Lecture
Even within a single society, various types of culture can be distinguished.
Based on its structure, material culture, spiritual culture, artistic culture, and physical culture are distinguished.
Material culture is the material values created by people. It includes the culture of everyday life — the material side of human daily existence (clothing, furniture, household items, appliances, communal amenities, food); the culture of labor (technology and tools, energy sources, industrial facilities, communication systems, and energy infrastructure); the culture of place, or of settlement (type of housing, the structure and features of populated areas).
Spiritual culture consists of ideal (that is, nonmaterial) forms of social life and ideas that people create. Spiritual culture can be said to include religious culture (systematized religious teachings, traditional confessions and denominations, contemporary cults and teachings, ethnographic religiosity), intellectual culture (philosophy, history, science), legal culture (judicial proceedings, legislation, the executive system, law-abidingness), political culture (the traditional political regime, ideology, norms of interaction among political actors), ethical culture (ethics as the theoretical understanding of morality, morals as its social expression, conscience as a personal norm), and pedagogical culture (the ideals and practice of education and upbringing). It should be noted that the concept of "spiritual culture" also includes material objects that embody the world of spiritual culture: libraries, museums, educational institutions, courts, and the like.
Artistic culture is the totality of all types of artistic activity, including both the product and the process of that activity. Artistic culture includes applied art, or design (numbering more than 400 types: culinary art, cosmetics, hairdressing, floristry, lighting design, and so on); "pure" or "fine" art (traditionally seven types are distinguished: architecture, visual art, music, literature, dance, theater, and cinema).
Physical culture is expressed in a subjective (bodily) form and satisfies people's primary needs. Physical culture includes: the culture of physical development (from general fitness to professional sport); recreational culture — the maintenance and restoration of health (medicine, tourism); and sexual culture — the forms of expressing and satisfying sexuality accepted in society.
By scale of dissemination, culture is divided into dominant culture, subculture, and counterculture.
Dominant culture is the culture of the majority or of the ruling classes. These are common, unified forms of culture characteristic of large societies, nations, or peoples as a whole. Thus, a shared history, living conditions, and features of everyday life lead to the emergence of common socio-psychological traits of a people, which are called a mentality.
A subculture is a system of norms and values that is widespread within a particular social community and distinguishes it from others. Subcultures form under the influence of such factors as class affiliation, ethnic origin, religion, place of residence, age, and so on. Thus, businessmen and the homeless, programmers and athletes, Christians and Buddhists, city dwellers and farmers, the young and the elderly, drug addicts and alcoholics, and so on, each have their own culture. A person can take part in many subcultures at the same time; however, this does not mean that they are rejecting the dominant culture - most often they merely display a minor deviation from it. But a subculture can sometimes take the form of a counterculture.
A counterculture is a subculture whose norms and values not only differ from generally accepted ones but actively oppose them. A counterculture is a form of protest, a challenge to the existing social system; the main goal of those who carry a counterculture is to provoke society, to arouse interest in the "underground," and to draw attention to certain social problems. Examples of a counterculture include the culture of hippies, terrorists, and criminals.
Countercultures serve as a sign of a deep crisis in culture and of the dissatisfaction of a segment of society (most often young people) with the system of values, norms, and behavioral patterns that the culture offers. Every culture experiences such moments, more or less often. But with the help of countercultures these crises can be overcome, by absorbing their positive elements and improving relations among people.
Already in the era of the division of mental and physical labor and the social stratification of society, the basic forms of culture arose, interacted, and at the same time preserved their own specific character: high (elite) culture and folk (folkloric) culture.
Elite (or high) culture consists of cultural patterns created by the privileged part of society, or on its commission by professional creators. It includes, above all, classical music, literature, and the visual arts. As a rule, it is decades ahead of the perceptual level of the ordinary person. Its circle of consumers is made up of the highly educated part of society: critics, literary scholars, regulars at museums and exhibitions, theatergoers, artists, writers, and musicians. Its varieties include secular art and salon music.
Folk culture is created by anonymous creators. Its creation and functioning are practically inseparable from everyday, practical life.
In the most general sense, one can say that in the public consciousness folk culture is associated with a great many concepts and objects whose name includes the word "folk": art, wisdom, rumors, traditions, legends, beliefs, songs, dances, proverbs, craftsmen, healers, and so on.
Today there are also plenty of examples of folk culture - songs (everyday, street, courtyard, student, hiking songs, and partly the so-called bard songs), refrains, and various kinds of non-fairytale oral narratives: retellings, modern tall tales, oral stories, anecdotes, and rumors.
The division of culture into elite and folk forms persisted until the middle of the 20th century, when a third form of culture emerged - mass culture.
Mass culture is created by professionals, yet it is generally accessible, oriented toward the widest possible audience, and consuming its products does not require any special preparation.
The emergence of mass culture was no accident. Its main prerequisites were:
Features of mass culture:
1. Mass culture has a commercial character - it is, first and foremost, a standardized commodity intended for a mass market, and the main criterion of quality for this commodity is commercial success, that is, how profitably it can be sold.
2. Since mass culture must appeal to a great many people, it tends, as a rule, not to be of very high quality, but of "average" quality, and is aimed at satisfying not only refined spiritual needs. Mass culture has been subjected to considerable criticism from sociologists on the grounds that, unlike high culture, it offers primitive models, enriches a person spiritually to a lesser degree, is incapable of conveying genuine feelings, and thus does not allow the individual to fully realize themselves.
3. However, mass culture, which is very often criticized, and justly so, nevertheless creates a cultural community that unites people on an almost worldwide scale. Thanks to its universality, mass culture easily overcomes vast distances and cultural boundaries. For example, today Hollywood's output enjoys enormous popularity even in countries where the majority of the population hates America and sees it as its main enemy.
4. Mass culture significantly smooths over cultural differences: its consumers are drawn from representatives of all strata and groups of society. Television series, popular music, detective novels, and romance novels find their supporters among both the wealthy and the poor, the young and the elderly, the employed and the unemployed.
De-culturation is a society's partial loss of the level of culture it previously possessed; a transition to a lower degree of culturedness. It is often used by unfriendly countries as a means of destroying an adversary's culture.
A person who has been raised since childhood on the ideas and values of their own community tends, as a rule, to regard these ideas and values as natural and correct. The values, ideas, and norms of a different culture may seem incomprehensible, strange, or even savage. That is, people usually look at the world through the prism of their own culture.
The tendency to evaluate the customs, values, and norms of other cultures from the standpoint of the standards of one's own culture is called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism may be not only ethnic (although this is the form we encounter most often), but also group-based. For example, when the military uses norms and values specific to itself to evaluate the activities of civilian associations or scientific communities.
The position opposite to ethnocentrism is called cultural relativism. From the standpoint of cultural relativism, each culture is a unique phenomenon, and therefore should be considered only on the basis of the standards accepted within it. However, adherence to the principle of cultural relativism sometimes gives rise to difficulties and questions. For example, if ritual cannibalism exists in some cultures, should we treat this as a «normal manifestation of cultural diversity»? In many contemporary Eastern societies, women still do not have equal rights with men. Should we abandon our negative assessment of the discrimination against women solely out of respect for other people's traditions? The answer to these questions, in the view of many sociologists, is that what matters most for science in general, and for sociology in particular, is not evaluation but understanding of the phenomenon.
Every cultural pattern (whether a custom or a norm, a value or a rite), however «savage» it may seem to a member of a different culture, can be understood only in the context of its own culture. Understanding the meaning of a given custom does not mean unconditionally approving and accepting it. If, on the other hand, everything that seems «wrong» is simply discarded, understanding another culture becomes simply impossible. Thus, polygamy cannot be assessed and understood within the traditions of Christianity, but Islam and Eastern traditions make it possible to discover the causes and the essence of this phenomenon.
Cultural relativism must be applied not only in the process of scientific analysis, but also in the everyday interactions of representatives of different cultures. Instilling cultural relativism is a difficult process; it requires understanding unfamiliar values and norms, and abandoning the cultural standards that people have held to their whole lives. But gradually, as inhabitants of different countries come into contact with one another ever more often, the importance of understanding other cultures increases significantly. Thanks to the international economy, the spread of mass communication and information media, and the processes of migration, tourism and so on, we observe a convergence of world cultures, a cultural exchange between them.
Alongside this, an opposite tendency also manifests itself - significant cultural differences are preserved. The integrity and distinctiveness of a culture is ensured by mechanisms of socio-cultural selection and socio-cultural immunity. In the process of cultural exchange, every culture tries to select and preserve only those traits that correspond to its overall logic and mentality. For this purpose, a culture may resist elements alien to it. Thus, almost all countries of the world have borrowed technologies and means of organizing production from Western society, but not the norms and principles of Western morality. Such resistance is evidence of people's particular concern for their own culture, for preserving its distinctiveness and uniqueness, since the loss of a culture would inevitably lead to the disintegration of a given society, which is always characterized by certain traditions, norms, and patterns of behaviour.
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