The production of culture perspective focuses on the ways in which the content of symbolic elements of culture are significantly shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. The initial focus was on the production of expressive symbols such as art works, scientific research reports, popular culture, religious practices
What is culture in sociology? To produce a definition of culture, one can examine the concept in the abstract, that is, explore the concept theoretically from a variety of standpoints and then justify the definition that emerges through deductive logic. Or one can explore how the concept is used in practice, that is, describe how
Culture is a system created by human activity comprising spiritual, organizational, and material items and expanding within the Earth’s nature at the expense of this very nature. People mostly understand human culture in several ways: (1) as an acquired characteristic of human behavior, (2) as a spiritual culture, (3) as a better view of civilization
“Culture and personality” has been perhaps the most mythologized and misunderstood of American anthropology’s interdisciplinary endeavors. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the two anthropologists most closely associated with “cultural and personality,” have often been understood to equate culture with personality. While views of this sort are common, there is little, if any, evidence in Mead’s
The culture area concept was developed in the early 1900s, at a time when American anthropology was in its infancy. Franz Boas and his students were collecting enormous amounts of data about the “disappearing” native cultures of North America. There was no framework for organizing this data, however. The concept of the culture area was
Elite culture can be defined as those ‘‘high’’ cultural forms and institutions that were exclusive to, and a distinguishing characteristic of, modern social elites. It is a term that particularly references the cultural tastes of the established aristocracy, the commercial bourgeoisie, educated bureaucrats and political power brokers, and the professions in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
Fans have become important to work in media sociology and cultural studies for a variety of reasons: they can be taken to represent a dedicated, active audience; they are consumers who are often also (unofficial, but sometimes official) media producers (Jenkins 1992; McKee 2002); and they can be analyzed as a significant part of contemporary
The reproduction of our society’s sex gender system has been a continuing puzzle for sociologists of gender. The history of western writings on gender has long included ruminations on the role of culture in constituting gender difference and privilege (Wollstonecraft 1978; Mill 2003; and especially de Beauvoir 1993). Yet during the last 40 years of
Mass culture typically refers to that culture which emerges from the centralized production processes of the mass media. It should be noted, however, that the status of the term is the subject of ongoing challenges – as in Swingewood’s (1977) identification of it as a myth. When it is linked to the notion of mass
Material culture refers to the physical stuff that human beings surround themselves with and which has meaning for the members of a cultural group. Mostly this ‘‘stuff’’ is things that are made within a society, but sometimes it is gathered directly from the natural world or recovered from past or distant cultures. It can be