IV Topics for reports

Choose the sociologist whose ideas are closer to you and tell us about him

1. Max Weber – one of the most important German social theorists.

2. John Dewey and George Herbert Mead in the development of American sociology.

3. W.I. Thomas (1863-1947) and Florian Zwaniecki

4. Structural Functionalism of Tlacott Parsons (1902-1979)

5. Sir Karl Popper and his “The open society and its enemies”

6. Sociology in Russia

1. M.M. Kovalevsky

2. P.A. Sorokin

7. Any other sociologists.

Unit III

Society and culture

Text 1

Society is a group of people occupying a particular territory where the inhabitants are subject to a common system. Culture is a set of socially learned knowledge and values, including the production of material objects and the creation of new ideas. This means culture exists both as ideas in people’s mind and as material artifacts.

Cultural knowledge includes the rules, ideas, concepts and values that people share. By values we mean preferences and standards of worth that the society considers good or bad, desirable or undesirable. Every culture has experiences and symbols that people try to sustain and keep alive, these are the things people worship. Communal societies place a strong value on responsibility and duty, especially within the family. More independent societies value individuals who “go against the grain”. You cannot live in a society without being aware of these values. You may react against them, rejecting some, but they are still a part of your life space. Values are preserved through patriotic and religious feelings, customs, legends, and even laws. Culture does not exist independently of a society. Every society has a culture. Societies and cultures are continually evolving.

Society and culture are independent concepts used to describe human events usually changing over time. It is not a simple theoretical task in sociology to conceptualize the several possible components of social and cultural change. In our modern era, attention is usually focused on technology in the economic arena of society as the major engine of change. Technology develops in different institutional spheres of a society and always involves relevant social behavior. The technological sphere is neither autonomous nor self-directed. Different institutional spheres may react to technological changes. In sum, humans create technology, work with it and modify it.

I Vocabulary

1. to occupy – занимать

2. inhabitant – житель, обитатель

3. culture – культура

4. to include – включать в себя, содержать

5. creation – создание, формирование

6. to exist – существовать

7. artifact – артефакт

8. to involve – привлекать, вовлекать

9. relevant – релевантный, значимый, существенный

II Comprehension check

1. What is society?

2. What is culture?

3. What does cultural knowledge include?

4. What do we mean by values?

5. What does every culture have?

6. What do communal societies value?

7. What do more independent societies value?

8. What are values preserved through?

9. How do societies and cultures interact?

10. What do such concepts as society and culture describe?

11. What is the major engine of change in modern era?

12. Who creates technology?

Text 2

Explaining culture: Nature or Nurture?

There has been a continual debate in the social sciences concerning the relative importance of biology in explaining human social and cultural changes. Biological reductionism refers to the tendency to explain social phenomena in terms of biological causes, such as physiology and genetics. Cultural determinism is the opposite, insisting that culture explains everything. Some scholars in the past have tried to explain various types of criminal behavior by differences in the structure of chromosomes or even the shape of the head or body type. There have been recent efforts to explain same-sex preference in terms of chromosome differences. Prominent psychologist Arthur Jensen of the University of California published the article “How far can we boost intelligence and IQ?” which occupied an entire issue of the Harvard Educational Review. He argued that genetic differences explained why blacks did more poorly than whites in urban education settings. According to Jensen, greater efforts at improving certain aspects of education cannot benefit people who are genetically programmed for the acquisition of a different, more practical type of knowledge. Stephen Gould, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, and a long list of sociologists have demonstrated the flaws in Arthur Jensen’s arguments. Research that claims genetic explanations for certain behaviors attracts much media attention, while the rebuttals are frequently less publicized. If behavior can be explained biologically, present social arrangements are more difficult to challenge.

Social biology

Social biology is a term coined by Professor Edward O. Wilson at Harvard in 1975. Advocates of this approach think that genetic makeup transmitted through biology explains aspects of human society and culture. We can study the social behavior of bees, ants, or primates and learn important things about human culture.

There is no doubt that much about each of us is determined by the chromosomes we inherited at birth from each of our parents. From this union we became male or female and inherited a range of physical traits, including our mental aptitude. However, two major errors occur in ascribing primary importance to our biological inheritance.

First, our biological inheritance does not determine how a particular behavior is expressed and understood culturally. In different cultures, an individual with a high energy level might be considered a shaman, or a rambunctious person “too full of himself”, or a child requiring Ritalin to control hyperactivity (ADHD – Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder). Expressions of our biology always appear in a cultural context and this cultural context is continually evolving.

Second, individual biological differences do not explain group differences. Pure gene pools no longer exist as a possible way of explaining group differences. Group differences that we observe come from humans with genetically diverse backgrounds in distinct cultural situations. Cultures attach significance to phenotypes. A phenotype is an observable or detectable physical characteristic of a person. Cultures make distinctions between subtle gradations of skin pigment (e.g., between the extremely light skin pigment of Scandinavians and the more “olive” skin pigment of some Spanish, Italian, and Greek people). In the European community these differences may appear quite obvious and important, though a dark-skinned person of the Dravidian language group of Southern India might view them all as “white” people. No biological differences cause particular social or cultural arrangements or behaviors. As in the above example, some reactions are explainable only by the cultural differences between the two observers, not the underlying biological differences