Culture is the intersection of people and life itself.

Its how we deal with life,

love, death, birth, disappointment... all of that is expressed in culture. Wendell
Pierce
Culture can be defined as the beliefs and behaviours that a social group shares.
It includes how they dress, their marriage customs, language and family life,
their patterns of work, religious ceremonies and leisure pursuits

Types of culture
Material culture includes all the physical things that people create and attach
meaning to. Clothing, food, tools, and architecture are examples of material
culture. Nonmaterial culture includes creations and abstract ideas that are not
embodied in physical objects. In other words, any intangible products created
and shared between the members of a culture over time are aspects of their
nonmaterial culture. Social roles, rules, ethics, and beliefs are just some
examples.
Elements of Culture
Culture consists of many elements, such as the values and beliefs of its society.
Culture is also governed by norms, including laws, mores, and folkways. The
symbols and language of a society are key to developing and conveying culture.
How culture is learned?
Culture is learned through the process of socialization. Socialization, is a term
used to refer to the lifelong process of inheriting and
disseminating norms, customs, values and ideologies, providing an individual
with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society.
Types of Socialization
1. Primary Socialisation:
This type of socialization happens when a child learns the values, norms and
behaviour that should be displayed in order to live accordingly to a specific
culture. The primary socialisation takes place in the family.
2. Secondary Socialisation:

The process can be seen at work outside the immediate family, in the peer
group. The growing child learns very important lessons in social conduct from
his peers and school. Secondary socialisation generally refers to the social
training received by the child in institutional or formal settings and continues
throughout the rest of his life.
3. Adult Socialisation:
In the adult socialisation, actors enter roles (for example, becoming an
employee, a husband or wife) for which primary and secondary socialisation may
not have prepared them fully. Adult socialisation teaches people to take on new
duties.
4. Anticipatory Socialisation:
This type of socialization refers to the process wherein a person practices or
rehearses for future social relationships.
Example: A child anticipates parenthood as he observes his parents perform their
daily roles.

5. Re-socialisation:
This type of socialization involves rejecting previous behaviour patterns and
accepting new ones so the individual can shift from one part of his life to another.
Re-socialization is said to be happening throughout human life cycle. For
example, when a criminal is rehabilitated, he has to change his role radically.
The looking-glass self is a social psychological concept, created by Charles
Horton Cooley, stating that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal
interactions and the perceptions of others. The term refers to people shaping
their self-concepts based on their understanding of how others perceive them.
The concept of the looking glass-self theory constitutes the cornerstone of the
sociological theory of socialization. The idea is that people in our close
environment serve as the mirrors that reflect images of ourselves. According to
Cooley, this process has three steps. First, we imagine how we appear to another
person. Sometimes this imagination is correct, but may also be wrong since it is
merely based on our assumptions. Second, we imagine what judgments people
make of us based on our appearance. Lastly, we imagine how the person feels
about us, based on the judgments made of us. The ultimate result is that we
often change our behaviour based on how we feel people perceive us.

George Herbert Mead developed a theory of social behaviourism to explain how

social experience develops an individual's personality. Mead's central concept
is the self: the part of an individual's personality composed of self-awareness and
self-image. Mead claimed that the self is not there at birth, rather, it is developed
with social experience. The self has two sides: 'me' and 'I. The 'me' is considered
the socialized aspect of the individual. The 'me' represents learned behaviours,
attitudes, and expectations of others and of society. This is sometimes referred to
as the generalized other. The 'me' has been developed by the knowledge of
society and social interactions that the individual has gained. The 'I' represents
the individual's identity based on response to the 'me.' The 'I' says, 'Society says
I should behave and socially interact one way, and I think I should act the same
(or perhaps different),' and that notion becomes self.

CASES WHERE SOCIALIZATION DID NOT TAKE PLACE CULTURE WAS NOT
LEARNED
Cases of Anna and Natasha highlight how important the process of socialization
is. Anna was an illegitimate child, having been kept in a room for most of her life
because her grandfather disapproved of his daughters behaviour. She was kept
in a dark room where she was tied to a broken chair and tied to a cot. When she
was found at the age of six, she was suffering from malnutrition as well as her
muscles showed signs of atrophy. She was immobile, expressionless and
indifferent to everything. She could not talk, walk, feed her or do anything that
showed signs of intelligence.
Natasha, a five-year-old girl spent her entire life locked in a room with cats and
dogs, and no heat, water, or sewage system. When she was found, she could not
speak, would jump at the door and bark as caretakers left, and had "clear
attributes of an animal". Both these girls lived isolated from human contact from
a very young age where they have little or no experience of human care,
behaviour, or, crucially, of human language.
These two cases highlight the need to learn culture. Becoming a human is not
just a matter of being born. Its all about becoming a social being, which happens
through socialization i.e. learning of culture. Thus it is rightly said that an
individual is the product of culture.