Notes: The opener introduced the concept of culture, the society’s socially learned and shared ideas, behaviors, and material components (HP), specifically concerning the pageant culture. By analyzing how individuals and groups interact within the pageant industry, we can gain insight into how this culture is socially learned and shared through consistent day-to-day social interactions.
In addition to material and nonmaterial culture, there are two additional types of culture to consider. Ideal culture, the ideals and values that a society professes to believe, represents the majority of members of society. Often, the ideal culture is what the members consider to be ethically and morally desirable. Equality and justice for everyone, regardless of race, gender, or creed, characterize the American culture, but this ideal has not been achieved among all Americans. When we look at America’s real culture, the actual behavior of members of society, it is evident that inequalities and injustices exist within American society.
The structural elements of culture include five basics: symbols, language, beliefs, values, and norms. These structural building blocks influence everything from speech accents to behavior in a society. One way to experience these different cultural “flavors” is through travel.
Many of the cultural traits we associate with NYC represent a symbol, an idea or object that has a shared meaning to groups of people (HP). Most symbols represent a shared meaning among many members of society
Nonverbal language, a system of communication using symbols such as facial expressions, gestures, and proximity of the body, can be just as powerful as spoken words, if not more so. Consider the example of personal space, the physical region surrounding an individual that is considered private. Maintaining personal space is a form of language that speaks volumes, often without the use of words. However, the pandemic created scenarios requiring individuals to speak up as a new social etiquette of social distancing developed, and we learned how to say “back off” politely when someone invaded our space. Our personal “bubble” is more related to culture than it is to social characteristics such as gender and age. Figure 3.2.1 indicates that the first group keeps the most distance between themselves and others, while the last group keeps the least space. The last group is more likely to have face-to-face conversations, while the first group tends to orient themselves to the side (Beaulieu 2004). Individuals defining and protecting their personal space is a means of communicating boundaries within a social encounter.
The third element of culture is beliefs, ideas generally held to be true in society (HP). Beliefs include ideas, viewpoints, and attitudes held by groups of people in a society. Traditions, science, religion, superstitions, and ideologies mold and shape our beliefs. One commonly held belief among Americans is technological determinism, the idea that society’s technology drives the development of its social structures.
Robin M. Williams, Jr.’s Basic American Values
- equal opportunity
- achievement and success
- material comfort
- activity and work
- practicality and efficiency
- nationalism
- process and progress
- science and rationality
- external conformity
- moral orientation
- democracy and enterprise
- freedom
- humanitarian motives
- racism
- group conformity
Upon closer examination of the list of values, you will notice value contradictions, conflicting issues between values. For example, the first three values can be contradictory in some situations. Pursuing material comfort and success often leads to the exploitation and unequal treatment of workers. The result is not an equal opportunity for everyone but the perpetuation of structural inequality.
There are also value contradictions concerning sustainable development, development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
These elements are maintained in our culture through norms, established guidelines, behaviors, and expectations that are accepted in a given range of social situations (HP). These informal and formal rules we experience in our everyday lives dictate how members of a society interact. Norms (C-19) impact all aspects of society and vary by degree and culture.
Folkways, informal and common norms that guide everyday behavior, are norms encountered throughout your day. These norms are not strictly enforced and usually do not incur penalties for violations.
The violation of a folkway does not cause any moral harm. However, the violation of mores, (more-ayz), informal norms based on moral and ethical factors, typically results in minimal to severe disapproval.
Taboos, formal norms that, if violated, cause revulsion and the most severe social sanctions, are considered abhorrent to most members of society. Cannibalism is considered taboo in all but a few remote societies. Severe negative social sanctions, punishments or rewards that support socially approved norms (HP), such as lengthy prison sentences, reinforce and maintain the socially approved norms among members of society.
Cultural transmission, the means by which culture is passed from generation to generation, is an essential tool for the health and perpetuation of communities. Cultural elements are passed from one generation to the next via social institutions such as family, religion, and education.
Culture is not a static phenomenon, nor is it problem-free. Social problems in cultures may occur for a variety of reasons. Situations that often lead to social problems include when one group imposes its will on another group or tries to adapt to another group’s culture. This module examines these concepts in depth.
Within society, the dominant ideology, the beliefs and interests of the majority, typically takes precedence over all others. This can lead to problems for those with different beliefs, interests, perspectives, or resources. Take, for instance, consumerism, the constant need to acquire products and services.
An example of a dominant ideology in American culture is that a bride should wear white on her wedding day to keep with tradition and symbolize her purity
On the international stage, it is easy to see how social problems can develop between groups due to cultural imperialism, the influence and power of one country’s culture on a country due to importing goods and services. Corporations like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are multinational organizations, i.e., large businesses that operate in multiple nations worldwide.
In societies around the world, people often belong to subcultures, groups with a distinct set of cultural characteristics shared by a minority of people in society.
Subculture groups may have characteristics that distinguish them from the majority population, but they generally do not want to change the overall society. By comparison, countercultures are subculture groups that are in opposition or contrast with the majority of the members of society. A counterculture group wants to change the whole of society. Its actions and behaviors are so much in opposition to the larger society that they are seen as a threat to long-established norms. Due to their insistence on extensive change, this subculture category is often seen as a social problem by the larger society.
Functionalist Theory: Functionalist theory is concerned with how cultures operate interdependently as societies evolve. Functionalists focus on how society adapts to a changing culture through shifts in norms, values, and ideologies. To maintain stability, large social structures, like the government, function to protect the interests of the society and its subculture groups while also responding to the concerns of counterculture groups, like the LGBTQ+ movement.
Conflict Theory: Conflict theory focuses on the tension and struggles for social change between various groups in society. Counterculture groups in Myanmar have established the Spring Revolution movement to oppose those now in authority. This theory focuses on the strain between groups, concerns over scarce resources, and inequalities in society.
Symbolic Interactionism: Symbolic interactionist theory focuses on the role symbols play in everyday life and our experience of the world around us. Subculture groups like the Amish have ways of thinking, acting, and behaving that distinguish them from the dominant group, while counterculture movements such as hate groups often use signs, symbols, and patterns to demonstrate their opposition to the larger society.
In the same way, humans have practical needs that sociologists refer to as cultural universals, aspects of culture found in all societies. Examples of cultural universals include beliefs, family structures, shelter, clothing, and language, to name a few. Every society has examples of these categories because they are considered fundamental to human existence.
The reason your parents would never have considered these alternative forms of shelter has to do with what Durkheim called social facts, social patterns that are external to individuals and greatly influence our way of thinking and behaving in society. These social patterns exert control over the individual via cultural norms and values in social structures and institutions. Most homes in the United States are shaped like boxes.
How would you react if you woke up one morning and found yourself in a different pond where all the fish swim counterclockwise? You would probably be confused, disoriented, and even angry about constantly bumping into other fish as you swim. You might exclaim something like, “You all are swimming backward!” Sociologically speaking, your judgment of the other fish’s swimming would be an example of ethnocentrism, judging another culture by one’s own standards (HP).
Ethnocentrism is a common aspect of culture because people tend to view their way of doing something as the right (and only) way it should be done. On a certain level, it has to do with being set in our ways.
An alternative way to respond to situations outside our cultural norm is cultural relativism, understanding another culture from its standards. In other words, instead of looking at the situation from the standpoint of a person from Anywhere, USA, consider it from the perspective of a member of that culture
Culture spreads. As people from different groups interact with one another, they spread their culture through the process of cultural diffusion, the spread of norms, values, knowledge, symbols, and material components from one society to another. The spread of culture in this manner is often unintentional, arising from a person’s desire to be surrounded by the familiar.
When some parts of society change quickly and others more slowly, sociologists call this cultural lag, the process by which technological development and progress outpace current norms, values, knowledge, symbols, and material components of society (HP). Cultural lag (C-19) generally involves changes in society’s material aspects happening faster than in its nonmaterial aspects. Businesses and corporations worldwide manufacture powerful mobile devices (material culture) that allow us to share images with thousands of other people.
Whereas cultural diffusion involves the spread of culture from one society to another, cultural leveling, the process of cultures becoming similar due to factors such as media and globalization, is what happens when societies adopt a new culture they have been exposed to, resulting in similarity from one society to the next.
The spread of these dolls to countries around the globe speaks to the phenomena of cultural leveling but also allows us to classify Monster High dolls as part of 21st-century popular culture, cultural characteristics adopted, imitated, and idolized by the masses (HP). Of course, popular culture isn’t limited to toys. Other examples of popular culture can be found in books, pop songs, dances, TV shows, and viral videos, to name a few. Popular culture generally includes items that are mass-produced and widely accepted by the general population. An interesting aspect of popular culture is that while it is idolized by the masses one week, it may be utterly belittled or ignored the next.
Compared to pop culture, high culture consists of cultural characteristics associated with the dominant and elite members of society. While popular culture changes frequently based on the interests and whims of the masses, high culture experiences relatively little change.