Culture

Culture is a human universal. From an anthropological perspective, all societies and groups have cultures, transmitted to new members through reproduction or initiation as time goes on. Material culture refers to physical objects such as art, buildings, weapons, and tools. Symbolic culture, also known as nonmaterial culture, refers to a culture’s unique concepts, worldview/ethos, and patterns of behavior. Ideal culture refers to a people’s actual behavior, which usually fails to attain its own ideals.

People tend to approach other cultures from two perspectives. The first is ethnocentrism, in which an individual will use his own culture as a standard of comparison against other cultures. The second is cultural relativism, which seeks to understand other cultures in terms of other cultures. Different cultures are all convinced of their own culture’s normalcy. The Japanese find a woman wearing a kimono to be typical, while Americans see it as exotic. Material culture is entirely artificial, constructed to the specifications of the environment within which a culture exists. Items are practical for their cultural utility. Culture also supplies expected patterns of behavior through internalizing things such as morality. Culture provides an individual with an understanding of his place in the universe, and exposure to a foreign culture can radically challenge one’s entire understanding of life.

Nonmaterial culture centers on symbols. Symbols are signs of assigned meanings within a cultural or personal understanding. Symbols include language, gestures, norms, values sanctions, indigenous life-ways, and mores. Language is easily the most powerful weapon the human race has. Language allows humans to communicate, cooperate, and direct themselves to goals. It also allows for abstract thinking, including concepts of future and past. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis goes so far as to say that language goes so far as to shape the way we perceive the world.

Society cannot exist without priorities, and these take the form of values, standards by which a culture defines what is desirable and what is undesirable, and establish norms, rules, or exceptions of proper behavior. Groups use positive sanctions to show approval for and encourage certain behaviors and negative sanctions in order to express disapproval for and deter the occurrence of others.

Human culture is not monolithic. Within cultures, there are also subcultures and countercultures. A subculture will hold values and display behaviors to distinguish itself from members of the general culture. A counterculture, on the other hand, will hold values that oppose those of the general culture.

Within the United States of America, many cultures exist side by side. Despite being a pluralistic society, the nation is practically united under certain shared values, such as achievement and success, individualism, hard work, efficiency, practicality, science, technology, material comfort, democracy, equality, education, religiosity, and romantic love. Cultures evolve out of the way humans interact with each other and the world around them, and American culture developed accordingly. It began as a self-sufficient colony with a labor-intensive agrarian economy that began to resent the hold of their mother nation, resulting in values on things such as limited government and hard work.

Culture continues to develop, and technology brings acceleration to the process. Instant communication allows for cultural diffusion like never before. As ideas spread from culture to culture, they see a sort of cultural leveling, and cultures become more similar to one another.

Work Cited

Henslin, James M. "Chapter 2 - Culture." Essentials of Sociology: A Down-To-Earth Approach. 10th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004. N. pag. Print.