essay about elements of culture

18 Major Elements of Culture (Explained for Students!)

Elements of culture include our norms, languages, rituals, holidays, food and diet, art, and architecture.

It’s often hard to picture what a culture will look like. There are so many subtle things that inform our cultural identities. But the above elements can help us visualize some key building blocks of any culture .

18 Elements of Culture

Every culture has its own norms. Norms comes from the same origin as the word ‘normal’. Our cultural norms are the things we do that seem normal or natural within our culture.

But different cultures will have different norms. That’s why in your own culture you may feel comfortable and completely ‘normal’, but when you travel to another culture, you might seem a little strange!

Think about, for example, eating with a fork. This is a norm in Western cultures. But go to parts of Asia and they might think you’re a little weird, or even have poor dexterity, because you don’t know how to use chopsticks. Chopsticks are the norm in many Asian cultures.

Other norms include ways of saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, how to dress in the workplace, and even which side of the footpath you should walk on!

The 4 Types of Norms
Examples of Folkways
Examples of Mores (Moral Norms)

2. Languages

Most cultures are brought together by a common language and way of speaking.

But even within languages (like English or French) there are regional dialects. And this is often where cultures express themselves most.

We will often identify common euphemisms within a cultural group, for example.

American culture has euphemisms like:

A home run – This baseball idiom means to have an amazing success. This comes from baseball.
It grinds my gears – A euphemism for being annoyed by something. When I lived in England, they found it funny that I used this term!
Monday-morning quarterback – This is a person who judges something after the event with the benefit of hindsight. This comes from US Football.

By contrast, Australian culture has its own euphemisms like:

Flat out like a lizard drinking – To be very busy.
Chuck a sickie – To call in sick from work for a day.
You little ripper – An exclamation used when you are excited by something.

3. Festivals

Cultures often celebrate their uniqueness and identities through festivals. The festivals often show-off the clothing and outfits of a culture, as well as the food and music.

Cultural festivals are also very regularly (but not always) oriented around religious beliefs or superstitions.

An example of a cultural festival that’s linked to superstition is Día de los Muertos, a festival in Mexico designed to celebrate and commemorate their deceased loved ones.

In the United States, festivals are often oriented around music, such as the famous Burning Man festival.

4. Rituals and Ceremonies

Cultural rituals and ceremonies are similar to festivals but often have a more solemn and commemorative element.

In the United States, we could consider Veteran’s Day to be an important national ritual to remember fallen soldiers. While this isn’t religious, it’s still very important to the national culture.

Another common ritual is to lower a flag to half mast as a sign of mourning.

But many types of rituals can also be intertwined with other parts of culture such as religion.

For example, when someone does, we often have a funeral for them. This is usually in a Church or other place of worship. In India, the cremation is often a much more central part of the burial ritual than in Western nation.

5. Holidays

Some cultures have very important holidays where everyone decides not to work for the day.

In the UK, which has its own national culture but also shares elements of a Western cultural identity, they celebrate what’s called bank holidays .

Bank holidays are days that everyone gets off to rest and relax.

Thanksgiving is a common holiday in the United States that’s not celebrated in many other countries. It has its origins in the founding of the nation as well as a harvest celebration.

6. Pastimes

All cultures have their own unique pastimes. These often revolve around sports but also could include activities like hiking and following certain television shows!

Baseball is called “America’s Pastime” because it’s so popular in the United States.

Another cultural pastime (or, rather, subculture pastime) is video gaming in South Korea. Being incredibly popular there, it has come to be associated with South Korean youth.

In the 21 st Century, where sub-cultures and countercultures are emerging online via digital media , shared pastimes are becoming increasingly important in bringing together disparate people to form cultural groups, such as cosplay and blogging cultures.

Read More: In Groups vs Out Groups

Many cultures develop their own tastes for particular foods and diets. Famously Italian culture is oriented around coffee, pasta, and pizza.

Japanese culture is well-known for sushi and other seafood and salmon-based dishes.

Mexican culture is well-known for its spicy foods and tacos. Interestingly, the south of the United States has appropriated parts of Mexican culture into its own cultural dishes, often considered Tex-Mex . This is an example of cultural diffusion .

8. Architecture

When traveling the world, you can see different architectural influences in different countries. Here, we can see how culture shapes architectural choices.

Head to old Soviet countries and there is a lot of solid concrete architecture, tall buildings, and grey colors. The architecture here reflects the communist political ideology that was predominant in Eastern European culture in the mid-20 th Century.

Other parts of Eastern Europe, like Prague, are influenced by an older Gothic style architecture. This architecture stems from the Goths who were the dominant culture in the region in the late Middle Ages.

9. Religions

While religion and culture are different concepts, they also overlap a lot. Cultures are often built upon religions over hundreds of years.

Many people in the Western culture believe it’s built upon Christianity. While it’s more complex than that (secular enlightenment philosophy also had a huge influence), it’s true that Christianity and Western culture are traditionally intertwined.

For example, some in the United States credit its rapid rise in the 19 th and 20 th Centuries to the ‘protestant work ethic’.

There are cultures in India strongly influenced by Hinduism and many in the Arabian peninsula are strongly influenced by Islam and its values.

Many cultures coalesce around a certain set of values. In the West, individual liberty has been a central cultural marker since the enlightenment.

Individual liberty is particularly prominent in American culture , whereas just north in Canada, social democratic values tend to be more prominent.

In China, dominant values tend to be more conservative and individual liberty is a secondary concern to the integrity of the national character, currently highly oriented around the ruling party.

Cultural taboos are things that are considered shocking or shameful within a culture.

An examples of an American taboo is not tipping the waitress. If you failed to tip the waitress, you would be very much frowned upon.

Other nations, like New Zealand, do not have tipping as part of the culture. Therefore, a New Zealander coming to the United States might get a little culture shock !

Another cultural taboo example is men wearing shorts in Morocco. Westerners might find it quite normal, but shorts in Morocco are often seen as too informal, especially among older generations.

Sports help us come together as a culture. They can also help us transcend cultures to get to know others.

Cricket, for example, is very popular in India, and a prominent cultural pastime. But it is also shared by Australia, creating a link between many people who would identify as ethnic Hindus and those who would identify as ethnic Western Christians, who would otherwise be disconnected.

In the United States, we’d see Baseball and American football as central to American culture.

Association football (soccer) is hugely popular in many cultures around the world, which is why it has the nickname “the world game”.

13. Clothing and Outfits

The clothes we wear might seem normal within our culture but strange or even ‘dress-ups’ in another culture.

For example, in Pakistan, men often wear traditional the shalwar kameez, whereas in Western contexts they might wear a suit jacket and tie.

For women, dresses are quite traditional in Western culture, whereas in some Islamic cultures women will often traditionally wear a hijab.

You may notice this traditional cultural attire being worn at festivals and ceremonies where people come together to celebrate their tradition.

Unique music tastes and preferences become dominant in some cultures.

Southern USA culture embraces country music, for example, while the UK is famous for its pop rock music stemming from the influence of the Beetles.

Head to Japan and you will find traditional instrumental music played on Japanese string instruments such as the Shamisen, Shakuhachi, or Koto.

15. Social Hierarchy

Different cultures have their own ways of organizing society into hierarchies. A hierarchy is needed to help a culture sort out who will be the decision-makers and get preferential treatment in social situations.

For example, conservative cultures tend to prefer men as leaders at the expense of women. But, they may also give preferential treatment to women and children when it comes to comforts and healthcare.

As another example, some societies sort out their social hierarchy through tribal rights or birthright, such as in kingdoms and monarchies. By contrast, other cultures have traditions of sorting out who will have power through democratic elections.

Related: Social Identity Examples

16. Symbols

Traditional symbols of cultural groups include the flag of a culture as well as elements like national birds or flowers.

The culture of the United States is identifiable by symbols like the star spangled banner and bald eagle. Up North in Canada, you might see the maple leaf as a national and cultural symbol.

For Chinese people, national symbols might include the Chinese dragon, panda bear, or Chinese lantern.

Cultures also develop their own dance preferences. If you don’t dance in the same way as the rest of the cultural group, you might look a bit funny on the dance floor!

In North America, young people often dance in ‘mosh pits’, bouncing up and down to the music. Head to South America, and you’re likely to find people of all ages dancing tango instead. Not only this, but they’ll likely be dancing to different types of music.

There are also traditional dances, such as the traditional dance of Indigenous cultures in Australia and Canada.

Even the artistic preferences of cultures can differ. Art works of France are closely associated with famous artists like Monet and Matisse, whereas Turkish art tends to be more associated with miniatures, marbling, and calligraphy.

Traditional Australian Aboriginal art embraces dot painting, earthy colors, and artwork that depicts traditional ‘dreaming’ stories.

Traditional Chinese art is called guó huà and associated with gentle, fine strokes often painted on thin tissue paper or silk.

See More Examples of Cultural Preferences Here

Culture vs Cultural Identity

A culture is a group of people who tend to share the same cultural elements (18 of which are listed above).

A cultural identity is the individual’s sense of who they are. It involves the cultural elements you identify with that.

Your cultural identity is part of who you are. It shows the ‘in groups’ you identify with and the values you hold. Generally, if you identify as being a part of a culture, you endorse many or all of the cultural elements which it connotes.

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Culture vs Nation vs Religion

Cultures, nations, and religions are intertwined but not the same thing.

A culture is a group of people who identify with one another due to common values, beliefs, arts, music, sport, architecture, and pastimes.

A nation is a political entity recognized as being in control of a defined geographical area.

But since the rise of nation-states, nations often develop cultural identities. This doesn’t mean nations and cultures are the same thing, but nations cohere around a culture.

National laws will often embrace and promote the dominant culture, such as by creating national holidays so people can celebrate the dominant culture’s festivals.

A religion is a philosophical entity whose members share a belief one or more a higher powers or Gods.

As religion was a primary organizing system for societies for many centuries, cultures grew with and around religions. Thus, today, many cultures contain dominant religious beliefs as well as festivals, values, and norms that can be traced back to a religion that is dominant within the cultural grouping.

4 Stages of Cultural Adaptation
Examples of Ethnocentrism
Culture vs Society

Culture has many elements which, combined, create a coherent cultural identity. Often, we only personally identify with some elements of the culture. But, we can usually identify dominant elements of our culture, even if we only choose to participate in a few of them.

This shows how culture is fluid and hard to pin down. It changes with each generation.

Nevertheless, by looking at examples of the elements of culture, we can reflect on how many complex elements intertwine to create cultural identities.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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The Elements of Culture

Learning objectives.

Distinguish material culture and nonmaterial culture.
List and define the several elements of culture.
Describe certain values that distinguish the United States from other nations.

Culture was defined earlier as the symbols, language, beliefs, values, and artifacts that are part of any society. As this definition suggests, there are two basic components of culture: ideas and symbols on the one hand and artifacts (material objects) on the other. The first type, called nonmaterial culture also known as symbolic culture , includes the values, beliefs, symbols, and language that define a society. The second type, called material culture , includes all the society’s physical objects, such as its tools and technology, clothing, eating utensils, and means of transportation. These elements of culture are discussed next.

Every culture is filled with symbols , or things that stand for something else and that often evoke various reactions and emotions. Some symbols are actually types of nonverbal communication, while other symbols are in fact material objects. As the symbolic interactionist perspective discussed in Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” (Links to an external site.) emphasizes, shared symbols make social interaction possible.

Let’s look at nonverbal symbols first. A common one is shaking hands, which is done in some societies but not in others. It commonly conveys friendship and is used as a sign of both greeting and departure. Probably all societies have nonverbal symbols we call gestures , movements of the hands, arms, or other parts of the body that are meant to convey certain ideas or emotions. However, the same gesture can mean one thing in one society and something quite different in another society (Axtell, 1998). In the United States, for example, if we nod our head up and down, we mean yes, and if we shake it back and forth, we mean no. In Bulgaria, however, nodding means no, while shaking our head back and forth means yes! In the United States, if we make an “O” by putting our thumb and forefinger together, we mean “OK,” but the same gesture in certain parts of Europe signifies an obscenity. “Thumbs up” in the United States means “great” or “wonderful,” but in Australia it means the same thing as extending the middle finger in the United States. Certain parts of the Middle East and Asia would be offended if they saw you using your left hand to eat, because they use their left hand for bathroom hygiene.

• Gestures are the signs that we make with our body, such as hand gestures and facial expressions; it is important to note that these gestures also carry meaning. This familiar gesture means “OK” in the United States, but in certain parts of Europe it signifies an obscenity. An American using this gesture might very well be greeted with an angry look.

Some of our most important symbols are objects. Here the U.S. flag is a prime example. For most Americans, the flag is not just a piece of cloth with red and white stripes and white stars against a field of blue. Instead, it is a symbol of freedom, democracy, and other American values and, accordingly, inspires pride and patriotism. During the Vietnam War, however, the flag became to many Americans a symbol of war and imperialism. Some burned the flag in protest, prompting angry attacks by bystanders and negative coverage by the news media.

As these examples indicate, shared symbols, both nonverbal communication and tangible objects, are an important part of any culture but also can lead to misunderstandings and even hostility. These problems underscore the significance of symbols for social interaction and meaning.

Perhaps our most important set of symbols is language. In English, the word chair means something we sit on. In Spanish, the word silla means the same thing. As long as we agree how to interpret these words, a shared language and thus society are possible. By the same token, differences in languages can make it quite difficult to communicate. For example, imagine you are in a foreign country where you do not know the language and the country’s citizens do not know yours. Worse yet, you forgot to bring your dictionary that translates their language into yours, and vice versa, and your iPhone battery has died. You become lost. How will you get help? What will you do? Is there any way to communicate your plight?

As this scenario suggests, language is crucial to communication and thus to any society’s culture. Children learn language from their culture just as they learn about shaking hands, about gestures, and about the significance of the flag and other symbols. Humans have a capacity for language that no other animal species possesses. Our capacity for language in turn helps make our complex culture possible.

Three kids talking on the street and smiling

Language is a key symbol of any culture. Humans have a capacity for language that no other animal species has, and children learn the language of their society just as they learn other aspects of their culture.

Bill Benzon – IMGP3639 – talk (Links to an external site.) – CC BY-SA 2.0.

To what extent does language influence how we think and how we perceive the social and physical worlds? The famous but controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , named after two linguistic anthropologists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, argues that people cannot easily understand concepts and objects unless their language contains words for these items (Whorf, 1956). They explained that language structures thought. Language thus influences how we understand the world around us. For example, people in a country such as the United States that has many terms for different types of kisses (e.g. buss, peck, smack, smooch, and soul) are better able to appreciate these different types than people in a country such as Japan, which, as we saw earlier, only fairly recently developed the word kissu for kiss.

Another illustration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is seen in sexist language, in which the use of male nouns and pronouns shapes how we think about the world (Miles, 2008). In older children’s books, words like fire man and mail man are common, along with pictures of men in these jobs, and critics say they send a message to children that these are male jobs, not female jobs. If a teacher tells a second-grade class, “Every student should put his books under his desk,” the teacher obviously means students of both sexes but may be sending a subtle message that boys matter more than girls. For these reasons, several guidebooks promote the use of nonsexist language (Maggio, 1998). Table 3.1 “Examples of Sexist Terms and Nonsexist Alternatives” (Links to an external site.) provides examples of sexist language and nonsexist alternatives.

Table 3.1 Examples of Sexist Terms and Nonsexist Alternatives

Cultures differ widely in their norms , or standards and expectations for behaving. We already saw that the nature of drunken behavior depends on society’s expectations of how people should behave when drunk. Norms of drunken behavior influence how we behave when we drink too much.

Norms are often divided into two types, formal norms and informal norms . Formal norms, also called mores (MOOR-ayz) and laws , refer to the standards of behavior considered the most important in any society. Examples in the United States include traffic laws, criminal codes, and, in a college context, student behavior codes addressing such things as cheating and hate speech. Informal norms, also called folkways and customs , refer to standards of behavior that are considered less important but still influence how we behave. Table manners are a common example of informal norms, as are such everyday behaviors as how we interact with a cashier and how we ride in an elevator.

Many norms differ dramatically from one culture to the next. Some of the best evidence for cultural variation in norms comes from the study of sexual behavior (Edgerton, 1976). Among the Pokot of East Africa, for example, women are expected to enjoy sex, while among the Gusii a few hundred miles away, women who enjoy sex are considered deviant. In Inis Beag, a small island off the coast of Ireland, sex is considered embarrassing and even disgusting; men feel that intercourse drains their strength, while women consider it a burden. Even nudity is considered terrible, and people on Inis Beag keep their clothes on while they bathe. The situation is quite different in Mangaia, a small island in the South Pacific. Here sex is considered very enjoyable, and it is the major subject of songs and stories.

While many societies frown on homosexuality, others accept it. Among the Azande of East Africa, for example, young warriors live with each other and are not allowed to marry. During this time, they often have sex with younger boys, and this homosexuality is approved by their culture. Among the Sambia of New Guinea, young males live separately from females and engage in homosexual behavior for at least a decade. It is felt that the boys would be less masculine if they continued to live with their mothers and that the semen of older males helps young boys become strong and fierce (Edgerton, 1976).

A gay couple kissing at a Lesbian and Gay parade

Although many societies disapprove of homosexuality, other societies accept it. This difference illustrates the importance of culture for people’s attitudes.

philippe leroyer – Lesbian & Gay Pride (Links to an external site.) – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Other evidence for cultural variation in norms comes from the study of how men and women are expected to behave in various societies. For example, many traditional societies are simple hunting-and-gathering societies. In most of these, men tend to hunt and women tend to gather. Many observers attribute this gender difference to at least two biological differences between the sexes. First, men tend to be bigger and stronger than women and are thus better suited for hunting. Second, women become pregnant and bear children and are less able to hunt. Yet a different pattern emerges in some hunting-and-gathering societies. Among a group of Australian aborigines called the Tiwi and a tribal society in the Philippines called the Agta, both sexes hunt. After becoming pregnant, Agta women continue to hunt for most of their pregnancy and resume hunting after their child is born (Brettell & Sargent, 2009).

Different cultures also have different rituals , or established procedures and ceremonies that often mark transitions in the life course. As such, rituals both reflect and transmit a culture’s norms and other elements from one generation to the next. Graduation ceremonies in colleges and universities are familiar examples of time-honored rituals. In many societies, rituals help signify one’s gender identity. For example, girls around the world undergo various types of initiation ceremonies to mark their transition to adulthood. Among the Bemba of Zambia, girls undergo a month-long initiation ceremony called the chisungu , in which girls learn songs, dances, and secret terms that only women know (Maybury-Lewis, 1998). In some cultures, special ceremonies also mark a girl’s first menstrual period. Such ceremonies are largely absent in the United States, where a girl’s first period is a private matter. But in other cultures the first period is a cause for celebration involving gifts, music, and food (Hathaway, 1997).

Are rituals more common in traditional societies than in industrial ones such as the United States? Consider the Nacirema , studied by anthropologist Horace Miner more than 50 years ago (Miner, 1956). In this society, many rituals have been developed to deal with the culture’s fundamental belief that the human body is ugly and in danger of suffering many diseases. Reflecting this belief, every household has at least one shrine in which various rituals are performed to cleanse the body. Often these shrines contain magic potions acquired from medicine men. The Nacirema are especially concerned about diseases of the mouth. Miner writes, “Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them” (p. 505). Many Nacirema engage in “mouth-rites” and see a “holy-mouth-man” once or twice yearly.

Spell Nacirema backward and you will see that Miner was describing American culture. As his satire suggests, rituals are not limited to preindustrial societies. Instead, they function in many kinds of societies to mark transitions in the life course and to transmit the norms of the culture from one generation to the next.

Changing Norms and Beliefs

Our examples show that different cultures have different norms, even if they share other types of practices and beliefs. It is also true that norms change over time within a given culture. Two obvious examples here are hairstyles and clothing styles. When the Beatles first became popular in the early 1960s, their hair barely covered their ears, but parents of teenagers back then were aghast at how they looked. If anything, clothing styles change even more often than hairstyles. Hemlines go up, hemlines go down. Lapels become wider, lapels become narrower. This color is in, that color is out. Hold on to your out-of-style clothes long enough, and eventually they may well end up back in style.

An old newspaper article featuring a picture of The Beatles

Some norms may change over time within a given culture. In the early 1960s, the hair of the four members of the Beatles barely covered their ears, but many parents of U.S. teenagers were very critical of the length of their hair.

U.S. Library of Congress (Links to an external site.) – public domain.

Values are another important element of culture and involve judgments of what is good or bad and desirable or undesirable. A culture’s values shape its norms. In Japan, for example, a central value is group harmony. The Japanese place great emphasis on harmonious social relationships and dislike interpersonal conflict. Individuals are fairly unassertive by American standards, lest they be perceived as trying to force their will on others (Schneider & Silverman, 2010). When interpersonal disputes do arise, Japanese do their best to minimize conflict by trying to resolve the disputes amicably. Lawsuits are thus uncommon; in one case involving disease and death from a mercury-polluted river, some Japanese who dared to sue the company responsible for the mercury poisoning were considered bad citizens (Upham, 1976).

Individualism in the United States

American culture promotes competition and an emphasis on winning in the sports and business worlds and in other spheres of life. Accordingly, lawsuits over frivolous reasons are common and even expected.

Clyde Robinson – Courtroom (Links to an external site.) – CC BY 2.0.

In the United States, of course, the situation is quite different. The American culture extols the rights of the individual and promotes competition in the business and sports worlds and in other areas of life. Lawsuits over the most frivolous of issues are quite common and even expected. Phrases like “Look out for number one!” abound. If the Japanese value harmony and group feeling, Americans value competition and individualism. Because the Japanese value harmony, their norms frown on self-assertion in interpersonal relationships and on lawsuits to correct perceived wrongs. Because Americans value and even thrive on competition, our norms promote assertion in relationships and certainly promote the use of the law to address all kinds of problems.

The Work Ethic

Another important value in the American culture is the work ethic. By the 19th century, Americans had come to view hard work not just as something that had to be done but as something that was morally good to do (Gini, 2000). The commitment to the work ethic remains strong today: in the 2008 General Social Survey, 72% of respondents said they would continue to work even if they got enough money to live as comfortably as they would like for the rest of their lives.

The last element of culture is the artifacts , or material objects, that constitute a society’s material culture. In the most simple societies, artifacts are largely limited to a few tools, the huts people live in, and the clothing they wear. One of the most important inventions in the evolution of society was the wheel.

Source: Data from Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

Although the wheel was a great invention, artifacts are much more numerous and complex in industrial societies. Because of technological advances during the past two decades, many such societies today may be said to have a wireless culture, as smartphones, netbooks and laptops, and GPS devices now dominate so much of modern life. The artifacts associated with this culture were unknown a generation ago. Technological development created these artifacts and new language to describe them and the functions they perform. Today’s wireless artifacts in turn help reinforce our own commitment to wireless technology as a way of life, if only because children are now growing up with them, often even before they can read and write.

The iPhone is just one of the many notable cultural artifacts in today’s wireless world. Technological development created these artifacts and new language to describe them and their functions—for example, “There’s an app for that!”

Philip Brooks – iPhone (Links to an external site.) – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sometimes people in one society may find it difficult to understand the artifacts that are an important part of another society’s culture. If a member of a tribal society who had never seen a cell phone, or who had never even used batteries or electricity, were somehow to visit the United States, she or he would obviously have no idea of what a cell phone was or of its importance in almost everything we do these days. Conversely, if we were to visit that person’s society, we might not appreciate the importance of some of its artifacts.

Key Takeaways

The major elements of culture are symbols, language, norms, values, and artifacts.
Language makes effective social interaction possible and influences how people conceive of concepts and objects.
Major values that distinguish the United States include individualism, competition, and a commitment to the work ethic.

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Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What is Culture: an Exploration of Its Elements and Significance

Categories: Cultural Competence What is Culture

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Published: Sep 7, 2023

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Factors shaping culture, major elements of culture, the impact of cultural elements.

Geography: Geography plays a crucial role in shaping culture. The physical environment, such as climate, terrain, and available resources, affects the way people live and adapt to their surroundings. For example, societies in arid regions may develop nomadic lifestyles, while those in fertile areas may engage in agriculture and settlement.
History: Historical events, such as wars, conquests, colonization , and revolutions, have a profound impact on culture. They shape collective memories, traditions, and identities. Historical narratives and commemorations often serve as cultural touchstones, influencing the way societies perceive themselves and others.
Religion: Religion plays a central role in culture by providing belief systems , moral frameworks, and rituals that guide individual and collective behavior. Different religious traditions can lead to distinct cultural practices , values, and norms.
Language: Language is a fundamental element of culture. It not only serves as a means of communication but also reflects the worldview and values of a culture. Language shapes thought processes and influences the way people perceive and interpret the world around them.
Symbols: Symbols are representations that convey meaning within a culture. They can take the form of words, gestures, images, or objects. Symbols are imbued with cultural significance and are used to communicate complex ideas, values, and beliefs.
Language: Language is the primary vehicle through which culture is transmitted. It is not merely a tool for communication but a repository of cultural knowledge , stories, and traditions. Language shapes the way people perceive and interact with the world and serves as a key marker of cultural identity.
Norms: Norms are social rules and expectations that guide behavior within a culture. They encompass a wide range of behaviors, from etiquette and manners to more profound cultural practices. Norms are crucial for maintaining social order and cohesion.
Values: Values are the core beliefs and principles that underpin a culture. They dictate what is considered desirable, acceptable, and important within a society. Values influence decision-making, ethics, and the formation of individual and collective identity.
Artifacts: Artifacts are tangible objects created by a culture. They include tools, clothing, art, architecture, and everyday items. Artifacts not only serve practical functions but also convey cultural aesthetics, craftsmanship, and innovation.
Communication: Language and symbols shape the way people communicate. They enable individuals to convey ideas, emotions, and information within the cultural framework. The choice of language and the use of specific symbols reflect cultural norms and values.
Behavior: Norms and values guide behavior by setting expectations for individuals and society. They determine what is considered appropriate, moral, and socially acceptable. Deviation from cultural norms may lead to social sanctions or conflicts.
Identity: Cultural elements contribute significantly to the formation of cultural identity. Individuals identify with their cultural heritage through language, traditions, and shared values. Cultural identity shapes self-perception and influences how individuals relate to others.

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3.2 Elements of Culture

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

Differentiate values, beliefs, and norms
Explain the significance of symbols and language to a culture
Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Discuss the role of social control within culture

Values and Beliefs

The first, and perhaps most crucial, elements of culture we will discuss are values and beliefs . When speaking of cultural values, value does not mean monetary worth, but rather the ideals, principles, and standards members of a culture hold in high regard. Most cultures in any society hold “knowledge” in high regard. Values are deeply embedded and are critical for learning a culture’s beliefs , which are the tenets or convictions that people hold to be true. Individual cultures in a society have personal beliefs, but they also share collective values. To illustrate the difference, US citizens may believe in the American Dream—that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the American value that wealth is important. In other cultures, success may be tied less to wealth and more to having many healthy children. Values shape a society by suggesting what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, sought or avoided.

Consider the value that the US places upon youth. Children represent innocence and purity, while a youthful adult appearance signifies sexuality. Shaped by this value, individuals spend millions of dollars each year on cosmetic products and surgeries to look young and beautiful. The US also has an individualistic culture, meaning people place a high value on individuality and independence. In contrast, many other cultures are collectivist , meaning the welfare of the group takes priority over that of the individual. Fulfilling a society’s values can be difficult. Marital monogamy is valued, but many spouses engage in infidelity. Cultural diversity and equal opportunities for all people are valued in the US, yet the country’s highest political offices are predominantly white men from more economically privileged backgrounds.

Values often suggest how people should behave, but they don’t accurately reflect how people behave. Values portray an ideal culture , the standards society would like to embrace and live up to. But ideal culture differs from real culture . In an ideal culture, there would be no traffic accidents, murders, poverty, or racial tension. But in real culture, police officers, lawmakers, educators, and social workers constantly strive to prevent or address these issues. American teenagers are encouraged to value celibacy. However, the number of unplanned pregnancies among teens reveals that the ideal alone is not enough to spare teenagers the potential consequences of having sex.

One of the ways societies strive to maintain their values is through rewards and punishments. When people observe the norms of society and uphold its values, they are often rewarded. A boy who helps an elderly woman board a bus may receive a smile and a “thank you.” A business manager who raises profit margins may receive a quarterly bonus. People sanction unwanted or inappropriate behaviors by withholding support, approval, or permission, or by implementing sanctions . We may think of ‘sanction’ as a negative term, but sanctions are forms of social control — ways to encourage conformity to cultural norms or rules. Sometimes people conform to norms in anticipation or expectation of positive sanctions . Receiving good grades, for instance, may mean praise from parents and teachers. Sanctions can also be negative. A boy who shoves an elderly woman aside to board the bus first may receive frowns or even a scolding from other passengers. A business manager who drives away customers will likely be fired. Breaking norms and rejecting values can lead to cultural sanctions such as earning a negative label like ‘lazy’ or to legal sanctions , such as traffic tickets, fines, or imprisonment. Utilizing social control encourages most people to conform regardless of whether authority figures (such as law enforcement) are present.

Values are not static. They change across time and between groups as people evaluate, debate, and change collective social beliefs. Values also vary from culture to culture. For example, cultures differ in their values about what kinds of physical closeness are appropriate in public. It’s rare to see two male friends or coworkers holding hands in the US, where that behavior often symbolizes romantic feelings. But in many nations, masculine physical intimacy is considered natural in public. This difference in cultural values came to light when people reacted to photos of former president G.W. Bush holding hands with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2005. Simple gestures, such as hand-holding, carry great symbolic differences across cultures.

Figure 3.5: In many parts of Africa and the Middle East, it is considered normal for men to hold hands in friendship. How would a US citizen react to these two soldiers? (Credit: Geordie Mott/Wikimedia Commons).

Cultural norms.

So far, many of the examples in this chapter have described how people are expected to behave in certain situations—for example, buying food or boarding a bus. These examples describe the visible and invisible rules of conduct through which societies are structured, or what sociologists call norms . Norms are behaviors that reflect compliance with what cultures and societies have defined as good, right, and important. Most members adhere to them.

Formal norms are established and written rules that exist in all societies. They support many social institutions , such as the military, criminal legal systems, healthcare, and educational institutions. Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, a professor’s policies as determined on their syllabus, and “no running” signs at swimming pools. Formal norms are the most specific and clearly stated of the various types of norms, and they are the most strictly enforced but are also enforced to varying degrees depending on the circumstances. A professor may have a policy about plagiarism but will work with a student to learn through the violation of the norm if they engage in it, whereas the college that the professor works at might have a policy that indicates that plagiarism is a violation of student conduct and could lead to a mark on a student’s record or even, depending on the institution or severity of the plagiarism, expulsion. This is because the property, including intellectual property, is highly valued in the US. People who steal someone else’s property can be fined, imprisoned, or both. People safeguard valuable possessions by locking their doors, buying a safe, and installing alarm systems on homes and cars. Much like the professor working with a student to learn the importance of not plagiarizing in college vs., formally enforcing the norms of the college the professor works for, another less strictly enforced social norm is driving while intoxicated. While it’s against the law to drive under the influence of alcohol, drinking is for the most part an acceptable social behavior. Though there are laws to punish driving under the influence of alcohol, there are few systems in place to prevent the crime.

Although informal norms define personal interactions, they extend into other systems as well. In the US, there are informal norms regarding behavior at fast-food restaurants. Customers line up to order their food and leave when they are done. They don’t sit down at a table with strangers, sing loudly as they prepare their condiments, or nap in a booth. Most people don’t commit even harmless breaches of informal norms, while some college students wear pajamas and bedroom slippers to class–clothing formerly associated only with privacy and bedtime. By wearing the outfit, students are defying traditional cultural norms.

Sociological Research: Breaching Experiments

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) studied people’s customs to find out how societal rules and norms not only influence behavior but also shape social order. He believed that members of society together create a social order (Weber, 2011). His resulting book, Studies in Ethno-methodology (1967) discusses people’s assumptions about the social makeup of their communities.

One of Garfinkel’s research methods was known as a “breaching experiment,” in which the researcher behaves in a socially awkward manner to test the sociological concepts of social norms and conformity. The participants are not aware an experiment is in progress, but their response is recorded. For example, if the experimenter is, say, a man in a business suit, and he skips down the sidewalk or hops on one foot, a passerby is likely to stare at him with surprised expressions. But the experimenter does not simply “act weird” in public. Rather, the point is to deviate from a specific social norm in a small way, to subtly break some form of social etiquette, and see what happens.

For example, he set up a simple game of tic-tac-toe. One player was asked beforehand to mark Xs and Os not in the boxes but on the lines dividing the spaces instead. The other player, in the dark about the study, was flabbergasted and did not know how to continue. The second player’s outrage, anger, puzzlement, or other emotion suggested that a cultural norm had been violated.

There are many rules about speaking with strangers in public. It is okay to tell a woman you like her shoes. It is not okay to ask if you can try them on. It is okay to stand in line behind someone at the ATM. It is not okay to look over their shoulder as they make a transaction. It is okay to sit beside someone on a crowded bus. It’s weird to sit beside a stranger in a half-empty bus.

For some breaches, the researcher directly engages with innocent bystanders. An experimenter might strike up a conversation in a public bathroom, where it’s common to respect each other’s privacy. In a grocery store, an experimenter might take a food item out of another person’s grocery cart, saying, “That looks good! I think I’ll try it.” An experimenter might sit down at a table with others in a fast-food restaurant or follow someone around a museum and study the same paintings. In those cases, the bystanders are pressured to respond, and their discomfort illustrates how much we depend on social norms. Breaching experiments uncover and explore the many unwritten social rules we live by.

Norms may be further classified as either mores or folkways. Mores (mor-ays) are norms that embody the moral views and principles of a group. They often have a religious foundation. Violating them can have serious consequences. The strongest mores are protected with laws and other formal sanctions. In most societies, for instance, homicide is considered immoral, and it’s punishable by law (a formal norm). But more often, mores are judged and guarded by public sentiment (an informal norm). People who violate mores are seen as shameful. They can even be shunned or banned from some groups. Plagiarism would be considered a more.

Unlike mores, folkways are norms without any moral underpinnings. Rather, folkways direct appropriate behavior in the day-to-day practices and expressions of a culture. We can think of them as ‘traditions’—things we do because we ‘always have.’ They indicate whether to shake hands or kiss on the cheek when greeting another person. They specify whether to wear a tie and blazer or a T-shirt and sandals to an event. In Canada, women can smile and say hello to men on the street. In Egypt, that’s not acceptable. In regions in the southern US, bumping into an acquaintance means stopping to chat. It’s considered rude not to, no matter how busy one is. In other regions, people guard their privacy and value time efficiency. A simple nod of the head is enough. Other accepted folkways in the US may include holding the door open for a stranger or giving someone a gift on their birthday. The rules regarding these folkways may change from culture to culture. A folkway in one culture could be extremely rude in another.

Folkways are actions that people everywhere take for granted. People need to act without thinking to get seamlessly through daily routines. They can’t stop and analyze every action (Sumner, 1906). Folkways might be small actions, learned by observation and imitated, but they are by no means trivial.

Symbols and Culture

Humans, consciously and subconsciously, are always striving to make sense of their surrounding world. Symbols —such as gestures, signs, objects, signals, and words—help people understand that world. They provide communication methods for understanding experiences by conveying recognizable meanings that are shared by societies.

The world is filled with symbols. Sports uniforms, company logos, and traffic signs are symbols. In some cultures, wearing a ring on your “ring finger” is a symbol of marriage, in others, there is no “ring finger.” Some symbols are highly functional, such as stop signs, which provide useful instructions and keep roadways safer. As physical objects, they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings. Some symbols are valuable only in what they represent. Trophies, blue ribbons, or gold medals, for example, represent accomplishments. But many objects have both material and nonmaterial symbolic value.

Figure 3.6: Some road signs are universal. But how would you interpret the signage on the right? (Credit: (a) Andrew Bain/flickr; (b) HonzaSoukup/flickr)

Some symbols represent only one side of the story and elicit strong emotions, which can lead to social unrest. Their presence is a reminder of a nation’s worst times and not something to celebrate. Many of these symbols are targets of vandalism as the destruction of these representations is symbolic. Effigies representing public figures are burned to demonstrate anger at certain leaders. In 1989, crowds tore down the Berlin Wall, a decades-old symbol of the division between East and West Germany, communism, and capitalism. In the US, beginning in 2019, statues associated with slavery and the Civil War were removed from state capitols, college campuses, and public parks. In Germany, any display of Hitler or Nazi memorabilia or to deny the Holocaust is illegal.

While different cultures have varying systems of symbols, one system is common to all: language. Whatever its form, people learn social and cultural norms through it.

Language and Symbols

Language is a system that uses symbols with which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted. Letters (which make up words), pictographs, and hand gestures are all symbols that create a language used for communication. Sign language, for example, requires an intimate knowledge not only of an alphabet but also of signs that represent entire words and the meaning indicated by certain facial expressions or postures. Its grammar differs from the spoken language. As spoken language is different across regions, nations, and cultures, and can even differ by the age of the person, so too does sign language.

All language systems contain the same basic elements that are effective in communicating ideas–object, subject, action. A written language system consists of symbols that refer to spoken sounds. Taken together, these symbols convey specific meanings. The English language uses a combination of twenty-six letters to create words. These twenty-six letters make up over 600,000 recognized words (OED Online, 2011). We can compare the reliance on tone and inflection to Mandarin Chinese. It contains over 8,000 characters, but the same character may symbolize different concepts depending on the tone used.

English today contains an English and French version of the same concept. For example, in the English version, one eats, but in the French version, one dines. In the English version, we meet someone. In the French version, we encounter someone. Readers of American English may be surprised by the inclusion of a ‘u’ in some spellings of words like ‘behaviour’ or ‘flavour.’ Americans have dropped that ‘u’ that writers of British English include. Billions of people speak English, and there are almost as many pronunciations of it.

Rules for speaking and writing vary even within cultures, most notably by region or across different ethnic groups. Do you eat a grinder, a sub, or a hero/gyro? Do you refer to a can of carbonated liquid as “soda” or “pop”? Is a household entertainment room a “family room,” “rec room,” or “den”? When leaving a restaurant, do you ask your server for a “check,” the “ticket,” or your “bill”? Is it a “semi-truck,” “18-wheeler,” “semi,” or “big rig”? Are you “going to”, “gonna” or “finna”? Language is constantly evolving and adding new words as societies create new ideas. In this age of technology, many cultures have adapted almost instantly to new nouns such as “e-mail” and “Internet,” and verbs such as “downloading,” “texting,” and “blogging.” These would have been considered nonsense words to the world twenty-five years ago.

Language and Culture

Even while it constantly evolves, language shapes our perception of reality and our behavior. In the 1920s, linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf advanced this idea which became known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity. It is based on the idea that people experience their world through their language, and therefore understand their world through the cultural meanings embedded in their language. The hypothesis suggests that language shapes thought and thus behavior (Swoyer, 2003). For example, words have attached meanings beyond their definition that can influence thought and behavior. In the US, where the number thirteen is associated with bad luck, many high-rise buildings do not have a 13 th floor. In Japan, however, the number four is considered unlucky, since it is pronounced similarly to the Japanese word for “death.”

Many sociologists believe that language can have a broad and lasting impact on perception. In 2002, Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues conducted experiments on native German and Spanish speakers in English. Unlike English, these languages assign genders to nouns. In German, for example, the word for sun, die Sonne, is feminine, but the word for moon, der Mond, is masculine. The team chose a set of nouns with opposite genders in German and Spanish and asked participants to provide adjectives to describe them. They found that German speakers used more masculine adjectives than Spanish speakers when describing a noun that was grammatically masculine in German but feminine in Spanish. For example, the word for “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers used the adjectives, golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The team concluded that gendered perceptions acquired in a person’s native language carry forward to how they see the world even when they switch to a language without grammatical genders (Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips, 2002).

Some sociologists also believe the structure of language can have consequences on both individual and group behavior. For example, a series of studies have found that Finland has a significantly higher rate of workplace accidents than Sweden even though the languages have similar workplace regulations (Salminen & Johansson, 2000). John A. Lucy explained this discrepancy through differences in the structure of these languages. Swedish places a greater emphasis on the timing of movement in three-dimensional space. Consequently, Lucy argued, the Swedish factories are physically arranged in a manner that supports the smooth running of the product process. Finnish factors experience frequent disruptions, so workers rush and have more accidents (Lucy, 1997).

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been interpreted to suggest that if a word does not exist in a language then users of that language cannot have the experience. Studies have shown, for instance, that unless people have access to the word “ambivalent,” they don’t recognize having conflicting positive and negative feelings about an issue as ‘ambivalence.’ However, the hypothesis should not suggest that people do not have conflicting feelings but rather that they interpret the feelings differently.

In addition to using spoken language, people communicate without words. Nonverbal communication is symbolic, and, as in the case of language, is learned through one’s culture. Some gestures are nearly universal; some are not. Smiles often indicate positive reinforcement in the U.S., whereas in some cultures it is rude as you do not know the person. A thumbs-up in Russia and Australia is an offensive curse (Passero, 2002). Other gestures vary in meaning depending on the situation and the person. A wave of the hand can mean many things, depending on how it’s done and for whom. It may mean “hello,” “goodbye,” “no thank you,” or “I’m royalty.” Winks convey a variety of messages, including “We have a secret,” “I’m only kidding,” or “I’m attracted to you.” From a distance, a person may “read” the emotional situation of people just by watching their body language and facial expressions. However, many cultures communicate with lots of physicality, which people outside that culture may interpret as an argument. So, for example, you might believe two people are arguing when, in fact, they are simply having a regular conversation.

Social Policy and Debate: Is the U.S. Bilingual?

When she was six, Lucy and her family immigrated to the United States and attended a school that allowed for the use of both English and Spanish. Lucy’s teacher and many staff were bilingual (fluent in English and Spanish), and the district offered books in both languages. While she was being driven to learn English, the dual-language option helped to ensure that she did not become lost and get behind in her learning of all subjects. Having math, science, and computing taught in both languages helped her understand concepts and skills. Within two years of enrolling in the school, Lucy was getting nearly all of her instruction in English and rarely used Spanish-language books or resources. While she still had trouble with some intricacies of English, her math progress was above grade level and she did well in other subjects as well.

Some people might believe that Lucy would have learned faster had she been instructed only in English. But research indicates that is not the case. Johns Hopkins University researchers conducted a series of studies on the effects of bilingual education across multiple subjects (Slavin et al. 2008). They found that students taught in both their native tongue and English make better progress than those taught only in English.

Legally, the US has no official language. However many believe English to be the rightful language of the US, and over thirty states have passed laws specifying English as their official tongue. Proponents of English-only laws suggest that a national ruling will save money on translation, printing, and human resource costs, including funding for bilingual teachers. They argue that setting English as the official language will encourage non-English speakers to learn English faster and adapt to the culture of the US more easily (Mount 2010). Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) oppose making English the official language and claim that it violates the rights of non-English speakers. English-only laws, they believe, deny the reality of our nation’s diversity and unfairly target non-English speakers. They point to the fact that much of the debate on this topic has risen since 1970, a period during which the US has experienced new waves of immigration from various Asian countries and Central and Latin America.

Today, a lot of product information is written in multiple languages. Enter a store like Home Depot and you’ll find signs in both English and Spanish. Buy a children’s product and the safety warnings could be presented in multiple languages. While marketers are financially motivated to reach the largest number of consumers possible, this trend also may help people become accustomed to a culture of bilingualism.

Studies show that most US immigrants eventually abandon their native tongues and become fluent in English. Bilingual education helps with that transition. Today, Lucy is an ambitious and high-achieving college student. Fluent in both English and Spanish, Lucy is studying law enforcement—a field that seeks bilingual employees. The same bilingualism that contributed to her success in grade school will help her thrive professionally as a law officer serving her community.

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SOC101: Introduction to Sociology (2020.A.01)

Read this chapter for a review of culture. As you read each section, consider the following topics:

Write down the differences between culture and society.
Focus on the bold terms, paying close attention to the differences between ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. Then, write down some ideas as to why these two concepts would be central to studying societies.
Take note of the bold terms in this section, focusing on the different kinds of norms as well as the significance of symbols.
Take note of the different types of cultures as well as the effect of globalization on those cultures.
Read this section while making connections to the three theoretical perspectives you studied in subunit 1.1.

Elements of Culture

Learning objectives.

Understand how values and beliefs differ from norms
Explain the significance of symbols and language to a culture
Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Discuss the role of social control within culture

Values and Beliefs

The first, and perhaps most crucial, elements of culture we will discuss are its values and beliefs. Values are a culture's standard for discerning what is good and just in society. Values are deeply embedded and critical for transmitting and teaching a culture's beliefs. Beliefs are the tenets or convictions that people hold to be true. Individuals in a society have specific beliefs, but they also share collective values. To illustrate the difference, Americans commonly believe in the American Dream - that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the American value that wealth is good and important. Values help shape a society by suggesting what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, sought or avoided. Consider the value that the United States places upon youth. Children represent innocence and purity, while a youthful adult appearance signifies sexuality. Shaped by this value, individuals spend millions of dollars each year on cosmetic products and surgeries to look young and beautiful. The United States also has an individualistic culture, meaning people place a high value on individuality and independence. In contrast, many other cultures are collectivist, meaning the welfare of the group and group relationships are a primary value. Living up to a culture's values can be difficult. It's easy to value good health, but it's hard to quit smoking. Marital monogamy is valued, but many spouses engage in infidelity. Cultural diversity and equal opportunities for all people are valued in the United States, yet the country's highest political offices have been dominated by white men. Values often suggest how people should behave, but they don't accurately reflect how people do behave. Values portray an ideal culture , the standards society would like to embrace and live up to. But ideal culture differs from real culture , the way society actually is, based on what occurs and exists. In an ideal culture, there would be no traffic accidents, murders, poverty, or racial tension. But in real culture, police officers, lawmakers, educators, and social workers constantly strive to prevent or repair those accidents, crimes, and injustices. American teenagers are encouraged to value celibacy. However, the number of unplanned pregnancies among teens reveals that not only is the ideal hard to live up to, but the value alone is not enough to spare teenagers the potential consequences of having sex. One way societies strive to put values into action is through rewards, sanctions, and punishments. When people observe the norms of society and uphold its values, they are often rewarded. A boy who helps an elderly woman board a bus may receive a smile and a "thank you". A business manager who raises profit margins may receive a quarterly bonus. People sanction certain behaviors by giving their support, approval, or permission, or by instilling formal actions of disapproval and nonsupport. Sanctions are a form of social control , a way to encourage conformity to cultural norms. Sometimes people conform to norms in anticipation or expectation of positive sanctions: good grades, for instance, may mean praise from parents and teachers. From a criminal justice perspective, properly used social control is also inexpensive crime control. Utilizing social control approaches pushes most people to conform to societal rules, regardless of whether authority figures (such as law enforcement) are present. When people go against a society's values, they are punished. A boy who shoves an elderly woman aside to board the bus first may receive frowns or even a scolding from other passengers. A business manager who drives away customers will likely be fired. Breaking norms and rejecting values can lead to cultural sanctions such as earning a negative label - lazy, no-good bum - or to legal sanctions, such as traffic tickets, fines, or imprisonment. Values are not static; they vary across time and between groups as people evaluate, debate, and change collective societal beliefs. Values also vary from culture to culture. For example, cultures differ in their values about what kinds of physical closeness are appropriate in public. It's rare to see two male friends or coworkers holding hands in the United States where that behavior often symbolizes romantic feelings. But in many nations, masculine physical intimacy is considered natural in public. This difference in cultural values came to light when people reacted to photos of former president George W. Bush holding hands with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2005. A simple gesture, such as hand-holding, carries great symbolic differences across cultures.

Figure 3.4 In many parts of Africa and the Middle East, it is considered normal for men to hold hands in friendship. How would Americans react to these two soldiers?

So far, the examples in this chapter have often described how people are expected to behave in certain situations - for example, when buying food or boarding a bus. These examples describe the visible and invisible rules of conduct through which societies are structured, or what sociologists call norms. Norms define how to behave in accordance with what a society has defined as good, right, and important, and most members of the society adhere to them. Formal norms are established, written rules. They are behaviors worked out and agreed upon in order to suit and serve the most people. Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, college entrance exam requirements, and "no running" signs at swimming pools. Formal norms are the most specific and clearly stated of the various types of norms, and they are the most strictly enforced. But even formal norms are enforced to varying degrees and are reflected in cultural values. For example, money is highly valued in the United States, so monetary crimes are punished. It's against the law to rob a bank, and banks go to great lengths to prevent such crimes. People safeguard valuable possessions and install antitheft devices to protect homes and cars. A less strictly enforced social norm is driving while intoxicated. While it's against the law to drive drunk, drinking is for the most part an acceptable social behavior. And though there are laws to punish drunk driving, there are few systems in place to prevent the crime. These examples show a range of enforcement in formal norms. There are plenty of formal norms, but the list of informal norms - casual behaviors that are generally and widely conformed to - is longer. People learn informal norms by observation, imitation, and general socialization. Some informal norms are taught directly - "Kiss your Aunt Edna" or "Use your napkin" - while others are learned by observation, including observations of the consequences when someone else violates a norm. But although informal norms define personal interactions, they extend into other systems as well. In the United States, there are informal norms regarding behavior at fast food restaurants. Customers line up to order their food and leave when they are done. They don't sit down at a table with strangers, sing loudly as they prepare their condiments, or nap in a booth. Most people don't commit even benign breaches of informal norms. Informal norms dictate appropriate behaviors without the need of written rules.

Sociological Research

Breaching experiments.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) studied people's customs in order to find out how societal rules and norms not only influenced behavior but also shaped social order. He believed that members of society together create a social order. His resulting book, Studies in Ethnomethodology, published in 1967, discusses people's assumptions about the social makeup of their communities. One of Garfinkel's research methods was known as a "breaching experiment," in which the researcher behaves in a socially awkward manner in order to test the sociological concepts of social norms and conformity. The participants are not aware an experiment is in progress. If the breach is successful, however, these "innocent bystanders" will respond in some way. For example, if the experimenter is, say, a man in a business suit, and he skips down the sidewalk or hops on one foot, the passersby are likely to stare at him with surprised expressions on their faces. But the experimenter does not simply "act weird" in public. Rather, the point is to deviate from a specific social norm in a small way, to subtly break some form of social etiquette, and see what happens. To conduct his ethnomethodology, Garfinkel deliberately imposed strange behaviors on unknowing people. Then he observed their responses. He suspected that odd behaviors would shatter conventional expectations, but he wasn't sure how. For example, he set up a simple game of tic-tac-toe. One player was asked beforehand to mark Xs and Os not in the boxes but on the lines dividing the spaces instead. The other player, in the dark about the study, was flabbergasted and did not know how to continue. The second player's reactions of outrage, anger, puzzlement, or other emotions illustrated the existence of cultural norms that constitute social life. These cultural norms play an important role. They let us know how to behave around each other and how to feel comfortable in our community. There are many rules about speaking with strangers in public. It's OK to tell a woman you like her shoes. It's not OK to ask if you can try them on. It's OK to stand in line behind someone at the ATM. It's not OK to look over his shoulder as he makes his transaction. It's OK to sit beside someone on a crowded bus. It's weird to sit beside a stranger in a half-empty bus. For some breaches, the researcher directly engages with innocent bystanders. An experimenter might strike up a conversation in a public bathroom, where it's common to respect each other's privacy so fiercely as to ignore other people's presence. In a grocery store, an experimenter might take a food item out of another person's grocery cart, saying, "That looks good! I think I'll try it". An experimenter might sit down at a table with others in a fast food restaurant or follow someone around a museum and study the same paintings. In those cases, the bystanders are pressured to respond, and their discomfort illustrates how much we depend on social norms. Breaching experiments uncover and explore the many unwritten social rules we live by. Norms may be further classified as either mores or folkways. Mores (mor-ays) are norms that embody the moral views and principles of a group. Violating them can have serious consequences. The strongest mores are legally protected with laws or other formal norms. In the United States, for instance, murder is considered immoral, and it's punishable by law (a formal norm). But more often, mores are judged and guarded by public sentiment (an informal norm). People who violate mores are seen as shameful. They can even be shunned or banned from some groups. The mores of the U.S. school system require that a student's writing be in the student's own words or use special forms (such as quotation marks and a whole system of citation) for crediting other writers. Writing another person's words as if they are one's own has a name - plagiarism. The consequences for violating this norm are severe and usually result in expulsion. Unlike mores, folkways are norms without any moral underpinnings. Rather, folkways direct appropriate behavior in the day-to-day practices and expressions of a culture. They indicate whether to shake hands or kiss on the cheek when greeting another person. They specify whether to wear a tie and blazer or a T-shirt and sandals to an event. In Canada, women can smile and say hello to men on the street. In Egypt, that's not acceptable. In regions in the southern United States, bumping into an acquaintance means stopping to chat. It's considered rude not to, no matter how busy one is. In other regions, people guard their privacy and value time efficiency. A simple nod of the head is enough. Other accepted folkways in the United States may include holding the door open for a stranger or giving someone a gift on their birthday. The rules regarding these folkways may change from culture to culture. Many folkways are actions we take for granted. People need to act without thinking in order to get seamlessly through daily routines; they can't stop and analyze every action. Those who experience culture shock may find that it subsides as they learn the new culture's folkways and are able to move through their daily routines more smoothly. Folkways might be small manners, learned by observation and imitated, but they are by no means trivial. Like mores and laws, these norms help people negotiate their daily lives within a given culture.

Symbols and Language

Humans, consciously and subconsciously, are always striving to make sense of their surrounding world. Symbols - such as gestures, signs, objects, signals, and words - help people understand that world. They provide clues to understanding experiences by conveying recognizable meanings that are shared by societies. The world is filled with symbols. Sports uniforms, company logos, and traffic signs are symbols. In some cultures, a gold ring is a symbol of marriage. Some symbols are highly functional; stop signs, for instance, provide useful instruction. As physical objects, they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings. Some symbols are valuable only in what they represent. Trophies, blue ribbons, or gold medals, for example, serve no other purpose than to represent accomplishments. But many objects have both material and nonmaterial symbolic value. A police officer's badge and uniform are symbols of authority and law enforcement. The sight of an officer in uniform or a squad car triggers reassurance in some citizens, and annoyance, fear, or anger in others. It's easy to take symbols for granted. Few people challenge or even think about stick figure signs on the doors of public bathrooms. But those figures are more than just symbols that tell men and women which bathrooms to use. They also uphold the value, in the United States, that public restrooms should be gender exclusive. Even though stalls are relatively private, most places don't offer unisex bathrooms.

Figure 3.5 Some road signs are universal. But how would you interpret the signage on the right? Symbols often get noticed when they are out of context. Used unconventionally, they convey strong messages. A stop sign on the door of a corporation makes a political statement, as does a camouflage military jacket worn in an antiwar protest. Together, the semaphore signals for "N" and "D" represent nuclear disarmament - and form the well-known peace sign. Today, some college students have taken to wearing pajamas and bedroom slippers to class, clothing that was formerly associated only with privacy and bedtime. Though students might deny it, the outfit defies traditional cultural norms and makes a statement. Even the destruction of symbols is symbolic. Effigies representing public figures are burned to demonstrate anger at certain leaders. In 1989, crowds tore down the Berlin Wall, a decades-old symbol of the division between East and West Germany, communism, and capitalism. While different cultures have varying systems of symbols, one symbol is common to all: language. Language is a symbolic system through which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted. Some languages contain a system of symbols used for written communication, while others rely on only spoken communication and nonverbal actions. Societies often share a single language, and many languages contain the same basic elements. An alphabet is a written system made of symbolic shapes that refer to spoken sound. Taken together, these symbols convey specific meanings. The English alphabet uses a combination of twenty-six letters to create words; these twenty-six letters make up over 600,000 recognized English words. Rules for speaking and writing vary even within cultures, most notably by region. Do you refer to a can of carbonated liquid as "soda," pop," or "Coke"? Is a household entertainment room a "family room," "rec room," or "den"? When leaving a restaurant, do you ask your server for a "check," the "ticket," or your "bill"? Language is constantly evolving as societies create new ideas. In this age of technology, people have adapted almost instantly to new nouns such as "e-mail" and "Internet," and verbs such as "downloading," "texting," and "blogging". Twenty years ago, the general public would have considered these nonsense words. Even while it constantly evolves, language continues to shape our reality. This insight was established in the 1920s by two linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. They believed that reality is culturally determined, and that any interpretation of reality is based on a society's language. To prove this point, the sociologists argued that every language has words or expressions specific to that language. In the United States, for example, the number thirteen is associated with bad luck. In Japan, however, the number four is considered unlucky, since it is pronounced similarly to the Japanese word for "death". The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is based on the idea that people experience their world through their language, and that they therefore understand their world through the culture embedded in their language. The hypothesis, which has also been called linguistic relativity, states that language shapes thought. Studies have shown, for instance, that unless people have access to the word "ambivalent," they don't recognize an experience of uncertainty from having conflicting positive and negative feelings about one issue. Essentially, the hypothesis argues, if a person can't describe the experience, the person is not having the experience. In addition to using language, people communicate without words. Nonverbal communication is symbolic, and, as in the case of language, much of it is learned through one's culture. Some gestures are nearly universal: smiles often represent joy, and crying often represents sadness. Other nonverbal symbols vary across cultural contexts in their meaning. A thumbs-up, for example, indicates positive reinforcement in the United States, whereas in Russia and Australia, it is an offensive curse. Other gestures vary in meaning depending on the situation and the person. A wave of the hand can mean many things, depending on how it's done and for whom. It may mean "hello," "goodbye," "no thank you," or "I'm royalty". Winks convey a variety of messages, including "We have a secret," "I'm only kidding," or "I'm attracted to you". From a distance, a person can understand the emotional gist of two people in conversation just by watching their body language and facial expressions. Furrowed brows and folded arms indicate a serious topic, possibly an argument. Smiles, with heads lifted and arms open, suggest a lighthearted, friendly chat.

Social Policy and Debate

Is the united states bilingual.

In 1991, when she was six years old, Lucy Alvarez attended a school that allowed for the use of both English and Spanish. Lucy's teacher was bilingual, the librarian offered bilingual books, and many of the school staff spoke both Spanish and English. Lucy and many of her classmates who spoke only Spanish at home were lucky. According to the U.S. Census, 13.8 percent of U.S. residents speak a non-English language at home. That's a significant figure, but not enough to ensure that Lucy would be encouraged to use her native language in school. Lucy's parents, who moved to Texas from Mexico, struggled under the pressure to speak English. Lucy might easily have gotten lost and left behind if she'd felt the same pressure in school. In 2008, researchers from Johns Hopkins University conducted a series of studies on the effects of bilingual education. They found that students taught in both their native tongue and English make better progress than those taught only in English. Technically, the United States has no official language. But many believe English to be the rightful language of the United States, and over thirty states have passed laws specifying English as the official tongue. Proponents of English-only laws suggest that a national ruling will save money on translation, printing, and human resource costs, including funding for bilingual teachers. They argue that setting English as the official language will encourage non-English speakers to learn English faster and adapt to the culture of the United States more easily. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) oppose making English the official language and claim that it violates the rights of non-English speakers. English-only laws, they believe, deny the reality of our nation's diversity and unfairly target Latinos and Asians. They point to the fact that much of the debate on this topic has risen since 1970, a time when the United States experienced new waves of immigration from Asia and Mexico. Today, a lot of product information gets written in multiple languages. Enter a store like Home Depot and you'll find signs in both English and Spanish. Buy a children's product, and the safety warnings could be presented in multiple languages. While marketers are financially motivated to reach the largest number of consumers possible, this trend also may help people acclimate to a culture of bilingualism. Studies show that most U.S. immigrants eventually abandon their native tongues and become fluent in English. Bilingual education helps with that transition. Today, Lucy Alvarez is an ambitious and high-achieving college student. Fluent in both English and Spanish, Lucy is studying law enforcement - a field that seeks bilingual employees. The same bilingualism that contributed to her success in grade school will help her thrive professionally as a law officer serving her community.

Figure 3.6 Nowadays, many signs - on streets and in stores - include both English and Spanish. What effect does this have on members of society? What effect does it have on our culture?

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12 Elements of Culture

Learning objectives.

Understand how values and beliefs differ from norms
Explain the significance of symbols and language to a culture
Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Discuss the role of social control within culture

Values and Beliefs

The first, and perhaps most crucial, elements of culture we will discuss are its values and beliefs. Values are a culture’s standard for discerning what is good and just in society. Values are deeply embedded and critical for transmitting and teaching a culture’s beliefs. Beliefs are the tenets or convictions that people hold to be true. Individuals in a society have specific beliefs, but they also share collective values. To illustrate the difference, Americans commonly believe in the American Dream—that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the American value that wealth is good and important.

Values help shape a society by suggesting what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, sought or avoided. Consider the value that the United States places upon youth. Children represent innocence and purity, while a youthful adult appearance signifies sexuality. Shaped by this value, individuals spend millions of dollars each year on cosmetic products and surgeries to look young and beautiful. The United States also has an individualistic culture, meaning people place a high value on individuality and independence. In contrast, many other cultures are collectivist, meaning the welfare of the group and group relationships are a primary value.

Living up to a culture’s values can be difficult. It’s easy to value good health, but it’s hard to quit smoking. Marital monogamy is valued, but many spouses engage in infidelity. Cultural diversity and equal opportunities for all people are valued in the United States, yet the country’s highest political offices have been dominated by white men.

Values often suggest how people should behave, but they don’t accurately reflect how people do behave. Values portray an ideal culture , the standards society would like to embrace and live up to. But ideal culture differs from real culture , the way society actually is, based on what occurs and exists. In an ideal culture, there would be no traffic accidents, murders, poverty, or racial tension. But in real culture, police officers, lawmakers, educators, and social workers constantly strive to prevent or repair those accidents, crimes, and injustices. American teenagers are encouraged to value celibacy. However, the number of unplanned pregnancies among teens reveals that not only is the ideal hard to live up to, but the value alone is not enough to spare teenagers the potential consequences of having sex.

One way societies strive to put values into action is through rewards, sanctions, and punishments. When people observe the norms of society and uphold its values, they are often rewarded. A boy who helps an elderly woman board a bus may receive a smile and a “thank you.” A business manager who raises profit margins may receive a quarterly bonus. People sanction certain behaviors by giving their support, approval, or permission, or by instilling formal actions of disapproval and nonsupport. Sanctions are a form of social control , a way to encourage conformity to cultural norms. Sometimes people conform to norms in anticipation or expectation of positive sanctions: good grades, for instance, may mean praise from parents and teachers. From a criminal justice perspective, properly used social control is also inexpensive crime control. Utilizing social control approaches pushes most people to conform to societal rules, regardless of whether authority figures (such as law enforcement) are present.

When people go against a society’s values, they are punished. A boy who shoves an elderly woman aside to board the bus first may receive frowns or even a scolding from other passengers. A business manager who drives away customers will likely be fired. Breaking norms and rejecting values can lead to cultural sanctions such as earning a negative label—lazy, no-good bum—or to legal sanctions, such as traffic tickets, fines, or imprisonment.

Values are not static; they vary across time and between groups as people evaluate, debate, and change collective societal beliefs. Values also vary from culture to culture. For example, cultures differ in their values about what kinds of physical closeness are appropriate in public. It’s rare to see two male friends or coworkers holding hands in the United States where that behavior often symbolizes romantic feelings. But in many nations, masculine physical intimacy is considered natural in public. This difference in cultural values came to light when people reacted to photos of former president George W. Bush holding hands with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2005. A simple gesture, such as hand-holding, carries great symbolic differences across cultures.

Two male soldiers in uniform are shown from behind walking and holding hands.

So far, the examples in this chapter have often described how people are expected to behave in certain situations—for example, when buying food or boarding a bus. These examples describe the visible and invisible rules of conduct through which societies are structured, or what sociologists call norms. Norms define how to behave in accordance with what a society has defined as good, right, and important, and most members of the society adhere to them.

Formal norms are established, written rules. They are behaviors worked out and agreed upon in order to suit and serve the most people. Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, college entrance exam requirements, and “no running” signs at swimming pools. Formal norms are the most specific and clearly stated of the various types of norms, and they are the most strictly enforced. But even formal norms are enforced to varying degrees and are reflected in cultural values.

For example, money is highly valued in the United States, so monetary crimes are punished. It’s against the law to rob a bank, and banks go to great lengths to prevent such crimes. People safeguard valuable possessions and install antitheft devices to protect homes and cars. A less strictly enforced social norm is driving while intoxicated. While it’s against the law to drive drunk, drinking is for the most part an acceptable social behavior. And though there are laws to punish drunk driving, there are few systems in place to prevent the crime. These examples show a range of enforcement in formal norms.

There are plenty of formal norms, but the list of informal norms —casual behaviors that are generally and widely conformed to—is longer. People learn informal norms by observation, imitation, and general socialization. Some informal norms are taught directly—“Kiss your Aunt Edna” or “Use your napkin”—while others are learned by observation, including observations of the consequences when someone else violates a norm. But although informal norms define personal interactions, they extend into other systems as well. In the United States, there are informal norms regarding behavior at fast food restaurants. Customers line up to order their food and leave when they are done. They don’t sit down at a table with strangers, sing loudly as they prepare their condiments, or nap in a booth. Most people don’t commit even benign breaches of informal norms. Informal norms dictate appropriate behaviors without the need of written rules.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) studied people’s customs in order to find out how societal rules and norms not only influenced behavior but also shaped social order. He believed that members of society together create a social order (Weber 2011). His resulting book, Studies in Ethnomethodology , published in 1967, discusses people’s assumptions about the social makeup of their communities.

One of Garfinkel’s research methods was known as a “breaching experiment,” in which the researcher behaves in a socially awkward manner in order to test the sociological concepts of social norms and conformity. The participants are not aware an experiment is in progress. If the breach is successful, however, these “innocent bystanders” will respond in some way. For example, if the experimenter is, say, a man in a business suit, and he skips down the sidewalk or hops on one foot, the passersby are likely to stare at him with surprised expressions on their faces. But the experimenter does not simply “act weird” in public. Rather, the point is to deviate from a specific social norm in a small way, to subtly break some form of social etiquette, and see what happens.

To conduct his ethnomethodology, Garfinkel deliberately imposed strange behaviors on unknowing people. Then he observed their responses. He suspected that odd behaviors would shatter conventional expectations, but he wasn’t sure how. For example, he set up a simple game of tic-tac-toe. One player was asked beforehand to mark Xs and Os not in the boxes but on the lines dividing the spaces instead. The other player, in the dark about the study, was flabbergasted and did not know how to continue. The second player’s reactions of outrage, anger, puzzlement, or other emotions illustrated the existence of cultural norms that constitute social life. These cultural norms play an important role. They let us know how to behave around each other and how to feel comfortable in our community.

There are many rules about speaking with strangers in public. It’s OK to tell a woman you like her shoes. It’s not OK to ask if you can try them on. It’s OK to stand in line behind someone at the ATM. It’s not OK to look over his shoulder as he makes his transaction. It’s OK to sit beside someone on a crowded bus. It’s weird to sit beside a stranger in a half-empty bus.

For some breaches, the researcher directly engages with innocent bystanders. An experimenter might strike up a conversation in a public bathroom, where it’s common to respect each other’s privacy so fiercely as to ignore other people’s presence. In a grocery store, an experimenter might take a food item out of another person’s grocery cart, saying, “That looks good! I think I’ll try it.” An experimenter might sit down at a table with others in a fast food restaurant or follow someone around a museum and study the same paintings. In those cases, the bystanders are pressured to respond, and their discomfort illustrates how much we depend on social norms. Breaching experiments uncover and explore the many unwritten social rules we live by.

Norms may be further classified as either mores or folkways. Mores (mor-ays) are norms that embody the moral views and principles of a group. Violating them can have serious consequences. The strongest mores are legally protected with laws or other formal norms. In the United States, for instance, murder is considered immoral, and it’s punishable by law (a formal norm). But more often, mores are judged and guarded by public sentiment (an informal norm). People who violate mores are seen as shameful. They can even be shunned or banned from some groups. The mores of the U.S. school system require that a student’s writing be in the student’s own words or use special forms (such as quotation marks and a whole system of citation) for crediting other writers. Writing another person’s words as if they are one’s own has a name—plagiarism. The consequences for violating this norm are severe and usually result in expulsion.

Unlike mores, folkways are norms without any moral underpinnings. Rather, folkways direct appropriate behavior in the day-to-day practices and expressions of a culture. They indicate whether to shake hands or kiss on the cheek when greeting another person. They specify whether to wear a tie and blazer or a T-shirt and sandals to an event. In Canada, women can smile and say hello to men on the street. In Egypt, that’s not acceptable. In regions in the southern United States, bumping into an acquaintance means stopping to chat. It’s considered rude not to, no matter how busy one is. In other regions, people guard their privacy and value time efficiency. A simple nod of the head is enough. Other accepted folkways in the United States may include holding the door open for a stranger or giving someone a gift on their birthday. The rules regarding these folkways may change from culture to culture.

Many folkways are actions we take for granted. People need to act without thinking in order to get seamlessly through daily routines; they can’t stop and analyze every action (Sumner 1906). Those who experience culture shock may find that it subsides as they learn the new culture’s folkways and are able to move through their daily routines more smoothly. Folkways might be small manners, learned by observation and imitated, but they are by no means trivial. Like mores and laws, these norms help people negotiate their daily lives within a given culture.

Symbols and Language

Humans, consciously and subconsciously, are always striving to make sense of their surrounding world. Symbols —such as gestures, signs, objects, signals, and words—help people understand that world. They provide clues to understanding experiences by conveying recognizable meanings that are shared by societies.

The world is filled with symbols. Sports uniforms, company logos, and traffic signs are symbols. In some cultures, a gold ring is a symbol of marriage. Some symbols are highly functional; stop signs, for instance, provide useful instruction. As physical objects, they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings. Some symbols are valuable only in what they represent. Trophies, blue ribbons, or gold medals, for example, serve no other purpose than to represent accomplishments. But many objects have both material and nonmaterial symbolic value.

A police officer’s badge and uniform are symbols of authority and law enforcement. The sight of an officer in uniform or a squad car triggers reassurance in some citizens, and annoyance, fear, or anger in others.

It’s easy to take symbols for granted. Few people challenge or even think about stick figure signs on the doors of public bathrooms. But those figures are more than just symbols that tell men and women which bathrooms to use. They also uphold the value, in the United States, that public restrooms should be gender exclusive. Even though stalls are relatively private, most places don’t offer unisex bathrooms.

The photo (a) shows a sign of a pedestrian crossing and an arrow.

Symbols often get noticed when they are out of context. Used unconventionally, they convey strong messages. A stop sign on the door of a corporation makes a political statement, as does a camouflage military jacket worn in an antiwar protest. Together, the semaphore signals for “N” and “D” represent nuclear disarmament—and form the well-known peace sign (Westcott 2008). Today, some college students have taken to wearing pajamas and bedroom slippers to class, clothing that was formerly associated only with privacy and bedtime. Though students might deny it, the outfit defies traditional cultural norms and makes a statement.

Even the destruction of symbols is symbolic. Effigies representing public figures are burned to demonstrate anger at certain leaders. In 1989, crowds tore down the Berlin Wall, a decades-old symbol of the division between East and West Germany, communism, and capitalism.

While different cultures have varying systems of symbols, one symbol is common to all: language. Language is a symbolic system through which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted. Some languages contain a system of symbols used for written communication, while others rely on only spoken communication and nonverbal actions.

Societies often share a single language, and many languages contain the same basic elements. An alphabet is a written system made of symbolic shapes that refer to spoken sound. Taken together, these symbols convey specific meanings. The English alphabet uses a combination of twenty-six letters to create words; these twenty-six letters make up over 600,000 recognized English words (OED Online 2011).

Rules for speaking and writing vary even within cultures, most notably by region. Do you refer to a can of carbonated liquid as “soda,” pop,” or “Coke”? Is a household entertainment room a “family room,” “rec room,” or “den”? When leaving a restaurant, do you ask your server for a “check,” the “ticket,” or your “bill”?

Language is constantly evolving as societies create new ideas. In this age of technology, people have adapted almost instantly to new nouns such as “e-mail” and “Internet,” and verbs such as “downloading,” “texting,” and “blogging.” Twenty years ago, the general public would have considered these nonsense words.

Even while it constantly evolves, language continues to shape our reality. This insight was established in the 1920s by two linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. They believed that reality is culturally determined, and that any interpretation of reality is based on a society’s language. To prove this point, the sociologists argued that every language has words or expressions specific to that language. In the United States, for example, the number thirteen is associated with bad luck. In Japan, however, the number four is considered unlucky, since it is pronounced similarly to the Japanese word for “death.”

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is based on the idea that people experience their world through their language, and that they therefore understand their world through the culture embedded in their language. The hypothesis, which has also been called linguistic relativity, states that language shapes thought (Swoyer 2003). Studies have shown, for instance, that unless people have access to the word “ambivalent,” they don’t recognize an experience of uncertainty from having conflicting positive and negative feelings about one issue. Essentially, the hypothesis argues, if a person can’t describe the experience, the person is not having the experience.

In addition to using language, people communicate without words. Nonverbal communication is symbolic, and, as in the case of language, much of it is learned through one’s culture. Some gestures are nearly universal: smiles often represent joy, and crying often represents sadness. Other nonverbal symbols vary across cultural contexts in their meaning. A thumbs-up, for example, indicates positive reinforcement in the United States, whereas in Russia and Australia, it is an offensive curse (Passero 2002). Other gestures vary in meaning depending on the situation and the person. A wave of the hand can mean many things, depending on how it’s done and for whom. It may mean “hello,” “goodbye,” “no thank you,” or “I’m royalty.” Winks convey a variety of messages, including “We have a secret,” “I’m only kidding,” or “I’m attracted to you.” From a distance, a person can understand the emotional gist of two people in conversation just by watching their body language and facial expressions. Furrowed brows and folded arms indicate a serious topic, possibly an argument. Smiles, with heads lifted and arms open, suggest a lighthearted, friendly chat.

In 1991, when she was six years old, Lucy Alvarez attended a school that allowed for the use of both English and Spanish. Lucy’s teacher was bilingual, the librarian offered bilingual books, and many of the school staff spoke both Spanish and English. Lucy and many of her classmates who spoke only Spanish at home were lucky. According to the U.S. Census, 13.8 percent of U.S. residents speak a non-English language at home. That’s a significant figure, but not enough to ensure that Lucy would be encouraged to use her native language in school (Mount 2010).

Lucy’s parents, who moved to Texas from Mexico, struggled under the pressure to speak English. Lucy might easily have gotten lost and left behind if she’d felt the same pressure in school. In 2008, researchers from Johns Hopkins University conducted a series of studies on the effects of bilingual education (Slavin et al. 2008). They found that students taught in both their native tongue and English make better progress than those taught only in English.

Technically, the United States has no official language. But many believe English to be the rightful language of the United States, and over thirty states have passed laws specifying English as the official tongue. Proponents of English-only laws suggest that a national ruling will save money on translation, printing, and human resource costs, including funding for bilingual teachers. They argue that setting English as the official language will encourage non-English speakers to learn English faster and adapt to the culture of the United States more easily (Mount 2010).

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) oppose making English the official language and claim that it violates the rights of non-English speakers. English-only laws, they believe, deny the reality of our nation’s diversity and unfairly target Latinos and Asians. They point to the fact that much of the debate on this topic has risen since 1970, a time when the United States experienced new waves of immigration from Asia and Mexico.

Today, a lot of product information gets written in multiple languages. Enter a store like Home Depot and you’ll find signs in both English and Spanish. Buy a children’s product, and the safety warnings could be presented in multiple languages. While marketers are financially motivated to reach the largest number of consumers possible, this trend also may help people acclimate to a culture of bilingualism.

Studies show that most U.S. immigrants eventually abandon their native tongues and become fluent in English. Bilingual education helps with that transition. Today, Lucy Alvarez is an ambitious and high-achieving college student. Fluent in both English and Spanish, Lucy is studying law enforcement—a field that seeks bilingual employees. The same bilingualism that contributed to her success in grade school will help her thrive professionally as a law officer serving her community.

A keep out sign with text in English and Spanish is shown.

A culture consists of many elements, such as the values and beliefs of its society. Culture is also governed by norms, including laws, mores, and folkways. The symbols and language of a society are key to developing and conveying culture.

Section Quiz

A nation’s flag is:

The existence of social norms, both formal and informal, is one of the main things that inform ___________, otherwise known as a way to encourage social conformity.

social control

The biggest difference between mores and folkways is that

mores are primarily linked to morality, whereas folkways are primarily linked to being commonplace within a culture
mores are absolute, whereas folkways are temporary
mores refer to material culture, whereas folkways refer to nonmaterial culture
mores refer to nonmaterial culture, whereas folkways refer to material culture

The notion that people cannot feel or experience something that they do not have a word for can be explained by:

linguistics
Sapir-Whorf
Ethnographic imagery
bilingualism

Cultural sanctions can also be viewed as ways that society:

Establishes leaders
Determines language
Regulates behavior
Determines laws

Short Answer

What do you think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Do you agree or disagree with it? Cite examples or research to support your point of view.

How do you think your culture would exist if there were no such thing as a social “norm”? Do you think chaos would ensue or relative peace could be kept? Explain.

Further Research

The science-fiction novel, Babel-17 , by Samuel R. Delaney was based upon the principles of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Read an excerpt from the novel here: http://openstax.org/l/Babel-17

Mount, Steve. 2010. “Constitutional Topic: Official Language.” USConstitution.net , last modified January 24. Retrieved January 3, 2012 ( http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_lang.html ).

OED Online . 2011. Oxford University Press. Retrieved May 5, 2011 ( http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/260911 ).

Passero, Kathy. 2002. “Global Travel Expert Roger Axtell Explains Why.” Biography July:70–73,97–98.

Slavin, R. E., A. Cheung, C. Groff, and C. Lake. 2008. “Effective Reading Programs for Middle and High Schools: A Best-Evidence Synthesis.” Reading Research Quarterly 43(3):290–322.

Sumner, William G. 1906. Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals . New York: Ginn and Co.

Swoyer, Chris. 2003. “The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by E. N. Zalta, Winter. Retrieved May 5, 2011 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2003/entries/relativism/supplement2.html ).

Vaughan, R. M. 2007. “Cairo’s Man Show.” Utne Reader March–April:94–95.

Weber, Bruce. 2001. “Harold Garfinkel, a Common-Sense Sociologist, Dies at 93.” The New York Times , May 3. Retrieved February 10, 2012 ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/us/04garfinkel.html?_r=2 ).

Westcott, Kathryn. 2008. “World’s Best-Known Protest Symbol Turns 50.” BBC News , March 20. Retrieved January 3, 2012 ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7292252.stm ).

Introduction to Sociology 2e Copyright © 2012 by OSCRiceUniversity (Download for free at https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-sociology-2e) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

3.1 Culture and the Sociological Perspective

Learning objectives.

Describe examples of how culture influences behavior.
Explain why sociologists might favor cultural explanations of behavior over biological explanations.

As this evidence on kissing suggests, what seems to us a very natural, even instinctual act turns out not to be so natural and biological after all. Instead, kissing seems best understood as something we learn to enjoy from our culture , or the symbols, language, beliefs, values, and artifacts (material objects) that are part of a society. Because society, as defined in Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” , refers to a group of people who live in a defined territory and who share a culture, it is obvious that culture is a critical component of any society.

If the culture we learn influences our beliefs and behaviors, then culture is a key concept to the sociological perspective. Someone who grows up in the United States differs in many ways, some of them obvious and some of them not so obvious, from someone growing up in China, Sweden, South Korea, Peru, or Nigeria. Culture influences not only language but the gestures we use when we interact, how far apart we stand from each other when we talk, and the values we consider most important for our children to learn, to name just a few. Without culture, we could not have a society.

The profound impact of culture becomes most evident when we examine behaviors or conditions that, like kissing, are normally considered biological in nature. Consider morning sickness and labor pains, both very familiar to pregnant women before and during childbirth, respectively. These two types of discomfort have known biological causes, and we are not surprised that so many pregnant women experience them. But we would be surprised if the husbands of pregnant women woke up sick in the morning or experienced severe abdominal pain while their wives gave birth. These men are neither carrying nor delivering a baby, and there is no logical—that is, biological—reason for them to suffer either type of discomfort.

And yet scholars have discovered several traditional societies in which men about to become fathers experience precisely these symptoms. They are nauseous during their wives’ pregnancies, and they experience labor pains while their wives give birth. The term couvade refers to these symptoms, which do not have any known biological origin. Yet the men feel them nonetheless, because they have learned from their culture that they should feel these types of discomfort (Doja, 2005). And because they should feel these symptoms, they actually do so. Perhaps their minds are playing tricks on them, but that is often the point of culture. As sociologists William I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1928) once pointed out, if things are perceived as real, then they are real in their consequences. These men learn how they should feel as budding fathers, and thus they feel this way. Unfortunately for them, the perceptions they learn from their culture are real in their consequences.

The example of drunkenness further illustrates how cultural expectations influence a behavior that is commonly thought to have biological causes. In the United States, when people drink too much alcohol, they become intoxicated and their behavior changes. Most typically, their inhibitions lower and they become loud, boisterous, and even rowdy. We attribute these changes to alcohol’s biological effect as a drug on our central nervous system, and scientists have documented how alcohol breaks down in our body to achieve this effect.

Culture affects how people respond when they drink alcohol. Americans often become louder and lose their sexual inhibitions when they drink, but people in some societies studied by anthropologists often respond very differently, with many never getting loud or not even enjoying themselves.

Melissa Wang – bp tourney – CC BY-SA 2.0.

This explanation of alcohol’s effect is OK as far as it goes, but it turns out that how alcohol affects our behavior depends on our culture. In some small, traditional societies, people drink alcohol until they pass out, but they never get loud or boisterous; they might not even appear to be enjoying themselves. In other societies, they drink lots of alcohol and get loud but not rowdy. In some societies, including our own, people lose sexual inhibitions as they drink, but in other societies they do not become more aroused. The cross-cultural evidence is very clear: alcohol as a drug does affect human behavior, but culture influences the types of effects that occur. We learn from our culture how to behave when drunk just as we learn how to behave when sober (McCaghy, Capron, Jamieson, & Carey, 2008).

Culture and Biology

These examples suggest that human behavior is more the result of culture than it is of biology. This is not to say that biology is entirely unimportant. As just one example, humans have a biological need to eat, and so they do. But humans are much less under the control of biology than any other animal species, including other primates such as monkeys and chimpanzees. These and other animals are governed largely by biological instincts that control them totally. A dog chases any squirrel it sees because of instinct, and a cat chases a mouse for the same reason. Different breeds of dogs do have different personalities, but even these stem from the biological differences among breeds passed down from one generation to another. Instinct prompts many dogs to turn around before they lie down, and it prompts most dogs to defend their territory. When the doorbell rings and a dog begins barking, it is responding to ancient biological instinct.

Because humans have such a large, complex central nervous system, we are less controlled by biology. The critical question then becomes, how much does biology influence our behavior? Predictably, scholars in different disciplines answer this question in different ways. Most sociologists and anthropologists would probably say that culture affects behavior much more than biology does. In contrast, many biologists and psychologists would give much more weight to biology. Advocating a view called sociobiology , some scholars say that several important human behaviors and emotions, such as competition, aggression, and altruism, stem from our biological makeup. Sociobiology has been roundly criticized and just as staunchly defended, and respected scholars continue to debate its premises (Freese, 2008).

Why do sociologists generally favor culture over biology? Two reasons stand out. First, and as we have seen, many behaviors differ dramatically among societies in ways that show the strong impact of culture. Second, biology cannot easily account for why groups and locations differ in their rates of committing certain behaviors. For example, what biological reason could explain why suicide rates west of the Mississippi River are higher than those east of it, to take a difference discussed in Chapter 2 “Eye on Society: Doing Sociological Research” , or why the U.S. homicide rate is so much higher than Canada’s? Various aspects of culture and social structure seem much better able than biology to explain these differences.

Many sociologists also warn of certain implications of biological explanations. First, they say, these explanations implicitly support the status quo. Because it is difficult to change biology, any problem with biological causes cannot be easily fixed. A second warning harkens back to a century ago, when perceived biological differences were used to justify forced sterilization and mass violence, including genocide, against certain groups. As just one example, in the early 1900s, some 70,000 people, most of them poor and many of them immigrants or African Americans, were involuntarily sterilized in the United States as part of the eugenics movement, which said that certain kinds of people were biologically inferior and must not be allowed to reproduce (Lombardo, 2008). The Nazi Holocaust a few decades later used a similar eugenics argument to justify its genocide against Jews, Catholics, gypsies, and gays (Kuhl, 1994). With this history in mind, some scholars fear that biological explanations of human behavior might still be used to support views of biological inferiority (York & Clark, 2007).

Key Takeaways

Culture refers to the symbols, language, beliefs, values, and artifacts that are part of any society.
Because culture influences people’s beliefs and behaviors, culture is a key concept to the sociological perspective.
Many sociologists are wary of biological explanations of behavior, in part because these explanations implicitly support the status quo and may be used to justify claims of biological inferiority.

For Your Review

Have you ever traveled outside the United States? If so, describe one cultural difference you remember in the nation you visited.
Have you ever traveled within the United States to a very different region (e.g., urban versus rural, or another part of the country) from the one in which you grew up? If so, describe one cultural difference you remember in the region you visited.
Do you share the concern of many sociologists over biological explanations of behavior? Why or why not?

Doja, A. (2005). Rethinking the couvade . Anthropological Quarterly, 78, 917–950.

Freese, J. (2008). Genetics and the social science explanation of individual outcomes [Supplement]. American Journal of Sociology, 114, S1–S35.

Kuhl, S. (1994). The Nazi connection: Eugenics, American racism, and German national socialism . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Lombardo, P. A. (2008). Three generations, no imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

McCaghy, C. H., Capron, T. A., Jamieson, J. D., & Carey, S. H. (2008). Deviant behavior: Crime, conflict, and interest groups . Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Thomas, W. I., & Thomas, D. S. (1928). The child in America: Behavior problems and programs . New York, NY: Knopf.

York, R., & Clark, B. (2007). Gender and mathematical ability: The toll of biological determinism. Monthly Review, 59, 7–15.

3.1 What Is Culture?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

Differentiate between culture and society
Explain material versus nonmaterial culture
Discuss the concept of cultural universals as it relates to society
Compare and contrast ethnocentrism and xenocentrism

Humans are social creatures. According to Smithsonian Institution research, humans have been forming groups for almost 3 million years in order to survive. Living together, people formed common habits and behaviors, from specific methods of childrearing to preferred techniques for obtaining food.

Almost every human behavior, from shopping to marriage, is learned. In the U.S., marriage is generally seen as an individual choice made by two adults, based on mutual feelings of love. In other nations and in other times, marriages have been arranged through an intricate process of interviews and negotiations between entire families. In Papua New Guinea, almost 30 percent of women marry before the age of 18, and 8 percent of men have more than one wife (National Statistical Office, 2019). To people who are not from such a culture, arranged marriages may seem to have risks of incompatibility or the absence of romantic love. But many people from cultures where marriages are arranged, which includes a number of highly populated and modern countries, often prefer the approach because it reduces stress and increases stability (Jankowiak 2021).

Being familiar with unwritten rules helps people feel secure and at ease. Knowing to look left instead of right for oncoming traffic while crossing the street can help avoid serious injury and even death. Knowing unwritten rules is also fundamental in understanding humor in different cultures. Humor is common to all societies, but what makes something funny is not. Americans may laugh at a scene in which an actor falls; in other cultures, falling is never funny. Most people want to live their daily lives confident that their behaviors will not be challenged or disrupted. But even an action as seemingly simple as commuting to work evidences a great deal of cultural propriety, that is, there are a lot of expected behaviors. And many interpretations of them.

Take the case of going to work on public transportation. Whether people are commuting in Egypt, Ireland, India, Japan, and the U.S., many behaviors will be the same and may reveal patterns. Others will be different. In many societies that enjoy public transportation, a passenger will find a marked bus stop or station, wait for the bus or train, pay an agent before or after boarding, and quietly take a seat if one is available. But when boarding a bus in Cairo, Egypt, passengers might board while the bus is moving, because buses often do not come to a full stop to take on patrons. In Dublin, Ireland, bus riders would be expected to extend an arm to indicate that they want the bus to stop for them. And when boarding a commuter train in Mumbai, India, passengers must squeeze into overstuffed cars amid a lot of pushing and shoving on the crowded platforms. That kind of behavior might be considered rude in other societies, but in Mumbai it reflects the daily challenges of getting around on a train system that is taxed to capacity.

Culture can be material or nonmaterial. Metro passes and bus tokens are part of material culture, as are the buses, subway cars, and the physical structures of the bus stop. Think of material culture as items you can touch-they are tangible . Nonmaterial culture , in contrast, consists of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society. These are things you cannot touch. They are intangible . You may believe that a line should be formed to enter the subway car or that other passengers should not stand so close to you. Those beliefs are intangible because they do not have physical properties and can be touched.

Material and nonmaterial aspects of culture are linked, and physical objects often symbolize cultural ideas. A metro pass is a material object, but it represents a form of nonmaterial culture, namely, capitalism, and the acceptance of paying for transportation. Clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry are part of material culture, but the appropriateness of wearing certain clothing for specific events reflects nonmaterial culture. A school building belongs to material culture symbolizing education, but the teaching methods and educational standards are part of education’s nonmaterial culture.

As people travel from different regions to entirely different parts of the world, certain material and nonmaterial aspects of culture become dramatically unfamiliar. What happens when we encounter different cultures? As we interact with cultures other than our own, we become more aware of the differences and commonalities between others and our own. If we keep our sociological imagination awake, we can begin to understand and accept the differences. Body language and hand gestures vary around the world, but some body language seems to be shared across cultures: When someone arrives home later than permitted, a parent or guardian meeting them at the door with crossed arms and a frown on their face means the same in Russia as it does in the U.S. as it does in Ghana.

Cultural Universals

Although cultures vary, they also share common elements. Cultural universals are patterns or traits that are globally common to all societies. One example of a cultural universal is the family unit: every human society recognizes a family structure that regulates sexual reproduction and the care of children. Even so, how that family unit is defined and how it functions vary. In many Asian cultures, for example, family members from all generations commonly live together in one household. In these cultures, young adults continue to live in the extended household family structure until they marry and join their spouse’s household, or they may remain and raise their nuclear family within the extended family’s homestead. In the U.S., by contrast, individuals are expected to leave home and live independently for a period before forming a family unit that consists of parents and their offspring. Other cultural universals include customs like funeral rites, weddings, and celebrations of births. However, each culture may view and conduct the ceremonies quite differently.

Anthropologist George Murdock first investigated the existence of cultural universals while studying systems of kinship around the world. Murdock found that cultural universals often revolve around basic human survival, such as finding food, clothing, and shelter, or around shared human experiences, such as birth and death or illness and healing. Through his research, Murdock identified other universals including language, the concept of personal names, and, interestingly, jokes. Humor seems to be a universal way to release tensions and create a sense of unity among people (Murdock, 1949). Sociologists consider humor necessary to human interaction because it helps individuals navigate otherwise tense situations.

Sociological Research

Is music a cultural universal.

Imagine that you are sitting in a theater, watching a film. The movie opens with the protagonist sitting on a park bench with a grim expression on their face. The music starts to come in. The first slow and mournful notes play in a minor key. As the melody continues, the heroine turns her head and sees a man walking toward her. The music gets louder, and the sounds don’t seem to go together – as if the orchestra is intentionally playing the wrong notes. You tense up as you watch, almost hoping to stop. The character is clearly in danger.

Now imagine that you are watching the same movie – the exact same footage – but with a different soundtrack. As the scene opens, the music is soft and soothing, with a hint of sadness. You see the protagonist sitting on the park bench with a grim expression. Suddenly, the music swells. The woman looks up and sees a man walking toward her. The notes are high and bright, and the pace is bouncy. You feel your heart rise in your chest. This is a happy moment.

Music has the ability to evoke emotional responses. In television shows, movies, commercials, and even the background music in a store, music has a message and seems to easily draw a response from those who hear it – joy, sadness, fear, victory. Are these types of musical cues cultural universals?

In 2009, a team of psychologists, led by Thomas Fritz of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, studied people’s reactions to music that they’d never heard (Fritz et al., 2009). The research team traveled to Cameroon, Africa, and asked Mafa tribal members to listen to Western music. The tribe, isolated from Western culture, had never been exposed to Western culture and had no context or experience within which to interpret its music. Even so, as the tribal members listened to a Western piano piece, they were able to recognize three basic emotions: happiness, sadness, and fear. Music, the study suggested, is a sort of universal language.

Researchers also found that music can foster a sense of wholeness within a group. In fact, scientists who study the evolution of language have concluded that originally language (an established component of group identity) and music were one (Darwin, 1871). Additionally, since music is largely nonverbal, the sounds of music can cross societal boundaries more easily than words. Music allows people to make connections, where language might be a more difficult barricade. As Fritz and his team found, music and the emotions it conveys are cultural universals.

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

Although human societies have much in common, cultural differences are far more prevalent than cultural universals. For example, while all cultures have language, analysis of conversational etiquette reveals tremendous differences. In some Middle Eastern cultures, it is common to stand close to others in conversation. Americans keep more distance and maintain a large “personal space.” Additionally, behaviors as simple as eating and drinking vary greatly from culture to culture. Some cultures use tools to put the food in the mouth while others use their fingers. If your professor comes into an early morning class holding a mug of liquid, what do you assume they are drinking? In the U.S., it’s most likely filled with coffee, not Earl Grey tea, a favorite in England, or Yak Butter tea, a staple in Tibet.

Some travelers pride themselves on their willingness to try unfamiliar foods, like the late celebrated food writer Anthony Bourdain (1956-2017). Often, however, people express disgust at another culture's cuisine. They might think that it’s gross to eat raw meat from a donkey or parts of a rodent, while they don’t question their own habit of eating cows or pigs.

Such attitudes are examples of ethnocentrism , which means to evaluate and judge another culture based on one’s own cultural norms. Ethnocentrism is believing your group is the correct measuring standard and if other cultures do not measure up to it, they are wrong. As sociologist William Graham Sumner (1906) described the term, it is a belief or attitude that one’s own culture is better than all others. Almost everyone is a little bit ethnocentric.

A high level of appreciation for one’s own culture can be healthy. A shared sense of community pride, for example, connects people in a society. But ethnocentrism can lead to disdain or dislike of other cultures and could cause misunderstanding, stereotyping, and conflict. Individuals, government, non-government, private, and religious institutions with the best intentions sometimes travel to a society to “help” its people, because they see them as uneducated, backward, or even inferior. Cultural imperialism is the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.

Colonial expansion by Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, and England grew quickly in the fifteenth century was accompanied by severe cultural imperialism. European colonizers often viewed the people in these new lands as uncultured savages who needed to adopt Catholic governance, Christianity, European dress, and other cultural practices.

A modern example of cultural imperialism may include the work of international aid agencies who introduce agricultural methods and plant species from developed countries into areas that are better served by indigenous varieties and agricultural approaches to the particular region. Another example would be the deforestation of the Amazon Basin as indigenous cultures lose land to timber corporations.

When people find themselves in a new culture, they may experience disorientation and frustration. In sociology, we call this culture shock . In addition to the traveler’s biological clock being ‘off’, a traveler from Chicago might find the nightly silence of rural Montana unsettling, not peaceful. Now, imagine that the ‘difference’ is cultural. An exchange student from China to the U.S. might be annoyed by the constant interruptions in class as other students ask questions—a practice that is considered rude in China. Perhaps the Chicago traveler was initially captivated with Montana’s quiet beauty and the Chinese student was originally excited to see a U.S.- style classroom firsthand. But as they experience unanticipated differences from their own culture, they may experience ethnocentrism as their excitement gives way to discomfort and doubts about how to behave appropriately in the new situation. According to many authors, international students studying in the U.S. report that there are personality traits and behaviors expected of them. Black African students report having to learn to ‘be Black in the U.S.’ and Chinese students report that they are naturally expected to be good at math. In African countries, people are identified by country or kin, not color. Eventually, as people learn more about a culture, they adapt to the new culture for a variety of reasons.

Culture shock may appear because people aren’t always expecting cultural differences. Anthropologist Ken Barger (1971) discovered this when he conducted a participatory observation in an Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic. Originally from Indiana, Barger hesitated when invited to join a local snowshoe race. He knew he would never hold his own against these experts. Sure enough, he finished last, to his mortification. But the tribal members congratulated him, saying, “You really tried!” In Barger’s own culture, he had learned to value victory. To the Inuit people, winning was enjoyable, but their culture valued survival skills essential to their environment: how hard someone tried could mean the difference between life and death. Over the course of his stay, Barger participated in caribou hunts, learned how to take shelter in winter storms, and sometimes went days with little or no food to share among tribal members. Trying hard and working together, two nonmaterial values, were indeed much more important than winning.

During his time with the Inuit tribe, Barger learned to engage in cultural relativism . Cultural relativism is the practice of assessing a culture by its own standards rather than viewing it through the lens of one’s own culture. Practicing cultural relativism requires an open mind and a willingness to consider, and even adapt to, new values, norms, and practices.

However, indiscriminately embracing everything about a new culture is not always possible. Even the most culturally relativist people from egalitarian societies—ones in which women have political rights and control over their own bodies—question whether the widespread practice of female genital mutilation in countries such as Ethiopia and Sudan should be accepted as a part of cultural tradition. Sociologists attempting to engage in cultural relativism, then, may struggle to reconcile aspects of their own culture with aspects of a culture that they are studying. Sociologists may take issue with the practices of female genital mutilation in many countries to ensure virginity at marriage just as some male sociologists might take issue with scarring of the flesh to show membership. Sociologists work diligently to keep personal biases out of research analysis.

Sometimes when people attempt to address feelings of ethnocentrism and develop cultural relativism, they swing too far to the other end of the spectrum. Xenocentrism is the opposite of ethnocentrism, and refers to the belief that another culture is superior to one’s own. (The Greek root word xeno-, pronounced “ZEE-no,” means “stranger” or “foreign guest.”) An exchange student who goes home after a semester abroad or a sociologist who returns from the field may find it difficult to associate with the values of their own culture after having experienced what they deem a more upright or nobler way of living. An opposite reaction is xenophobia, an irrational fear or hatred of different cultures.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for sociologists studying different cultures is the matter of keeping a perspective. It is impossible for anyone to overcome all cultural biases. The best we can do is strive to be aware of them. Pride in one’s own culture doesn’t have to lead to imposing its values or ideas on others. And an appreciation for another culture shouldn’t preclude individuals from studying it with a critical eye. This practice is perhaps the most difficult for all social scientists.

Sociology in the Real World

Overcoming culture shock.

During her summer vacation, Caitlin flew from Chicago, Illinois to Madrid, Spain to visit Maria, the exchange student she had befriended the previous semester. In the airport, she heard rapid, musical Spanish being spoken all around her.

Exciting as it was, she felt isolated and disconnected. Maria’s mother kissed Caitlin on both cheeks when she greeted her. Her imposing father kept his distance. Caitlin was half asleep by the time supper was served—at 10 p.m. Maria’s family sat at the table for hours, speaking loudly, gesturing, and arguing about politics, a taboo dinner subject in Caitlin’s house. They served wine and toasted their honored guest. Caitlin had trouble interpreting her hosts’ facial expressions, and did not realize she should make the next toast. That night, Caitlin crawled into a strange bed, wishing she had not come. She missed her home and felt overwhelmed by the new customs, language, and surroundings. She’d studied Spanish in school for years—why hadn’t it prepared her for this?

What Caitlin did not realize was that people depend not only on spoken words but also on body language, like gestures and facial expressions, to communicate. Cultural norms and practices accompany even the smallest nonverbal signals (DuBois, 1951). They help people know when to shake hands, where to sit, how to converse, and even when to laugh. We relate to others through a shared set of cultural norms, and ordinarily, we take them for granted.

For this reason, culture shock is often associated with traveling abroad, although it can happen in one’s own country, state, or even hometown. Anthropologist Kalervo Oberg (1960) is credited with first coining the term “culture shock.” In his studies, Oberg found that most people are excited at first to encounter a new culture. But bit by bit, they become stressed by interacting with people from a different culture who speak another language and use different regional expressions. There is new food to digest, new daily schedules to follow, and new rules of etiquette to learn. Living with this constant stress can make people feel incompetent and insecure. People react to frustration in a new culture, Oberg found, by initially rejecting it and glorifying one’s own culture. An American visiting Italy might long for a “real” pizza or complain about the unsafe driving habits of Italians.

It helps to remember that culture is learned. Everyone is ethnocentric to an extent, and identifying with one’s own country is natural. Caitlin’s shock was minor compared to that of her friends Dayar and Mahlika, a Turkish couple living in married student housing on campus. And it was nothing like that of her classmate Sanai. Sanai had been forced to flee war-torn Bosnia with her family when she was fifteen. After two weeks in Spain, Caitlin had developed more compassion and understanding for what those people had gone through. She understood that adjusting to a new culture takes time. It can take weeks or months to recover from culture shock, and it can take years to fully adjust to living in a new culture.

By the end of Caitlin’s trip, she had made new lifelong friends. Caitlin stepped out of her comfort zone. She had learned a lot about Spain, but discovered a lot about herself and her own culture.

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Defining and Understanding Culture

Learning objectives.

Define culture.
Identify the differences between armchair anthropology and participant-observer fieldwork.
Compare and contrast the ideas of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
Define engaged anthropology.
Identify the key historical figures in the development of cultural anthropology.
Distinguish between the approaches used by these four schools of anthropological thought: C ultural Evolutionism, European Structural Functionalism, Historical Particularism, and Interpretive Anthropology.

This lesson introduces you to the concept of culture , a system of knowledge, beliefs, behavioral norms, values, traditions, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people, often to be challenged and transformed over time. The lesson begins with a discussion of how we can learn about groups of people and their cultures through stories, and how anthropologists themselves are storytellers. It then overviews the history of the field of cultural anthropology, and significant moments, perspectives and people in that history.

Stories as a Reflection of Culture by Emily Cowall and Priscilla Medeiros

Stories are told in every culture and often teach a moral lesson to young children. Fables are similar, but often set an example for people to live by or describe what to do when in a dangerous situation. They can also be a part of traditions, help to preserve ways of life, or explain mysteries. Storytelling takes many different forms such as tall tales and folktales. These are for entertainment or to discuss problems encountered in life. Both are also a form of cultural preservation, a way to communicate morals or values to the next generation. Stories can also be a form of social control over certain activities or customs that are not allowed in a society.

A fable becomes a tradition by being retold and accepted by others in the community. Different cultures have very similar stories sharing common themes. One of the most common themes is the battle between good and evil. Another is the story of the quest. The quest often takes the character to distant lands, filled with real-life situations, opportunities, hardships, and heartaches. In both of these types of stories, the reader is introduced to the anthropological concept known as the Other . What exactly is the Other ? The Other is a term that has been used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are different from one’s own.

Figure 1: Travel writer Lemuel Gulliver is captured and tied down by the Lilliputians.

Can a story explain the concept of the Other? Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is about four different voyages that Gulliver undertakes. His first adventure is the most well-known; in the story, Lemuel Gulliver is a surgeon who plans a sea voyage when his business fails. During a storm at sea, he is shipwrecked, and he awakens to find himself bound and secured by a group of captors, the Lilliputians, who are six inches tall. Gulliver, having what Europeans consider a normal body height, suddenly becomes a giant. During this adventure, Gulliver is seen as an outsider, a stranger with different features and language. Gulliver becomes the Other.

What lessons about culture can we learn from Gulliver’s Travels ? Swift’s story offers lessons about cultural differences, conflicts occurring in human society, and the balance of power. It also provides an important example of the Other. The Other is a matter of perspective in this story: Gulliver thinks the Lilliputians are strange and unusual. To Gulliver, the Lilliputians are the Other, but the Lilliputians equally see Gulliver as the Other—he is a their captive and is a rare species of man because of his size.

The themes in Gulliver’s Travels describe different cultures and aspects of storytelling. The story uses language, customary behaviors, and the conflict between different groups to explore ideas of the exotic and strange. The story is framed as an adventure, but is really about how similar cultures can be. In the end, Gulliver becomes a member of another cultural group, learning new norms, attitudes, and behaviors. At the same time, he wants to colonize them, a reflection of his former cultural self.

Stories are an important part of culture, and when used to pass on traditions or cultural values, they can connect people to the past. Stories are also a way to validate religious, social, political, and economic practices from one generation to another. Stories are important because they are used in some societies to apply social pressure, to keep people in line, and are part of shaping the way that people think and behave.

WATCH: Ted talk

Anthropologists as storytellers by emily cowall and priscilla medeiros, and melanie a. medeiros.

People throughout recorded history have relied on storytelling as a way to share cultural details. When early anthropologists studied people from other civilizations, they relied on the written accounts and opinions of others; they presented facts and developed their stories, about other cultures based solely on information gathered by others. These scholars did not have any direct contact with the people they were studying. This approach has come to be known as armchair anthropology . Simply put, if a culture is viewed from a distance (as from an armchair), the anthropologist tends to measure that culture from his or her own vantage point and to draw comparisons that place the anthropologist’s culture as superior to the one being studied. This point of view is also called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is an attitude based on the idea that one’s own group or culture is better than any other.

Armchair anthropologists were unlikely to be aware of their ethnocentric ideas because they did not visit the cultures they studied. Scottish social anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is well-known for his 1890 work The Golden Bough: A Study of Comparative Religions . Its title was later changed to A Study in Magic and Religion , and it was one of the first books to describe and record magical and religious beliefs of different culture groups around the world. Yet, this book was not the outcome of extensive study in the field. Instead, Frazer relied on the accounts of others who had traveled, such as scholars, missionaries, and government officials, to formulate his study.

Figure 2: Sir James Frazer

Another example of anthropological writing without the use of fieldwork is Sir E. B. Tylor ’s (1832-1917) book Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor, who went on to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896, was an important influence in the development of cultural anthropology as a separate discipline.

Figure 3: Sir E.B. Tylor

Frazer, Tylor and Morgan contributed important and foundational studies even though they never went into the field to gather their information. Armchair anthropologists were important in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century because although these early scholars were not directly experiencing the cultures they were studying, their work did ask important questions that could ultimately only be answered by going into the field.

At the same time that Frazer, Tyler and Morgan were writing their armchair ethnographies about “the other,” members of otherized societies were writing their own portrayals of life in their communities. Ohíye S’a (1858-1939) was an Indigenous Santee Dakota Sioux, born in what is now the state of Minnesota. He grew up in a semi-nomadic society before moving in with his father who had a European lifestyle. His father baptized him as Charles Eastman and he began learning English and attending colonial schools. Although Ohíye S’a was not trained as an anthropologist, his 1905 book Red Hunters and the Animal People is considered to be the first book about American history written by a Native American author and from the Native American point of view. The book describes Indigenous knowledge and perspectives on non-human animals, with whom who they had a kinship. Ohíye S’a was also an indigenous rights activist. Therefore, Ohíye S’a is one of the first engaged anthropologists , anthropologists who use their research to bring awareness to and address social problems.

Figure 4: Charles Eastman, Ohíye S’a

In the early 20th century, anthropologists continued to be storytellers, however the discipline transformed in such a way that the stories they told were beginning to be informed by in-depth, face-to-face interactions with the people about whom they wrote. While the perspective of the anthropologist always influences the story they tell, later anthropologists attempted to tell stories about groups of people that were informed by their experiences, conversations and perspectives of members of the community themselves.

Anthropologists as Cultural Participants by Emily Cowall and Priscilla Medeiros

The armchair approach as a way to study culture changed when scholars took to the field and studied people by being participants and observers. As they did, fieldwork became the most important tool anthropologists used to understand the “complex whole” of culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), a Polish anthropologist, was greatly influenced by the work of Frazer . However , unlike the armchair anthropology approach Frazer used in writing The Golden Bough , Malinowski used more innovative ethnographic techniques, and his fieldwork took him off the veranda to study different cultures. The off the veranda approach is different from armchair anthropology because it includes active participant observation : traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives. Malinowski wrote The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which was considered the first modern ethnography and redefined the approach to fieldwork. This book is part of Malinowski’s trilogy on the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski lived with them and observed life in their villages. By living among the islanders, Malinowski was able to learn about their social life, food and shelter, sexual behaviors, community economics, patterns of kinship, and family. [1] In The Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Malinowski suggested that other anthropologists should “grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realize his vision of his world.” [2] However, as we will see in the next lesson on ethnographic field work and ethics , Malinowski’s research presented problems from an ethical point of view.

Figure 5: Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, 1915–1918

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF CULTURE

European structural functionalism.

The discipline of cultural anthropology developed somewhat differently in Europe, North America, and other countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many European anthropologists were particularly interested in questions about how societies were structured and how they remained stable over time. In every society, people are linked to one another through social institutions such as families, political organizations, and businesses. Anthropologists across Europe often focused their research on understanding the form and function of these social institutions.

European anthropologists developed theories of structural functionalism to explain how social institutions contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order. Bronislaw Malinowski believed that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific human needs such as food, comfort, safety, knowledge, reproduction, and economic livelihood. One function of educational institutions like schools, for instance, is to provide knowledge that prepares people to obtain jobs and make contributions to society. The British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) was also interested in the way that social structures functioned to maintain social stability in a society over time. [3] He suggested that in many societies it was the family that served as the most important social structure because family relationships determined much about an individual’s social, political, and economic relationships and these patterns were repeated from one generation to the next. In a family unit in which the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to raise the children, the social and economic roles of both the husband and the wife will be largely defined by their specific responsibilities within the family. If their children grow up to follow the same arrangement, these social roles will be continued in the next generation.

Figure 6: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown

European structural functionalism influenced the work of anthropologists outside of Europe as well. Hsiao-t’ung Fei (1910-2005) was a groundbreaking Chinese anthropologist and sociologist who studied under Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown at the London School of Economics. Fei’s 1939 book, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley presents the findings of his ethnographic study of the economic life of Chinese peasants. Fei’s work was a testament that anthropologists do not need to travel outside of one’s home country to study culture and society.

Figure 7: Hsiao-t’ung Fei

E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) was another respected European structural functionalist. His trilogy, The Nuer: A Description of Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940), Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer (1951), and Nuer Religion (1956) are classic examples of structural functionalism, examining specific social institutions in detail in each book.

Figure 8: E. E. Evans-Pritchard

One of the biggest critiques of structural functionalism is that it views cultures as stable and orderly and ignores or cannot explain social change. Functionalism also struggles to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another. Functionalist perspectives did contribute to the development of more sophisticated concepts of culture by establishing the importance of social institutions in holding societies together. Functionalist theory helped to develop the concept of culture by demonstrating that culture is not just a set of ideas or beliefs, but consists of specific practices and social institutions that give structure to daily life and allow human communities to function.

Although Evans-Pritchard was also one of the first anthropologists to study the religion, and psychological effects of religion in his 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande , Ibrahim Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer from Martinique studied and wrote about the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. He also examined the psychological, social, and cultural impact of colonization and decolonization. His most well-known book the Wretched of the Earth was published shortly after his death in 1961 and was a controversial discussion of colonialism and resistance to it.

Figure 9: Frantz Fanon

Anthropology in the Americas: Historical Particularism

The participant-observation method of fieldwork was a revolutionary change to the practice of anthropology, but at the same time it presented problems that needed to be overcome. The challenge was to move away from ethnocentrism, racial stereotypes, and colonial attitudes, and to move forward by encouraging anthropologists to maintain high ethical standards and open minds.

Franz Boas (1858-1942), an American anthropologist, is acknowledged for redirecting American anthropologists away from theories of cultural evolutionism and toward cultural relativism. Boas first studied physical science at the University of Kiel in Germany. Because he was a trained scientist, he was familiar with using empirical methods as a way to study a subject. Empirical methods are based on evidence that can be tested using observation and experiment. In 1883, Franz Boas went on a geographical expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. The Central Eskimo (1888) details his time spent on Baffin Island studying the culture and language of the central Eskimo (Inuit) people. He studied every aspect of their culture such as tools, clothing, and shelters. This study was Boas’ first major contribution to the American school of anthropology and convinced him that cultures could only be understood through extensive field research. As he observed on Baffin Island, cultural ideas and practices are shaped through interactions with the natural environment. The cultural traditions of the Inuit were suited for the environment in which they lived. This work led him to promote cultural relativism : the principle that a culture must be understood on its own terms rather than compared to an outsider’s standard. This was an important turning point in correcting the challenge of ethnocentrism in ethnographic fieldwork. [4]

Figure 10: Franz Boas, One of the founders of American Anthropology, 1915

Although Boas’s contribution of cultural relativism and his challenge of the theory of cultural evolution was critical to the development of the discipline of cultural anthropology, it is important to note that Boas was not only scholar openly challenging the notions of cultural evolution and racial hierarchies that had been popular for decades. In his book, The Equality of Human Races (1885), Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), a Haitian anthropologist, lawyer and journalist, challenged the racist ideas of early anthropologists, arguing that “all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal” (450). Not only did his work predate that of Boas, it was also influential in the Pan-African movement, which advocated for the rights of all people of African descent around the world.

Figure 11: Anténor Firmin

Additionally, although W.E.B DuBois (1868-1963)–an American sociologist, historian, writer, and civil rights activist– was not trained as an anthropologist, his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) critically examines the effects of “race” on society. DuBois demonstrated the negative and divisive effects of racism on society, and for individual sense of self. He outlined the rights he believed should be afforded to all people irrespective of race, including voting rights, education, and fair treatment. Like Firmin, DuBois’s work was central to the Pan-Africanist movement and later to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Figure 12 : W.E.B. DuBois in 1918

Franz Boas also influenced American anthropology through his students. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) was one of Boas’s first female students. Benedict continued to use the approach of cultural relativism as a starting point for investigating the cultures of the American northwest and southwest. Her best-selling book Patterns of Culture (1934) emphasized that culture gives people coherent patterns for thinking and behaving. She argued that culture affects individuals psychologically, shaping individual personality traits and leading the members of a culture to exhibit similar traits such as a tendency toward aggression, or calmness.

Figure 13: Ruth Benedict, 1936

Figure 14: Ella C. Deloria

Figure 15: Margaret Mead in 1950

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was another engaged anthropologist, as well as a dancer, choreographer, and activist. She shared the findings of her fieldwork in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Tabago, and Haiti through her choreography and dance. “ Among her many lasting contributions is the deep concern for the politics of representation that she brought to her work. She recognized early on that not all stories were hers to tell and carefully attended to the responsibilities that came with translating across places, audiences, languages, and genres throughout her acclaimed career.” “Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology.”

Figure 16: Katherine Dunham

Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) is another well-respected anthropologist who helped develop the American school of anthropological thought. Hurston embodied the anthropologist as participant observer and story-teller. In 1925, Hurston started studying anthropology as an undergraduate student at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she was the only black student. After graduating with her B.A. in 1928 she began a graduate program in anthropology at Columbia, where she worked with Boas, Benedict and fellow student Mead. Hurston was interested in Southern, African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to a community’s identity. She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston wrote and published her literary anthropology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti. Hurston’s works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman.

Figure 17: Zora Neale Hurston

In summary, anthropologists in the Americas have used cultural relativism to add depth to the concept of culture in several ways. In the late 19th century British anthropologist Tylor defined culture as including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, capabilities and habits. Anthropologists in the Americas added to this definition by emphasizing the importance of enculturation , the process of learning culture, in the lives of individuals. They established that through enculturation culture shapes individual identity, self-awareness, and emotions in fundamental ways. They also emphasized the need for holism , approaches to research that considered the entire context of a society including its history.

Late 20th Century Interpretive Anthropology

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), the founding member of interpretive anthropology, noted in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) that culture should not be seen as something that was “locked inside people’s heads.” Instead, culture was publicly communicated through speech and other behaviors. Culture , he concluded, is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.” [5] Geertz’s definition, which continues to be influential today, reflects the influence of many earlier efforts to refine the concept of culture in anthropology.

There are many definitions of culture, all influenced by historical perspectives and figures. For our purposes, we will combine these perspectives into this definition: a system of knowledge, beliefs, behavioral norms, values, traditions, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people, often to be challenged and transformed over time.

Complete this 2 Minute Survey after Finishing this Reading Assignment

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

How do the armchair anthropology and the fieldwork approaches differ as methods to study culture? What can be learned about a culture by experiencing it in person that cannot be learned from reading about it?
What do you think are the most important elements of culture?
In the twenty-first century, people have much greater contact with members of other cultures than they did in the past. Which topics or concerns should be priorities for future studies of culture?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture . Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1934.

Boas, Franz. Race, Language, and Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species . London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859.

Kroeber, Alfred. The Nature of Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific . London: Routledge and Sons, 1922.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization . New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . London: Benjamin Motte, 1726.

Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs . London: Cambridge University Press. 1871.

The film Bronislaw Malinowski: Off the Veranda , (Films Media Group, 1986) further describes Malinowski’s research practices. ↵
Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1922), 290. ↵
For more on this topic see Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (New York: Routledge, 1983) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen and West, 1952). ↵
Boas’ attitudes about cultural relativism were influenced by his experiences in the Canadian Arctic as he struggled to survive in a natural environment foreign to his own prior experience. His private diary and letters record the evolution of his thinking about what it means to be “civilized.” In a letter to his fiancé, he wrote: “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them ... We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We ‘highly educated people’ are much worse, relatively speaking.” The entire letter can be read in George Stocking, ed. Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 33. ↵
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, Geertz 1973), 89. ↵
Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology. Authored by : Edited by Nina Brown, Laura Tubelle de Gonzalez, and Thomas McIlwraith. Provided by : American Anthropological Association. Located at : http://perspectives.americananthro.org/ . License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
The Culture Concept. Authored by : Emily Cowall, Priscilla Medeiros. Provided by : McMaster University. Located at : http://perspectives.americananthro.org/Chapters/Culture_Concept.pdf . License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
Everyone around you has a story the world needs to know. Authored by : Dave Isay. Provided by : TED talk. Located at : https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_isay_everyone_around_you_has_a_story_the_world_needs_to_hear?language=en . License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Photographs of anthropologists. Provided by : Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ . Project : Wikipedia. License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright . License Terms : https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en

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3.3: Elements of Culture

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

Differentiate values, beliefs, and norms
Explain the significance of symbols and language to a culture
Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Discuss the role of social control within culture

Values and Beliefs

The first, and perhaps most crucial, elements of culture we will discuss are values and beliefs . Value does not mean monetary worth in sociology, but rather ideals, or principles and standards members of a culture hold in high regard. Most cultures in any society hold “knowledge” (education) in high regard. Values are deeply embedded and are critical for learning a culture’s beliefs , which are the tenets or convictions that people hold to be true. Individual cultures in a society have personal beliefs, but they also shared collective values. To illustrate the difference, U.S. citizens may believe in the American Dream—that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the American value that wealth is important. In other cultures, success may be tied less to wealth and more to having many healthy children. Values shape a society by suggesting what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, sought or avoided.

Consider the value that the U.S. places upon youth. Children represent innocence and purity, while a youthful adult appearance signifies sexuality. Shaped by this value, individuals spend millions of dollars each year on cosmetic products and surgeries to look young and beautiful. The U.S. also has an individualistic culture, meaning people place a high value on individuality and independence. In contrast, many other cultures are collectivist, meaning the welfare of the group takes priority over that of the individual. Fulfilling a society’s values can be difficult. Marital monogamy is valued, but many spouses engage in infidelity. Cultural diversity and equal opportunities for all people are valued in the U.S., yet the country’s highest political offices have been dominated by white men.

Values often suggest how people should behave, but they don’t accurately reflect how people do behave. Values portray an ideal culture , the standards society would like to embrace and live up to. But ideal culture differs from real culture . In an ideal culture, there would be no traffic accidents, murders, poverty, or racial tension. But in real culture, police officers, lawmakers, educators, and social workers constantly strive to prevent or address these issues. American teenagers are encouraged to value celibacy. However, the number of unplanned pregnancies among teens reveals that the ideal alone is not enough to spare teenagers the potential consequences of having sex.

One of the ways societies strive to maintain its values is through rewards and punishments. When people observe the norms of society and uphold its values, they are often rewarded. A boy who helps an elderly woman board a bus may receive a smile and a “thank you.” A business manager who raises profit margins may receive a quarterly bonus. People sanction unwanted or inappropriate behaviors by withholding support, approval, or permission, or by implementing sanctions. We may think of ‘sanction’ as a negative term, but sanctions are forms of social control , ways to encourage conformity to cultural norms or rules. Sometimes people conform to norms in anticipation or expectation of positive sanctions. Receiving good grades, for instance, may mean praise from parents and teachers. Sanctions can also be negative. . A boy who shoves an elderly woman aside to board the bus first may receive frowns or even a scolding from other passengers. A business manager who drives away customers will likely be fired. Breaking norms and rejecting values can lead to cultural sanctions such as earning a negative label like ‘lazy’ or to legal sanctions, such as traffic tickets, fines, or imprisonment. Utilizing social control encourages most people to conform regardless of whether authority figures (such as law enforcement) are present.

Values are not static. They change across time and between groups as people evaluate, debate, and change collective social beliefs. Values also vary from culture to culture. For example, cultures differ in their values about what kinds of physical closeness are appropriate in public. It’s rare to see two male friends or coworkers holding hands in the U.S. where that behavior often symbolizes romantic feelings. But in many nations, masculine physical intimacy is considered natural in public. This difference in cultural values came to light when people reacted to photos of former president G.W. Bush holding hands with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2005. Simple gestures, such as hand-holding, carry great symbolic differences across cultures.

Two soldiers in uniform are shown from behind walking and holding hands.

Formal norms are established, written rules existing in all societies. They support many social institutions , such as the military, criminal justice and healthcare systems, and public schools. Functionalists may question what purpose these norms serve, conflict theorists might be interested in who creates, benefits, and suffers under these formal norms, and symbolic interactionists wonder about how a group that benefits interacts. Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, college entrance exam requirements, and “no running” signs at swimming pools. Formal norms are the most specific and clearly stated of the various types of norms, and they are the most strictly enforced. But they are enforced to varying degrees.

For example, private property is highly valued in the U.S. Thieves can be fined, imprisoned, or both. People safeguard valuable possessions by locking their doors, buying a safe, and installing alarm systems on homes and cars. A less strictly enforced social norm is driving while intoxicated. While it’s against the law to drive drunk, drinking is for the most part an acceptable social behavior. And though there are laws to punish drunk driving, there are few systems in place to prevent the crime.

Although informal norms define personal interactions, they extend into other systems as well. In the U.S., there are informal norms regarding behavior at fast food restaurants. Customers line up to order their food and leave when they are done. They don’t sit down at a table with strangers, sing loudly as they prepare their condiments, or nap in a booth. Most people don’t commit even harmless breaches of informal norms.

Sociological Research

Breaching experiments.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) studied people’s customs in order to find out how societal rules and norms not only influence behavior but also shape social order. He believed that members of society together create a social order (Weber, 2011). His resulting book, Studies in Ethno-methodology (1967) discusses people’s assumptions about the social makeup of their communities.

One of Garfinkel’s research methods was known as a “breaching experiment,” in which the researcher behaves in a socially awkward manner in order to test the sociological concepts of social norms and conformity. The participants are not aware an experiment is in progress, but their response is recorded. For example, if the experimenter is, say, a man in a business suit, and he skips down the sidewalk or hops on one foot, a passersby is likely to stare at him with surprised expressions. But the experimenter does not simply “act weird” in public. Rather, the point is to deviate from a specific social norm in a small way, to subtly break some form of social etiquette, and see what happens.

There are many rules about speaking with strangers in public. It is okay to tell a woman you like her shoes. It is not okay to ask if you can try them on. It is okay to stand in line behind someone at the ATM. It is not okay to look over his shoulder as he makes a transaction. It is okay to sit beside someone on a crowded bus. It’s weird to sit beside a stranger in a half-empty bus.

The mores of the U.S. school system require that a student’s writing be in the student’s own words or use special forms (such as quotation marks and a whole system of citation) for crediting other writers. Submitting or publishing another person’s words as if they are one’s own has a name—plagiarism. The consequences for violating this norm are often severe and can result in expulsion from school or termination from employment.

Unlike mores, folkways are norms without any moral underpinnings. Rather, folkways direct appropriate behavior in the day-to-day practices and expressions of a culture. We can think of them as ‘traditions’—things we do because we ‘always have.’ They indicate whether to shake hands or kiss on the cheek when greeting another person. They specify whether to wear a tie and blazer or a T-shirt and sandals to an event. In Canada, women can smile and say hello to men on the street. In Egypt, that’s not acceptable. In regions in the southern U.S., bumping into an acquaintance means stopping to chat. It’s considered rude not to, no matter how busy one is. In other regions, people guard their privacy and value time efficiency. A simple nod of the head is enough. Other accepted folkways in the U.S. may include holding the door open for a stranger or giving someone a gift on their birthday. The rules regarding these folkways may change from culture to culture. A folkway in one culture could be extremely rude in another.

Folkways are actions that people everywhere take for granted. People need to act without thinking in order to get seamlessly through daily routines. They can’t stop and analyze every action (Sumner, 1906). Folkways might be small actions, learned by observation and imitated, but they are by no means trivial. An important folkway in many cultures is kissing Grandmother on the cheek. Fail to do so and you will likely be scolded.

Symbols and Culture

Humans, consciously and subconsciously, are always striving to make sense of their surrounding world. Symbols—such as gestures, signs, objects, signals, and words—help people understand that world. They provide communication methods to understanding experiences by conveying recognizable meanings that are shared by societies.

The world is filled with symbols. Sports uniforms, company logos, and traffic signs are symbols. In some cultures, a gold ring is a symbol of marriage. Some symbols are highly functional; stop signs, for instance, provide useful instruction. As physical objects, they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings. Some symbols are valuable only in what they represent. Trophies, blue ribbons, or gold medals, for example, represent accomplishments. But many objects have both material and nonmaterial symbolic value.

Symbols often get noticed when they are out of context. Used unconventionally, they convey strong messages. A stop sign placed on the door of a college building makes a political statement, as does a camouflage military jacket worn in an antiwar protest. Together, the semaphore signals for “N” and “D” represent nuclear disarmament—and form the well-known peace sign (Westcott, 2008). Some college students wear pajamas and bedroom slippers to class, clothing that was formerly associated only with privacy and bedtime. By wearing the outfit, students are defying traditional cultural norms.

Some symbols represent only one side of the story and elicit strong emotions, which can lead to social unrest. Their presence is a reminder of a nation’s worst times and not something to celebrate. Many of these symbols are targets of vandalism as the destruction of these representations is symbolic. Effigies representing public figures are burned to demonstrate anger at certain leaders. In 1989, crowds tore down the Berlin Wall, a decades-old symbol of the division between East and West Germany, communism, and capitalism. In the U.S. beginning in 2019, statues associated with slavery and the Civil War were removed from state capitols, college campuses, and public parks. In Germany, any display of Hitler or Nazi memorabilia or to deny the Holocaust is illegal.

While different cultures have varying systems of symbols, one system is common to all: language. Whatever its form, people learn social and cultural norms through it.

Language and Symbols

Language is a system that uses symbols with which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted. Letters (which make up words), pictographs, and hand gestures are all symbols that create a language used for communication. Sign language, for example, requires an intimate knowledge not only of an alphabet but also of signs that represent entire words and the meaning indicated by certain facial expressions or postures. Its grammar differs from the spoken language. As spoken language is different across regions, nations and cultures, and can even differ by the age of the person, so too does sign language.

All language systems contain the same basic elements that are effective in communicating ideas - object, subject, action. A written language system consists of symbols that refer to spoken sound. Taken together, these symbols convey specific meanings. The English language uses a combination of twenty-six letters to create words. These twenty-six letters make up over 600,000 recognized words (OED Online, 2011). We can compare the reliance on tone and inflection to Mandarin Chinese. It contains over 8,000 characters, but the same character may symbolize different concepts depending on the tone used.

English today contains an English and French version for the same concept. For example, in the English version, one eats, but in French version, one dines. In the English version, we meet someone. In the French version, we encounter someone. Readers of American English may be surprised by the inclusion of a ‘u’ in some spellings of words like ‘behaviour’ or ‘flavour.’ Americans have dropped that ‘u’ that writers of British English include. Billions of people speak English, and there are almost as many pronunciations of it.

Rules for speaking and writing vary even within cultures, most notably by region. Do you eat a grinder, a sub, or a hero/gyro? Do you refer to a can of carbonated liquid as “soda” or “pop”? Is a household entertainment room a “family room,” “rec room,” or “den”? When leaving a restaurant, do you ask your server for a “check,” the “ticket,” or your “bill”? Language is constantly evolving and adding new words as societies create new ideas. In this age of technology, many cultures have adapted almost instantly to new nouns such as “e-mail” and “Internet,” and verbs such as “downloading,” “texting,” and “blogging.” These would have considered nonsense words just the world twenty-five years ago.

Language and Culture

Even while it constantly evolves, language shapes our perception of reality and our behavior. In the 1920s, linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf advanced this idea which became known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity. It is based on the idea that people experience their world through their language, and therefore understand their world through the cultural meanings embedded in their language. The hypothesis suggests that language shapes thought and thus behavior (Swoyer, 2003). For example, words have attached meanings beyond their definition that can influence thought and behavior. In the U.S. where the number thirteen is associated with bad luck, many high-rise buildings do not have a 13 th floor. In Japan, however, the number four is considered unlucky, since it is pronounced similarly to the Japanese word for “death.”

Many sociologists believe that language can have a broad and lasting impact on perception. In 2002, Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues conducted experiments on native German and Spanish speakers in English. Unlike English, these languages assign genders to nouns. In German, for example, the word for sun, die Sonne, is feminine, but the word for moon, der Mond, is masculine. The team chose a set of nouns with opposite genders in German and Spanish and asked participants to provide adjectives to describe them. They found that German speakers used more masculine adjectives than Spanish speakers when describing a noun that was grammatically masculine in German but feminine in Spanish. For example, the word for key is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers used the adjectives, golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The team concluded that gender perceptions acquired in a person’s native language carry forward to how they see the world even when they switch to a language without grammatical genders (Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips, 2002).

Some sociologists also believe the structure of language can have consequences on both individual and group behavior. For example, a series of studies have found that Finland has a significantly higher rate of workplace accidents than Sweden despite the fact that the languages have similar workplace regulations (Salminen & Johansson, 2000). John A. Lucy explained this discrepancy through differences in the structure of these languages. Swedish places a greater emphasis on the timing of movement in three-dimensional space. Consequently, Lucy argued, the Swedish factories are physically arranged in a manner that supports the smooth running of the product process. Finnish factors experience frequent disruptions, so that workers must rush and have more accidents (Lucy, 1997).

Social Policy and Debate

Is the u.s. bilingual.

When she was six, Lucy and her family immigrated to the United States and attended a school that allowed for the use of both English and Spanish. Lucy’s teacher and many staff were bilingual (fluent in English and Spanish), and the district offered books in both languages. While she was being driven to learn English, the dual-language option helped to ensure that she did not become lost and get behind in her learning of all subjects. Having math, science, and computing taught in both languages helped her understand those concepts and skills. Within two years of enrolling in the school, Lucy was getting nearly all of her instruction in English, and rarely used the Spanish-language books or resources. While she still had trouble with some intricacies of English, her math progress was above grade level and she did well in other subjects as well.

Legally, the U.S. has no official language. But many believe English to be the rightful language of the U.S., and over thirty states have passed laws specifying English as their official tongue. Proponents of English-only laws suggest that a national ruling will save money on translation, printing, and human resource costs, including funding for bilingual teachers. They argue that setting English as the official language will encourage non-English speakers to learn English faster and adapt to the culture of the U.S. more easily (Mount 2010). Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) oppose making English the official language and claim that it violates the rights of non-English speakers. English-only laws, they believe, deny the reality of our nation’s diversity and unfairly target non-English speakers. They point to the fact that much of the debate on this topic has risen since 1970, a period during which the U.S. has experienced new waves of immigration from Asia and Mexico.

Today, a lot of product information gets written in multiple languages. Enter a store like Home Depot and you’ll find signs in both English and Spanish. Buy a children’s product and the safety warnings could be presented in multiple languages. While marketers are financially motivated to reach the largest number of consumers possible, this trend also may help people become accustomed to a culture of bilingualism.

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

612 Culture Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

If you are writing a culture essay, topics are easy to find. However, their abundance can quickly become overwhelming – so we prepared this handy list of culture title ideas, along with writing tips and examples.

🤫 Culture Essays: Topics and Writing Tips

🏆 best culture topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics about culture, 🎓 simple & easy culture title ideas, 📌 cultural topics and writing prompts, 🥇 most interesting culture topics to write about, ❓ research questions about culture.

Describing culture is a challenging task. You have probably stumbled across the concept if you study sociology, media, or a variety of other subjects. There are many cultural differences across the Earth. Each nation, community, and subgroup of people have its own values, vocabulary, and customs. In the 21st century, we can document and share them thanks to cross-cultural communication.

Since there is an almost infinite number of things to consider about this broad topic, our team has collected 582 topics about culture. Check them out on this page!

Culture essays present excellent opportunities for conducting extensive research. They allow students to analyze acute global problems and investigate the topic of diversity, customs, and traditions, as well as the significance of individuals’ cultural backgrounds. You can choose one of the many topics for your culture essay. You can find culture essay ideas online or ask your professor.

We suggest the following culture essay topics and titles:

The significance of cultural identity in an individual
Culture as a political instrument in the modern world
The differences between the Eastern and the Western culture
The role of culture in people from mixed origins
The impact of religious views on culture
Cultural diversity in the workplace
Are there similarities among different cultures?
The link between culture and gender roles

After selecting culture essay questions for discussion, you can start working on your paper. Here are some secrets of the powerful paper on the topic:

Conduct preliminary research on the selected issue. Remember that you should find as much relevant information as possible while presenting a multifaceted perspective on the issue. Ask your professor about the sources you can use and stick to the instructions. Avoid using personal blogs or Wikipedia as the primary sources of information. Do not make a statement if you cannot support it with evidence.
If you are writing a paper about a particular culture, think about whether you can talk to someone coming from this background. Such an approach can help you to include all the relevant information in your paper and avoid possible crucial mistakes.
Remember that a well-organized culture essay outline is key for your paper. Think of the main points you want to discuss and decide how you structure your paper. Remember that each topic or subtopic should be stated in a separate paragraph, if possible.
If it is necessary, check out essay examples online to see how you can organize the information. In addition, this step can help you to evaluate the relevance of the issue you want to discuss. Remember to include an introductory and concluding paragraph in which you will state the main points and findings of your paper.
Avoid discriminating against some cultures in your essay. Remember that even if you do not understand the causes of some behaviors or norms, you should not criticize them in your paper. Instead, help the reader to understand them better and provide insight into important differences between cultures.
Be accepting and try to be as accurate as possible. Support your claims with evidence from your preliminary research.
If relevant, include graphs and charts to represent significant information. For example, you can visualize the presence of diversity in the workplace in different countries.
Remember that the reader should understand the goal and idea of your paper clearly. Define all terms and avoid using overly complex sentences. Be concise but provide enough relevant information on the topic.
Make sure that you use correct grammar and sentence structures in your essay. Even an excellent essay can look bad with grammatical mistakes. Grammar-free papers allow the reader to see that your opinion is credible. Check the essay several times before sending it to your instructor.

Do not forget to find a free sample in our collection that will help you get the best ideas for your writing!

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Globalization and Food Culture Essay The interviewee gave the examples of France, America, and China in her description of how food can affect the culture of a place and vice versa.
Japan vs. Germany: Cultural Differences The first aspect of the matter is people’s activity in Japan and Germany within businesses as determined by culture and their habits and preferences in terms of distinguishing their work time and families.
Importance of Cultural Diversity Campaigns such as the Black Lives Matter may be attributed to lack of inclusion and appreciation of different cultures. For instance, the discussion of inclusivity in the 1970s focused on primary and secondary dimensions of […]
Cultural Competence: Indian Culture and Healthcare They also believed that, the disease was heredity and that if one member of the family suffered from one of the diseases, chances that somebody from the same family would contract the disease are high.
The Influence of Ramayana on the Indian Culture If one considers the image provided in the work with the work itself, one notices the detailed depiction of the life and activities of the protagonist.
The United States of America’s Culture These are however just general views on what the American culture really is, the next section of this paper will go to the specifics, and zero in into the following factors that determine the true […]
Philippines Dressing Culture and Customs The country borders South China Sea to the North and West, the Sulu Sea and Celebs Sea to the southwest, and the Philippines Sea to the east.
The Kikuyu Community: Religion and Culture The community speaks the Kikuyu language. Kenya’s Kikuyu people are the most popular and largest ethnic group.
Celebrity Culture and Its Influence on Society Before discussing the way Angelina Jolie and other celebrities affect modern society, it is necessary to identify the origins of the celebrity culture.
Amazon Corporate Culture Issues Term Paper Problem Scenario: Amazon’s employees report about multiple cases of workplace disregard, the lack of benefits and praise as well as unfair ranking system that creates the need to analyze the corporate culture of the organization […]
Intercultural Communication Essay: Differences in Cultural, Religious, and Ethnic Backgrounds Identity management theories are also a form of intercultural communication theory developed to explain the cross-cultural aspect of communication where intercultural communication under this theory is seen to originate from the intercultural and intracultural types […]
Comparison of US and Germany Cultural Differences Power distance is the degree to which power is shared evenly in a community as well as the extent in which the community recognize and accepts this variation in power distribution among itself; this is […]
The Zulu Nation’s History and Culture The Zulu people live on the continent of Africa, in the southern part of it, which is known as KwaZulu-Natal. In this family, the husband stands for the chief, and institution of marriage is hallowed.
Cultural Differences Between Turkey and USA Spanish, Polish and Greek languages are also part of the oral communication of the people in America. The use of suffixes in Turkish language is very important and we can feel the grammatical functions of […]
Diverse Contexts and Intercultural Communication at Work As the world moves to the global environment, the modern workplace becomes more and more diverse. When individuals are educated about intercultural differences are more likely to alter their communication styles to suit the needs […]
The Effect of Globalization on a World Culture The net result is a global culture; the effect and extent that global culture has gone in the world varied among nations and continents; developed countries have their culture more diffused and uniformity can be […]
Cultural Norms: Fair and Lovely and Advertising Is the advertising of Fair & Lovely demeaning to women or is it portraying a product not too similar to cosmetics in general?
The Bhagavad Gita: The Role of Religion in Relation to the Hindu Culture From this point, it is important to focus on the Bhagavad Gita and its role for the Hindu culture in the context of the role of religion in the Hindu society because the scripture contains […]
Birthing Traditions and Practices Among Russian-Speaking Cultural Group Many things about Russia, its people, and its traditions remain a mystery for the average American, as a history of geopolitical and military confrontation, as well as the distance between the two countries, cause many […]
The Importance of Organizational Culture Essay Organizational culture and change is most valuable to an aspiring manager because it they form the basis of organizational success. It is imperative for managers to introduce change in the organization to encourage innovation and […]
Culture and Development in Nigeria The following are some of the organizations that are concerned with cultural developments in Nigeria:- The African development bank is involved in major activities in the water sector and in sanitation projects across Nigeria.
Japanese Animations’ Effects on the Japanese Economy and Their Cultural Influence on Foreign Countries These artists incorporate the characteristic anime stylizations, gags and methodology in their piece of work to produce animations that are a bit similar to Japanese anime. The growing interest among foreign artists in anime is […]
Social and Cultural Aspects of Pre-Colonial Africa in Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart The novel emphasize on the encounters of the pre-colonial Africa and the effect of British colonialism during the 19th century. Gender disparity is clear in this village and the crimes are identified with gender where […]
The Luo Culture of Kenya The Luo people are the indigenous people of Kenya living around lake Victoria, which lies in the western part of the country.
Communication Challenges in Intercultural Interactions This essay aims to show that communication in intercultural interactions is hindered by the communication style, body language, stereotypes, the tendency to evaluate, high anxiety, and differences in ways of completing tasks.
Reasons for Not Appreciating Different Cultural Point of View One of the reasons why people may not appreciate the cultural point of view of others is because of the differences in cultural values.
Managing Cultural Diversity: A Case Analysis of Hilton Hotels Corporation The hospitality industry, in particular, is at the core of recent developments in globalization and labor migration as can be witnessed by the increasing mobility of the workforce and attempts within the industry to expand […]
The Mughal Empire: Culture and Heritage The combination of the regions’ economic independence, the tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and the penetration of the subcontinent by the European economic powers led to the decline of the Mughal Empire.
Indian Custom and Culture Community For example, there were various activities used to illustrate this marking, and these would include invitation and welcoming of the bridegroom, exchange of flower garlands, presentation of the would-be wife, the ceremony of the sacred […]
British and Brazilian People: Cultural Differences It is critical to make appointments in advance, not to begin business discussions before the host, and to be on time for a business meeting.
Ramen Culture as a Vital Part of the Traditions in Japan Studying the history of the transformation of ramen culture and the role it plays in modern Japanese popular culture helps to explore the uniqueness of the phenomenon and understand the origins of its immense popularity.
Managing Cultural Diversity in the Hospitality Industry This is common due to confusion and the inability to interact with others in the society. This refers to the level of integration in the society.
Communication Culture: Hall’s High and Low-Context Model of Culture The differences in the modes and styles of communication are due to diverse cultures of the people from different countries. The aim of this report is to evaluate the concept of different communication cultures through […]
A Comparison Between Swedish and Australian Culture Impact of Culture on Life Experience and Belief System The interviewee explained that having been born in Sweden, where Lutheran is the main church, he followed the teachings of the Lutheran church.
Campinha-Bacote’s Model of Cultural Competence It is valid to specify that the original title of the model is the Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services.
Material and Nonmaterial Culture of Middle East The cultural heritage of the Middle Eastern countries is rooted in the deep history of humanity. The states of this territory almost entirely belong to the countries of the eastern part of the Islamic world.
Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech Cancel culture is a phenomenon of modern society that has arisen thanks to the development of social media. However, in this situation, it is difficult to determine who sets the boundaries of the morally correct […]
How to Avoid Ethnocentrism – Essay on Promoting Cultural Relativism In an effort to understand ethnocentrism which is defined as, the tendency to believe that one’s cultural beliefs and their culture’s ethnic values to be superior to others.
Cultural Identity in “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith Exploring the thematic significance of the novels title “White Teeth” it would be instrumental to argue that the title touches on the aspects of cultural identity.
Jamaican Family Cultural Practices The history of the Jamaicans in the United States began in 1619 when some blacks from Jamaica, as well as from the Caribbean islands migrated to the United States.
The Culture Industry According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry refers to the collection of all the aspects of technology in the modern society that brings change in the lifestyles of many.
The Jarawa People and Their Culture One of the most interesting areas of study not only to the anthropologists but also to the modern and contemporary human race is culture.
Cultural Identity and Heritage in the “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker In the broad context, Walker designs the story to underscore the conflict that African Americans faced concerning their cultural identity and heritage after the abolition of slavery.
Ethnicity Essay: Cultural Background in the Daily Lives of Children and Young People The idea of a child according to Montgomery and Kellett refers to a representation of a whole category of young people that are identified by their age and intellectual development and also their social maturity […]
Importance of Cross-Cultural Management in International Business As earlier pointed out, a vital requirement for success in an international business setup is the ability of managers to comprehend and appreciate other cultures across the world.
Convergence vs. Divergence of Culture and Literature – Examples The notion of culture emerged for the first time in the course of the 18th century. It was used to identify the culture of the people.
Cultural Differences Among Families in the “Hotel Rwanda” Film Arguably, the existence of cultural differences between families across the lifespan is the most significant problem affecting the family of Rusesabagina as he attempts to play the role of a corporate manager and a family […]
Geography, Peoples and Culture Areas of Oceania Oceania is a geographical region of the planet that is located in the central and western parts of the Pacific Ocean and is mostly composed of a large number of small islands and atolls.
ABC Manufacturing Company’s Organisational Structure and Culture So, the owner has vast knowledge in this sector, which helps him to contribute the company for future development; Resources: Now, the company has two brand new large and modern CNC centres with all essential […]
Kazakhstani Culture Through Hofstede’s Theory The purpose of the research paper is to discuss cultural similarities and dissimilarities, challenges of acculturation, helpful patterns of behavior, and look at the featured culture through the prism of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory.
The Fashion of the Hippie Culture Studying the fashion of the hippie culture is important because it illustrates the changes that society had undergone in the 1960s not only with regards to the style of clothing that people wore but also […]
Cultural Pride and Cultural Baggage One of the articles that was written by Kincaid gives her experiences in England which portrays her cultural baggage as she finds it quite hard to fit in this society and to adopt a similar […]
eBay in Japan, Its Strategic and Cultural Missteps Its strategy of purchasing local companies in target countries as a measure of the quick establishment made it thrive in the European and the American markets.
Toyota’s Culture and Leadership Strategy Toyota’s Leadership and Culture Irrespective of numerous difficulties, the company is still one of the leaders of the industry. To understand the essence of the lean leadership, it is crucial to consider some peculiarities of […]
Political and Cultural Impact of Alexander the Great’s Conquests Due to many territories that he conquered, the dominion that Alexander the Great had was regarded as one of the greatest in the history of the world.
The Nature of People and Culture The first key point is the understanding that culture is the framework of life and influences the aspects of life for every individual.
Existential Therapy and Multicultural Perspective Paying attention to the entire idea of existential therapy, the exploring meaning and values of the issue will be considered referencing to the authenticity of the ideas, priorities, and values.
Socialization for the Transmission of Culture Cultural transmission is one of the basic constituents of recreating cultures and passing values from one person or group to others.
IKEA Company’s Organizational Culture Thus, every worker is a carrier of the propagated IKEA culture, which in turn forms the basis for the success of the organization as a whole.
Cultural Assimilation: Benefits and Challenges The mass migration of people leads to the fact that the population of the country is constantly growing, new nations come, and cultures are mixed, forming the so-called “melting pot”.
Impacts of Culture on Consumer Behaviour In addition, the impacts of the environment on the conduct of these consumers are made evident. For example, in the field of marketing, the phrase refers to acts and patterns of purchasing and buying.
Saudi Arabian Culture In this view, observation of Islamic beliefs, norms, values, and traditions enables people to understand the Saudi Arabian culture and adopt it.
Cultural Traditions and Practices in the Novel the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri One of them is the so-called mourner’s diet or fasting which is aimed at showing the grief of the entire family at the loss of the father.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) Cultural Analysis And the root of the word Miller is Greek and means apple in Greek. Overall, the treatment of the Greek culture in the movie is inelegant.
Multicultural Education Benefits: Functioning in a Pluralistic and Egalitarian Society Students are thus required to acquire knowledge and skills necessary to function effectively in a pluralistic and egalitarian society. The teacher is thus able to enhance socialization and transmission of culture while providing academic skills […]
African Cultural Traditions and Communication Unfortunately, there are a lot of countries with the shortest life expectancy rates and the low quality of life in Africa.
Western Culture Impacts on the UAE Local Lifestyle One of the countries that observe the impact of western culture on the life of the young generation in the United Arad Emirates.
Cross-Cultural Environment Negotiations: Japan and America Based on this understanding, this paper shows that understanding the need for neutrality, cultural sensitivity, and flexibility is the key to having a positive outcome in a cross-cultural business negotiation. To have a proper understanding […]
Culture and Health Beliefs in Korea Buddhism and Confucianism have had the most profound impact on the spiritual world and the life of the Korean people, and more than half of the country’s cultural heritage is associated with these two religions.
The Beautiful Country of Kazakhstan: Kazakh Culture The report on the culture must broaden the audience’s ideas about the country and explain some of the most respected traditions every Kazakh follows.
Hofstede’s Cultural Model in Negotiations It is important to include terms and conditions of the relationship as a measure of reducing conflicts where third parties are involved.
Hamlet’s Renaissance Culture Conflict The death of Hamlet as the play ends indicates that though he was the definite answer to all the questions before him as he faced death, he was not in any position to give any […]
Comparison of the Australian and Indonesian Culture On the other hand, Indonesia is one of the countries with the largest population in the world and it has over two hundred ethnic groups who use different languages. Marriage is also important in the […]
The Effects of Modern Popular Culture on Personal Beliefs and Values I persisted with this behavior until I was admitted to the university where the modern culture dwells on wearing casually. This essay has showed that modern popular culture changes the beliefs and behaviors of people […]
Cultural Identity Theory: “How to Be Chinese” by Celeste Ng Thus, while recognizing the role that the specified cultural signifiers have for Asian American people in their attempts to retain their cultural identity, Ng also demonstrates the urge to introduce immediate change to prevent the […]
Cross Cultural Management and International Business In this essay we will focus on the role of culture in international business situations and also the strategies and frameworks that are appropriate in cross-cultural management.
Subjectivism and Cultural Relativism: Objections and Differences The key difference is that relativism relates the human experience to the influence of culture, while subjectivism states that right and wrong is a matter of personal opinion.
Culture and Agriculture: Nature and Significance Understanding Seeing that agriculture shapes the society and defines the course of its further development, promoting the ideas of environmentalism and sustainability, it will be reasonable to assume that agriculture belongs to the domain of cultures.
Cultural Role of Crepes in France French crepes have a long history of celebration. February 2nd was the day when every home in France would make twelve crepes to eat together.
Adorno and Horkheimer ‘The Culture Industry’ Review The underlying principle of this theory was to encourage the liberation of the user from the oppression of the manufacturers by inducing the user, to subject attitudes and beliefs to questioning.
Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective by Brettell & Sargent Islam accorded equal opportunities to both men and women in the society when it realized the important roles that women play in the society.
Cultural Pollution:Traditions and Historical Concepts The cultures traditions and historical concepts of the Middle East have over the centuries been characterised as by a distinct sense of variety that stems from a whirlwind of customs and traditions.
Adolf Hitler’s Cultural Theories in “Mein Kampf” So, according to Adolf Hitler, the foreign Aryan spirit was the awakener of Japanese people hence the bore a culture that they did not create.
Italian Culture There is no post of the vice president in Italy and in the event that the president dies, elections will have to be held.
Hall Stuart: Questions of Cultural Identity Hall states that it is important to theorize the notion of identity to make it more applicable. However, Hall still claims that it is important to understand what identity is.
Concept of Globalisation and Cultural Diversity The Concept of Globalisation Globalisation can be defined as the minimisation of the differences between people of the world and the maximisation of their similarities through interactions, cooperation and communication.
East Meets West: Culture Differences He described the Japanese as the best people known among the heathens.[2] “Portuguese Views of Chinese”[3] is an account of the first impression the Portuguese had upon encountering the Chinese.
Social Cultural Causes of Crime There is need to highlight the social cultural factors of crime and describe the necessary positive measures to prevent the occurrences of crime.
Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality Madeleine Leininger was a famous American nursing theorists, whose main contribution was the creation of the theory of culture care diversity and universality in 1991.
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: Structuralism and Post-Structuralism In the fields of literature, and design, architecture, in addition to marketing business and the interpretation of culture, history and law are started to analyze on the basis of post-structuralism in the nineteen sixties of […]
Culture of the Dominican Republic In the end, we attempt to relate the relationship between each aspect and the developments in politics, economics and social lives of the Dominicans.
Cultural Analysis – China and the Us In a bid to survive in such a market, it is crucial for the American investors to conduct a broad analysis of the cultural differences between China and the United States.
Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication Styles Across Ethnic and Cultural Backgrounds In the essay, I discuss verbal and non-verbal communication styles across ethnic and cultural background, communication styles that a counselor may come across when dealing with culturally diverse clients and how a therapist can succeed […]
The Impact of the Internet in Culture and Daily Habits The growth of the internet has greatly improved our culture and society today with services it offers in the enrichment of our lives at work and at home.
Diversity of Jamaican Culture The culture of Jamaica is a rich blend of the ways deriving from both Spanish and British eras which affected lives of the people on this small island.
Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution With the fine details included in the memoir, it helps a reader to walk through the Chinese revolutionary era and witness the havoc that the revolution triggered by Mao Zedong had on the Chinese people. […]
Gang Culture in the USA: Symbols, Norms, Values The term culture refers to the norms and social behavior of a given community or group of people. Having the objects makes them feel brave and ready to act in the interest of the group […]
Intercultural Communication Led by UNESCO The organization aspires to achieve universal respect for justice, the rule of law, human rights, and freedom for all the communities in the world.
The Role of Ethnocentrism in Intercultural Communication The only way to control ethnocentrism is to avoid biases as we find better ways to understand other people’s point of view.
Disney and Its Impact on Popular Culture and Society A waitress who is a cast in The Princess and the Frog undertake to begin saving to fulfill her dreams and the dreams of her late father of owning a restaurant.
IBM Company’s Multicultural Project Team Management Such practice would also give me a chance to easily adapt to cultural diversity and polish my problem-solving, networking, and team-work-related skills because teamwork can be regarded as one of the most effective ways of […]
Taiwan and the U.S. Cultural Elements An evaluation of the cultural differences between Taiwan and the US is conducted in an effort to develop a comprehensive understanding of the cultural variation between the two countries.
Cross Cultural Management Strategies: Brazil vs. America The failures in cross-cultural management mainly arise from the weaknesses of managers to consider the impact of cultural differences in their management practices.
The Overall Effects of Cultural Diversity in the Hospitality Industry The report focuses on analyzing the overall effects of cultural diversity in the hospitality industry. The nature of the industry’s workplaces and the way they deal with the issues concerning management of cultural diversity.
The Importance of Understanding National Culture These days when more and more organizations strive to operate globally, it is essential that managers understand the specificities of each country their company sells to or establishes a brunch in.
Football Impact on England’s Culture This paper will study the various impacts of football both on the social life of people and on the economy of the country.
Culture and Identity: “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros The past is a driving force for the future and it is hard to erase that part of an individual’s life.
Cultural Aspects in Different Societies For example, in some cultures, funerals represent a time of feasting and making merry whereas in majority of cultures funerals represent a time of grief and mourning. Their different cultures enable them to tolerate the […]
Culture and Communication: Egypt Egypt is the origin of the earliest civilizations and has taken an important position in the Middle East as the connection between the Arab and Europe regions.
Identity, Language, and Culture The differences in culture and language gives respective cultures and languages a sense of identity and this is important because it defines an individual or a group of people.
Porsche Brand’s Cultural Biography This resulted in the creation of the Volkswagen Beetle, one of the iconic cars of the century. By the end of the 30s, the company has built three racing prototypes, but the progress in the […]
Organizational Culture & Leadership: Whirlpool Corporation At the heart of the discussion of management and leadership are the concepts of goal setting and results. Common to both managers and leaders is the focus on the results they produce, which are based […]
The “Brave” Intercultural Film Analysis In their discourse in the forest, the princess and her mother realized the need for relationship rebuilding, mending the bond that led to a solution for the kingdom’s survival.
Culture and Health Correlation People’s culture influences the type of food they purchase and the way they prepare it, which is a vital determinant of health.
Three Stages of Cultural Development The main goal of this paper is to describe my personal experience along the lines of the stages of cultural development.
Chinese New Year Foods: Chinese Culture and Traditions This piece of work will give an in depth discussion of Chinese culture with the central focus being on the Chinese New Year Foods and its relationship with the changes that have been experienced in […]
Sushi: History, Origin and the Cultural Landscape
Anthropological Approach to Culture
The Erosion of Cultural Differences and Globalised Consumer Culture
Cultural Diversity in the Play “Othello”
Dubai’s Food, Dress Code and Culture
The Influence of Heavy Metal on Japanese Culture
Handy and Schein Models in Organizational Culture
Food, Eating Behavior, and Culture in Chinese Society
Culture, Subculture, and Their Differences
The UAE Cultural Analysis: Adherence to Traditions, Cultural Beliefs, and Values
Discussion: Cultural Roots and Routes
IKEA’s and Home Depot’s Cross-Cultural Management
Cultural Prostitution: Okinawa, Japan, and Hawaii
American Culture Pros & Cons
Cultural, Political, Economic and Legal Aspects of Doing Business in France
Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture by Carol A. Padden, Tom L. Humphries
What Role Does Food Play in Cultural Identity?
Culture of Simping and Why One Should Stay Away From It
The Preservation of Our Cultural Heritage: Music for Entertainment and Communication
Korean Culture: History and Principles
Servant Leadership in Indian Culture and Hindu Religion
Visual Culture Understanding in Modern Society
Cultural Hybridization: The Beliefs, Language, and Social Habits
Greek Culture and Traditions
How Geography Has Impacted the Development of Ancient Cultures
Muriel’s Wedding as a Representation of Australian Culture
Heritage Tourism vs. Cultural Tourism Definition
Cultural Assimilation, Acceptance and Identity in Julia Alvarez’s Poetry
The Renaissance and Its Cultural, Political and Economic Influence
Differences in Culture between America and Sudan
Society, Culture, and Civilization
Google Inc. Employees’ Intercultural Competencies
Culture Comparison Between China and Japan
Principles of Effective Cross-Cultural Communication Essay
Cultural Diffusion: Factors and Effects
Cross-Cultural Management and HRM in Walmart
Leading a Culture of Excellence in Healthcare Industry
Building High Performance Culture: Zappos
The Marriage Traditions of Wolof Culture
Exploring the Human Culture
Influence of Political, Social, and Cultural Issues
Religion in Intercultural Communication
Bombas Firm’s Organizational Structure and Culture
Cultural Differences in International Business
Cultural Family Assessment in “Under the Same Moon” Film
Racial and Cultural Identity Development Model
Cross-cultural Comparison Between the US and Japan
Compare and Contrast the Political Culture of Australia and Saudi Arabia
Cultural Convergence: The Interactions Between Different Cultures
Arab Culture and Teenagers
Marriott Hotel’s Promotion of Intercultural Synergy
Cultural Diversity and Cultural Universals Relations: Anthropological Perspective
Cultural Identity: Problems, Coping, and Outcomes
Sustaining a Culture in Multinational Corporations
Intercultural Communication Patterns in the U.S. and UK
Angels and Insects: The Issue of Incest in the Pop-Culture
Cultural Competence: Jamaican Heritage
American Culture and Indian Culture Comparison
Multicultural Education: Action Plan for Professional Development of the School’s Staff
Culture and Public Administration Relationship in Canada
History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
Japanese and Emirati Cultural Differences
Youth Culture and Globalization
Dance Analysis: Social and Cultural Context
Haiti History and Culture
Nacirema Culture
The Cross-cultural Construct of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems
Consumerism Culture: Challenges and Solutions
Western Pop Culture and Street Fashion of Japanese Youth
The Essence of Cultural Ecology: The Main Tenets
Celebrations in School Culture
Cultural Intelligence by Christopher and Elaine Mosakowski
Vanilla: History, Culture and Production
Hospitality Industry: Coping with Culture Shock
Authenticity in Cultural Tourism Sites: A Critical Discussion
Hofstede and Trompenaars Theories of Culture Diversity
Global Business Cultural Analysis: Japan
Cultural Factors and Their Influence on Individuals
The Business and Cultural Practices of Japan
Cultural Revolution and Education in China During the 1960s-1970s
Body Ritual Among the Nacirema: Cultural Study
African and Western Culture in the “Touki Bouki” Film
Impact of Globalization on the Maasai Peoples` Culture
Adorno’s Concept of Culture Industry
History: Cultural Exchanges in the Medieval Period
Cultural Belief System: Experiences and Traditions
Subculture Theories: Response to the Dominant Culture
Non-Material and Material Culture
The “Friends” TV Show as a Cultural Artifact
Islamic Culture and Civilization
Stephen Hawking: Visionary and Cross-Cultural Leadership
Culture Influence on Intimacy and Human Relationships
Language and Culture Interaction in English Language Teaching
Coping With Cultural Shock and Adaptation to a New Culture
Intercultural Understanding in Hala Alyan’s Poems
Cultural Heritage of Oyo Empire in Africa
Multicultural Communication and Its Origin
Qantas Airways: Cross Culture and Safety Management
Cultural Diversity and Cultural Integration in Western Societies
Culture, Globalization and Intercultural Adaptation
Abu Dhabi Tourism and Cultural Authority
Cultural Diversity in Hotel Industry
Race Matters, Cancel Culture, and “Boys Go to Jupiter”
Enron Company’s Organisational Culture Problem
Music and Its Effects on Culture
Technology as a Form of Material Culture
Cultural Diversity Management in the Workplace
Culture Identity: Asian Culture
“Food Colombusing” and Cultural Appropriation
The Spread of European Culture
Culture and Identity as Depicted in Kay’s “Trumpet”
Intellectual, Scientific and Cultural Changes in Europe Towards the End of 19th Century
Gender Roles and Family Systems in Hispanic Culture
Food Preferences and Nutrition Culture
Culture and Employee Management
Kinship Organization of Yanomamo Culture
An Academic Critique of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory
Cross-Cultural Communication Between the French and German Communities in Switzerland
Cross Culture Management
The Influence of the Cultural Current “Modernism” on the Conception of Music in the 20th Century
Culture Clash as a Great Conflict
Cultural Adaptation Plan: Comparing Canada and the Philippines
Culture and Communication Problems in HRM
Implications of Korean Culture on Health
The History of the Hippie Cultural Movement
Communication in a Cross-Cultural Project Team
International Marketing Decisions: Culture Significance
Themes and Culture in Li Bai’s Poetry
Starbucks in China and Cross-Cultural Values
The Egyptians and the Hindu Cultural Rites Comparison
Tesco and Global Supermarket Chain in Hungary: Cultural Issues
Pop Culture and Print Media: Trends Propagated by the Print Media
Ways in Which an Organization’s Culture is Transmitted to its Members
Local Museums and Their Cultural Heritage
Threats of Globalization on Culture of Individual Countries
Effect of Economy on Culture and Social Structure
Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society
Cultural Significance of Flynn Rider in “Tangled” by Greno
Cultural Change: Mechanisms and Examples
American and Lithuanian Cultural Environments
Henry Jenkins’ Theory of Convergence Culture
Cultural Products in Strategic Plan Development
Cross-Cultural Differences Between the US and Pakistan
The Role of Culture in Gospel Communication
Cross-Cultural Management in Emirates Airline
Intercultural Awareness and Multicultural Society in a Global Village
Singapore Geography and Culture
The Bushmen: Culture and Traditions
“Family Supper” by Ishiguro: Eastern and Western Family Attitudes Cultural Differences
Columbia Under Hofstede’s Cultural Analysis
Conflict in a Multicultural Context
Cultural Diversity: Diversification and Integration
Does Copyright Enhance Creativity and Culture?
How Chinese Culture Influences Foreign Businesses
Arab Music and Cinema Development: Western Culture Impact
Five Cultural Dimensions for Understanding the Values
Cultural Criminology: Inside the Crime
Pokémon Go as a Pop Culture Phenomenon
Organizational Culture and Physical Structure
The Culture of Smartness in Education
Chicano Culture in “First Communion” by T. Rivera
Cultural Linguistic Autobiography: An Experience of a Second Language
Juno and Political, Social, and Cultural Ideology
Indian Culture, Food, Temples, and Clothing
Cultural Traditions: Arranged vs. Autonomous Marriage
The Western Cultural Narratives
Colombia’s and the US’ Cultural Dimensions
Intercultural Communication: Paul Haggis’ “Crash”
Organizational Culture in Educational Institution
Singapore’s Culture and Social Institutions
Matthew Arnold’s and Raymond Williams’ Ideas About Culture
Struggle to Retain Culture: McDonaldization in China
British Colonialism and Its Impact on Indian Culture
The Origin of Organizational Culture
Social and Cultural Influences in Nursing Practice
Competent Care: Filipino Cultural Assessment Model
Intercultural Relationships Importance
Intercultural Communication in “Gran Torino” Movie
The Educational Organization’s Culture
Procter and Gamble: Culture and Diversity in Decision Making
The Problem of Expatriate Management in Multinationals – Adaptation to Foreign Culture
Cultural Bias in Counseling Practices
Organizational Culture of Google Incorporation
Hotpot Concept and Cultural Value
Culture and Conflict
Cultural Shock: Visiting Eastern, Arab, Muslim Countries
The Impact of Cultural and Religious Tourism on Communities
Billboard as an Element of the Popular Culture
The Myth of the Culture of Poverty
Social, Cultural and Gender Inequality From a Global Perspective
Cultural Relativism: Impact on Individuals
The Importance of Cultural Research
The General Motors Firm’s Cultural Crisis
Culturally Sensitive Care For Jehovah’s Witnesses
Culture, Power and Representation in Ideology and Language
Paisà (1946) by Roberto Rossellini: Style, Theme, and Cultural Value
Cross-Cultural Sleeping Arrangements in Children
TV Culture: The Oprah Winfrey Show
Indigenous Australian Culture, History, Importance
“High” and “Low” Culture in Design
The Culture of the Nacirema Society
Umm Al-Nar: Geoarchaeology and Cultural Heritage
Multicultural Literacy: Patricia Polacco and Roald Dahl
Navajo Ethnographic and Ethnological Studies
Cabramatta’s Culture and Art
The Meaning of Cultural Consumption and Influence of Cultural Backgrounds
What Is the Relationship Between the Social Definition of Deviance and the Media’s Role in the Dissemination of Popular Culture?
Teaching Cultural Identities: A Lesson Plan
Tribal Tattoos: Cultural Appropriation and Appreciation
Punjabi Culture and Threat to Survival
Culture Values Expression through Humanities
The Importance of Culture in Nursing
Influence of African-American Culture on Rock n Roll Music
Siemens Company’s Corporate Governance and Culture
Personal Worldview and Intercultural Communications
Socio-Cultural Issues and Health Assessment in Nursing
Integrity in Organizational Culture and Ethical Theories
Appropriations, Prejudices and Cultural Cruise Control: Overview
Culture and Language: Impact on Reflections
Japanese Kimono: A Part of Cultural Heritage
The Impact of American Popular Culture on Society
The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Heroes of “The Bluest Eye”
Marriott International: Analyzing Culture
Disneyland Hong Kong Company: Cultural Adaptation
General Motors Company: Organizational Culture and Strengths
Cultural Assimilation of International Students
Bahrain Fashion: Culture and Antiquities
Consumer vs. Organizational Buying and Culture
Multicultural Career Counseling Method
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How Does Culture Affects How Students Interact?
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Civilization Topics
Literacy Essay Ideas
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Equality Topics
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Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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Essay on African Culture

Students are often asked to write an essay on African Culture in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on African Culture

African culture: an overview.

African culture is vast and diverse. It is not just one culture, but many. There are 54 countries in Africa, each with its own unique traditions, languages, music, and art. This makes African culture rich and varied.

In Africa, over 2000 languages are spoken. These include Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, and Zulu. Each language tells a story about the people who speak it. It shows their history, their beliefs, and their way of life.

Art and Craft

African art is famous for its bold colors and unique designs. It includes masks, sculptures, paintings, and textiles. Each piece of art tells a story or represents a belief.

Music and Dance

Music and dance are important in African culture. They are used to celebrate, to tell stories, and to honor ancestors. Instruments like drums, xylophones, and the kora are often used.

African food varies by region. In North Africa, you will find dishes with couscous and spices. In West Africa, dishes often include rice, yams, and fish. Each dish reflects the local environment.

Religion and Beliefs

Religion is a big part of African culture. Many people follow Christianity or Islam. Others follow traditional African religions. These often involve respect for ancestors and nature.

African clothing is colorful and varied. It often features bright colors and bold patterns. It can also show a person’s status or role in society.

In conclusion, African culture is rich and diverse. It is a blend of many different traditions, beliefs, and practices.

250 Words Essay on African Culture

Introduction to african culture.

Africa is a large continent with many different people and cultures. Each group has its own unique way of life, but there are some things that they all share.

African art is famous around the world. It is very colorful and often tells a story. People use different materials like wood, bronze, and clay to make sculptures and masks. They also make beautiful jewelry and clothes using beads and shells.

Music and dance are very important in African culture. They are used to celebrate, to tell stories, and to show respect to elders. African music uses many different instruments like drums, bells, and flutes. The dances are often very energetic and involve a lot of movement.

Food and Cuisine

African food is tasty and diverse. In many places, people eat a lot of grains, vegetables, and meat. They also use many different spices to give their food a unique flavor. Some popular dishes include jollof rice, couscous, and injera.

Traditional Clothing

In Africa, traditional clothing is often bright and colorful. Many people wear clothes made from fabrics like kente cloth and mud cloth. These clothes are often decorated with beautiful patterns and designs.

African culture is rich and diverse. It is full of beautiful art, music, food, and clothing. It is a culture that values community, respect for elders, and celebration. It is a culture that should be respected and appreciated by all.

500 Words Essay on African Culture

African culture is rich and varied, just like the continent itself. Africa is the second largest continent in the world, and it is home to many different countries, each with its own unique culture. When we talk about African culture, we are talking about the traditions, languages, art, music, and social habits of these different countries.

Traditions and Customs

One of the most important parts of African culture is its traditions and customs. These are the ways of life that have been passed down from generation to generation. In many African societies, elders are highly respected, and their wisdom is valued. Storytelling is also a big part of African culture. Through stories, important lessons and history are shared.

Language is another key aspect of African culture. There are over 2000 distinct languages spoken across the continent. Some of the most widely spoken languages include Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, and Zulu. Each language is unique and reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Art and Music

Art and music are central to African culture. African art is diverse and includes sculptures, paintings, pottery, and textiles. It often tells a story or represents spiritual beliefs. African music is also diverse and varies from region to region. It plays a key role in celebrations, ceremonies, and storytelling.

Social Habits

African societies value community and family. Many African cultures believe in the concept of “Ubuntu”, a Zulu term meaning “I am because we are”. This philosophy emphasizes the importance of community and caring for each other.

Food in African culture is more than just sustenance. It is a way to bring people together. African cuisine varies greatly across the continent. North African food, for example, is influenced by Arabic culture, while West African food is known for its bold flavors and hearty stews.

In conclusion, African culture is a vibrant and diverse tapestry of traditions, languages, art, music, social habits, and food. It is a culture that values community, respect for elders, and the sharing of stories. By learning about African culture, we can gain a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of the human experience. Remember, Africa is not a single country, but a continent with many unique cultures. Each one has its own beauty and value, contributing to the rich tapestry that is African culture.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on African American
Essay on Afghanistan
Essay on Advertisement Boon Or Bane

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Elements of an Essay

Definition of elements of an essay.

An essay is a piece of composition that discusses a thing, a person, a problem, or an issue in a way that the writer demonstrates his knowledge by offering a new perspective , a new opinion, a solution, or new suggestions or recommendations. An essay is not just a haphazard piece of writing. It is a well-organized composition comprising several elements that work to build an argument , describe a situation, narrate an event, or state a problem with a solution. There are several types of essays based on the purpose and the target audience . Structurally, as an essay is an organized composition, it has the following elements:

Introduction
Body Paragraphs

Nature of Elements of an Essay

An essay has three basic elements as given above. Each of these elements plays its respective role to persuade the audience, convince the readers, and convey the meanings an author intends to convey. For example, an introduction is intended to introduce the topic of the essay. First it hooks the readers through the ‘ hook ,’ which is an anecdote , a good quote, a verse , or an event relevant to the topic. It intends to attract the attention of readers.

Following the hood, the author gives background information about the topic, which is intended to educate readers about the topic. The final element of the introduction is a thesis statement. This is a concise and compact sentence or two, which introduces evidence to be discussed in the body paragraphs.

Body paragraphs of an essay discuss the evidences and arguments introduced in the thesis statement . If a thesis statement has presented three evidences or arguments about the topic, there will be three body paragraphs. However, if there are more arguments or evidences, there could be more paragraphs.

The structure of each body paragraph is the same. It starts with a topic sentence, followed by further explanation, examples, evidences, and supporting details. If it is a simple non-research essay, then there are mostly examples of what is introduced in the topic sentences. However, if the essay is research-based, there will be supporting details such as statistics, quotes, charts, and explanations.

The conclusion is the last part of an essay. It is also the crucial part that sums up the argument, or concludes the description, narration, or event. It is comprised of three major parts. The first part is a rephrasing of the thesis statement given at the end of the introduction. It reminds the readers what they have read about. The second part is the summary of the major points discussed in the body paragraphs, and the third part is closing remarks, which are suggestions, recommendations, a call to action, or the author’s own opinion of the issue.

Function of Elements of an Essay

Each element of an essay has a specific function. An introduction not only introduces the topic, but also gives background information, in addition to hooking the readers to read the whole essay. Its first sentence, which is also called a hook, literally hooks readers. When readers have gone through the introduction, it is supposed that they have full information about what they are going to read.

In the same way, the function of body paragraphs is to give more information and convince the readers about the topic. It could be persuasion , explanation, or clarification as required. Mostly, writers use ethos , pathos , and logos in this part of an essay. As traditionally, it has three body paragraphs, writers use each of the rhetorical devices in each paragraph, but it is not a hard and fast rule. The number of body paragraphs could be increased, according to the demand of the topic, or demand of the course.

As far as the conclusion is concerned, its major function is to sum up the argument, issue, or explanation. It makes readers feel that now they are going to finish their reading. It provides them sufficient information about the topic. It gives them a new perspective, a new sight, a new vision, or motivates them to take action. The conclusion needs to also satisfy readers that they have read something about some topic, have got something to tell others, and that they have not merely read it for the sake of reading.

Important Elements of Poetry
Narrative Essay
Definition Essay
Descriptive Essay
Types of Essay
Analytical Essay
Argumentative Essay
Cause and Effect Essay
Critical Essay
Expository Essay
Persuasive Essay
Process Essay
Explicatory Essay
An Essay on Man: Epistle I
Comparison and Contrast Essay

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10 of The Most Important Elements of Organizational Culture in 2023

Organizational culture is like the operating system that sets the tone across every aspect of a company.

It guides how people collaborate, make decisions, recognize achievements, and even decorate office spaces. Culture exists in the unwritten attitudes, subtle habits, and collective personalities woven into the fabric of a workplace.

When culture thrives, employees personally feel invested in the company’s purpose and community. But culture fails to materialize out of thin air. It takes deliberate action across the core elements that we are going to discuss in this article in detail and with some examples.

Key Insights

Concept of Organizational Culture
Core Elements of Organizational Culture
Examples of Companies Incorporating These Elements

What is Organizational Culture?

Organizational Culture is defined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting that contribute to an organization's unique social and psychological environment.

The employees are expected to understand the culture of the company and be a part of it. Only to accomplish the company goals and missions together, believing and acting on the cultural values.

10 Elements of Organizational Culture

Values like integrity, customer service, collaboration, diversity and inclusion should be clearly defined and then integrated into every aspect of operations.

Example: Southwest Airlines values inclusion, generosity, humility, etc. They empower employees to make decisions that uphold these values. While hiring, they assess potential candidates during interviews to ensure alignment with the company's values rather than focusing solely on the individual's values. This practice not only minimizes employee turnover but also boosts overall job satisfaction. This has resulted in merely 1.5% of employees getting terminated, with only 2% opting to leave voluntarily.

2. Leadership

Additionally, leaders should take the necessary steps to strengthen culture. These steps include -

Soliciting feedback,
Explaining decisions,
Being vulnerable about mistakes, and
Highlighting employee stories.

Example: Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, hosts weekly fireside chats and Q&As with employees to model transparency. His authenticity keeps the culture strong despite rapid growth.

3. Communication

In the absence of trust in leadership, and credible and relevant communications from leadership, organizations run the risk of having more detractors than activists. – Renee Austin ( Weber Shandwick )

Example: Buffer, a social media marketing software company, is well-known for its internal communication to improve organizational culture. Buffer places a significant emphasis on transparency, focusing on clear communication and avoiding assumptions. This commitment is evident in the company's day-to-day practices, notably through the 'All Hands' meeting held monthly. This event includes a CEO and leadership team presentation for updates on headlines and performance. Additionally, a meeting in the 'town hall' format provides all employees the chance to ask questions and stay informed. By adopting a meeting format that promotes communication and engagement, they effectively mitigate the risk of individuals becoming bored and disengaged.

4. Recognition

Timely employee recognition for achievements, demonstrating values, solving problems, strong collaboration, and milestones show alignment with cultural priorities. Both monetary and social recognition boost motivation and engagement.

As per a report , when employee recognition is done right, it boosts employee retention by a whopping 5X in the organization.

Example: Zappos, a subsidiary of Amazon, has an amazing employee recognition program. The program is based on peer-to-peer recognition. It aims to build a culture of appreciation among colleagues and a positive team spirit. In order to make the program fun, they have coined the term ‘Zapponians’ for their employees. Their peer-to-peer programs include - A. Zollar Program: Here, Zollars (or Zappos Dollars) can be earned by volunteering to help others, and they are then used to redeem merchandise from the Zollar Store. B. Master of WOW Parking: Recognizes employees with a premium parking space through peer-to-peer acknowledgment. C. Coworker Bonus Program: Allows employees to reward one another with a $50 coworker bonus.

5. Professional Development

Investing in employees demonstrate that their development matters to the organization. It can be done through several initiatives, such as -

Continuous learning and growth through training programs,
Mentorship,
Tuition assistance, and
Internal mobility opportunities

Initiatives and opportunities like these provide a sense of progress and purpose to your employees.

Data shows that a striking 94% of employees express their willingness to remain with a company for a longer duration if the organization invests in their learning and development.

Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don't want to. – Richard Branson

Example: Chipotle, an American chain of fast casual restaurants, has bolstered its commitment to employee development. They have incorporated over 5,500 remote courses spanning diverse subjects such as business, tech, and wellness. This initiative aims to foster an inclusive approach to career growth, contributing to Chipotle's vision of cultivating a workplace free from discrimination and inequality.

6. Physical Environment

The answer is “Yes,” It does.

The office layout, architecture, accessibility, safety, and aesthetics influence how people interact and feel at work.

Spaces designed intentionally around collaboration and company culture create a sense of belonging. Natural light and ergonomic furniture also boost productivity.

According to a study conducted by Savills UK , 65% of employees believe that changing the current office design to their ideal workplace would improve their productivity.

Example: The Domino's headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is truly impressive. Featuring a spacious and stylish design, the offices boast an expansive interior and ample kitchen space. Notably, the company goes the extra mile by providing a built-in art gallery and a petting zoo, creating a stress-relieving environment for employees.

7. Hiring & Onboarding

You must thoughtfully select people who align with the company's mission and values. Then provide them with immersive onboarding experience rooted in culture. This process contributes towards boosting retention.

Again, retention leads to facilitating cultural continuity as an organization evolves. According to SHRM , employees who underwent a well-structured onboarding program were found to be 58% more likely to stay with the organization after three years.

Example: Netflix is dedicated to ensuring the success of its employees right from day one. The company embraces a "welcome home" approach, creating a sense of security and grounding for newcomers. The orientation process delves into the company's culture and vision, strategically spreading insights at various points throughout the employee's learning journey. Managers play a crucial role during onboarding by scheduling regular introductions with different teams, fostering a comprehensive integration process.

8. Wellbeing

Comprehensive wellbeing initiatives boost resilience, creativity, and loyalty. Such initiatives include health insurance, 401k matching, mindfulness training, and mental health benefits.

Wellness is the complete integration of body, mind, and spirit – the realization that everything we do, think, feel, and believe has an effect on our state of well-being. – Greg Anderson

Example: Johnson & Johnson, with a workforce of 130 thousand across over 60 countries, has emerged as a trailblazer in promoting the health of its employees. The commitment to well-being is seamlessly integrated into the company's physical environment and daily activities. This ranges from offering healthy eating guidance in the canteens to providing fitness centers with lunchtime classes, ensuring the well-being message permeates every aspect of the organization.

9. Diversity & Inclusion

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without. – William Sloane Coffin Jr.

Celebrating diverse backgrounds and perspectives creates psychological safety and a sense of belonging.

While hiring for diversity is crucial, inclusion must be embedded across the employee lifecycle. It can be done through fair policies, anti-bias training, mentorship programs, Employee Resource Groups, and more.

A study done by Glassdoor reports that 67% of job seekers consider diversity a crucial factor when assessing companies and job offers.

Example: Sodexo, emphasizing gender parity, is featured in Bloomberg's Gender Equality Index. The company boasts a 37% female presence on its executive committee and 60% on its board of directors. Sodexo's findings reveal that achieving an optimal gender balance leads to a 4% increase in employee engagement, a 23% rise in gross profit, and a 5% improvement in brand image.

10. Social Connection

While the latest “perks” and ping pong tables contribute to some extent, natural social connections and shared experiences make work more enjoyable and meaningful.

Research shows that companies that foster social connection reap better collaboration, innovation, loyalty, and business results.

According to BetterUp , companies with high connection are 14X more likely to be named a "Best Places to Work"

Example: Hewlett-Packard, a leader in the field of technology, is making the world a better place through innovative products and practices. HP introduced Maker Space, a collaborative environment exclusively for HP employees to engage in group interactions. This space features various workspaces where employees can experiment with robotics and share their creations. HP's inclusive approach in creating professional spaces for team collaboration is a valuable lesson for other companies. Establishing environments that foster idea development without disrupting daily business practices can significantly enhance employee engagement .

Organizational culture ultimately comes down to people and experiences. No matter how strong values are on paper or how nice office amenities appear, a positive culture emerges when employees feel genuine connection, care, and community.

The 10 elements discussed here act as guideposts. In the end, organizational culture materializes in the laughter during lunch, the mentoring of new hires, the pats on the back for jobs well done, and the friendships carrying from offices.

While culture starts with policies, it is brought to life through your employees.

What are the different types of organizational culture?

4 common types of organizational culture include clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market culture. Other types of organizational culture include entrepreneurial, innovative, results-oriented, people-oriented, customer-centric cultures, etc.

What are the signs that your culture needs to change?

Signals that culture change may be needed include lack of alignment with strategy and environment, people practices not matching espoused values, high turnover, low accountability, lack of collaboration, unethical behaviors, etc.

How can you change your organizational culture?

Evolving culture requires identifying needed changes, communicating the vision, aligning leadership, systems and processes. Organizations must identify cultural priorities, and foster it through training, incentives and consistent role modeling.

Why do organizational cultures decline?

Cultures can decline due to poor leadership transitions, lack of realignment to environment. Unaddressed behaviors that violate values, and not reinforcing or adapting cultural priorities can also cause decline.

How to assess your organizational culture?

Assessing culture involves exploring employee attitudes and experiences. It can be done through surveys, interviews, observation, document reviews and tracking relevant metrics. Assessing helps in identifying surface strengths, pain points and opportunities.

This article is written by Nilotpal , a content marketer at Vantage Circle. When he is not reading or writing content, he is probably clicking some photographs. For any related queries, contact [email protected]

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Interview with Rachel Nadon, CIRM's BMO 2024 postdoctoral fellow

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It was a busy spring for Rachel Nadon! On April 2nd, she began her stay as the BMO Posdoctoral Fellow at CIRM for the year 2024 , and on July 1st, she will take up her new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Québec Literature in the Département de littérature, théâtre et cinéma at Université Laval! Despite her short stay with us, we are eager to find out more about her fascinating research project, which she hopes to pursue as a professor.

But first and foremost, a brief biography is in order. With a PhD in French-language literatures from Université de Montréal, Rachel Nadon works on the relationship between emotions and the sensational press. Member of the Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec (GRÉLQ) , she works at the crossroads of cultural studies and literary history. She co-edited the collective Relire les revues québécoises : histoire, formes et pratiques (PUM, 2021). She is also director of Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle .

Her research project as a BMO Postdoctoral Fellow, which she plans to pursue, is “Emotions and archives of feelings: reading Montreal through Allô Police, 1970-2004”.

The question on everyone's mind: why Allô Police?

I've already been working on yellow newspapers for a few years ("yellow newspapers", just to get everyone on the same wavelength, is an expression that includes all sorts of different newspapers, crime papers, gossip papers, saucy cartoon papers, etc.). These are newspapers that are often ephemeral, that don't last long and whose circulation is difficult to evaluate. Allô Police had a very long life, from 1953 to 2004. It also had a huge circulation, between 100,000 and 200,000 copies a week in the 1950s. So, on the one hand, there's the duration and popularity of this newspaper.

And on the other, I have noticed that everyone has one or more anecdotes about Allô Police. When I was a kid, my parents used to cover my eyes a little when we passed the Allô Police in the convenience store! But just about everyone has something to say about Allô Police: reading it only on vacations (like a little party), cutting it up for scrapbooking, reading it on the sly, despite parental prohibitions, etc. It is this conjecture of two elements that intrigues me: its popularity, the widespread yet almost intimate nature of its reading. Although few people mention Allô Police as a legitimate reading habit...

What motivates you to study the relationship between emotions and the sensational press?

When I started reading Allô Police, I realized that emotion was quite important in my reading. I was confronted with articles about mutilated and decapitated people; there were lots of photos of corpses. Itis something that really grabbed me, and which seems to me to go beyond the notion of sensationalism. Starting from my emotions of fascination and disgust, and perplexity too, I came to pay attention to the texts, to the way emotions like fear, disgust, even love, were named. I realized that all this, the mobilization of emotion in different ways, was part of the reading pact of these newspapers. I should point out that my reading emotions are probably not the same as those of another readership, that of the 1950s for example; I cannot assume that, at least!

What are your goals and expectations for your residency as a postdoctoral fellow at CRIEM?

The project is structured in two parts. First, I will be reading copies of Allô Police from the 1976 Olympics to the end of the newspaper's activities in 2004. I'm particularly interested in the 1980s and 1990s, because I want to see how the paper stages the city. For example, what neighborhoods are named, what events are covered? Does it resemble the years I've already studied (the 1950s-1960s)? I will be able to pursue these questions, analyzing the ways in which the city of Montréal is constructed over the course of the articles. I am also going to see how a newspaper like Allô Police situates itself in relation to the pro-sex and anti-sex feminist movements, and everything to do with pornography and sex work. As it's a newspaper that makes a living out of sexuality and its particular circles, I'm interested.

There's a second aspect to the project, that of archives. I want to explore people's memories of this diary, with the idea of reconstructing an archive of readings, or rather an "archive of feelings", to use Ann Czetkovich 's words. The aim is to seek out stories, objects of all kinds, business cards, photocopied editions, photos, scrapbook pages made from Allô Police clippings, etc. This will be a good way to reflect on the different uses of the newspaper and the ways in which people interacted with Allô Police, but also on the memories they retain of it and what it tells us about a way of living in or representing Montréal. It goes beyond a simple "broadcast-reception" type of reading, I want to touch on the uses of the newspaper and its ways of circulating, and of "orienting" us in the city.

Can you explain the concept of the archive of feelings?

Ann Czetkovich is interested in the experience of trauma among lesbian and queer people. According to her, this experience isn't "officially" documented, but is associated with objects or narratives. These objects - it could be a diary or pulp collections - are not necessarily linked to the experience of trauma, but evoke it in different ways for someone or for a community. These objects, figures or photos (for example), are invested with sentimental value and meaning, but they are not considered archives in the institutional sense of the term. Ann Czetkovich, in her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , analyzes these archives and "produces" them, too. There is a double movement of analysis and creation (she "constitutes" cultural productions as archives, so to speak), and that is what I want to do too. Does the experience of emotionally reading a newspaper like Allô Police produce an archive of feelings? I would like to collect objects and stories that would enable us to reflect on the relationship between emotions, memory and the city.

This implies creative work.

For the project, I'd like to set up a website, collect alternative archives of Allô Police, meet people who still remember it, and explore different modes of distribution, such as fanzines. I have co-written a "detective serial" in the cultural magazine Liberté, in which I've used the device of fiction to integrate interviews I have already done with Allô Police actors. I'm also thinking of organizing a round-table discussion on the 20th anniversary of Allô Police's demise.

For me, in this project, there is a dimension of research and creation in the strict sense, i.e. reading and research on the one hand, and "reconstituting" the archives on the other. More broadly, it allows me to reflect on the question of archives, which is a complicated one when it comes to large-scale cultural productions. The documents that bear witness to the production of these periodicals are often not intended for conservation or archiving. In fact, the product itself - the newspaper - was never intended for preservation!

Why is it important to study a crime news journal like Allô Police?

On the one hand, it is a place of memory, in the sense of a space of memory that bears witness to many events affecting Montreal and many other places. This place of memory allows us to read the watermark of changes affecting society, but also relationships between people, the way we conceive of crime and criminals. In short, it allows us to reflect on what affects people, and what constitutes an era. And at the same time, it is a place of memory in the most fundamental sense: people remember it. Many readers meet there. It's important to highlight how a newspaper that has had bad press has brought together a community of readers, a community that could be reconstituted by, among other things, the very diverse uses to which this newspaper has been put.

What are your plans for your first months (or rather first years!) as an assistant professor of Québec literature?

One thing is for sure: I want to pursue this project! It is very close to my heart. I am interested in pursuing all these reflections on how a tabloid newspaper like Allô Police has left an emotional, concrete and material mark on people's lives and on the city of Montréal. More broadly, I have a project on the cultural history of bad taste in Québec; to be continued, as they say!

A perfect day in Montréal? It's summer, I get on my bike, I go swimming in Parc Jarry, I have a coffee in the Mile End and we eat hot dogs at Orange Julep.. 3 essential symbols of Montréal? Olympic Stadium, Caffè Italia and Milano (together), and the Lachine Canal Favorite neighborhood? My neighborhood, Little Italy, because of my neighbors! Bibliography on emotions and cultural & literary studies: Sara Ahmed (2014), Cultural Politics of Emotion , Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,2 nd ed., 256 p. Ann Czetkovich (2003), An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , Duke University Press, 368 p. Michel de Certeau (1990), L’invention du quotidien, tome 1 : Arts de faire , Folio, 416 p. Richard Hoggart (1970), La Culture du pauvre , trad. de l’anglais par Jean Claude Passeron, Paris, Minuit, 420 p. Will Straw (2021), «The Pastness of Allo Police» , dans Martha Langford et Johanne Sloan (ed.), Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City, Montréal, McGill/Queen’s University Press, p. 199-216.

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