607 - Section on Sociology of Culture Invited Session. Sources of Cultural Power

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

The dominant paradigm for understanding cultural power is the “cultural arbitrary,” the idea that a sign receives its meaning from its relationship to other signs in a symbolic structure. Pragmatism, critical realism, embodied realism and materiality studies argue instead that symbols and objects have a substantive meaning. Do these approaches represent a new understanding of cultural power, or do they point to processes that are themselves constructed by arbitrary symbols?

Sub Unit

• Section Invited

Session Organizer

• Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan

Presider

• David A. Smilde, Tulane University

Individual Presentations

• The Power of Things: Material Culture as Political Resource - Virag Molnar, The New School for Social Research

• A Hermeneutic of Power - Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago

• The Matter of Emergence - Philip S. Gorski, Yale University

• Definitely not Arbitrary: Grounding and Motivation in Cultural Symbols and Meaning Construction - Omar A. Lizardo, University of Notre Dame