Culture can be very difficult to strictly define due to such a variety of societal aspects. According to the Webster’s Mew Dictionary of English Language, culture is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. Culture is defined in extremely vague terms as a way of life.
Culture passes on from one generation to the next. Many varieties of culture exist. Ethnic cultures such as the African-American culture, Greek culture, Indian culture, and American culture each have their own style in art, values, religion, household structure and food. Each specific generation within America also has their own culture due to their particular age group. The great age of the, “Baby Boomers,” will differ from the previous generation. Music, dress, beliefs, and goals are in general contradictory. There is the different culture of a particular age such as the Pre-historic civilization, which has drastically changed due to modernization. Culture is a particular group of people’s way of life. What that culture has idealized, moralized, and valued. Culture defines our learned behavior, whether it be the rules that define the customary ways of our thinking, feeling, social expectations, and / or our community laws.
A very important part of any culture is the social structure within. The social structure is essentially the roles or positions that particular individual or groups in a culture fall into. On a much smaller scale, the social structure exists within a family as well. In a “typical” family, the mothers usually resume the role as the caregiver, while the father plays the provider and the protector. We only need to look around to experience everything that culture contains. Everyday life is a part of culture. Each person has a role in the many different social structures, and each role is genuinely important. It is our role, in our social structures that make up every part of our culture.
The Essay on Poverty And Social Structure
Although the United States is one of the richest countries in the world many of it's people sleep in the streets, dig through garbage cans to find food, and carry all that they own in this world on their backs or in shopping carts. These people are known as the homeless. Recently I had the opportunity of helping, and at the same time being educated by one of the members of this unfortunate group. ...
Culture underlies human social behavior. What people do and do not do, what they like and dislike, what they believe and do not believe, and what they value and discount are all based, in large part, on culture. Human social behavior is based on culture and since culture is not innate, human behavior must be learned. The sociological classification system consists of three major dimensions of culture: the normative (standards for behavior), the cognitive (knowledge and beliefs), and the material (tangible objects).
An elaboration on each of these dimensions helps us to better comprehend the nature of culture.
Many Americans, in enthusiastic endorsement of multiculturalism, ignore the similarities among cultures. We tend to focus on the cultural differences despite a wide variety of “cultural universals” which are shared by all cultures. Like the United States, for instance, Iraq has families, schools, house of worship, economics, and governments. Culture is the social heritage of humans that is altered by each generation and must be learned by the newest members of that particular society.
