What is a social culture photographer?

Social Sciences: What is culture? What is society? What's the difference?

• Does one depend on the other? Does only one or do both depend on the individual mind/brain/whatever is studied by psychology? What is the genealogy of these words' usage?

• Answer:

  Culture and society are two different perspectives with which one can analyze similar phenomena.  Culture refers to what referred to as "collective sentiments", which is the shared meanings, values and symbols of a community.  Society refers to stable patterns of relationships between people based on enduring roles which are not tied to specific individuals.  That sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but if you just think of a kinship structure - its a structure of roles, not people.  That is, if you're a son, you will become a father, a grand father, a great grandfather, etc..  The structure of relationships between father and son is enduring, and we move through them as individuals.  In the early days of anthropology, there was a split between British anthropologists, who tended to focus on society, and American's, who tended to focus on culture.  But these days the general sense is that cultural meanings only arise within social structures, and social structures are held together by cultural values.  So, it might be useful to distinguish between them for analytical reasons, they're not really separable. For example, look at the Chinese martial arts.  Culture would be the meanings which one attributes to certain physical movements (e.g. Chineseness, Daoism, ideals of discipline, etc.), and the physical movements themselves.  And society would be the networks of individuals through which the practice and culture are taught.  Now, you can't have a teacher without ideas of what it is to teach, how to relate to an authority figure, ideals of expertise, etc..  And you can't transmit a teaching outside of the structure of a school, or some other social institution.  So, you can see how social institutions and culture rely on each other. Brains are definitely involved in society and culture - and you see patterns in social organization which are presumably tied to patterns in human cognitive abilities (e.g. as groups get larger, either the social organization gets more complex or gets less efficient).  But it is a mistake to see group activity as purely a function of psychology, or the minds of individual actors.  There are complexities introduced by social organization which aren't reducible to the individual actors involved.