Sociological Theory 4: Culture and Structure
Online lectures by Alex van Venrooij
Period: 2019-20, Semester 2, Block 5
LECTURE 1 – INTRODUCTION
Sociological theory is characterized by a number of fundamental theoretical debates:
- Micro/macro
- Conflict/consensus
- Choice/constraint
- Culture/Structure
The culture/structure debate deals with the question of how we should understand the role
of culture in the production, reproduction and change of social structures. Culture is
understood as “meaning-making”: the way people think, interpret, categorize, evaluate,
judge, talk, narrate. Common questions within this debate are:
- How do these processes of meaning making inform the processes of production,
reproduction and change of social structures?
- How does culture play a role in the production of social hierarchies?
- How can people become trapped in poverty?
The culture/structure debate has become one of the most central in sociological theory
because of something that has been called the ‘Cultural Turn’: the resurgence of interest in
the concept of culture within sociological theory. One of the most important inspiration for
the cultural turn was the French school of structuralism. This has been taken on by one of
the contemporary authors of this week: Jeffrey Alexander.
THE CULTURAL TURN
The study of culture is nowadays one of the most popular topics within sociology. Many
sociologists identify as cultural sociologists. This was not always the case; before the 1980s
most sociologists would actively avoid the study of culture. Why? Because it had become
synonym of the work of Talcott Parsons which was very influential until the 1960s.
The Culture as values approach
The key problem Parsons was trying to solve was the problem of social order, or what holds
society together and makes it functional – so all the elements of society integrate into one
coherent system. To understand this coherence, Parsons pointed to the role of culture
which he understood as consisting of shared values that people had internalized through
the socialization process of the family, alongside other structured institutional domains of
society such as the economy, the workplace and the educational system. Culture became
synonymous with the idea of consensus and coherence. But it was not really a useful
concept to understand social conflict or opposition.
The idea that societies were held together by shared moral values became increasingly
unlikely because of the social unrest of the 1960s and the rise of various counter-cultural
movements and social movements such as the Feminist movement and the Civil Rights
movement. These movements pointed towards value conflicts within societies. This was
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,also reflected then in sociology with a move away from consensus theories, like those of
Talcott Parsons, and towards a more conflict-oriented sociology. Not many sociologists
were drawing upon the cultural concept as associated with cohesion and consensus
anymore.
Network analysis
What we see in the following decades is a flourishing of various explicitly anti-cultural
approaches, one of which is network analysis or network sociology.
“[Network] analysts first seek explanations in the regularities of how people and
collectivities actually behave rather than in the regularities of their beliefs about how
they ought to behave. They interpret behavior in terms of structural constraints on
activity instead of assuming that inner forces (i.e. internalized norms) impel actors in
voluntaristic, sometimes teleological, behavior toward desired goals.” – Wellman
1988
This is an anti-Parsonian quote. Network sociologists study actual patterns of behavior
rather than beliefs about how people think they need to behave or their internalized norms.
You can do sociology without actually referring to internalized beliefs or culture for that
matter. Network sociology has the ambition, or had, to study these objective patterns of
behavior without referring to culture.
Cultural turn
As we mentioned, there was a rapid shift in the 1960s from theories that place a lot on
emphasis on culture as providing cultural coherence and cohesion to society, to theories
that would emphasis conflict, structure and that step away from that notion of culture.
But what happens in the 1980s is a return back to culture and you could call this a
pendulum swing back to emphasizing culture! Sociologists were interested in trying to study
culture in a way that avoids some of the pitfalls of the previous ways being discussed and
theorized in the work of Talcott Parsons. New ways of study emerged, conceptualizing the
role of culture and also studying the interaction between culture and structure.
1960s: Conlfict theories,
"Culture as values"
network analysis, structural 1980s: Cultural Turn
approach (Talcott Parsons)
sociology
FRENCH STRUCTURALISM
In the 1960s, especially in the United States, sociologists were abandoning the study of
culture. In Europe, and especially in France, a new intellectual movement was developing
which would eventually become the main influence for the ‘Cultural Turn’ and the renewed
interest in culture within sociology. And this movement is known as French structuralism.
Some of the main structuralists: Michele Foucault, Jacque Lacan, Claud Lévi-Strauss and the
founder of semiotics Roland Barthes. There are many others like Jacques Derrida and Pierre
Bourdieu who were also closely tied to or inspired by this intellectual movement.
Influenced by linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Although the structuralists were active in quite different disciplines, they all had in common
a shared source of inspiration in the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure
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,developed a theory of language and meaning that emphasized the importance of
relationality. Symbols, like words, don’t refer to any particular meaning because of some
inherent, essential characteristic of the symbol itself or a direct relationship between the
symbol and the thing that it refers to (which we sometimes find in the case of an
onomatope). Saussure dismissed these kinds of necessary relations and developed a purely
relational theory of meaning in which the relationship between the signifier and the
signified is arbitrary and lacked this necessity. According to Saussure, symbols take on
meaning because of their difference from other symbols and it is these relationships of
difference that allow for meaning to emerge.
Key characteristics:
- The arbitrary relation between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’
- The importance of difference as basis of meaning: MEANING IS RELATIONAL
This idea of the relationality of meaning became central to the work of the French
structuralists and they have applied it in various productive ways.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used it, for example, to analyze the
structural patterns of cultural myths. He would argue that to decode the meaning of a story
such as a myth you need to look at it as a kind of language that consists of elements and
then study how these elements relate to each other. One of his most famous examples is his
analysis of one of the key myths of Western civilization: the Oedipus myth. His method for
analyzing the myth then consists of a few steps:
1. First, he decomposes the myth into the elements and he calls these elements the
“Mythemes”, which are the key scenes of the myth.
2. He then tries to find the relationships among these elements: relations of similarity and
difference. Within columns he organizes the elements that are similar to each other. The
first column lists scenes such as Cadmos seeking his sister, Oedipus marrying his mother
or Antigone burying her brother. These elements all have something in common
according to Lévi-Strauss: they are all about the overrating of blood relations (incestuous
relationships). In the second column he finds similarities between scenes such as the
Spartans killing each other, Oedipus killing his father, Eteocles killing his brother -> these
are all about the underrating of blood relations. The third column is about denying
autochthonous origin (monsters/mythical creatures never are born, they are just there,
they have no origin ???). The fourth column is about affirming autochthonous origin
(man can come/emerge from the earth).
3. Lévi-Strauss then argues that these two oppositions also refer to each other. This is the
point where his interpretation becomes somewhat hard to follow. The meaning of the
opposition between the first two columns becomes clear in light of the opposition of the
third and fourth column. So, the opposition between overrating and underrating blood
relations is about the origin of man, and whether man comes from man (aka born from
people) or whether he is a creature that emerged from the earth. Are we born from the
same or from the different? If we were not born from people, where did we come from?
It is basically a mediation of the origin of man, and a kind of sophisticated chicken or
egg dilemma.
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, Now, whether you find this analysis far-fetched or not, it is a nice illustration of how Lévi-
Strauss envisioned meaning to emerge from patterns of relationships and from
oppositions, within mythical stories.
Richard Barthes (founder of semiotics)
A more contemporary example is Richard Barthes, who also used the idea of relationality to
analyze the symbolic system of “the fashion system”. He was interested in understanding
how the difference between elements of fashion (e.g., whether the collar is worn open or
closed) becomes meaningful in relation to other elements of the use of fashion; and, for
instance, how the different ways to wear something takes on the meaning of being “sporty”
or “dressy”. Again, we see an interest in how relations between cultural elements can
become signs to signal some additional layer of meanings. This is arbitrary or conventional.
“It is… possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of
social life. […] We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, ‘sign’). It would
investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them” – Ferdinand de
Saussure
Michel Foucault
Similarly, we see an interest in relational oppositions in the work of Michele Foucault when
he analyzed the historical emergence of categorical distinctions such as the distinction
between the mad/the sane, the normal/the deviant – which are defined in opposition to
each other. What made his analysis also interesting for sociologists is that he tied these
categorical oppositions (these cultural oppositions) to the emergence of certain social
institutions and organizations, such as the insane asylum, the prison, the workhouses. These
organizational and institutional practices of “putting” certain categories of people apart also
gave a certain institutional reality to these kinds of cultural oppositions.
Pierre Bourdieu
Finally, the influence of structuralism can also be seen in the work of Bourdieu who was
interested in understanding cultural oppositions (high/low culture; good/bad;
refined/vulgar) and how these related to social oppositions (classes).
The harvest of French Structuralism
French Structuralism and its approach to culture became very influential. In particular
because it gave us new ways to think about culture that could deal with some of the
problems of the “culture as values” approach of Talcott Parsons. French Structuralism could
show that the study of culture was not just about consensus and coherence; it is also about
divisions and conflict. Cultural oppositions can also be related to social conflicts.
Main changes brought by French Structuralism:
- The importance of culture in power struggles, social conflict, stratification, and so
on, instead of culture (only) creating consensus and ‘value communities’.
- Externalization of culture: from “internalized culture” (values) to “public culture”
(texts, discourses, semiotic codes, practices). In the culture as values approach,
values and cultures are located in the subjective minds of the individual; they were
internalized. The kinds of cultures structuralists were studying were instead external
discourses, like texts or practices.
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