Culture and Socialisation

In everyday use, culture usually means refined taste in things like music, dance, painting, or the way of life of a particular class or country. In social science, culture is understood much more broadly as the total way of life of a people. It includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, habits, values, tools, and techniques acquired as a member of society. So, social science does not treat culture as only “high” art or individual taste; it sees it as a shared, learned, and changing way of life.

The different dimensions of culture comprise a whole because they are interrelated and work together in everyday life.

- The cognitive dimension helps us understand and assign meaning to things.
- The normative dimension provides the rules and values that guide behaviour.
- The material dimension includes tools, machines, buildings, and technologies.

For example, using the internet is a material activity, but it also depends on cognitive skills like reading and understanding, and normative rules like what is proper to say or share. Similarly, private letters may be read out by a third party in a community where literacy is limited: here material conditions, cognitive ability, and social norms all work together. Thus, culture is a whole because its parts support and influence one another.

For example, one can compare a rural tribal culture and an urban modern culture, or two familiar Indian cultures from different regions. A rural community may have different food habits, dress, housing, worship styles, and more dependence on nature and local customs, while an urban culture may be more influenced by schools, media, technology, and market life.

It is often difficult not to be ethnocentric because people tend to judge other ways of life using their own standards. The chapter defines ethnocentrism as applying one's own cultural values to evaluate others, and it shows that this can make one believe one's own culture is superior. A better approach is a cosmopolitan one, which appreciates differences without ranking them. So, yes, avoiding ethnocentrism is difficult, but it is possible if we remember that cultures are different rather than superior or inferior.