Culture, Society and Their

Change
Social Anthropology
 Nature and Culture
• Nature:
– environment, ecology
– biological givens
• Culture:
• Culture: everyone has
Culture
• cultures: there are
variations in cultures

Gender-socialization theory
 Culture

• “It is a society’s shared and socially transmitted ideas,

values, and perceptions, which are used to make sense of
experience and generate behavior and are reflected in
that behavior.”
 Features of Culture
• Learned and socially transmitted
• Shared
• Based on symbols
• Integrated
• Dynamic
 1. Culture is learned
• Culture is not biologically inherited; it is learned.

• Enculturation: The process through which cultural belief,

ideas and perspectives are transmitted across generations.

• Through enculturation every person learns socially

appropriate ways of satisfying the basic biologically
determined needs of all humans: food, sleep, shelter,
companionship, self-defense, and sexual gratification.

• It is important to distinguish between the needs themselves,

which are not learned, and the learned ways in which they
are satisfied—for each culture determines in its own way how
these needs will be met.
 2. Culture is widely-shared
• Culture is widely-shared. Sharing the same culture
makes peoples’ behavior intelligible to each other
and enables people to predict how others are
most likely to behave in a given circumstance, and
it tells them how to react accordingly.

• Culture is widely-shared. Yet, culture is not

uniformly shared. Sometimes no two people share
the same version and there are differences in
interpreting cultural values, norms and ideas.
 Subcultures
• Subcultures: Relatively smaller groups in a society
may operate on distinctive standards of behavior
while they share common standards within the
group.

e.g.
- Youth subcultures
- Ethnic subcultures
- Religious subcultures
 CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE CULTURE AND
SUBCULTURES
• The possibilities for resolution depends on the nature of the
conflict.
Amish Native Americans

Anti-technology, radical Christian beliefs but Some traditions that are kept while others
thrift, hard work, independence, a close family life are appropriated by Euro-settler culture.
and Euro-immigrant heritage.
 3. Culture is based on symbols
• Symbol: A sign, sound, emblem or another
thing that is arbitrarily related to something
else and represents it in a meaningful way.

• Language is made up of as symbols and the combination of symbols to

refer to objects as well as ideas.
e.g. Гъби
 4. Culture is integrated
• Cultures are well-structured systems made up
of distinctive parts that are functioning
together as an organized whole.

e.g.
- Why do we see multiple wives (polygyny) in some traditional societies?
- Why do we see cannibalism in some societies?
 5. Culture is dynamic and open to change

• Cultures are dynamic systems that respond to motions

and actions within and around them.

• Cultures are flexible; adapt to the changes in the

circumstances.
– Adaptation to the environment (e.g. development of
technologies) or changing circumstances (e.g. mindset)
– Adaptation in relative degrees and in nature:
• Adaptation in a culture may be seen as maladaptation in another
culture.
• Adaptation may turn into maladaptation in time.
e.g. Online dating (what would your grandparent and parents think?)
 Nature versus Culture Debate
• A historical debate about whether the nature
or nurture determines human behaviors and
actions.

How to explain criminal behavior?

e.g. mass shooters or serial killers

Remember social anthropologists focus on

not individual but collective and commonly
shared behaviors…
 Is there a way to explain human
variation based on purely biological
categories?
 The concept «race» is a myth
• Jefferson M. Fish «Mixed Blood»
• Comparison of the concept «race» in
the USA with the concept «tipos» in
Brazil
• Like Americans we treat race as an
immutable biological given but the - Author’s American daughter and Brazilian
same people can have different race by boyfriend
- «Are you Black?»
simply jumping into a airplane from
USA to Brazil. - Daughter: «I am Black since my
mother is Black» while she is
«morena» in Brazil.
- Daughter’s boyfriend: «I’m not Black
since I am not a preto but mulato»
while he passes as «Black» in the USA

- American racial system makes classification

based on parents’ heritage rather than the
appearance while the Brazilian system relies
on categories of appearance.
 The concept of «race» is a myth
• «The short answer to the question: ‘what is race?’ is: There is no such thing. Race
is a myth. And our racial classification scheme is loaded with pure fantasy.» (Fish,
p.218)

• Race is not a biologically meaningful category to assess the human

physical/biological variation.

• The statement «race is not biologically meaningful» does not mean we are not diverse. Home
sapiens evolved from Africa and spread out to different parts of the World and over time the
human groups differentiated physically. Three different reasons for differentiation: mutation,
natural selection, genetic drift (p.218). We show adaptive differences in skin color, eyelid, body
shape.

Yet,
the way the races are classified is arbitrary (e.g. picking skin color not body type).
the way the races are classified change culturally (e.g. American system of classification
is different than the Turkish one or the Brazilian one)
the way is which human differentiation is discussed in folk taxonomies are different than
scientific taxonomies.
the taxonomies about human physical variation is not immune from practical and
political implications.
• In anthropology we transcend the nature
versus nurture discussion by utilizing a socio-
biological approach to understand human
ideas, beliefs and practices across cultures.

NOT «NATURE VS CULTURE»

BUT «NATURE AND CULTURE»
 Nature and Culture
• Human beings are biological creatures. Yet,
there are variations and similarities across
human groups

– BIOLOGICAL UNIVERSALS: e.g. feeling hungry

– BIOLOGICAL VARIATIONS: e.g. lactose
tolerance

• Human beings are social creatures. Yet

there are cultural variations and similarities
across human groups

– CULTURAL UNIVERSALS: e.g. preparing food

– CULTURAL VARIATIONS: e.g. what counts as
food (religious food taboos)
 Socio-economic factors condition our perceptions

• Eating mud: “Pica,” an eating disorder

according to American Psychology Association

• Haitian Mud Cookies:

PERSON AND SOCIETY
 Society
• An organized group or groups of interdependent people who generally
share the same space, language, culture and who act together for
collective survival and well-being.

• “Society may be defined as an organized group or groups of

interdependent people who generally share a common territory,
language, and culture and who act together for collective survival and
well-being. The ways in which these people depend upon one another
can be seen in such features as their economic, communication, and
defense systems. They are also bound together by a general sense of
common identity.”
 Components of societies
In terms of components:
• Social structure:
– Totality of the established and standardized patterns of
rules, customs, statuses, social institutions, duties, laws.

• Social organization:
– Actually existing patterns of action in the society.
 Person in Society
STATUS ROLE
• A socially defined aspect of a • Expectations from a person
person which defines the social
holding a certain status in
relationship .
the society.
• “Tags” we have.
• Every person has multiple «What should one do?»
statuses: e.g. a teacher, student,
engineer, wife, drum player.
• Statuses entails rights and
duties in social relationships. ACTUAL BEHAVIOR
• Types of statuses:
– Ascribed status: by birth Sometimes there are discrepancies
– Achieved status: through time between the expected and actual
behaviors of a person.
 Mismatches in status, role and actual
behavior
Motherhood
• Who holds the status of mother?
• Is it an ascribed or achieved status?
• What are the rights and duties comes with the mother status?
• What are the expected behaviors (i.e. social role) from one holding the
mother status in a society?
• How do individual mothers act in reality ?
• What happens when one does not comply with the social roles that are
derived from one’s status?
How about fatherhood?