Every one of us is born into a family, and that family is already part of something larger: a network of relatives, a community, a caste or tribe, sometimes even a nation. Long before we can speak or think for ourselves, we are handed a place in this web and a set of instructions on how to live within it. Anthropologists call the web society and the instructions culture. The two ideas sound simple on the surface, but understanding how they work together explains almost everything about why humans behave the way they do.
Table of Contents
What is society? A network you are born into
Society is not something an individual builds from scratch. It is a pre-existing set of social relationships that a child enters the moment they are born. A newborn already has parents, siblings, grandparents, and often uncles, aunts, and cousins waiting to receive them. This web of relatives is what anthropologists call a kinship network, and it forms the first and most immediate layer of society a person experiences.
Kinship does not stop at the household. It extends outward into larger social units such as clans, castes, tribes, ethnic groups, and eventually the nation itself. Anthropological studies of kinship systems show that these larger groupings are far from simple; they organise marriage rules, inheritance, and even political alliances across generations. In the Indian context, caste and kinship are especially closely tied, since marriage practices and social obligations are often structured around them.
Ascribed and acquired identities
Because society exists before we do, it hands us a social identity we did not choose. This is called an ascribed status – a position assigned to a person by birth, such as being Indian, Hindu, Muslim, or belonging to a particular caste or tribe. Ascribed status is largely outside an individual’s control, though it shapes expectations and roles from the very start of life. Traditional caste structures remain one of the clearest examples of ascribed status, since birth into a caste has historically determined occupation and social standing regardless of individual merit.
Alongside this, a person also builds an acquired (or achieved) status through their own efforts – becoming a doctor, an engineer, or a respected community leader. Most people carry several identities at once, some given at birth and some earned later, and these layers combine to form a complete sense of who they are within society.
What is culture? The blueprint for living
If society is the network of relationships, culture is the shared way of doing things within that network. It is a pattern of behaviour and a set of meanings that a group imposes on the world around it. According to material developed for anthropology students by IGNOU’s course on the concept of society and culture, culture can be understood as learned, shared, symbolic, and systemic – it has to be picked up rather than inherited biologically, it is held in common by a group, it relies on symbols to carry meaning, and its different parts work together as an integrated whole.
This distinction between what is learned and what is inherited matters enormously. Unlike eye colour or height, culture is an acquired trait. Two children born with identical genetic potential will grow up eating different foods, speaking different languages, and following different customs purely because of where and to whom they were born. Genetics does not decide whether a person eats with their hands or a fork, or whether they consider cows sacred or ordinary livestock – culture does.
The gift of symbolic thought
What makes culture possible in the first place is a uniquely human capacity for symbolic behaviour and abstract thinking. Humans can assign arbitrary meanings to objects, sounds, and gestures, and then agree collectively on what those meanings are. Language is the clearest expression of this ability. As anthropological linguists writing in an open-access cultural anthropology textbook from the American Anthropological Association explain, all human languages are symbolic systems in which a word has no natural connection to the thing it represents – the sound “tree” does not resemble an actual tree in any way. This arbitrariness is precisely why thousands of languages exist across the world, each assigning a different sound to the same object.
Because meaning is symbolic rather than fixed, culture becomes flexible and endlessly varied. It provides the blueprint for what a group eats, how its members dress, how they greet one another, and what counts as proper behaviour for someone occupying a particular role – a parent, a student, an elder, or a guest.
Why society and culture cannot exist without each other
Society and culture are often discussed separately in textbooks, but in real life they are inseparable. To have a culture, a person must first belong to a society, since culture is only ever acquired through interaction with other people – it cannot develop in isolation. At the same time, a society without shared culture would have no common norms holding it together; it would just be a scattered collection of individuals with no agreed way of relating to one another.
Socialisation and enculturation
Two closely related processes explain how children come to belong fully to both their society and their culture. Socialisation is the process through which a person learns to live within society according to accepted social norms – how to behave with parents, siblings, teachers, and strangers, and what obligations come with each relationship. Running alongside it is enculturation, the process of acquiring the specific meanings, values, and ways of life that give that behaviour its content. Anthropological teaching material on this topic, hosted by the UGC-supported INFLIBNET digital learning platform, describes enculturation as the process by which an established culture teaches an individual its values and norms until the person finds an accepted role within it.
These two processes work together rather than in sequence. A child does not first learn that a grandmother deserves respect (socialisation) and only later learn what respectful behaviour looks like (enculturation) – the two lessons are absorbed simultaneously, through daily observation, correction, and participation in family and community life.
Social identity and world-view
Belonging to a particular set of relationships gives a person their social identity – a layered sense of who they are that can include being a daughter, a Bengali, a Christian, or a member of a specific tribe, all at once. Alongside identity, culture also shapes a person’s world-view: a particular way of perceiving the world and a set of prescribed responses to life’s situations, from how to mourn a death to how to celebrate a marriage.
Nowhere is this clearer than in food habits. What one community considers a staple food, another may reject outright because of religious prohibition or cultural taboo. Beef is avoided by many Hindus on religious grounds, while pork is avoided in many Muslim communities, even though neither restriction has anything to do with nutritional science or biology. These choices are not instinctive; they are learned, and they demonstrate a central point in social and cultural anthropology – human behaviour is guided overwhelmingly by culture, not by genetics or instinct. Where most animals rely on hardwired behaviour to survive, humans rely on a self-acquired mechanism that has to be taught, learned, and passed down across generations.
This is what makes the study of society and culture so central to understanding human existence. Strip away the specific customs, languages, and social structures, and what remains is a species uniquely dependent on collective learning to know how to live at all.
What do you think? Do you think the caste or community you were born into has shaped your world-view more than the culture you have picked up through school, friends, or the internet? And can you think of a habit of yours that feels completely natural but is actually a product of enculturation rather than instinct?
References
- https://www.britannica.com/science/anthropology/Social-and-cultural-anthropology
- https://www.lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202004080636591147SMH_Rizvi_anthro_Status.pdf
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/41246/1/Unit-1.pdf
- https://perspectives.americananthro.org/Chapters/Language.pdf
- https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp02/chapter/enculturation-acculturation-and-transculturation/
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