Sociology

Culture
Culture can be defined as the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. (36) When you first look at someone you can see what culture they are from. Material culture is the things of culture such as jewelry, art, buildings, weapons, machines, hairstyles, and clothing. (36) Material culture is looking at the physical things about the culture. When people are judging other cultures it is usually by the physical appearance of the culture and that is called ethnocentrism. (37) Next you notice how the person talks and their gestures. Nonmaterial culture is a group’s way of thinking and doing. (36) Nonmaterial culture is digging deeper into the people’s lives and finding out their beliefs and actions. When looking into the nonmaterial culture people tend to take away their judgments and realize everyone is human and has a right to their ways of their culture. When we aren’t judging and just looking at the culture on its own terms, we are practicing culture relativism. (37) The United States is made of a pluralistic society which is a society made up of many different groups. (50) The culture we live in is very diverse. It’s a mixture of people with different material and nonmaterial cultures. The United States has thirteen major values that make up our culture. (51) I think individualism, freedom, and equality are a huge part of the United State culture. Everyone is seen as equal therefore they have the freedom to be individuals. Individualism, freedom, and equality are United States values that intertwine with each other.
On page 51, the book talks about how individualism is how someone from the bottom of society can rise to the top. I believe that statement is very true because there are many people who may have grown up in a poor environment but grow up and became very successful. I think there is more to individualism though, it also has to do with freedom. Freedom is another value in United States. People in United States are free to dress how they want, listen to what music they want, and create themselves to the people they want to be. We have the freedom to be individuals. Everyone has the same freedom to be individuals and that’s where equality comes in. United States culture is big on equality and everyone having the same rights and freedoms to be the individuals they want to be. Equality is putting people together in the same society and stating that even if everyone has different colors of skin or different beliefs, all the people in that society will have the same freedoms as the person standing next to them.
By reading this chapter it helped me realize a lot about culture. When reading on page 44, I learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis says that language influences the ways that members of a culture see the world. Our language sees the world as past, present, and future. This shows that our language determine how we see the world. Some cultures in the world have multiple names for one object when we might only have one name for the same object. It shows that the object that is named multiple times has greater value in that culture than ours. Also because our language determines how we see the world, people who speak different languages will the world differently. This means that different cultures with different languages will think different about a concept. An example I heard on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was that a translator was interpreting a bibles quote “I will wash you as white as snow” to a South African tribe but they had never seen snow or knew what it was. Therefore the interpreter had to find a different word that still kept the powerful meaning so the Africans would understand the depth of the quote. I had never thought before about how language and certain words could mean so much in culture and nothing in another culture.
When thinking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I became to think that it probably has a big impact on why some people go through a culture shock. (37) Culture shock is feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is in an unfamiliar culture. The reason why I think culture involves Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is because language in culture is such a big deal and certain words have different amounts of purpose in different cultures. I know when I was in Africa the children and you called the kids beautiful, it would put tears in the child’s eyes. If you were to call a child beautiful in the United States, they would probably feel special but not get too over whelmed by it. There are so many things to learn about different cultures and reading this chapter really helped with reading our other sociologist defined different cultures. I believe when you learn about other cultures then you can compare to your culture, you learn more about yourself and how you fit into the society you are living in.