Culture and Socialisation

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XI (Introducing Sociology), Chapter 4.

How does a stranger know what a raised eyebrow means?

A commuter in Bangalore says one word to an autorickshaw driver, "Indiranagar?", and lifts an eyebrow. The driver jerks his head towards the back seat, or just drives away. No full sentence was spoken, yet a complete question and answer took place. Both of them share a culture: an understanding of what signs and gestures mean. A tourist who does not know the code would be lost. Now think about how you learnt your own code. Nobody sat you down and taught it. You picked it up from the people around you, and that process is socialisation. This chapter takes up both ideas.

What sociologists mean by culture

In everyday talk, "culture" means refined taste in classical music, dance or painting, or the way of life of a class or country. A sociologist uses the word differently: culture is a whole way of life in which all members of a society share, and it does not set individuals apart. Every social organisation develops a culture of its own. Think of it as a map. You need a map to move through unknown territory, and you need culture to behave in society. Culture is a common understanding that is learnt and developed through interaction. It gives a group its identity, and it is never finished: elements are constantly added, dropped, expanded and rearranged.

This ability to share meanings from signs and symbols is what separates humans from other animals. We learn tools and techniques (the material side) and signs and symbols (the non material side) from family, friends and colleagues.

Diverse settings, different cultures. People live in mountains and plains, forests, deserts, river valleys and islands, in villages, towns and cities. Different surroundings call for different strategies of coping, and so different cultures emerge. The tsunami of 26 December 2004 shows this. Mainland populations and service personnel in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, living a relatively modern way of life, were caught unaware and suffered much loss. But island tribal communities such as the Onges, Jarawas, Great Andamanese and Shompens, with no access to modern science, foresaw the calamity from experience and moved to higher ground. The lesson is that modern science and technology do not make modern cultures superior. Cultures cannot be ranked, but they can be judged adequate or inadequate in coping with the strains imposed by nature.

Two views. For the exam: cultures cannot be ranked, only judged adequate or inadequate at coping with nature. Another reading: scholars debate how far this cultural relativism should go. Some argue that universal standards, such as human rights, allow us to question particular practices in any culture, while relativists reply that such standards can themselves reflect one culture's values. Answer with the first position unless the question names the debate.

Three dimensions of culture

Sociologists separate culture into three dimensions. They work together, but separating them gives useful insights.

The cognitive and normative dimensions are non material. Our understanding of material culture such as art is incomplete without the other two. In a community where few can read, it may become the norm for private letters to be read aloud by a third person. That one example uses all three dimensions.

Cognitive aspects. These are harder to notice in your own culture than the material (visible) or normative (stated) aspects. In literate societies ideas are written down and stored in libraries and archives. In non literate societies, legend and lore are memorised and passed on orally by trained specialists, who narrate them at ritual and festive events. Walter Ong cited a 1971 study saying that only 78 of about 3,000 existing languages possess a literature, and noted that oral material has a lot of repetition to aid memory. Literacy has historically been available mainly to the privileged, and a vegetable seller who asked why he needed the alphabet when he could calculate what his customers owed him in his head. Even today, students of Indian classical music are discouraged from writing down what they learn.

Normative aspects. Norms are implicit rules that we follow mostly because socialisation has made it habit. All norms carry sanctions that promote conformity. Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that other cultures' norms hold implicit understandings: to show gratitude you should not return a gift too quickly, or it looks like clearing a debt.

Norms can discriminate: dominant sections impose dominant norms, as in norms that barred Dalits from drinking water from the same vessel or source, or kept women from moving freely in public.

Material aspects. These include tools, machines, buildings, transport and instruments of production and communication, from mobile phones and ATMs in cities to electric pumps for irrigation in villages. For a culture to function in an integrated way, material and non material dimensions must work together. When technology changes quickly, values and norms can lag behind, a situation called culture lag.

Pause and predict: a village gets mobile phones and internet quickly, but norms about who may use a phone, and when, do not keep pace. Which concept describes the gap?

Check your answer: culture lag. The material side (technology) changed faster than the non material side (values and norms).

Culture and identity: roles, codes and subcultures

Identities are not inherited. They are fashioned by individuals and groups in relationships with others. Playing a role is not enough, because it has to be recognised, often through a shared language. Students have their own words for teachers and class performances, which works as a code and creates a world of meanings. Women have created their own language and private space, whether at the village pond or across rooftop washing lines.

A subculture is a group within a larger culture marked by style, taste and association, and identifiable by speech, dress, music and ways of interacting. Subcultures can be cohesive units, such as a neighbourhood sports club whose members win recognition and a positive self image from the locality.

Ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism

When cultures meet, ethnocentrism can appear: applying your own cultural values to judge the behaviour and beliefs of other cultures, taking your values as the standard and the others as inferior. A colonial example makes the point. In his 1835 Minute on Education, Thomas Babington Macaulay proposed forming a class of people who were Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, opinions, morals and intellect.

Cosmopolitanism is the opposite: valuing other cultures for their difference, celebrating and accommodating them and encouraging borrowing to enrich one's own culture.

Take "Hinglish": words like chai, desi, prepone and time-pass are used in Indian English, and the verb "to be Bangalored" describes losing a job to outsourcing. It shows that borrowing does not erase identity. English does not become a different language by adding foreign words, and Hindi film music does not lose its character.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: ethnocentrism is judging others by your own culture, and cosmopolitanism is its opposite. In reality: the two are not a clean pair of good and bad. Everyone is a little ethnocentric because we all start from our own culture, which is why the idea only arises when cultures come into contact. Why it matters: a sociologist's task, as in earlier chapters, is to describe without judging.

Cultural change

Cultural change is the way societies alter their patterns of culture. Causes can be internal (such as new farming methods that raise production and change food and living standards) or external (conquest or colonisation, which can change deep seated practices). Change can come from changes in the natural environment, contact with other cultures, or adaptation. For example, when forest dwelling communities lose access to the forest and its produce through legal restrictions or the loss of forests, their way of life suffers badly. Tribal communities in North East and middle India were among the worst affected.

Socialisation: becoming human, becoming one of us

A newborn knows nothing of society. Socialisation is the process through which a helpless infant gradually becomes a self aware, knowledgeable person skilled in the ways of the culture into which he or she is born. Without it, a person would not behave like a human being. Consider the "Wolf children of Midnapore": two small girls reportedly found in a wolf den in Bengal in 1920, who walked on all fours, preferred raw meat, howled and had no speech.

Socialisation is life long. Parents are socialised too, as when a person becomes a parent and then a grandparent, and a child's life changes with the birth of a sibling. It is also not "cultural programming": even a newborn asserts its will by crying until someone responds, and a family's whole schedule can be rearranged around a baby.

A child belongs to a family (nuclear or extended), to a wider kin group (biradari, khandaan or clan), and to a tribe or sub caste, and to religious and linguistic groups. Each membership brings norms, values and roles that are performed simultaneously. The norms differ across castes, regions, classes, village or city, and tribes, and even the language one speaks depends on the region and the family's socio economic profile.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the Wolf children of Midnapore show what happens without socialisation. In reality: the girls were only "reportedly" found, and details of such cases are hard to check. Treat them as an illustration of how much of human behaviour is learnt, not as proof about exact outcomes. Why it matters: write "reportedly" in your own answer too.

Agencies of socialisation

Television shows the reach of media: serials and films from India have audiences in Nigeria, Afghanistan and among Tibetan emigres, and the televised Mahabharat was watched in London by children who spoke only English. A newspaper report on children copying a television superhero and suffering fatal accidents is cited to show learning by imitation.

Pause and predict: a family teaches a girl to stay quiet, her school teaches her to speak up in class, and her friends tell her to stay quiet in front of boys. What does this situation show about socialisation?

Check your answer: socialising agencies can conflict with each other. Because of this, socialisation never turns people into perfect copies, and it leaves room for independent thought.

Socialisation and individual freedom. Because culture shapes behaviour, it may seem to take away free will. That view is fundamentally mistaken. Interacting with others conditions our personalities, but socialisation also is the origin of our individuality and freedom: through it we develop a sense of self identity and the capacity for independent thought and action. Conflicts between agencies, such as home against school or peers, help to keep individuality alive.

How gendered is socialisation? Krishna Kumar's account of growing up male describes boys using streets for standing around, playing and trying out their bikes, while girls treated the street simply as a route home, usually in clusters, carrying a fear of being assaulted. The short story "The Bell" shows a girl challenging adults who say that a temple priest's daughter may touch the bell while she may not (a question of ascribed status), being escorted, having her hair oiled and tied tightly, and watching boys play football. Her punishment is a "tight lipped silence" and the missing pappadams at dinner, which are forms of informal social control. The story brings together individual and society, status, social control and the conflict between agencies.

Timeline and key names

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Understanding Social Institutions explains the family, school and religion that act as agencies of socialisation here.
• Next: Doing Sociology: Research Methods shows how Malinowski's fieldwork tradition and other methods are used.
• Class XII link: Cultural Change develops the idea of change, and The Challenges of Cultural Diversity takes up diversity and identity. Mass Media and Communications extends the media section.