Construct

 

 

 

 

emojis, a thumbs-up,

things that stand for other

Signifiers

diamond rings, the Christian

things

cross

 

 

 

subsets of things that we

“pets” (a subset of animals),

 

believe are sufficiently

“blue” (a subset of the

Categories

similar to one another to

spectrum), “blouses” (a

be considered the same

subset of shirts)

 

 

 

Binaries

categories we see as

good and evil, friends and

opposites or otherwise in enemies, legal and illegal opposition

 

 

 

 

 

ideas that have nothing

rainbows and flags

 

special in common except (LGBTQIA pride), roses and Associations for the fact that they’re diamonds (love), red and connected by a third idea green (Christmas)

 

 

 

 

ideas arranged into a

outline, draft, edit; hug, kiss,

Sequences

specific chronological

fondle; marry, buy a house,

order

have kids

 

 

 

 

Nordstrom is higher end than

 

ideas placed into ranked

Kohl’s, mammals are more

Hierarchies relationships

important than insects, it’s

better to be young than old

Social constructs also include categories, subsets of things that we believe are sufficiently similar to one another to be considered the same, yet different enough from other things to be considered distinct.3 We put some physically altering substances into the category of “illegal drugs,” for example, while others are categorized as “prescriptions.” The same chemical substance might be called one or the other depending on how a person attains it and from whom. And sometimes we move substances from one category to the other; marijuana used to be illegal and now is a prescription in many states, whereas heroin used to be a prescription and is now illegal. Still other stimulants and depressants—like coffee, tea, soda, and beer—escape the categories altogether and are simply called “drinks.”

These categories are socially constructed. We accept them because they’re familiar, not because they make sense. Because they’re both in the category of “alcohol,” for example, we associate beer with wine, though wine has at least as much in common with the grape juice we give to toddlers.

Sometimes categories are explicitly contrasted to one another in the form of binaries, categories we see as opposites. We oppose business to pleasure,

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humans to animals, and married to single. But humans are animals and business can be pleasurable; some technically single people are all-but-married and some married people are all-but-single. We socially construct these categories as meaningfully opposed and nonoverlapping, even though life usually fails to obey such simple divisions.

 

This 1885 advertisement for cocaine recommends it as a cure for children’s toothaches. Substances like cocaine, opium, and morphine used to be categorized as medicine but have since been recategorized as illegal drugs.

 

Within categories, ideas become linked by association. Associated ideas are ones with nothing particular in common except for the fact that they’re connected by virtue of a third idea. Pigs and chickens, for instance, have no special relationship in nature, but bacon and eggs come together on our plates because they’re linked by the idea of breakfast. We usually wear formal dresses with heels not because we couldn’t wear sneakers, but because sneakers don’t fall into the category of evening wear and dresses and heels do.

Finally, we socially construct sequences and hierarchies. Sequences are ideas arranged into a specific order. Hierarchies are ideas placed into ranked relationships. People generally believe, for example, that a “main course”

should come after soup or salad and before a sweet dessert. That’s a socially constructed sequence. Thanks in part to the Olympic medal ceremony, people also tend to think of gold as better than silver and silver as better than bronze. That’s a socially constructed hierarchy.

Taken together, the universe of ideas and their relationships to one another form a symbolic structure, a constellation of social constructs connected and opposed to one another in overlapping networks of meaning. Ideas fall into categories, often multiple ones, connecting across and within them to other ideas, which are linked in sequences and ranked in hierarchies, connecting still to other ideas. We call it a structure because it’s a complex and relatively rigid network. The meanings it contains allow us to communicate with each other, but the symbolic structure is unyielding, making it difficult to communicate in ways that it doesn’t support. In the same way that it’s hard to say “vacation” with the word “hippopotamus,” in other words, it’s hard to say “Great job!” with a thumbs-down.

In the symbolic structure that most of us are probably familiar with, for example, blue-collar work is associated with certain kinds of vehicles, like the pickup truck. Trucks are tied to country music and cowboy hats, associated via the category of rural life, which is opposed in a binary to urban life in cities. People in cities are more likely than people in the country to vote Democratic, the political party signified by the color blue. In that context, to be blue is to be a “lefty.” We call our political parties “right”

and “left,” which implies an opposed binary that makes Republicans and Democrats into moral opponents. And some would say that Republicans, more so than Democrats, value blue-collar work.

Maybe that all sounded familiar, but maybe it didn’t. There’s no universal symbolic structure. Signifiers, sequences, associations, and other social constructs aren’t the same everywhere. That’s because the symbolic structure varies by culture.

Glossary

 

social construct

an influential and shared interpretation of reality that will vary across time and space

social construction

the process by which we layer objects with ideas, fold concepts into one another, and build connections between them

symbolic structure

a constellation of social constructs connected and opposed to one another in overlapping networks of meaning

Endnotes

 

Note 02: Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966).Return to reference 2

Note 03: Eviatar Zerubavel, “Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social

Classification,” Sociological Forum 11, no. 3 (1996): 421–433.Return

to reference 3

CULTURE

Culture is a wide-ranging word that sweeps into its definition most of the things about people that vary from place to place. This includes cultural objects, like the stop sign. These are natural items given symbolic meaning, or natural resources extracted and molded to serve cultural purposes. It also includes cultural cognitions, like the idea that red means stop. These are shared ideas and values. The term also refers to cultural practices, like the fact that most of us stop (or almost stop) at stop signs most of the time.

Practices are habits, routines, and rituals that people frequently perform.

And, finally, cultural practices produce cultural bodies, culturally influenced shapes and sizes, capacities, and physiological processes. When our foot moves to the brake reflexively when we see a stop sign coming, for example, it’s because our body has been culturally conditioned to respond in just that way.

Human beings are not unique in having cultures. Social learning—or the transmission of knowledge and practices from one individual to another via observation, instruction, or reward and punishment—has been documented in rats, birds, whales and dolphins, nonhuman primates, and more. Different groups of orcas (also known as killer whales), for example, have different languages. From one group to the next, their sets of calls and whistles are

“as different as Greek and Russian.”4 Small pods have distinct dialects.

Different groups of orcas also eat different foods, even when they share potential prey. Some groups eat marine mammals like sea lions; others only eat fish. Scientists have observed that the cultural differences are so great that orcas generally won’t mate with orcas from other clans.

Though humans are not the only animals to have culture, it’s probably fair to say that we’re especially cultural. For hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve passed down ideas, behaviors, and objects from one generation to another, relieving each new generation of the need to acquire knowledge from scratch and giving them the opportunity to build on what others have learned. This is true in arenas as wide-ranging as art, mathematics, and human rights. As the German sociologist Karl Mannheim observed:

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“Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks.

Rather it is more correct to insist that they participate in thinking further what others have thought before them.”5

When we speak of culture, then, we’re really talking about cumulative culture. Those of us alive today are merely at the forefront of hundreds of thousands of generations. We’re modifying, advancing, and revolutionizing what we’ve inherited. Often, we make our societies better; sometimes we make them worse. Human cultures, in other words, evolve, though not always in the direction we desire. They’ve been doing so, along with human bodies, since the first Homo sapiens walked the earth.

Anthropologists call this parallel biological and cultural evolution dual inheritance theory.6 It’s the notion that humans are products of the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution. Our genetic evolution influences our cultural evolution, and vice versa. Every human society has specific practices that guide how we accomplish basic biological necessities like eating, reproducing, and staying warm and dry. And, as our cultural practices shift, they put pressure on our genes, newly selecting for some and making others newly disadvantageous.

Cultural innovation, in fact, is probably why humans became suddenly and substantially smarter around 70,000 years ago. The innovation was fire.7

Cooking made food more digestible, giving humans the ability to consume the extra energy needed to build bigger brains. We call this the cognitive revolution, and it’s why we named ourselves Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man”). The practice of cooking, a cultural innovation, changed the human body and, thus, the future of our species.

 

No need to reinvent the wheel. Human culture is cumulative, so each generation inherits the knowledge of their parents, builds upon it, then passes more developed knowledge down to their own children, and so on.

 

As the art of cooking was passed down across generations of people who spread out across the globe, it also evolved. Human creativity interacted with our diverse environments, producing an incredible range of diets. In Peru, potatoes account for 74 percent of caloric intake; Peruvians cultivate over 3,000 varieties.8 In Somalia, more than half of calories consumed come from milk, mostly from camels.9 Traditionally, in Greenland, 75 percent of Inuit calories came from fat harvested from marine mammals. Like orcas, our cuisines vary by clan.10

The same variety characterizes our architecture, fashion, rituals, and routines. This cultural diversity makes travel captivating. It can be deliciously energizing, a feast for the senses that inspires us to see our environment anew. Travel can also be quite disorienting. Our cultural competency is compromised; we can’t quite be sure what’s going on or how to communicate effectively. We call this feeling culture shock, and it’s a reminder that we aren’t born knowing how to get along as a member of a human group. This is something we have to learn from others and it’s a lifelong journey, involving adaptation to new, contradictory, and constantly changing cultures. This lifelong journey is called socialization