The readings you (undergrads) need to know:
William Sewell jr., The Concept(s) of Culture (email)
Philip Smith, Introduction: What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory? (Smith I)
Lynn Spillman, Introduction: Culture and Cultural Sociology (Spillman)
Richard Harvey Brown, Textuality and the Postmodern Turn in Sociological Theory (Smith II)
Philip Smith, 37-57 (Smith I)
Raymond Williams, Base and Superstructure (Spillman)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (Spillman)
Habermas, Jurgen, "On Systematically Distorted Communication"
Philip Smith, 13-18 (Smith)
Max Weber, "The Social Psychology of the World Religions" (email)
Max Weber, "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism" (email)
Bryan Turner, Islam, Capitalism and the Weber Theses (email)
Samuel Huntington, Cultures Count and Lawrence Harrison, Why Culture Matters
Ruth Benedict, "The Diversity of Cultures" (Spillman)
Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (Spillman)
Richard Shweder, Moral Maps, "First World" Conceits, and the New Evangelists (email)
You should be able to define and discuss all of the following terms:
Karl Marx
George Lukacs
Antonio Gramsci
Horkheimer and Adorno
Jurgen Habermas
Max Weber
Bryan Turner
Ruth Benedict
Clifford Geertz
Richard Shweder
"Prison Notebooks"
"The Dialectic of Enlightenment"
"The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"
"The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
"Patterns of Culture"
Newtonian paradigm
Positivism
Hypothesis testing
Cause-and-effect relationshipgs
"linguistic turn"
"cognitive revolution"
Sociology of culture
Cultural sociology
Culture as "cultivation"
Folk culture
Culture as learned behavior
Culture as creativity/agency
Culture as systems of symbols and meanings
Culture as a life-system, way of life
Culture as meaning
Historical materialism
Communist revolution
False consciousness
"Opium of the people"
Commodification
Commodity Fetishism
Class consciousness
Hegemony
"Organic intellectuals"
Culture industry
"lowest common denominator"
Public sphere
Life-world
System-world
Communicative reason
Colonization of the life-world
Verstehen
Value-rationality
Purposive rationality
Salvation
Theodicy
Calvinism
Bryan Turner
Islamic asceticism
Sufi mystics
"Sultanism"
Individualism
Equality
Trust
Social capital
Synchronic cultural analysis
Diachronic cultural analysis
Cultural functionalism
Culture-as-personality school
Culture as text
Thick description
Thin description