Ch 4Culture and Socialisation — Class 11 Sociology, concept-first.

The word 'culture' gets used loosely in everyday talk -- sometimes to mean the fine arts, sometimes to mean the customs of a particular class or country.

People live in very different physical settings -- mountains, plains, deserts, river valleys, islands -- and in different kinds of social settings too, from villages to cities.

Ordinary usage often treats 'culture' as a mark of refinement -- knowing classical music, appreciating a particular dance form or painting -- something that separates 'cultured' people from everyone e…

Having looked at how culture has been defined, we can now break it down into its working parts. Sociologists distinguish three dimensions of any culture: the cognitive dimension, which is about how me…

Of the three dimensions of culture, the cognitive one is the hardest to notice in your own culture, precisely because it is neither visible like a tool nor spelled out like a rule.

The normative dimension of culture consists of the rules that guide how people are expected to behave in a given context -- folkways, mores, customs, conventions and, at the most formal end, laws.

The material dimension of culture covers everything a group produces and uses by means of physical materials -- tools, technologies, machines, buildings, modes of transport, and the instruments people…

A person's sense of identity is not something handed down at birth in a fixed form; it is built up, both by the individual and by the group, through relationships with other people.

It is only when different cultures come into contact with each other that the question of ethnocentrism actually arises.

Cultural change refers to the way a society's patterns of culture shift over time, and the push behind such change can come from inside a society or from outside it.

A newborn infant knows nothing at all about society or how to behave within it. Socialisation is the process through which that helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person who…

A child is socialised through several different agencies and institutions across the course of growing up -- principally the family, the peer group, the school, the mass media, and more broadly the oc…

Family systems differ widely across cultures, which means an infant's earliest experience of socialisation is not standardised either.

The peer group -- a friendship group made up of children roughly the same age -- is another major agency of socialisation.

Schooling is, on the face of it, a formal institution with a defined curriculum and a set number of subjects to be taught -- but schools function as agencies of socialisation in far more subtle ways t…

Mass media has become an increasingly central part of everyday life as a socialising force, and while electronic media such as television has expanded rapidly, print media continues to matter as well…

Beyond family, peer groups, schools and mass media, people also spend large stretches of their lives within other social settings that shape them just as surely, even if less obviously labelled as 'so…

It might seem, given how thoroughly the cultural setting we are born into shapes our behaviour, that socialisation leaves little room for genuine individuality or free will.

A short glossary of terms used across this chapter, restated here in plain language.