alt=""/> What is considered edible, even delectable, to people in one society may be repulsive to those in another. Taste and how people eat differ greatly, depending on the culture in which one lives and what is available in that culture.
Mrs. Ukita, the mom in the Ukita family, rises early to prepare a breakfast of miso soup and a raw egg on rice. The father and two daughters eat quickly and rush out to catch their early morning trains to work and school in Kodaira City, Japan. The mother cares for the house; does the shopping; and prepares a typical evening meal of fish or meat, vegetables, and rice for the family.
The Ahmed family lives in a large apartment building in Cairo, Egypt. The 12 members of the extended family include the women who shop for and cook the food: vegetables, including peppers, greens, potatoes, squash, and tomatoes; garlic, onions, and spices; and rice, along with pita bread and often fish or meat. The adult men work in shops in one of the many bazaars, while the school-age children attend school and then help with the chores.
At the Aznaq and Za’atan refugee camps in Jordan, Syrian refugees face food insecurity. Some refugee families who are registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees receive cash vouchers to buy limited amounts of food available. Other families receive weekly rations with bare essentials for existence. Sometimes shipments of food are not possible due to hostilities, and people go hungry.
The Walker family from Norfolk, Virginia, grabs dinner at a fast-food restaurant on their way to basketball practice and an evening meeting. Because of their busy schedules and individual activities, they cannot always find time to cook and eat together—a behavior that would be unthinkable in most societies around the world.
Although most diets include some form of grain and starch, locally available fruits and vegetables, and perhaps meat or fish, broad variations in food consumption exist even within one society. Yet all of these differences have something in common: Each represents a society with a unique culture that includes growing or buying food, preparing and eating it, storing food, and cleaning up after eating. Food preparation is only one aspect of our way of life, common for all humans and necessary for survival. Ask yourself why you sleep on a bed, brush your teeth, or listen to music with friends. Our way of life is called culture.
Culture refers to the way of life shared by a group of people—the knowledge, beliefs, values, rules or laws, language, customs, symbols, and material products (such as food, houses, and transportation) within a society that help meet human needs. Culture provides guidelines for living. We are seldom conscious of learning our culture, but learning culture puts our social world in an understandable framework, providing a tool kit we can use to help construct the meaning of our world and behaviors in it (Bruner 1996; Nagel 1994). We compare culture with software because it is the human ideas and input that make the society work. Otherwise, society would just be structures, like the hard drive of a computer or framework of a house, with no processes to bring it alive.
A society is an organized and interdependent group of individuals who live together in a specific geographic area, who interact more with each other than they do with outsiders, who cooperate for the attainment of common goals, and who share a common culture over time. In most cases, societies are the same as the countries that make up the world. Each society includes key parts called institutions—family, education, religion, politics, economies, and health care or medicine—that help humans meet basic needs. This structure that makes up society is what we refer to here as the hardware, like the hard drive mentioned earlier. Culture, the software, is learned, transmitted, shared, and reshaped from generation to generation. All activities in the society, whether educating young members, preparing and eating dinner, selecting leaders for the group, finding a mate, or negotiating with other societies, are guided by cultural rules and expectations. In each society, culture provides the social rules for how individuals carry out necessary tasks.
▲ Traditional, rural Mayan women in Guatemala make tortillas or boxboles. Food preparation, as well as consumption, is a communal experience among these people with customs to be followed.
© Getty Images/Benjamin Pipe/Moment
Society—organized groups of people—and culture—their way of life—are interdependent. The two are not the same thing, but they cannot exist without each other, just as computer hardware and software are each useless without the other.
This chapter explores the ideas of society and culture and their relation to each other, what society is and how it is organized, how it influences and is influenced by culture, what culture is, how and why culture develops, the components of culture, cultural theories, and policy issues. After reading this chapter, you will have a better idea of how you learn the ways of your society and culture.
Society: The Hardware
The structures that make up society include the micro-level positions we hold (parent, student, and employee); the groups to which we belong (family, work group, and clubs); and the larger groups, organizations, or institutions in which we participate (educational, political, and economic organizations). This “hardware” (structure) of our social world provides the framework for “software” (culture) to function.
Societies, usually countries but sometimes distinct sovereign groups within countries (such as Native Americans), differ because they exist in different locations with unique resources—mountains, coastal areas, jungles, and deserts. Although human societies have become more complex over time, especially in recent history, people have been hunters and gatherers for 99% of human existence. Only a few groups remain hunters and gatherers today. As Table 3.1 illustrates, if all human history were to be compressed into the lifetime of an 80-year-old person, humans would have started cultivating crops and herding animals for their food supply only a few months ago. Note the incredible rate of change that has occurred just in the past 2 centuries.
Thinking Sociologically
What major changes took place in your grandparents’ lifetimes that affect the way you and your family live today?
▼ Table 3.1
Societies are organized in particular patterns shaped by factors that include the way people procure food, the availability of resources, contact with other societies, and cultural beliefs. For example, people can change from herding to farming only if they have the knowledge, skills, and desire to do so and only in environments that will support agriculture. As societies develop, changes take place in the social structures and relationships between people. For example, in industrialized societies, relationships between people typically become more formal because people must interact with strangers and not just their relatives. It is important to note that not all societies go through all stages. Some are jolted into the future by political events or changes in the global system, and some resist pressures to become modernized and continue to live in simpler social systems.
Evolution of Societies
The Saharan desert life for the Tuareg tribe is pretty much as it has been for centuries. In simple traditional societies, individuals are assigned to comparatively few social positions or statuses. Today, however, few societies are isolated from global impact. Even
