Midterm 1 Flashcards
Etymology of the word “culture”
Latin word “culture” - to cultivate
Important people in the Sociology of Culture
Ibn Khaldun
Auguste Comte coined the term Sociology
Marx, Weber, Freud, Spencer, Durkheim
Definition of Society
Group of people sharing a community (place) and a culture
Definition of Culture
totality of ideas beliefs, values symbols, rituals creating patterns of behaviour of a group of people
Sociology of Culture
study of the interaction between society and culture
Uses empirical evidence
Focus on social and cultural factors
Cultural sociology
study of the interaction between sociology and culture
Generation Gap creates..
inter-generational conflict
Ethnocentrism (other word + definition+ antonym)
Cultural relativism
Use of one’s own culture as a yardstick for judging others
Xenocentrism: Belief that another culture is superior
Norms
Standards of behaving in a given context
Cultural shock
When the norms are different
Values
Culturally defined standards about what is desirable, proper, valuable
Subculture
Smaller but not inferior, different norms and values
Counterculture
Subculture whose values or activities and goals are opposed to the mainstream culture
Spencer’s theory
Social evolutionism
Social evolutionism
Culture development is a product of social evolution, product of transformation of natural factors
Different Stages
Barbaric - organic environment
Civilised - super organic environment
Criticism of social evolutionism
Eurocentric vision (B shaped by N, Civilisation shaped by C)
Engels on the gender war
“world historical defeat of the female sex”
Series of events that led to monogamy
Agricultural settlement –> The rise of PP –> ensure inheritance by “own” children
Paul Seabright
natural selection –> breeding viable children
What are the conditions at a given time the expression of for Marx?
An ongoing power struggle between two groups
What does culture reflect?
the social conditions at a given time
3 oldest branches of philosophy that shapes Marx’s idea
Ontology - deals with the nature of being
Epistemology - study of knowledge
The philosophy of consciousness - what it is to be human
2 ways of understanding reality (-isms) + Marx’s stance
Idealism - reality only exists in our idea of it
Materialism (≠) - ideas are the manifestation of physical properties
Marx: both: ideas generate ideas (Human centric naturalism)
Species-being
through creativity, we created a reality we understand through experience.
The created product defines the nature of the producer
What does the product do?
Reflect back our nature
Commodity fetishism
the products created have a life of their own
Origin of the word ideology
Latin: idea (image) and logos (knowledge)
Definition of ideology
distorted image of reality that gives us false knowledge
Georg Lukács on ideology
Reification - distorted cultural lens
Ideology springs from a spontaneous philosophy which contains
Language
Common sense (conventional wisdom) and good sense
Popular Religion
Definition of counter-hegemony
World view selective accommodation of the desires of a wide range of groups within a society
Criticism of culture as an ideology
People may have reason to believe in the social order
Culture is not just ideology + interest of Bourgeois
Culture might shape economy (weber)
Weber’s methodology
Comparative historical analysis
Comparative historical analysis
Have to understand social action and the meaning that people give to their actions
What does Weber create to understand reality?
Ideal types (and compare cases and look at similarities and deviances)
2 kinds of ideal types
Classificatory - social action, authority
Historical - spirit of capitalism
Main theoretical assumption for Weber
every person acts within a cultural context that is historically specific
4 ideal types for social actions
Value rational
Affective action
Traditional action
Instrumental-rational action
Value rational
Based on values and morals
Affective action
Emotion in a given situation
Traditional action
Determined/motivated by habits or customs
Instrumental-rational action
means and ends are rationally linked (logical only in a particular culture)
Weber’s 3 meanings of rationalization
Means/end calculation
Bureaucracy (organisational culture)
Disenchantment/ secularisation/ demystification
Steps that lead to domination
Rationalisation –> Legitimation –> Domination
Characteristics of hyper-reality (4)
Efficiency, calculability, predictability, technology
Ideal type of authority (3)
Charismatic Authority
Traditional Authority
Rational Legal Authority
Charismatic Authority
Belief in supernatural or intrinsic gifts of the individual
Traditional Authority
Belief in time and customs
Rational legal authority
Belief in procedure rules and laws
Definition of a class (Weber)
ability to buy and sell goods and services that bring us satisfaction
Definition of a status (Weber)
Have an effective claim to social esteem in terms of positive or negative privileges (based on: lifestyle, education and occupation)
Definition of a party (Weber)
The social organization and practice of power (ex. political parties, unions, interest groups)
When does social change occur?
When legitimation of the stratification is questioned
“Calling”
Luther - type of social action, social responsibility to behave correctly in society
“Predestination”
Calvin - faith is predestined
Ascetism
Blessings of god to be reinvested (in K: wealth)
Ideal type of the spirit of capitalism
Ethically oriented maxim for the organization of life
3 maxims of the spirit of capitalism
Life with a specific goal to always make more money
Work as an moral duty, vocational calling
Life and actions are legitimised on basis on quantitative calculations
Basic premise of the Frankfurt School critical theory (3)
Cant understand reality from scientific perspective
Science studies things with market value
Social dynamics understood in context of a whole : Social totality
What does enlightenment switch out
Tradition with reason
Science, most dominant form of…
ideology
The culture industry (2 main people)
Adorno and Horkheimer
Cultural items no longer have artistic value but…
exchange value
Benjamin
In advanced technological societies, art loses its aura (originality and authenticity) when mechanically produced
Fromm
Pathology of normalcy
Marcus
technocrats set the rules of the game through technological rationality and use technology to dominate us
Repressive desublimation
exchanging certain freedoms for others
Sublimation (Freud)
transform libido into “socially useful” achievements
Surplus repression
imposes discipline from the inside
Habermas (replacement of … by … )
Life world by System world because of rationalisation (loss of agency)
Eliot and Lewis (culturalism)
Loss of tradition and reaction to modernism
Williams and Hogart (culturalism)
W: Elite/high culture: form of social privilege H: main objective of cultural studies is to diagnose the cultural health of a society (he compared pre war working class and post war mass culture)
Ordinary people, working class and youth are controlled (or at least tried to) by
Demolishing working class habitats and building tower blocks Creating a market for their cultural creativity (creative economy)
4 industries of creative economy
Heritage
Arts
Media
Creative business services
Definition of creative industries
Activities born in individual creativity, skill and talent which have potential for wealth and job creation through intellectual property
Problems with creative economy
Distributors capture more of the value
Big industries dominate
Collective representations (for Durkheim)
Social components of ourselves: beliefs,norms and values
Socially created classifications or cultural lenses
What does the division of labour determine (for Durkheim)
Solidarity
Simple society (for Durkheim)
Mechanical solidarity
Complex society (for Durkheim)
Organic solidarity
Anomie (for Durkheim)
Normless situation (condition of alienation), leads to crime and suicide
Religion (for Durkheim)
unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them
What does religion provide?
framework, clear moral guidelines
Totem and taboo
Sacred animal or object that spiritually represents a group
Ritual prohibitions around a totem
Purpose of a ritual
reinforce societies key values, bind individuals to the community and make the world symbolically meaningful to them
How does religion classify things (in what process)
Differentiation
What theories/ists does functionalism and structuralism come from?
Durkheim’s totetism
Saussure’s linguistic theory
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
Saussure’s linguistic structuralism
Language is a system (langue)
Made up of signs: signifiers (phonetic expression of an idea) and signified (idea or concept)
RS is arbitrary and culturally defined
Social psychological structuralism (theorist)
Freud
All signs are arbitrary (freud) because of two important psychological mechanisms
Condensation
Displacement
Condensation
the unconscious seeks to express itself by attaching meaning to something (ex. metaphor in dream)
Displacement
using one thing to stand for another (metonymy)
What does civilization do to our principles
restriction of our pleasure principle and makes us abide to reality principle (norms, laws, rules..)
Too much discipline leads to
discontent, nervosis
Definition of a myth
unproved collective beliefs or stories used to understand or justify a cultural practice or tradition
A vital feature of culture
How are stories important
Meaningful way to understand realities of human experience, to see how they understand their reality
What is totetism due to for Levi-Strauss?
Due to the universal processes of the human mind in terms of binary oppositions
Why are we prisoners of language according to Barthes?
We can only access reality through our culture schemes and codes
What is modernity based on? (3)
the industrial revolution
greek philosophy
Inductive logic
Post structuralism
There aren’t any real things, they’re representations of the image produced by the signifier
Jacques Derrida
Each system is always changing
Deconstructionism
Method of textual reading and writing
Baudrillard (on postmodernism)
Contemporary post-modernist isn’t real: produced by an endless series of signifiers
Simulated world that capitalism has created (Marx)
Simulacrum
Simulacra
signs or images that fabricate a reality that doesn’t exist
The Culture of Spectacle (organized around 3 things + author)
Guy Debord: a media and consumer culture organised around the production and consumption of images, spectacular commodities and stages events
McLuhan 3 definitions of a medium
- Any extension of human mind and body
- Anything from which a change emerges, anything we conceive or create
- It’s the message
What is a message according to McLuhan
The change of scale or pace or pattern, it differentiates between the previous and current state (change in interpersonal dynamics)
For debord, what is the goal of all production systems?
manufacturing signe and images
Consequence of the SotS
creates passivity, decrease in public engagement
Entropy (in this context)
When output is smaller than input
More and more information, less and less meaning
Negentropy
output bigger than input
ex. photosynthesis, capitalist investment
How is negentropy made possible in the capitalist society?
through exploitation of nature and human labour
Democracy and capitalism producing entropy of …
meaning
Simulation doesn’t copy reality but it…
destroys it
Mechanisms happening in simulacra (5)
- Media
- Language and ideology
- Urbanization
- Multinational capitalism
- Consumer capitalism (exchange value/money)
Definition of simulacrum
is a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model.
