tournament? Did you know that Michael Jordan used to wear his college team
shorts under his NBA uniform for good luck? Or that Wayne Gretzky never used
to get a haircut while playing on the road because the last time he did, his team
lost? When Woods, Jordan, and Gretzky started these superstitious practices,
they were taking the first step toward creating one aspect of culture, the socially
transmitted ideas, practices, and material objects that people create to deal with
real-life problems. Their superstitions helped them deal with performance anxiety,
reassuring them and perhaps allowing them to play better.
Similarly, a tractor is a cultural tool that helps people solve the problem of
how to plant crops, while religion is a cultural tool that helps them come to
terms with death and give meaning to life. Note, however, that religion, technology,
and many other elements of culture differ from the superstitions of
Woods, Jordan, and Gretzky in two ways. First, superstitions may be unique
to the individuals who create them whereas culture is widely shared. Second,
unlike many superstitions, culture is passed on from one
generation to the next by means of communication and
learning; culture is socially transmitted. It requires a
society to persist. (A society is a number of people who
interact, usually in a defined territory, and share a culture.)
When people use the term culture in everyday speech,
they often have in mind what sociologists call high culture—
opera, ballet, and similar activities enjoyed mainly by people
in upper social classes. Sometimes they mean popular
culture
or mass culture—the movies, rock music, and similar
activities that people in all social classes enjoy. However,
the sociological notion of culture is much broader than the
way we use the term in everyday speech. Sociologically
speaking, culture is composed of the socially transmitted
ideas, practices, and material objects that enable people to
adapt to, and thrive in, their environments.
The Origins and
Components of Culture
You can appreciate the importance of culture for human survival by considering
the predicament of early humans about 100,000 years ago. They lived
in harsh natural environments. They had poor physical endowments, being
slower runners and weaker fighters than many other animals. Yet they survived
despite these disadvantages. More than that: They prospered and came to dominate
nature.
That was possible largely because they were the smartest creatures around. Their
sophisticated brains enabled them to create cultural survival kits of enormous complexity
and flexibility. These cultural survival kits contained three main tools. Each tool was
a uniquely human talent, and each gave rise to a different element of culture.
Abstraction: Creating Symbols
Human culture exists only because we can think abstractly. Abstraction is the capacity
to create symbols or general ideas that carry particular meanings. Languages and
mathematical
notations are sets of symbols. They allow us to classify experiences and
generalize from them. For instance, we recognize that we can sit on many objects but that
only some of them have four legs, a back, and space for one person. We distinguish
them
from other objects by giving them a name: chairs. By the time most babies reach the end
of their first year, they have heard the word chair many times and understand that it
refers to a certain class of objects.
Cooperation: Creating Norms and Values
The ability to cooperate is a second factor that enables human culture to exist. Cooperation
involves creating a complex social life by establishing norms, or generally accepted ways of
doing things, and values, or ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful
and ugly. For example, family members cooperate to raise children. In the process, they develop
and apply norms and values about which child-rearing practices are appropriate and
desirable. Different times and places give rise to different norms and values. In our society,
parents might ground children for swearing, but in Puritan times, parents would typically
“beat the devil out of them.” By analyzing how people cooperate and produce norms and
values, we can learn much about what distinguishes one culture from another.
Production: Creating Material and Non material Culture
Finally, culture can exist because humans can engage in production; we can make and
use tools and techniques that improve our ability to take what we want from nature.
Such tools and techniques are known as material culture because they are tangible. In
contrast, the symbols, norms, values, and other elements of non material culture are
intangible. All animals take from nature to subsist, and an ape may sometimes use a rock
to break another object. But only humans are sufficiently intelligent and dexterous to
make tools and use them to produce everything from food to computers. Understood in
this sense, production is a uniquely human activity.
Concept Summary 2.1 illustrates each of the basic human capacities and their cultural
offshoots in the field of medicine. As in medicine, so in all fields of human activity:
Abstraction, cooperation, and production give rise to specific kinds of ideas, norms, and
elements of material culture.
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