Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals

Sumner's "Folkways" (1906) is the book that invented the modern study of culture. Before this volume, no sociologist had systematically asked why humans around the world - from ancient Romans to Victorian Englishmen, from Melanesian Islanders to industrial Americans - develop such wildly different ways of greeting, eating, marrying, worshipping, and treating strangers. Sumner coined the terms that still anchor the field: folkways (the habits and customs that govern daily life) and mores (the moral norms with coercive force). Drawing on anthropological evidence from dozens of societies, he demonstrates that what any culture treats as natural or inevitable is in fact an accumulated inheritance - sometimes wise, often arbitrary, always powerful. This is the intellectual ancestor of every subsequent work on culture, from Ruth Benedict to modern behavioral economics. A hundred years later, "Folkways" remains essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered why humans do what they do - and why the answer is never simple.