A full and concise summary of all the literature and all lectures of the course Sociological Theory 4 (CY) within the bachelor Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.
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Sociological Theory 4
English
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,Articles................................................................................................................................. 3
Chapter 1: Culture in Classical Theory .............................................................................. 3
Chapter 2: Culture and Social integration in the Work of Talcott Parsons .......................... 6
Chapter 11: Clifford Geertz .............................................................................................. 10
Chapter 6: Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture ........................................ 11
Social space and symbolic power .................................................................................... 14
The problem of the subject .............................................................................................. 17
Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics ......................................................................... 17
Chapter 6: Love and Marriage ......................................................................................... 19
Chapter 8: Codes, Contexts, and Institutions ................................................................... 22
Introduction: .................................................................................................................... 25
Chapter 2: Anthropological resistance ............................................................................. 27
Chapter 3: Schema theory and connectionism ................................................................ 29
Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues ... 32
Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action .......... 35
Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst ............................... 38
Chapter 1: Culture and social networks: A conceptual framework ................................... 41
Chapter 2: The Nuts and Bolts of Networks, through a Cultural Lens .............................. 42
One-mode versus two-mode analysis .............................................................................. 44
The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City 1888 – 1917 .......... 45
The gendered transition to college: The role of culture in ego-network evolution ............. 49
Distinction…, chapter 3: The Homology between the Spaces .......................................... 51
Money, morals and manners. The culture of the French and American upper-middle class.
Chapter 4: Most of My Friends Are Refined: Keys to Cultural Boundaries ....................... 54
Money, Morals and Manners. The culture of the French and the American upper-middle-
class. Chapter 5: Explaining National Differences ........................................................... 58
Lectures ............................................................................................................................. 63
Lecture 1 ......................................................................................................................... 63
Lecture 2 ......................................................................................................................... 65
Lecture 3 ......................................................................................................................... 68
Lecture 4 ......................................................................................................................... 71
Lecture 5 ......................................................................................................................... 75
Lecture 6 ......................................................................................................................... 77
2
,Articles
Chapter 1: Culture in Classical Theory
Smith
This chapter aims to briefly highlight some of the key concepts and themes in their approaches
to cultures.
Karl Marx
Marx is typically thought of as an anticultural theorist. For him, culture in industrial society
operates as a dominant ideology with several characteristics.
- It reflects the views and interests of the bourgeoisie (the ruling, capitalist class of
owners) and serves to legitimate their authority.
- It arises from and expresses underlying relations of production. As Marx and Engels
wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the
conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property".
- It makes that which is conventional and socially constructed (e.g., wage labor. the
commodity form) seem natural and inevitable. It transformed into "eternal laws of
nature and of reason. the social forms springing from [the] ... present mode of
production and form of property"
- It engenders a mistaken or distorted view of reality. This condition sometimes known
as false consciousness, allows people to feel happy with their miserable lot. Religion,
for example, was an "opium" which prevented the formation of class consciousness
(awareness of a common class identity and interests I among the proletariat
(workers).
To this day scholars writing from such a position suggest that we should read cultural forms
as reflections of hidden interests and social forces. As a counter to the insidious power of
ideology, the duty of the analyst is to expose distortions and reveal a more rational and true
picture of the world - a process known as demystification.
Marx spoke of species being as a form of solidarity toward which people aspire. He
also wrote about alienation, which has multiple meanings. He suggested that with the arrival
of communism and the end of private property, there would once again be an end to alienation.
The great strength of Marx's thinking has been his ability to connect culture to power
and economic life in systematic ways. The price of this is the inability to theorize the autonomy
of culture and a tendency to view human action in a deterministic framework. Under the
Marxist vision the economy seems to drive both collective ideology and individual behaviour
with a clockwork precision.
Emile Durkheim
An increasingly prominent way of thinking about Durkheim is as an advocate of cultural
analysis. Central to this reading is his insistence that society was very much a moral
phenomenon, held together by sentiments of solidarity. These played their part in ensuring
the survival of a smoothly functioning, well-integrated society in which every piece had its role.
In ‘The Division of Labor in Society’, he argued that simple and industrial societies were
characterized by different kinds of solidarity. Simple societies, people were more alike and
performed the same tasks, which resulted in mechanical solidarity where there is little
tolerance for deviance, and conformity is the norm. In industrial societies, there was a division
of labour and organic solidarity where there is more tolerance for difference thanks to the
role diversity that comes from the increased division of labour. Durkheim used the term
collective conscience when talking about the shared moral awareness and emotional life in
a society which can be seen during the punishment of deviants. Punishments tend to be
harsher and more violent in mechanical societies.
3
, Durkheim suggested that the division of labour lead to more individual freedom and
happiness, which has not been managed well. This lead to anomie, which is a situation of
social dislocation where customary and cultural controls on action are not very strong. He
argues for social facts over individual volition. These are collective or "social" in nature and
are external and constraining on the individual. Durkheim suggested that sentiments,
moralities, and behaviours could be explained away as social facts that were linked to other
objective features of society like social organization, societal differentiation, and social
change. They tend to work to generate social order and social integration. This vision of a
stable society made up of mutually reinforcing institutions, sentiments and roles is known as
functionalism.
Durkheim claimed that all religions revolved around a distinction between the sacred
and the profane. The sacred involves feelings of awe, fear, and reverence and is set apart
from the everyday or profane. The sacred is potentially dangerous as well as beneficent and
is often separated from the profane by special taboos, whilst its power is regulated by special
rites (e.g., ritual. prayer, sacrifice).
According to Durkheim the purely ideal power of symbol systems is complemented by
concrete acts of observance. He pointed out that societies periodically come together in ritual
in order to fulfil the need to worship the sacred, which brings people into proximity with each
other. With the aid of music, chants, and incantations they generate collective emotional
excitement or collective effervescence. This provides a strong sense of group belonging.
Major criticism points are
- He assumes culture brings social consensus or social integration and therefore cannot
account for its role in generating conflict or sustaining social exclusion
- His perspective is one-sided in an idealist direction. He has little to say about the role
of force, power. interest, or necessity as key variables influencing social life
- His evolutionary perspective is often empirically wrong and denies the complexity of
traditional societies and their beliefs by assuming that they are somehow more "basic"
or "elementary" than those of industrial settings
- There is a mechanistic tendency in his works thanks to the influence of functionalism.
Durkheim speaks of social facts as external and constraining on individuals rather than
as enabling creativity and agency.
On the positive side, Durkheim's advocates suggest that his later thinking provides a key
resource for linking culture with social structure in a way that that resists materialist
reductionism. Society for Durkheim was an idea or belief as much as a concrete collection of
individuals and actions.
Max Weber
Much of his work is quite materialist, pointing to the role of power, military force, and
organizational forms in maintaining social order. However, there is also a strong idealist streak
in some of his writings and we will focus on this here.
At the centre of Weber's relevance for cultural theory is his understanding of human
action. Dilthey argued that knowledge concerning humans had to take account of the
meaningful nature of action. What was required was Verstehen, or understanding. This
requires the observer to try to reconstruct the subjective meanings that influenced a particular
line of action – an activity that could involve re-creating shared cultural values as well as
empathizing with individual psychologies and life histories. Dilthey argued that the study of
human life belonged to the Geisteswissensclmften (literally: "science of the spirit") rather
than the natural sciences.
Weber also advocated a Verstehen approach to social analysis and suggested that
human agents be thought of as active and meaning-driven. Weber insists that it is the job of
the analyst to try to uncover the motive or subjective intent behind an action.
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