Q.What is meant by the material aspects of culture, and how are material and non-material culture related to one another?

The material aspects of culture refer to everything a society produces or relies on through physical objects and technologies -- tools, machines, buildings, modes of transportation, and the instruments people use for production and communication. This is the most visible and tangible dimension of culture, in contrast to the cognitive and normative dimensions, which are non-material. Its reach today is considerable: in cities, everyday dependence on mobile phones, ATMs, cars, refrigerators and computers is obvious, but rural areas show the same underlying pattern on a different scale -- a transistor radio bringing in news and entertainment, or an electric pump used to draw water for irrigation, are both examples of communities adopting technology to make daily life or production more effective.

Material culture does not exist in isolation from the non-material, cognitive and normative dimensions of culture; the two sides need each other to keep a culture functioning as an integrated whole. A new technology (material culture) typically calls for new habits of understanding it (cognitive culture) and new rules about how it should be used (normative culture). The relationship between them is not always smooth, however. When the material or technological dimension of a culture changes faster than the normative dimension -- the values, etiquette and rules that are supposed to govern its use -- can adapt, the resulting mismatch is what sociologists call culture lag: the tools race ahead while the shared understanding of how to use them responsibly struggles to keep pace. Recognising this relationship is part of why sociologists insist material culture cannot be studied in isolation from a society's beliefs and norms; each shapes, and is shaped by, the other.