Lecture: Culture
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 3
Opening
Picture three people on three different days. A nurse is explaining a care plan to a family whose customs differ from the clinic's. A manager is writing a dress code for a team. A student is settling into a new campus and trying to work out what everyone else seems to know already. None of them has a rulebook. All of them are reading the same thing: the unwritten rules a group shares.
In Week 1, you met the three perspectives and the macro and micro levels of analysis. In Week 2, you learned to ask how evidence was gathered and to read a figure four ways. In this lecture we put both to work on culture. I'll start by pulling culture apart from society. Then we'll separate values from beliefs, rank the rules people follow, and ask how each rule is enforced. After that come symbols and language, a few ideas for looking across cultures, two ways of meeting an unfamiliar custom, and the groups that live inside a culture. We'll finish by running one workplace rule through all three perspectives. Next week, in Week 4, the course asks how each of us learns a culture in the first place.
Let's start with a moving truck.
1. Culture and society, material and nonmaterial
Imagine a family moving across the country for a new job. They leave their neighbors behind, and their old school, and the people at the corner store. But they bring more than boxes. They bring the way they celebrate birthdays, the words they use for things, and their sense of what counts as rude. They left one society behind. They carried their culture with them.
That's the first distinction of the week. Culture is the shared values, beliefs, norms, symbols, language, and material objects of a group, which its members learn and pass on. Society is the people who share a culture and interact with one another, usually within a shared territory. Society is the people; culture is what they share.
Culture itself has two sides. Think about a recreational soccer team. The jerseys, the cleats, and the cooler of orange slices are things you can hold. That's material culture, the physical objects a group makes and uses. The habit of shaking hands with the other team after a match, the value of showing up for teammates, and the nickname everyone uses for the coach are ideas. That's nonmaterial culture, the ideas a group shares about how to live, including its values, beliefs, norms, symbols, and language.
Here's a test I like. If every player quit, and a new group bought the same jerseys but kept none of the habits, the objects would survive. The team's culture would not.
Pause and try this. A friend says, "Our society loves birthday cake." Is that sentence about culture or about society?
Ask yourself: the people, or what they share?
Here's the answer. It's about culture. Loving birthday cake is something the group shares, so the sentence should say "our culture."
2. Values and beliefs
Two coworkers are arguing on a break. One says, "Honesty matters more than anything." The other says, "Anyone who works hard enough can get ahead." Both sound like big statements about life. They're two different kinds of statement.
Values are a culture's shared standards of what is good, right, and desirable, such as honesty or family loyalty, which people use to judge behavior. Beliefs are statements the people in a culture hold to be true, such as the conviction that hard work leads to success. Unlike a value, a belief can be checked against evidence.
So the first coworker named a value. Honesty is a yardstick you judge by. Nobody can prove it true or false. The second coworker stated a belief. Whether hard work is enough to get ahead is a claim about the world, and later in the course you'll read real evidence on it.
Pause and try this. At a neighborhood meeting, someone says, "We should take care of our elders." Is that a value or a belief?
Could you test it with evidence, or is it a yardstick?
Here's the answer. It's a value. It's a standard of what's good, not a claim about the world that a survey could check.
3. Ranking norms, and how they're enforced
You're in line at a food truck. Someone walks past everyone and orders first. Nobody calls the police, but people stare, and somebody mutters. Now picture someone in a cemetery digging up a grave. The reaction isn't a stare. It's shock, and a criminal charge. Both are broken rules. They don't weigh the same.
Sociologists call these rules norms: the shared rules of a group for how people are expected to behave in a given situation. They come in three weights. Folkways are everyday customs that carry no moral weight, such as how quickly to answer a message. Mores are norms that carry moral weight, such as honesty on an exam, and the singular is mos. A taboo is the strongest kind of prohibition, a norm so serious that even the thought of breaking it shocks people. Sumner, in his 1906 book Folkways, brought the words folkways and mores into sociology.
That's the first question you ask of any norm: how much moral weight does it carry? The second question is how the group enforces it. A sanction is a reward or a penalty that a group uses to enforce a norm. A positive sanction is a reward, and a negative sanction is a penalty. A formal sanction comes from an official body under written rules, like a school, an employer, or a court. An informal sanction comes from ordinary people in everyday life, like a smile or a cold shoulder.
Let me walk you through the six-norm sort, which is illustrative, made up for this course. Answering a friend's group-chat message within a day is a folkway; break it and you get a teasing "hello??", a negative, informal sanction. Waiting until everyone is served at a family dinner is a folkway; keep it and a grandparent smiles, a positive, informal sanction. Wearing the store's uniform shirt on shift is a folkway too, and breaking it gets you a written warning, a negative, formal sanction. Doing your own work on an exam is a mos. Returning a lost wallet with the cash inside is a mos, and the neighborhood association gives you a good-neighbor award, a positive, formal sanction. Never disturbing a grave is a taboo.
Add them up. That's 3 folkways, 2 mores, and 1 taboo, for 6 norms. And 3 of the 6 sanctions are negative and formal.
Pause and try this. The uniform-shirt rule is written down, and breaking it brings a formal sanction. So is it a mos?
Separate the two questions before you answer.
Here's the answer. No, it's still a folkway. Wearing the wrong shirt isn't a moral wrong, and moral weight, not paperwork, is what makes a norm a mos.
That's the line I want you to carry: moral weight and formality are two questions, not one.
4. Symbols and language
Send a thumbs-up emoji to two friends. One reads it as a cheerful "got it." The other reads it as curt, almost rude. The little picture didn't change. The meaning each person attached to it did.
A symbol is anything that carries a meaning the members of a group share, such as a gesture, an emoji, a flag, or a ring. A red light means stop to every driver who learned the same traffic rules. Language is a system of spoken, written, or signed symbols that the members of a culture use to communicate and to pass their culture on. It's the biggest symbol system a culture has.
Language may do more than carry a culture. Think about a restaurant kitchen, where the crew says "in the weeds" when someone is falling behind. A new cook who learns that phrase may start noticing that moment sooner, because now there's a word for it. That idea has a name. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the proposal that the language people speak shapes how they perceive and think about the world.
Notice the word hypothesis. It's a claim to be tested, not a proven law. One kitchen can't prove it. You'd need a study designed to test it.
Pause and try this. A classmate writes, "The Sapir–Whorf law proves that your language decides what you can think." What's wrong with that sentence?
Look at the word law, and the word proves.
Here's the answer. It's a hypothesis, not a law, and nothing has proven it. A careful sentence says the hypothesis proposes that language shapes perception.
5. Looking across cultures and across time
Imagine a student spending a few months with a host family abroad. On the first night, dinner runs for hours and nobody eats alone in their room. The student's usual habits suddenly feel wrong, and nobody explains the new ones. A few weeks later, the long dinners feel normal. That stretch in between is culture shock: the disorientation and stress people feel when they enter an unfamiliar culture and the norms they know no longer guide them.
Some patterns show up everywhere. A cultural universal is a pattern or practice found in every known culture, such as having a language, even though its form differs from one culture to the next. The idea is associated with Murdock. Every known culture has a language and some recognized form of family. But the languages differ, and so do the families. Universal doesn't mean identical.
Cultures also change, and their parts don't always change at the same speed. Cultural lag is the gap that opens when material culture changes faster than the nonmaterial culture, such as the norms, around it. Ogburn named the idea in his 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature.
Here's one real figure to read with Week 2's four questions. Pew Research Center's Mobile Fact Sheet reports that 35% of U.S. adults owned a smartphone in 2011 and 91% in 2025. That's a rise of 56 percentage points in 14 years. What's measured is self-reported smartphone ownership, among U.S. adults, in those two years. It shows how fast one material object spread.
Pause and try this. Does the smartphone figure show that the rules about phones at dinner have fallen behind?
Ask what the figure actually measures.
Here's the answer. No. It measures ownership, not norms, so any lag in the rules is a separate claim this figure can't test. And it's a description, neither a correlation nor a cause.
6. Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism
Two roommates are comparing their families. In one family, dinner is early, the moment everyone gets home. In the other, dinner starts late in the evening. The first roommate says, "Eating that late is weird." The second says, "Eating that early is like eating lunch twice." Each one is measuring the other's family against their own.
That move is ethnocentrism: judging another culture by the standards of your own culture, usually in a way that treats your own as the right or normal way. Sumner popularized the word in the same 1906 book that gave us folkways and mores.
The opposite move is cultural relativism, the practice of understanding a custom by the meaning it has within its own cultural context. A relativist asks questions first. When do the adults in each house get home from work? When does homework end? Is dinner a quick refuel, or the main time the family talks? Asked that way, each dinner hour makes sense inside its own household.
Here's the trap. Cultural relativism is a method of study, not a moral verdict that every practice is acceptable. It means understand first. It doesn't mean you can never say a practice causes harm.
Pause and try this. Someone says, "Cultural relativism means nothing can ever be criticized." Is that right?
Think about whether relativism is a method or a verdict.
Here's the answer. No. Relativism is a method for understanding a practice in its own context. Whether the practice is right is a separate question you can still ask.
7. Subcultures and countercultures
Picture an illustrative esports team that practices late into the night several times a week. Its members use slang outsiders can't follow, wear matching headsets, and have their own rituals before a match. And yet they still go to class, hold jobs, pay rent, and follow the same laws as everyone else.
That's a subculture: a group within a larger culture that shares the dominant culture's main norms and values but also has distinctive norms, language, or styles of its own.
Now picture a different illustrative group, an off-grid community that refuses to use money, rejects private property, and won't take wage work. It doesn't add a few special habits. It sets itself against the dominant culture's central rules. That's a counterculture: a group within a larger culture that actively rejects the dominant culture's norms and values and puts its own in their place.
The test isn't how unusual a group looks. It's whether the group adds to the dominant norms or rejects them.
Pause and try this. A hospital night-shift crew has its own jokes, its own break rituals, and its own words for a rough shift. Subculture or counterculture?
Does the crew add norms, or reject the main ones?
Here's the answer. A subculture. The crew adds distinctive habits, but it keeps the dominant culture's central norms about work, pay, and the law.
8. One cultural norm through three lenses
Let's go back to the uniform shirt from the six-norm sort. It's a small folkway with a formal sanction. Now I want to read it through each of Week 1's three perspectives, one at a time, in the usual order.
Structural functionalism works at the macro level. It asks what job a pattern does for the whole. Through that lens, the rule helps the store run: customers can find staff, and the shared look signals a team.
Conflict theory also works at the macro level. It asks who benefits and who decides. Through that lens, the rule raises a question about who writes it and whose styles it treats as the default, since the people who set a dress code are rarely the people who wear it.
Symbolic interactionism works at the micro level. It asks what a thing means to people in a face-to-face moment. Through that lens, the shirt says "ask me" to a customer, and to the worker it might feel like pride, or like a costume.
No lens wins. Each one answers a different question at its own level, and you'll get a fuller picture by keeping all three.
Pause and try this. Which of the three readings of the uniform shirt works at the micro level?
Find the one that looks at two people, not the whole store.
Here's the answer. Symbolic interactionism. It looks at what the shirt means in the face-to-face moment between a worker and a customer.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Culture is what a group shares, and society is the people who share it; culture has a material side of objects and a nonmaterial side of ideas. A value is a standard of what's good, and a belief is a claim about what's true. Norms come as folkways, mores, and taboos, and sanctions are positive or negative and formal or informal. Moral weight and formality are two questions, not one.
Symbols carry shared meaning, and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is a hypothesis, not a law. Cultural universals show up everywhere in different forms, culture shock is the jolt of the unfamiliar, and cultural lag is material change running ahead of the norms. Ethnocentrism judges first, while cultural relativism tries to understand first. A subculture adds to the dominant culture, and a counterculture pushes against it. And the three perspectives read one custom at two macro levels and one micro level.
Next in this module come the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, the discussion, and the assignment. Next week, in Week 4, Socialization & the Self, we'll ask how each of us learns all of this in the first place.
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