Culture and Socialisation

Chapters 1–3 introduced society, its concepts and institutions. This chapter turns to culture — the shared meanings that make social life possible — and to socialisation, the lifelong process by which individuals acquire them. It ends where Chapter 1 began, with the individual and society: socialisation shapes us, yet also makes individuality and freedom possible. It has two parts, eleven numbered activities (Activity 10 is missing from this reprint) and six exercise questions.

• Builds on Chapter 2 (norms, sanctions, status, role, peer and reference groups) and Chapter 3 (family, school, religion as institutions). Leads into Chapter 5 (fieldwork — Malinowski) and Understanding Society.
• Pairs with live chapters: Class 12 Indian Society, Chapter 6 The Challenges of Cultural Diversity; Social Change and Development in India, Chapter 2 Cultural Change (Sanskritisation, Westernisation, modernisation) and Chapter 6 Globalisation and Social Change (homogenisation vs hybridisation).
• UPSC: Prelims asked where the Shompen tribe is found (2009). Mains GS1 asked about the impact on children's socialisation of mobile phones replacing cuddling (2023), the uniqueness of tribal knowledge systems (2021), and whether globalisation homogenises culture or strengthens specificities (2018); the Essay paper set ‘Culture is what we are, civilization is what we have’ (2020).

• Culture = learnt, shared, changing common understanding — a ‘map’ for conduct; it gives identity. Sociology means a whole way of life, not refined taste.
• 2004 tsunami: Onges, Jarawas, Great Andamanese and Shompens escaped using experiential knowledge — cultures cannot be ranked, only judged adequate or inadequate in coping.
• Definitions: Tylor (1871, ‘complex whole’), Malinowski (artifacts too), Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952 survey), Geertz (1973, ‘webs of significance’).
• Dimensions: cognitive, normative (folkways, mores, customs, conventions, laws), material; culture lag when technology outpaces norms.
• Ethnocentrism (Macaulay's Minute, 1835) vs cosmopolitanism (Hinglish; film music). Change: internal/external, environment; evolutionary vs revolutionary (French Revolution).
• Socialisation: primary (family) and secondary (school, peers, media, work); not cultural programming — it creates individuality; socialisation is gendered.

‘Culture’, like ‘society’, is used often and vaguely — for the arts, or the way of life of certain classes or countries. Sociologists and anthropologists study the social contexts of culture and take it apart to understand relations between its aspects. Just as you need a map in unknown territory, you need culture to conduct yourself in society. Culture is the common understanding learnt and developed through social interaction; it demarcates a group and gives it an identity. Cultures are never finished: elements are constantly added, deleted, expanded, shrunk and rearranged, which makes them dynamic.

The capacity to develop a common understanding and draw the same meanings from signs and symbols distinguishes humans from other animals. Creating meaning is learnt in the company of others — family, groups, communities; we learn tools and techniques and also the non-material signs and symbols, much of it described and conveyed orally or in books. This learning prepares us for our roles; learning in the family is primary socialisation, in school and other institutions secondary socialisation.

Humans live in mountains and plains, forests and clearings, deserts and river valleys, islands and mainlands, villages, towns and cities. In different environments people adopt different strategies to cope with natural and social conditions, producing diverse ways of life. NCERT's example is the tsunami of 26 December 2004, which struck parts of the Tamil Nadu and Kerala coasts and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Fisherfolk and service personnel on the islands, integrated into a relatively modern way of life, were caught unaware and suffered large-scale loss of life. The tribal communities of the islands — Onges, Jarawas, Great Andamanese and Shompens — without access to modern science and technology, foresaw the calamity from experiential knowledge and saved themselves by moving to higher ground. NCERT concludes that access to modern technology does not make modern cultures superior: cultures cannot be ranked, but can be judged adequate or inadequate in coping with the strains nature imposes.

Culture is often used to mean refined taste in classical music, dance or painting — taste once thought to distinguish people from ‘uncultured’ masses, even in something as individual as preferring coffee to tea. The sociologist instead sees culture as a way of life in which all members participate; every social organisation develops a culture of its own. Edward Tylor (1871) defined culture or civilisation, in its wide ethnographic sense, as ‘that complex whole’ including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Two generations later Bronisław Malinowski of Poland (1884–1942), founder of the ‘functional school’ of anthropology, wrote that culture comprises inherited artifacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits and values (1931). Clifford Geertz asked us to read human actions like words in a book: man is ‘suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, and culture is those webs — the search is for interpretation and meaning, not causal explanation (1973). Leslie White likewise stressed culture as adding meaning to objective reality — people regarding water from a particular source as holy.

What is in Malinowski's definition that is missing in Tylor's? Apart from art, Tylor's list is non-material — not because he ignored material culture (he was a museum curator who studied artifacts from societies he never visited) but to capture culture's intangible side. Malinowski, stranded on an island in the Western Pacific during the First World War, discovered the value of staying long with the people one studies — the origin of the fieldwork tradition (Chapter 5). The many definitions led Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn to publish Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952).

Three dimensions are distinguished: (i) cognitive — how we learn to process what we hear or see so as to give it meaning (recognising our own phone's ring, a cartoon of a politician); (ii) normative — rules of conduct (not opening other people's letters, performing rituals at death); (iii) material — activity made possible by materials, including tools and machines (internet chatting; designing a kolam with rice-flour paste). Understanding material culture, especially art, needs the cognitive and normative too — where few are literate, it becomes the norm for letters to be read out by a third party.

Cognitive. Our own cognitive culture is harder to see than its tangible material side or its explicitly stated norms. Literate societies store ideas in books and archives; non-literate societies commit lore to memory, with specialists trained to narrate it on ritual or festive occasions. Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy, cites a 1971 study that only 78 of roughly 3,000 existing languages possess a literature; unwritten material uses repetition to aid memory, and oral audiences are more involved than readers of an unfamiliar text; writing makes texts more elaborate. In India literacy was historically restricted to the privileged, and sociologists study how literacy can be made relevant to families who never went to school — a vegetable-seller asked why he needed the alphabet when he could calculate in his head. Students of Indian classical music are still discouraged from writing down what they learn. NCERT asks how electronic media, multiple channels and instant surfing affect attention and cognitive culture.

Normative. This dimension consists of folkways, mores, customs, conventions and laws — values or rules that guide behaviour. We usually follow norms because we are used to them through socialisation, and all norms carry sanctions (Chapter 2). Norms are implicit, laws explicit. Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that understanding another culture means grasping implicit understandings: a return gift offered too quickly looks like settling a debt rather than a friendly gesture. A law is a formal sanction defined by government, applicable to the whole society, with penalties: a family rule against staying out after sundown is a norm; stealing a necklace breaks the law of private property and can lead to trial and jail. Laws, deriving from the State, apply to all who accept its authority; norms can vary by status — dominant sections apply dominant norms, often discriminatory, such as barring Dalits from drinking from the same vessel or source, or restricting women's movement in public.

Material. Tools, technologies, machines, buildings, transport, and instruments of production and communication — mobile phones, music systems, cars, ATMs, refrigerators and computers in cities; transistor radios and electric pumps for irrigation in villages. In sum there are two principal dimensions, material and non-material; for integrated functioning they must work together. When the material changes rapidly and values and norms lag behind, there is culture lag.

Identities are not inherited but fashioned by individuals and groups through relationships with others. For individuals, roles impart identity, and roles must be recognised — often through a shared language among role-players. Students have their own ways of referring to teachers, classmates and performances, a code that creates their own world of meanings; women create their own language and private space beyond men's control when they gather at the village pond or across rooftop washing lines. Within a culture there are sub-cultures — such as those of elite and working-class youth — marked by style, taste and association: speech, dress, music, ways of interacting. Sub-cultures can be cohesive units with leaders and followers bound by a purpose — a neighbourhood youth club for sports, for instance, wins recognition in the locality, gives members a positive self-image and differentiates the group from others.

Ethnocentrism arises when cultures come into contact: it is applying one's own cultural values to evaluate other people's behaviour and beliefs, treating one's own standard as superior. NCERT reminds us that sociology is empirical, not normative. Underlying ethnocentric comparison is a sense of cultural superiority, clearest in colonial situations: Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minute on Education (1835) proposed forming a class of interpreters ‘Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, morals and intellect’.

Cosmopolitanism is the opposite: it values other cultures for their difference, does not judge them by one's own values, and welcomes exchange and borrowing to enrich one's own culture. English has become a leading international language by constantly absorbing foreign words; Hindi film music borrows from western pop and from Indian folk and semi-classical forms such as bhangra and ghazal. Such influences are incorporated in a distinctive way: English does not become a separate language, nor does Hindi film music lose its character. In a world where communication shrinks distances, a cosmopolitan outlook lets diverse influences enrich one's own culture.

Cultural change is the way societies change their patterns of culture; the impetus may be internal (new farming methods boosting production and changing food and quality of life) or external (conquest or colonisation altering deep-seated practices). Change may come through the natural environment, contact with other cultures or adaptation. When forest-dwelling communities lose access to the forest — through legal restrictions or deforestation — the effects on their way of life can be disastrous; NCERT notes that tribal communities in the North East and middle India have been worst affected. Besides evolutionary change there is revolutionary change, when values and meaning systems are transformed rapidly — through political intervention, technological innovation or ecological transformation. The French Revolution (1789) destroyed the estate system of ranking, abolished the monarchy, and instilled liberty, equality and fraternity. NCERT asks whether the expansion of electronic and print media has brought evolutionary or revolutionary change.

At birth an infant knows nothing of society; growing up, the child learns about the physical world and what it means to be a good or bad girl or boy — what will be applauded and what disapproved. Socialisation is the process whereby the helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person, skilled in the ways of her or his culture; without it an individual would not behave like a human being. NCERT recalls the ‘wolf-children of Midnapore’: two small girls reportedly found in a wolf den in Bengal in 1920, who walked on all fours, preferred raw meat, howled and lacked speech; similar cases are reported elsewhere.

Socialisation also changes those who bring up the child: parents and grandparents learn new roles; a young child's life changes with a sibling's birth. It is lifelong: the most critical learning happens early (primary socialisation), while secondary socialisation extends over the whole life. And it is not ‘cultural programming’ in which the child passively absorbs influences: even a newborn asserts her will — she cries when hungry until her carers respond, and family schedules reorganise around her. A child belongs to a family (nuclear or extended), a wider kin group (biradari, khaandaan, clan), and larger groups — tribe or sub-caste, religious and linguistic group — each imposing norms and values and corresponding roles (son, daughter, grandchild, student), learnt from early in life. Norms differ across families of different castes, regions, classes and religions, village and city, and tribes; even the language one speaks, and whether it is closer to a spoken dialect or a standard written form, depends on region and the family's socio-economic and cultural profile.

The child is socialised by many agencies: family, school, peer group, neighbourhood, occupational group, and by social class or caste, region and religion.

• Family: family systems vary, so infants' experiences are not standard; in nuclear families parents are key, in extended families grandparents, an uncle or a cousin may matter more. Families have different ‘locations’ in society — in traditional societies the family largely fixes one's position for life, and even where it does not, region and class shape socialisation sharply. Few children simply take over their parents' outlook, especially amid pervasive change; the diversity of agencies creates differences between generations.
• Peer groups: friendship groups of children of similar age; in some small traditional societies formalised as age-grades. ‘Peer’ means equal; peer relations are relatively egalitarian, with more give and take than the dependence of the family, so rules can be tested and explored. Peer relationships remain important through life — at work and elsewhere.
• Schools: a formal organisation with a defined curriculum, but also a hidden curriculum — e.g. schools where girls, rarely boys, are expected to sweep classrooms; some schools counter this by assigning tasks against stereotype.
• Mass media: print remains important — 19th-century Indian ‘conduct-books’ instructed women how to be better housekeepers and wives; electronic media can make access to information more democratic, reaching villages without roads or literacy centres. A British study found children spend the equivalent of almost a hundred school days a year watching television; the link between on-screen violence and aggression is still debated. What is certain is the extent of influence — Indian serials and films have audiences in Nigeria, Afghanistan and among Tibetan émigrés; the televised Mahabharat was dubbed for Tashkent and watched in London by children who spoke only English. Digital media is now receiving attention, especially in cities.
• Work: an important setting everywhere, though only in industrial societies do large numbers ‘go out to work’ to places separate from home; traditional communities often worked land near home or in workshops in their dwellings (Chapter 3, page 43).

Socialisation can never completely reduce people to conformity: there are conflicts between agencies — school and home, home and peers. It might seem that cultural settings rob us of individuality; NCERT calls this view fundamentally mistaken. Interaction conditions our personalities, values and behaviour, yet socialisation is also the origin of our individuality and freedom: through it each of us develops a sense of self-identity and the capacity for independent thought and action.

How gendered is socialisation? NCERT quotes Krishna Kumar (1986): boys used the streets for many things — standing around, playing, trying out bikes — while for girls the street was only a route straight home from school, walked in clusters, perhaps out of fear of assault. The same public space teaches boys freedom and girls caution.

The chapter's activities are numbered 1–9 and 11 (there is no Activity 10 in this reprint), with photo prompts and questions in the text. Short outlines follow.

The six questions at the end of the chapter (page 80). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Culture is learnt, shared and always changing — a map for conduct.
• Cultures cannot be ranked, only judged adequate or inadequate in coping.
• Sociologists see culture as a whole way of life, not refined taste.
• Tylor: ‘complex whole’; Malinowski adds artifacts; Geertz: ‘webs of significance’.
• Norms are implicit; laws are explicit and backed by the State.
• Culture lag: norms lag behind technology.
• Identities are fashioned, not inherited.
• Ethnocentrism judges others by one's own values; cosmopolitanism values difference.
• Primary socialisation in the family; secondary across life.
• Socialisation is not cultural programming — it is the source of individuality and freedom.
• Socialisation is gendered — the street teaches boys freedom and girls caution.

Traps to avoid

• Malinowski's definition adds material culture; Tylor's is mostly non-material — though Tylor studied artifacts.
• Cognitive and normative are both non-material; the two principal dimensions are material and non-material.
• Culture lag means non-material culture lagging behind material change, not the reverse.
• NCERT does not rank modern cultures above tribal ones — the tsunami example argues the opposite.
• Macaulay's Minute (1835) is NCERT's example of ethnocentrism.
• Primary socialisation is in the family; secondary socialisation runs through school, peers, media and work — lifelong.
• Socialisation is not passive ‘cultural programming’ — even a newborn asserts her will.
• ‘Webs of significance’ is Geertz, not Weber (though Geertz drew the image from Weber).
• There is no Activity 10 in this reprint; the activities jump from 9 to 11.
• The Shompen live in Great Nicobar, not the Andaman group.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Prelims asked where the Shompen tribe is found — the Nicobar Islands (2009); NCERT names them among the island tribes of the tsunami example. Learn the five PVTGs of the islands and where each lives.
• Scholar–concept pairs: Tylor (complex whole, 1871), Malinowski (functional school, fieldwork), Geertz (webs of significance, 1973), Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), Ogburn (culture lag), Sumner (folkways, mores, ethnocentrism), Cooley (looking-glass self), Mead (generalised other); Macaulay's Minute 1835.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• Socialisation (GS1): mobile phones replacing child cuddling and the impact on socialisation (2023) — primary socialisation in the family, media as an agency, imitation vs interpretation debates, class and gender angles, children's agency.
• Tribal knowledge (GS1): uniqueness of tribal knowledge systems compared with mainstream systems (2021) — the tsunami example: experiential, ecological, oral knowledge; cultures not ranked but judged by adequacy; oral transmission (Ong); threats from loss of forests and the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
• Globalisation and culture (GS1): whether globalisation homogenises or strengthens cultural specificities (2018) — cosmopolitan borrowing absorbed ‘in a distinctive way’ (Hinglish, Hindi film music, Indian serials abroad); develop with the live Globalisation chapter.
• Essay: ‘Culture is what we are, civilization is what we have’ (2020) — material vs non-material culture, culture lag, Tylor's ‘culture or civilisation’ and the MacIver distinction; cultures not ranked.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.