Introduction

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. Sociologists and anthropologists use it more precisely: culture is the shared understanding that members of a group build up through interacting with one another, and it is this shared understanding that lets people act meaningfully together. Much like a map lets you find your way through unfamiliar territory, culture is what lets you find your way through social life -- knowing how to greet an elder, how to behave at a wedding, what a gesture or a silence means.

A key point is that culture is never a finished product. It keeps changing: new elements get added, old ones fade out, and existing ones get reshaped, because culture is a living, working system rather than a fixed inheritance. What makes this possible -- and what sets humans apart from other animals -- is our capacity to arrive at a common understanding with others, to read the same meaning into the same signs and symbols. This capacity is not something we are born with; it is learned, in the company of others, inside families, peer groups and communities. Some of it we absorb through daily interaction -- watching how people talk, what a raised eyebrow or a head-jerk means in a particular setting; some of it comes to us more formally, through books and instruction.

Learning a culture is what equips a person to take on the statuses and roles society expects of them. This learning does not happen all at once. The earliest and most intensive phase, which happens mainly within the family, is called primary socialisation; the learning that continues afterwards, through school and other institutions across the rest of a person's life, is called secondary socialisation. This chapter first unpacks what culture actually consists of -- its different aspects and how it varies with setting -- and then turns to how socialisation, the process of becoming a cultural being, actually works.