SOC100H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Benjamin Lee Whorf, Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Sapir
CHAPTER 2- Culture
⇒ Culture: The socially transmitted practices, languages, symbols, beliefs, values, ideologies, and material objects
that people create to deal with real-life problems.
- Culture can solve practical problems
⇒ Elements of culture:
- Religion helps people give meaning to life and come to terms with death.
- Tools and Religion help people solve real-life problem
⇒ Culture is shared when socially transmitted through generations by:
- Human interaction, communication, and learning. In other words,
- Society: A number of people who interact, usually in a defined territory, and share a culture.
⇒ Culture is the sum of the socially transmitted:
- Ideas, practices, and material objects that enable people to adapt to, and thrive in, their environments.
The Origins and Components of Culture
⇒ Domination by human
- Their sophisticated brain enabled them to survive and solve complex situations and adapt them
⇒ 3 Cultural survival kits contained three main tools:
- Abstraction, Cooperation, and Production.
- Each tool was a uniquely human talent, and each gave rise to a different element of culture.
(1) Abstraction: Creating Symbols
⇒ Human culture exists bc we think abstractly
⇒ Abstraction: The human capacity to create general ideas/Symbols or ways of thinking that are not linked to
particular instances.
- Symbols: Things that carry particular meanings, including the components of language, mathematical notations, and
signs.
- Symbols allow us to classify experience and generalize from it.
- EX. We recognize that we can sit on many objects but that only some of those objects have four legs, a back, and
space for one person.
⇒ Abstraction at anything beyond the most rudimentary level is a uniquely human capacity.
⇒ The ability to abstract enables humans to learn and transmit knowledge in a way no other animal can.
(2) Cooperation: Creating Norms and Values
⇒
Second factor enables ⇒ human culture to exist
⇒ Cooperation: The human capacity to create a complex social life by sharing resources and working together.
⇒ Involves:
- Creating a complex social life by establishing norms and Values
- Norms: Generally accepted ways of doing thing
- Values: Ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly.
- Family members cooperate to raise children
- Apply Norms and Values to raise child
- Change in cooperation occurs from old days to new
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CHAPTER 2- Culture
- There is a change in norms and values between different cultures
Three Types of Norms: Folkways, Mores, and Taboos
⇒ Folkway: The least important type of norm, a norm that evokes the least severe punishment when violated.
- If a man walks down a busy street wearing nothing on the top half of his body, he is violating a folkway
- Social preferences
- Minor punishment
⇒ More: A core norm that most people believe is essential for the survival of their group or their society.
- If he walks down the street wearing nothing on the bottom half of his body, he is violating a more
- Social requirement
- Punishment is harsh
⇒ Taboo: The strongest type of norm. When someone violates a taboo, it causes revulsion in the community, and
punishment is severe.
- Someone violates a taboo, it causes revulsion in the community and punishment is severe.
- Incest ⇒ Most widespread taboo
(3) Production: Creating Material Culture
⇒ Production: The human capacity to make and use tools. It improves our ability to take what we want from nature
- Culture can exist because humans can engage in production
- Human activity
- Sociologists call such tools and techniques material culture
- Material culture: The tools and techniques that enable people to accomplish tasks.
Culture and Social Class
⇒ Culture is not homogeneous across all sectors of society.
⇒ Culture is evident in different classes, ethnic and racial groups, genders, and regions.
⇒ High Culture: Culture consumed mainly by upper classes
⇒ Popular Culture/Mass Culture: Culture consumed by all classes
⇒ High Culture includes opera, ballet, classical music, fine art, and literature.
⇒ Popular or mass culture includes movies, TV shows, and rock, hip hop, and country music. Popular or mass
culture is consumed by many people in all social classes
⇒ French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) emphasized
- The consumption of high culture tends to be restricted to upper classes.
- That is because appreciating the fine points of high culture requires a certain type of education or training that takes
considerable time and money to achieve.
- This fact makes high culture more accessible to people in upper classes and less accessible to people in lower
classes.
⇒ Sociologists who study the political effects of culture often distinguish dominant culture from subordinate
culture.
- Dominant culture: Helps rich and powerful categories of people exercise control over others.
- Rich people love to make that their wealth is from their own intelligence not inherent
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CHAPTER 2- Culture
- It ignores the economic and other advantages that many rich people inherit from their parents.
- Idea that there is a “proper” way to speak English is part of the dominant culture.
- English is a culture tool, used to communicate
- Subordinate culture: Contests dominant culture to varying degrees.
- Believe if they work hard, they’ll be rich
- They kinda accepted being dominated by the upper cultures
- Some believe that hard work experience social constraint preventing them of becoming rich
- EX: Diseases and accidents related to the kinds of jobs they do, insufficient money to help their children attend
professional school
Language and the Sapir–Whorf Thesis
⇒ Most important part in culture
⇒ Language: A system of symbols strung together to communicate thought.
- Allows culture to develop and grow
- Sociologists think of language as a cultural invention that distinguishes humans from other animals.
- Sharing understandings, passing experience and knowledge from one generation to the next, and making plans for
the future.
⇒ Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
- Proposed an influential argument about the connections among experience, thought, and language. Known as
Sapir–Whorf thesis
⇒ Sapir-Whorf thesis:
- Holds that we experience certain things in our environment and form concepts about those things
- We then develop language to express our concepts
- Language itself influences how we see the world.
⇒ Language obliges people to think in a certain ways
- We think “egocentrically,” locating objects relative to ourselves
⇒ Egocentric directions: have no meaning for speakers of Tzeltal in southern Mexico or of Guugu Yimithirr in
Queensland, Australia.
- They lack concepts and words for “left,” “right,”
Culture as Freedom and Constraint (Functionalist theory)
⇒ Culture is invisible
- People take their own culture for granted
- We rarely think about it
- We are startled when we confront people with other cultures
- We find other cultures norm, values, and techniques odd
⇒ Ethnocentrism: The tendency to judge other cultures exclusively by the standards of your own.
- Impairs sociological analysis
- Illustrated by Marvin Harris’s functionalist analysis
- Ex. Hindu pray cows as a symbol of life while Westerners see it as a way to feed
people and reduce hunger and poverty
⇒ Marvin Harris:
- Ethnocentrism misleads many Western observers.
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Document Summary
Culture: the socially transmitted practices, languages, symbols, beliefs, values, ideologies, and material objects that people create to deal with real-life problems. Religion helps people give meaning to life and come to terms with death. Tools and religion help people solve real-life problem. Culture is shared when socially transmitted through generations by: Society: a number of people who interact, usually in a defined territory, and share a culture. Culture is the sum of the socially transmitted: Ideas, practices, and material objects that enable people to adapt to, and thrive in, their environments. Their sophisticated brain enabled them to survive and solve complex situations and adapt them. 3 cultural survival kits contained three main tools: Each tool was a uniquely human talent, and each gave rise to a different element of culture. (1) abstraction: creating symbols. Human culture exists bc we think abstractly. Abstraction: the human capacity to create general ideas/symbols or ways of thinking that are not linked to particular instances.
