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    Sociology of Culture

    Culture shapes society and society shapes culture, which in turn affects how culture will continue to shape society and vice versa. Although the study of culture is multidisciplinary, it is inarguable that culture is social in nature.

    Raymond Williams explains in his Keywords that ‘culture’ is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’(1). There are countless definitions and different disciplines point to different definitions as being ‘official’.’

    Culture helps societies develop religious, moral, normative, aesthetic and cognitive meanings. Cultural sociology does not study so much institutions that we define as being cultural but more so the dimension that permeates through every aspect of social life.(1)

    In sociology, culture and the dynamics of cultural construction and diffusion are studied in the context of social interaction.(1) Those who study sociology of culture aim to empirically show how much culture matters relative to other variables that account for sociological phenomenon.(1) This phenomena includes but is not limited to criminal regulation of sex, women’s economic advancements, racial political participation and social movements.(1)  

    Today, those who study the sociology of culture posit that culture is expressed and negotiated almost entirely through explicit social  constructions or products.(1) The ‘new’ sociology of culture deals largely with various types of recorded culture and represents a number of distinct and dependent subfields.(1) These include science, entertainment, technology, knowledge, relgiion, media, popular culture and the arts as well as culturally orientated approaches to history, politics, organizations, etc.

    (1) http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19951802769.html

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