Culture, its components, and the sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills)

What sociologists mean by 'culture'

Culture is the whole way of life of a group: the shared knowledge, beliefs, values, customs, language, symbols and objects that members learn and pass on. It is learned, not inherited — you acquire it through socialisation rather than biology. Sociologists split it into two parts:

• Non-material culture — the intangibles: values, beliefs, norms, language, symbols, knowledge systems. For Australian Indigenous cultures this includes the Dreaming, kinship systems, songlines, lore and connection to Country.
• Material culture — the physical, tangible products: tools, art, weapons, dwellings, clothing, ceremonial objects. For Indigenous cultures, examples include boomerangs, coolamons, rock art, fish traps (e.g. the Brewarrina fish traps) and woven goods.

The two are linked: a material object (a clapstick) carries non-material meaning (its role in ceremony). Strong answers always tie an artefact back to the belief or value it expresses.

The sociological imagination — Mills (1959)

Charles Wright Mills, in The Sociological Imagination (1959), argued that to understand society we must connect personal troubles (private problems felt by an individual) to public issues (wider social structures, history and institutions). The imagination is the capacity to step back from your own biography and see how it is shaped by the society and historical moment you live in.

Mills' classic test is scale: if one person is unemployed, that may be a personal trouble; if millions are unemployed, it is a public issue rooted in the structure of the economy. Applied to Indigenous cultures, the over-representation of one Aboriginal person in the justice system is not just a 'personal trouble' — seen sociologically it is a public issue traceable to colonisation, dispossession, the Stolen Generations and ongoing structural disadvantage.