Discussion 2
Culture
Jonathan R. Wynn, University of
Massachusetts Amherst
Culture (Fall 2021)
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Culture
J O N A T H A N R . W Y N N , U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A S S A C H U S E T T S A M H E R S T
WHAT IS CULTURE?
Material culture vs. symbolic culture
High culture vs. popular culture
Culture as values vs. culture as a way of life
CULTURE IS A CYCLE
The romantic image of an artist
How is culture produced?
Consuming culture
Subcultures
HOW CULTURE WORKS
How culture creates inequalities
How culture creates groups and boundaries
THE CULTURE JAM
Culture jam as a mix
Culture jam as a problem
Culture jam as a solution
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INTRODUCTION
How does music help us understand the complexity of culture?
You close your eyes and feel the music. Your head bobs up and down. You see the
color of the lights through your eyelids.
Are you close to the stage, with bodies and sweat pressed to your shoulders, or do you
hang back? Do you feel a connection with the surrounding strangers? With the band? What
kind of music is it? Do the lyrics reflect your experiences or do they transport you into another
perspective? Where are you? A packed underground club? A stadium? Or a library cubicle,
listening on Beats headphones?
Music is a powerful force in our lives. It is also a multibillion-dollar industry, with
organizational and technological changes that shape how music is made and experienced.
Music is just one kind of culture, shaping our views of the world, connecting people near and
far.
What kind of music is this crowd listening to? (Source)
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We humans produce far more than what we need for mere survival. Our intellect allows
for expansive creativity, self-reflection, and communication. We transform our living
environment. We share ideas and values. Culture, broadly, is everything we make and
consume—including our ideas, attitudes, traditions, and practices—beyond that bare
necessity. Music may very well be one of the earliest forms of culture humanity produced.
“Culture” is one of the most difficult words for a sociologist to use. Sociological research
on culture varies, but most sociologists are committed to the idea that the symbolic and
expressive aspects to social life—the beliefs and values we hold, as well as the practices and
activities we engage in—are worth examination. Thinking in this way, burritos and Beyoncé,
athleisure and college athletics, juggalos (fans of the band Insane Clown Posse) and graffiti all
uncover great sociological questions.
Opening this chapter with a few questions about how you experience music illustrates
how we can think about culture from a sociological perspective. Émile Durkheim allows us to
think about how much of social life works via culture: he notes that symbols (material or
immaterial objects that groups affix meaning to), deployed through rituals (routinized and
highly important group activities), give a community its specific character. In my research on
festivals, for example, I walked through the Country Music Association’s CMA Fest in Nashville,
cataloging common references in song lyrics (dirt roads, pickup trucks, cigarettes, Red Solo
Cups) performed on stage that resonated with audiences. The annual ritual of the country
music festival creates collective meanings for festivalgoers—crystalizing shared sentiments
about America (small towns, simple living, reckless but “honest” fun)—through this common set
of symbols.
This chapter explores how to understand culture sociologically. The first section provides
a set of key tensions for making sense out of the complexity of what we mean when we use
the term “culture.” Then I discuss how sociologists analyze culture as an object: how culture is
made and produced. A third section explains how culture shapes social life. The last section
discusses some wider issues raised in studies of culture, from globalization to cultural
appropriation.
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WHAT IS CULTURE?
What is the difference between high culture and popular culture?
How has the idea of culture changed over time, and what are the tradeoffs?
Is culture a set of beliefs, and how are those beliefs put into practice?
What does it mean to say that culture is a way of life?
We start by differentiating between high and popular culture, material and symbolic
culture, and “culture as values” vs. “culture as activity.” Later sections discuss how people
produce and consume culture, and how tastes shape groups and boundaries.
Material culture vs. symbolic culture
In general, humans produce clothing to stay cool in the summer and warm in the
winter. But if that were its only purpose, everyone would wear the same clothes—perhaps a
brown tunic or blue denim overalls. People don’t just use clothing in this way, however. Often,
people use clothing to communicate something about themselves. There is a material
component to a piece of clothing (fabric, dye, the production of clothing) and a symbolic
component (words, images, style). Sociologically, we say this is material culture—physical
goods, often placed in an economic system—and symbolic culture—beliefs, values,
language.
Published in 1912, Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life explains how
symbolic culture shapes social life. He described how a set of images and words—a bundle he
called collective representations—can represent a particular culture; the purpose, or function,
is to create social order and cohesion. For Durkheim, religion separates symbols into categories
of sacred and profane, constructing social boundaries between people who recognize a set
of collective representations as worthy of reverence and those who do not. Although he
makes the argument primarily through religion, his work points to the importance of culture in
shaping social life.
We can certainly see how collective representations work in the U.S. American
collective representations might be baseball, the “Stars and Stripes,” apple pie, and the like.
Similarly, college fashion might be part of the collective representations for your college or
university, which could also include a mascot or a motto, colors (e.g., “Spartan Green”), an
iconic campus building, or statue, all of which were created, debated, and then shape the
character of your college community.
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No matter the school, students tend to wear college gear a lot. Recently, I’ve noticed
new fashion trends on my campus. I used to see a lot of jeans, mixed with an assortment of
sweatpants and sweatshirts, usually with our campus logo in maroon. Increasingly, I see more
leggings. They are made of a material that is light, stretchable, odor-resistant, and sweat-
wicking. It’s useful for yoga and stretching at the gym and now, apparently, sitting in class.
Athleisure, as it’s called, is a growing market trend; it combines the causal style of sweatpants
with a more fitted look. My campus, apparently, is becoming a large (and rather expensive)
yoga studio.
Trends in the relationship between symbolic and material culture can be quite telling.
Symbolically, athleisure is part of a growing tendency toward the “casualization” of fashion,
intersecting with health and fitness trends to make everyday clothes less formal. And then
there is the material aspect: USA Today notes that yoga pants (like corduroy pants and khakis
before them) are cutting into the jeans market.1 And what does it say about masculinity that
men are unlikely to wear leggings, and companies sell them “luxury sweatpants” instead? For
centuries, it was quite common for men to wear leggings—exemplified by the painting of
Henry VIII of England on the next page—but today it’s unlikely one of your professors would
wear yoga pants to class, regardless of their gender. Sometimes controversies highlight cultural
change: what do you think of three women being kicked off a United Airlines flight in 2017
because an attendant deemed their leggings to be “improper dress”?
Fashion can be profoundly meaningful, and unpacking the relationship between its
symbolic and material elements produces insights into cultural change and even how groups
cohere. More on this later.
Yoga pants with punk studs (Source); Portrait of Henry VIII by the workshop of Hans
Holbein the Younger (Source).
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High culture vs. popular culture
Most classical artists designed their work for the enjoyment of a few. When people used
the term culture, the term once denoted only high culture: cultural goods made for and
enjoyed by elite groups. This included oil paintings, ballet, the opera, fancy cuisine, and the
like. High culture was “fine art,” often hidden from the masses.
The Industrial Revolution allowed us to mechanically reproduce cultural goods for
broader society. In contrast with high culture, industry manufactures popular culture: heavily
produced and commercialized goods made for and consumed by a large audience. It is
sometimes called mass culture or low culture. While high culture is attuned to elite and upper-
middle class tastes, and has an aura that denotes its exceptional quality, popular culture is
commonly associated with pleasure, the mundane, and the masses. Although you might hear
of elites, well, being elitist about popular culture (for instance, dismissing superhero movies as
frivolous and trivial) or working-class folks rejecting high culture (say, avoiding art museums),
most sociological studies of culture start from the assumption that all culture has value,
whether it’s Spiderman or the Mona Lisa.
The once obvious lines between high and popular culture have become quite blurred.
New media and technologies always challenge our notions of art and culture: whether it is the
invention of paint tubes, photography, the development of wax disks for audio recording, or
the use of silk-screening on canvas. Can, for example, a mass reproduced image like Andy
Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans be considered art? Increased use of computer-assistance and
even Artificial Intelligence have further redefined our understanding of high art and popular
culture. Are virtual reality art installations like those created by Sara Ludy to be considered art,
technology, or both?
As COVID-19 shaped many aspects of our social lives, the pandemic affected our
relationship with culture in illuminating ways. Severe limits on physical movement and social
gathering presented a fresh challenge to museums: how to connect with audiences in their
own homes. Museums have been experimenting with virtual tours for years, and others have
digitized their collections to display works for educational purposes. The COVID pandemic,
however, forced museums to not only augment their online collections but also develop new
kinds of virtual engagements, including launching curated walk-throughs, digital festivals, and
TikTok and Instagram feeds. The Smithsonian’s Open Access project, for example, allows
anyone to download, share, and use over three million digitized items without needing
permission. (This chapter’s cover photo—of a 19th-century French fan—is used through the
Open Access project.) New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art asked people to post their live-
acted reproductions of famous artwork on Twitter with the hashtag #MetTwinning.
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Figure 1: Family Income and Attendance at Select High Culture Events
Source: Data from “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the
Arts, 2002-2015,” p. 4
Is tearing down the wall between high and popular culture a positive development?
Culture theorist Walter Benjamin noted with some melancholy that, while allowing for greater
accessibility, the mass reproduction of art destroys the aura—a glow of authentic and unique
creative labor—of high culture.2 It is possible that Benjamin would dismiss the idea of a
museum posting its art online. And yet, transformations in high and popular culture are
complex tradeoffs. Museums can only display a tiny fraction of the art in their permanent
collections—according to one estimate, an average of about 5%.3 The British Museum only
displays 1% of the eight million pieces in its collection!4 Now, audiences can learn more about
art than ever before, without having to travel to a metropolitan area or paying hefty
admissions fees.
What examples successfully bridge high and low? Here’s one: In 2016, Beyoncé
released Lemonade, a chart-topping and award-winning visual art album with songs
packaged along with a feature-length gritty, breathtaking, Instagram-filter-hued film.
Lemonade is a concept album: a set of songs centered on a set of themes (infidelity, revenge,
and the historical impact of race relations on intimate and social relationships in the African
American community) that tell a story; they divided the video into chapters based on themes,
from intuition and denial all the way to redemption. While Lemonade was a chart-topping
and infectiously catchy example of pop culture, the idea of the concept album originated
with classical German musical compositions by Beethoven and Brahms. (Pink Floyd’s The Wall
is a famous example of a pop concept album.) Lemonade is high culture enough to be
artistic, popular culture enough to bring down the house at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show.
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Figure 2: Decline in Attendance at Select High Culture Events
Source: Data from “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation
in the Arts, 2002-2015,” p. 5
Such changes in high and popular culture spark a lot of debate: Is high culture really
high culture when it’s accessible to everyone? What do we gain and lose? Does it matter and,
if not, why not?
Culture as values vs. culture as a way of life
From Max Weber to 1950s American sociologist Talcott Parsons, social scientists learned
to approach culture as a unified system of values (moral beliefs) and norms (rules and
expectations by which a group guides the behavior of its members).5 Culture, in this way,
bends our beliefs into actions.
A well-known example is the conversation around the “culture of poverty.” In the 1960s,
Oscar Lewis studied Mexico and Puerto Rico, finding that the conditions of poverty there
created a set of widespread values and norms.6 In a report, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan claimed that a “tangle of pathologies” resulted from the combined effects of
slavery, economic marginalization, and racism.7 Although these studies argued that this
culture results from poverty and inequality—that is, that individuals who are poor develop
pathological cultural values and norms—Lewis and Moynihan’s work was incorrectly
interpreted as blaming the poor for their own marginalization. The debate transformed into the
perception that poor folks are poor because of their own habits and preferences, their own
culture.
Research has since shown that poor Americans hold values that are like the wider
American population, even among the homeless.8 William Julius Wilson’s The Truly
30%
33%
32%
34%
38%
37%
26%
33%
36%
37%
36%
37%
33%
21%
36%
40%
42%
46%
41%
35%
23%
18-24
25-34
35-44
45-54
55-64
65-74
75+
Overall decline in Attending Ballet, Classical or Jazz Music, an Arts Museum, Opera, Musical or Play
2002 2008 2012
Culture (Fall 2021)
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Disadvantaged sought to understand how culture helps those trapped in poverty to cope with
and come to understand their circumstances.9 He found high social isolation among urban
African Americans living in areas of extreme poverty; changes in urban economies had led to
declining employment rates for Black men and rising female-headed households. But Wilson
found the same values among this population as among wider American society, including a
strong belief in marriage and a work ethic.
Studies of organizations illustrate how values and beliefs are rather stubborn. In the
middle of the last century—with the rise of an affluent middle class after World War II—
sociologists turned toward understanding how organizations create their own culture, nurturing
the institution’s goals and developing a world of meaning that shapes how its members think
and act.10 In order to explain the 1986 Challenger disaster—when the NASA space shuttle
exploded because of a structural failure in one of its booster rockets—Diane Vaughan studied
how NASA’s organizational culture shaped problem-solving among engineers and scientists in
a way that allowed such an event to occur. She found widespread awareness that booster
rockets were faulty before 1986, and yet, even in the face of a potential catastrophe, NASA’s
practices were difficult to change because the organization’s culture made such risks a
normal part of their calculations.11
It might appear that culture is external to us, that we are fully socialized into a culture’s
ideas, language, and patterns of interaction. And yet, people also adopt and adapt culture
from moment to moment. Our collective norms, values, and ideas are not as stable as they
appear. Contrary to the “culture as values” approach, don’t we also think of culture as a set
of practices, a way of life?
Take ethnographer Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street, a detailed account of a
primarily African American neighborhood in Philadelphia. He divides groups of kids based on
cultural cues (how they dressed, the language they used, their mannerisms and gestures) that
put them into two groups: “street” and “decent.” Some were successful in the contrasting
spheres of the street and school because they could switch between those different norms,
each suited to particular situations. Anderson called this skill code switching: adopting a set of
informal rules and manners that are appropriate in a specific setting.12 For example, some kids
would embrace the slang, manner, and clothing of the street to avoid being ridiculed on their
blocks, and then adopt the norms of middle-class culture at school in order to succeed in the
eyes of their teachers.
While responding to the “culture as values” perspective, Ann Swidler offered an
alternative understanding of how we practice culture in real life. Swidler describes culture as a
cultural toolkit: sets of beliefs, values, and attitudes that we learn to use in different situations.13
We use the cultural tools that solve particular problems or help us in the specific situation we’re
facing. Culture isn’t a single system of beliefs and practices that we have all learned and
accepted. It’s a strategic activity: people deciding about what might work best in a situation.
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Culture is continually practiced and repurposed in every interaction. Those in
Anderson’s study, for example, used culture strategically. Think about it: if culture wasn’t
remade and repurposed, everyone would still wear corduroy pants from the 1970s! (Or is that
back in fashion?) Furthermore, those with a wider cultural repertoire are equipped to handle a
greater variety of conditions and those who hold a “cultural tool” well matched for a
particular situation are more successful.14
In thinking about culture as both a set of values and a set of practices, it becomes a
kind of paradox: Culture exists outside of us as individuals, shaping our understandings of the
world, yet it is also constantly remade and repurposed through everyday interactions.15
REVIEW SHEET: WHAT IS CULTURE
CLICK THE LINK FOR:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS
AUDIO KEY POINTS
PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE
VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS
Culture (Fall 2021)
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CULTURE IS A CYCLE
How do sociologists study the way cultural and artistic goods are made?
What are the culture industries and how have they changed?
Is consuming culture an active or passive activity?
How do subcultures and fan cultures help us think about culture as a process?
The romantic image of an artist
Author James Baldwin once wrote that “perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is
that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of
being alone.”16
The image of a solitary creative artist, deep in thought, certainly sounds right. When you
think of a cultural good—a song, say, or a novel—being made, do you imagine a musician
and his favorite acoustic guitar, trying a new chord progression? A fiction writer in a cabin,
slouched over her laptop tapping out her next novel?
Baldwin’s image is quite romantic, and yet, even in their most isolated forms, artists are
always part of a vast network of groups and institutions that shape every cultural object. Those
guitars and laptops were all produced in places far away from where they were used, and yet
the conditions of production are quite important to the overall artistic endeavor.17 Someone
invented those chord progressions and expectations of fiction writing well before he strummed
G, C, and D chords and before she made the decision to describe a murder scene for the
opening chapter of her mystery novel. An author like Baldwin might write alone, but the writers
he socialized with in artistic neighborhoods like New York City’s Greenwich Village and Paris’s
Left Bank certainly influenced him. And what of all the audiences who listen and read those
finished products?
As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—who will be discussed in a few pages—notes: we
should be interested in “not what the artist creates, but who creates the artist.”18 Contrary to
the image portrayed by Baldwin, the artist is one part of a cultural cycle. In this section, we
look at that larger circuit, which includes production, consumption, and remaking of culture.
How is culture produced?
Where do cultural goods come from, and under what conditions were they made?
If we maintained Baldwin’s romantic notion of the artist, we might believe that Elvis
invented rock-and-roll. From a more sociological perspective, the rise of rock-and-roll music in
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the 1950s wasn’t due to his individual genius, or even to a White man copying the style of
Black singers, but resulted from technological advances (the electric guitar, amplification),
new market demands (young and Black radio audiences with money to spend), and music
label business decisions.19 Music genres are made in the studio and through a wide social
system, not by a single artist.
The mass production of cultural goods requires a vast system of people and
organizations called the culture industries. In his study of country music from its early
commercialization through radio and recorded music production, Richard Peterson outlined
different systems through which music was created, distributed, evaluated, and preserved. We
call this the “production of culture” perspective. Using country music as a case, Peterson
showed how macro-level (that is, large scale) arrangements in the culture industries (e.g.,
laws, technology) shape innovations and standardize cultural production; over time, changes
in these macro-level forces are critical factors in making the culture that we see and hear.20
Peterson describes country music as being “fabricated” to underscore how cultural goods are
subjected to this industrial process. He noted, for example, that there was a great deal of
diversity and innovation in country music when many record labels competed against each
other for consumers, but that the genre became increasingly homogeneous as larger labels
bought smaller ones, monopolizing the production of most country music.
In the last few decades, a handful of companies have controlled an increasing share of
the cultural industries. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 lifted limits on how many U.S.
media outlets can be owned by the same group or company. The resulting corporate
consolidation—the acquisition of smaller corporations by larger ones—has created a more
uniform symbolic and material cultural landscape. In the 1980s, 50 corporations owned 90% of
the media; now just six companies own over 90% of the U.S. media market: 20th Century Fox,
Paramount, Disney, Universal, WB, and Sony.21 The music industry consolidated in the 1960s
and again in the 1990s and 2000s as larger record labels purchased smaller ones. Even large
live music events are in the hands of two companies: Live Nation and AEG own major music
festivals like Bonnaroo and Coachella.22
Who produces these cultural goods? Non-White and Hispanic individuals make up only
13% of writers and artists, 20% of designers, and 17% of fine artists.23 Women are just 2% of music
producers, 12.3% of songwriters, and 22.4% of professional musicians.24 In 2015 and 2016 there
was a major critique of the Oscars (the most prestigious U.S. film awards ceremony) for the
lack of diversity among those nominated for awards, despite the release of well-received films
like Creed, Selma, and Beasts of No Nation, which featured diverse casts and creators. The
#OscarsSoWhite hashtag trended when no person of color was nominated for an acting
award; in addition, no women were nominated for Best Director or Best Cinematographer in
2016. While much of this activism has focused on nominations of Black actors and film creators
(such as directors), since 2000, the proportion of acting nominations received by African
Culture (Fall 2021)
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Americans has nearly matched their percentage of the overall U.S. population. We have paid
less attention to Latinos and Asian Americans in Hollywood, who remain underrepresented
among Oscar nominees. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, which awards the
Oscars, has recognized that more work is needed, including diversifying its membership: 94% of
the Academy Awards voting members are White (and most are men), which may affect the
films that are likely to win awards.
COVID-19 hammered the creative industries, however. One study shows that between
April and July 2020, the creative industries lost $150 billion in sales, with the film, TV, and radio
industries taking the largest share of the hit—the authors estimate the industry lost 31% of all
employment and 9% of sales.25
Figure 3: Estimated Cumulative Losses for the Creative Industries by Cluster, April to July 2020
Cluster Jobs % of Total Jobs
Lost
Sales (in Billions) % of Total Sales
Lost
Fine and Performing
Arts
1,383,224 50% $42.5 27%
Design and
Advertising
365,334 13.2% $18.7 11.9%
Publishing 252,820 9.1% $16.3 10.4%
Crafts 232,429 8.4% $12.0 7.6%
Motion Picture,
Television & Radio
193,550 7% $33.1 21.1%
Creative Technology 164,108 5.9% $22.0 13.9%
Architecture 77,069 2.8% $3.4 2.2%
Fashion 69,271 2.5% $4.5 2.9%
Culture & Heritage 29,978 1.1% $4.6 3.0%
Source: “Lost Art: Measuring COVID-19’s Devastating Impact on America’s Creative Economy,” Florida and Seman
2020
Technology can open greater access to cultural production. In 2015, Tangerine, a Do It
Yourself (DIY) film about transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, made waves for being shot
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entirely on an iPhone 5s, edited with an $8 app, and accompanied by music found via a free
streaming service called Soundcloud. It was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival.
As an outgrowth of the production of culture approach, scholars have examined
changes in work and occupations in the cultural realm. Sociologist Alexandre Frenette, for
example, looks at the pivotal role of interns: the army of free and temporary labor that is
essential to many cultural industries. He finds a very complex relationship between the cultural
industries and higher education, demonstrating how internships limit employment opportunities
in the culture industries and reproduce inequalities (for instance, only those who can afford to
live in an expensive place like New York City and work for free can be music interns).26 New
jobs emerge across the culture industries, too. The rise of fast food created new youth labor
markets,27 as fast food restaurants provided part-time work for teenagers. More recently, as
markets for artisanal, organic, and hand-crafted foods have grown, individuals in the middle
class have regained an interest in older types of food work like cocktail bartending, butchering
meat, and distilling whiskey. These changes provide sociologists with opportunities to study
how culture shapes labor markets.28
The production of cultural goods serves as one part of the cultural cycle. What about
the people who listen to the music, read the books, and drink the cocktails?
Consuming culture
With the publication of his
book, A Theory of the Leisure Class, in
1899, Thorstein Veblen (pronounced
VEH-blen) became one of the first
theorists of cultural consumption.29 He
noted a major shift in the late 1800s. In
colonial America (until the late 1700s),
open displays of wealth were usually
met with scorn, as they were
considered vulgar. People profited
economically, of course, but most
people shunned the open
appreciation of material possessions or
leisure time. Instead, they valued the
ability to delay gratification, putting
off pleasure. But over time, excess wealth became something to display. Veblen called it
conspicuous consumption: gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods, which
implies to others that you are wealthy. Sure, a $17,000 Hyundai Elantra can get you to the
grocery store, but to display wealth, a bright yellow $100,000 Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet
Fancy cocktail bar, crafted to look authentic. (Source)
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would do the trick. Why wear $20 college sweatpants to class when you can wear $200 Kanye
West-designed Calabasas trackpants?
Sociologists have broadened our understanding of how people consume culture,
including the effects of fast food on children30 and how different consumption habits, from
social media use to buying the newest fad in clothing, can create tensions within a family.31
Sharon Zukin examined how the spaces of consumption have changed over time, from small
mom-and-pop businesses to megamalls and international corporations.32 And Elizabeth Currid-
Halkett explains how elites today are more likely to conspicuously participate in services and
activities (e.g., yoga, silent meditation retreats, listening to NPR, drinking almond milk) rather
than displaying luxury goods.33 The way we consume music is rapidly changing, too.
But is cultural consumption simply a passive activity? You might believe that the women
who join romance novel book clubs internalize what many see as their oppressive and sexist
messages about women, sex, and relationships. Janice Radway, however, found that book
clubs are a great example of how cultural consumption can be quite complex. When reading
romance novels, some women in her study inverted even the most old fashioned stories—
mysterious men and damsels in distress—into narratives of adventure, female empowerment,
and freedom.34 By rejecting the regressive gender norms in the books they read, another
scholar concluded that female readers “press books into service for the meanings that they
transmit and the conversations they generate.”35
Figure 4: Global Spending on Luxury Goods, 2016
Source: Bain & Company Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, 2016
474
269
198
71 49 42 35 19 7 2
Luxury Cars
Personal Luxury Goods
Luxury Hospitality
Fine Wines & Spirits
Fine Food Fine Art Designer Furniture
Private Jets Yachts Luxury Cruises
2016 Worldwide Luxury Goods Expenditures, in billions (Total: over $1.1 trillion)
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Figure 5: Music Sales by Format
Sources: RIAA Year-End 2019 Music Revenues Report and Rolling Stone 201936
Are we mindless consumers, or do we bend the meanings and uses of the cultural
goods to our own purposes? Sociology shows how audiences play a role in culture as much as
producers do. As Radway’s research illustrates, the meaning of a cultural good is open to
multiple interpretations by its varied users. Studying how people consume cultural goods
illuminates another part of the cycle.
Subcultures
What can goth culture teach us about the cycle of culture? While the production of
culture allows us to understand that culture is fabricated just like any other product, and
consumption studies teach us how audiences are active and strategic interpreters of the
culture they see and hear, subcultures like goths give us a sense for how people repurpose
and remake culture.
A subculture is, generally, a group that holds values and engages in activities that
separate members from the wider society. Based on his examination of British working class
youth, professor of art and media studies Dick Hebdige differentiated subcultures based on
their expressions of style: their particular forms of slang, dress, and music. Goths have their own
jargon (“babybat” means a new or young goth), dress (dark clothes, boots, pale makeup),
and music (Bauhaus, The Cure). Subcultures take and adapt existing cultural items and
4% 10 %
80 %
2%
2019 U.S. Music Industry
Revenues
Digital Downloads Physical Streaming Sync (Cross Platform)
-21% -18%
11.9%
41.8%
24.3% 16.2%
27.4% 35.4%
Percent Change in Music Consumption from 2017 to 2018
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behaviors and reuse them. Goths, for example, repurpose British Victorian-era styles from the
1800s, blended with a more contemporary punk DIY sensibility.
From goths to skate punks to juggalos (fans of the band Insane Clown Posse), it’s nearly
impossible to think of a subculture without its characteristic style. Subcultures are not just about
the symbolic content of style, however. Subcultures offer characteristic “ways of life” as well. In
Amy Wilkins’s study of teen subcultures, Wannabes, Goths, and Christians, she points to how
subcultural groups offer freedom of behavior. The groups she studied allow young girls to
select various sexual strategies and break taboos in ways that the more dominant culture does
not.37
Punk or Goth? (Source)
There are also subcultural groups based upon reusing and sharing fictional and pop
cultural worlds. More than merely interpreting cultural products, these fan cultures actively
change and use fictional characters and settings to write their own stories. You might think
that J.K. Rowling would be upset that tens of thousands of stories have been written and
published online (at www.harrypotterfanfiction.com) using characters from her Harry Potter
books. Rowling, however, sees these writers as fans of her books and as a community that
keeps her characters alive. Indeed, thousands of people have written, read, and reviewed
each other’s work—over two million times.
Subcultures allow us to see how culture is remade, but there’s more to it. Subcultural
activities may also be co-opted by popular culture. For example, goth was an explicit
rejection of commercialization and popular culture, yet it was eventually repackaged into
consumerist culture as a popular mall chain, Hot Topic, and serves as a character style on
primetime TV shows like 24: Live Another Day and NCIS. (Women in tech, apparently, have to
be goth.) The ultra-popular Fifty Shades of Grey series began as Twilight fan fiction that was
repackaged into a modern-day romance novel and a major movie series. Subcultures show us
how systems of production and consumption are not discrete spheres but parts of a broader,
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 19
more intertwined cultural circuit, as individuals consuming culture may then use it as the
jumping-off point to produce something new.
REVIEW SHEET: CULTURE IS A CYCLE
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HOW CULTURE WORKS
How does culture shape our lived social worlds?
Why are cultural practices sometimes effective in one social sphere but not in another?
What are the purposes of “us vs. them” feelings? How is such boundary-making nurtured
and reinforced?
What can “taste” tell us about how culture is used to distinguish different types of people,
and how has this changed over time?
How culture creates inequalities
Elijah Anderson’s account of code switching provides a story of how people practice
culture. It also shows how some beliefs and practices are useful in some contexts, but less
helpful in others. Sociologists argue that no set of beliefs and practices is inherently better or
more valuable than another. Rather, different cultures lead to different outcomes depending
upon the situation in which they are used. In Anderson’s study, there were two worlds—the
school and the street—where two different cultures exist and are considered appropriate.
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 20
Digging deeper, sociologists have found that such cultural differences can create inequality
and affect social mobility.
How? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (pronounced boar-DEW) proposed three
interlinked concepts for understanding how culture makes differences seem fair or natural and
reproduces social hierarchies.
People acquire and trade particular cultural—material and symbolic—goods. Bourdieu
called this cultural capital: non-economic resources (knowledge, skills, behaviors) that are
useful in a particular sphere of social life.38 These can be institutional cultural capital (such as a
degree from a particular university), embodied cultural capital (your manner, style, ways of
acting), or objectified cultural capital (your clothes, material objects). For example, high
school students participating in certain types of extracurricular activities (student government,
chess club) have greater success getting into elite colleges, where admissions officers are
likely to value that kind of cultural capital.39 However, not everyone has access to those
resources. Not every school has the funding to support a Model United Nations club, and if a
student has to work a job after school to help support their family, there’s no time to join the
chess club. Similarly, not everyone has the same kinds of knowledge. Upper-class students are
far more likely to have visited a museum like the Smithsonian, listened to classical composers
such as Brahms, or read Moby Dick. That kind of cultural knowledge can be used to improve
their standing in school. Gathering cultural capital can bring tangible rewards if they deploy it
under the correct circumstances.
What does it mean to say “…if they deploy it under the correct circumstances?” Well,
cultural goods aren’t necessarily valuable everywhere, or in the same way. Think of cultural
capital like money. (That’s why Bourdieu called it “capital”!) If you go to Istanbul, it would be
difficult to purchase something with five U.S. dollars; you need the local currency—Turkish lira.
Cultural capital works the same way. Cultural capital might function in one social sphere and
not in another, just as a country’s money works perfectly well in that country but isn’t
necessarily useful outside of it. Bourdieu called these social spheres fields: contexts where a
kind of cultural capital is exchanged, like a profession, a community, or a class of people.
People vary in how much control they have over who belongs and what kinds of culture they
value within the field. Bourdieu compared it to a field in a sport. Each sport has its own “rules of
the game” through which players compete. The better a player learns the specific rules of the
game, and how they work in the field, the better their chances for success.
Our ability to know how capital works is crucial. Using the right knowledge in the right
way leads to rewards. This introduces Bourdieu’s third major concept, habitus (pronounced
HA-bi-tuss). Our habitus is our learned dispositions, a set of tendencies organizing how we see
the world and act within it. For example, we don’t consciously think about how to cross the
street. With little thought we wait for traffic to stop, look both ways, and cross. It’s a kind of
second nature that is really only apparent when something goes wrong (a distracted driver) or
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 21
we travel to another country with different norms (traffic comes from the right at a crosswalk,
not the left as in the U.S.). Applying the concept of the habitus to issues like education, social
class, and race allows us to explain how we learn, somewhat unconsciously, to think and carry
ourselves in the social world—from crossing the street to how we eat a meal to what kinds of
culture we appreciate.
With these three concepts—cultural capital, fields, and habitus—in mind, let’s look at
schooling to understand how culture creates inequalities. Education is the field, with its
particular rules of the game, from raising your hand in class to instilling a belief in meritocracy
(that is, that anyone can succeed if they work hard and have talent). And the education
system teaches and rewards a particular kind of cultural capital: that of the dominant, White,
and middle- to upper-class culture. Poorer and non-White students are disadvantaged in their
attempts to gain educational credentials, such as good grades and degrees, that are forms of
institutional cultural capital. Middle- and upper-class students have a habitus, or disposition,
that corresponds to their social class, resonating with the teachers and education they
receive. Success in education offers greater employment opportunities and better economic
outcomes. By valuing and rewarding the culture of the dominant group, the educational
system reproduces the existing class structure, allowing those with more economic and cultural
resources to succeed more easily than their peers with fewer resources.
Code switching illustrates Bourdieu’s concepts nicely. The young African Americans in
Anderson’s study were not being fake when they acted one way at school and another way
in the street. They were being savvy cultural actors whose habitus allowed them to use the
kinds of cultural capital that were valuable in the very different fields of school and the street.
They had learned a set of behaviors and values that allowed them to easily move between
these two worlds, using the cultural capital that was most helpful in each one—allowing them
to succeed in school while fitting in, and staying safe, on the streets. This is not an inspiring story
of how disadvantaged students can succeed in school, however. Those students had to learn
different ways of acting, and mistakes could be costly. Anderson’s work proves how culture
places severe obstacles in front of poor and non-White students, while middle-class students
have an easier path toward educational credentials and better life chances.
How culture makes groups and boundaries
Would you be willing to go on a blind date with a country music fan? What about a
goth? Does the music someone listens to, or maybe a bit of extra eyeliner, say a lot about
them? These seemingly superficial questions get at how culture can create groups and
boundaries.
Classical social theorists like Émile Durkheim and Max Weber influenced Pierre Bourdieu.
As mentioned earlier, Durkheim showed how religion divides the symbolic world into the
sacred and the profane, identifying the social origins of how we classify our world. One of
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 22
Weber’s key contributions was to distinguish between a class (groups who share a similar
position based on income, wealth, education, and occupation) and status (the social
designation of honor).40 For Weber, there are classes and also status groups. A status group is a
collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community has given a certain
level of prestige—a greater or lesser value when compared to other groups. In your high
school, for example, there may have been a high-status clique (social group) of popular kids
who wore a certain style of clothes and makeup, and a lower-status clique that listened to a
particular type of music. Music and eyeliner, of course, are not the only ways to determine
such groups.
Contemporary sociologists like Michèle Lamont examine how we organize ourselves
through culture. Lamont differentiates between social boundaries—inequalities in access to
resources (e.g., race, social class, gender)—and symbolic boundaries, or the ways people
separate each other into groups (through traditions, styles, tastes, classifications).41 These
boundaries generate feelings of group membership, lend an emotion-fueled sense of
belonging, and help us grasp the wild diversity of social life by placing other people into
categories. Lamont looked at men in France and the U.S., showing how men create group
identities by contrasting themselves with the poor. In France, the middle class sees the poor as
temporarily out of work, disadvantaged by the economy, but otherwise similar to other social
classes; in the U.S., middle-class people believe they hold different values (hard work and self-
sufficiency) than the poor, explaining economic inequality because of these supposedly
different values.42
So, on the one hand, culture shapes and binds groups. Recalling Durkheim’s
contribution—that symbols, activated through rituals, foster shared meanings and create
community—we know that culture “bridges”: We make friendships and social ties through our
taste in music or clothes, and we can maintain those connections through continued cultural
activities.43 If you like bands like The Cure, you might be more willing to go on a blind date with
someone who dresses like a goth. In return, our social networks also affect our tastes,
introducing us to new ideas, fashions, cultural items, and classifications, which are passed
along to us through our social interactions with others.44 Bethany Bryson, for example, explains
that people use others’ musical preferences—like goth vs. country music—as cues to help
them decide whether to include them in or exclude them from a friendship group.
And yet, culture also creates fences. While Durkheim focused on how culture generates
social cohesion, Max Weber saw that culture can also differentiate, pulling us apart.45 Sports,
while generating warm feelings, can also create strong negative feelings: wearing a Yankees
cap in Boston almost always compels someone to say, “Go Sox!” This phenomenon occurs
everywhere, from American baseball to Spanish soccer.
Culture, seen in this way, can be a bridge or a fence.46 It allows us to establish or cross
boundaries, activate differences, and maintain social proximity or distance. Symbolic
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 23
boundaries, nurturing a sense of “us vs. them,” shape everything from employment to politics
to education: we define groups when we hire employees, when we decide who is welcome in
a political movement and who isn’t, and when elite culture is valued more in higher education
than the cultures of poor or working–class students.47 Creating and maintaining these
distinctions—from defining a friendship group to classifying people as part of the working
class—and limiting membership and access to resources is called boundary work.
Somewhat paradoxically, boundary work—and even conflict—creates groups and
solidifies group cohesion.48 Think about how passionate sports rivalries foster a strong sense of
in-group belonging. NCAA
schools are divided into athletic
conferences that define which
programs compete against
each other. When Texas A&M
University left the Big 12 for a
more prestigious conference,
they left Texas Tech football
without a strong in-state rival;
the loss of this competition that
allowed Texans to divide
themselves into groups of fans
lowered enthusiasm for Texas
Tech football (and ticket sales).
In the case of cricket in South
Asia, where a match between
India and Pakistan reflects decades of political conflict, over 60 students were expelled from
their Indian university—and even threatened with criminal sedition charges—for cheering for
the Pakistani team.49 Boundary work in culture—even in sports—creates groups and
hierarchies, limiting or distributing resources and opportunities. Let’s go us! Let’s beat them!
Last, sociological research shows how cultural tastes have changed dramatically, not
just in people’s interests (corduroy pants vs. athleisure, disco vs. hip hop), but in how we think
of taste itself. People used to gain status in their group by displaying an encyclopedic
knowledge of a particular cultural genre. Think about a classical music aficionado or a wine
expert. The music snob can differentiate Mozart from Chopin and the wine connoisseur, as a
song from British punk-pop band Blur goes, “knows his claret from a Beaujolais.” Both experts
can use their knowledge to make claims of high status. Perhaps you know the type: Not
always the person you want to be cornered by at a party. But sociologists note that today,
many people differentiate themselves by knowing a lot about many cultural spheres.50 These
Fans at a Texas Tech football game; when Texas A&M left its
athletic conference, Texas lost an in-state athletic rivalry. (Source)
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 24
cultural omnivores might talk about wine or classical music, but can discuss Budweiser and
Beyoncé, too. Omnivores speak of high culture and popular culture with equal ease.
You should now see how culture generates inequalities and creates symbolic
boundaries. The two processes work in concert. The rise of cultural “omnivorousness” as a form
of cultural consumption is hardly a democratization of taste, nor a sign that we have
eliminated symbolic boundaries. Knowing Beyoncé and Mozart does not give someone equal
footing in the eyes of the wider culture. Rather, people find new ways to distinguish
themselves. A familiarity with a wide range of cultural goods is just another form of generating
status.51
REVIEW SHEET: HOW CULTURE WORKS
CLICK THE LINK FOR:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS
AUDIO KEY POINTS
PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE
VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS
THE CULTURE JAM
What happens when culture moves across boundaries? Who benefits, and why should it
matter?
What are the intended and unintended consequences of an increasingly globalized
culture? How does global culture interact with local cultures?
Is there room for critique in popular culture?
The final section of this chapter uses the term “jam” in three different ways to discuss a
few challenging and controversial ideas. These sections look at culture as a mixture, especially
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 25
in the era of globalization; discuss debates around mixing goods from different cultures; and
point to ways people use culture for political and social commentary.
Culture jam as a mix
Culture moves, spreading beliefs and practices across groups. Anthropologists study the
various ways this diffusion occurs (often through conflict, war, migration, or trade), and as
culture crosses boundaries—whether a national border or a music genre—it changes and
adapts. Culture is always a combination, where the parts can harmonize and conflict with
each other, often obscuring history.52
Investigating cultural mixtures can illuminate a great deal about social life. We can look
at three curious examples. While doing research on a country music festival, I found myself in a
Nashville crowd, listening to an African American performer named Cowboy Troy sing and rap
a county/hip hop song called “I Play Chicken with the Train.” When visiting Las Vegas, I
ordered duck tongue tacos at a Chinese/Mexican restaurant called China Poblano. And
recently, I was excited to see a restaurant open in my town that sells Vietnamese bánh mì
sandwiches: pickled veggies and roast pork on a French baguette.
These might seem like little more than odd cultural mashups. A successful African
American singing in a predominantly White music genre? Chinese Mexican food? Vietnamese
sandwiches on French bread? But these mixtures are hardly haphazard. African American
music was part of early country music. When Beyoncé performed at the Country Music
Association Awards in 2016 to promote Lemonade—an album that includes samples from
country, R&B, Led Zeppelin, indie rockers Vampire Weekend, soul legend Isaac Hayes, and
1950s crooner Andy Williams—she honored that country tradition.53 Chinese Mexican food and
bánh mì sandwiches have their own histories. In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion
Act, which banned Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. to work, barred those already
here from becoming citizens, and made it difficult for them to re-enter the U.S. if they returned
to China to visit family. This sparked a wave of Chinese immigration from the U.S. to
northwestern Mexico (and there are still Chinese Mexican restaurants in that region). And the
bánh mì sandwich is the product of France’s occupation of Vietnam, starting in the late 1800s;
the mashup of Vietnamese and French cuisine has become one of Vietnam’s most
recognizable cultural products worldwide.
While examples like Chinese Mexican food and bánh mì sandwiches show that cultural
mashups have happened for centuries, today’s exchange of culture across the world is at
another magnitude. When intercultural communication and the exchange of ideas and
values reaches such an international scale, integrating political and economic systems, we
call it globalization.
As American culture becomes globalized, what is its relationship within other cultures?
When U.S. corporations enter new markets, they don’t impose themselves completely. They
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 26
often adapt. Whether in Tokyo, Mumbai, or Hong Kong, you can find a McDonald’s or
Starbucks. However, globalizing corporations often “localize” themselves to regional tastes. In
Japan and India, McDonald’s offers squid ink black burgers and Maharaja Macs, respectively,
while the McDonald’s in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, serves a bánh mì. Hong Kong’s Starbucks,
meanwhile, has a Red Bean Green Tea Frappuccino. The global becomes localized.
This moves us to seeing culture jams in a second, and more challenging, way.
A Starbucks in China (Source); tortillas warming on a grill (Source).
Culture jam as a problem
Certainly some people are relieved to find a McDonald’s everywhere. George Ritzer,
however, called the mass production of culture, resulting in similar cultural goods being found
everywhere, McDonaldization. Ritzer drew from Max Weber, who noted capitalism’s tendency
toward rationalization: increased efficiency, predictability, and control.54 While corporations
do, undoubtedly, make some efforts to adapt to local cultures, McDonaldization is the
broader trend toward driving out local cultures, replacing them with standardized products.
Entire places can fall under a similar process. Tourist zones, like New York City’s Times Square or
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, lose their distinctive qualities, making seemingly distinct places more
alike than different.
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 27
Multinational corporations are increasingly universal and inescapable, drowning out
local ideas, beliefs, and traditions. Cultural hybrids like Maharaja Macs should not distract us
from the fact that the most recognizable worldwide brands tend to be owned by American
and Western corporations. We call this imposition of a dominant group’s material and
symbolic goods cultural imperialism. Recall the consolidation of the music industry? We see it
on the wider global culture landscape, too: the same music companies that dominate the U.S.
market—Sony BMG, EMI, Warner, and Universal Music Group—dominate the global market.
The economic power of Western culture industries overwhelms competition from local culture.
(At the same time, we are seeing a rise in the economic power of India’s “Bollywood” and
China’s emerging movie production market.)
Figure 6: Global Box Office Revenue, 2014-2016
Source: Data from Motion Picture Association of America Theatrical Market Statistics 2016, p.6
On the flip side of cultural imperialism, there’s cultural appropriation, when members of
a dominant culture adopt the cultural goods (e.g., ideas, symbols, skills, expressions,
intellectual property) of other groups for profit. This disconnects the product from the history
and community from which it emerged, and reduces the chances that those groups can
benefit from the culture they produce.55
Can an ethnic group “own” culture? Let’s talk about burritos. In 2017, two White chefs,
operators of a food truck called Kooks Burritos, explained to a local alternative weekly
newspaper in Portland, Oregon, that they went to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, and asked local
2.1 1.7 1.6 1.4 1.6 1.7 2.1 2.6 2.8 3 3 3.4 2.8
8.5 7.2 6.8 6.5 6.8 7.2 8.5 9
10.4 11.1 12.4
14.1 14.9
10.4 9.9 9.7 8.7 9.7
9.9 10.4
10.8 10.7 10.9
10.6 9.7 9.5
10.6 10.6
9.6 9.6
9.6 10.6
10.6 10.2
10.8 10.9 10.4
11.1 11.4
2 0 0 4 2 0 0 5 2 0 0 6 2 0 0 7 2 0 0 8 2 0 0 9 2 0 1 0 2 0 1 1 2 0 1 2 2 0 1 3 2 0 1 4 2 0 1 5 2 0 1 6
GLOBAL BOX OFFICE REVENUE 2004-2016, BY REGION (IN BILLION U.S. DOLLARS)
Latin America Asia Pacific Europe, Middle East and Africa U.S. and Canada
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 28
chefs to teach them how to make a flour tortilla for their breakfast burritos.56 They thought their
story illustrated their own hard work and desire to create an “authentic” tortilla. However, it
pulled them into a wider debate over how White folks use other people’s cultures for their own
gain. Internet commentators called this cultural appropriation, and the two quickly closed
their business.
Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco U.S.A.: How Mexican Food Conquered America,
responded to the debate by saying that appropriation happens all the time in the food
industry. He says it’s laughable to think of Mexican food, comida mexicana, as a sacred and
untouchable tradition, or that “cultural appropriation is a one-way street where the
evil gabacho steals from the poor, pathetic Mexicans yet again.”57
Are burritos Mexican or Tex Mex? Are flour tortillas traditionally Mexican? Does it matter
if, as some argue, they come from Jewish immigrants to Mexico who made tortillas out of
wheat—a European grain introduced by the Spanish—instead of the corn that was native to
Mexico?58 If, as Arellano points out, Mexicans mix and borrow from other cultures, why
shouldn’t Anglos borrow too? Should it matter that these groups don’t have equal
opportunities to profit from a cultural trend? If Mexican food, like rock music, is a mixture of
many cultural traditions (for instance, the method of preparing pork for tacos al pastor
originated in the Ottoman Empire, centered in modern-day Turkey), who is being
appropriated? Who has the power to control the path of a culture? Who profits?
El Luchador restaurant, South Street Seaport, NYC (Source)
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 29
The owners of Kooks Burritos are rather insignificant when compared with multinational
corporations adopting culture for profit. In 2016, Urban Outfitters and the Navajo Nation settled
a lawsuit over the corporation using the Navajo name and symbolic culture on a line of
products, from alcohol flasks to underwear. Using Navajo imagery on a flask is culturally
insensitive, even racist, when paired with the ugly stereotype of Native American peoples
being prone to alcoholism. Such corporate appropriation also disconnects culture from history,
from tradition, and from a community. The expansive systems of goods and ideas flowing
across the world, particularly through large corporations, hides such discrimination and
inequalities.
Culture jam as a solution
With these concerns, it is fair enough to feel frustrated. What can be done to address
these issues?
People who participate in the culture industries are not completely unaware of the
larger problems in culture. Take hip hop, for example. Rappers can be quite self-aware and
willing to critique the wider corporate and political systems they work within. Some have been
doing it for a long time. Although it’s more common in today’s hip hop for MCs to flaunt status
and engage in conspicuous consumption (such as boasting about cars and money), many
rappers in the 1990s infused their lyrics with criticisms of the corporate music production system.
De la Soul rapped about the power record labels wield in their 1993 song “I Am, I Be”: “I be the
new generation of slaves / Here to make papes to buy a record exec rakes / The pile of
revenue I create / But I guess I don’t get a cut cuz my rent’s a month late.” Similarly, A Tribe
Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime” (1991) includes the lyrics, “Industry rule number four-
thousand-and-eighty / Record company people are shady.” With more scope, Mos Def’s “Hip
Hop,” from 1999, outlined how the genre was part of a long tradition from exploitation to
gaining some class mobility: “We went from pickin’ cotton / To chain gang line chopping / To
Be-Bopping, to Hip-Hopping / Blues people got the blue-chip stock option.” These insights
serve as examples of what we call culture jamming.
In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein explains that culture jamming is the practice of raising
awareness around issues of McDonaldization, corporate consolidation, and cultural
imperialism through informal and often illegal guerilla (independent and unauthorized)
marketing campaigns.59 These alternative or subversive media activities are a form of political
communication, often using existing media to subvert a marketing strategy. Just as early hip
hop illuminated the conditions under which African American culture was made and
exploited, graffiti often engages with and critiques cultural industries.
From another cultural realm, well-known graffiti artist Shepard Fairey uses imagery similar
to Soviet and Chinese propaganda and other references (e.g., images from the 1980s anti-
consumerist alien-invasion movie They Live) to critique consumerism, promote social justice
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 30
causes, and puncture commonly-held beliefs through pop culture. At the same time, his use of
imagery from African American and Latino social justice movements has led to others claiming
that he is appropriating symbolic culture.
A sociological approach to culture can illuminate power, inequality, and the cycle of
culture by tying together the ends of the production and consumption process. We call the
international production, distribution, and marketing system of corporations, laborers, and
consumers the global commodity chain (or global assembly line). This system is largely hidden:
Few people have any idea where their products come from, leaving most consumers
unconcerned by the gross inequalities between them and the laborers on the other side of the
system.
Art by Shepard Fairey, a well-known graffiti artist who critiques pop culture while
adopting its familiar imagery. (Source)
To interrogate this global commodity chain, sociologist and filmmaker David Redmon
made the documentary film Mardi Gras: Made in China, focusing on Mardi Gras beads. He
unpacks the symbolic and material components of those colorful plastic beads (such as the
meanings of Mardi Gras as a celebration and an escape from everyday values and norms) as
well as the rituals associated with the exchange of beads (women showing their breasts, men
throwing beads in return). Then he takes his camera far from New Orleans to Fuzhou, China, to
uncover how those beads are produced and the working conditions the workers (mostly
young women) endure at the factory. But the third component of his investigation is the
documentary’s best: Using a handheld camera and projector, he shows Mardi Gras revelers
images of the labor conditions that create the beads they casually toss around, and shows the
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 31
young Chinese factory girls what happens to the beads after they leave the factory. Redmon
educates both groups, scandalizing the laborers and sobering the partygoers.
For viewers of the documentary, connecting the global commodity system is a powerful
reminder of how cultural goods are made and consumed and what sociology brings to the
study of culture.
REVIEW SHEET: THE CULTURE JAM
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS
AUDIO KEY POINTS
PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE
VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS
Culture (Fall 2021)
Page 32
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rage/15146265/ 2 Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 217-251 in Illuminations.
New York: Schocken. 3 Kordic, Angie. 2016. “Treasures We Never See - How Much Art is Hidden Away in Museums Storage?” January 31.
Retrieved from https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/art-storage-museum-collections 4 Jhala, Kabir. 2019. "British Museum to display hundreds of thousands of archived artifacts in new storage facility."
August 20. Retrieved from https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/british-museum-to-open-new-storage-facility 5 Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. New York: Free Press. 6 Lewis, Oscar. 1966. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York. New York:
Random House. 7 Moynihan, Daniel P. 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: Office of Policy
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Berkeley: University of California Press. See also: Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: FSG. 9 Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner-City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. 10 Ouchi, William and Alan Wilkins. 1985. “Organizational Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 11: 457-83. 11 Vaughn, Diane. 1999. “The Dark Side of Organizations: Mistake, Misconduct, and Disaster,” Annual Review of
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Cover Photo: The Smithsonian