Culture and society: a global perspective

Intuition Beginner

A family in Tokyo sits down to dinner. The table holds rice, miso soup, grilled fish, and pickled vegetables. Chopsticks rest on ceramic holders. Before eating, everyone says itadakimasu — an expression of gratitude for the food and everyone who made it possible. The meal follows a rhythm shaped by centuries of tradition, seasonal awareness, and aesthetic sensibility.

Twelve time zones away, a family in Oaxaca, Mexico, gathers for a meal of mole negro, handmade tortillas, and mezcal. The mole recipe has been passed down through four generations. The grandmother leads the preparation, and the cooking itself is a social event: children watch, aunts chop, uncles grind spices on a metate. The meal is accompanied by stories about the family's ancestors and the village's patron saint festival.

On the same day, a family in Lagos eats jollof rice, suya, and fried plantains while a Nollywood film plays on the television. The children alternate between English, Yoruba, and Nigerian Pidgin depending on what they are talking about and to whom. The television show depicts contemporary Nigerian life: urban professionals navigating family expectations, romance, and career ambitions in a city of twenty million people.

Each of these scenes involves the same basic human activity — eating a meal with family. Yet each is profoundly different. The foods, the language, the social roles, the aesthetic values, the relationship between generations, the meaning of the meal itself — all of these differ. Those differences are not random. They are patterns shared by millions of people and transmitted across generations. They are culture.

What is culture? Beginner

The word "culture" comes from the Latin colere, meaning to cultivate or tend. In sociology, culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, norms, behaviours, and material objects that constitute a people's way of life. It is the lens through which a group of people interprets reality, organises social life, and passes understanding from one generation to the next.

Culture has two broad components. Material culture consists of the physical objects, spaces, and resources that people create, use, and assign meaning to. Architecture, clothing, tools, food, art, technology, sacred objects, domestic spaces, public monuments, modes of transportation — all of these are material culture. A mosque is material culture. So is a smartphone. So is a handwoven Andean textile and a factory-produced pair of jeans.

Non-material culture consists of the intangible aspects of shared life: beliefs, values, norms, language, symbols, knowledge, myths, rituals, and social institutions. The idea that individuals have rights is non-material culture. The practice of bowing as a greeting is non-material culture. The belief in one God, or many gods, or no gods, is non-material culture. The grammatical structure of a language, the moral code of a community, the narrative a people tells about their own history — all non-material culture.

Material and non-material culture are intertwined. A temple (material) expresses religious belief (non-material). A school building (material) embodies a society's commitment to education (non-material). A wedding ring (material) symbolises a set of beliefs about marriage, commitment, and love (non-material). You cannot fully understand material culture without understanding the non-material meanings invested in it, and you cannot fully grasp non-material culture without examining the material forms it takes.

Culture is not static. It changes through innovation, diffusion, colonisation, migration, technological development, and deliberate reform. What people call "traditional culture" is often a snapshot of practices that were themselves innovations at some point in the past. Japanese ramen was adapted from Chinese wheat noodles. Italian pasta likely arrived via Arab trade routes. The potato, now central to cuisines across Europe, originated in the Andes and was brought to Europe by Spanish colonisers in the sixteenth century. Cultural purity is a myth. Every culture is a product of centuries of borrowing, adaptation, and synthesis.

Culture is also not monolithic. Within any society, multiple cultural traditions coexist, compete, overlap, and blend. A single nation may contain dozens of ethnic groups, each with distinct languages, religious practices, culinary traditions, and social norms. The idea that a country has "one culture" is a political claim, not a sociological fact.

Cultural universals Beginner

Despite the enormous diversity of human cultures, certain features appear in every known society. These cultural universals are practices, institutions, or patterns found in all human groups, though their specific forms vary enormously.

Anthropologist George Murdock identified dozens of cultural universals, including: language, kinship systems, marriage, funeral rites, religious or spiritual beliefs, rules about incest, property norms, rules about status and role, myths and storytelling, body adornment, food preparation, tools, and methods of socialising children. Every known society has all of these, though what counts as marriage, what counts as religion, and what counts as a proper funeral differ radically.

The existence of cultural universals does not mean that human nature is fixed or that culture merely decorates a biological template. It means that all humans face certain common problems — reproducing and raising children, coordinating labour, managing conflict, explaining the world, coping with death — and every society develops institutions to address these problems. The universality lies in the problems, not in the solutions.

Consider funeral rites. Every known society has rituals surrounding death. The universal problem is that people die, and the living must somehow respond. But the responses are extraordinarily diverse. Tibetan sky burial leaves the body exposed for vultures to consume, reflecting a Buddhist understanding of the body as a temporary vessel. Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations treat death as a continuation of the relationship between the living and the dead, with families building altars and sharing food with deceased relatives. Hindu cremation releases the soul (atman) from the body for rebirth. Secular memorial services in many Western countries focus on celebrating the person's life and supporting the grieving. All are funeral rites. None is the "default" or "normal" version.

Some sociologists and anthropologists argue that the concept of cultural universals can obscure more than it reveals. The claim that "every society has religion" depends on how broadly you define religion — and the definition itself is a product of Western intellectual history. Many Indigenous traditions do not separate "religion" from daily life, governance, ecology, or healing in the way that Western categories assume. The act of labelling something a "cultural universal" involves imposing a category that may not map cleanly onto every society's self-understanding.

Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism Beginner

Ethnocentrism is the practice of judging another culture by the standards and values of one's own. The term was coined by William Graham Sumner in 1906, who defined it as the view that one's own group is the centre of everything, and all other groups are scaled and rated with reference to it.

Ethnocentrism is not simply prejudice, though it can feed prejudice. It is a cognitive tendency that emerges naturally from the process of socialisation. If you grow up in a particular culture, that culture's norms, values, and practices feel natural, right, and obvious. They become the baseline against which you evaluate everything else. A person raised in a society where direct eye contact signals honesty and confidence may interpret the avoidance of eye contact in another culture as dishonesty or shame, when in that culture avoiding eye contact with authority figures is a mark of respect.

Ethnocentrism operates at every level of social life. It shapes how individuals perceive each other, how nations understand their role in the world, how international institutions are designed, and which cultural products are valued and which are dismissed. The conviction that one's own cultural practices are self-evidently correct has motivated colonial projects, religious conversion campaigns, and educational systems designed to "civilise" other peoples.

Cultural relativism is the principle that a culture should be understood on its own terms rather than judged by the standards of another culture. Franz Boas, the anthropologist who did more than anyone to establish cultural relativism as a disciplinary norm, argued that each culture represents a unique historical development that must be studied in its own context rather than ranked on a scale from "primitive" to "advanced" ^{[source pending]}.

Cultural relativism was a radical proposition when Boas articulated it in the early twentieth century, because the dominant view in Western intellectual life was that European civilisation represented the pinnacle of human development and other cultures represented earlier stages of evolution. Boas demonstrated that this view was not science but ideology dressed up as science. The same data about other peoples' customs could be interpreted very differently depending on whether you assumed European superiority or took each culture on its own terms.

Cultural relativism does not mean that anything any culture does is acceptable. Most sociologists and anthropologists distinguish between methodological relativism (the research strategy of suspending judgment to understand a culture on its own terms) and moral relativism (the philosophical claim that no moral standards transcend culture). You can practice methodological relativism in your research while maintaining that certain practices — slavery, genocide, female genital mutilation, torture — violate human rights that transcend cultural boundaries. The tension between respecting cultural difference and upholding universal human rights is one of the most difficult problems in both sociology and international law.

Visual Beginner

Concept	Definition	Example
Material culture	Physical objects and spaces a society creates	Mosques, smartphones, kayaks, kimonos
Non-material culture	Intangible shared beliefs, values, norms, language	Belief in human rights, bowing as greeting, grammatical rules
Cultural universal	Feature found in all known human societies	Funeral rites, language, kinship systems
Ethnocentrism	Judging other cultures by one's own standards	Calling another culture's diet "disgusting" or "weird"
Cultural relativism	Understanding a culture on its own terms	Studying Hindu dietary practices within Hindu theology, not against Western norms
Subculture	A group within a larger culture with distinct patterns	Deaf culture, military culture, gaming communities
Counterculture	A subculture that actively opposes dominant norms	Punk movement, anti-apartheid resistance, hippie communes
Culture shock	Disorientation from encountering unfamiliar cultural norms	A rural student overwhelmed by Tokyo; a city dweller anxious in remote Nepal
Cultural diffusion	Spread of cultural traits from one group to another	Buddhism spreading from India to Japan; hip-hop from the Bronx to Seoul
Cultural hybridity	Fusion of elements from different cultural traditions	Peruvian Nikkei cuisine (Japanese-Peruvian fusion); Afro-Cuban jazz

Subcultures and countercultures Beginner

No society is culturally homogeneous. Within any society, groups develop distinctive patterns of behaviour, values, dress, language, and social organisation that differ from the dominant culture. Sociologists distinguish between subcultures and countercultures based on their relationship to the dominant cultural framework.

A subculture is a group within a larger culture that shares patterns that distinguish it from the wider society while still participating in the broader social order. Subcultures are not separate from the dominant culture; they exist within it and usually accept its basic institutional framework while developing distinctive practices in specific domains.

Deaf culture is a subculture. Deaf communities around the world have their own languages (American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, and hundreds of others), their own literary traditions (poetry in sign language, storytelling, visual vernacular), their own social norms (maintaining visual attention during conversation, using visual alerts instead of auditory ones), and their own political movements (advocacy for sign language education, opposition to forced cochlear implantation in Deaf children). Deaf culture is not a deficit. It is a rich cultural tradition built around the visual-gestural experience of the world.

Military culture is a subculture. It has its own rank system, its own language rich in acronyms and jargon, its own norms about loyalty and chain of command, its own rituals (boot camp, commissioning ceremonies, military funerals), and its own values about duty, honour, and sacrifice.

Gaming culture, surfer culture, bodybuilding culture, academic culture, medical culture — these are all subcultures. Each has distinctive practices and norms while coexisting within the broader society.

A counterculture is a subculture whose values, norms, and practices actively conflict with those of the dominant culture. Countercultures do not merely differ from the mainstream; they challenge it.

The punk movement of the 1970s was a counterculture. Its deliberate rejection of conventional aesthetics (torn clothing, dyed hair, body modifications), its DIY ethic that rejected commercial music production, and its political stance against authority, conformity, and corporate power placed it in direct opposition to mainstream values.

The anti-apartheid movement within South Africa functioned as a counterculture relative to the dominant white supremacist regime. Its values of racial equality, its defiance of pass laws, and its commitment to dismantling the apartheid system placed it in fundamental conflict with the dominant culture's core organising principle.

Not all subcultures remain subcultures forever, and not all countercultures stay oppositional. Hip-hop began as a countercultural movement in the South Bronx and became a global subculture and eventually a dominant force in mainstream music, fashion, and language. What begins as resistance can become commodified and absorbed into the culture it once opposed.

Culture shock Beginner

When a person enters a cultural environment very different from their own, the experience can be profoundly disorienting. Culture shock describes the psychological and emotional distress that results from losing familiar social cues, symbols, and patterns of behaviour.

Culture shock is not simply surprise or mild confusion. It can involve anxiety, frustration, homesickness, anger, helplessness, and even physical symptoms like insomnia and digestive problems. The intensity varies depending on how different the new culture is from the person's own, how much support they have, how long they stay, and how much they expected the difference.

Culture shock often follows a pattern. In the first stage, the newcomer experiences a "honeymoon" period where the new culture seems exciting and fascinating. In the second stage, differences that initially seemed charming become sources of frustration. Simple tasks — buying food, using public transport, greeting a neighbour — become difficult because the implicit rules are unfamiliar. In the third stage, the person gradually adjusts, learning the new norms and developing strategies for navigating daily life. In the fourth stage, the person achieves some degree of adaptation, able to function in the new culture while maintaining their own identity.

Reverse culture shock is also real. When people return to their home culture after adapting to another, they may find that home feels strange. They have changed, and they see their own culture with new eyes — noticing things that were previously invisible because they were normal.

Culture shock is not a deficiency. It is a normal response to the loss of the cognitive map that one's home culture provides. The experience can also be transformative. People who work through culture shock often develop greater empathy, cognitive flexibility, and a deeper understanding of both the new culture and their own. Many sociologists and anthropologists consider the experience of being a cultural outsider — even briefly — to be one of the most effective ways to see the constructed, contingent nature of what feels natural and obvious.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

In sociology, culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, norms, language, symbols, material objects, and social practices that constitute a people's way of life and that are transmitted from one generation to the next through socialisation rather than genetic inheritance.

Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the twentieth century, defined culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" ^{[source pending]}. For Geertz, culture is not a state of mind or a set of behaviours but a system of shared meanings embodied in symbols. A flag is not merely coloured cloth; it is a symbol that condenses a people's understanding of their history, identity, and aspirations. A handshake is not merely two hands meeting; it is a symbol of mutual recognition, trust, or agreement.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Social Construction of Reality (1966), argued that culture is the product of externalisation, objectivation, and internalisation ^{[source pending]}. People externalise their subjective experiences by creating cultural products (tools, institutions, languages, art). These products take on an objective reality that persists beyond the individuals who created them — the English language, the legal system, the institution of marriage all existed before any living person was born and will exist after they die. New generations internalise these objective cultural forms through socialisation, treating them as given features of reality rather than human creations. This three-step process explains how culture acquires the feeling of naturalness and inevitability that makes it so powerful and so difficult to see critically.

Material and non-material culture: formal distinction

Material culture refers to the tangible, physical products of human activity that are invested with shared meaning. It includes artefacts (tools, clothing, architecture, art, technology, food), spaces (sacred sites, public squares, domestic interiors, borders), and resources (land, water, minerals) as they are culturally defined and used.

Non-material culture refers to the intangible dimensions of shared life. It includes:

• Symbols: anything that carries shared meaning beyond its intrinsic properties (a national flag, a religious icon, a brand logo, a gesture)
• Language: the system of symbols and rules that enables communication, thought, and the transmission of knowledge
• Values: culturally defined standards of desirability that guide judgement about what is good, right, beautiful, and important
• Beliefs: shared conceptions about what is true, real, and possible
• Norms: shared expectations about appropriate behaviour in specific situations, ranging from folkways (mild customs, like elevator etiquette) to mores (strong norms carrying moral weight, like prohibitions on murder) to taboos (norms so deeply held that violation provokes revulsion)
• Sanctions: mechanisms for enforcing norms, including formal sanctions (laws, punishments) and informal sanctions (social approval, gossip, ostracism)

Ethnocentrism: formal treatment

Sumner defined ethnocentrism as the technical name for the view of things in which one's own group is the centre of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. Ethnocentrism manifests at multiple levels: individual (personal bias against other cultures), institutional (organisational policies reflecting one cultural standard), and societal (national narratives of exceptionalism or superiority).

Research on ethnocentrism finds that it correlates with in-group favouritism, out-group hostility, resistance to intercultural contact, and support for authoritarian governance. However, some degree of in-group preference appears to be a human universal, suggesting that ethnocentrism is a natural cognitive tendency that can be amplified or mitigated by socialisation and institutional design.

Cultural relativism: formal treatment

Cultural relativism, as formulated by Boas and refined by later anthropologists and sociologists, holds that cultural practices should be understood within the context of the culture in which they occur, not by the standards of an external culture. This is both a methodological principle (how to study culture) and an epistemological claim (how knowledge about culture is possible).

The methodological version is standard practice in sociology and anthropology: researchers strive to understand the internal logic of the cultural systems they study before making comparative judgments. The moral version — that no transcultural ethical standard exists — is more controversial and is not required by the methodological principle.

Language and culture: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Intermediate+

One of the most consequential claims about the relationship between language and culture is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The hypothesis proposes that the language a person speaks shapes the way they think, perceive, and experience the world.

Sapir, writing in 1929, observed that "human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society" ^{[source pending]}. Whorf, building on Sapir's work and drawing on his own research on Hopi, a Native American language, argued that different languages impose different habitual patterns of thought on their speakers.

The hypothesis has two versions. The strong form (linguistic determinism) holds that language determines thought — that it is impossible to think in ways that your language does not permit. The weak form (linguistic relativity) holds that language influences thought — that the language you speak makes some ways of thinking easier or more natural and others more difficult or less habitual.

The strong form is largely rejected. People can and do think thoughts that their language does not readily express, and bilingual individuals report thinking differently depending on which language they are using — suggesting that language influences but does not imprison thought.

The weak form has accumulated substantial empirical support. Consider several lines of evidence:

Spatial reasoning. Some languages use absolute spatial reference frames (north, south, east, west) rather than egocentric frames (left, right, front, back). Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language, uses cardinal directions almost exclusively: a speaker might say "the cup is on the west side of the table" rather than "the cup is to your left." Speakers of such languages maintain extraordinary spatial orientation, always knowing which direction they face, even indoors. This ability is not genetic — it is developed through habitual use of a language that requires constant spatial tracking ^{[source pending]}.

Colour perception. Languages divide the colour spectrum differently. Russian has two basic colour terms for blue — sinij (dark blue) and goluboj (light blue) — where English has only "blue." Russian speakers are faster at discriminating shades of blue that cross the sinij/goluboj boundary than shades within one category, an effect not found in English speakers. The language's colour categories appear to influence perceptual discrimination.

Time and causation. Whorf argued that Hopi conceives of time differently from English, though his specific claims about Hopi have been debated and partially revised. More recent research shows that the metaphors a language uses for time shape how speakers think about temporal relationships. English speakers typically talk about time horizontally (the past is behind us, the future is ahead). Mandarin speakers also use vertical metaphors (earlier events are "up" and later events are "down"). These linguistic differences produce measurable differences in how people process temporal information.

Gender and language. Languages with grammatical gender assign nouns to gender categories, and these assignments influence how speakers think about the objects named. In German, the word for bridge (Brucke) is feminine; in Spanish, the word for bridge (puente) is masculine. When asked to describe a bridge, German speakers tend to use adjectives like "beautiful," "elegant," and "slender" (stereotypically feminine traits), while Spanish speakers tend to use adjectives like "strong," "sturdy," and "towering" (stereotypically masculine traits). The grammatical gender of the noun appears to shape the associated conceptual content.

The implications of linguistic relativity extend beyond cognitive psychology into sociology. If language shapes thought, then the global dominance of a small number of languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish) is not merely a matter of convenience — it is a form of cultural influence that shapes how billions of people perceive and reason about the world. Language death, the process by which languages cease to be spoken, is not just the loss of a communication tool but the loss of a way of knowing.

Key concepts: cultural diffusion and globalization Intermediate+

Cultural diffusion is the process by which cultural traits, ideas, practices, and material objects spread from one society or social group to another. It is one of the oldest and most pervasive social processes. Archaeological evidence shows that agriculture, metallurgy, writing systems, and religious ideas spread across vast distances through trade, migration, conquest, and imitation long before the modern era.

Diffusion occurs through several mechanisms. Direct diffusion happens when cultures interact through trade, intermarriage, or warfare. The adoption of Arabic numerals by European mathematicians during the medieval period, facilitated by trade and scholarly exchange across the Islamic world, is direct diffusion. Forced diffusion occurs when one culture imposes its practices on another through colonisation or conquest. The imposition of English as an official language in India, Nigeria, and dozens of other formerly colonised nations is forced diffusion. Indirect diffusion occurs when cultural traits pass from one culture to another through intermediaries. Buddhism spread from India to China to Korea to Japan through a chain of indirect diffusion, each culture adapting the tradition to its own context.

Globalization accelerates and intensifies cultural diffusion. The term refers to the increasing interconnection of the world's economies, political systems, and cultures through trade, communication technology, migration, and international institutions. Globalization is not new — trade routes have connected distant civilisations for millennia — but the speed, scale, and intensity of contemporary global cultural exchange are unprecedented.

Television, film, the internet, social media, and mobile phones have created channels through which cultural products, ideas, and practices circulate the globe in real time. A K-pop music video released in Seoul can accumulate hundreds of millions of views worldwide within days. A political protest in Tehran is witnessed globally within hours. A meme created in Brazil is remixed in Indonesia and shared in Canada within the same afternoon.

The sociological question is not whether globalization is happening — it manifestly is — but what kind of cultural world it is creating. Two competing frameworks offer different answers.

Religion as cultural institution Intermediate+

Religion is one of the most powerful and enduring cultural institutions in human history. Sociologists do not evaluate whether religious claims are true or false — that is a theological question. Sociology studies religion as a social institution: how it organises belief, practice, community, morality, identity, and social action.

Emile Durkheim, one of the founding figures of sociology, argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) that religion is fundamentally a social phenomenon ^{[source pending]}. Religion, Durkheim proposed, is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things — things set apart and forbidden — that unite a community into a single moral unit. The sacred is not a property of objects themselves but a social classification. A river is just water until a community invests it with sacred meaning. What makes something sacred is the collective attitude of the group, not any intrinsic quality of the thing.

Durkheim's insight applies to all religious traditions. The sociological task is to understand how each tradition creates community, meaning, and moral order, without privileging any one tradition as the standard against which others are measured.

Major religious and spiritual traditions

Christianity originated in the first century CE in the eastern Mediterranean and today encompasses roughly 2.4 billion adherents across Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and other traditions. Christianity centres on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians regard as the Christ (the anointed one) and the son of God. The religion's sacred text is the Bible, comprising the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) and the New Testament. Christianity has shaped — and been shaped by — the cultures of Europe, the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia. Ethiopian Christianity, for example, developed independently from European Christianity for centuries and has its own distinctive liturgical traditions, canon, and artistic heritage.

Islam originated in the seventh century CE in the Arabian Peninsula with the prophet Muhammad and today encompasses roughly 1.9 billion adherents. Muslims believe that Muhammad received revelations from God (Allah) recorded in the Quran, which Muslims consider the literal word of God. The Five Pillars of Islam — declaration of faith (shahada), prayer five times daily (salat), charitable giving (zakat), fasting during Ramadan (sawm), and pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) — structure daily life for Muslims worldwide. Islam is not a monolith: Sunni and Shia traditions differ on questions of religious authority and succession, and within each are diverse schools of thought, legal traditions, and cultural expressions spanning from Morocco to Indonesia.

Hinduism encompasses a family of religious traditions originating in the Indian subcontinent with roots extending back over 4,000 years, today counting roughly 1.2 billion adherents. Hinduism has no single founder, no single sacred text, and no single set of beliefs that all adherents share. Central concepts include dharma (duty, righteousness, cosmic order), karma (the moral law of cause and effect governing rebirth), samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth), and moksha (liberation from the cycle). The tradition encompasses devotion to a vast pantheon of deities (including Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi), philosophical monism (the Upanishadic tradition), and non-theistic meditative practice (some schools of Yoga). Hinduism's internal diversity is extraordinary, and treating it as a single "religion" is itself a simplification that outsiders have imposed.

Buddhism originated in the fifth century BCE in what is now Nepal with Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha ("the awakened one"). Buddhism today encompasses roughly 500 million adherents across Theravada traditions (dominant in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos), Mahayana traditions (dominant in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam), and Vajrayana traditions (dominant in Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia). The core teaching is the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering (attachment and craving), the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path leading to the cessation of suffering (the Eightfold Path). Buddhism emphasises personal experience, meditation, and ethical conduct rather than worship of a deity.

Judaism traces its origins to the covenant between God and Abraham, recorded in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), roughly 3,500 years ago. Today, roughly 15 million Jews practice worldwide. Judaism centres on the relationship between God and the Jewish people, governed by the covenant and the commandments (mitzvot) recorded in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). Jewish religious life revolves around study, prayer, ethical conduct, and observance of holidays and lifecycle events (Sabbath, Passover, Yom Kippur, bar/bat mitzvah, marriage, mourning). Judaism encompasses diverse traditions: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular Jewish culture, each with different approaches to religious law and practice.

Sikhism originated in the Punjab region of South Asia in the late fifteenth century with Guru Nanak and the nine Gurus who succeeded him. Today roughly 30 million Sikhs practice worldwide. Sikhism is monotheistic, teaching that there is one universal creator and that all humans are equal before this creator, regardless of caste, gender, or social status — a radical position in the caste-structured society of sixteenth-century Punjab. The core practices include meditation on the name of God, honest living, and charitable service (seva). The Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh sacred text, is treated as a living Guru. Sikh identity is often expressed through the Five Ks: uncut hair (kes), a wooden comb (kangha), a steel bracelet (kara), a sword (kirpan), and special undergarments (kachera).

Indigenous spiritual traditions around the world encompass an enormous range of beliefs and practices. These traditions are often mischaracterised by outsiders as "animism," "shamanism," or "primitive religion" — terms that carry colonial baggage and oversimplify complex systems of knowledge. What many Indigenous spiritual traditions share is a worldview that does not separate the sacred from the secular, the spiritual from the ecological, or the individual from the community and the land.

Australian Aboriginal peoples maintain the longest continuous religious tradition on Earth, spanning at least 65,000 years. The Dreaming (or Dreamtime) is not a myth of the past but a continuing reality in which ancestral beings shaped the land, established law and ceremony, and remain present in the landscape, in ceremony, and in the lives of the people. The land itself is sacred, alive with meaning, and inseparable from identity, law, and spiritual practice.

The Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand understand the world through whakapapa (genealogy) — a web of connections that links all living things to each other and to the ancestors, the gods, and the land. A person's identity is constituted by their place in this web, not by internal attributes. Spiritual practice involves maintaining these relationships through proper conduct, ceremony, and care for the natural world.

The Lakota and other peoples of the North American Plains practice the Hanbleceya (crying for a vision), the Sun Dance, and the keeping of the sacred pipe — ceremonies that connect individuals and communities to Wakan Tanka (the Great Sacred, the spiritual power pervading all things). These are living practices, not historical relics, though they have been suppressed by colonial governments and are now maintained through active cultural revitalisation.

Yoruba spiritual traditions, originating in what is now Nigeria and carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, encompass a complex cosmology involving the supreme creator (Olodumare), divine spirits known as orishas, ancestor veneration, and divination through Ifa. In the Americas, Yoruba traditions blended with Catholicism and Indigenous practices to produce Santeria (Cuba), Candomble (Brazil), and Vodou (Haiti) — examples of cultural hybridity discussed later in this unit.

Secularism and non-religious worldviews are also part of the cultural landscape. Secularism, broadly defined, is the position that religious belief and practice are matters of personal choice rather than public obligation, and that governance, education, and public life should operate independently of religious authority. This is both a political arrangement (separation of church and state) and a worldview.

Atheism (the position that deities do not exist) and agnosticism (the position that the existence of deities is unknown or unknowable) are worldviews held by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Secular humanism is a philosophical tradition that affirms the capacity of human beings to lead meaningful, ethical lives without reference to the supernatural, grounding morality in reason, empathy, and human welfare.

From a sociological standpoint, secularism and atheism are not the absence of culture. They are cultural positions — worldviews that shape how adherents understand meaning, morality, community, and the nature of reality. Treating religion as the default and secularism as its absence is itself a cultural assumption, not a neutral observation.

Cultural imperialism vs cultural hybridity Intermediate+

The intensification of global cultural exchange raises a fundamental question: is globalization creating a single global culture dominated by the most powerful nations, or is it creating new hybrid cultural forms that cannot be reduced to any single source?

Cultural imperialism refers to the domination of one culture over others through economic, political, and media power rather than military conquest. The concept was developed in the 1970s by critics who observed that American and Western European media corporations — Hollywood studios, television networks, music labels, news agencies — produced the vast majority of globally consumed cultural content. When people around the world watch the same films, listen to the same music, follow the same news, and consume the same advertising, the argument goes, they absorb the values, assumptions, and worldviews embedded in that content.

The cultural imperialism thesis holds that global media flows are structurally unequal. The United States and a handful of other Western nations export cultural products; the rest of the world imports them. This creates a one-way flow of influence that marginalises local cultural production, undermines local languages and traditions, and promotes a consumerist, individualist worldview that benefits Western economic interests.

Evidence for cultural imperialism is substantial. American films dominate global box offices. English has become the global language of business, science, and internet communication. Western brands (Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Nike, Apple) are recognised in virtually every country. Western news agencies (Associated Press, Reuters) set the global news agenda. Western social media platforms (YouTube, Instagram, X) shape how billions of people communicate and present themselves.

But cultural imperialism is not the whole story, and many sociologists argue that the picture is more complex.

Cultural hybridity refers to the fusion of elements from different cultural traditions to create new forms that are not reducible to any single source. Hybridity theory, developed by scholars including Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, argues that globalisation does not simply overwrite local cultures. Local audiences interpret, adapt, resist, and remix global cultural products in ways that produce genuinely new cultural forms.

Consider several examples of non-Western cultural production that have achieved global reach:

Nollywood. The Nigerian film industry produces more films annually than Hollywood and is the second-largest film industry in the world by volume (after India's Bollywood). Nollywood films are made quickly, on low budgets, and distributed primarily through digital platforms. They depict contemporary Nigerian life: urban migration, family conflict, religious faith, corruption, romance, and the supernatural. Nollywood has enormous audiences across Africa, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora worldwide. It is not a copy of Hollywood; it is a distinct cultural form that emerged from Nigerian creative traditions, market conditions, and storytelling conventions.

K-pop. South Korean popular music has become a global phenomenon. Groups like BTS and Blackpink attract fan bases spanning every continent. K-pop is sometimes cited as evidence of cultural imperialism — after all, it uses Western musical forms (hip-hop, R&B, electronic dance music). But this framing misses the cultural innovation involved. K-pop integrates Korean musical elements, performance traditions, and aesthetic values with global genres. Its production system, artist development model, and fan engagement practices are distinctly Korean. The global audience does not passively consume K-pop; fans translate lyrics, create fan art, learn Korean, and build communities that blend Korean cultural elements with their own local traditions.

Bollywood. The Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai produces over 1,500 films per year and reaches audiences across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the global South Asian diaspora. Bollywood films are not Hollywood films in Hindi. They follow distinct narrative conventions, integrating music, dance, and spectacle in ways that reflect Indian theatrical traditions. The films address themes — family duty, arranged marriage, religious pluralism, caste dynamics — that are central to Indian social life and that Hollywood rarely treats with comparable depth.

These examples illustrate that global cultural flows are not one-directional. Western cultural products are dominant in many domains, but non-Western cultural producers are creating work that circulates globally on its own terms. The reality is somewhere between cultural imperialism and free cultural exchange: power structures shape what gets produced and distributed, but audiences and creators in every culture exercise agency in how they receive, adapt, and transform cultural inputs.

Cultural appropriation vs cultural exchange Intermediate+

Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption or use of elements of a minority or marginalised culture by members of a dominant culture, typically without understanding, acknowledgement, or respect for the original context. The concept has become central to discussions of culture, power, and identity in an interconnected world.

The key elements that distinguish appropriation from exchange are power and context. Cultural exchange implies a roughly symmetrical relationship between parties who mutually share and benefit from the exchange. Cultural appropriation typically involves a power imbalance: the dominant group takes elements from a marginalised group, profits from them, strips them of their original meaning, and gives nothing back.

Examples that are widely discussed include:

• Fashion designers using Indigenous patterns, textiles, or sacred symbols in clothing lines without permission, attribution, or compensation to the communities that created them
• Non-Black people wearing traditionally Black hairstyles (cornrows, dreadlocks) as fashion trends while Black people face discrimination or bans for wearing the same styles in schools and workplaces
• Sports teams using Native American names, mascots, and caricatures that reduce living peoples to stereotypes
• Western corporations patenting traditional knowledge (herbal medicines, agricultural practices) from Indigenous communities and profiting from it without sharing benefits

The harm of cultural appropriation lies partly in the specific act and partly in the larger pattern it represents. When a dominant culture treats a marginalised culture's sacred objects as decoration, its traditional knowledge as a resource to be extracted, or its aesthetic traditions as exotic flavour for commercial products, it perpetuates the power dynamic that made the appropriation possible in the first place.

However, the concept of cultural appropriation has also been criticised — including by scholars of culture — for several reasons:

First, all cultures borrow. Cultural exchange has been a constant feature of human history. English is a Germanic language massively enriched by French, Latin, and Norse. Pasta, as noted earlier, travelled across continents. Jazz, one of the United States' most significant cultural contributions, emerged from the encounter between African musical traditions, European harmonic systems, and Caribbean rhythmic patterns. If every instance of cross-cultural borrowing is treated as appropriation, the concept loses its analytical precision and becomes a prohibition against all cultural mixing.

Second, the lines between appropriation, appreciation, and exchange are not always clear. A non-Japanese person practicing Zen meditation is appropriating a Japanese cultural practice, but Zen Buddhism explicitly aims to be a universal teaching available to all. A non-Indian person learning Bharatanatyam dance from an Indian teacher who wants to share the tradition is participating in cultural transmission, not appropriation. Context, intention, relationship, and power matter, and these cannot be captured by a simple rule.

Third, the concept can be over-applied in ways that reinforce racial and cultural boundaries. If people are told they can only engage with cultural traditions that match their ethnic background, the result is a kind of cultural segregation that makes intercultural understanding more difficult, not less. Some critics argue that the most militant applications of the appropriation concept produce a world in which cultures are treated as property owned by ethnic groups — a framing that is itself a Western, capitalist way of thinking about culture.

The sociologically productive approach is to distinguish between cases based on power, context, and consequence. A fashion corporation profiting from Indigenous designs without attribution is qualitatively different from an individual learning a language or cooking a dish from another culture. The concept of appropriation is most useful when it draws attention to power imbalances and the extraction of cultural value from marginalised communities — and least useful when it becomes a blanket prohibition on cross-cultural engagement.

Exercises Intermediate+

Indigenous cultures as living contemporary cultures Master

One of the most persistent misconceptions about Indigenous peoples is that they are relics of the past — remnants of an earlier stage of human development whose cultures are preserved in amber, unchanged since pre-contact times. This misconception is not merely inaccurate. It is a direct legacy of colonial ideology that positioned Indigenous peoples as "primitive" and European-derived cultures as "modern."

Indigenous cultures are living, dynamic, contemporary cultures. They are not museum exhibits. They are not frozen in the past. They adapt, innovate, and respond to changing circumstances while maintaining continuity with their traditions.

The Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand provide a striking example. Since the 1970s, Maori have led a cultural revitalisation movement that has transformed New Zealand society. Maori language (te reo Maori) immersion schools (kura kaupapa Maori) educate thousands of children. Maori-language television and radio broadcast daily. Maori artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers produce contemporary work that is rooted in Maori tradition and fully engaged with global culture. Maori legal concepts like kaitiakitanga (guardianship of the natural world) have been incorporated into New Zealand environmental law. The Maori economy, based on assets returned through Treaty of Waitangi settlements, is a significant sector of the New Zealand economy. Maori culture is not a survival from the past. It is a thriving, forward-looking contemporary culture.

The Navajo (Dine) Nation in the United States operates its own government, police force, court system, and educational institutions across a reservation larger than ten US states. Navajo language is taught in schools and used in government. Navajo weavers create contemporary art that sells in international galleries. Navajo code talkers used their language to create an unbreakable military code during World War II — one of the most consequential contributions of any Indigenous language to modern warfare. The Dine Nation faces serious challenges (poverty, unemployment, lack of infrastructure) but it is a living political and cultural entity, not a historical footnote.

The Sami people of northern Scandinavia have established their own parliament (the Sami Parliament, Samediggi), developed a vibrant contemporary music scene (including the "yoik" tradition adapted to modern genres), and operate businesses ranging from reindeer herding to technology startups. They are simultaneously rooted in tradition and fully modern.

The misconception that Indigenous cultures are "vanishing" or "traditional" in the sense of unchanging serves a political function. If Indigenous peoples are relics of the past, then their land claims, sovereignty claims, and cultural rights can be dismissed as nostalgia. If they are living, contemporary peoples with ongoing relationships to their territories, traditions, and self-governance, then their claims have the same moral weight as those of any other people.

Sociologists and anthropologists have increasingly adopted the principle that Indigenous cultures should be studied as contemporary social formations facing contemporary challenges, not as windows into humanity's past. This means attending to Indigenous peoples' own accounts of their cultures, priorities, and futures — and accepting that those accounts may not fit Western academic categories.

Secularism and non-religious worldviews Master

The sociology of religion has traditionally focused on religious belief and practice, sometimes treating secularism as the absence of religion rather than a phenomenon in its own right. This framing is inadequate. Secularism, atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism are worldviews that shape how hundreds of millions of people understand meaning, morality, community, and the nature of reality. Treating them alongside religious traditions is not merely inclusive — it is sociologically necessary.

Secularism as a political arrangement refers to the separation of religious authority from state authority. Different nations implement this differently. France practices laicite, a strict separation that prohibits religious symbols in public institutions. The United States constitutionally prohibits the establishment of religion while protecting free exercise. India is officially secular but accommodates religious personal law in family matters. Turkey's secularism was imposed by the state as part of a modernisation project. Each arrangement reflects different cultural histories and different solutions to the question of how diverse religious communities can coexist within a single political system.

Atheism is the position that deities do not exist. This is not a modern Western invention. Atheist and sceptical traditions have existed in many cultures. The Charvaka school of Indian philosophy, dating to around 600 BCE, rejected the supernatural, dismissed religious ritual, and argued that only direct perception could serve as a basis for knowledge. Classical Chinese philosophy includes strongly non-theistic strands — Confucius himself was agnostic about the gods, focusing on ethical conduct in this life rather than speculation about the next.

Agnosticism is the position that the existence of deities is unknown or unknowable. The term was coined by T. H. Huxley in 1869, but the underlying position — suspension of judgment about supernatural claims — has a long history across cultures.

Secular humanism is a philosophical tradition that grounds ethics, meaning, and community in human reason, experience, and welfare rather than divine revelation. Secular humanist organisations provide many of the same social functions as religious communities: moral education for children, ceremonies marking life transitions (coming-of-age ceremonies, marriages, funerals), community support networks, and shared ethical commitments.

From a sociological perspective, the interesting question is not whether secular or religious worldviews are "correct" but how each organises social life. How do secular communities create the sense of shared meaning and moral purpose that religious communities provide through shared belief in the sacred? How do they mark life transitions? How do they mobilise collective action? How do they provide existential frameworks for coping with suffering, death, and uncertainty? The answers to these questions reveal that secularism is not simply the absence of religion but an alternative cultural system with its own beliefs, values, rituals, and communities.

The global trend toward secularisation is real but uneven. Western Europe has seen significant declines in religious belief and practice over the past century. The United States is following, more slowly. But sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia remain deeply religious, and some regions are experiencing religious revival. The secularisation thesis — the prediction that modernisation inevitably produces secularisation — has been revised significantly. Modernisation does produce secularisation in some contexts, but in others it produces new forms of religious expression, including fundamentalist movements that are themselves distinctly modern phenomena.

Connections Master

• The sociological imagination and research methods 30.01.01. This unit builds directly on the foundational concepts introduced in the first sociology unit. The sociological imagination — the ability to see the connection between individual experience and social structure — is essential for understanding culture, because culture shapes individual perception, behaviour, and identity in ways that are typically invisible to the people living within it. Research methods for studying culture (participant observation, ethnography, content analysis, comparative historical analysis) were introduced in the first unit and are applied throughout this one.

• Cross-cultural and Indigenous psychology 29.12.01. The psychology unit on cross-cultural variation addresses many of the same themes from a psychological perspective: cultural dimensions, self-construal, analytic versus holistic thinking, Indigenous psychologies. This sociology unit complements that analysis by focusing on culture as a social system — shared symbols, institutions, and practices — rather than on individual psychological processes within cultural contexts.

• Colonialism and imperialism 32.15.01. The cultural imperialism discussion in this unit connects directly to the world history unit on colonialism. The unequal cultural flows of the contemporary world are a legacy of colonial power structures. The suppression of Indigenous languages and cultural practices was a deliberate colonial strategy; cultural revitalisation is a form of decolonisation.

• Decolonization 32.23.01. Cultural decolonisation — reclaiming language, restoring cultural practices, challenging the dominance of Western cultural frameworks — is a dimension of political decolonisation that this unit addresses through the discussion of cultural imperialism, Indigenous cultures, and the politics of appropriation.

• Epistemology 20.01.01. The cultural relativism debate mirrors epistemological debates about whether knowledge is universal or culturally situated. The question of whether a Western social science can study non-Western cultures without distortion is an epistemological question about the nature and limits of cross-cultural understanding.

• Philosophy of science 20.08.01. The critique of cultural imperialism extends to a critique of Western science as the only legitimate mode of knowledge production. Indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions, and community-based epistemologies challenge the Western model of science in ways that connect to philosophy of science debates about pluralism and the relationship between power and knowledge.

• The Cold War 32.24.01. Cultural imperialism was a weapon of the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union used cultural exports — films, literature, music, educational exchanges — to win influence in the non-aligned world. The global reach of American culture today is partly a legacy of Cold War cultural strategy.

Historical and philosophical context Master

The emergence of the culture concept

The modern concept of culture has its origins in the Enlightenment, but its development as a sociological and anthropological concept is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century story.

Edward Burnett Tylor, a founding figure of cultural anthropology, provided the first comprehensive definition of culture in 1871: "Culture, or civilisation, taken in its wide 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." This definition was progressive for its time in treating culture as learned rather than innate, but Tylor still assumed that cultures could be ranked on a scale from "savage" to "civilised."

Franz Boas revolutionised the study of culture by rejecting the evolutionary ranking of societies. Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant to the United States, argued that each culture is a unique historical product that must be understood on its own terms. His students — including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston — produced some of the most influential studies of cultural variation in the twentieth century. Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) demonstrated that cultures are not random collections of traits but integrated systems with their own internal logic ^{[source pending]}.

Ruth Benedict's work is particularly relevant to this unit's multi-perspective approach. She argued that each culture selects from the "great arc of human potentialities" a particular configuration of traits, values, and practices, and that the selection is neither superior nor inferior to the selections made by other cultures — merely different. This was a direct challenge to the assumption that Western cultures represent the norm and other cultures represent deviations from that norm.

Postcolonial theory and the critique of cultural representation

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) fundamentally changed how scholars think about cultural representation ^{[source pending]}. Said argued that Western scholarship about "the Orient" (the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa) was not an objective description of these regions but a system of representation that served Western colonial interests. The "Orient" was constructed as exotic, irrational, sensual, and backward — a mirror image that defined the West as rational, progressive, and civilised by contrast. This construction was not a harmless academic exercise; it provided the ideological justification for colonial domination.

Said's analysis extends to the study of culture more broadly. When Western scholars study non-Western cultures, they do so from a position shaped by centuries of political, economic, and military inequality. The very categories used to describe cultural difference ("religion," "tribe," "civilisation," "primitive," "modern") carry colonial baggage. Postcolonial scholars — including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Walter Mignolo — have extended Said's critique, arguing that knowledge production is always situated within power structures and that genuine cross-cultural understanding requires acknowledging those structures.

This unit has tried to incorporate these insights by presenting all religious traditions as equally valid objects of sociological study, by treating Indigenous cultures as contemporary rather than historical, and by examining cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism as structural phenomena rather than individual choices.

The globalization debate

The academic debate about globalisation and culture has evolved through several phases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural imperialism thesis dominated: globalisation meant Westernisation, and local cultures were being erased. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars like Arjun Appadurai argued that globalisation creates complex "cultural flows" that are multidirectional and unpredictable ^{[source pending]}. Appadurai identified five dimensions of global cultural flow — ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes — each operating at different speeds and in different directions, producing cultural outcomes that cannot be predicted from any single variable.

In the twenty-first century, the debate has been enriched by attention to digital culture. Social media platforms, streaming services, and mobile technology have democratized cultural production and distribution to some degree, enabling creators in every part of the world to reach global audiences. But the platforms themselves are owned by a small number of predominantly American corporations, and the algorithms that determine what content reaches whom are opaque and shaped by commercial interests. The tension between democratised cultural production and concentrated platform power is the contemporary frontier of the globalisation-and-culture debate.

Bibliography Master

Foundational texts on culture

• Boas, F., The Mind of Primitive Man (Macmillan, 1911). The foundational argument for cultural relativism against evolutionary ranking of cultures.
• Benedict, R., Patterns of Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 1934). Demonstrates that cultures are integrated systems with internal logic, not random collections of traits.
• Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973). The most influential statement of the interpretive approach to culture as a system of shared meanings.
• Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality (Anchor, 1966). Develops the theory of how culture is externalised, objectivated, and internalised.
• Durkheim, E., The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; trans. Fields, Free Press, 1995). The foundational sociological analysis of religion as a social institution.
• Sumner, W. G., Folkways (Ginn and Company, 1906). Originates the concept of ethnocentrism.

Language, thought, and culture

• Sapir, E., "The Status of Linguistics as a Science," Language 5(4) (1929), 207-214.
• Whorf, B. L., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings (MIT Press, 1956).
• Boroditsky, L., "How Language Shapes Thought," Scientific American 304(2) (2011), 62-65.
• Everett, D. L., Language: The Cultural Tool (Pantheon, 2012).

Globalization, imperialism, and hybridity

• Said, E. W., Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978). The foundational critique of Western representation of non-Western cultures.
• Appadurai, A., Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
• Tomlinson, J., Globalization and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Bhabha, H. K., The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994). Develops the concept of cultural hybridity.
• Haynes, D. and Prakash, G. (eds.), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (University of California Press, 1991).

Cultural appropriation

• Young, J. O. and Brunk, C. G. (eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
• Ziff, B. H. and Rao, P. V. (eds.), Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (Rutgers University Press, 1997).
• Rogers, R. A., "From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation," Communication Theory 16(4) (2006), 474-503.

Indigenous cultures and cultural revitalisation

• Smith, L. T., Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Zed Books, 1999; 3rd ed., 2021).
• Battiste, M. (ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (University of British Columbia Press, 2000).
• Moreton-Robinson, A. (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Allen and Unwin, 2007).

World religions and secularism

• Bruce, S., God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Blackwell, 2002).
• Casanova, J., Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Berger, P. L. (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Eerdmans, 1999).
• Asad, T., Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003).

Sociology textbooks

• Giddens, A. and Sutton, P. W., Sociology (9th ed., Polity, 2021).
• Conley, D., You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist (6th ed., W. W. Norton, 2021).
• Ferrante, J., Sociology: A Global Perspective (10th ed., Cengage, 2022).