Non-material culture is everything in a culture that has no physical substance: the beliefs and cosmologies a society holds, its values and norms, its folkways and mores, its language, etiquette, law, art forms as conventions rather than objects, and its stock of knowledge and skill. It is transmitted through socialisation rather than manufacture, and it exists only in shared understanding and repeated practice. Its counterpart is material culture — the artefacts through which those understandings are expressed and used.
Where it comes from
The pairing was formalised by American sociology in the early twentieth century. W. G. Sumner had already sorted the intangible order into folkways, the customary and morally neutral, and mores, the customs invested with moral force and defended by sanction. William F. Ogburn, later with M. F. Nimkoff, built the material and non-material division into a general theory of social change.
How it works
Ogburn's argument turns on a difference of rate. Technology accumulates, and each invention supplies the means for further invention, so the material realm expands exponentially. Non-material culture has no such multiplier: mores are internalised in childhood, protected by sentiment and by the interests of those who benefit from them, and so adjust reluctantly. The interval of misfit is cultural lag — the reason a society can possess advanced means while retaining institutions unable to govern them.
Points of debate
The distinction is criticised as too tidy. Law and belief are also productive forces: ideas of individual right, nationalism or piety reshape what a society builds, so causation runs both ways. Nor is non-material culture uniformly slow — legal change can be abrupt while custom persists beneath it. India illustrates this vividly: the Hindu Succession Act amendment of 2005 granted daughters coparcenary rights years before families began treating those rights as legitimate, and dowry persists in prosperous, technologically modern households.
For the UPSC answer
Define non-material culture as the intangible normative and cognitive order, and always present it with material culture as one analytical pair. Attribute the differential rate of change to Ogburn and name cultural lag. The evaluative point is that the causal arrow is not one-way, best shown by an Indian instance where law outran custom.
References & further reading
- Ogburn, W. F. (1922). Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature. B. W. Huebsch.
- Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways. Ginn and Company.
- Ogburn, W. F. and Nimkoff, M. F. (1940). Sociology. Houghton Mifflin.