Lecture 2

Question 1

What is culture?

Answer 1

No unifying theory
Many debated theories
Includes status, lifestyles, and structure

Question 2

Norms

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

Culture can be both

Answer 3

a unit of analysis and an area of study

Question 4

What is culture as meaning?

Answer 4

Understood to include the study of meaning-making or sense-making processes

Question 5

Types of analysis in culture as meaning

Answer 5

macro/micro- level analysis

Question 6

Questions in culture as meaning

Answer 6

how individuals and groups understand themselves, as well as the objects/people who make up their social world

Question 7

How we make sense of inequality

Answer 7

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

Question 8

Linda Taylor, “welfare queen”

Answer 8

Government promoted this identity to showcase a woman who used aid to live a luxurious lifestyle

Question 9

Cultural repertoires

Answer 9

A collection of meanings that individuals and groups deploy when and if appropriate

Question 10

What do cultural repertoires do

Answer 10

help us make sense of our social world

Question 11

Culture as power

Answer 11

Culture can be used to draw materially and socially powerful distinctions between individuals and groups

Question 12

Marx and class power

Answer 12

Not explicitly concerned with culture, but much of his treatise on class domination and how power informs cultural thinking

Question 13

Bourdieu and distinction

Answer 13

Argued that class groups used culture to mark distinctions between they and other

Question 14

How Distinctions were signaled according to Bordieu

Answer 14

through class-based differences in taste, i.e. likes and dislikes, genres of music, styles of art, etc.

Question 15

Bourdieu’s three forms of capital

Answer 15

Economic, social and cultural

Question 16

Economic capital

Answer 16

consists of material and financial assets and is primary, with all other forms of capital convertible to it under certain conditions

Question 17

Economic capital is directly and most clearly convertible to

Answer 17

money, though it may take an institutionalized form, such as property rights; it can also convert to social capital

Question 18

Social capital

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Cultural capital

Answer 19

• 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.).

Question 20

What Bourdieu believed about Cultural capital

Answer 20

you need to acquire this at a young age; there was no way to gain it later in life

Question 21

Culture as hegemony

Answer 21

Concerned with ideology and the reproduction of inequality

Question 22

What developed the idea of hegemony

Answer 22

Marx’s early work and was later refined by Antonio Gramsci

Question 23

Hegemony

Answer 23

a kind of domination that is consented to; giving in without conscious awareness

Question 24

Culture as action

Answer 24

Culture helps to scaffold or guide action

Question 25

Types of study used for culture as action

Answer 25

Cognitive approaches to the study of culture: dual-cognition and/or the tripartite model of cognition are popular heuristic tools in this area

Question 26

Means-ends schema

Answer 26

Early theories of action supposed that culture provided an “end” that must be achieved

Question 27

Swidler’s Cultural Toolkit:

Answer 27

A repertoire of cultural “tools” or resources from which actors draw when making decisions and coordinating actions

Question 28

Strategy of action

Answer 28

what Swindler calls the application and use of tools

Question 29

Settled Times

Answer 29

Characterized by stable social structures and routine action

Question 30

what settled times are useful for

Answer 30

give way to diverse cultural tools and resources and, to distinct cultural ideals worth aspiring toward

Question 31

Unsettled times

Answer 31

Periods of profound change or de-stabilization

Question 32

what unsettled times are useful for

Answer 32

make way for cultural change; for new “strategies of action”

Question 33

material culture

Answer 33

The physical things that are used by or that surround a particular group or community of people; tangible

Question 34

Brand culture

Answer 34

refers to the many ways in which brands shape our social world; brands infuse culture with meaning and are interpreted or read in multiple ways