Definition
Culture as a design for living
Culture patterns people; people still improvise. Avoid both ‘puppet’ and ‘free atom’.
- Learned, symbolic, shared — not genes. Unity of the species, diversity of designs.
- Culture shock: homesickness, irritation, sleep mess — the ethnographer’s occupational illness.
- Harris’s infra/structure/superstructure as one integration map; Pospisil’s Kapauku pigs as a working whole.
- Maladaptive culture: festival sweets every day; once-fit habits in a new ecology.
- Benedict: ethos (emotional tone) and eidos (intellectual form); Apollonian/Dionysian as configuration, not diagnosis.
Process
Change, relativism, civilisation talk
- Innovation vs diffusion; acculturation (power) vs transculturation (two-way). Berry: integration, separation (Sentinelese teaching), marginalisation, assimilation.
- Enculturation (Herskovits): unconscious then conscious; gender training inside it. Sumner: we-group morality.
- Boasian relativism: traits make sense in context; UDHR tension is the ethics PYQ.
- A.W. Green: civilisation as language + metal + science + complex economy + polity — a checklist, not a moral peak.
- Oscar Lewis culture of poverty; Appadurai’s scapes (ethno, techno, finance, media, ideo); subculture vs counterculture; pluralism vs multiculturalism.
Thinker
Society, status, class
- Spencer organism; Durkheim sacred bind; Malinowski charter–norms–personnel–kit for institutions; Merton manifest/latent.
- Ascribed vs achieved; intersectionality; Davis–Moore vs Tumin on why inequality ‘must’ pay.
- Weber: class, status, party. Gender: sex ≠ gender; pink-collar (Howe); Ortner nature/culture; Marxist feminism’s unpaid reproduction.
- Murdock’s functional sex roles — and the criticisms. Ethnic stratification as order-for-some.
- Mobility: Sorokin; barriers including Lewis’s poverty culture. Cooley looking-glass; Goffman total institution.
Concepts
Gender, mobility, self
- Sex is biology; gender is the social script. Pink-collar work (Howe) names the jobs coded female and paid less.
- Ortner: culture ranked over nature, and women placed nearer nature — a map of male dominance, not a law of chromosomes.
- Marxist feminism: unpaid reproduction keeps wage labour going. Murdock’s ‘functional’ sex roles are the view to criticise, not to recite as nature.
- Mobility: horizontal vs vertical; Sorokin’s barriers (inspiration, opportunity, ascription). Affirmative action and elections are state levers, not magic.
- Cooley: looking-glass self — imagine appearance, imagine judgement, feel pride or shame.
- Goffman, Asylums: total institution strips the old self (prison, barracks, asylum) and rebuilds a role. The Presentation of Self (1959) is the everyday stage; keep the two books distinct.
- Bourdieu’s habitus: tastes and posture learned until they feel natural — class in the body, not only in the wallet. Reference groups set the comparison, not only the membership group.
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