If there are no cars coming, do you stay at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change?
Or do you just go for it?
Do you look left first before you cross, or do you look right?
Or maybe you just dart across the street, shouting, ‘Hey I’m walking here!’
No matter what you do in this situation, what you do is going to depend on culture.
Now you may be thinking, how can something like crossing the street be a cultural phenomenon?
Isn’t culture, like, opera and galas and fancy art openings with tiny hor d’oeuvres?
Or maybe you think culture is bigger than all that, that culture is your heritage, traditions
that have been passed down for generations, like Quinceañeras, Bar Mitzvahs, or Sweet Sixteen parties.
The fact is, all of these things – street-crossing, fine arts, and traditional rites of passage – they are all part of culture.
[Theme Music]
Culture is the way that non-material objects – like thoughts, action, language, and values – come together with material objects to form a way of life.
So you can basically break culture down into two main components: things and ideas.
When you’re crossing the road, you can see markers of your culture in the things around you –
the street signs, the width of the road, the speed and style of the cars.
This is material culture, the culture of things.
Books, buildings, food, clothing, transportation.
It can be everything from iconic monuments like the Statue of Liberty to something as simple as a crosswalk sign that counts down how many seconds you have to cross the street.
But a lot of the culture that’s packed into crossing the street is non-material, too.
We interpret the color red to mean stop – because our culture has assigned red as a symbol for stop and green for go.
And if you grew up in a country where cars drive on the right side of the road, your parents probably taught you to look left first before crossing.
This is non-material culture, the culture of ideas.
It’s made up of the intangible creations of human society – values, symbols, customs, ideals.
Instead of the Statue of Liberty, it’s the idea of liberty and what it means to be free.
For our purposes as sociologists, we’ll mainly be focusing on this second type of culture and its three main elements: symbols, values and beliefs, and norms.
Symbols include anything that carries a specific meaning that’s recognized by people who share a culture.
Like a stop sign. Or a gesture.
If I do this [holds up one hand, palm out, then just 1 finger], you probably know that I mean: hold on a sec.
Non-verbal gestures like this are a form of language, which is itself a symbolic system that people within a culture can use to communicate.
Language is more than just the words you speak or write – and it’s not just a matter of English or French or Arabic.
The type of language you use in one cultural setting may be entirely different than what you’d use in another.
Take how you talk to people online.
New linguistic styles have sprung up that convey meaning to other people online, because internet culture.
See, there’s one right there!
If you’re internet fluent, me saying ‘because’ and then a noun makes perfect sense, as a way of glossing over a complicated explanation.
But if you’re not familiar with that particular language, it just seems like bad grammar.
Whether it’s written, spoken or non-verbal, language allows us to share the things that make up our culture, a process known as cultural transmission.
And one view of language is that it not only lets us communicate with each other, but that it also affects how people within a culture see the world around them.
This theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, argues that a person’s thoughts and actions are influenced by the cultural lens created by the language they speak.