Review Sheet: What is Culture | Culture is a Cycle | How Culture Works

Perusall

Key Points

• Culture can be understood in a variety of ways, from a division between high and popular culture to analyzing the material and symbolic components of a cultural good.

• Culture can be seen as a system of values and norms, whether at the macro-level of a society or at the more middle (or ‘meso’) level of an organization.

• Culture can also be seen as a set of practices people use startegically that can change over time.

Key People

• Elijah Anderson

• Emile Durkheim

• Ann Swidler

• Diane Vaughan

Key Terms

Code Switching: Adopting a set of informal rules and manners attuned to a particular setting.

• Collective Representation: A set of images and words that represent a particular culture.

• Cultural toolkit: Using a stash of beliefs, values, and attitudes that we learn how to deploy based upon the situation at hand.

• High Culture: Cultural goods made for and enjoyed by elite groups.

• Material Culture: Physical goods, not necessarily essentials, often placed within an economic system.

• Norms: Rules for group behaviors, informed by values, specifying appropriate and inappropriate activities.

• Popular Culture: Heavily produced and commercialized goods made for and consumed by a large audience.

• Rituals: Routinized and highlight important group activities.

• Symbolic Culture: Aspect of culture that includes beliefs, values, norms, and language.

• Symbols: Material or immaterial objects that groups affix meaning to.

• Values: Moral beliefs.

Key Points:

• Depending on whether you examine culture from the point of production or consumption, different issues emerge. Each perspective answers significant questions.

• The production of culture perspective shows how culture is made and distributed by a wide array of groups and organizations, not just individuals.

• Consuming culture is not necessarily a passive activity, but rather a thoughtful practice.

• Subcultures and fan cultures engage in cultural refashioning, cobbling together symbolic and material culture and assigning them new meanings.

• Subculture can be coopted by popular culture, refreshing the wider cultural landscape.

Key People

• Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

• Alexandre Frenette

• Dick Hebdige

• Richard Peterson

• Janice Radway

• Thorstein Veblen

• Sharon Zukin

Key Terms

• Conspicuous Consumption: Gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods.

• Corporate Consolidation: The acquisition of smaller corporations by larger ones.

• Culture Industries: A system of organization that produce and distribute cultural goods (e.g., music, food, art).

• Subculture: A group that uses alternative symbolic and material cultural goods to distinguish themselves from the wider society.

Key Points

• Cultural capital, fields, and habitus conceptualize culture as a kind of exchangeable good, useful depending upon the context, and a kind of learned tendency towards seeing and acting in the world.

• Culture can work as a bridge and as a fence.

• Tastes help people to define groups based on aesthetic or moral bases.

• People distinguish themselves through a deep understanding of a particular fact of culture, but nowadays people also gain status with knowledge of a wide palate of cultural goods.

• Culture can justify and reinforce inequalities.

Key People

• Pierre Bourdieu

• Michele Lamont

• Max Weber

Key Terms

• Boundary work: Creating and maintaining symbolic to limit group membership and access to resources.

• Cultural capital: Non-economic cultural resources (e.g., knowledge, skills, behaviors) attuned to a particular sphere of social life.

• Cultural Omnivores: People who differentiate themselves by knowing a lot about many different cultural fields.

• Field: A context of social relations (e.g., a profession, a community) where a particular kind of cultural capital is exchanged.

• Habitus: A learned disposition, based within the particular social world a person inhabits.

• Status: the social designation of honor, either positive or negative.

• Status group: Collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community has given a certain level of prestige.

• Symbolic Boundaries: Conceptual ways people separate each other into groups (e.g., traditions, styles, tastes, classifications).