According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), culture is “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature, but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions, and beliefs.” Sociocultural variables greatly influence human behavior, including where a person lives, went to school, their parents’ beliefs, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and many other factors. These variables characterize not only how individuals relate to their own culture, but also how they relate to other cultures. Often, when people travel to or live in places where the culture is different from what they are used to, they experience culture shock. You may have experienced this yourself on a recent trip or during study abroad!

Historically, people have gathered into distinct groups based on geographic boundaries, basic needs for water, food, and shelter, means of communication, religion, and societal practices, shared experiences and indigenous traits, and experience of the “other,” as groups began to encounter other groups. However, our modern understanding of society and culture developed in the seventeenth century when the nation-state became the unit of national identity and the international system became dominated by European colonialism and its philosophies shaped by the Enlightenment.

People also define themselves on the bases of their social standing through birthright, relative power, and wealth. There have always been social divisions, such as the caste system of South Asia. At the end of the Enlightenment period, class divisions tended to hinge on new wealth and the jobs people performed, and people were generally separated into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There were plenty inequities between the two groups. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels sought the creation of communism, a new social movement, to promote communal values of the worker class.

To understand the complex relationships between people and their society, culture, and others, many academic fields became prominent, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Through observation and description of people in their environment, or ethnography, scholars in these fields studied enculturation, or how culture was communicated to its native societies. Three critical mechanisms of cultural learning include cultural diffusion, assimilation, and cultural imperialism. The conceptualization of these studies often rely on the idea that cultural meaning is relative to the environment in which it exists, or cultural relativism.

In modern times, the effects of globalization on culture and society produce significant cultural conflict. The general trend seems to be of deterritorialization, as cultures cross geographic boundaries of specific locations. Many scholars claim that while globalization can affect positive change for many people, a vociferous number of critics assert that globalization is a polarizing and homogenizing force dangerous to the world’s unique societies. A favorite topic among scholars is the proliferation of McDonalds globally; again, opinion is generally split on whether McDonalds symbolizes homogenization or hybridization of culture. Other scholars still describe the adaptation of local forms of expression and identity to outside influences, such as the tailoring of McDonald’s famous foods to different tastes around the world, as a process of glocalization.

The world’s people can and do come together to share their culture in several ways, namely through music and sport. Hip hop, for example, has become a global genre, and soccer the favorite sport of many countries. This integration of cultural identity has thus created a new common ground for people to work together and promote cooperation and collaboration.