What Culture Is - Material and Non-Material

Welcome to Part 2.

Part 1 installed the eyes. You can now see that private troubles sit inside public arrangements, that society is partly inside you, and that the whole apparatus can be misused. What you do not yet have is vocabulary — the precise words for the things you are now able to see.

That is what this Part is for. Think of it as being handed the Lego pieces. Culture, values, norms, sanctions, symbols, status, role, group, institution, structure, socialisation, self, interaction. Thirteen or so words, each with a technical meaning sharper than its everyday one. Once you own them, you can say precise things — and precision is what separates an insight from a feeling.

We begin with the biggest word in the discipline.

Imagine your great-grandmother — a woman born around 1930, in whatever country your family comes from — is placed in your kitchen for one hour. She is intelligent, curious, and in good health. She speaks your language, or at least the version of it she grew up with.

First, the objects. She does not know what most of them are. The refrigerator she might guess at. The microwave, no. The induction hob is a flat plate that does nothing visible. There is a machine for washing plates, which she will find morally suspicious. There is a bottle of liquid soap, a roll of paper towels, a plastic container of instant noodles, a phone charging on the counter, and a small speaker that talks. She would not know what to do with almost any of it, and she would not know which of it is expensive.

Now, the ideas. These are stranger to her than the machines.

You buy food already cooked, several times a week, from strangers, and this is not a sign of crisis. You eat at irregular hours, sometimes alone, sometimes standing. You do not know your neighbours' names. Your kitchen contains no shrine, or a small one, and nobody comes to check. Your brother cooks. Your salary is not pooled with your father's. You take a photograph of your food. You have a phrase — work–life balance — which she could parse word by word and would not understand as a concept, because the arrangement it describes had not been invented.

She could learn the machines in a week. The ideas would take her the rest of her life, and she would probably never stop finding some of them faintly wrong.

The idea, in plain words

The classic anthropological definition is Edward Tylor's, from 1871: culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Note the last five words. Acquired — not inherited biologically. As a member of society — not as an individual.

Culture in the everyday sense, and why sociology uses a bigger one

There is a narrow everyday meaning of "culture": the arts. Museums, poetry, classical music, theatre — the things a "cultured person" is supposed to appreciate.

Sociology and anthropology use a far broader meaning that includes the arts as one small province. On the sociological definition, a bus queue is culture. Instant noodles are culture. The way you greet your father is culture. So is a WhatsApp forward and the etiquette of when to leave a party.

Raymond Williams (5.12), one of the founders of cultural studies, made the case that this broadening was itself a political act. His famous phrase — culture is ordinary — insisted that working-class life had a culture, in the full sense, and was not merely a deficient version of an elite one. Before that argument was won, "culture" was something the educated had and everybody else lacked. Keep that history in mind, because the narrow definition never fully went away: you will meet it again in 2.1.11, where "high culture" and "popular culture" turn out to be doing hard status work.

Culture is not the same as society

An early distinction that will save you real confusion later, because beginners use the two words interchangeably and they are not interchangeable.

Society refers to the people and their relationships — an organised group of people who interact, share a territory, and are connected by durable patterns of relationship. It is a structure of positions and connections.

Culture refers to the shared way of life those people have — their meanings, practices and objects.

The metaphor most people find useful: society is the cast and the arrangement of the stage; culture is the script, the props, and the conventions of the performance. Neither exists without the other in practice, and you can only separate them analytically — but the separation is worth making, because a single society can contain many cultures, and one culture can span many societies. There are Tamil speakers in Chennai, Colombo, Singapore and Toronto; they share a great deal of culture and belong to four societies.

Culture is also not the same as nature, though the boundary is genuinely blurry and the interesting cases sit on it. You must eat: that is nature. What counts as food, who eats first, whether you use fingers, a fork or chopsticks, whether eating alone is sad, and which animals are unthinkable — all culture. Hunger is biological. Cuisine is not.

Six properties of culture worth memorising

These six show up in every textbook because they are genuinely the load-bearing features.

1. It is learned. Not inherited biologically. A newborn taken at birth to another society acquires that society's culture completely, with no trace of its parents' — which is one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have for the whole sociological view of human beings.

2. It is shared. A private habit is not culture. Culture is what is held in common enough that others can anticipate and evaluate it. This is why culture makes coordination possible (1.2.1).

3. It is transmitted across generations, through socialisation (2.3) — mostly by ordinary teaching, correction and imitation, mostly by people who love you, mostly without anyone noticing they are doing it.

4. It is symbolic. It works through things standing for other things — words, gestures, flags, colours, clothes (2.1.5). This is why culture can carry meanings that nothing physical about the object explains.

5. It is cumulative. This is the deep one. Because humans transmit culture with high fidelity, each generation does not start over: it inherits the accumulated inventions of everyone before. No individual could design a smartphone, a legal system or a language. Culture is how a species with ordinary individual brains achieves collectively extraordinary things — sometimes called the ratchet effect, because the accumulated knowledge rarely slips backwards.

6. It is adaptive — and maladaptive. Culture lets groups adjust to environments far faster than biological evolution could: clothing for cold, irrigation for drought, medicine for disease. And it can also carry practices that harm the people who hold them, sometimes for centuries. Nothing guarantees that an inherited practice is good for you (1.2.3).

Pick up a teacup — an ordinary one, from a stall or a kitchen.

Material culture: clay or porcelain or plastic, a shape refined over centuries, produced in a factory using a technology transmitted from elsewhere, at a size that reflects an assumption about how much a person drinks at once.

Non-material culture inside the same object: that hot drinks are social and cold ones are not; that offering one to a guest is nearly obligatory and refusing is nearly rude; how many times you may refuse before accepting; whether sugar is assumed; whether the cup you are given signals something about your standing; that "come for tea" is an invitation whose real subject is not tea; who in the household is expected to make it; and whether a person may be interrupted while drinking it.

None of that is in the clay. All of it arrives with the cup. This is why the sociological definition has to be broad: the object and the meanings cannot be studied apart.

Go deeper

Cultures are not billiard balls

The most important correction to make early, because the popular image of culture is badly wrong and does real damage.

The popular image: the world contains a number of discrete cultures, each internally uniform, each with a boundary, each attached to a nation or an ethnic group, meeting one another as intact units — like billiard balls colliding.

Every part of that picture fails on inspection.

Cultures are internally diverse. "Indian culture" contains twenty-two scheduled languages, several major religions, radically different kinship systems between north and south (Karve, 6.2.8), and class differences so large that two Indians may share less daily practice than either shares with a foreigner of the same class. The same is true of "American," "Chinese" and "African" culture — the last of which describes fifty-four countries.

Cultures are contested. At any moment, people inside a culture are arguing about what it requires — about dress, marriage, food, who may enter which building. Those arguments are not a departure from culture; they are culture in operation. Whoever wins gets to call their position "the tradition."

Cultures are hybrid. Almost nothing is pure. Chilli, the defining note of Indian food, arrived from the Americas via Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century. Tea, the defining British beverage, is Chinese. The "traditional" is nearly always an earlier borrowing that has been naturalised (1.1.2).

And boundaries are drawn by people, for reasons. Who counts as inside a culture is itself a claim, usually made in a political argument, usually by someone with an interest in where the line falls (8.5, 9.5).

Culture as explanation: the trap

A warning that belongs here, and follows directly from 1.3.6 and 1.5.3.

"Culture" is the most tempting explanation of last resort in the social sciences. Why is that country poor? Their culture. Why don't women there work? Their culture. Why is corruption high? Culture.

Notice what such statements do. They explain a variable outcome by an unmeasured constant, they treat the group as homogeneous, they usually locate the cause in something the group cannot easily change, and they are almost never applied by the speaker to their own group. This is culturalism, and it has a long and shabby history — it was, for a century, the standard explanation of why colonised peoples were poor, and it happened to make the colonisers' role invisible.

The corrective is not to deny that culture matters — it plainly does. It is to demand of any cultural explanation exactly what 1.5.3 demanded: name the specific practice, name the mechanism, show that it varies where the outcome varies, and check whether a material explanation does the work better.

Two tests worth applying whenever you hear a cultural explanation. First: has this culture always produced this outcome? South Korea's "Confucian culture" was cited in the 1950s to explain economic stagnation and in the 1990s to explain rapid growth. A constant cannot explain a change. Second: does the same culture produce different outcomes elsewhere? If the same group prospers under one set of institutions and not another, look at the institutions.

Why humans have culture at all

Worth two paragraphs, because it grounds everything else.

Many animals learn socially, and some have local traditions — birdsong dialects, chimpanzee tool techniques. What appears to be distinctively human is the fidelity and scale of transmission: language, teaching, and the ability to imitate not just an outcome but a procedure. This allows the ratchet — improvements accumulate rather than being reinvented — and it means humans adapt at the speed of learning rather than the speed of genetic change.

The consequence for sociology is fundamental. Human beings are the animal that is incomplete at birth and finished by a group. That is why 1.1.3 could say that society is partly inside you: it has to be, because without it there is not enough of you to function. Culture is not a decoration on human nature. It is a necessary organ that happens to be located outside the body.

"Culture means the arts." Not in sociology. It means the entire learned, shared way of life. The arts are one region of it.

"One nation, one culture." Almost never true. States are political units; cultures do not respect their borders, and no state is culturally uniform.

"Culture is what other people have." The definitional error behind a century of bad social science (1.4.3). You are as thoroughly cultured as anyone you might study — the difference is only that yours is invisible to you.

"Culture explains it." Only if you can name the practice and the mechanism. Otherwise you have relabelled the outcome (1.5.3).

"Culture is fixed." Every element of it is being transmitted, adjusted, resisted and reinvented right now. That is why 2.1.15 exists.

"Material culture is the trivial part." Objects carry and enforce meanings, and they change slower or faster than ideas — which is the whole subject of cultural lag (2.1.15). A society's plumbing shapes its notions of purity.

Why it matters

It gives you the widest lens in the discipline. With this definition, nothing in human life is off the table: food, jokes, queues, tattoos, funerals, spreadsheets, memes. Everything humans share and pass on is available for study.

It relocates you. You now know that you are inside a culture, not standing outside all of them looking in. That is the precondition for 1.1.2's habit of seeing the strange in the familiar, and for the whole global project of Part 6.

And it makes the rest of Part 2 possible. Culture is the container; the next fourteen lessons take out its contents one at a time — values, norms, sanctions, symbols, beliefs — and each one turns out to be a precision instrument.

Culture is the whole learned, shared way of life of a group: everything its members make, mean, do and transmit.

Material culture is objects and technologies; non-material culture is values, norms, beliefs, language, symbols and meanings.

Sociology uses a broad definition, not the narrow "arts" one. Williams: culture is ordinary — and broadening the word was itself a political achievement.

Culture is not the same as society (people and their relationships) or nature (hunger is nature; cuisine is culture).

Six properties: learned, shared, transmitted, symbolic, cumulative (the ratchet), and adaptive — but not always beneficial.

Cultures are not billiard balls: they are internally diverse, contested, hybrid, and bounded by claims people make for reasons.

Beware culturalism — explaining variable outcomes by an unmeasured cultural constant. Demand a practice, a mechanism, and variation.

Culture — the learned, shared way of life of a group: its objects, practices, meanings, values, norms and knowledge.

Material culture — the physical objects and technologies a group produces and uses.

Non-material culture — the intangible elements: values, norms, beliefs, language, symbols, knowledge.

Society — an organised set of people connected by durable patterns of relationship, usually sharing a territory.

Cultural transmission — the passing of culture between people and across generations, chiefly through socialisation.

Cumulative culture (the ratchet effect) — the accumulation of inventions and knowledge across generations because transmission is high-fidelity.

Culturalism — the error of explaining variable social outcomes by reference to an unspecified, unmeasured cultural essence.

Hybridity — the mixed, borrowed character of all actual cultures (see also Bhabha, 6.7).

Tylor's definition — the classic 1871 formulation of culture as the complex whole of capabilities and habits acquired as a member of society.

One — the great-grandmother test. Write two lists for your own home: ten objects she would not recognise, and ten ideas or expectations she would find strange. The second list is harder to write and more revealing.

Two — material and non-material of one object. Choose a single object you use daily. Write everything physical about it, then everything it means, expects or implies. Notice which list is longer.

Three — find the hybrid. Pick three things considered typically "yours" — a food, a garment, a musical form. Find out where each actually came from and when. Expect surprises.

Four — culturalism watch. For one week, note every time someone explains a group's behaviour by "their culture." For each, ask the two tests: has that culture always produced this outcome, and does the same culture produce different outcomes elsewhere?