Sociology of culture
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".
[3] For instance, a leading proponent of the "strong program" in cultural sociology, Alexander argues: "To believe in the possibility of cultural sociology is to subscribe to the idea that every action, no matter how instrumental, reflexive, or coerced [compared to] its external environment, is embedded to some extent in a horizon of affect and meaning.
In the beginning of the cultural turn, sociologists tended to use qualitative methods and hermeneutic approaches to research, focusing on meanings, words, artifacts and symbols.
For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.
As a major contributor to conflict theory, Marx argued that culture served to justify inequality.
Marx believed that the "engine of history" was the struggle between groups of people with diverging economic interests and thus the economy determined the cultural superstructure of values and ideologies.
Durkheim held the belief that culture has many relationships to society which include: 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.
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.
Social classes ranked in order of importance (status) based on the culture's core values.
Anthropologists lay claim to the establishment of modern uses of the culture concept as defined by Edward Burnett Tylor in the mid-19th century.
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.
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.
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 (sauvage pensée), knowledge, art and aesthetics, applying the methodological structuralism on his investigations.
Mary Douglas is widely known for her contributions to social anthropology, particularly in her analysis of ritual purity, pollution, and the symbolic structures that shape cultural classifications of dirt and disorder.
Additionally, she developed a theoretical model for understanding how social structures and individual roles influence cultural beliefs and practices.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's influential model of society and social relations has its roots in Marxist theories of class and conflict.
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.
Habitus explains the mutually penetrating realities of individual subjectivity and societal objectivity after the function of social construction.
Its original meaning may have been lost, but it is now used by many practitioners of New Age religion as an arcane symbol of power or life forces.
Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such as what happened with many Native American Indians.
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.
Culture theory, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, sees audiences as playing an active rather than passive role in relation to mass media.
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.
Key figures in today's cultural sociology include: Julia Adams, Jeffrey Alexander, John Carroll, Diane Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Henning Eichberg, Ron Eyerman, Sarah Gatson, Andreas Glaeser, Wendy Griswold, Eva Illouz, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michele Lamont, Annette Lareau, Stjepan Mestrovic, Philip Smith, Margaret Somers, Yasemin Soysal, Dan Sperber, Lynette Spillman, Ann Swidler, Diane Vaughan, and Viviana Zelizer.
