Sociology | Class 11| Culture and socialization
Sociologists and anthropologists study the social conditions in which culture exists. They take culture apart in order to understand how its different pieces fit together and shape everyday life. These study notes on culture and socialisation for Class 11 Sociology stay close to your NCERT chapter, and they are part of the wider One Young India study library.
Humans are set apart from other animals by their ability to build a shared understanding with others and to draw the same meanings from signs and symbols. That shared meaning is the raw material of culture.
We do not inherit culture in our genes. We learn it. This lifelong learning is called socialisation. Primary socialisation happens at home, while secondary socialisation happens at school and in other institutions.
Diverse settings, different cultures
Humans live in a wide range of natural environments, including mountains and plains, forests and cleared land, deserts and river valleys, islands and mainlands. Each setting shapes a different way of life.
When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, communities such as the Jarawa, the Great Andamanese and the Shompen, who had no access to modern science and technology, read the warning signs, anticipated the disaster and protected themselves by moving to higher ground.
This shows that having modern science and technology does not make one culture superior to another. Cultures cannot be ranked as higher or lower. They can only be judged as adequate or inadequate in how well they help people cope with the pressures of their own environment.
Defining culture
In everyday speech, the word "culture" is used for a refined taste in classical music, dance and painting. This polished taste was once thought to separate cultured people from the so called "uncultured" masses.
The sociologist sees culture very differently. For a sociologist, culture is a whole way of life shared by all members of a society, not a badge that sets some people above others.
The British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor gave one of the earliest and most quoted definitions of culture:
"Culture or civilisation, taken in its broad ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
Dimensions of culture
Culture has two broad dimensions. The non-material dimension is made of ideas, norms and values, while the material dimension is made of physical objects. Both are needed for a society to function well.
Non-material dimension
The non-material dimension refers to the abstract or intangible side of culture, such as ways of thinking and habits of behaviour. It has two parts: the normative part (norms and values) and the cognitive part (ideas and knowledge).
Normative aspect: norms and laws. This part covers a society's rules and expectations, usually described as its norms and values.
- Norms are socially accepted standards that guide the behaviour of members of a community or group. They are, in effect, the unwritten rules of acceptable behaviour. Norms often differ between societies, and even between groups within the same society.
- A norm does not always match actual behaviour. Most human action is guided by these unwritten rules, and there are different kinds of norms depending on how strict they are.
- Folkways, mores, customs and laws all make up the normative component. We usually follow social norms because our upbringing has conditioned us to do so.
- Laws are explicit, written rules, whereas ordinary norms are tacit. A law is a formal rule backed by the authority of the state, it applies to everyone in society, and breaking it carries a defined punishment. Laws are the most formal statements of permitted behaviour.
Social values.
- Values are the standards that decide what is good, desirable and worthwhile in a society. They are the underlying principles that drive our choices and actions.
- In Indian society, for example, there is a strong value of respect for elders. From it flow many norms, such as offering elders a seat, touching their feet in greeting, and not addressing them by their first names.
Cognitive dimension.
- The cognitive dimension covers a society's ideas, including its beliefs, knowledge, myths and superstitions.
- Cognition is the process by which we make sense of the information we receive from our surroundings.
- In literate societies, ideas are written down in books and records and stored in libraries and archives. In non-literate societies, ideas take the form of stories and myths that are memorised and passed on by word of mouth. Today, ideas also travel through audio-visual media such as advertisements and films.
Material dimension and culture lag
The material dimension refers to the physical, tangible things that members of a society own and use, such as machines, buildings, jewellery, means of transport and technological gadgets.
The two dimensions change at different speeds. The material or technological side tends to change faster than the non-material side, because values and norms are slower to shift. When our values and rules cannot keep up with rapid technological change, the result is a gap known as culture lag.
For example, when the internet first became widespread, several social groups objected that it was corrupting cultural norms. The technology arrived faster than society could agree on how to handle it.
Identity and culture
Individual and group identities are not inherited. They are formed through our interactions with others. The various social roles a person plays are what give that person an identity.
Within a family, for instance, the same person may be both a parent and a child, and each role carries its own set of duties and powers.
Sub-cultures
Sub-cultural groups act as tight units that give all their members a shared identity. A single culture can contain many sub-cultures, such as elite and working-class youth.
Style, taste and association mark out a sub-culture. You can often recognise one by its slang, dress codes, musical tastes, or the way its members treat one another.
Such groups may have leaders and followers, but all members are held together by a common goal. Young people in a neighbourhood, for example, may form a club for sport and other useful activities. This builds a positive image in the community, gives members a positive sense of themselves, and pushes them to do better.
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the habit of using one's own cultural standards to judge the behaviour and beliefs of people from other cultures. It treats one's own values as the norm, and therefore as superior to the values of others.
The opposite outlook is cosmopolitanism, which welcomes differences between cultures. A modern society values cultural diversity and does not shut out influences from other countries. Instead, it encourages cultural exchange and borrowing to enrich its own way of life.
Borrowed influences are usually reshaped to fit local features. The English language does not stop being English because it has absorbed foreign words, and Hindi film music does not lose its identity because it borrows from elsewhere.
Cultural change
Cultural change is the process by which a culture alters its patterns over time. The push for change can come from inside or outside a society.
- Internal factors: a new farming technology, for example, can raise agricultural output, which changes what people eat and how they live in a farming society.
- External factors: conquest or colonisation can force deep changes in a society's customs and behaviour.
- Change can also come from shifts in the natural environment, contact with other cultures, or new ways of adapting.
- When forest-dwelling groups lose access to the forest and its products, whether through new laws or deforestation, the effect on their way of life can be severe.
Socialisation
At birth, a human child knows nothing of what we call society or social behaviour. As the child grows, it keeps learning about a world beyond the purely physical one.
Socialisation shapes us powerfully, but it is not the same as simple "culture programming" in which a child passively soaks up every influence. Even a newborn has a will of its own. When it is hungry, it cries, and it keeps crying until those who care for it respond.
The family a child is born into may be nuclear or extended. It also belongs to a wider community, such as a tribe or subcaste, a clan or biradri, a religious or linguistic group. Membership in these groups places particular norms and beliefs on each member, along with duties tied to roles such as son, daughter, grandchild or student.
Agencies of socialisation
A child is socialised through the many groups and institutions it takes part in. The main agencies of socialisation are:
- the family
- the school
- the peer group
- the neighbourhood
- the occupational group
- social class, caste, region and religion
Individual liberty and socialisation
Even in normal conditions, socialisation never turns people into complete conformists. Many things create conflict. Different agencies can pull in different directions, for example when school clashes with home, or home clashes with the peer group.
Because the cultural settings we are born into and grow up in shape us so strongly, it can feel as though we have no individuality or free will left. Yet the truth is more balanced. The fact that we relate to others from birth to death certainly moulds our personalities, our values and our actions, but it does not erase our capacity to choose.
Why it still matters today
This chapter can read like old theory, but its two biggest ideas are live news stories right now: the idea that no culture is automatically superior, and the idea that technology can race ahead of our values.
Isolated cultures and the "cultures cannot be ranked" argument. The Shompen who survived the 2004 tsunami are still here, and still isolated. Around 300 Shompen, most of them uncontacted, live in the rainforests of Great Nicobar Island, a group the Indian government officially lists as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. From 2024, the government began pushing ahead with the Great Nicobar Island Development Project, a roughly 9 billion dollar plan for a giant transshipment port, an airport, a power plant and a township for hundreds of thousands of residents. In 2024, thirty-nine genocide scholars wrote to the government warning that the project could wipe the Shompen out, because a people with almost no immunity to outside diseases can suffer a rapid population collapse after even simple contact. It is a real, present-day test of the chapter's claim: a culture that looks "primitive" from the outside is not inferior, and pushing it aside is exactly the ethnocentrism these notes describe.
Culture lag in your own pocket. The smartphone is a textbook case of culture lag, and school is where the argument is being fought. UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report team has argued that phones should be kept out of classrooms unless they clearly support learning, pointing to distraction, wellbeing and privacy worries. The idea spread quickly. By March 2026, 114 education systems, about 58 percent of countries, had a national ban on mobile phones in schools, up from fewer than one in four in 2023. Whether a phone belongs in the hands of a school student is, in sociology terms, a fight over norms and values struggling to catch up with a fast-moving material technology.
To see how the same ideas connect to careers and real world data, explore the Learnacy Hub, or read more in our full set of Class 11 Sociology notes.
Sources
- Survival International, "New report: Indian government plans spell disaster for uncontacted island tribe": https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/14189
- Yale Environment 360, "Planned Indian Mega-Port Could Wipe Out Isolated Tribe": https://e360.yale.edu/digest/shompen-great-nicobar-island-port
- UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, "Phone bans in schools are spreading worldwide as the policy debate rages on": https://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/articles/phone-bans-schools-are-spreading-worldwide-policy-debate-rages