The short answer is no, Saussure did not say meaning is arbitrary. Why do we care what Saussure said? Because some influential work in cultural sociology makes the consequential (and I think incorrect) claim that meaning is arbitrary and uses Saussure’s work to justify these claims. Consider, as an example, …
Habits play a double role. They are both a kind of action and a resource for explaining action. This makes them different from other parts of the conceptual arsenal used by people (and social scientists) to explain action. For instance, while the notion of belief is a resource for explaining …
Despite increasing efforts to integrate ideas, concepts, findings and methods from the cognitive sciences with the social sciences, not all social scientists agree this is a good idea. Some are indifferent to these integrative attempts. Others consider them as overly reductionist and, thereby, as a threat to the identity of …
In previous posts (see here and here) I made the case for the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture and cultural phenomena. First, I distinguished between what I called epistemic and ontic claims about culture (following the philosopher Mark Rowland’s 2010 similar argument with regard to the …
Habitus and Embodiment Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and embodiment (Bourdieu, 1990, 2000; Lizardo, 2004; Wacquant, 2016), represents a promising conceptual starting point for renewed studies of socialization. On the one hand, habitus is a way of specifying what is really at stake with socialization, namely the nature of its product. The idea …
Following up on a previous discussion, in this post, I argue that it is useful to differentiate between three types of ontic claims about culture that have typically been made in the history of cultural theory. Typically, these ontic claims are made with the goal of isolating the “nature” of …
Recent sociological theorizing on culture has made a distinction between “personal culture” and “public culture” (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017; Patterson 2014; Wood et al. 2018). Precise usage of the concepts varies somewhat, but generally speaking, personal culture refers to culture stored in declarative and nondeclarative memory, and public culture refers …
A relatively neglected task of cultural analysis (or cultural/culture theory) concerns itself with specifying the nature (and therefore expected properties) of the sorts of entities and processes that can be said to be cultural. Most serious cultural theorists do this, but they are seldom explicit to note that this is …
There’s a story — probably a myth — about Pythagoras killing one of the members of his math cult because this member discovered irrational numbers (Choike 1980). (He also either despised or revered beans). The Greeks spent a lot of time arguing about arche, or the primary “stuff.” Empedocles argued …
A few years ago The Economist published “Lil Jon, Grammaticaliser.” “Lil Jon’s track ‘What You Gonna Do’ got me thinking,” the author tells us, “of all things, the progressive grammaticalisation of the word shit.” In it, Lil Jon repeats “What they gon’ do? Shit” and in this lyric, shit doesn’t …
