CULTURRE, SOCIETY, SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE

Word culture is often used to refer to refined tastes in art, literature, or music etc. the sociological use of the term in much wider, and includes that entire way of life of a society.

·        Everything that is human in form and origin - - our language, technology, relationships & other activities

·        Culture is the sum or total of all things happening in an organization

·        It’s the way things are done - the written and unwritten rules of performance

·        Culture is what gives meaning to the way things are

In this sense everyone who participates in society is “cultured”. To the sociologists, culture consists of all the shared products of human society”.

 

SOCIETY

A society or a human society is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations such as social status, roles and social networks. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals sharing a distinctive culture and institutions. Without an article, the term refers either to the entirety of humanity or a contextually specific subset.

Used in the sense of an association, a society is a body of individuals outlined by the bounds of functional interdependence, possibly comprising characteristics such as national or cultural identity, social solidarity, language or hierarchical organization. Like other groupings, a society allows its members to achieve needs or wishes they could not fulfill alone. independent of, and utterly irreducible to, the qualities of constituent individuals; it may act to oppress. The urbanization and rationalization inherent in some, particularly Western capitalist, societies, has been associated with feelings of isolation and social "anomie".

 

HOW CULTURE IS DIFFERENT FROM SOCIETY?

Culture is changing constantly. Certain products of culture are governments, languages, buildings and manmade things. It is a powerful tool for the survival of mankind. Cultural patterns of ancient people are reflected in their artifacts and are studied by archaeologists to understand their way of life. Culture is an important part of a society for the very existence of society. Culture also plays an important role to establish discipline in a society. According to the behavior patterns and perceptions, there are three levels of culture.

·        Body of Cultural Traditions

·        Subculture

·        Cultural Universals

First one is the body of cultural traditions that makes you to differentiate a society from others. When people speak German, Japanese or Italian, then they are referred as the language, beliefs and traditions shared by each set of people that is different from others.

Second one is the subculture in which different societies from different parts of the world preserve their original culture. Such people are the part of a subculture in the new society. For example, subcultures in United States consist of ethnic groups like Mexican Americans, African Americans and Vietnamese Americans. The members of each subculture share a common language, identity, food tradition and other traits through a common ancestral upbringing.

The third level is the cultural universals that consist of behavior patterns shared by the humanity as a whole. Some examples of such behavior patterns are communicating with a verbal language, use of age and gender to classify people, differentiation based on marriage and relationships.

SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE

Unique Human Reality:      Culture is a unique human reality, it emanates from the unity of humankind in nature, but it situates itself as a meta-natural reality. It is manifested in the technological, mental, moral, social, aesthetic and spiritual achievements of humankind.

It gives Meaning to Relationship: Culture gives meaning to our relationship with the other, as it also forms our subjective identity. Culture, therefore, enters into the processes of social change in many forms and at various levels.

Quality of Social Change:               It defines the quality of social change as its indicator. By selective adaptations to outside cultural forces, it has a large measure of resilience. With all its institutional pervasiveness, it has a core which acts as a filter or a moderator to the outside forces of cultural contact and change. This also explains why in each mainstream culture one may find existence of sub-cultures and counter-cultures.

Success:         Only culture accounts for the success of human beings. We create culture, but culture in turn creates us. We are no longer the helpless victims of the natural environment. We make our own social environment, inventing and sharing the rules and patterns of behavior that shape our lives. We use our knowledge to modify the natural environment as well. Without a culture transmitted from the past, each new generation would have to solve the most elementary problems of human existence over again.

Family System:         It would be obliged to devise a family system, to invent a language, to discover fire, to create the wheel, and so on. Cultural inventions enable us to be insulated from the cold of the Arctic, to travel in outer space, and to live in submarines, all without any recourse to physical evolution. Unlike other animals, we can self consciously adapt to our environments and can adapt the environment to meet our needs. We have the biological capacity to speak, but which language we use and how we use it depends on our cultural environment. We have the biological capacity to laugh to cry to blush to become angry, but the circumstances under which we might do any of these things are learnt in society.