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KEY WORDS: sociology of culture, social classification, social cognition, schemata
ABSTRACT
Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supra-individual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action are developed.
INTRODUCTION
The study of culture in everyday life remains a virtuoso affair. Interpretive studies offer great insight but fail to build on one another. Cultural theory has become highly sophisticated but not fully operational. These riches ready the field for takeoff, like the study of social stratification in Sorokin's day (1957 [1927]). But before the study of lived culture can become a cumulative enterprise, scholars must clarify the cognitive presuppositions behind their theories of what culture does and what people do with it, and the fundamental concepts and units of analysis (Jepperson & Swidler 1994, Wuthnow 1987).
Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition provides resources for both tasks. After describing recent convergence between cultural sociology and psychology, this chapter considers lessons of recent work on cognition for presuppositions about the nature of culture; develops implications of these lessons for sociological work on identity, collective memory, social classification, logics of action, and framing; and points to key problems that remain unsolved.
Rather than offer an exhaustive review of cognitive sociology per se (see Zerubavel 1997) or work in psychology relevant to culture (see D'Andrade 1995), I emphasize tensions and affinities between recent cognitive research and work in the sociology of culture with the aim of bringing the former into the service of the latter. I focus on how people use culture, rather than the production of culture, ideology, or culture embedded in the physical environment. The point is not to psychologize the study of culture, but to lay a foundation for a view of culture as working through the interaction of shared cognitive structures and supra-individual cultural phenomena (material culture, media messages, or conversation, for example) that activate...