From Schema to Shared Culture through Commensuration

• In Event: 30612 - Culture I: On the Infrastructures and Politics of Belief

Abstract

Sociologists understand culture both as shared values and as a loose repertoire of personal habits. Rather than being in opposition, these two views of coexist in current literature and scholars claim that people can share similar values while also disagreeing on what these values mean. Although there is a body of literature theorizing how we adapt shared culture to individual needs, we don’t yet understand the other half of the process and lack theories of how personal cultures aggregate to common meanings. In this research I combine vignettes with in-depth interviews and identify commensuration as a mechanism that reconciles individual-level contradictions to create and maintain shared culture. This mixed method enabled the 44 participants to access automatic, and then deliberate cognition, which then allowed me to record not only schemas, but also meaning-making. By using vignettes and questions centered around pain, which is generally perceived as a personal experience, I minimized the interference of values, ideologies, and norms that have complicated previous schema research. The commensuration approach to measuring schemas can serve as a useful tool to sociologists who study contradictory values and practices in other subfields such as political and medical sociology, as well as sociology of religion or social movements.

Author

• Anna Gabur, Weber State University