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Qual Sociol (2016) 39:199204
DOI 10.1007/s11133-016-9329-4
Omar Lizardo1
Published online: 6 April 2016# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
The Problem of Cultural Power
How is culture powerful? The answer to this question depends on what the analyst means by Bculture,^ as every analytical elaboration of the concept comes packaged with either an explicit or implicit account of the way that culture Bmatters^ in social action (Swidler 1995, 3435; Sewell 2005, 175ff). Accordingly, I will limit the short discussion that follows to a specific conception of culture as a (more or less coherent) system of Bmeaningful^ symbols (e.g. Geertz 1973). To make matters even more concrete, I will provide my own coupling of an analytical reconstruction and critique of previous accounts of a one (central) element in this conception of culture: namely, the notion of cultural symbol.
My wager is that we can make headway on the more general question by providing a more focused account of how cultural symbols can be powerful. Along the way I will be rejecting an intuitive, still influential, but highly misleading because of the umbilical cord that ties it to mid-twentieth century functionalism (Kuper 1999)model of the ways that symbols come to be powerful. Focusing on the Bculture as system symbols^ argument is strategic because this conception of culture is shared across seemingly heterogeneous traditions of cultural analysis, inclusive of Neo-Weberian/Geertzian models of culture as a Bsymbolic web of meanings^ (Biernacki 2000), neo-hermeneuticist conceptions of culture as resource for interpretation (Alexander 2003), neo-Saussurean conceptions of culture as a signifying system governed by relations of difference and substitution, symbolic interactionist conceptions of culture as emergent (bottom up) clusters of significant symbols, and phenomenological conceptions of culture as underlying conceptions constitutive of a life-world among others.
Based on remarks delivered at a Thematic Session on BThe Sources of Cultural Power,^ organized by David Smilde at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, IL, 2015.
* Omar Lizardo [email protected]
1 Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, 735 Flanner, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
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A Definition...