What comes to mind when you hear the word “culture”? Beliefs? Symbols? Art? Music? Values? While our answers may vary, there are a lot of different ideas attached to the word “culture.” As cultural critic Raymond Williams explained, culture is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams 1976:76). There is no correct or definitive meaning attached to the word culture. It is an ambiguous term, whose meanings change depending on time and context.

The word began as a noun connected to growing crops and livestock (cultivation). This was later broadened to encompass the human mind or spirit, and the idea of a cultivated person or cultured person emerged. Within academia several traditions to study culture have emerged.

6.2.1 Humanities

One approach to the study of culture is based in the humanities. Here culture is taken as “The best that has been thought and known” (Griswold 2004:4), in other words, the wisest and most beautiful human expressions. This largely ends up confining the meaning of culture to the arts and literature, religion, meanings and values, and intellectual life. It is something seen as apart from the rest of society. This is culture with a capital C. This has several implications.

This approach leads to the evaluation of some cultural works as better than others. Generally, in this tradition “high culture” like art and opera are understood as culture. Ultimately this ends up producing a rather elitist view of culture and privileging European culture over culture from other places. In other words it is ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view your own society or culture as superior and the standard by which other societies and cultures are judged.

Since culture becomes defined as a narrow range of elite objects, there is a fear it is fragile. As a result it can be lost or destroyed, and therefore it must be preserved. Educational institutions, archives, libraries, and museums aid in that preservation. Finally, since culture in this approach is something that is so unique and special and removed from everyday life, it does not make much sense to critically analyze it. Which can lead to a downplaying of a cultural object’s economic, political, and social dimensions (Griswold 2004).

6.2.2 Social Sciences

In the social sciences a broader definition of culture developed, where culture was understood as a “People’s entire way of life.” This emerged from 19th Century anthropology and emphasized lived experience. In this tradition, there is not one culture, but multiple cultures. Instead of engaging in some of the elitism and ethnocentrism of the humanities approach, the social sciences try to take a culturally relativistic perspective. Cultural relativism is the view that a culture can only be understood and judged by the standards, behaviors, norms, and values within the culture and not by anything outside.

The social scientific understanding of culture has several implications. First, this is an expanded definition of culture, from the best/European culture to culture as a complex whole. This includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by people within a society. It includes material and symbolic elements of culture. Popular culture becomes something to be studied. The social sciences try to avoid evaluating cultural objects against some abstract standard (such as the “best”) in favor of understanding that culture in terms of its own context.

Instead of being seen as fragile, culture is something that is durable and persistent. Culture is seen more as an activity not something that needs to be protected by a museum or library. Rather than being a piece of artwork in a museum it is the way museum goers and everybody else live their lives. Culture can be studied like anything else. There is nothing sacred or fundamentally different about it from other human activities (Griswold 2004).

Over the past century American and European sociologists developed a wide variety of definitions of culture (Sewell 1999). At the broadest level you could sociologically think of culture as “different ways of seeing and doing things” (Wray 2014: xix). Cultural sociology, the specific subfield within sociology, is focused on meaning making, with a particular focus on symbols, categories, and interpretation. In what follows we will explore some of these different sociological traditions for studying culture and discuss the role that meaning making process play in the creation of inequalities. We begin first by discussing cultural objects as a way to gain a starting point to think about the connections between culture and society.

6.2.3 Cultural Objects

Wendy Griswold, an influential cultural sociologist, has developed a model to help us better understand and study culture. Griswold focuses on cultural objects. Cultural objects are socially meaningful expressions, they can be audible, visible, tangible, or articulated. They tell a story. This can range widely from proverbs, particular styles, to beliefs and material things.

Being a cultural object is not something built into the object, it is something we as sociologists analytically decide upon. By specifying a cultural object it is a way to grasp some part of the broader system we call “culture.”

To better grasp the different aspects of culture Griswold proposes a framework she calls the cultural diamond. The framework begins with the cultural objects. From there you will want to look at who created the objects (creator). It can be an individual or a group of people.

Every cultural object has a receiver, people that experience the object. These are the people that hear, read, understand, think, participate in and remember the objects. You could potentially call it the audience, but they are actively making meaning of the object.

The cultural objects, those who create and receive them are not floating freely along, they are embedded in the social world and in particular contexts. This includes the economic, political, and social patterns that occur at a particular point in time. When analyzing a cultural object you need to consider who created it, who received it, the society it is occurring within, and the linkages between the corners of the diamond (Griswold 2004).

As an example, we could take a zine associated with riot grrrl. We could look at who created it, both the individuals and groups involved in its creation. We could then explore how people accessed the zine and interpreted it. What did they make of zine? How did the audience’s social position influence their interpretation of the zine? We would then step back and focus on the larger sociological context of the time. Were there trends in politics or social movements influencing the ideas presented in the zine? Using the cultural diamond helps us narrow our focus when studying something cultural, while allowing us to account for how the specific object is produced, consumed, and understood.