CULTURE

                                        CULTURE

"Cultural sociology" redirects here. You may also be looking for Cultural Sociology (journal).
The sociology of culture concerns culture—usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a society —as it is manifested in society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history".^[1] Culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be any of two types, non-material culture or material culture.^[2]
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany, where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie (cultural sociology). Cultural sociology was then "reinvented" in the English-speaking world as a product of the "cultural turn" of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may loosely be regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols.
"Culture" has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted post-structural aspects of cultural sociology, and instead look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.
"Cultural sociology" is one of the largest sections of the American Sociological Association. The British establishment of cultural studies means the latter is often taught as a loosely-distinct discipline in the UK.

Contents

• 1 Development of Sociology in Culture
  • 1.1 Early researchers and development of cultural sociology
    • 1.1.1 Karl Marx
    • 1.1.2 Émile Durkheim
    • 1.1.3 Max Weber
    • 1.1.4 Georg Simmel
• 2 The Elements of Culture
• 3 Anthropology
  • 3.1 Bronisław Malinowski
  • 3.2 Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
  • 3.3 Marcel Mauss
  • 3.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss
  • 3.5 Additional Anthropology
• 4 Major Areas of Research in Sociology of Culture
  • 4.1 Theoretical Constructs in Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture
  • 4.2 Frankfurt School
    • 4.2.1 Walter Benjamin
    • 4.2.2 Theodor W. Adorno
    • 4.2.3 Herbert Marcuse
    • 4.2.4 Erich Fromm
• 5 Ideology
• 6 Cultural Change
  • 6.1 Culture Theory
• 7 Current Research
  • 7.1 Computer-mediated Communication as Culture
  • 7.2 Cultural Institutions Studies
• 8 Key Figures
• 9 See also
• 10 References

Development of Sociology in Culture

Early researchers and development of cultural sociology

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology, as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and with the growing discipline of anthropology where researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field is still felt in the methods (much of cultural sociological research is qualitative) in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities) and substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Karl Marx

As a major contributor to the Conflict Theory, Marx's ideas also dealt with culture. Marx's belief of culture is that the most powerful members of a society are those who live in the ruling class. These members set up the culture of a society in order to provide the best interests to that society. He has also talked about how a society's economic status determines their values and ideologies.

Émile Durkheim

Durkheim held the belief that culture has many relationships to society which include:

• Logical- Power over individuals belongs to certain cultural categories, and beliefs such as God.
• Functional- Certain rites and myths create and build up social order by having more people create strong beliefs. The greater the number of people who believe strongly in these myths more will the social order be strengthened.
• Historical- Culture had its origins in society, and from those experiences came evolution into things such as classification systems.

Max Weber

Weber innovated the idea of a status group as a certain type of subculture. Status groups are based on things such as: race, ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, gender, sexual preference, etc. These groups live a certain lifestyle based on different values and norms. They are a culture within a culture, hence the label subculture. Weber also had the idea that people were motivated by their material and ideal interests, which include things such as preventing one from going to hell. Weber also explains that people use symbols to express their spirituality, and that symbols are used to express the spiritual side of real events, and that ideal interests are derived from symbols.

Georg Simmel

For Simmel, culture refers to 'the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history'.^[3] Simmel presented his analyses within a context of 'form' and 'content'. Sociological concept and analysis can be viewed.

The Elements of Culture

1. Symbols: Anything that carries particular meaning recognized by people who share the same culture.^[4]
2. Language: A system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another.^[5]
3. Values: Culturally defined standards of desirability, goodness, beauty and many other things that serves as broad guidelines for social living.^[6]
4. Beliefs: Specific statements that people hold to be true.^[7]
5. Norms: Rules and expectations by which a society guides the behaviour of its members. The two types of norms are mores and folkways. Mores are norms that are widely observed and have a great moral significance. Folkways are norms for routine, casual interaction.^[8]

Anthropology

Anthropologists lay claim to the establishment of modern uses of the culture concept as defined by Edward Burnett Tylor in the mid-19th century. Some of the 20th century scholars include Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Mauss.

Bronisław Malinowski

Malinowski collected data from the Trobriand Islands. Descent groups across the island claim parts of the land, and to back up those claims, they tell myths of how an ancestress started a clan and how the clan descends from that ancestress. Malinowski's observations followed the research of that found by Durkheim.

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown

Radcliffe-Brown put himself in the culture of the Andaman Islanders. His research showed that group solidification among the islanders is based on music and kinship, and the rituals that involve the use of those activities. In the words of Radcliffe-Brown, “Ritual fortifies Society”. Radcliffe-Brown's observations also followed the research of that found by Durkheim.

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss made many comparative studies on religion, magic, law and morality of occidental and non-occidental societies, and developed the concept of total social fact, and argued that the reciprocity is the universal logic of the cultural interaction.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss, based, at the same time, on the sociological and anthropological positivism of Durkheim, Mauss, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, on the economic and sociological marxism, on freudian and Gestalt psychology and on structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, realized great studies on areas myth, kinship, religion, ritual, symbolism, magic, ideology (souvage pensée), knowledge, art and aesthetics, applying the methodological structuralism on his investigations. He searched the universal principals of human thought as a form of explaining social behaviors and structures.

Additional Anthropology

• In an anthropological sense, culture is society based on the values and ideas without influence of the material world (Radcliffe-Brown). “The cultural system is the cognitive and symbolic matrix for the central values system” (Parsons).
• Culture is like the shell of a lobster. Human nature is the organism living inside of that shell. The shell, culture, identifies the organism, or human nature. Culture is what sets human nature apart, and helps direct the life of human nature.

Major Areas of Research in Sociology of Culture

Theoretical Constructs in Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's influential model of society and social relations has its roots in Marxist theories of class and conflict. Bourdieu characterizes social relations in the context of what he calls the field, defined as a competitive system of social relations functioning according to its own specific logic or rules. The field is the site of struggle for power between the dominant and subordinate classes. It is within the field that legitimacy—a key aspect defining the dominant class—is conferred or withdrawn.
Bourdieu's theory of practice is practical rather than discursive, embodied as well as cognitive and durable though adaptive. A valid concern that sets the agenda in Bourdieu's theory of practice is how action follows regular statistical patterns without the product of accordance to rules, norms and/or conscious intention. To explain this concern, Bourdieu explains habitus and field. Habitus explains the mutually penetrating realities of individual subjectivity and societal objectivity after the function of social construction. It is employed to transcend the subjective and objective dichotomy.