society The structure of relationships within which culture is created and shared through regularized patterns of social interaction. cultural universal A common practice or belief shared by all societies. Going GLOBAL Is success in life determined by forces outside our control? Bangladesh Germany China Mexico United States 23 74 80 60 40 20 0 20 40 60 80 Source: Pew Research Center 2014a. 31 33 67 58 49 36 57 40 % Disagree % Agree As the graph illustrates, perceptions about the degree to which we control our fates vary by country. In a survey of 44 nations, only Venezuelans (62 percent) were more likely than people in the United States to disagree. The global median was 38 percent. 46 • SOC 2016 ceremonies, and religious doctrines vary significantly. In India, parents are accustomed to arranging marriages for their children, but in the United States, parents typically leave such choices up to their children. Lifelong residents of Cairo consider it natural to speak Arabic, whereas lifelong residents of Buenos Aires feel the same way about Spanish. >> Creating Culture Because we are not narrowly determined by our genes, human beings throughout history have demonstrated the innovative capacity to create amazing cultural artifacts. Examples include the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, poems by Langston Hughes, novels by Toni Morrison, and films such as Schindler’s List. We now take for granted what once seemed impossible, from air travel, to the cloning of cells, to organ transplants, to always-on wireless Internet access. We can peer into the outermost reaches of the universe or analyze our innermost feelings. In all these ways, our cultural creativity sets us apart as remarkably different from other species of the animal kingdom. CULTURAL UNIVERSALS Given that we have a certain amount of freedom to construct culture in a multitude of ways, one of the early sociological questions was whether there are any aspects of culture shared by all people. Some sociologists, such as Comte, sought to discover whether there are fundamental laws of society equivalent to the laws of nature. Such patterns were referred to as cultural universals—common practices and beliefs shared by all societies. Anthropologist George Murdock (1945) compared results from studies of hundreds of cultures and concluded that, although there are common denominators shared by all cultures, how cultures go about addressing each varies significantly. Included among his list of 70 categories were athletic sports, community organization, dancing, division of labor, folklore, funeral rites, housing, incest taboos, marriage, personal names, property rights, religious ritual, sexual restrictions, and trade. The degree of human variation we see in how we organize such activities suggests that we do not have universal laws determining human behavior that are the equivalent of the laws of nature in science. The debate about the degree to which our behavior is determined harkens back to philosophical questions regarding nature versus In so doing, we create society. Society consists of the structure of relationships within which culture is created and shared through regularized patterns of social interaction. Society provides the taken-for-granted structure within which we interact. It both enables and constrains the culture we construct. In a given culture, some ways of thinking, acting, and making seem inevitable, whereas other ways may not even be conceivable. For example, the way our society organizes government determines our rights and responsibilities and the way we organize education shapes how and what we learn. Because cultural preferences are constructed by different people in different times and places, culture varies across societies. People often confront this reality when they travel abroad and find their taken-for-granted ideas and actions to be out of place and inappropriate. Educational methods, marriage SOCTHINK How does social context influence how we relate to others? If you were asked about how school is going, how might you respond differently at home with your parents compared to in a dorm with friends or at work with colleagues?
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