Lecture 2 Flashcards
What is culture?
No unifying theory
Many debated theories
Includes status, lifestyles, and structure
Norms
Social norms are the perceived informal, mostly unwritten, rules that define acceptable and appropriate actions. within a given group or community, thus guiding human behaviour.
Culture can be both
a unit of analysis and an area of study
What is culture as meaning?
Understood to include the study of meaning-making or sense-making processes
Types of analysis in culture as meaning
macro/micro- level analysis
Questions in culture as meaning
how individuals and groups understand themselves, as well as the objects/people who make up their social world
How we make sense of inequality
wed to widely shared cultural narratives like the American Dream; cultural narratives such as this shape our willingness to provide support and/or address inequality
Linda Taylor, “welfare queen”
Government promoted this identity to showcase a woman who used aid to live a luxurious lifestyle
Cultural repertoires
A collection of meanings that individuals and groups deploy when and if appropriate
What do cultural repertoires do
help us make sense of our social world
Culture as power
Culture can be used to draw materially and socially powerful distinctions between individuals and groups
Marx and class power
Not explicitly concerned with culture, but much of his treatise on class domination and how power informs cultural thinking
Bourdieu and distinction
Argued that class groups used culture to mark distinctions between they and other
How Distinctions were signaled according to Bordieu
through class-based differences in taste, i.e. likes and dislikes, genres of music, styles of art, etc.
Bourdieu’s three forms of capital
Economic, social and cultural
Economic capital
consists of material and financial assets and is primary, with all other forms of capital convertible to it under certain conditions
Economic capital is directly and most clearly convertible to
money, though it may take an institutionalized form, such as property rights; it can also convert to social capital
Social capital
loosely refers to network connections and to the “potential resources” embedded across them; who you know, who they know, and what they have access to
Cultural capital
- consists of symbolic goods, educational degrees, skills, and subjective dispositions (a person’s inherent qualities of mind and character)
- a measure of how one moves through the world; how they talk, walk, and act
- what one knows (i.e., knowledge of fine art, music, etc.).
What Bourdieu believed about Cultural capital
you need to acquire this at a young age; there was no way to gain it later in life
Culture as hegemony
Concerned with ideology and the reproduction of inequality
What developed the idea of hegemony
Marx’s early work and was later refined by Antonio Gramsci
Hegemony
a kind of domination that is consented to; giving in without conscious awareness
Culture as action
Culture helps to scaffold or guide action
