Unit 6 Lecture Notes.docx

Unit 6 Lecture Notes The Human Species This is the beginning of module two, which is how society, and the individual are connected. So, we're going to begin by talking about culture. In this video we will talk about one of the biggest topics within sociology, delving into something as deep and wide...

Unit 6 Lecture Notes The Human Species This is the beginning of module two, which is how society, and the individual are connected. So, we're going to begin by talking about culture. In this video we will talk about one of the biggest topics within sociology, delving into something as deep and wide as culture is almost unmatched by any one of the other topics in this course. So, this too, is foundational to module two, culture and society. So, what is culture? Well, here's an initial definition: the sum total of the heritage of a people. So, what do people inherit. When you're born, you are born into a culture. You are taught a particular language, customs, beliefs, knowledge, norms, material objects, all those things we all talk about most of that one at a time. But that's the sum total of everything that you were born into. Here's another way of defining culture. Culture is a collective definition and interpretation of reality. Okay, so it's not just things, it's not just ideas, but it's a collective definition and interpretation of reality that produces a whole way of life. Or you could say, produces a whole design of living. Culture is a system of shared meaning, of shared behavior. All those things that a culture has in common. One of the ways of understanding culture is to distinguish it from the physical environment. Now, we've probably all heard about the notion of Mother Earth. Mother Earth is our physical environment given to humans. Humans did not create Mother Earth. We all just were born into it. The physical environment is something given to us. So, is Earth our mother or who mothers more? The earth or culture. A good argument can be made that we are nurtured more by, or we are mothered more by a culture than we are by the Earth. And no, significantly, that mother culture is our social environment that we made up. Unlike the physical environment which was given to us. Mother culture is the social environment that we created. It's created by human interaction. It's sustained by human interaction. Culture is not nature, and we acquire culture by learning it. We don't inherit. It's not in our DNA. It's not in our genes. We must acquire or learn it. And it is so pervasive that we almost never notice it. It's almost imperceptible. The famous anthropologist Ralph Linton, back in 1936 was, I think, the first one to ever say that "the last thing a fish would ever notice would be water." And the last thing we humans would ever notice is the culture that we swim in because we just assume it's the entirety of reality as we know it. So, if that's what culture is, how does it compare to society? Well, here's a definition of society: a complex, all-encompassing system of interrelationships that connects people. Okay, so society is the relationships that connect people. It's not their ideas and values and technologies and all that sort of thing. It's the relationships. And then to qualifications, usually within the defined territory, as we will see, culture is always part of a society, and a society is part of a defined territory with a defined culture. So here are the intersections between culture and society. Think of it this way. No culture can exist without a society. There can't be some culture floating around up in the clouds somewhere. No, all culture must be based in some kind of society and vice versa. No society can exist without a culture. And as we will see, all societies have more than one culture, a dominant culture, subcultures, counter cultures, etc. Note that cultural characteristics can be transmitted from one society to another. So, societies are the interrelations of the connections between people within a defined territory. Yes, but their values, their beliefs, their norms, their technologies can be transmitted to another society elsewhere. We call that cultural diffusion. Or think about what we call cultural globalization. There's economic globalization, political globalization, but there's also cultural globalization. The ways in which culture share has been transmitted around the world. And thirdly, societies can share common cultural characteristics. Not all societies are totally distinct, obviously. Just think about Canada and the United States. We share a lot of common cultural characteristics, but we're also slightly different in our cultural characteristics in some way or another. So hopefully you can understand the difference between culture and society. Here's the best way to summarize it: culture is the script that we humans live by, society is the connection, the network of actors within a defined territory, and so forth. Culture is the script. Society is the actor. So, we humans, as I've said, create culture. We're not born with it. We don't inherit it. Do all species create cultures? You could argue that animals create cultures of their own. Different species of animals. Different breeds of animals. But humans create culture in a way different or more distinct than non-human animals do. Here's a quick list. Animals are conscious, sentient beings. They're conscious of everything around them. But they are not as self-aware as humans are. We see ourselves selves in ways that animals do not see themselves. We create and use symbols to communicate at a far more complex higher rate than animals do. Yes, they communicate but they don't use symbol systems to the extent that humans do. And we'll talk about that shortly. Humans are more adaptable to living in different physical environments. Most species and breeds of animals can only live in one physical territory because of the climate and topography. But we humans have found a way to live everywhere around the globe. No other animal has found a way to live everywhere on the globe. This is interesting. Humans have a capacity and an interest in year-round mating. Animals are only interested in temporary mating and there is no meaning attached to mating other than reproduction at the moment. But humans have a lot more meaning attached to it. And this is also interesting. We kill our own kind more than any other animal. We don't need to say more than that. And part of our self-consciousness is that we all know we're going to die. Ernest Becker has argued that it is human mortality and the consciousness of our mortality. Mortality that has created culture, that has been the impetus to creating culture, something that will outlive us because we all know we're going to die. Animals fight death like crazy at the last moment, but they don't know they're going to die. We do. Nature vs Nurture The central debate of social science is whether we humans are a product of nature or nurture. This is the central debate. Are we a product of our biology or are we mostly a product of our culture? Are we mostly a product of Mother Earth or are we a product of mother culture? That's the debate. As a somewhat of an aside, there is a one small branch of sociology known as sociobiology, which sort of attempts to combine these two. It attempts to explain social behavior by our social makeup. It's very similar to evolutionary psychology, which also tries to explain our psychology as something that has evolved and that we inherit. So, for example, the sexual behavior of males versus the sexual behavior of females. Males have a billion sperm. Females have only one egg. So, if the male wants to somehow reproduce and ensure some kind of intergenerational immortality, how does he go about it compared to how does she go about it? Well, what's the most practical thing for a male to ensure that he will have some progeny? Well, it's to have sex with as many different females as possible on the assumption that at least one, two, three or four of them will survive. What about the female? Well, she has only one egg per month and not a billion sperm. And it takes her nine months to conceive and grow a child within her. That's a lot more complicated. So, what does she need to do? Well, she needs to secure some male that will help her in the process. And so, sociobiologists would explain that's why males are inherently more promiscuous than females are. Here's another way of understanding the difference between nature and culture. And I think this is a good example. Simply, rivers are nature, roads are culture, right? Rivers exist whether humans ever existed or not. Roads? No, they would not have existed if humans had not created them. So, rivers are nature and roads are culture. But here's the big qualification. We humans know how to turn nature into culture. Rivers can be acculturated. We attach all sorts of meanings, and we use rivers for many different things. Rivers can become transport nation roads, or they can become playgrounds, garbage dumps or they can become political boundaries between two nation states. Or we add dams and use them for hydropower. Or we can regard them as some kind of sacred site where we worship. I mean, just think of all the ways in which we turn something as natural as a river into something as cultural as all the above. The Segments of Culture Here are the two main segments of culture. You may recall that we talked about Durkheim arguing about social facts. There's a difference between material facts and social facts and the segments of culture basically divide along the very same lines. So, there is material culture, the physical things created by members of a society. All our products, all our artifacts, all our structures. And as the example that I just use, roads. Okay, so roads are material culture. We humans create them. They are physical things. You can go out there, touch, feel, taste, smell. There is also nonmaterial culture or what Durkheim called social facts. So, these are the ideas created by members of society. We all carry culture. We carry society around in our heads. Our values, our norms are our ideology. And we will talk specifically about each one of those. And as an example, religion. Religion is a nonmaterial culture because it's not the ideas that we carry around in our heads that we learn that we acquire, that were not there at birth. So, think of culture or the different segments of culture as material as just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, there are physical things that we have created, but deeper down there is how we organize ourselves and deeper down than that it's our worldview. Assumptions and culture are comprised of all these segments. The Components of Culture 1 What we want to do now is talk about the components of culture. The first component of culture is symbols. All cultures have a symbol system. What is a symbol? that which represents something else. Or if you want to define it differently, objects to which people attach a shared meaning. So, it's an object, but it represents something else. The meaning is what something else is. We have the object, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about that to which it refers or represents. So, for example, a symbol can be a simple sound. I can make a sound. Okay, you ready? Here I go. Fish. What does that sound mean? What does that object mean? Well, I imagine that as soon as I made that vocalization, as soon as I made that sound, you immediately what came into your mind is all those slimy things that swim in the sea. That's amazing. I just make one sound and you associate it with something else because there is a shared meaning to that sound. So instead of making a sound, I can show you an image there of a Maple Leaf. If you said Canada, you're right. So, but those lines are just a representation of Canada. That's not Canada. That's just an image. That's a picture, but it represents the idea of Canada. So, the red maple leaf or lines are symbols that represent something else. A symbol can be a movement. I can make all kinds of gestures with my hands, and you will interpret those gestures to mean something else because they are all symbols. Now, those symbols may be interpreted differently in different cultures. Here in Canada, applause means good job. We appreciate what you just did. But in other cultures, in Latin America, applause means disapproval. Not approval, but disapproval. Thumbs up means something. Thumbs up in Canada means approval. Thumbs up in Turkey means disapproval. And so, it can change from culture to culture. The stimulus, the sound, the image, the gesture becomes an object because there is subjective meaning attached to it. So, I could show you a piece of wood, a stick. And what is that? Well, some people might say that's firewood, or some people might say that's a weapon or some people might say that's a baseball bat. What's the shared meaning you attached to this piece of wood or even a dandelion? Is that a flower? Is that a weed? Is that medicine? Is that a culinary herb? Well, you know, it depends on what the shared meaning of that dandelion is. Note that symbols are social products. They only come into existence by agreement. People agree that this represents that. So, for example, we tell our children that we live in Canada. Well, what's Canada? That's a very abstract concept sustained only by agreement. Recall that the use of symbols is a very pronounced characteristic of humans. Animals not so much. The human world is grounded in meanings that we attach to symbols, grounded not in the objects or the actions themselves, but in the meanings attached to the actions and the objects. And animals generally don't have any idea of God, government, golf or anything like that. They don't have such concepts. Animals merely react to a stimulus physically, or they react based on conditioned response, or they use trial and error to how to get under or around the fence. They're just reacting to the physicality or the conditioned. They don't use symbols as much. Now, recent research has shown that some animals do use symbols dolphins, chimpanzees, but those symbols are learned via conditioning. They have a very limited capacity, maybe a maximum of about 100 symbols that an animal can master. And the animal cannot transmit the meaning attached to that symbol, to their offspring, to their children, to their progeny. They can't transmit it. So, yes, animals do use symbols to a certain extent, but symbols are a far greater component of human culture than animal culture. Language is just one symbol or one kind of symbol system. And it's probably the most important symbol system for a human's sensitivity to language is huge. I mean, just think of all the tensions about language here in Canada between English, French, and Indigenous peoples. Language is super important to culture. Here are a few other things to note about language, though. Are you thinking right now? What are you doing when you're thinking? You're talking to yourself? What are you using when you're talking to yourself? Well, you're using language, so, if you didn't have language, would you be able to think? Probably not. Until we have language, we can't even think. Talk to ourselves. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the 1950s was that without language or without labels, there can be no meaning attached to objects or actions or anything like that. We cannot think without language. Yes, we can sense. We still have our senses. We can remember our senses, we can process them, but we cannot attach meaning to them. So, language creates the capacity to think. At least the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says it does. More than that. Language functions not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also more significantly as a way of defining experience for its speakers. The language that you and I speak has biases some would say, distorts our perceptions, our meaning. Just think about how sexist language has been in the English world. Traditional language in all cultures, in all languages has been horribly sexist. It has used generic masculine. So, when it refers to the male, it’s, just assuming every female as well. It doesn't just ignore females; it stereotypes females and males. The sexism of language has been a huge issue over the last generation as we've tried to gender neutralize our language. Okay, so here's a very famous quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." Now, most people today would modify that slightly to say the limits of my language are the limits of my mind. The world exists out there, regardless of my language. Mountains exist, regardless of whether I have a word for a mountain or not, but the limits of my language are the limits of my mind. That's huge. So, language is both enabling, and constraining. Language enables humans to do far more than nonhuman animals can do. It saves us from having to start over. Like what if when you were born you were taught no language, would you create a language? Would you attach sounds to objects and actions? Well, you might too. Good for you. Good luck with that and see how far you get in your lifetime. Probably not very far. But because we inherit a language, we can accumulate a past. We can learn about history; we can organize for the future. Language enables us to express ourselves what we're feeling, what our intentions are, express ourselves to get outside of ourselves. I can tell you how I'm feeling. You know, you can get outside yourself and get into my head and my feelings through language because I can report them to you so you can get outside of yourself by understanding other people. But beyond understanding other people, you can manipulate other people, too, with your language, with what you say. And as I've already suggested, language enables us to reach beyond the here and now. You can go back into history; you can go into the future with your language to speculate. You can talk to somebody on the other side. We now have the technology. You can talk to anybody around the world at any time. What's my son thinking now? Who lives in New York? I can ask him. Finally, language generates an abstract reality. Metaphysical reality, ethical reality. What is justice? What is love? What is humility? Well, we have language. We can’t process any of that. All those things that make us so, humans make us human. But on the other hand, language is also constraining. We become heirs to the stereotypes of the past. You know, for example, sexism, gender inequality that is embedded in language. We inherit a vocabulary of motives, so we inherit in our language racial prejudice, sexual stereotypes, the view of neurodiversity. That's all embedded in language. Kenneth Burke famously said "the names of things and smuggles in some kind of connotation of is this a good thing or a bad. A noun tends to carry with it an invisible adjective and a verb, an invisible adverb." Our language is just rife with all kinds of meaning, beyond description, beyond just describing something I write, it affects our perception of reality. It affects our relations. Everything around us, our culture. This is as good a reason as there is for learning a second language. If you haven't done that, I recommend it because learning another language often exposes how one language views the world compared to how another language will view the world. Thirdly, third component is stock of knowledge. All cultures have a certain stock of knowledge, things that they know that they believe to be true. Here's just one example. All cultures have a myth, a cultural myth. What do we mean by that? Well, here's a big, long definition. Cultural myths are stories or belief systems that help people understand the nature of the cosmos, the purpose and meaning of life, the origin and the role of evil and suffering. A cultural myth isn't just a trivial bit of knowledge. It's probably the biggest piece of knowledge that a culture will ever impart. Viewing North America as Turtle Island is an example of a cultural myth. It explains so much to indigenous peoples. A cultural myth is sometimes called the truth telling stories that provide a world view. Yes, it certainly provides a worldview to truth telling. It may not be historically or scientifically factual, but it does convey truths in a story form. So is also part of our stock of knowledge. Beliefs become objectified as knowledge and then transmitted in culture. A way of handling becomes the way of handling. So, for example, mate selection coupling. How does your culture do it? Arranged marriage, self-Selected marriage. A way of doing something becomes the way of doing it and just becomes common knowledge, at least in our culture. All cultures consist of shared ideas about what is desirable. In other words, values That's what evaluation is about. Values. Evaluation of self. Of others. Of everything. Values are very abstract. There they are ethical ideals. So does your culture value monogamy? Does it value friendship? Does it prioritize friendship over the law? Does friendship come ahead of the law? Does family come before civil society? In some cultures, it does as we'll see in a moment. So, these values often get embedded in language again. Just think of an example of how we now talk about partnering. We used to talk about spouses: husbands and wives and slowly our culture is shifting towards the term partner. So why? What value is being represented by the shift from husband and wife to partner? Well, husband and wife were just loaded terms of all kinds of gender stereotypes, morality, obligation, hierarchy, attachment, a heterosexual assumption, and all those sorts of things. We now value equality and inclusivity, so we want to leave behind all the words that do not represent our language, our values. Again, the power of language. And here at the intersection with values. Okay, there I was talking about gender equality. So here are some of the big differences between Eastern values and Western values. If you want to divide the world up that way, just look down the left hand. Well, look across internal self-control compared to external control, communal society versus individual society. Hierarchical society compared to equal society. Modesty versus achievement. And go ahead, read down the list. These are all values that produce profoundly different cultures, not societies. Look at the very bottom. In the West, we value doing. In the East, they value being. What are all the applications of that? You may have heard of Eastern cultures as shame based compared to Western cultures is guilt based. And so, here's a depiction of that. Shame is something you are, guilt is something you do. Okay. So, in Western cultures, we're focused on what we do. In Eastern cultures, they're focused on who they are. Shame versus guilt. Culture is huge informing how cultures manifest themselves. Here's a quick sampling of Canadian cultural values. Okay, I'm just going to skim down on this. It's not on the tests or anything like that. So, this is a compilation of many sources of Canadian cultural values? Freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality of condition. We'll talk about that later. Individualism, diversity, multiculturalism, competition. The way we achieve is by performing and outperforming everybody else. Really? Does achievement have to be based on competition? Well, I mean, in our society it is a work ethic. Materialism, the quality of life is measured by how much stuff you have. Consumerism. We all think of ourselves primarily as consumers, not as citizens who share responsibility for the well-being of each other. Self-fulfilling. Self-actualization, humanitarianism. Yeah. We help the needy. Economism. All problems are best solved by the marketplace. Rationality as we should live according to reason, not tradition or anything like that. Progress. Yes, we should all be getting better all the time. And if we're not getting better, then we're doing something wrong. Social conformity. Are they consensual Canadian values or not? Absolutely not. We need to distinguish between Euro-Canadian values and Indigenous values. Euro Canadian culture compared to Indigenous culture. And so here you see some of the differences. They reflect the differences between East and West, different cultures to a certain extent. So those are values. All cultures, values, and all. Some of them are more like each other than others. Some of them are flat out contradictory. Sociologists typically distinguish between the ideal values of a culture and the real values of a culture. So, the ideal is that to which people aspire. But the reality is how they actually think and act. So, we might share what is ideal in Canadian society, but are we living that way, acting that way, thinking that way? There is also the difference between values and virtues. Value is what people desire. Virtues identify what is morally correct. There might be a difference between what our culture values and what is virtuous, and then who judges what is virtuous? Well, of course, culture itself defines what is virtuous, but that gets us into the historic distinction between the true, the good and the beautiful which goes all the way to Greco-Roman antiquity. This distinction, what is true, what is good, what is beautiful. The true is what is, the good is what should be. And the beautiful is what attractive. What is attractive? So, there are lots of dimensions to values in all cultures. This is just an introduction to what they are and their power. Let's move on to norms, the norms of culture, the values that which are defined as desirable norms. The shared rules of conduct. This is the do's and don'ts of social life. The DOs are prescriptive, norms that prescribe what we should do. The don'ts are the prescriptive norms that describe what we should not do. Here are some examples. Have you heard of man spreading? Yeah. It's a norm in our society that men get to spread their needs for comfort. Men get to do that, but women don't get to do that. Women must keep their knees together or cross their legs. If they spread their knees, they break it very well. It's a behavioral norm that I don't know. Maybe you've noticed it. Maybe you haven't. Because what if a woman would sit like a man, you know, slouch, and spread her knees and everything? So, the woman on the right is breaking all the norms of the woman on the left knows how to sit like a "real woman." So, here's just an example of a very gendered norm in our society. Several things to note about the relationship between values and norms. Norms are more specific than values. As an example, we here in North America, our personal space, when we're talking to somebody, we want about three feet of distance between my face and your face. But if we were in South America or in Latin America, they prefer to stand closer face to face. Well, I mean, it's no big deal either way. But I think it makes, you know, so the North American and the Latin American that can start a conversation in one side of the room and ended on the other side of the room because the North American is backing up while the Latin American is moving in because they're both trying to maintain the norms of their culture. It's very specific. Norms are justified by values. So, for example, the norm against cheating is based on our value of fairness. Cheating is a very specific action. Fairness is a value. We don't cheat because we believe in fairness, at least in the West. In the East, they wouldn't call that cheating. They would call that sharing. And it's a good thing for them as it is part of their values. So, we have cultural disagreement about that. Norms are also often very situation specific. For example. Applause. When do you applaud as an audience? Whom do you applaud? Well, you're expected to applaud after a musical performance. You are not expected to applaud after an academic lecture. You're certainly not expected. You're not even allowed to applaud after a sermon in a church. That would be horribly inappropriate. So, applause as appreciation is very situation specific takes. Let’s consider more serious like taking the life of another person. There's a difference between murder, which is a bad thing, and execution, which is a fair and justifiable thing. Abortion, suicide, assassination, self-defense, warfare. I mean, we kill each other in many different contexts, and some of them are okay and others are not okay. You get it. It's very situation specific. So here are a couple of more examples of norms. Here's a micro norm: holding hands. Isn't that beautiful? But you know what? If they're heterosexuals, nine times out of ten, his hand will be in the front and her hand will be in the back. Why is he always the leader? Is this patriarchy? Why do we do it that way? What does it mean? Okay, that's a micro norm. Here's a macro norm. Get out there. Get a job, go to work, get married, have children, follow fashion, act normally. And then on the bottom, repeat after me. I am free. Well, you're certainly not free from your cultural norms, are you? No, you're not. One more thing about norms, and that is that there is a hierarchy of obligation. We've already talked about the ways in which norms vary. So, three levels of obligation. Folkways. The way of the folk. That's what it means. These are just customary, normal, habitual ways of doing things. There are social conventions. There's no strong feeling of right or wrong attached to it. They're trivial. And if you violate the folk way, then people think you're weird, you're eccentric, you're crazy. They may stare at you, they laugh at you, they may even show some disgust at you. I mean, you don't eat steak for breakfast, do you? I mean, you don't put up a Christmas tree on Mother's Day, do you? You don't belch in a lecture, do you? I mean, you could. And you probably get some stares. And that's because that's the folk way, right? You don't cut to the front of the line. You wait in line. That said, they are trivial and non-absolute. There are cultures in which belching is the highest compliment to the chef and where nobody lines up, they all rush for services. It's a very cultural thing. The second level is mores. It's pronounced mores, strong feelings. This isn't just weird or eccentric. This is morally right or wrong. Very strong feelings. You do not engage in extramarital sex because that is wrong. So, if you violate mores, then you are an immoral person, or at least you've conducted an immoral act and people will be hurt and not just amused or disgusted, but they will be angry. They will be indignant. There will be severe reactions. You will be reprimanded. You will be punished, shunned, ostracized because you've done something. You violated a much more important norm. If you violate a folk way, you’re just being rude or weird. But if you violate a moral, you're being immoral. For a man not to wear a tie at a formal event may contravene a folk way. But for a man to wear only a tie at a formal event would be to breach a more. That would be immoral. Then we'd have a problem. That's the difference. And the third level is laws. Norms that become rules enforced by the authority of the state. And if you violate one of them, you're not just eccentric and immoral. You are a criminal. If you break one of the highest level of norms and the most important mores of a society will always become the laws of a society. And sometimes they stay in the books long after the mores have changed. Did you know that blasphemy is still illegal in Canada? You can go to jail or be fined for being blasphemous, apparently. Well, nobody enforces that anymore. But there was a time, you know, why is it that it was so important that it became a law? Okay, so here's a summary example. I've already used this, but here's a value. A cultural value for sexual expression enhances marital love. Here's a norm of that value. A husband and wife should have sexual intercourse with each other regularly, but not with anyone else. If we break that norm down into Folkways, mores and laws, the folk way then is the husband and wife share a bedroom and a bed. The kids sleep somewhere else in the house. So how we arrange our space is a folk way. People everywhere throughout history have not arranged their space like that. What's the more. Well, adultery is morally evil. Extramarital sex morally evil. What's the law? Marital rape is criminal if he forces himself on her that's not just violating the folk way or immoral that is violating the law. Ever since 1983. So, there you see the gradation of values, norms, and then the three different kinds of norms folkways mores and laws. The Components of Culture 2 In our previous video, we identified and described five different components of culture. In this video, I'm going to identify another three. And the first one is ideology. One of the preeminent sociological questions is how social order is possible; not just how it is created, but how it is maintained. We hardly use physical force anymore to maintain social order. So, the answer, if you don't use physical force, you must use mental force or what we might call ideology. So here are two aspects of ideology, the ideology that creates and maintains social order. Here's a definition of it. Ideology is a coherent set of very interrelated ideas (about what is) and ideals (about what ought to be) that explain and justify. In other words, they legitimate the prevailing or the proposed distribution of power, wealth, and privilege in a particular society. So, in Canadian society, we have what would be historically traditionally termed a liberal ideology. For example, we believe that success or failure is to the credit or blame of the individual. It's just classic individualism that the individual determines their success or failure in this world. That social structure or social systems have nothing to do with it. Every person for him or herself. That's what liberal ideology is. That is the dominant ideology. And as Karl Marx observed, the dominant ideology is always the ideology of the ruling class. So, here's the way he said it: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch. The ruling ideas. The class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. So, there is the power of social class. As we noted when we first introduced Marx, he was very focused on social class. There is always a privileged class in every society, a class that is privileged by having enough time, resources, power, and position to define what is true, what is real. The ideas and ideals that explain and justify or legitimate the distribution of power and privilege. So that's what ideology is. How does it function? It functions as a set of limits to consciousness. Or the metaphor would be as blinders. Sometimes humans wear blinders. That's what ideology does for them. And Marx would argue that it creates a false consciousness or a perception of a situation not in accord with reality. So, blaming the individual for their failure alone is perhaps a false consciousness when maybe social order or social structure has contributed to their failure. Why blame the individual? Martin Luther King famously said It's cruel to tell somebody to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps when somebody is standing on the boot. So maybe there are other causes for success and failure other than individual responsibility. But that's what ideology does. An idea is something you create, an ideology, that's something that has you. It's got you. It controls you. We don't see things the way they are. We see them the way we are. We see them according to our ideology. All cultures have more than one ideology. There's a dominant, counter, all that sort of thing. Number seven, all cultures have forms of expression; activities done for their own sake. They simply express the human experience, the human condition. They're not instrumental. They're not a means towards an end. They're done for their own sake, like the arts, sport, religion, etc. They are not instrumental; they are not utilitarian. For example, art. All art is a social experience because all art uses symbols. That was number one on our list. It's a symbolic activity that uses symbols and relies on the shared meanings of symbols. All art is performed according to certain codes or rules that must be learned to be appreciated. Hip hop music is different than country music and so on. They all have their own codes and conventions. And art has always been performed for the public. It's not done just for the sake of the artists. The artists are trying to communicate with the public. It's a social experience. It's a social activity. So, thinking back to the idea of music, how many kinds of music are there in the world? How are they associated with one culture, subculture, or another? How many kinds of clothing are there in the world? How are they associated with one culture or another culture? And the last component of culture is technology. Note that all the above cultural components 1-7 would be what we called nonmaterial culture. Only number eight is material culture. Technology is material culture. It's the tools and the toys of a culture. Here's a definition: technology is the skills, tools and machines used by members of a society to convert material objects like natural resources into products that are useful to themselves. In other words, yes, forms of expression are expressive. They are important. But technology is instrumental. It's a bunch of tools and toys and instruments. Technology is made possible by applying the knowledge and skills derived from science, using science to create tools to meet human needs. Technology is just applied science, physical science. Okay, to create material objects out of what are otherwise just natural resources. E.g., you put a sharp stone on a stick, and you have a stone ax. Note that technology is cumulative in a way that art is not. Technology throughout history has always built on the prior of previous technology and made it more advanced. That's not true of art. Art goes in cycles. It goes in every different direction. Technology is cumulative in a way that expressive systems are not. Note that technology is evaluated according to its efficiency. Like does it do the job that we want it to do? If it doesn’t do the job, it's useless. Here's another point about technology. Technology is what makes its way into museums, values, and norms and all those other things that we talked about don't show up in museums. They disappear with the culture. But technology in as much as it stays there, we can recover that and try to imagine what their life was like based on the tools that they had. We call that archeology. It's one aspect of anthropology, right? Archeology is reconstructing the non-material culture from the material culture. If we can access the material culture, can we sort of imagine and piece together what the non-material, what the values and norms and symbols of that society were. So, for example, if what could be learned about you and your culture 500 years from now, if some alien walked into your room today and said, okay, so these are all the objects here. So, what kind of a life did he or she lead? What would they see? What would they sort of conclude that our culture is obsessed with time, appearance, efficiency, and that we're loaded with information? Exactly. That's the point. Technology also creates some problems. It can dictate the character of life. As I just said, Western technology unconsciously controls us by now by demanding that we all be efficient, rational, and have good know-how. Those are all the ways in which technology will determine the character of life. And technology can create dependency. What do you depend on your phone for? Basically everything, right? What would you do without your phone? Could you go for a weekend without your phone now? Are you entirely dependent on that technology? Technology disempowers and deskills. It replaces humans. Look at where A.I. is going. Machine learning and robotics replace humans. These are serious issues. It also simply distorts reality. What does social media tell you about reality out there and to you? Do you think that's accurate? I don't think so. There’s the environmental aspect of it. We just go through so much technology that it accelerates environmental degradation. And here's an interesting one: it's called "the tyranny of the possible." Technology sort of creates the tyranny of the possible. Just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should, does it? And think of the world of medicine. Think of AI. Just because we can doesn't mean that we should. So how does a culture go about deciding? Or do they just let technology race ahead and force the rest of us to catch up? That's what cultural lag is. That's when the norms and values of society lag behind the technology that the technology has advanced so rapidly that, no, we haven't really caught up ethically or philosophically on what we should do or shouldn't do. That's known as cultural lag. Here you go. Look at the title of this book, Neil Postman. This was published in the mid-nineties. Technopoly: the term is a combination of technology and monopoly, right? It's the monopoly that technology has over culture by now. Look at the subtitle The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Is it true that all of culture in all the previous seven components that we talked about can be steered by technology? Well, that's worth thinking about. Thinking Outside the Box? One of the characteristics of our culture is that we're all thinking outside the box. Well, think again. Are you thinking outside the box? Because, I mean, face it, if everybody is thinking outside the box, then that's the norm. And that means nobody is thinking outside the box. Because thinking in the box is for everybody to think outside the box. Right? The claim itself is inside the box of Western individualism. If we're all a bunch of nonconformists, if we're all thinking outside the box, then non-conformity is the ultimate form of conformity. Right? Get it? Thinking outside the box. Well, outside which box? We're all inside the box of our culture, even when we are thinking outside the box. Because that's part of our culture. Cultural Diversity Now we want to simply observe the facts, some of the facts and terms associated with cultural diversity. Jews do not eat pork or pig. Hindus do not eat beef or cow. Canadians do not eat dog, but Chinese do. So why? Why the difference? We Westerners kiss each other to express affection. But the Tonga of Southeast Africa, I think it's disgusting to exchange saliva and dirt. In Saudi Arabia, you can be stoned to death for adultery. Historically, to be a good host of a family friend or even a stranger, and Inuit male was obligated to offer his wife's sexual services to any visitor as part of his hospitality. So why the difference? Well, let's start by talking about cultural universals. The cultural elements that are found in every culture of the world. George Murdock, an anthropologist, claimed that there are more than 60 cultural universals, all cultures have a language, sexual obligations, or restrictions of some sort. They have a form of art, religion, law, morality. They have different ways of feeding themselves and clothing themselves. So, the actual elements of culture are found everywhere in the world. All people must communicate, feed themselves, clothe themselves, cope with the environment, procreate, die. All people must do that. So, diversity is in the way of doing it, not in the thing being done. That's the point about cultural diversity. So, a similarity of elements, a diversity of style, a similarity of the things that must be done. But a difference in how cultures go about it. So here is a list of cultural universals on the right. Arts and Leisure Basic needs. Beliefs. Communication. Family. Government. Economy. And examples of each one of those universals. So yes, of course, athletics, sports, dancing, decorative art games, music will sound and look completely different from one culture to the next. But all cultures have some form of art and leisure and so forth. Okay, so that's just the concept of cultural universals. Cultural identity is that all of us identify with one culture more than another. We're more comfortable in our own culture. We get uncomfortable when we go and visit another culture. It's very natural to feel comfortable with your own, to prefer your own, to be loyal to your own because and it's equally natural to feel like a stranger, to feel out of out of place. When you go to a different culture, when you're away from your home culture. I may not know all Canadians who live in Vancouver personally, but they're not strange to me. They're not strange to me because they live according to the same culture that I do. So here are some concepts of cultural identity. This notion of feeling strange when you go to another culture or more severely feeling cultural shock when you go to another culture. Here's the definition: feeling of unreality, disorientation, anxiety, frustration upon realizing taken for granted thoughts and actions are not appropriate in the new context. That's culture shock. By now, we were all aware of the phenomenon we expected when we go to another culture, we're not surprised by it, but we're still confused and unsettled by it. It depends on how distant that culture is from our own. So Spanish culture is not as distant from Canadian culture as Chinese culture is, which is a greater distance from Canada. And now we're talking about reverse culture shock. This is what happens when you go and live in another culture for a while and then come back to your own and suddenly you see your own culture through the eyes of another. You see it completely differently and you're shocked by, let's say you go live abroad for a year and then you come back to Canada, and you notice the individualism and the materialism of Canadian culture, and you are kind of unsettled by that. Now, obviously, the phenomenon of both culture shock and reverse culture shock has been lessened somewhat by cultural globalization, which has been happening for the last generation or two, depending how you define it. But as cultures around the world intermingle and are homogenized, there is less and less cultural shock or reverse cultural shock than there used to be. But we still work with the tools that we were given that we were raised in. In other words, our original definition of the true, the good and the beautiful. Ethnocentrism is another aspect of cultural identity. This is the downside of cultural identity. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view things from the viewer's culture instead of from the perspective of the viewed culture. So, here's a definition: judging another culture using the standards of our own culture instead of using their standards to judge or assess them. When you're ethnocentric, you think either everyone is like us or they want to be like us, or they should be like us. You're just using us, your own culture, as the point of judgment, you know, thinking that everybody else has an accent and you don't. Come on, you have, and we all have an accent, right? Or what's sometimes called Eurocentrism or the Far East. Why don't we talk about the Far East? Like what? What's the point of reference which determines that they are Far East? Really? Well, you're speaking from a certain social location. You're being very ethnocentric when you say that. Or when you say down under. According to whom? North America should be up and South America down or so we think. But because we live on a globe up and down, this has no meaning at all. So yeah, the phrase down under makes no sense. It's just an ethnocentric bias, I think that says it. Well, here's another one: the world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit. So, then the concepts of cultural relativity versus cultural relativism. Theoretically, we observed based on Max Weber's, that sociology should be value free, that it should not make moral judgments, that it should simply describe and explain and not judge, not moralize about what is good or bad, because it’s inevitably ethnocentric in its moralism. Moralizing is inevitably ethnocentric. So, bullfighting in Spain. Raising a bull for the sole purpose of stabbing it to death in front of large crowds who are shouting, are we going to judge that as animal cruelty or perhaps even more severely, or are we going to judge female genital mutilation in Africa as immoral? On what basis? That's the question. So, here's the difference between cultural relativity and cultural relativism. Cultural relativity is the empirical fact of cultural diversity. We just talked about that. The empirical fact of cultural diversity. But often that empirical facts fact leads to the metaphysical presumption, given that all cultures are equally valid and deserving of our respect. So, this is what we call cultural relativism, the metaphysical assumption that all cultures are equally valid and moral and deserving of respect. So cultural relativity is an empirical fact. Cultural relativism is a metaphysical, moralistic judgment. So, do we abandon all moral criteria when we look at cultural diversity? Do we give up the search for the better in the best of, well, according to cultural relativism, cultures can only be judged according to their own ethical standards, not our ethnocentric ethical standards, judged according to their own standards and their functional adaptation and integration. Like does that work for the Inuit people up north? Here's another example. Unproductive Inuit elders were expected to wander off onto an ice floe and not return. In other words, commit suicide. Once you're no longer productive, you're just wasting food. And so, it's your obligation to commit suicide. Do we judge that? Widows in India. Historically, if their husband died and was being cremated in a public fire in the town square, the widowed wife was expected to throw herself on the fire and burn herself up and commit suicide. Because, after all, what good is a woman if she's not married? Do we judge that, you know, or is that relative to their culture, their values, and their ethical standards? Cultural relativism is, you know, the value neutrality of it, is very unsatisfying and probably ultimately impossible. Value neutrality is a good thing to a certain extent, but as an ideal, it is waning, I would say, within social science and sociology. There's a difference between absolute cultural relativism, which says whatever goes on in a culture cannot be questioned because if you question it, you're just being ethnocentric. That's absolute cultural relativism compared to critical cultural relativism, which poses questions about the cultural practices in terms of who accepts them and why, who is being harmed by those practices. Are human rights being violated? Who is being harmed? Who's being helped? Can we evaluate different cultural practices without being relativistic? Human rights, while not all cultures believe in human rights. So maybe, maybe just basing judgment on human rights is itself ethnocentric. It just gets really, really complicated. That's the point. Another part of cultural diversity is subcultures versus counter cultures. A subculture is cultural patterns that set some groups apart from their host culture. Okay, so they agree with most of the cultural norms, values, and expressions, but they disagree with some of them. So, they are a subculture. Cultural patterns that set apart some segment of a society's population, but they share the overall culture. Yes, I said that's right. They share in the overall culture, but they maintain a distinctive set of values, norms, and language that are modifications of the host culture. And just the fact that there are subcultures in every culture shows that society is never totally integrated. Society never agrees on everything. So, here's the concept of counterculture. A subculture agrees with the majority but disagrees with the minority. A counterculture disagrees with the whole thing. Cultural patterns that strongly oppose those are widely accepted in society. So, groups whose values conflict with a larger culture. The term counterculture first arose with hippies in the 1960s, but a criminal gang might be a counterculture. Religious sect or cult might be a counterculture that lives completely different differently than their host culture. So, speaking of religion, sometimes religion is the dominant culture in a society. Sometimes it’s the subculture in a society. Sometimes it's the counterculture in a society. Groups whose set of values and norms conflict with the larger culture. Okay, here's another difference between high culture, pop culture or mass culture. The labels high and pop are sort of evaluative, sort of hierarchical in themselves. We sometimes talk about highbrow and lowbrow culture as if there's a status difference between different kinds of culture status, difference of social position, prestige, level styles of life, that sort of thing. But here's a definition of high culture: cultural patterns that distinguish a society's elite. This is elitist. It is considered more profound, serious, intellectual, demanding, accessible only to a few. So, yes, the ballet, symphony, music, painting, poetry that was high culture. I went to see a ballet of Cinderella at the Lincoln Center in Midtown Manhattan, and I was lost. I could not appreciate it. I didn't understand enough of what was going on to be much amused. So that's high culture. In some ways you would say that it is exclusive, it is elitist, it excludes all those people like me who simply aren't educated enough to be able to understand its nuances. Popular culture: cultural patterns that are widespread throughout a culture, be it promotes, celebrates. Commonality. It appeals to the masses. So, advertising pop music, sports, mass media, bestseller lists, top ten. And yes, it is inclusive instead of exclusive and elitist. One more distinction. Art versus entertainment. Art is sort of highbrow. Entertainment is what? Lowbrow. What’s the difference? High art challenges and enlightens the mind, it deeply moves the human mind and spirit. Look at entertainment. Entertainment occupies. It just occupies the mind, agreeably amuses one's feelings securely. What mass media offers is not art, but entertainment, which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced with a new dish? Finally, cultural assets. So here are a couple of terms that sociologists use. Well, not just sociologists, but cultural capital is the non-financial assets that promote social mobility beyond economic means. You can be promoted economically, but you can also be promoted because of the social assets that you have, not just the financial assets. In other words, your values, your attitudes, your education, your knowledge, your interpersonal skills, even your style of speech or your dress, or even your physical appearance/attractiveness. It's all cultural capital that will get you ahead, or that capital is what you gain from watching documentaries instead of watching game shows. So that's what a cultural capital is. Secondly, cultural literacy. Maybe you don't have much capital, but at least your cultural literate, right? I mean, you have enough general knowledge about society to communicate effectively with anyone. I remember one of my best friends in high school. He did not graduate and then a couple of years later, he was trying to get his G.E.D. and I was helping him study and I was explaining the Canadian political system to him. I mean, just the most basic descriptions of what happens in Ottawa. And at one point he says, like, where did you learn all this stuff? And I said, well, I've been living with my eyes open, and you haven't. You know, I have the basic cultural literacy and you don't. I mean, I didn't say that to him, but that was the point. Finally, the culture of poverty. So, this is a social class, cultural difference. Is there a distinct culture among the lower classes or the culture of poverty. Here, defined as: the structure, rationale, and defense mechanisms of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. So, these studies first done back in the sixties, sort of identify that people in impoverished areas believed in luck. They believed in destiny. They bought more lottery tickets than anybody else did because they couldn't earn wealth. They were just hoping to maybe get lucky enough to win wealth. The males, the masculinity, impoverished masculinity is very showy. It shows off, it takes risks. You know that kind of bravado to compensate for the drudgery, deprivation, and humiliation of their everyday life. So, the men just show off a little bit more, a little bit more macho. They don't plan much. They don't believe in cultural literacy, literacy because it's useless. It doesn't get them anywhere. And so on. Is there a culture of poverty? Is there some kind of self-perpetuating, self-defeating, perpetuation of victimization and children who grow up in this culture? They absorb the alienation and the cynicism from social institutions. And then it's pointed out that maybe this whole culture of poverty thesis is just allowing middle classes to feel good about themselves, to feel blameless, and to blame the victims of the system. So maybe the whole idea of culture of poverty is just another form of middle-class blaming victims of the social system. And so, you see how it gets complicated from there. But those are some terms of cultural assets. All right. That concludes our unit on culture.