Two: Are You Socialized?
Even though I am a social scientist, I am typically not that…sociable. I spend most of my time alone, writing, reading, crunching numbers. But sociology has shown me that this feeling of alone-ness, of not being that sociable, is an illusion. As I write this book, I’m drawing on a lot of other things I’ve read that other people wrote—science itself is a social activity. I wouldn’t be able to write a sociology book without talking about what other sociologists have thought, said, and done. In a sense, I’m in conversation with them as I write, and their words are in my head as I read their work; they are speaking to me.
When I read a book, watch a movie, listen to music, eat a meal, even if I’m doing so alone, I’m not really alone. Someone else made those things possible—I am interacting with them all, in a sense, as I watch. Music—it isn’t just the artist or the band but all the people who brought the artist’s work to my headphones. The interaction is the basic unit—the atom—of sociology. Economists study the economy; chemists study chemicals; sociologists study interaction.
If I left society and became a hermit, living in the woods and detached from all other human contact, I would still be a product of society, because everything I take with me, knowledge-wise, came from someone or somewhere else. I probably didn’t learn it on my own; it was taught to me. Even the words I speak, and the thoughts I think in those words, are the product of the social environment in which I was raised, schooled, taught how to be a person. This is the fundamental lesson of sociology, I think: socialization. People learn how to be people from other people, through the process of interacting with them. Socialization is how people to be people through social interaction.
Reflect for a moment. You are reading these words on this page. This means that, in a sense, we are interacting with one another. Maybe you are enrolled in one of my sociology classes. Maybe you are a family member, friend, colleague, editor; maybe you just stumbled across this on the Internet. Maybe you are reading these words years or decades after I have written them, and I’ve since passed away. I’m talking in your head right now, even if we’ve never met, and even if I’m no longer alive. It’s kind of unnerving to think about reading and writing in these terms. In any case, you can only read these words because you learned how to read them. You didn’t teach yourself how to read—without someone to help you learn to read, to connect the symbols on the page to sounds or images or thoughts, these words would be meaningless scribbles.
People are social critters. We literally cannot survive without socialization, and the interactions that make it possible. In 2005, a seven-year-old child was discovered in Plant City, Florida, lying alone in a dirty diaper in a dark room filled with insects and human waste. She was taken from her family to the hospital, where doctors were able to nurse her back to health. Despite having no detectable psychological or physical symptoms, she did not recognize human faces or react to pain or affection; she could not speak or easily interact other people. The little girl named Dani was classified a feral child, a youth or teen who has undergone little or no socialization. Many of the most basic experiences the vast majority of us take for granted—from being picked up or held to playing outside to learning to go the bathroom on our own—were never part of little Dani’s life.
Primary socialization begins with birth, really—arguably, even before. Some of the things you experienced while in the womb may have affected the person you became. If your parents were expecting a boy or girl, they may have made plans about what that would mean, and those plans came with all kinds of assumptions about the person you would be, what you would like, what toys to play with, what clothes to buy you and how to decorate your room. Even when parents try to avoid these assumptions other agents of socialization, other people and groups and institutions, make it difficult or impossible to do so.
The most important agents of socialization during this period, about the first seven years of life, are typically your family and your religion. The structure of families is different across time and place. Though religion is often a lifelong commitment, religious adults were typically raised religious as children. And though parents or caregivers may raise a child to be religious, other, later influences, including peer groups and the broader society or culture, may change their views in profound or unexpected ways.
If you live in a small town, you’re probably going to interact with far fewer people by age seven than someone who lives in a large city. But in a small town, you will interact with the same people over and over again, likely building closer relationships with them. A relationship, sociologically speaking, is just a product of ongoing interaction. Relationships can be helpful or harmful, involving making friends or enemies, spanning the best to the worst of what human beings have to offer (and sometimes a combination of both). They can begin, deepen, fade, end. In a sense, relationships aren’t just between people. My dog, Chewie, couldn’t talk to me, but interaction isn’t just talking. I learned to know what he was wanting or needing, smacking his lips or sticking out his tongue when I’m eating, using his teeth to pull at the edge of his bed, staring at me while I’m watching TV. He even learned a handful of words (or seemed to).
This next stage is secondary socialization. Whereas family and religion are often the most important agents of primary socialization, secondary socialization is characterized by new agents. In more and more societies, school is part of this process—leaving home to learn how to be a part of a bigger, broader, and more complex society. And that is what you’re doing, sociologically, when you’re getting educated—more on that later. Another agent of secondary socialization is your peer group, or the people around your age that you interact with, both at school and elsewhere.
Both education and peer groups can, and often do, create tension with agents of primary socialization. The norms of parents and religion may chafe against those of peer groups and education, to varying degrees. This leads to the cliché that teenagers are rebellious. Teenagers are really engaged in finding their identity and learning their place within the peer group, among others their age, and this can mean conformity (sometimes rigid conformity) to other teenagers’ expectations, even if those expectations defy the expectations of their parents, family, and religion. One group’s norms may be another group’s deviance. It is also why parents so often find it challenging to raise teenagers—and why being a teenager is so difficult and awkward for so many of us.
This is also why cultural conflict can take place between religion and family on one hand; and schools and peer groups on the other. Sometimes the norms of the broader society shift more quickly or in unexpected directions, leaving people, young and old, in a state of culture shock or leading to cultural conflict. This is because culture is a set of durable expectations for how to live, the source of norms and of deviance; and big complex societies might have lots of overlapping cultures and different expectations in different places. Lots of stories involve culture shock, as a person who grows up in a small, tightly-knit, religious town might experience moving to a big, impersonal, more secular city. At the extreme end of this, there arises the possibility of a culture war, or a society fundamentally and irreconcilably internally divided on cultural issues. Culture wars are not necessarily violent, but if people feel their way of life is being undermined or taken away, they might consider it (more on violence later). Often such issues are resolved peacefully over time; sometimes they tear societies apart.
Thinking about secondary socialization also requires introducing some new ideas. People in this secondary stage begin forming bonds beyond those of the household and childhood interactions, usually to address specific human needs or solve problems. These networks are relationships between multiple people that bind them together for some specific purpose. When you go to school and start making friends your age, the world opens up in new ways. You get to know your friends, their parent(s) or caregiver(s), your teachers, your friends’ friends, your friends’ enemies, the kids who get picked on and the kids who will pick on you. You may meet your future spouse at school, and then you’re getting connected to their family and they to yours in ways that are fodder for good drama.
Because informal networks often aren’t enough to sustain a big, complex social world, institutions arise through ongoing collective human activity to meet ongoing collective human needs. They aren’t really built, per se—the building itself is just a step along the process (if there is a building). And they’re durable, lasting a long time. Bemidji State University was formed in 1919, long before anyone currently working in and for it was born. It arose as Bemidji Normal School, a way to train schoolteachers for rural Northern Minnesota and surrounding areas. Networks can connect people across and within institutions; I know other faculty and through them have met other members of the community. Institutions, notably, tell us what to do, and enforce rules; we can feel the weight of institutions that persisted before us and that are bigger than us even as we come to recognize their importance.
Now I have transitioned from secondary socialization to adulthood; Universities are another stage in schooling for training adults in particular specializations. Some sociologists study agents of socialization that go beyond primary and secondary: work and the economy, college, parenthood, politics, voluntary organizations, and more. These are social things that continue to shape adults through interaction, relationship, network, and institution. Even death is fair game for sociological thought; and in a perhaps odd sense socialization continues even after we are gone (because the people around us may still be interacting with us and learning how to be people from us).
Sociologically, what makes death painful is that we have formed a relationship with another, and now that other is no longer there to interact with. There is a whole set of interactions and habits of body and mind that are still part of us that now seem unfamiliar or without purpose. After I had Chewie put to sleep in January of 2023 at the age of 13, because his organs were failing and he was in pain, I had to face grief, or the enduring pain of the end of a relationship. Because I had spent more time with him than any human being during that time period, the grief was intense and long-lasting. Grief is a part of a relationship coming to an end; a breakup, a divorce, or a loss. It is another social thing that we social critters endure, in this chaotic dance of interaction.
Important Words:
Agents of socialization
Culture
Culture shock
Culture war
Feral child
Grief
Institution
Interaction
Network
Peer group
Primary socialization
Relationship
Secondary socialization
Socialization
Image Credit: Russian Nesting Doll (Matroyshka), Wiki Public Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll
