01:920:101 Chap.4 Culture and Society
Culture and Society
Culture is the way of life of a group: its values, norms, language, symbols and the objects it makes. Society is the organised group of people who share a territory and institutions. This chapter separates the parts of culture the review sheet lists and then shows how culture connects to inequality, which is where the topic becomes more than vocabulary.
The first distinction is between material culture, the physical things people make and use, and symbolic culture, the shared meanings in people's minds. Values and norms both belong to symbolic culture, but values are ideals and norms are rules of behaviour.
The course uses a classic essay about the Nacirema, a tribe whose strange rituals turn out to be ordinary American habits, to show how easily familiar practices come to seem natural. From there the review sheet moves to culture as advantage. Ann Swidler's cultural toolkit, cultural scripts and cultural capital explain how habits and knowledge learned at home can be rewarded by schools and employers.
Annette Lareau's research on class and child rearing is the course's example: the parenting style of middle-class families matches what institutions expect, so everyday culture carries class advantage forward.
The chapter ends with how groups relate to one another's cultures: ethnocentrism and cultural relativism as ways of judging, assimilation and multiculturalism as ways of living together, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language shapes thought. Each pair is a likely source of multiple-choice distractors, so the full chapter gives a one-line test for telling them apart.
Culture questions on Exam 1 tend to be classification items: is this example material or symbolic, a value or a norm, ethnocentric or relativist, assimilation or multiculturalism. The review sheet also asks you to define cultural scripts and explain how they relate to cultural capital, which rewards a short causal sentence rather than two separate definitions.
Prepare one example that shows culture producing advantage, because that is the point where this chapter links forward to stratification.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Culture, society, norms and values
- 02
Material and symbolic culture
- 03
The Nacirema and seeing the familiar as strange
- 04
Cultural toolkits, scripts and cultural capital
- 05
Ethnocentrism, relativism, assimilation and multiculturalism
Worked example · free
Explaining a classroom gap with cultural capital
- 2Name the unwritten script the situation requires.
- 2Explain who learned it and where.
- 2Show how the institution rewards it, and propose a test.
Key terms
- Cultural capital
- Knowledge, tastes and ways of speaking that institutions such as schools reward, often learned at home and unevenly distributed by class.
- Cultural relativism
- Understanding a practice by the standards and meanings of the culture in which it occurs rather than one's own.
- Symbolic culture
- The shared, non-material side of culture, including values, norms, language and symbols.
- Cultural toolkit
- Ann Swidler's image of culture as a repertoire of habits, skills and styles that people draw on to act.
- Cultural script
- A familiar sequence of behaviour that a group expects in a particular situation, such as how to act in a job interview.
Culture and Society FAQ
What is the point of the Nacirema reading?
It describes ordinary American grooming and medical habits as if they were the rituals of an exotic tribe. Readers learn two things at once: other groups' practices are not bizarre, and our own practices are not simply natural.
How does Lareau's research connect culture and class?
Lareau found that middle-class and working-class parents raise children differently, and that schools reward the middle-class style of engaging with adults. Class advantage therefore passes through everyday habits as well as money, which is what cultural capital means.
Are norms and values the same thing?
No. Values are broad ideals about what is good, such as honesty. Norms are specific rules of behaviour that put values into practice, such as citing sources. A person can hold a value and still break a related norm.
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
It is the idea that the language people speak shapes how they perceive and think about the world. Sociologists use it to show that culture works through categories of thought, not only through customs and objects.
Exam move
Collect five examples from your own week and classify each as material or symbolic culture, and if symbolic, as a value or a norm. Then pick one and explain who benefits from knowing its script. Finish by writing one sentence that links a cultural script to a class advantage.
Working through Culture and Society in 01:920:101? Sia is AskSia’s AI Sociology tutor — ask any 01:920:101 Culture and Society question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how 01:920:101 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
