Sociology of culture
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (September 2020) |
Part of a series on |
Sociology |
---|
The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the 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". Culture in the sociological field is analyzed as the ways of thinking and describing, acting, and the material objects that together shape a group of people's way of life.[1]
Contemporary sociologists' approach to culture is often divided between a "sociology of culture" and "cultural sociology"—the terms are similar, though not interchangeable.
Development
Cultural sociology first emerged in
Early researchers
The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology, as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and 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
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 in 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 purported 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, 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."[8] Simmel presented his analyses within a context of "form" and "content". Sociological concept and analysis can be viewed.
The elements of a culture
As no two cultures are exactly alike they do all have common characteristics.[9]
A culture contains:
1. Social Organization: Structured by organizing its members into smaller numbers to meet the culture's specific requirements. Social classes ranked in order of importance (status) based on the culture's core values. For example: money, job, education, family, etc.
2. Customs and Traditions: Rules of behavior enforced by the cultures ideas of right and wrong such as customs, traditions, rules, or written laws.
3. Symbols: Anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share the same culture.[10]
4. Norms: Rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior 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.[10]
5. Religion: The answers to their basic meanings of life and values.
6. Language: A system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another.[10]
7. Arts and Literature: Products of human imagination expressed through art, music, literature, stories, and dance.
8. Forms of Government: How the culture distributes power. Who keeps order within the society, who protects them from danger, and who provides for their needs. Can fall into categories such as Democracy, Republic, or Dictatorship.
9. Economic Systems: What to produce, how to produce it, and for whom. How people use their limited resources to satisfy their wants and needs. Can fall into the categories such as Traditional Economy,
10. Artifacts: Distinct material objects, such as architecture, technologies, and artistic creations.
11. Social institutions: Patterns of organization and relationships regarding governance, production, socializing, education, knowledge creation, arts, and relating to other cultures.
Anthropology
In an anthropological sense, culture is society based on the values and ideas without influence of the material world.[11]
The cultural system is the cognitive and symbolic matrix for the central values system
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.
Anthropologists lay claim to the establishment of modern uses of the culture concept as defined by Edward Burnett Tylor in the mid-19th century.
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".
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
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss, based, at the same time, on the sociological and anthropological
Major areas of research
Theoretical constructs in Bourdieu's sociology of culture
French sociologist
Bourdieu's theory of practice is practical rather than
Cultural change
The belief that culture is symbolically coded and can thus be taught from one person to another means that cultures, although bounded, can change. Cultures are both predisposed to change and resistant to it. Resistance can come from habit, religion, and the integration and interdependence of cultural traits.
Cultural change can have many causes, including: the environment, inventions, and contact with other cultures.
Several understandings of how cultures change come from anthropology. For instance, in diffusion theory, the form of something moves from one culture to another, but not its meaning. For example, the
Contact between cultures can also result in
Sociology suggests an alternative to both the view that it has always been an unsatisfying way at one extreme and the sociological individual genius view at the other. This alternative posits that culture and cultural works are collective, not individual, creations. We can best understand specific cultural objects... by seeing them not as unique to their creators but as the fruits of collective production, fundamentally social in their genesis. (p. 53) In short, Griswold argues that culture changes through the contextually dependent and socially situated actions of individuals; macro-level culture influences the individual who, in turn, can influence that same culture. The logic is a bit circular, but illustrates how culture can change over time yet remain somewhat constant.
It is, of course, important to recognize here that Griswold is talking about cultural change and not the actual origins of culture (as in, "there was no culture and then, suddenly, there was"). Because Griswold does not explicitly distinguish between the origins of cultural change and the origins of culture, it may appear as though Griswold is arguing here for the origins of culture and situating these origins in society. This is neither accurate nor a clear representation of sociological thought on this issue. Culture, just like society, has existed since the beginning of humanity (humans being social and cultural). Society and culture co-exist because humans have social relations and meanings tied to those relations (e.g. brother, lover, friend). Culture as a super-phenomenon has no real beginning except in the sense that humans (homo sapiens) have a beginning. This, then, makes the question of the origins of culture moot—it has existed as long as we have, and will likely exist as long as we do. Cultural change, on the other hand, is a matter that can be questioned and researched, as Griswold does.
Culture theory
Culture theory, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, sees audiences as playing an active rather than passive role in relation to mass media. One strand of research focuses on the audiences and how they interact with media; the other strand of research focuses on those who produce the media, particularly the news.[12]
Frankfurt School
Walter Benjamin
Theodor W. Adorno
Herbert Marcuse
Erich Fromm
Current research
Computer-mediated communication as culture
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the process of sending messages—primarily, but not limited to text messages—through the direct use by participants of computers and communication networks. By restricting the definition to the direct use of computers in the communication process, you have to get rid of the communication technologies that rely upon computers for switching technology (such as telephony or compressed video), but do not require the users to interact directly with the computer system via a keyboard or similar computer interface. To be mediated by computers in the sense of this project, the communication must be done by participants fully aware of their interaction with the computer technology in the process of creating and delivering messages. Given the current state of computer communications and networks, this limits CMC to primarily text-based messaging, while leaving the possibility of incorporating sound, graphics, and video images as the technology becomes more sophisticated.
Cultural institutions
Cultural activities are institutionalised; the focus on institutional settings leads to the investigation "of activities in the cultural sector, conceived as historically evolved societal forms of organising the conception, production, distribution, propagation, interpretation, reception, conservation and maintenance of specific cultural goods".[13] Cultural Institutions Studies is therefore a specific approach within the sociology of culture.
Key figures
Key figures in today's cultural sociology include:
See also
- Communication studies
- Cultural anthropology
- Cultural Sociology (journal)
- Cultural studies
- Culture
- Sociology
- Sociology of literature
- Sociomusicology
- Taste (sociology)
References
Citations
- ^ Vuong, Quan-Hoang (2023). Mindsponge Theory. Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
- ^ "the sociology of culture versus cultural sociology | orgtheory.net". orgtheory.wordpress.com. 27 August 2006. Retrieved 2014-10-01.
- ^ "Sociology of Culture and Cultural Sociology". blog.lib.umn.edu. Archived from the original on 2015-05-05. Retrieved 2014-10-01.
- ISBN 978-0-19-020757-1.
- ISBN 9781412990547.
- ^ Rojek, Chris, and Bryan Turner. "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn." The Sociological Review 48.4 (2000): 629-648.
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2014-07-22.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ Levine, Donald (ed) 'Simmel: On individuality and social forms' Chicago University Press, 1971. pxix.
- ^ "Onondaga Central School District".
- ^ ISBN 978-0-13-700161-3.
- ^ Radcliffe-Brown
- ^ "The Role and Influence of Mass Media". Cliffs Notes. Archived from the original on 21 August 2012.
- ^ Zembylas, Tasos (2004): Kulturbetriebslehre. Begründung einer Inter-Disziplin. Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, p. 13.
Sources
- Groh, Arnold. 2019. Theories of Culture. London, England: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-66865-2.
- Stark, Rodney. 2007. Sociology: Tenth Edition. Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, Inc. ISBN 049509344-0.
- Walker, Gavin. 2001. Society and culture in sociological and anthropological tradition Archived 2007-11-14 at the Wayback Machine. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
- JSTOR 2577977.
- Lawley, Elizabeth. 1994. The Sociology of Culture in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Initial Exploration Archived 2007-10-11 at the Wayback Machine.
- Swartz, David. 1997. Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Griswold, Wendy. 2004. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
- Swidler, Ann (1986). "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies". JSTOR 2095521.
- La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia. Genova: Edizioni ECIG. ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.
- "Culture and Public Action: Further Reading." Welcome to Culture and Public Action. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. <http://www.cultureandpublicaction.org/conference/s_o_d_sociologyanddevelopment.htm Archived 2008-11-21 at the Wayback Machine>.
External links
- Media related to Sociology of culture at Wikimedia Commons