SOCI 1F90 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Guard Dog, Service Dog, High Culture
23 Sep 2017
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Document Summary
Social organizing principle, an abstract concept used to define a realm of society: anthropology. The way of life of a people: humanities. High culture - the best that has been thought and known (as opposed to pop culture) Museum art, philosophy, literature, classical music, theatre: sociology. Convergence of these two extremes, includes pop culture. What is culture: basic element of society (society, expressive aspect of society (culture, symbol systems: represent thinking, feeling, behaviour (art, philosophy, music, etc. , symbols: things that represent something else. Culture orients us to our social environment. Cultural objects produce shared a meaning beyond their material reality. Behaviour is meaningful too, taking on particular meanings in certain social contexts. Cultural sociology describes and analyses these systems of meaning. If meaning is specific to a society, then culture and society are closely related. In contrast to the humanities perspective, culture consists of universal ideals share by all societies, autonomous from society.
