Page 10 - Flipbook: Sociology Shortcuts Issue 3

What Is Culture?

If the concept of culture is such a central one in Sociology, it would be useful to develop what
we mean by it…

In broad terms, a culture is a way of life They also have cultural meanings: the kind of
specific to a particular group or society. phone you own, for example, says something
More-specifically, it’s what Dahl (2001) calls about you to others, both intended (“look how
“a collectively held set of attributes”and this wealthy I am!”) and unintended (“that phone
includes both the material things people is so uncool”).
value, such as cars and computers, and the
non-material things: the knowledge, ideas By extension, this tells us something about
and beliefs that influence how and why the symbolic nature of both cultures as a
people behave as they do. whole and the artefacts they produce. There
is, for example, nothing inherent in “a phone”
As you might expect, these things and ideas that tells us its meaning, as opposed to its
are dynamic, change over time and are function (or purpose). It can mean different
transmitted from one generation to the next things to different people and groups within a
through a mechanism called socialisation. particular culture, just as it could mean
different things to different cultures.
Put more-sociologically, cultures embody
two main strands: If you think about it, the problem of meaning
is potentially a real one in cultures as large
1. Material culture consists of the physical and complicated as our own.
objects (“artefacts”) a society produces that
reflect cultural knowledge, skills, interests Take, for example, the idea of social status.
and preoccupations.

2. Non-Material culture involves
ideas: the knowledge and beliefs
that characterise a particular
group of people at a particular
time in their social development.
This might, for example, involve
things like rational and scientific
beliefs about the world. Equally,
it may involve irrational and non-
scientific beliefs.

Interestingly, of course, the
objects of material culture - such
as a mobile/cell phone - have
cultural meanings for the people
who produce and use them. A
phone is not only a device for talking to
people or browsing the Internet.

10