The DOI matches its Crossref record; 240 of the 248 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Making sense of culture.
Abstract
I present a brief review of problems in the sociological study of culture, followed by an integrated, interdisciplinary view of culture that eschews extreme contextualism and other orthodoxies. Culture is defined as the conjugate product of two reciprocal, componential processes. The first is a dynamically stable process of collectively made, reproduced, and unevenly shared knowledge structures that are informational and meaningful, internally embodied, and externally represented and that provide predictability, coordination equilibria, continuity, and meaning in human actions and interactions. The second is a pragmatic component of culture that grounds the first, and it has its own rules of usage and a pragmatically derived structure of practical knowledge. I also offer an account of change and draw on knowledge activation theory in exploring the microdynamics of cultural practice and propose the concept of cultural configuration as a better way of studying cultural practice in highly heterogeneous modern societies where people shift between multiple, overlapping configurations. Power, power everywhere, And how the signs do shrink, Power, power everywhere, And nothing else to think. —Marshall Sahlins (2002) , Waiting for Foucault, Still O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim For preacher and monk the honored name! For, quarreling, each to his view they cling. Such folk see only one side of a thing. —Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant Udanam vi.4 (transl. F.L. Woodward, 1948 , p. 83)
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“Culture is activated every time members interact in real life or when one member anticipates or imagines interacting with another member; culture is also activated whenever we come into contact with externalized representations of it (Patterson, 2014), such as a Catholic individual seeing a crucifix.”
From The Social Roots of Suicide: Theorizing How the External Social World Matters to Suicide and Suicide Prevention (2021) · cites this paper as Patterson, 2014
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Metadata
- Authors
- Patterson, O.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Patterson, Orlando
- Venue
- Annual Review of Sociology
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2014-07-30
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-30
- ISSN
- 0360-0572 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-2115
- OpenAlex
- W2161797449
- Cited by
- 399
- References
- 248
- Citations by year
- 2026: 44 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 36 · 2022: 37 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 37 · 2019: 44 · 2018: 26 · 2017: 24 · 2016: 25 · 2015: 19 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 7.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Annual Review of Sociology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
- Keywords
- sociology of culture, cultural practices, cultural configurations, pragmatic knowledge, cultural change, power, contextualism
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