SOC-0001 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: William Graham Sumner, Culture Shock, Trans-Cultural Diffusion
Document Summary
Culture has both material and nonmaterial attributes. Material culture includes all those things that humans make or adapt from the raw stuff of nature: computers,houses, forks etc. Material culture includes some very sophisticated and complex objects. Material culture is made up of artifacts. For example: our ideas about truth and beauty. It has five basic categories: symbols, language, norms, values and beliefs. A symbol is anything that represents something else to more than one person. Each of these marks is a symbol because it stands for something other than itself. Symbols are powerful because we react to them as if they were the real thing. They are powerful enough to invoke emotions. Language is an organized set of symbols. Many sociologists argue that without language, there would be no culture at all. Language is made up of certain kinds of symbols (spoken or written words and gestures) and rules (grammar and syntax)
