1. Building Order: Culture and History
Chapter 4
Building Order: Culture and History

2. Culture A society’s personality
The shared, taken-for-granted values, beliefs, objects, and rules that guide people’s lives

3. Culture Usually only notice other people’s cultures
Our own culture is usually invisible to us
Except in times of social upheaval
When traveling or returning home

4. Elements of Culture Non-material culture
Knowledge, beliefs, customs, morals, symbols
Patterns of behavior
“Owner’s manual for social life”

5. Elements of Culture Material culture
Stuff: clothing, buildings, inventions, food, artwork, music
Technological achievements that shape and are shaped by non-material culture

6. The Chair is Cultural May define your status or role
May carry symbolic meaning
Only common to about one third of the world’s populations

7. Thinking Sociologically
Cultural change
What are some changes that you have observed in material culture in your lifetime?
What are some changes that you have observed in nonmaterial culture in your lifetime?

8. Global Culture
Transnational media, global communication, transportation systems, and centuries of international migration have made the concept of “cultural purity” all but obsolete
People have always met, shared, and traded (but it happens a lot faster now)

9. Subcultures & Countercultures
Values, behaviors, and physical artifacts of a group that distinguish it from the larger culture
Subcultures
Culture within a culture

10. Subcultures & Countercultures
Reject some elements of the larger culture
Yet also exist in relation to it

11. History & Culture Culture’s “archives” Shifts in accepted behaviors
Need to view historical acts within their cultural setting

12. Cultural Expectations & the Social Order
Expected formulas: “How are you?”
Humor: disrupted social order or cultural expectations

13. Cultural Expectations & Social Order
Social order and cultural expectations are not static
History: how we tell our cultural story

14. Norms
Culturally defined “rules” of conduct or expectations for behavior
Different levels of norms
Folkways: informal norms that are mildly punished when violated  
Mores: highly codified, formal, systematized norms that bring severe punishment when violated

15. Institutionalized Norms
Patterns of behavior that become widely accepted within a particular social institution and taken for granted in society
Establish ways for people to discover preferences or see the world in a particular way

16. Institutionalized Norms
Make certain actions seem unthinkable:
2010: going to college is the path to financial success
1810: owning other human beings is the path to financial success

17. Institutionalized Emotions
Emotions seem natural, sometimes instantaneous
Yet, they are also culturally bounded
How should you react at funerals?
At weddings?
When you get good news?
If the good news is at someone else’s expense?
If you are a doctor giving bad news to a patient?
If you a flight attendant during turbulence?

18. Norms & Sanctions
Norms provide a framework for our actions and choices
Rarely tell us exactly what to do or how to act
May be ambiguous or contradictory

19. Norms & Sanctions Sanctions discourage breaking social norms
Direct social response to a behavior
Symbolically reinforce the culture’s values and morals

20. Cultural Relativism
People’s beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of their own culture
May challenge the values of one’s own culture

21. Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism: the tendency to evaluate other cultures using one’s own culture as a standard
Ethnocentrism is encouraged by institutional ritual and symbolism, cultural loyalty

22. Managing Cultural Variation
Doing taarof in Iran
Hand gestures across cultures
Forming lines

23. Culture in Health & Illness
U.S. medical treatment tends to derive from an aggressive, “can do” spirit
U.S. doctors are more likely than European doctors to prescribe drugs and resort to surgery

24. Culture in Health & Illness
What does it mean to be sick in U.S. culture compared to other cultures?
What if you don’t play the sick role correctly?

25. The Sick Role: Norms in Action
The sick role is a set of norms governing how one is supposed to behave and what one is entitled to when sick.

26. How to be Sick in the United States
It’s not your fault.
It’s bad to be sick and you should try to get over it.
You may be excused from ordinary obligations and duties.

27. How to be Sick in the United States
Laws institutionalize the sick role and legitimize it.
You may be excused from normal rules of etiquette.
You can ask for and receive care and sympathy.

28. Culture and “the Sexes”
Sexual dichotomy
Female and male
Universal
Exhaustive
Mutually exclusive
Sex is much more complex
Transsexuals
Intersexuals
Other cultures have defined more than two sexes

29. Intersexuality Ambiguous genetic/anatomical indicators of sex
Often “corrected” through surgery that reinforces cultural ideal of two sexes
Increasing protests regarding the use of “sex assignment surgery”
Surgeries seen as mutilating and potentially harmful
Doesn’t allow other options beyond male or female