ABSTRACT
Social order is a series of complex, interconnected and variable patterns of interaction among people in various social settings – social order is networks of social practices ordered across space and time. If geography represents nature – culture is ‘second nature’. It provides the medium for human life and human expression – the site of human activity. From birth humans learn and internalise a range of attitudes, norms, values and expectations. The child learns to speak and use a living social language; a language which consists of words and ideas, appropriate emotions, symbols, traditions. Culture shapes and moulds, limits and develops, the plasticity of the human (potential) self. From a functionalist perspective, while the modern self may escape from the bonds of tradition and custom he or she must inhabit culture:
Many westerners have been shocked by the strength of the prohibitions a strong cultural network offers. In the midst of famine in India one reported:
Why does the strength of a coherent culture to restrain crime appear so shocking? Where, asks the liberal, is the will to live, the call to action? Why do they not do something? This non-western (perhaps, dare we say it, non-modern) culture appears to overwhelm that injunction to life, to survival at all costs, Hobbes placed as fundamental to human nature.
