What is Cultural Sociology?

Lyn Spillman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509522811, 9781509522804
• eBook ISBN: 9781509522842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict always surround us. Cultural sociologists aim to understand their role across all aspects of social life by examining processes of meaning-making.

In this crisp and accessible book, Lyn Spillman demonstrates many of the conceptual tools cultural sociologists use to explore how people make meaning. Drawing on vivid examples, she offers a compelling analytical framework within which to view the entire field of cultural sociology. In each chapter, she introduces a different angle of vision, with distinct but compatible approaches for explaining culture and its role in social life: analyzing symbolic forms, meaning-making in interaction, and organized production.

This book both offers a concise answer to the question of what cultural sociology is and provides an overview of the fundamental approaches in the field.

1
Introduction

Sociology teaches us about human groups and human interactions, how they work, and how they influence our lives. Cultural sociology investigates the meanings people attach to their groups and interactions. What do their groups mean to people, where do those various meanings come from, and how do those meanings influence what they do?

For all of us as human creatures, meaning is as essential to our existence as infant care or water. Our lives are full of meaning and meaning-making. Sometimes our ideas and values are totally taken for granted. We are supported and sustained by perceptions of the world which seem natural and inevitable, passed on to us implicitly by those who raise us. Our meaning-making is like breathing, and we don’t notice the air that surrounds us.

At other times – and more and more often – we encounter different ideas about what is really meaningful. Encountering differences can be fascinating and helps us learn more about ourselves. Sometimes, though, cultural differences may give us “culture shock,” and disagreements challenging the ideas we take for granted may seem like “culture wars.” Modern life makes escalating cultural difference unavoidable, even as it also offers exponentially increasing opportunities for sharing meaning through mass and social media.

Cultural sociology offers concepts and methods to help explore meaning-making – familiar meanings we share, strange and unfamiliar meanings, and those we dispute with others. To start noticing the meaning-making all around us, we can orient ourselves by thinking about different rituals, symbols, values, norms, and categories.

Rituals, symbols, values, norms, and categories

As big, splashy, intentional, repetitive events distinct from everyday life, rituals clearly highlight culture and cultural difference. Weddings, graduations, pep rallies, religious services, birthday celebrations, and patriotic holidays – all of these are ritual events expressing the meanings of our social relationships. For example, new family commitments are expressed in wedding rituals, and shared national identity is expressed in patriotic holidays like July 4th or Bastille Day.

Because rituals are intentionally distinct from everyday life, they make cultural differences obvious. For instance, while graduations everywhere mark students’ transitions to the social status of graduate, different peoples do graduations differently. In New Zealand, unlike elsewhere, a university graduation begins with a traditional Maori welcome, with a Maori man blowing a conch shell, and a “Kairanga,” or call, by two Maori women in traditional dress. The chancellor of the university then offers a welcome in the Maori language, before the graduation ceremony proceeds much as it would anywhere else in the English-speaking world. To take another example of the ways ritual highlights cultural difference, even though national holidays everywhere celebrate history and patriotism, Norway’s “Children’s Parade,” coordinated by schools in every town (Elgenius 2011, 119–22), looks different to July 4th fireworks in the United States, or the glamorous military parades and local fire-station dances of France’s Bastille Day. Other peoples’ rituals condense cultural difference and draw attention to stories and symbols their participants may take for granted as “natural.” They may also condense unfamiliar histories and traces of conflict – highlighting, for instance, the residual effects of Maori resistance to the white (“pakeha”) invasion of New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, or, in Norway, strategic efforts to claim Norwegian identity and independence from Sweden later in that century (Elgenius 2011, 119).

Sometimes, too, conflict and disagreement over meaning become vivid in ritual processes. A protest march with large signs and chants dramatizes political dispute. So too do celebrities wearing colors or badges supporting controversial causes while they announce prizewinners at the Oscars.

Whatever the mix of consensus, difference, and dispute in big ritual events, they make vivid assertions about the meanings of our groups and social relationships and demonstrate cultural difference. But cultural differences extend beyond the bright highlights of unfamiliar ritual. Moving into any new setting, we also encounter less obvious differences to surprise us.

We encounter different symbols. Language is often an obvious symbolic difference, but even if we share a language, new vocabulary and diction can make communicating with someone from a different subculture or region a little strange. (Should you be asking for a “soda,” “pop,” “cool drink,” “soft drink,” or even “frappé”? What exactly is a “freshman”?) And symbolic differences run much deeper than language. Many symbols are highlighted in ritual events – such as team mascots, religious images, and national flags. But symbolism also pervades everyday life. Uniforms symbolize membership of teams, schools, the military, and many workplaces. T-shirts emblazon us with our tastes and tribes. Different genders are symbolized by different clothes almost everywhere. (Why don’t most men wear skirts in Western countries? What’s the point of high heels?) Even simple colors can mean different things. (Is black more associated with death than white, or vice versa? What are the different meanings of wearing a pink ribbon, a red ribbon, or a yellow ribbon?) And consumerism creates an even more complex symbolic universe. (Which sneakers will convey the best impression?)

Shared symbols ease communication, but we hesitate and puzzle over symbols that are new to us. We might ask for an explanation of a military medal, or an unfamiliar image on a road sign or a coin or a t-shirt. If we encounter symbols that are too unfamiliar – like the social difference between wearing a toga and a tunic in ancient Rome, or the lined and dotted rock paintings of Aboriginal groups – we need to learn the meanings just as we might learn a new language. And beyond taken-for-granted consensus and unfamiliar cultural difference, symbols express power, challenge, and conflict. Crowns and private airplanes are symbols of power. A rainbow flag makes a symbolic challenge to public assumptions about sexuality. Large neighborhood murals in Belfast or Chicago are permanent reminders of longstanding political tensions.

Noticing rituals and symbols like these – our own, and those of other people – helps us reflect on culture and helps to orient us to cultural sociology. Some other common ideas are equally helpful: we can also orient ourselves to culture by thinking about values, norms, and categories.

When we evaluate something as good or bad, something else as better or worse, we are making meaning about values, and these evaluations are often moral judgements. People appeal to “family values,” or the value of “education,” and they may value “tradition” or “innovation.” What exactly these values mean in practice is often vague, and how values are applied can shift with social context. For example, do we expect “family values” to include an extended family of second cousins and great aunts, or are they restricted to the straight nuclear family? Is it controversial to include gay couples and their children? (For this reason, cultural sociologists have recently preferred to investigate the sociology of evaluation, rather than using the more static concept of values.) Regardless of how values are applied in practice, though, people often draw boundaries between themselves and others, “us” and “them,” on the basis of such moral evaluations. And along with moral evaluations, aesthetic evaluations, like taste in music, are also important for making judgements and defining groups. In fact, cultural sociologists have shown that aesthetic values are often closely linked to moral judgements, and equally important in defining group identities.

Subtle cultural differences can often be seen in differing evaluations. Some people judge whether their acquaintances are better or worse than themselves according to the size and quality of their residence. Others make the same judgement on the basis of their tastes in music or movies. And sometimes value differences and change generate cultural conflicts, as when women executives must try to reconcile conflicts between values of family responsibilities and work commitment. Conversely, male homemakers may be stigmatized by their peers as “unsuccessful” if they choose devotion to home and family over an intense ethic of paid work. More generally, some of the most difficult forms of political conflict are expressed as value differences, like conflicts between egalitarian and authoritarian political values, or conflicts between economic and environmental assessments of new mining projects.

So we can become more attuned to big cultural differences by observing rituals, symbols, and evaluations wherever we are. We can also start to see intriguing cultural differences if we observe social norms. What do people take for granted about their interactions? Norms are often taken for granted – we fail to notice them until something goes wrong. If you move from a big city to a small town, it may seem odd that strangers greet you on the street – they seem to be violating interactional norms common in city life about keeping yourself to yourself. In the same way, bargaining over price, displays of affection, or interrupting a conversation are all normative in some settings, but offensive in others. Subtle patterns of interaction may seem trivial, but we learn their importance for meaning-making when they are breached.

Even more subtle are the taken-for-granted categories we use to divide up the world. Categories help clarify fuzzy perception, removing confusion and ambiguity. Clear categorization makes perception and action easier. An experienced chess player, familiar with categories of chess pieces like “queen” and “pawn,” will more easily remember a game layout than someone who doesn’t know a queen from a pawn, to whom all games will look much the same. Company stocks which fall between market categories do not do as well on the market as stocks which can be clearly categorized (Hsu et al. 2009; Zuckerman 2004).

On a larger scale, categories are always important cultural elements because social groups often vary in the ways they categorize the same reality, and their various cultural categories are consequential. For instance, when exactly you become an “adult” can vary widely. Are you an adult at fifteen or twenty-five? Are you an adult when you can fight in a war, bear children, hold a bar mitzvah or quinceañera, drive, drink, graduate, vote, earn your living, or form a new family yourself? “Childhood,” “adolescence,” “adulthood,” and “old age” are socially defined categories that make fundamental differences in our lives (Benedict 1959 [1934]; Furstenburg et al. 2004). To take another example, what work is categorized as “professional”? We might take it for granted that medicine and law are usually seen as professions, but what about artists or childcare workers? Whether or not a job is categorized as a profession is socially defined, and the categorization makes a difference for workers and clients (Spillman and Brophy 2018).

Cultural challenges and conflicts frequently target social categories, too. Older people might challenge regulations that make them “too old” to drive, and childcare workers might organize to become a profession. By looking at categories we take for granted, we can attune ourselves to observe another important type of cultural difference.

So to investigate culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict, we need to stop taking meaning-making for granted. Thinking about elements of culture – like rituals, symbols, values, norms, and categories – provides a vocabulary and an orientation with which to become more mindful of meaning-making in all its vast variation. Having initiated a more mindful attention to cultural elements surrounding us and cultural differences we encounter, we are in a better position to analyze and understand them.

The idea of culture

Many generations of scholars have sought to understand culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. Before turning to contemporary cultural sociology, it is helpful to deepen our initial orientation to the idea of culture by considering how it emerged and how it was taken up in sociology. The idea of culture carries historical connotations which echo around contemporary approaches. This historical baggage explains why some people say the idea of culture is confusing. Unpacking the baggage clarifies what we think of when we think of culture and shows how contemporary cultural sociology’s conceptual tools help specify and focus cultural explanation.

The contemporary idea of “culture” emerged in Europe as a way of characterizing differences between human groups, and changes within them. We know relatively little about pre-modern and non-Western understandings of what we would now call cultural difference. Among the ideas that survive, and are viewed as prefiguring contemporary cultural investigation, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 485–c. 425 BCE) is remembered for his careful observation and analysis of differences between different groups and regions in their everyday practices, including food, clothing, gender relations, sexual behavior, religion, and military organization, recognizing that “practices and norms which one nation may regard as right and proper may be considered outlandish and even shocking by another” (Evans 1982, 40; see also Ginzburg 2017). North African scholar and political leader Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) is admired for his Muqaddimah, or “introduction to history,” in which he analyzed asabiyyah (social cohesion or group solidarity) – which is stronger in nomadic, tribal societies compared to complex societies with central government – thus outlining an original theory of the role of culture in society (Çaksu 2017; Dhaouadi 1990; Gellner 1988). Europeans around Ibn Khaldun’s time often followed the classical geographical tradition, in which the physical environment caused social traits which were passed on to future generations – so, for instance, groups from harsh regions developed harsh characters. But one early geographer, Nicolas de Nicolay, after travelling with a French ambassador in the Ottoman Empire in 1551, abandoned this geographical determinism for a more modern attention to socialization, situated action, and social engineering (Mukerji 2013).

Raymond Williams, a twentieth-century British sociologist, literary critic, novelist, and activist, traced the European development of ideas about culture from around this time in the sixteenth century in his investigation of “keywords” (Williams 1976). According to Williams, the idea of culture emerged in the English Renaissance as a noun of process. At first, “culture” referred to the process of nurturing crops or animals, but the reference was gradually extended from agricultural husbandry to human development, as in the “culture” of skills, or the soul. This extension of the idea of active cultivation to human development from husbandry accompanied shifting ideas about responsibility for human nature, from religion and metaphysics to humanity itself. In this early phase, “culture” as a process always implied the cultivation of something, whether crops or skills.

But after the Industrial Revolution, from the late eighteenth century, “culture” began to refer to a general human feature, an institution, or a property of whole groups: an abstract thing more than an active process. By the mid-nineteenth century, in the English language, “culture” contrasted moral and intellectual activities with emerging economic and political trends in capitalism, industry, democracy, and revolution. This marked a stronger practical separation of ideas, ideals, and arts from other important economic and political activities and powers then disrupting traditional society. “Culture” became a court of appeal set against economic and political changes, a basis for value judgements made by English Romantic writers and others critical of the Industrial Revolution. “Culture” as an abstract quality of inner or spiritual development separated the arts, religion, and other institutions and practices of meaning and value from economic and polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Making Meaning Central
• 3 Meaning and Interaction
• 4 Producing Meaning
• 5 Conclusion: Landscapes, Stages, and Fields
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement