Introduction to

Sociology
Course: Sociology
Lecturer: Muniza Javed
 Culture:

Meaning and Nature of Culture:

• Culture is the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together
form a people’s way of life. Culture includes what we think, how we act, and what we
own. Culture is both our link to the past and our guide to the future.
• The term culture refers to the language, beliefs, values and norms, custom, dress, diets,
roles. Knowledge and skills.
• There are two thoughts of culture these are:
 Culture:
• Non-Material Culture: the ideas created by members of a society.
• Culture shapes not only what we do but also what we think and how we feel—elements
of what we commonly, but wrongly, describe as “human nature.
• Material Culture: the physical things created by members of a society, everything from
armchairs to zippers.
• the extent of cultural differences in the world and people’s tendency to view their own
way of life as “natural,” it is no wonder that travelers often find themselves feeling
uneasy as they enter an unfamiliar culture. This unfamiliar culture is culture shock,
personal disorientation when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life.
 Culture:
• Elements of Culture:
• Culture vary greatly but there are some common elements exists in almost all culture
these are:
• Symbols: symbols. A symbol is anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by
people who share a culture. A word, a whistle, a wall covered with graffiti, a flashing red
light, a raised fist—all serve as symbols.
• Language: Language, the key to the world of culture, is a system of symbols that allows
people to communicate with one another. Humans have created many alphabets to
express the hundreds of languages we speak.
 Culture:
• Language is the key that unlocks centuries of accumulated wisdom.
Throughout human history, every society has transmitted culture by using
speech, a process sociologists call the “oral cultural tradition.
• Language skills may link us with the past, but they also spark the human
imagination to connect symbols in new ways, creating an almost limitless
range of future possibilities.
 Culture:
• Value and Beliefs:
• Values: culturally defined standards that people use to decide what is desirable,
good, and beautiful and that serve as broad guidelines for social living. People
who share a culture use values to make choices about how to live.
• Values are broad principles that support beliefs, specific thoughts or ideas that
people hold to be true. In other words, values are abstract standards of goodness,
and beliefs are particular matters that individuals consider true or false.
 Culture:
• Value conflict exists when we have to select one value to give priority on
other value.
• Values vary from culture to culture around the world. In general, the
values that are important in higher-income countries differ somewhat from
those common in lower-income countries. (e.g. elite class give value to
lifestyle and individualism whereas lower income class give value to food
and shelter and family and traditions are important for them).
• Value changes over time to time and new values emerge.
 Culture:
• Norms: Both patterns illustrate the operation of norms, rules and
expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members.
• In everyday life, people respond to each other with sanctions, rewards or
punishments that encourage conformity to cultural norms.
 Culture:
• Mores and Folkways:
• William Graham Sumner (1959, orig. 1906), an early U.S. sociologist,
recognized that some norms are more important to our lives than others.
Sumner coined the term mores (pronounced “MORE-ayz”) to refer to
norms that are widely observed and have great moral significance. Mores,
which include taboos, are the norms in our society that insist, for example,
that adults not walk around in public without wearing clothes.
 Culture:
• People pay less attention to folkways, norms for routine or casual interaction.
Examples include ideas about appropriate greetings and proper dress. In
short, mores distinguish between right and wrong, and folkways draw a line
between right and rude. A man who does not wear a tie to a formal dinner
party may raise eyebrows for violating folkways. If, however, he were to
arrive at the party wearing only a tie, he would violate cultural mores and
invite a more serious response.
 Culture:
• social control: attempts by society to regulate people’s thoughts and behavior.
Culture plays a vital role in social control of any society.
• As we learn cultural norms, we gain the capacity to evaluate our own
behavior. Doing wrong (say, downloading a term paper from the Internet)
can cause both shame (the painful sense that others disapprove of our
actions) and guilt (a negative judgment we make of ourselves). Of all living
things, only cultural creatures can experience shame and guilt.
 Culture:
• Customs: A custom is a cultural idea that describes a regular, patterned way
of appearing or behaving that is considered characteristic of life in a social
system.
• Examples: Shaking hands, bowing, and kissing are all customary ways of
greeting people that distinguish one society from another.
 Culture:
• Types of Culture:
• Dominant Culture: It refers to the main culture of a society, which is shared,
or at least accepted without opposition by the majority of people. It includes
the main features of any society.
• Folk Culture: it is the culture created by the local communities and is rooted
in the experiences, customs and beliefs of everyday life of ordinary people.
 Culture:
• Material Culture and Technology: In addition to symbolic elements such as
values and norms, every culture includes a wide range of physical human
creations called artifacts. The Chinese eat with chopsticks rather than forks,
the Japanese put mats rather than rugs on the floor, and many men and
women in India prefer flowing robes to the close-fitting clothing common in
the United States. The material culture of a people may seem as strange to
outsiders as their language, values, and norms.
 Culture:
• a society’s technology: knowledge that people use to make a way of life in
their surroundings.
• Global culture: it refers to the way globalization has undermined national and
local cultures, with cultural products and way of life in different countries of
the world becoming more alike. ( Fast food culture, famous shows, famous
products)
 Culture:
• Cultural Diversity:
• Multiculturalism is a perspective recognizing the cultural diversity of the
United States and promoting equal standing for all cultural traditions.
Multiculturalism represents a sharp change from the past, when our society
downplayed cultural diversity and defined itself primarily in terms of well-
off European and especially English immigrants.
• Euro centrism, the dominance of European (especially English) cultural
patterns.
 Culture:
• Afrocentrism, emphasizing and promoting African cultural patterns.
• Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of
one's own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their
own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior,
customs, and religion.
• Counterculture:
• Cultural diversity also includes outright rejection of conventional ideas or behavior.
Counterculture refers to cultural patterns that strongly oppose those widely
accepted within a society.
 Culture:
• Cultural Change: Perhaps the most basic human truth of this world is that
“all things shall pass.” Even the dinosaurs, which thrived on this planet for
160 million years, exist today only as fossils. Today, as a generation ago, most
men and women look forward to raising a family. But today’s students are
less concerned with developing a philosophy of life and much more
interested in making money.
 Culture:
• cultural integration: the close relationships among various elements of a
cultural system.
• Change in one part of a culture usually sparks changes in others. For
example, today’s college women are much more interested in making money
because women are now far more likely to be in the labor force than their
mothers or grandmothers were. Working for income may not change their
interest in raising a family, but it does increase both the age at first marriage
and the divorce rate. Such connections illustrate the principle of cultural
integration.
 Culture:
• Cultural Lag: cultural lag, the fact that some cultural elements change more
quickly than others, disrupting a cultural system. For example, in a world in
which a woman can give birth to a child by using another woman’s egg,
which has been fertilized in a laboratory with the sperm of a total stranger,
how are we to apply traditional ideas about motherhood and fatherhood?
• Cultural relativism: the practice of judging a culture by its own standards.
Cultural relativism can be difficult for travelers to adopt: It requires not only
openness to unfamiliar values and norms but also the ability to put aside
cultural standards we have known all our lives.
 Culture:

• Subculture: The term subculture refers to cultural patterns that set apart some
segment of a society’s population.
• A counterculture is a group whose values and norms place it at odds with
mainstream society or a group that actively rejects dominant cultural values and
norms.
• High Culture and Popular Culture: high culture to refer to cultural patterns that
distinguish a society’s elite and popular culture to designate cultural patterns that
are widespread among a society’s population.
 Culture:
• Ideal Culture and Real Culture: Values and norms do not describe actual
behavior so much as they suggest how we should behave. We must
remember that ideal culture always differs from real culture, which is what
actually occurs in everyday life. For example, most women and men agree on
the importance of sexual faithfulness in marriage, and most say they live up
to that standard.
 Culture:
• Cultural evolution as a theory in anthropology was developed in the 19th
century, and it was an outgrowth of Darwinian evolution. Cultural evolution
presumes that over time, cultural change such as the rise of social
inequalities or emergence of agriculture occurs as a result of humans
adapting to some non cultural stimulus, such as climate change or population
growth. However, unlike Darwinian evolution, cultural evolution was
considered directional, that is, as human populations transform themselves,
their culture becomes progressively complex.
 Culture:
• Sociobiology explores how the long history of evolution has shaped patterns
of culture in today’s world.
• Cultural Pluralism:
• Cultural pluralism is a term used when smaller groups within a larger
society maintain their unique cultural identities, and their values and
practices are accepted by the wider culture provided they are consistent with
the laws and values of the wider society.