Culture and Society Contemporary Debates [Paperback]

Brings together the major statements by the leading contemporary scholars of cultural analysis on the relationship between culture and society.Highlighting developments over the past two decades, individual contributions bring together major statements by leading contemporary scholars on the relationship between culture and society.Highlighting developments over the past two decades, individual contributions bring together major statements by leading contemporary scholars on the relationship between culture and society.This volume brings together the major statements by the leading contemporary scholars of cultural analysis on the relation between culture and society. Part One surveys the range of current analytical debate over culture, focusing on the relationship of culture to social structure and power. While individual contributions differ in defining the nature of culture and its relation to society, they are in agreement in assessing the relative autonomy of culture and the centrality of symbolic analysis. Part Two turns to substantive debates, including those over the role of religion, secular ideology, and mass culture and brings to light disputes about the meaning of modernity. The book testifies to the remarkable development in the past two decades of a cultural paradigm for social and political analysis.Introduction Part I. Analytic Debates: 'Understanding the Relative Autonomy of Culture' introduction; The case for culture 1. The human studies; 2. Values and social systems; 3. Culture and ideological hegemony; 4. Signs and language; Approaches to culture Functionalist 1. The normative structure of science; 2. Values and democracy; Semiotic 3. The world of wrestling; 4. Food as symbolic code; Dramaturgical 5. Out of frame activity; 6. The Balinese cockfight as play; Weberian 7. Puritanism and revolutionary ideology; 8. French catholicism and secular grace; Durkheimian: 9. Lininality and community; 10. Symbolic pollution; 11. Sex as symbol in Victorian l£'