Because rituals are intentionally distinct from everyday life, they make cultural differences obvious. For instance, while graduations everywhere mark students’ transitions to the social status of graduate, different peoples do graduations differently. In New Zealand, unlike elsewhere, a university graduation begins with a traditional Maori welcome, with a Maori man blowing a conch shell, and a “Kairanga,” or call, by two Maori women in traditional dress. The chancellor of the university then offers a welcome in the Maori language, before the graduation ceremony proceeds much as it would anywhere else in the English-speaking world. To take another example of the ways ritual highlights cultural difference, even though national holidays everywhere celebrate history and patriotism, Norway’s “Children’s Parade,” coordinated by schools in every town (Elgenius 2011, 119–22), looks different to July 4th fireworks in the United States, or the glamorous military parades and local fire-station dances of France’s Bastille Day. Other peoples’ rituals condense cultural difference and draw attention to stories and symbols their participants may take for granted as “natural.” They may also condense unfamiliar histories and traces of conflict – highlighting, for instance, the residual effects of Maori resistance to the white (“pakeha”) invasion of New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, or, in Norway, strategic efforts to claim Norwegian identity and independence from Sweden later in that century (Elgenius 2011, 119).
Sometimes, too, conflict and disagreement over meaning become vivid in ritual processes. A protest march with large signs and chants dramatizes political dispute. So too do celebrities wearing colors or badges supporting controversial causes while they announce prizewinners at the Oscars.
Whatever the mix of consensus, difference, and dispute in big ritual events, they make vivid assertions about the meanings of our groups and social relationships and demonstrate cultural difference. But cultural differences extend beyond the bright highlights of unfamiliar ritual. Moving into any new setting, we also encounter less obvious differences to surprise us.
We encounter different symbols. Language is often an obvious symbolic difference, but even if we share a language, new vocabulary and diction can make communicating with someone from a different subculture or region a little strange. (Should you be asking for a “soda,” “pop,” “cool drink,” “soft drink,” or even “frappé”? What exactly is a “freshman”?) And symbolic differences run much deeper than language. Many symbols are highlighted in ritual events – such as team mascots, religious images, and national flags. But symbolism also pervades everyday life. Uniforms symbolize membership of teams, schools, the military, and many workplaces. T-shirts emblazon us with our tastes and tribes. Different genders are symbolized by different clothes almost everywhere. (Why don’t most men wear skirts in Western countries? What’s the point of high heels?) Even simple colors can mean different things. (Is black more associated with death than white, or vice versa? What are the different meanings of wearing a pink ribbon, a red ribbon, or a yellow ribbon?) And consumerism creates an even more complex symbolic universe. (Which sneakers will convey the best impression?)
Shared symbols ease communication, but we hesitate and puzzle over symbols that are new to us. We might ask for an explanation of a military medal, or an unfamiliar image on a road sign or a coin or a t-shirt. If we encounter symbols that are too unfamiliar – like the social difference between wearing a toga and a tunic in ancient Rome, or the lined and dotted rock paintings of Aboriginal groups – we need to learn the meanings just as we might learn a new language. And beyond taken-for-granted consensus and unfamiliar cultural difference, symbols express power, challenge, and conflict. Crowns and private airplanes are symbols of power. A rainbow flag makes a symbolic challenge to public assumptions about sexuality. Large neighborhood murals in Belfast or Chicago are permanent reminders of longstanding political tensions.
Noticing rituals and symbols like these – our own, and those of other people – helps us reflect on culture and helps to orient us to cultural sociology. Some other common ideas are equally helpful: we can also orient ourselves to culture by thinking about values, norms, and categories.
When we evaluate something as good or bad, something else as better or worse, we are making meaning about values, and these evaluations are often moral judgements. People appeal to “family values,” or the value of “education,” and they may value “tradition” or “innovation.” What exactly these values mean in practice is often vague, and how values are applied can shift with social context. For example, do we expect “family values” to include an extended family of second cousins and great aunts, or are they restricted to the straight nuclear family? Is it controversial to include gay couples and their children? (For this reason, cultural sociologists have recently preferred to investigate the sociology of evaluation, rather than using the more static concept of values.) Regardless of how values are applied in practice, though, people often draw boundaries between themselves and others, “us” and “them,” on the basis of such moral evaluations. And along with moral evaluations, aesthetic evaluations, like taste in music, are also important for making judgements and defining groups. In fact, cultural sociologists have shown that aesthetic values are often closely linked to moral judgements, and equally important in defining group identities.
Subtle cultural differences can often be seen in differing evaluations. Some people judge whether their acquaintances are better or worse than themselves according to the size and quality of their residence. Others make the same judgement on the basis of their tastes in music or movies. And sometimes value differences and change generate cultural conflicts, as when women executives must try to reconcile conflicts between values of family responsibilities and work commitment. Conversely, male homemakers may be stigmatized by their peers as “unsuccessful” if they choose devotion to home and family over an intense ethic of paid work. More generally, some of the most difficult forms of political conflict are expressed as value differences, like conflicts between egalitarian and authoritarian political values, or conflicts between economic and environmental assessments of new mining projects.
So we can become more attuned to big cultural differences by observing rituals, symbols, and evaluations wherever we are. We can also start to see intriguing cultural differences if we observe social norms. What do people take for granted about their interactions? Norms are often taken for granted – we fail to notice them until something goes wrong. If you move from a big city to a small town, it may seem odd that strangers greet you on the street – they seem to be violating interactional norms common in city life about keeping yourself to yourself. In the same way, bargaining over price, displays of affection, or interrupting a conversation are all normative in some settings, but offensive in others. Subtle patterns of interaction may seem trivial, but we learn their importance for meaning-making when they are breached.
Even more subtle are the taken-for-granted categories we use to divide up the world. Categories help clarify fuzzy perception, removing confusion and ambiguity. Clear categorization makes perception and action easier. An experienced chess player, familiar with categories of chess pieces like “queen” and “pawn,” will more easily remember a game layout than someone who doesn’t know a queen from a pawn, to whom all games will look much the same. Company stocks which fall between market categories do not do as well on the market as stocks which can be clearly categorized (Hsu et al. 2009; Zuckerman 2004).
On a larger scale, categories are always important cultural elements because social groups often vary in the ways they categorize the same reality, and their various cultural categories are consequential. For instance, when exactly you become an “adult” can vary widely. Are you an adult at fifteen or twenty-five? Are you an adult when you can fight in a war, bear children, hold a bar mitzvah or quinceañera, drive, drink, graduate, vote, earn your living, or form a new family yourself? “Childhood,” “adolescence,” “adulthood,” and “old age” are socially defined categories that make fundamental differences in our lives (Benedict