Q.How can we demonstrate that the different dimensions of culture comprise a whole?

The three dimensions of culture -- cognitive, normative and material -- can be studied separately, but they never actually function apart from one another.

Culture is usually broken down, for analytical purposes, into three dimensions: cognitive (how a group makes sense of what it perceives), normative (the rules that guide conduct), and material (the tools and technologies it uses). Treating these separately is useful for study, but it would be wrong to conclude that they are three independent systems that just happen to sit side by side within the same culture. They are better understood as different aspects of a single, working whole.

The clearest way to demonstrate this is to look at how a single cultural object or practice necessarily involves all three dimensions at once. Take a mobile phone: it is a piece of material culture, an object and a technology. But owning and using one immediately draws in the cognitive dimension too -- recognising your own ringtone instantly among many similar phones, correctly reading the tone of a text message -- and the normative dimension as well -- shared, evolving rules about when it is rude to answer a call, or whether checking your phone during a family meal or a meeting is acceptable. None of these three aspects is separable from the others in actual practice; the object, the meaning we make of signals connected to it, and the rules governing its use are bound together the moment the technology enters social life.

Stronger evidence for the dimensions forming a genuine whole comes from what happens when they fall out of step with each other. When the material or technological side of a culture changes rapidly -- a new communication technology spreading fast, say -- while the normative side (the etiquette, laws, and shared understanding of how to use it responsibly) has not caught up, the result is a recognisable strain sociologists call culture lag. That such friction is even possible, and is a real, observable feature of societies undergoing rapid technological change, is itself proof that these dimensions are interdependent parts of one system: change pressure in one dimension visibly propagates into the others rather than staying contained.