Lyn Spillman - What is Cultural Sociology?

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.

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 political institutions and practices. British educator Matthew Arnold, for example, argued in 1869 that “culture,” considered as sensitivity and flexible judgement informed by the arts and humanities, could be an antidote to the destructive materialism of modernity (Eagleton 2000, 11; Griswold 2013, 4–5). This historical genealogy still influences us when we think of the arts and popular culture as distinct from – perhaps “higher” and “purer” than – economic and political processes.