Tanamedrove sazogadoeba - Center for Social Sciences

Mariam Asatiani
SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE
Course Summary
Course Description and Objectives
The theme of culture and empirical research on culture has grown immensely in
sociology and the other social sciences over the last 25 years. Many disciplines have
experienced the so-called ‘cultural turn.’ Beyond just recognizing that culture matters,
scholars have developed a variety of theories of just what culture is and how it operates.
Cultural processes and practices, and symbolic and classificatory systems, are constitutive
elements of social life and important sites of, and vehicles for, political contestation. To
speak of culture this way is to speak in terms of shared ways of life, shared repertoires of
action, shared orientations to the world, shared widely shared specific attitudes, values,
behaviors, and practices, shared ‘operating systems,’ shared webs of significance, and so
on.
We will discuss our relationship to the culture(s) in which we live, and the relationship
between culture and power. We will consider how culture operates in micro-interactional
settings on the basis of widely shared cultural beliefs, and how it can exist in more clearly
delimited settings (for example, organizational cultures). Finally, we will examine how certain
cultural industries, or venues for experiencing culture, such as film, popular music, books,
high art, and fashion are organized and how they have changed over time in response to
both larger social forces and to each other.
Introduction to the Sociology of Culture and the Place (Problem) of Culture in Modern
Civilization
The idea of culture is notoriously difficult to define and the concept seems all
encompassing and ambiguous. However, most of the social scientists agreed to treat culture
as the processes of meaning making. Cultural sociology, combining interdisciplinary
influences with sociological presuppositions, examines meaning making processes, along
three specific dimensions: meaning making in everyday action, the shared mental
frameworks which are the tools of meaning making and the institutional production of
meaning.
Ruth Benedict presents some widely shared and important ideas about culture: the
ideas that human societies cannot be explained simply by nature, that cultural possibilities
are innumerable, that cultures are diverse, that different elements within a culture are
interconnected, and that elements of culture must be understood by placing them in their
context.
In his essay, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture”, Clifford
Geertz challenges reductionist social explanation which ignores the symbolic dimensions of
social life, but also criticizes reified cultural analysis of abstract codes, preferring instead
ethnography’s close examination of grounded, concrete sequences of action and their
contexts. Geertz emphasizes that culture is public and collective, not simply an attribute of
individuals; he also makes the important methodological point that cultural analysis should
not be treated as idiosyncratic but rather that it should be assessed on criteria appropriate to
the subject.
One of the fundamental tools for analyzing culture is the concept of cognitive categories.
As Zerubavel demonstrates, cognitive categories create meaning from a potentially
undifferentiated flux of experience. Further, they vary according to time, place, and social
context, and frequently generate dissent and debate. While categorical distinction is
essential, people may classify in either rigid, fuzzy or flexible ways, creating or blurring gaps
between mental entities to different degrees.
Pierre Bourdieu argues that social explanation must take into account the subjective
categories in which people understand their worlds, the pre-conscious practices in which
those categories are articulated, the power exercised in social categorization, and the
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