that certain things
are true or real
• These beliefs may be based on tradition, faith, experience,
scientific research or some combination of these
• Faith in a supreme being
• Conviction that education is the key to success
• Opinion that smoking causes cancer
• All humans face the same basic needs
• Food, clothing, shelter
• We engage in similar activities that contribute to our survival
• Cultural Universals: customs and practices that occur across all
societies
• Appearance, activities (sports, games, visits), social institutions, customary
practices
• These cultural universals are present in all cultures
• Joking is a universal practice
• Yet their specific forms vary:
• from one group to another
• from one time to another within the same group
• What is considered a joke in one society may be an insult in another
• Cultural universals ensure the smooth and continual operation of
society
• The self-interest of individuals must be balanced with the needs
of society as a whole
• Cultural universals help fulfill these functions of society
• Cultural Universals are not the result of functional necessity
• They have been imposed by members of one society on
members of another
• Religion is a cultural universal
• Traditional religious practices of indigenous peoples have often been
repressed by subsequent settlers or conquerors
• Sociological Question to keep in mind:
• Who determines the dominant cultural patterns?
• Cultural Universals group activity
• “What’s for dinner?”
• Nature Vs Nurture in Nature
• Nature Vs Nurture & Homosexuality
• The specifics of individual cultures vary widely, but all cultures
have 4 common non-material cultural components:
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Symbols
Language
Values
Norms
• These components contribute to both harmony and conflict in a
society
• Anything that meaningfully represents something else
• A set of symbols that express ideas and enable people to think
and communicate with one another
• Collective ideas about what is right or wrong, good or bad, and
desirable or undesirable in a particular culture
• Established rules of behaviour or standards of conduct