Specialties and Alternatives
Specialties and Alternatives
Specialties
- Elements only a portion of the adult population knows and can do.
- Occupational: vocational knowledge and skills, shaped by the division of labour.
- Social position: ways of thinking peculiar to a particular social group.
Alternatives
- Neither universal nor specialty; exercised by choice.
- Ways of thinking and doing that depart from accepted practice.
- Enter a culture by invention within it or diffusion from other cultures.
Static and dynamic cultures
- Static: unchanging. Dynamic: changing.
Universals are shared by nearly everyone. The other two of Linton’s categories are not. Specialties belong to some people but not all, and alternatives belong to only a few who choose them. Together with universals, they map out who in a society knows what.
Specialties
Specialties are the cultural elements that only a portion of the adult population knows about and can do. Where universals are common ground, specialties are the knowledge held by some and not others. Linton splits them into two kinds.
Occupational specialties are the largest group. They consist basically of vocational things that demand technical knowledge and skills. They exist because every society has a division of labour: different people do different work, and each kind of work carries its own specialized knowledge. In a simple society the division of labour may be coarse, with broad splits in who does what. In industrial societies, which are permeated by science and technology, the division of labour is far more advanced, so specialties contain a relatively large portion of all the cultural elements. The more specialized the work in a society, the more of its culture sits in specialties.
Social-position specialties are the second kind. A society with recognisable social elites will find those elites have ways of thinking peculiar to themselves, and a society with lower social strata will find ways of thinking there that are not present in the elite. Each social position carries its own slice of culture.
A note on simple societies: specialties are not shared directly or intimately by all individuals, but in a simple society most specialties are still understood in a general way by everyone, even those who do not practise them. The baker is not the only one who roughly knows how bread is made.
Cultural elements only some people know and can do
They come in two kinds: occupational specialties, the technical knowledge of particular jobs, and social-position specialties, ways of thinking peculiar to a social group. The division of labour drives them.
Alternatives
The third category is alternatives. These are cultural elements that belong among neither the universals nor the specialties, because they are exercised by people by choice. An alternative is a way of thinking or doing that departs from the commonly accepted ideas or practices: a new way of making soap, a new way of teaching, a new way of preparing food, or any of a thousand other things, accepted so far by only a few individuals.
How does an alternative enter a culture? In two ways: by invention within the society, when someone there devises a new way, or by diffusion from other cultures, when a new way is borrowed from outside. Either way, it starts as the practice of a few.
This connects to whether a culture changes. Cultures may be static, meaning unchanging, or dynamic, meaning changing. In a dynamic culture, new ways of doing things keep emerging, and over time they come to be accepted and absorbed, moving into the universals if everyone takes them up, or settling among the established alternatives. Alternatives are, in effect, the growing edge of a culture: the place where change is tried before it spreads.
Chosen ways that depart from accepted practice
They are neither universal nor specialty, used by a few by choice. They enter a culture by invention within it or by diffusion from other cultures, and are the growing edge where change is tried.
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