Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A foundational principle of cultural sociology is that meaning is relational – that the meanings of symbols, words, tropes, metaphors, ideologies, and so on emerge in concert and contrast to other meanings of social import. This is as true of the terms “culture” and “cultural sociology” as it is of anything else. In particular, cultural sociology in its current use and meaning emerges both diachronically in contrast to the humanities, anthropology and the sociology of culture, and synchronically in relation to the core sociological terms of structure, action, and critique. The old-fashioned definition of culture, which had as its institutional locus the humanities departments of elite Western universities in the early and mid-twentieth century, referred to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” Culture was, according to this definition, intellectual and artistic activity and the artifacts produced by this activity, and to have culture was to possess the ability to interpret these artifacts, and the taste to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. Simultaneously, Western anthropology developed a totalizing concept of culture that was expected to do the comparative work of differentiating the peoples of the world. Culture was thus the counterpoint to the concept of “human nature” which formed the subject of physical anthropology. Over and against ... log in or subscribe to read full text