Sociology · Ch 4 — Culture and Socialisation
Diverse Settings, Different Cultures
Diverse Settings, Different Cultures
Drawn by us to help you understand the concept clearly, and verified to make sure it's accurate. For exams, practice from your NCERT textbook's own diagram.
A desert camel caravan, the snow-capped mountains and Buddhist stupas of Ladakh, and a Kerala river snake-boat race are three strikingly different ways of life shaped by three strikingly different natural settings. The chapter opens its discussion of culture with images like these to show that culture is not a fixed, universal thing but is closely tied to the practical demands and poss …
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. Because groups have to adapt to the particular natural and social conditions around them, different ways of life, or cultures, emerge in different places. The 2004 tsunami on India's southern coast made this point sharply: island communities integrated into a modern way of life were caught off guard and suffered heavy losses, while tribal groups such as the Onges, Jarawas, Great Andamanese and Shompens, who had no access to modern science and technology, read the warning signs through their own inherited, experiential knowledge and moved to higher ground in time to save themselves. …