Introduction to Sociology/Culture/shin min kyung

summary

This topic is about theories of culture , potential for culture change and sociologists's invesgating methods. Culture includes objects and symbols, and norms, beliefs, values which is vested to these objects and symbols show social life properly. In any given society, cultures can't identical with other one necessarily. Mostly, culture is realatively stable but also has debatable points. Cultures also have multiple levels of meaning and each of them can affect various ways.
 The simplest and fastest way to think about culture is to think the relationship between nature(biology, genetics) and nurture(environment, identites). Biologically, we are granted certain form of genetics and ability. So, biological nature can't determine who we are exclusively. That is why culture is important. Human beings are learned everything in their own culture. Theorists Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Herbert Mead declare languages are the root of human's culture. Languages remain stably rather than other cultural elements and keep changing fluidly according to society's change.
  The most well-known cultural form is European culture which is formed between 18th century and the early 19th century. Mostly upper class enjoyed this kind of culture and the others were undervalued relatively. But the end of the 19th century, anthropologists started shifting their existing ideas. Rather than determining the ranking of cultures, they started regarding each culture's objects and symbols. This new perspective got rid of the idea of cultured vs uncultured. 
 Subculture can be distinctive by age, class, area. And we can find subcultures through fashion, language, etc.. Counterculture is a kind of subcultures, which has conflict with main culture's norms and values.
 Enthnocentrism means watching the world in one's own cultural sight. Ironically, enthnocentrism occurs every society. Enthnocentrism thinks their race and ethnic group is the best and other cultural groups are superior than them. In other words, a nation and member of that nation judge with  other cultural group's certain elements. Sociologists study ethnocentrism to find the elements from politics to terrorism. Also, sociologists help other people to realize that ethnocentrism affects bad influence to human beings society's solidarity and peace.
 There is a certain theoretical approache advocatd by sociologist Ritzer. His integration theory model is composed of four interdependent sociological elements. One ranging from objective to subjective, the other ranging from the macro-level to micro-level. Understaing to certain culture phenomenon, ritzer's model would expain how cultural norms affect to personal behavior.
 Culture's function is to unity social group members. Culture can fulfill their desire and instince as human beings. On the other hand, culture also create and sustain society's inequality. Thus, culture can justify exisiting inequality and oppression such as race, class, sexualities.
 Cultures are both predisposed to change and resistant to it, for instance, gender conflict. Culture change have many various causes. In environment, the end of ice age lead the beginning of agriculture. In addition, the invention of television reduces american's involvement in Civic life. Also, contacts between culture and other cultures result in accultration. Native American Indians follow european's cultures and lifestyles against their will, if they didn't, they were expelled. This is one example of accultration. Each different cultures may occure through force or choice. 
 Society and culture co-exist as long as human being have social relationships. Consequently, culture means everything that human beings create. And they change constantly and fluidly.



Interesting

At the last paragraph, a example of cultural changes, i am very surprised at increasing of beef consumption in India. I always think that religion is the most powerful culture than any other thing, so the element which is forbidden by religion will never change. It is better to accept a natural process rather than having positive or negative attitude. In 21th century, eating beef or not is on personal choice. Until now, the Christian religion have severe repulsion at homosexuality. I don't know there is something clear mentions about forbidden homosexuality. If culture is a fluid according to society, recognition of homosexuality in Christian could change now?



Discussion

I remember one question when i study essay. That is " Do we always have to have cultural relativism?" and " Can we judge other
unique culture wich is very different with ours?"
In our world, there exist some indigenous people who have cultures which seems to be an infringement on personal rights. For instance, some natvie women expand their neck length through hanging many metal rings becuase long neck is a symbol of beauty in their culture. But it can threat their own life. In another native culture, woman have to have sexual intercourse with outsiders and receive stuffs from him. Because the woman who has the largest number of objects becomes the best woman to marry. Then, can we criticize their own culture?