Culture and Society

Diffrence between culture and society

 

Culture is set of beliefs, food, tastes, ideals, moral values, tradition and ways of thinking. It is the abstract form of things that distinguish one group of people from other.  For example, when we refer to American culture, we mean the outfits they wear, the language they speak, festivals they celebrate, hip-hop music they enjoy, individualism that they cherish and belief system that they live up to. All these features of their cultures make them unique from ours. We in Pakistan follow moral values that are derived from the divine guidelines. Our two major festivals have roots in religion.  Our language is mostly derived from Arabic and Persian that, again, is due to our religion.  Our outfits are also represent the modesty that our religions expects from its followers. Our mystic music has its roots in religion. Our culture doesn’t appreciate individualism. Society, on the other hand, is group of people who live together in one place at a time and depend on one another for daily chores. The member of society also shares common cultural values. Society wants to maintain status quo and, thus, pressurizes to pass on their values to next generation. They vote those who can push for their values in legislative assemblies.  Society maintains cultural values by using peer pressure and it also unites it’s members as they have feeling of common cause to fight for.

Society controls and manipulates the culture by subliminally encouraging certain values and discouraging others.  For examples, a kid who is brought up in typical Pakistan family will end up appreciate Pakistan food, Urdu as language and Islam as a religion. The kid didn’t make any conscious effort to learn all this. His peers, parents and other elders all encouraged him to follow certain values. Moreover, people also discouraged American food culture (Pizza and Burger) by naming it as junk food. Likewise, our society appreciate use of right hand for daily chores and discourages the use of left hand. So it is very natural the more people will have the accepted-and-appreciated traits in coming generations. In this way, society continues to reproduce and replicate its cultural values. Recently, however, exposure has widened many folds due to multimedia and www connectivity. This is exposing our next generation to foreign cultural values and we see some groups start celebrating valentine day and Halloween festival.  Both of these have no root in our traditional culture and so they cause friction in members of our society. There are certain people in our society who appreciate and admire foreign cultures. They get frowned upon by the segments of society who hold traditional values dear to them.  Likewise, empowerment of females also causes some friction in society due to traditional view of shackling females to kitchen.  The member of society who are taking risk and trying to adopt some cultural values from foreign cultures are leader of the social change. They will eventually be able to make few changes in the attitudes of people and, hopefully, more member of society will cherish their views and thus follow new cultural norms. New cultural norms may not necessarily be a good one but they are definitely inevitable because the world is reduced to a social global village where people are interacting across different cultures and borders. They learn some new things and get overwhelmed by that and wish to import those values to their communities. In near future, we will have quite similar cultural values all around the world because of the exponential growth of networking technologies. Our best bet is to educate our next generation and make them feel that our cultural values are more valuable than foreign values because masses understand the value of something then they can appreciate it and take it. If we try to force our values without making any effort to convince our next generation about the strengths of our cultural values then we are most likely to lose in this era of the cultural invasion.