Implicit Culture and the Insane Clown Posse Stance

In a recent article published online first in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, I attempt to sort out the (various) distinction(s) cultural analysts aim to track when they use the term implicit culture (and, by implication, explicit culture). The article is partly based on reflections developed previously in …

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

How do people relate to cultural kinds? This is a big topic that will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will say that the discussion has been muddled mostly because, in the history of cultural theory, some cultural kinds have been given excessive powers compared to persons. …

What is “Implicit” Culture?

In an article currently available online first at American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Christina Simko and Jeff Olick (hereafter S&O) propose and develop a new dimensional characterization of cultural phenomena, what they refer to as a “four facet” model of culture. On the one hand, they distinguish between cultural phenomena along a dimension separating (public) discourses and …

A Typology of Cultural Practices

In a post-Bourdieu world, it is quite uncontroversial to think of practices as bona fide cultural kinds, with some analysts speaking unabashedly of “cultural practices” as possibly the most important type of cultural phenomenon in the social and human sciences (e.g., Reckwitz 2002; Sewell 2005; Swidler 2001). This means that …

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