NCERT Book Class 11 Sociology (Introducing Sociology) Chapter 4 Culture and Socialisation

CULTURE AND SOCIALISATION 63

CHAPTER 4

CULTURE AND SOCIALISATION

I Activity 1

How do you greet another person in
INTRODUCTION
your ‘culture’? Do you greet different
‘Culture’, like ‘society’, is a term used
kinds of persons (friends, older
frequently and sometimes vaguely.
relatives, the other gender, people
This chapter is meant to help us define
from other groups) differently?
it more precisely and to appreciate
its different aspects. In everyday Discuss any awkward experience
conversation, culture is confined to the you may have had when you did not
arts, or alludes to the way of life of know how you should greet a
certain classes or even countries. person. Is that because you did not
Sociologists and anthropologists study share a common ‘culture’? But next
the social contexts within which culture time round you will know what to
exists. They take culture apart to try do. Your cultural knowledge thereby
and understand the relations between expands and rearranges itself.
its various aspects.
Just like you need a map to
navigate over unknown space or constantly being added, deleted,
territory, you need culture to conduct expanded, shrunk and rearranged.
or behave yourself in society. Culture This makes cultures dynamic as
is the common understanding, which functioning units.
is learnt and developed through social The capacity of individuals to
interaction with others in society. A develop a common understanding with
common understanding within a group others and to draw the same meanings
demarcates it from others and gives it from signs and symbols is what
an identity. But cultures are never distinguishes humans from other
finished products. They are always animals. Creating meaning is a social
changing and evolving. Elements are virtue as we learn it in the company of