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Chapter 3 is an introduction to how sociologists conceive of culture, which is the distinctive set of norms, values, ideas, symbols, and objects characteristic of a particular community. Culture has material and nonmaterial aspects, and these reflect what is important about or defining of a particular culture. Cultures do not exist in isolation. Dominant cultures include and interact with subcultures (which have alternative norms) and countercultures (which are oppositional towards dominant norms).
Sociologists attempt to understand culture without the bias of ethnocentrism, by taking the position of cultural relativism, where culture is understood from the viewpoint of a member of that culture. For example, any analysis of Indigenous culture would connect individual contemporary experiences to historical and ongoing patterns of colonization, and resistance to that colonizing influence.
The theoretical perspectives take distinctive approaches to culture. Conflict theory is interested in how culture can reflect and reproduce social stratification, acting in the service of those with power. Feminist approaches examine how gender is a product of socialization, and people socialized into different cultures will manifest different cultural values about gender. Functionalist approaches look at how culture stabilizes social interactions and social positions, by, for example, indicating one’s social status to the self and others. Symbolic interactionism looks at how people deploy symbols such as language in their everyday interactions, constructing the reality of the social world.
Language is a marker of culture, reflecting and reinforcing ways of thinking and behaving.
Popular culture is culture which most people have access to, and provides a repertoire of conventional cultural knowledge, allowing them to participate in everyday life via this cultural literacy. High culture is restricted in terms of access and can signal to others one’s ability to participate in and navigate elite social groups, and can be a means of social exclusion. This can happen through unequal access to social, cultural, and economic capital.
Science too is a culture of its own, having distinctive norms and values, as for example in Merton’s analysis of norms around what constitutes good science. Science is a human activity, and its ideal norms are not always followed. Furthermore, the norms of what science is appropriate and what sorts of claims it can be is often contested.