Author Names
, Book Title, Edition Number:
Instructor Resource

Instructor Resource

Korgen
, Sociology in Action, 3e

SAGE Publishing, 2023

Lecture Notes

Chapter 4: Recognizing Culture

Learning Objectives

4-1 What is culture?

4-2 What are some ways that the different elements of culture influence everyday life?

4-3 How do changes to our culture shape our behaviors and ways of viewing the world?

4-4 In what ways can you use cultural capital to help both yourself and society?

Annotated Chapter Outline

I. Defining Culture

A. Culture: way of life of a particular group of people, and the distinct characteristics.

i.
Nonmaterial culture: concepts like norms, values and beliefs, symbols, and language.

ii.
Material culture: artifacts designed for leisure like flat-screen TVs or Xboxes.

a. Material culture reflects the values and beliefs of the people who live in a culture.

B. Finding Culture

i. Belief that materials are necessary to reflect the social construction of reality, the ways that people give meaning to the world around them through interaction with other people.

ii. Absolute value versus relative value. Example: a valued baseball is stolen. Importance of the baseball to self.

a. Sentimental value causes stress and anxiety.

b. People give value to material things.

c. Once a value is established, and we believe it is real, we think, feel, and behave based on that understanding not on any “objective” value it has.

C. Constructing Culture

i. Culture socially constructed
, created through interactions among people.

ii. Language of a culture changes over time:

a. Even languages shared by a whole culture change as we add and drop words over time research is research designed to produce results that are immediately useful in relation to some real-world situation.

b. Words as symbols to describe our material goods, beliefs, values, hopes and fears, and every other aspect of our culture. In turn, they become part of our culture and indicate who we are as a people.

iii. We don’t notice our culture and its influence on us until we look at it from a different cultural perspective, such as wider traveling.

a. If we think all values were relative, then it is difficult to have a coherent sense of the world or to create stable relationships.

II. Identifying Elements of Culture

A. Patterns of behavior, though mundane, provide a framework to make decisions.

i. At a job, one must work in tandem with another person to complete a task.

B. Difficult to coordinate activities with other people without routines.

C. Social Norms

i.
Norms: expectations about appropriate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a variety of situations.

ii. Violation of norms: murder is one of the worst norm violations.

iii.
Generalized other: collective knowledge of people that we bring to each situation.

iv. People have
agency or the ability to act and think independently of social constraints.

v.
Mores: widely held
beliefs about what is considered moral and just behavior in society.

a. Violation of mores threatens society’s stability.

b. Governments create laws to enforce many mores: prison for violating some mores.

vi.
Folkways: rules of behavior for routine interactions.

a. If violated, might lead to annoyance but would not threaten society.

vii. Whether individuals follow or go against the norms, they are society’s guideposts for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

viii. Status and Roles

a. Each society creates statuses and roles.

b. Status: relative position in society.

c. Roles: expectations about how people of a given status should think, feel, and behave.

d. Status is about relative power and respect.

D. Values and Beliefs

i. Values and Beliefs: two other basic elements of culture.

a.
Values are what a society holds to be desirable, good, and important.

b.
Beliefs are what we deem to be true.

ii. All values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are values.

iii. People hold on to their values and beliefs and find ways to prove them to be true.

iv. Beliefs related to family upbringing.

v. Mechanism for transmitting beliefs is through observation and reinforcement.

vi. Other aspects of children’s environment can affect beliefs and attitudes.

vii. Society and its institutions (education, economy, and family) impact our culture.

viii. Robin Williams developed a list of American values in 1970.

E. Symbols and Language

i.
Symbol refers to anything that has the same meaning for two or more people.

a. Convey meaning to large numbers of people and instill both thoughts and emotions.

b. Yield intense feelings of pride.

ii. Political leaders use symbols all the time.

iii. Each culture creates its own set of symbols.

iv.
Language: a series of symbols used to communicate meaning among people in the form of written letters, words, and body language.

a. Allows us to create levels of complexity in meaning not coming from pictures or sounds.

b. String together thoughts and feelings to create larger ideas with several dimensions.

c. Is a framework of meaning that two or more people use to make decisions in everyday life.

d. Change over time.

v. The
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativism: language influences our understanding of reality above and beyond the meaning of its symbols.

vi. Words give ability to understand an object, person, or phenomenon in a much deeper way.

vii. Symbols and language are a vital part of the social construction of reality.

viii. Technological inventions prompt the creation of new words.

III. Considering Cultural Variations

A. Culture changes over time; historical events impact cultural heritage.

B. Changes in law reflect changing norms.

C. Subcultures and Multiculturalism

i.
Subcultures: cultural groups that exist within another, larger culture.

a. Subcultures reflect immigration patterns, creating neighborhoods, material culture.

b. Take on elements of two different cultures, creating a new subculture.

ii.
Multiculturalism: people respect different cultures and honor their unique contributions to a larger, “umbrella” culture with multiple subcultures.

iii. One group espouses values or beliefs that conflict with the mainstream culture, they become a
counterculture.

a. People live in group homes; give up personal possessions for the good of the group.

b. Some countercultural groups threaten a society in the form of domestic terrorism.

D. Cultural Relativism and Global Culture

i.
Cultural Relativism: cultures cannot be ranked as better or worse than others (Franz Boas).

ii. Cannot judge people or their culture; each culture is unique.

iii.
Cultural universals: cultural practices that exist in most or all societies.

iv. Cultural attributes spread when some societies spread out and dominate others.

a. Culture was introduced through colonization and the growth of capitalism.

b. Western countries can affect other parts of the world without consciously trying to do so.

c. Conscious attempts to spread Western values especially democracy and freedom.

IV. The Power of Culture

A. Cultural tools help us interact with others effectively.

B. Appropriate “netiquette” for interacting with people in different forums.

C. Cultural knowledge can help to advance in both personal and professional arenas.

D. People get into trouble for saying offensive things or posting images that conflict with the values of the general public.

E. Cultural Capital and Social Intelligence

i.
Cultural capital: a type of capital related to education, style, appearance that promotes social mobility.

ii. Cultural capital helps to gain employment; provides the information people use when deciding if others are part of their group.

iii.
Social Intelligence

a. Refers to our ability to understand social relationships and get along with others using cultural capital.

b. People with social intelligence have great social skills and work well with others.

c. Psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized the expression “social intelligence” in the 1990s.

d. People with social intelligence know the appropriate cultural cues in their society (a sign of cultural capital) and can accurately read the cues given off by others.

F. Culture and Identity

i. Cultural capital and social intelligence are housed in us through our social identities.

ii. Social identities are a unique set of statuses, roles, and traits that each of us has.

a. We develop our identities based on statuses and roles available to us.

b. We rarely accept all the cultural expectations associated with a given role in a culture.

c. We incorporate elements of culture with our own, individual way of doing things.

iii. Synergy between our culture and individual traits makes our identity unique.

iv. Social identity gives us the power to change ourselves and society.

a. Visiting a new neighborhood or shelter for homeless people gives us exposures.

v. People work together to change the larger culture under the right circumstances.