Every social system has a culture. A college class has one. So does the Inter- net, and so does Canada. Culture consists primarily of symbolsespecially the words contained in languageand various kinds of ideas that shape how we think about everything from relationships with other people to the meaning of life. It also includes such practices as music, art, dance, and religious rituals. It includes how we shape the physical world around us, from using sand to make silicon that goes into computer chips to building cities to arranging owers and plants in that familiar form known as a gar- den. Culture is both material (the physical 'stufi' of social life) and nonma terial (the symbols and ideas we use to think and give meaning to just about everything). Symbols make culture possible, because they are what we use to give something meaning beyond what it otherwise 'is.' Symbols are building blocks that we use to make sentences, and sentences are what make such ideas as IThunder means a storm is coming' or 1Capitalism is the best eco- nomic system in the world.' In the simplest sense, when we give something a namesuch as 'thunder'we create a relationship with it by making it have something to do with us. If we do not have a name for it, we tend not to notice it and not live in relation to it. It doesn't 'matter.' When we call a dot of light in the sky a 'star,' for example, we make it part of a cultural real- ity. In that sense, we make it real to us in ways that it otherwise wouldn't be, even though that dot of light would still exist up there in the sky. As a species, we miss most of what is around us because there is so much of it and it's impossible to pay attention to more than a tiny portion of it. We use symbols to name things as a way to focus our attention and build a reality to live in. As philosopher Susanne Langer puts it, using symbols to construct reality lies at the heart of what makes us human