Cultural rules play a profound role in our society today, and through education we have learnt what is right and what is wrong. However, could somebody who has not bee brought up knowing these rules be able to interact with other humans? There are many cases where children in particular have had no social interact with other humans in the early stages of life, where primary socialisation should take place. And the outcome has been that they have no facial expression, incorrect movement, and have no human speech. The most popular example of this is the feral children.
Feral Children are children who have apparently been nurtured in the wild by animals. Also, children that by some twist of fate and/or circumstance were raised in a non-human, inhuman or sub-human environment, and because of it did not learn how to communicate and/or behave in a human manner. There have been, since the 1600s, about 40 cases of feral children, which become widely known and documented.
Among the cases of long ago, there are a few that deserve mention, such as those of the (1341), of of Hanover, found in 1724 in Germany and was brought to England by King George I, the Irish sheep-boy (1672), the Lithuanian bear-boy, found in 1661 living among bears and was adopted by a Polish count who attempted to "humanise" him, of the a child of about 12 who was seized by three hunters in France in 1798 as he was climbing a tree. Locals throughout many years running in the wild entirely naked before his capture saw him.
Also the well-documented case of (1828). Another case, whose authenticity has been disputed, is that of , two feral girls supposedly found among wolf cubs in India in 1920. More recently and better documented is the amazing story of , who was reared by apes in the Ugandan jungle in the late 80s and early 90s.
The nature-nurture debate is one of the biggest areas of controversy in language development. Are we genetically "programmed" to learn language, or is it something that we have to be taught? And is such social and environmental input necessary at certain stages in our development, without which, language will never be acquired? Sociologists have already looked at studies of chimpanzees to see what the effect of raising non-humans in human environments would have on language development; the reverse of this - looking at humans raised in non-human environments is an attempt to analyse the nature-nurture debate from a different perspective. If feral children can learn how to talk then perhaps this would be evidence to support the argument that social factors are important to language acquisition. If they cannot learn to talk then those interested in showing the profound effects of genetic structure would have evidence supporting their view. Therefore cases such as those above prove that cultural rules of society are needed for human interaction.
A culture can be defined as a “way of life” that is transmitted from one generation to the next and it consists of two basic elements:
1. The material things that a society creates. This material culture consists of the physical objects (cars, telephones, computers, etc.) that a society produces to reflect their interests and preoccupation’s.
2. The non-material things that a society creates. This non-material culture consists of the knowledge and beliefs that influence people’s behaviour. We can begin this section, therefore, by looking at the idea of non-material culture and in particular how it is taught and learnt.
Cultural rules are what we as humans deem to be the way we should determine what is right and wrong in our lives. For example, a rule of our culture is that we have the right to freedom of speech. In other cultures this may be different. If an individual does not know these rules then they cannot abide by them, meaning that it would be very difficult for them to be able to find a “medium” with other individuals.
The paradox of whether individuals are products of society or society is a product of individuals is controversial at least. It is the case that the individual is capable of producing a world that the individual experiences as something other than a human product. It is argumentative the individual is the producer of society or that society is the producer of the individual, but maybe they are so inter-linked that they are indistinguishable. This is a different situation when individuals separate themselves from society.
It is apparent that an individual in isolation could not conceive of or build a society. Society is built upon the collective of the morals and valves of the individuals within society, but a singular individual does not have a collective opinion. An individual in isolation can only look at the world from an internal perspective. Only through individual externalization can an individual view the social world as their others that transcended into social conformity. For society to continue, society must perpetuate its values to further present and future generations.
I have tried to discuss whether individuals need cultural rules in order to survive in a society. If we look at examples like the feral children, we can see that you do need the cultural rules in order to survive amongst other cultures.
Cultural rules, therefore, provide a structure for people’s behaviour, effectively channelling behaviour in some ways but not others. The emphasis here therefore, is on the way our behaviour is constrained by the rules of society and the group to which we are born. In conclusion, I believe that only by learning the cultural rules of a society can a human truly interact with other humans is a true statement, although there may be some exceptions to the rule, in general you need socialisation with a particular group in order to be able to interact with them.
