SOME KEY OBSERVATION in UNDERSTANDING CULTURE, SOCIETY AND POLITICS

At the end of this module the student should be able to:

- Articulate observation on human cultural variations, social differences, and social change and political identities
- Demonstrate curiosity and an openness to explore the origins and dynamics of culture and society and political
identities.
- Trace the link between behavior and culture through observation and analysis

Motivation: Activity 1
Directions:
1. Get one whole sheet of paper.
2. Write your name inside the circle.
3. Draw figure 1 on the sheet of paper
4. Write the following information of yourself in the 4 spaces: a. gender b. socio-economic class c. ethnicity d. religion

Directions: Based on the output from the previous activity, the teacher will ask the students to discuss their observations
based on the following questions:
1. What are the similarities and differences of every individual?
2. Do these similarities and differences affect the life of the whole community? Why?
(The teacher will give each group a time frame of 2 minutes to present their answers group outputs. Processing of
answers shall follow.)

Culture, Society and Politics as Conceptual Tools

Culture, society and politics are concepts. They exist in the realm of ideas and thoughts. As such, they cannot be seen or
touched and yet the influence the way we see and experience our individual and collective social beings.

Concepts are created and have been used to have firm grasp of a phenomenon. Just like any other words, concepts are
initially invented as icons to capture phenomena and in the process assist the users/inventors to describe facets of social
experience in relation to the phenomena concerned.

What is interesting about concepts is that as conceptual tools, they allow us to form other concepts, or relate concepts
to each other or even deconstruct old ones and replace them with something new.

Students as Social Beings

The way we live our lives—or should we say, the way we are being steered to live our lives-presupposes omnipotent
forces shaping the very fabric of our existence. The categories that we posses as individuals—labels that are ascribed or
given to us individually and collectively—are testament to the operation of these forces which leave us unsuspecting of
their intrusive and punitive implications in our lives. Our categories as male/female, rich/poor, or tall/short and even the
problematic effect of the color of our skin are evidences of the operation of these social forces.

Our sociality is defined by the very categories that we possess, the categories assigned to us by the society at large.
These labels so to speak, function, as tags with which our society read our worth and value. These categories that we
posses are not natural; rather they are socially constructed.

Identity

Identity is the distinctive characteristic that defines an individual or is shared by those belonging to a particular group.
People may have multiple identities depending on the groups to which they belong.
 THE SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

Lesson 1: The Need for Studying Social, Cultural, and Political Behavior through Science
At the end of this module the student can
1. Appreciate the value of disciplines of Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science as social sciences.
2. Understand the shared concerns of sociology, anthropology and political science

A. The Holistic Study of Humanity: Anthropology

Definition and Scope of Anthropology

Anthropology is derived from two Greek words anthropos and logos, which intensively studies human and the
respective cultures where they were born and actively belong to.

It is considered the father or even grandfather of all social and behavioral sciences like sociology, economics and
sychology, to name a few. The discipline had its humble beginnings with early European explorers and their accounts
which produced initial impressions about the native peoples they encountered In their explorations.

The father of American anthropology, Franz Boaz, a physicist, strongly believed that the same method and strategy
could be applied in measuring culture and human behavior while conducting research among humans including
uniqueness of their cultures.

Two American anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and William Henry Morgan, became prominent in their field since their
specialization included the championing of indigenous rights like traditional cultural preservation and ancestral domain
of the American Indian tribes they intensively studied.

Historical Beginnings

Ruth Benedict became a specialist in anthropology and folklore and authored the famous book Patterns of Culture.

The field of anthropology offers several topics for relevant research and discussion in various academic fields since its
distinct way of data gathering from their respondents applies participant observation which is central to ethnography.
Bronislaw Malinowski is the founding father of this strategy.

B. The Study of the Social World: Sociology

Sociology and the Sociological Perspective

Sociology is the study of society, social institutions, and social relationships. Sociology is interested in describing and
explaining human behavior, especially as it occurs within a social context (Merriam- Webster).

Studying sociology is practical and useful. A social beings, we gain understanding of how the social world operates and of
our place in it. C.Wright Mills (1959) calls it sociological imagination which he definedas “the vivid awareness of the
relationship between private experience and the wider society.”

Sociology’s point of view is distinct from other sciences. Peter Berger explains that the perspective of sociology enables
us to see “general patterns in particular events” (Macionis, 2010). This means finding general patterns in particular
events. The first systematic study on suicide provides a good example.

Emile Durkheim’s pioneering study on suicide in the 1800s revealed that there are categories of people who are more
likely to commit suicide.

History of Sociology as Science

Sociology emerged with the two of the most significant social and political revolution in the history. The French
Revolution of 1789, along with the Industrial Revolution in England during the 18th century, tremendously changed
people’s lives.

Early Thinkers

August Comte (1798-1857) is the person who “invented” sociology in 1842, by bringing together the Greek word socius
or “companion” and the Latin word logy or “study”. He originally used “social physics” as a term for sociology. Its aim
was to discover the social laws that govern the development of society.
Comte suggested that there were three stages in the development of societies, namely the theological stage, the
metaphysical stage, and the positive stage.

The founding mother of sociology is Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), an English writer and reformist. In her accounts in
her book How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), the deep sociological insights we call now ethnographic
narratives are fully expressed.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German philosopher and revolutionary further contributed to the development of sociology.
Marx introduced the materialist analysis of history which discounts metaphysical explanation for historical development.
Before Marx, scholars explain social change through divine intervention and the theory of “great men”.

Marx is the forerunner of the conflict theory. He wrote the Communist Manifesto a book that is focused on the misery of
the lower class (working class) caused by the existing social order. He reiterated that political revolution was vital in the
evolutionary process of the society, the only means to achieve improvement of social conditions.

Emile Durkheim (1864-1920) a French sociologist who put forward the idea that individuals are more products rather
than the creator of society; the society itself is external to the individual. In his book Suicide, Durkheim proved that
social forces strongly impact on people’s lives and that seemingly personal event is not personal after all.

Max Weber (1864-1920) Weber stressed the role of rationalization in the development of society. For Weber,
rationalization refers essentially to the disenchantment of the world. As science began to replace religion, people also
adopted a scientific or rational attitude to the world. People refused to believe in myths and superstitious beliefs.

C. The Study of Politics: Political Science

Guide Questions:

1. Why is there a need for politics?

2. Can we exist without politics?

Political Science is part of the social sciences that deals with the study of politics, power, and government. In turn,
politics refers to “ the process of making collective decisions in a community, society, or group through application of
influence and power” (Ethridge and Handelman 2010, p.8).

Political Science studies how even the most private and personal decisions of individuals are influence by collective
decisions of a community. “The personal is political.”

Politics

Generally, politics is associated with how power is gained and employed to develop authority and influence on social
affairs. It can also be used to promulgate guiding rules to govern the state. It is also a tactic for upholding collaboration
among members of a community, whether from civil or political organizations.

Concept of Politics

Politics is allied with government which is considered as the ultimate authority. It is the primary role of the government
to rule the society by stipulating and transmitting the basic laws that will supervise the freedom of the people. Each form
of government possesses power to attain order that should lead toward social justice.

Politics as Science

Science is commonly defined as the knowledge derived from experiment and observation systematically done. Policy-
making and government decisions should be done through proper research, social investigation, analysis, validation,
planning, execution and evaluation. Thus, politics is a science.
 DEFINING CULTURE AND SOCIETY

At the end of this module, the student should be able to:

1. Define and explain what culture is
2. Describe culture and society a complex whole
3. Identifies aspects of culture and society as a complex whole
4. Discuss cultural diversity and human differences.

Motivation:
List all things that make Filipino culture unique and different from other cultures. Then explain why Filipinos behave the
way they do. Are these cultural traits unchangeable or are they subject to historical and social changes? Do all Filipinos
share the same traits? Explain

The Complexity of Culture

Culture is a people’s way of life. This classic definition appears generic, yet prefigures both the processes and structures
that account not only for the development of such a way of life, but also for the inherent systems that lend it its self-
perpetuating nature.

According to British literary scholar, Raymond Williams, the first thing that one has to acknowledge in defining culture is
that culture is ordinary. This means that all societies have a definite way of life, a common way of doing and
understanding things.

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting
the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment, in artifacts , ideas and their attached values.

Elements of Culture

To understand culture, it is necessary to understand the different elements that compose it:

 Knowledge - It refers to any information received and perceived to be true.

 Beliefs - The perception of accepted reality. Reality refers to the existence of things whether material or
nonmaterial
 Social Norms - These are established expectations of society as to how a person is supposed to act depending
on the requirements of the time, place, or situation.
 Different forms of Social Norms
 Folkways - The patterns of repetitive behavior which becomes habitual and conventional part of living.
 Mores - The set of ethical standards and moral obligations as dictates of reason that distinguishes
human acts as right or wrong or good from bad.
 Values - Anything held to be relatively worthy, important, desirable, or valuable.
 Technology - The practical application of knowledge in converting raw materials into finished products.

Aspects of Culture

Since culture is very complex, there are important aspects of culture that contribute to the development of man’s social
interaction.

 Dynamic, flexible and adaptive

 Shared and contested
 Learned through socialization or enculturation
 Patterned social interactions
 Integrated and at times unstable
 Transmitted through socialization
 Requires language and other forms of communication

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

The range of dissimilarities between culture is almost endless and yet at the same time cultures joints with one another
in many important ways. Cultural variation is affected by man’s geographical set-up and social experiences. Cultural
Variation refers to the differences in social behaviors that different culture exhibit around the world. There are two
important perceptions on cultural variability namely ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.

 Ethnocentrism - It is a perception that arises from the fact that cultures, differ and each culture defines
reality differently. Judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one’s own culture.
 Cultural Relativism - The attempt to judge behavior according to its cultural context. The principle that an
individual person’s beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual’s own
culture.
 Xenocentrism and Xenophobia
Xenocentrism - refers to preference for the foreign. In this sense it the opposite of ethnocentrism. It is
characterized by a strong belief that one’s own products, styles, or ideas are inferior to those which originate
elsewhere.
Xenophobia - is the fear of what is perceived as foreign or strange.

Diversity of Cultures

Traditionally, many anthropologists believed that culture is a seamless whole that is well-integrated with the rest of
social system and structures. Later, many students of culture believed that within a given society there is little room for
cultural diversity. However it did not take long for students of culture to realize that culture is not merely body of well-
integrated beliefs and symbols. The culture in a given society is also diverse. There is no single culture but plural
cultures. In the sixties, the term “subculture” became prominent among scholars of culture. The fieldworks done by the
sociologists from the Chicago

University highlighted the unique character, if not, the fundamental differences between mainstream American culture
and subgroups within American society such as migrants, homeless, “deviant” groups, black ghettoes, minorities, and
those who dwell on slum areas. In response to the growing unrest among youth, many sociologists used the term
subculture to define the unique character of youth culture.

Subculture is used to denote the difference between the parent and dominant culture from the way of life of the
younger generation. In particular, Milton Yinger (1960) defines subculture “to designate both the traditional norms of a
sub-society and the emergent norms of a group caught in a frustrating and conflict-laden situation. This indicates that
there are differences in the origin, function, and perpetuation of traditional and emergent norms, and suggests that the
use of the concept contra-culture for the latter might improve sociological analysis.”

In other words, subculture is a response to the conflict between the values of the dominant culture and the emerging
values and lifestyle of the new, younger generation. In England, the works of Birmingham Center for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, led by Stuart Hall and Jefferson, argue that in modem societies the major cultural configurations are
cultures based on social class, but within these are subcultures which are defined as: “smaller, more localised and
differentiated structures, within one or other of the larger cultural networks” (Hall and Jefferson 1975,p. 13).

The larger cultural configuration is referred to as the ‘parent culture’. Subcultures, while having different focal concerns
from the parent culture, will share some common aspects with the culture from which they were derived. To distinguish
subculture from the dominant culture, one has to look into the language or lingo and symbolic elements of the group.
Subcultures coalesce around certain activities, values, uses of material artefacts, and territorial space. When these are
distinguished by age and generation, they are called ‘youth subcultures’. Some, like delinquent subcultures, are
persistent features of the parent culture, but others appear only at certain historical moments then fade away. These
latter subcultures are highly visible and, indeed, spectacular (Burke and Sunley 1998, p. 40). Some examples of
subcultures include the “skinheads,” “punks”, “heavy metal,” and gay subculture. Spectacular subcultures that appear
only during certain historical moments would include some fans club around certain pop icons or artists. They have to be
distinguished from “fads” and “fashions” that are regular part of social life. Fads are short-lived collectively shared
fascination with being cool such as playing the Japanese electronic pet Tamaguchi during the 1980s. Fads may also cover
the popularity of certain songs and hairstyles of certain artists among young people like Michael Jackson and Madonna
in the 1980s, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga most recently. The popularity of the language jejemon (popularly known for
typing jejejeje in social networking sites) is also a fad. Usually, these fads are short-lived. While subcultures may co-exist
with the parent culture peacefully, sometimes they become radical and extreme. They are called counterculture or
contraculture. The term counterculture is attributed to Theodore Roszak (1969), author of The Making of a Counter
Culture. Typically, a subculture may expand and grow into a counterculture by defining its own values in opposition to
mainstream norms. In the early 1970s, the young college Americans who rejected the dominant values of American
society, and championed antiVietnam war sentiments, advocated free love and psychedelic experience through drugs
could be considered as expressions of counterculture. Other than the dominant or parent culture, a certain type of
culture tends to be widespread and appreciated by a large mass of people beyond geographical confines. This is popular
culture. The term “popular culture” is a controversial concept in social sciences. An obvious starting point in any attempt
to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many
people (Storey 2009). This definition separates popular culture from “high culture” or the culture that is shared only by
an elite group within the wealthy echelons of society. Hence, popular culture is often seen as inferior or a product of
mass production for people with bad artistic taste. In the Philippines, those who patronize popular culture are often
labeled as jologs or bakya crowd. Their taste is supposed to be “baduy” —originally referring to the promdi (a person
from the province) way of combining clothing style in a wrong way: Ang baduy manamit. Popular culture is often
equated with cheaply made box-office movies, while better taste is reserved for those who watch Oscar-winning films or
movies shown in Cannes festival. So, somebody who watches Jolina Magdangal’s movie is a jolog, but someone who
wears green shirt with red pants is baduy. So, popular culture is controversial. But many students of media studies and
culture now realize the value and importance of popular culture. Many scholars believe that popular culture cannot
easily be distinguished from high culture. For instance, many people from the lower class also enjoy the music of the late
Luciano Pavarotti, an Italian operatic tenor. And many middle class persons enjoy popular culture. This is the
postmodern analysis of popular culture. According to postmodern analysis of culture, the distinction between what is
low and high in culture cannot be rigidly established. With the advent of mass production —music, CDs, DVDs, used
clothing’s (ukay), Internet, YouTube, torrents, file sharing, etc.— many elements and cultural styles once enjoyed by the
middle and upper classes are now easily accessible to the people from lower classes and vise versa.

Evaluation
A. My Culture My Heritage
Identify two Philippine cultural heritage under threat—one tangible and one intangible. For both, identify the threats
and their sources, and then come up with a plan of action on how to to deal with these threats. Write your output on
the table.

Heritage Threats Plan of Action

B. Genocide Events
List down 3 notorious genocide events and killings in history. You may consider past and recent events.

Event, Time and Place Perpetrators Targets Justification for Victimization

Looking back at Human Biocultural and Social Evolution

At the end of this module, the student can

- analyze the key features of the interrelationships of biological, cultural and sociopolitical

processes in humans that can still be used and developed

- explain the diffeences of biological and cultural revolution

- explain how hominids evolved into modern humans

Species Characteristics

Homo habilis Species with a brain of a Broca’s area which is associated with speech in

modern humans