SOC104: Sociology

of Culture
Lectures 3 & 4: Analysing Cultural Symbols (1)
Cultural sociologists interpret and analyze symbolic
forms (words, images, videos, soundtracks, brands,
architecture & design, news stories, debates,
advertising, etc.)

“[I]t is only by gaining access to the operations and logics

of the inner workings of cultural objects that any cultural
sociology can begin to track the meanings and
resonance of these objects in the social contexts in
which they appear” (Robin Wagner-Pacifici, 2010: 109)
Example: Roland Barthes,
Mythologies
• Barthes analyzed wrestling as entertainment
• Standard social science approaches might
investigate how wrestlers train and interact with
each other or their audience
• Or they might investigate how wrestling is affected
by larger social patterns like media markets, or class
stigma
• Barthes analyzed instead the conventional and
structured signs of wrestling itself as a performance
of good, evil, justice, suffering, and defeat
• He supported his analysis with close attention to the
ways these meanings were signified in exaggerated
and stereotypical bodies, movements, and gestures.
How is meaning generated by
symbolic forms?
1. Symbols are conventional
• This means they rely on rules, codes, or conventions (such as grammar,
etiquette, or color coding) to convey meaning
• Conventions may be deliberately adopted, e.g., the colours of traffic
lights
• More often conventions exist as shared, tacit knowledge
• Native speakers don’t formulate everything they say with conscious
awareness of correct grammar
• Knowledge about how to behave in a classroom, or the tone to adopt in
a Whatsapp message to friends, is almost always tacit
• We usually notice conventions only when they are challenged.
2. Symbols are structured
• This means they consist of different elements or parts which have
specific relation to each other
• These structured relations are crucial for generating meaning
• The pronoun “I” gains its meaning through its implicit grammatical
relation to “you” and “we”
• Meanings are often arranged in binary structure: black and white,
citizen and foreigner, elite and popular culture, familiar and exotic, etc.
• The structured relations between symbolic elements are almost
always a matter of implicit knowledge, and very much taken for
granted in everyday life
3. Signs rely directly or indirectly
on their material forms
• Meaning is stabilized in material
forms, and the persistence and
circulation of objects affect the
accessibility of the meanings
they convey to actors
• Meanings of cultural objects
may also change in unexpected
ways as their material form
changes
A variety of concepts have been developed
which help us grasp how symbolic forms
constrain and enable meaning-making…
Cognitive
categories Analyzing
symbols with
Symbolic these tools helps
Narratives
boundaries us to understand
unfamiliar
others, identify
Schemas &
what groups
Binary codes share, clarify
frames
cultural
differences, and
explain social
Discursive fields
Valuation & conflict
commensuration
Cognitive Categories
• We understand the world and communicate to
others by sorting things, experiences, and
people into cognitive categories
• Classification is an essentially social process
• According to Emile Durkheim, the ways we
perceive, evaluate, and act in our social
environments, and even the ways we orient
ourselves in time and space, emerge from our
experience in our social groups
• So one of the basic conceptual tools for
analyzing culture is the concept of cognitive
categories
Examples
• Durkheim argued that religions rely on
the categories of “sacred” and
“profane,” which are defined in relation
to each other
• Barry Schwartz explored how a
vocabulary of vertical classification
(upper/lower, etc.) is linked in many
different groups to evaluation of prestige
and value (upper class, lower class, etc.)
• He believed these cognitive categories
originate in the common experience of
children comparing themselves to adults
• Census categories support
particular types of racial
categorization in the United
States
• But these categories have
changed over time – for example
‘Mexican’ was a category from
1930-1940
• They are socially constructed,
rather than being based on
biology
• While we all experience the
passing of time, time has been
measured and marked very
differently in different societies
(Zerubavel, 1981).
• Traditional societies had a
‘cyclical’ sense of time, that of
modern societies is more
‘linear’
• We are also much more precise
about how we measure time,
down to minutes and second
Cognitive Categories - Examples
• Other categories we often take
for granted in modern life are
“home” and “work” – but these
were much less distinct in pre-
modern societies
• Whether or not a job is
categorized as a profession is
socially defined, and the
categorization makes a
difference for workers and
clients
Group Exercise
• Make a list of occupations whose members are generally seen as ‘professionals’ (7-
8)
• Make a list of occupations whose members are generally not seen as ‘professionals’
(7-8)
• What is the difference? What makes one job a ‘profession’ and another not?
• Do people look at employees in professional and non-professional positions
differently? In what ways?
• Make another list ‘borderline’ cases – occupations which you are unsure whether or
not to consider as ‘professional’ (3-4)
• Could you imagine one of these occupations moving fully into the ‘professional’
category some day? What might its members do to raise their status and become
more ‘professional’?
Submit your work individually on Blackboard as ‘Cognitive categories exercise’ before
the end of the class
Symbolic Boundaries
• Meaning-making through cognitive categories
necessarily involves drawing boundaries
• Cultural sociologists study how the boundaries
establishing cognitive categories are established,
shifted, and occasionally challenged in historical
and interactional processes
• Bourdieu wrote in Distinction about how
societies draw cultural boundaries
• Bethany Bryson (1996) found that well-educated
people disproportionately disliked music
associated with the less-educated, preferring, for
instance, “anything but heavy metal.”
You might think about how
symbolic boundaries are
established between
different categories of
medical employee in a
hospital (e.g. doctors and
nurses, consultants and
junior doctors) or between
different groups of staff and
students in the university
Schemas/Frames

Schemas or frames are shared cultural models we use to

make sense of the world

These combine different categories and boundaries

They evoke intense moral and emotional commitment

‘Family Devotion’ v. ‘Work
Devotion’ Schemas
• Mary Blair-Loy (2003) investigated a
common social problem – work/family
conflict – as a clash of two cultural schemas
• She compares the “family devotion schema”
and “work devotion schema”
• These schemas specify different views of
what makes life meaningful, and what is
rewarding
• They are also strongly gendered
• People can experience the conflict of these
two schemas in their own life, or they can
use them in arguments about work, social
policy, etc.
Framing Immigrants
• Rodney Benson (2013) analyzed media
coverage of immigration news in France
and the United States across four decades
• Six frames portrayed immigrants in a
positive light: as victims of the global
economy, humanitarian crisis, or
xenophobia, and as heroes contributing
cultural diversity, social integration, and
useful work
• Four frames characterized immigrants as a
threat: to jobs, to public order, to the cost
of public services, and to national cohesion
• The frames Benson analyzes constitute
widely available, often taken-for-granted
symbolic forms which generate “selective
perception” (2013, 19, 4)
Valuation
• Valuation means how we
judge people, things, or
behaviours
• It often relies on cognitive
categories, schemas and
frames
• We may not even recognize
that we are judging – or
stigmatizing – when we use
evaluative schemas and
frames
Group Exercise
• Read and discuss the linked article:
https://www.thenationalnews.com/lifestyle/wellbeing/2024/09/17/four-
day-work-week-dubai-benefits/
• What schemas (shared cultural models we use to understand the world)
can you identify within the article?
• List a number of ‘keywords’ from the article associated with each schema
• What is the most important value associated with each schema?
• What are some of the key cognitive categories each schema uses to
understand the world?
Submit your work individually on Blackboard as ‘Schemas exercise’ before
the end of the day
Commensuration
• In modern life, processes of evaluation are often explicitly formalized in
influential ratings and rankings
• Commensuration – the deliberate representation and evaluation of
different units with a common metric – changes what might otherwise
be seen as complex qualitative differences into quantitative relations
(Espeland and Stevens 1998)
• Examples: bestseller lists, college rankings, standardized tests
• These are seen as having authority and legitimacy despite the
recognition of qualitative differences that are not captured in ratings
and rankings
• These often affect subsequent behavior (“teaching to the test”)