STUDY GUIDE
MODULE 2: CONCEPT OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE
SOCIETY
- Group of people sharing a common identity, culture, territory, and language who act
together for collective survival and well-being
- Organization that caters to a human’s need for belongingness in a group
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIETY:
1. STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE (DURKHEIM/WEBER)
o Society is made possible by cooperation and interdependence as it views
itself as a system with parts that have respective functions to perform.
2. CONFLICT PERSPECTIVE (KARL MARX)
o Society was formed due to series of conflicts that produces new set of relations and
interactions.
3. SYMBOLIC-INTERACTIONIST (COOLEY/MEAD)
o Society was formed by the set of symbols and meanings created and interpreted by
people.
CULTURE
- Complex whole which encompasses beliefs, practices, values, attitudes, laws, norms,
artifacts, symbols, attitudes, norms, knowledge and everything that a person learns and
shares as a member of society (citing Taylor, 1920)
- An organized body of conventional understandings manifest in art which persisting through
tradition, characterizes a human group (citing Redfield, nd)
- Everything that a person learns as a member of the society (Gonzales,2016)
COMPONENTS OF CULTURE:
1. Tangible/Material
o All material objects
o Provides physical space for culture
2. Non-Tangible/Immaterial
o Abstractions
o Beliefs, values, norms, traditional skills and technologies
CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE:
1. Culture is social.
- Product of behavior and of the society
- Develops through social interaction
- The experiences of other people are impressed on a person as he or she grows up
2. Culture varies from society to society.
- Culture of each society is unique to itself due to the fact that it is a human product
3. Culture is shared.
- Various members of a society commonly share ideas, activities and artifacts, making it
socially and conventionally standardized.
- Shared culture provides order and meaning in interpreting behavioral patters of individuals in
a society.
- Transmission is not automatic but largely depends on the willingness of people to give and
receive it.
4. Culture is learned and transmitted.
- Learned socially rather than biologically
- Handed to generations through the process of socialization and/or enculturation
- Culture is bestowed in a cumulative fashion
5. Culture is continuous and cumulative.
- Culture exists as a continuous process, responsive to the changing conditions of the physical
world
FUNCTIONS OF CULTURE:
1. Culture defines situations.
o Each culture has many subtle cues which define each situation
o Cues which define situations appear in infinite variety
o A person who moves from one society to another will spend many years misreading
the cues
2. Culture defines attitudes, values, and goals.
o Attitudes, values, and goals are defined by the culture and the individual normally
learns them as unconsciously as he or she learns the language
o By approving certain goals and ridiculing others, the culture channels individual
ambitions
3. Culture defines myths, legends, and the supernatural.
o Culture provides the individual with a ready-made view of the universe
o The nature of the divine power and the important moral issues are defined by culture
4. Culture provides behavioral patterns.
o Culture imposes limits on humans and their activities
o Need for order calls forth the need for culture to establish behavioral patterns so
that disorderly behavior can be avoided
ISSUES IN CULTURE:
1. ETHNOCENTRISM
o Practice of comparing other cultural practices with those of one’s own and
automatically finding those other cultural practices to be inferior
o Conceived by William Graham Sumner; universal reaction found in all known societies
o When do we become Ethnocentric?
When you judge the behavior and beliefs of people who are different from
you
When you believe that there are primitive cultures, especially if their way of
life is different from yours
When you believe that some cultures are backward if they lack the
consumerism and technology of your culture.
o FUNCTIONS OF ETHNOCENTRISM
Encourages group solidarity
Hinders the understanding or cooperation between groups
2. XENOCENTRISM
o Preference for the foreign
o Strong belief that one’s own products, styles, or ideas are inferior to those which
originated elsewhere
3. XENOPHOBIA
o Fear of what is perceived as foreign or strange
o Can be seen in the relations and perceptions of an in-group towards an out-group
4. CULTURAL RELATIVISM
o Idea that all norms, beliefs and values are dependent of their cultural context.