7. Define the terms: culture trait, cultural complex and cultural pattern.

Quite arbitrarily, the smallest units of culture are defined as being culture traits. A knife or a kiss provide examples. Thousands of other illustrations could be given. Whenever the item under consideration cannot be divided into meaningful parts, we are dealing with culture traits. Traits are the basic building blocks of culture.

Culture traits seldom, if ever, exist in isolation. Instead, they exist in relation to other traits, with which they form what are called culture complexes. The knife, for example, is likely to how freely soldiers may kill under conditions of guerilla warfare, or how much persecution blacks must stand from the police before striking back. Social change may also convert former universals into cultural alternatives. To illustrate: the capitalist ethic may have been a universal in the United States only a generation or so ago but appears not to be accepted by growing numbers of young people.

Cultural alternatives are norms that offer to individuals a choice of behaviors, with the various possibilities being almost equally acceptable. If the requirement to wear clothes is a universal in our society, then several styles and colors of clothing constitute alternatives. Alternatives tend to be much more numerous than universals.

The concept of specialties takes us one step further to norms that are neither universal nor are they equally available to all of the members of society. Specialties are norms that are appropriate only for certain individuals or groups by virtue of certain characteristics that they possess. Generally, specialties are products of the division of labor in societies. They vary by age, sex, and occupation.

The best examples of specialties probably come from the occupational sphere. Lawyers, physicians, teachers, bricklayers, truck drivers, and so on, all have areas of knowledge and expected modes of behavior that are not shared by other occupational groups.

Through its normative system, culture promotes order in a society. Some norms, universals, apply to all members of the society without exception. Most norms, however, are not completely binding upon all members of the society and a range of alternative behaviors is permitted. Finally, there is always some specialization within the society, and certain norms are learned and observed only by individuals and groups for whom they are defined as appropriate.

8. Define the concepts of subculture and contraculture, distinguishing as carefully as possible between them. Give illustrations of each from contemporary American culture.

Subcultures

A subculture really consists of a culture within a culture. It represents an elaboration of the concept of cultural specialties where certain groups within the society share interrelated sets of behavior patterns that are not shared with the larger society.

The term, specialties, is often used to refer to the fairly distinct ways of life of occupational groups such as barbers, college professors, and so on. The distinctiveness of the ways of life of barbers and college professors is far from complete, however, and one does not grow up as a barber or a college professor. To the degree that occupations are transmitted from father to son and the special way of life is perpetuated over the generations, the rudiments of a subculture may be formed.

There is no precise boundary that sets off cultural specialties from subcultures. Nor is there any completely satisfactory way to separate many subcultures from the larger cultures of which they are a part. Yet the concept of subculture is a useful one, especially when the term is used carefully and with full awareness of its inherent ambiguities.

The most legitimate use of the concept of subculture is to apply it to those cases where groups maintain either physical or social isolation, or both, from other groups within the society and where they have developed a distinctive way of life that sets them off from the rest of the society. In contrast to the situation involving what are called cultural specialties, one typically is born into a group having a distinctive subculture, he grows up in it, he may marry within it, and live out his life in it.

Contracultures

The concept of contra culture came into sociology approximately a decade ago to identify subcultural patterns that are directly in conflict with the values, 'norms, and attitudes of the larger society. Large, complex societies such as our own are believed to be particularly prone to the development of contracultures and the best illustration from American society is usually agreed to be that of the delinquent gang. Other examples — assuming that they become permanent parts of the American scene would include hippies, some communal living groups who reject the basic values of American society, the Black Panthers, some drug users, and others.

The exact means whereby contracultures come into existence is unknown, but it is believed that they are a response to the continued and serious frustration encountered by some groups in their attempts to share in the values of the larger society. Delinquent youth, for example, are presumed to be exposed to values of occupational success and the acquisition of material goods just as other Americans are. They soon learn, however, that their best efforts will not permit them to share significantly in these values. They find solace, then, in the norms of the street gang that define the larger society as hypocritical and explorative.

In time, the gang develops an integrated normative pattern in which loyalty to the gang and its standards comes to replace loyalty to the larger society. The gang members know that stealing is disapproved of by the larger society but, within the gang, successful stealing becomes a route to prestige and the acquisition of material possessions analogous to that afforded through formal education and conformity to middle-class youth.

As in the case of subcultures where the dominant values do not stand in direct opposition to those of the larger society, contracultures are not completely separated from the larger culture. Delinquent youth share much of their argot with other teenagers, they smoke the same cigarettes, watch the same TV shows, admire the same musical groups, and so on.

True contracultures, like true subcultures, probably must cover the whole life cycle and must be transmitted from generation to generation. The delinquent contraculture appears to come close to meeting this criterion. Many people are born into families where there is systematic rejection of the standards of the larger society and where the adults earn their livings through illegal or quasi-legal activities. When the youth are grown, they too adopt criminal life styles and transmit them to their children. It probably is too early to tell whether some of the newer apparent contracultures such as those of the communal living groups and the Black Panthers will become lasting parts of the American scene.

CULTURAL VARIABILITY

The concepts of subculture and contraculture, along with those of cultural alternatives and specialties, indicate that there may be wide variability in values and norms even within a single society such as the United States. When we compare different societies with one another, the variability in their cultural patterns becomes correspondingly larger. When all 4000 human societies are brought into the picture, almost every belief or trait that one can think of is found to exist somewhere in the world.