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MCAT
Course: MCAT > Unit 13
Lesson 3: CultureCulture and society
Want to join the conversation?
- what is hegemony(4 votes)
- It's basically when one county dominates or has sufficient influence over another country or group of countries.(5 votes)
- Awesome. Your example of their relationship help me focus on big picture. Thank you ! I hope to watch more videos from you.(4 votes)
- Does society organizes only peoples? And if Culture are the knowledge, belief, rules, ideas: then what about institution?(2 votes)
- Wait, there is a culture that don't like phones and aren't allowed (weird). He used a phone analogy.(1 vote)
- not a great example to be honest(1 vote)
- So does religion influence culture? And how do you justify or comprehend people that blame certain cultures as a product of religion (or use religion as an excuse to make up things or twist certain aspects of religion to implement certain things into their culture)?(1 vote)
- This is a question as well as a suggestion to the community. Will there ever possibly be a foreign language section for languages like German or Spanish? It can sort of tie into culture and society for often language and culture are practically inseparable. Unless there's one already on here that I haven't noticed when searching for it?
There should be one in the future for I think that would be rather neat.
Thanks!(1 vote) - What comes first between culture and society(0 votes)
- But their is material culture too, that way isn't Culture more than a software?(0 votes)
- Would a social media platform be a cultural element? Like would it count as a symbol, language, norm, value, or artifact?(0 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Culture's a way of life shared by a group of people and it generally refers to the knowledge, beliefs and values that
bind a society togheter. So culture is very diverse
and it may include things like artwork, language and literature. These ways of thinking
and feeling and behaving, they're connected to a
shared knowledge of a society and they allow the members of that society to gain meaning from the
objects and ideas around them. When we talk about
society we're referring to the way people organize themself. Society is talking about a bunch
of people who live together usually in a specific geographic area, and these people interact
more with each other than they do with outsiders. So society shares a
common culture over time. To have an understanding
of one of these concepts you really should have an
understanding of them both. Culture can be thought of as the rules that guide the way people live. And society can be thought
of as the structure that provides organization for people. To understand this
relationship a little better let's look at a phone. Phones are pretty much just computers that we bring around everywhere and we use them for so
many different things now. There's a phone right here. Society includes key
parts called institutions. Examples include family,
education and politics. These all meet basic human needs so we can think of this as the hardware. We can think of society as the hardware. Hardware is anything
physical that you can touch. It's any physical device. This would be the actual phone, maybe even your protective phone case. These are the things you
can hold in your hand. Culture is a little bit different in a lot of respects. As we said, culture provides
guidelines for living. We can compare culture to
the software of our phone. Software is just a collection
of instructions and code that are installed on your phone and they cannot physically be touched. We can think of these
apps here as culture. I'll just draw an arrow
to one of these apps. We can think of all of
these apps as culture. These apps. Just as a reminder the physical phone is analogous to a society and the apps are like culture here. When we think about apps from when they were first being made to what they are capable of now, we know that they are
constantly being improved and oftentimes we get app updates where we get some new
features or bug fixes. This is similar to culture in sociology because culture is learned,
and it's transmitted and it's reshaped from
generation to generation. We can think of culture as
constantly being updated. Most things you do on your
phone require you to use apps so without the apps you would
just have your physical phone, you would have no way
to use it for anything, you would just be staring
at a blank screen. Apps allow the phone to be useful just as human ideas from culture allow society to work. Human ideas are big in culture. And they are what allow society to work. The physical phone represents society because it provides structure. And software and apps represent culture because they provide the rules and input that make the societies run, the apps are what make the phone run. The big takeaway is that society is just organized groups of people, and culture is their way of life. These two are not the same thing, but they cannot exist without each other. Just as a phone cannot
function without apps, society cannot function
without its culture.