Chapter 5
The Cultural Formations of
Modern Society
Robert Boccock
Presented by Hope
11 November 2005
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Introduction
1. What the term ‘culture’ means and examining its use
as a sociological concept?
2. How did the concepts of classification and
structuralist approach are used to analyze cultural
formations and phenomena?
3. How does Max Weber argue that religion is a central
role in determining cultural formation?
4. The cultural change in Nineteenth Century, there is a
growing disillusion with the scientific and rationalist
culture, and many disciplines show the significance of
values and beliefs as constituents of culture.
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Defining Culture
Five main definitions of the term ‘culture’
1. Culture=cultivating the land, crops, animals
2. Culture= the cultivation of the mind; the arts;
civilization
3. Culture = a general process of social development;
culture as a universal process (the Enlightenment
conception of culture)
4. Culture = The meanings, values, ways of life
(cultures) shared by particular nations, groups,
classes, periods
5. Culture = the practices which produce meaning;
signifying practices
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Defining Culture
4th Definition
5th Definition
Culture as shared
Culture as the practices which
meanings and ways of life produce meaning.
Focus
Focus on the meanings
which groups share
Focus on the practices by which
meaning are produced
Concerning
The contents of a culture
Cultural practices
Concentrating
Culture as a whole way of
life.
The interrelationships between
the components that make up a
particular cultural practice.
anthropologists What is totemism?
might ask?
How are totemic phenomena
arranged? (e.g. Wedding)
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Analysing Culture
• Bear the 5th definition of culture in mind –”signifying
practices”
Structuralsim looks at the symbolic structure of an event
in order to discover its cultural meaning.
• Introduce two structuralism Pioneers (French
Anthropologists)
– Ferdinand de Saussure (1875-1913)
– Claude Levi-Strauss (1908)
• Reassessment of Emile Durkheim’s work (1858-1917)
– How and What did Durkheim develop a whole new
approach to the understand of culture?
– Collective Representations
– Primitive Classification
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– Structuralist Developments
Roots of The structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure
Claude Levi-Strauss
Introduced an important distinction in
the way in which language could be
studied and, by extension, the way in
which culture more broadly might be
approached.
A culture operates ‘like a language.' the
idea of language having a given
structure (took from Saussure). Apply
such study to the studies of myths,
rituals and kingship structures
*as social institution (language, a
collective system)
The social scientist should analyze how
a structure of any kind operates as a
structure before knowing what counts
as changes, or variations, within a
structure and what counts as a change
of a structure.
Language as a collective system.
Language is a social institution.
The synchronic study of language,
not diachronic ( historical type of
study of language)
Language can be studied outside of
historical changes.
*the classifying system, The structure of a culture, “collective
representations” ,
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Analysing Culture
• Collective Representations
What and how did Durkheim develop a whole new approach to the
understand of culture?
– His analysis of the religious beliefs and rituals in
these societies
• Collective representations
– Representations are are the major symbolic components of
culture which are collectively produced, reproduced,
transmitted and transformed.
– Cultural belief, moral values, symbols and ideas
– A symbolic world of meanings within which a cultural group
lives. 238-239
– Symbolic identification-Totem of the group (239)
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Analysing Culture
• Primitive Classification
– How does the idea of collective representations’ work within a
culture?
• By the categories, a process of cultural classification in
‘primitive’ societies.
• Totem is the key, and it classificatory map of the society
(kingship)
• Both he (analysis of classification system) and Levi-Strauss
(analysis of symbolic structures) use the method of ‘terms of
pairs.” (242-3)
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Analysing Culture
• Durkheim’s Classification System
– Religious experience is not based upon illusions, but
upon concrete social, collective, ritual actions or
practices
– Sacred and Profane (243a)
• Levi-Strauss’ Symbolic Strucrtures
– Terms of pairs
– ‘savage mind’ –thinking by classifying things into
binary oppositions
*Royal family British as an example of cementing
divergent groups (245)
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Analysing Culture
• Structuralist Developments
– Using collective representations and primitive
classifications to analyzing the symbolic structure of
events (differences and relations)
– Apply the binary opposites as a central feature of all
classifying systems to every cultural phenomena. The
object of structuralist analysis was frozen in time
(Synchronic.)
– Many studies was applied with the above basic
structuralist method of analysis.
– The underlying code for deciphering the phenomenon
– Such a structuralist method can be applied to any
cultural pattern and in any historical period.
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– Example (246-7)
Culture and Social Change
• Bear the 4th definition of culture in mine
• The culture played in the great historical “transition from
a religious to a secular culture”
• How to understand the process of secularization which is
typical of the formation of modern culture?
• Max Weber’s extensive analysis
emphasize the role which culture and religion play in
major historical
transitions.
– Religion and the rise of capitalism
– Orientations of the World Religions
• 4 types
– Western culture, science and values
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Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
• Binary oppositions
– Adventurer capitalism
– Rational, peaceable bourgeois capitalism
(vocation)
• Rational Capitalism emerged from
–
–
–
–
The spirit of Christian asceticism (250)
Increasingly secularized cultural values process
Seventeenth Century Calvinist puritan sects
Protestant ethic
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Orientations of the World Religions
• Binary opposition method
– Oriental (eastern) religions and Occidental (western)
religions
– Harmony with the natural world (mysticism) and
seeking mastery over the world (asceticism)
• Religious intellectuals and high social roles
– ‘Inner-worldly’ suggest turning toward the world
(merchants, politician rulers. )
– ‘Other worldly’ refer to the roles which are removed13
from everyday tasks (nuns.)
Orientation of the World Religions
Social Roles
Type 1
Inner-worldly mysticism
Type 2
Other worldly mysticism
Type 3
Inner-worldly sceticism
Type 4
Other-worldly asceticism
Refer to chart in p. 254
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Western Culture, Science and Values
• Modernity can not resolve the problem of value
and of how we ought to live.
• Science and modern capitalism were tow
aspects of a long historical process.The process
began in earnest with Enlightenment.
• Such Rationality process dominate more and
more areas of life in western culture.
• Weber’s pessimistic tone (p. 256) and two other
same claims. (p.263)
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The Cost of Civilization
• Rationalization can not make the world
meaningful.
–
–
–
–
–
Increasing Rationality
Disenchantment with the Modern World
Civilization and its discontents
The Frankfurt School
Conclusion
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Increasing Rationality
• Tension between rationality (sociology and
capitalism) and traditional culture (religion)
• Equality
• Existential question, suffering issue.
The role of culture supposes to give meaning to,
or help people make sense of life.
• Theodicies’ Job (258)
– The intellectuals
– The main classes in the rest of the society *
• Aesthetic and Erotic (259)
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Disenchantment with the Modern World
• Rationalization increasing did not produce the increase
in overall human happiness.
• The Enlightenment project weakens of the hold of
custom, magic, superstition and other supernatural
taboos over which the philosophers rejoiced.
– Weber call it “a process of de-magnification” “the
disenchantment of the world”sociologists call it
“secularization”
• Increase pessimistic views of the ‘cost’ to modern
civilization
– Romantic poets in Britain
– Karl Max (1818-83) calls the cultural condition a
process of ‘estrangement’, or ‘alienation’. (p.262)
– Emile Durkheim argued the increasing disorder
behaviors and isolation.(263)
– Nietzche “nililism”(263)
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Two Important Critiques of Modern
• Sigmund Freud
• Frankfurt School
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Frued
• Civilization and its discontents
– War neurosis, the hostility people feel towards this
modern civilization. Instead of increased happiness,
there is an increase in neurosis. There are echoes
here of Marx’s notion of alienation and estrangement.
– The unconscious captured the important of the
irrational.
• sexuality
• Destruction aggression (274)
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Frankfurt School
• Same theme rehearsed already by both Weber
and Frued.
• The rise of fascism in Germany in 1930
• What had gone wrong?
–
–
–
–
False Dream!
The Reason (p265)
The Hope (266)
The Solution (266)
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Conclusion
• Intellectuals’ responsibilities
– Academic neutrality is dangerous. (267)
– Value-judgments are important.
– Moral vigilant is essential.
– Value-neutrality is a necessary
methodological stance for sociologists, but it
is never enough on its own.
– No others but intellectuals must continue to
think about, write about, human life.
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