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Sociology of Culture Review Sheet for Midterm 1 on Wednesday


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

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