Week 1: Money, Morals, and Manners – Michelle Lamont
Boundary work: the active process of drawing, maintaining, and negotiating symbolic boundaries. It’s
how people define themselves and others in moral or cultural terms, often to justify their own social
position.
Cultural capital (Bourdieu): non-economic resources like knowledge, taste, manners, education, and
cultural fluency. These assets help signal status and are valued differently across cultures.
Chapter 4: Drawing Moral Boundaries
Lamont explores how upper-middle-class professionals in France and the United States define their moral
worth and draw symbolic boundaries between themselves and others.
Symbolic boundaries: conceptual distinctions people use to categorize others, to define who belongs
and who doesn't. They help create a sense of identity and superiority, often separating “us” from
“them.”
Rather than relying only on economic or social capital, they use moral and cultural distinctions to define
who is “worthy.”
Moral Boundaries in Practice
Interviewees distinguish themselves not just by wealth or education, but by personal virtues: honesty,
integrity, respect, and hard work.
1. French respondents emphasize cultural refinement, discretion, and self-restraint. They often
reject materialism and display a more aesthetic moralism, judging worth by intellectual and
cultural depth.
2. Americans, by contrast, stress hard work, fairness, and religious or community-based
morality. Success is often seen as a moral achievement.
➔ Both groups criticize those they view as morally inferior, such as people who flaunt wealth or
lack “proper values.”
Moral boundaries: a specific kind of symbolic boundary focused on virtue, ethics, and personal
character (e.g. honesty, restraint, humility). These are used to judge someone’s moral worth, rather than
just their status or wealth.
Boundary Work and Identity
Boundary work: the active process of drawing, maintaining, and negotiating symbolic boundaries. It’s
how people define themselves and others in moral or cultural terms, often to justify their own social
position → reinforces their class position, but in moral, not material terms.
- Americans emphasize individual effort and achievement as primary markers of worth.
- French respondents ground their evaluations in cultural capital (Bourdieu): non-economic
resources like knowledge, taste, manners, education, and cultural fluency.
The criteria they use reflect national value systems, and respondents often define themselves by
excluding those who lack the “right” morality or culture.
Week 2 – Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture – Clifford Geertz
Geertz challenges scientific and positivist models of anthropology that seek general laws of human
behavior. Instead, he argues for an interpretive science that focuses on meaning-making.
Culture is not a set of behaviors or rules, but a system of meaning created and interpreted by people.
Thick description
- Drawing on Gilbert Ryle’s concept of “thick description,” Geertz shows that the same physical
action can have very different meanings depending on its cultural context. Understanding culture
thus requires in-depth interpretation of the symbolic dimensions of human life.
- Thick Description: a method of interpretation that captures not just the behavior itself but the
meaning behind it, by placing it in its cultural context. It allows researchers to distinguish
between similar-looking acts (e.g., a wink vs. an eye twitch) based on their symbolic significance.
, ▪ Thick description is essential to uncover the symbolic and contextual significance of
social actions.
Culture
Culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms “webs of significance” that
humans themselves have spun and in which they are suspended → Culture as a Web of Meaning.
- Culture as Semiotic: culture is a system of signs and symbols that can be “read” like a text.
Anthropology becomes an act of reading and interpreting these signs, much like literary criticism
- Culture, for Geertz, is public, it exists in shared symbols and practices that can be studied
through close, contextual analysis. This makes anthropology a practice of interpretation, aiming
to make the unfamiliar intelligible by translating cultural meanings.
- Geertz’s approach laid the foundation for qualitative, symbolic, and hermeneutic methods in
cultural sociology and anthropology.
Week 2: Sixguns and Society – Will Wright
Chapter 2: The Structure of Myth
Myth: the social concepts in altitudes determines by the history and institutions of society are
communicated to its members through its myths.
Aim of the study is to show how the myths of a society, through their structure, communicates a
conceptual order to the members of that society
Kenneth Burke
- Certain basic aspects of human communication are determined by the use of symbols.
- Language classifies the rules. It generalizes in consciousness to things of experience.
- The myths of the totemistic societies serve to resolve conceptual contradictions inherent in
their societies.
- The narrative theory assumes that exactly the same process of conceptualization takes place in
modern myth and literature.
Levi Strauss
- For the structure of myth in terms of binary oppositions which give meaning to the images of
important things in their societies existence.
▪ Every primitive society has a system of such oppositions.
▪ It is through this system of interrelated oppositions that the myths of the society are
(unconsciously) understood by the members of the society.
- This binary analysis assumes that the meaning of a character in a myth is determined by an
opposition motivated by the particular experiences of the society that produced the myth.
- The real conceptual meaning of myths is established and communicated solely by the structure
of oppositions.
The Western Myth
- Western films as a modern myth: They reflect and reinforce societal values, particularly those
related to order, justice, and individualism.
- Depends on simple and recognizable meanings which reinforce rather than challenge
understanding → a structure of oppositions is necessary.
- The Western myth presents a symbolically simple but remarkable deep conceptualization of
American social beliefs, offering insights into historical and social contexts.
- The narrative dimension of the myths is the opposition of characters creates a conceptual
image of social types.
▪ But to understand how myth presents a model of appropriate social action between
these types, we must know what they do and how they acts.
▪ The hero’s journey in Westerns often represents the tension between the individual
and society, with the hero’s role often being to restore order.
- The narrative structure tells us what the characters do, and unless we know what they do, we
can never know what they mean to people who not only think but act.
, Chapter 3: The Structure of the Western Film
Kind of oppositions
1. Inside/outside society opposition corresponds to a distinction felt by most Americans, who in
striving to become the autonomous individuals demanded by the market feel themselves to be
outside of the group to which they want to belong.
2. Strong/weak opposition corresponds to an important distinction between kinds of people in our
society – those who can take care of themselves and those who cannot → conceptual difference
between independence and dependence.
3. The good/bad opposition separates people by their motivations for trying to make money.
4. Civilization/wilderness opposition.
The myth is not a theoretical effort to analyze an institutional contradiction but a conceptual and
unconscious effort to live with the contradiction by providing a model of action which can utilize and
overcome it.
Week 2: The Civil Sphere – Jeffrey Alexander
Civil Sphere: A distinct social realm based on solidarity and democratic ideals, distinct from the state
and the market.
Binary Cultural Codes: Symbolic oppositions (e.g., pure/impure, rational/irrational) that structure civil
discourse.
Civil Repair: The process by which civil actors try to restore or expand the moral integrity of the civil
sphere.
Civil society: sphere or subsystem of society that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically
separated from the spheres of political, economic, family and religious life.
- Sphere of solidarity in which individual rights and collective obligations are tensely intertwined.
- Depend on resources and input of other spheres.
- It is homologous.
- The discourse of civil society is concrete, not abstract.
Binary codes supply the structured categories of pure and impure into which every (potential) member of
civil society is made to fit.
- When citizens make judgements about who should be included in civil society and who should
not, they draw on systematic, highly elaborated symbolic code.
- A symbolic structure takes different forms in different nations and regions.
The binary discourse occurs at three levels: motives, relations, and institutions.
- Motives: what kinds of people are necessary for viable democracies to form?
- (Social) relationships: how do such civil and uncivil people get along? → the positive side
describes the symbolic qualities necessary to sustain civil society, while the negative side
describes the solidarity structure in which mutual respect and expansive social integration has
broken down.
- Institutions: what kinds of organizations would be formed by these kinds of persons, which these
kinds of relations?
Civil narratives of good and evil
- The positive side of this structured set provides the elements for the comforting and inspiring
story of a democratic, free and spontaneously integrated social order, civil society in an ideal
typical sense.
- If people cannot rationally process information and tell the truth from falseness, they will be loyal
to leaders for purely personal reasons and will be easily manipulated by them in turn.
- They are ruled by calculation, rather than by conscience.
- Such persons subject themselves to hierarchical authority.
Boundary work: the active process of drawing, maintaining, and negotiating symbolic boundaries. It’s
how people define themselves and others in moral or cultural terms, often to justify their own social
position.
Cultural capital (Bourdieu): non-economic resources like knowledge, taste, manners, education, and
cultural fluency. These assets help signal status and are valued differently across cultures.
Chapter 4: Drawing Moral Boundaries
Lamont explores how upper-middle-class professionals in France and the United States define their moral
worth and draw symbolic boundaries between themselves and others.
Symbolic boundaries: conceptual distinctions people use to categorize others, to define who belongs
and who doesn't. They help create a sense of identity and superiority, often separating “us” from
“them.”
Rather than relying only on economic or social capital, they use moral and cultural distinctions to define
who is “worthy.”
Moral Boundaries in Practice
Interviewees distinguish themselves not just by wealth or education, but by personal virtues: honesty,
integrity, respect, and hard work.
1. French respondents emphasize cultural refinement, discretion, and self-restraint. They often
reject materialism and display a more aesthetic moralism, judging worth by intellectual and
cultural depth.
2. Americans, by contrast, stress hard work, fairness, and religious or community-based
morality. Success is often seen as a moral achievement.
➔ Both groups criticize those they view as morally inferior, such as people who flaunt wealth or
lack “proper values.”
Moral boundaries: a specific kind of symbolic boundary focused on virtue, ethics, and personal
character (e.g. honesty, restraint, humility). These are used to judge someone’s moral worth, rather than
just their status or wealth.
Boundary Work and Identity
Boundary work: the active process of drawing, maintaining, and negotiating symbolic boundaries. It’s
how people define themselves and others in moral or cultural terms, often to justify their own social
position → reinforces their class position, but in moral, not material terms.
- Americans emphasize individual effort and achievement as primary markers of worth.
- French respondents ground their evaluations in cultural capital (Bourdieu): non-economic
resources like knowledge, taste, manners, education, and cultural fluency.
The criteria they use reflect national value systems, and respondents often define themselves by
excluding those who lack the “right” morality or culture.
Week 2 – Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture – Clifford Geertz
Geertz challenges scientific and positivist models of anthropology that seek general laws of human
behavior. Instead, he argues for an interpretive science that focuses on meaning-making.
Culture is not a set of behaviors or rules, but a system of meaning created and interpreted by people.
Thick description
- Drawing on Gilbert Ryle’s concept of “thick description,” Geertz shows that the same physical
action can have very different meanings depending on its cultural context. Understanding culture
thus requires in-depth interpretation of the symbolic dimensions of human life.
- Thick Description: a method of interpretation that captures not just the behavior itself but the
meaning behind it, by placing it in its cultural context. It allows researchers to distinguish
between similar-looking acts (e.g., a wink vs. an eye twitch) based on their symbolic significance.
, ▪ Thick description is essential to uncover the symbolic and contextual significance of
social actions.
Culture
Culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms “webs of significance” that
humans themselves have spun and in which they are suspended → Culture as a Web of Meaning.
- Culture as Semiotic: culture is a system of signs and symbols that can be “read” like a text.
Anthropology becomes an act of reading and interpreting these signs, much like literary criticism
- Culture, for Geertz, is public, it exists in shared symbols and practices that can be studied
through close, contextual analysis. This makes anthropology a practice of interpretation, aiming
to make the unfamiliar intelligible by translating cultural meanings.
- Geertz’s approach laid the foundation for qualitative, symbolic, and hermeneutic methods in
cultural sociology and anthropology.
Week 2: Sixguns and Society – Will Wright
Chapter 2: The Structure of Myth
Myth: the social concepts in altitudes determines by the history and institutions of society are
communicated to its members through its myths.
Aim of the study is to show how the myths of a society, through their structure, communicates a
conceptual order to the members of that society
Kenneth Burke
- Certain basic aspects of human communication are determined by the use of symbols.
- Language classifies the rules. It generalizes in consciousness to things of experience.
- The myths of the totemistic societies serve to resolve conceptual contradictions inherent in
their societies.
- The narrative theory assumes that exactly the same process of conceptualization takes place in
modern myth and literature.
Levi Strauss
- For the structure of myth in terms of binary oppositions which give meaning to the images of
important things in their societies existence.
▪ Every primitive society has a system of such oppositions.
▪ It is through this system of interrelated oppositions that the myths of the society are
(unconsciously) understood by the members of the society.
- This binary analysis assumes that the meaning of a character in a myth is determined by an
opposition motivated by the particular experiences of the society that produced the myth.
- The real conceptual meaning of myths is established and communicated solely by the structure
of oppositions.
The Western Myth
- Western films as a modern myth: They reflect and reinforce societal values, particularly those
related to order, justice, and individualism.
- Depends on simple and recognizable meanings which reinforce rather than challenge
understanding → a structure of oppositions is necessary.
- The Western myth presents a symbolically simple but remarkable deep conceptualization of
American social beliefs, offering insights into historical and social contexts.
- The narrative dimension of the myths is the opposition of characters creates a conceptual
image of social types.
▪ But to understand how myth presents a model of appropriate social action between
these types, we must know what they do and how they acts.
▪ The hero’s journey in Westerns often represents the tension between the individual
and society, with the hero’s role often being to restore order.
- The narrative structure tells us what the characters do, and unless we know what they do, we
can never know what they mean to people who not only think but act.
, Chapter 3: The Structure of the Western Film
Kind of oppositions
1. Inside/outside society opposition corresponds to a distinction felt by most Americans, who in
striving to become the autonomous individuals demanded by the market feel themselves to be
outside of the group to which they want to belong.
2. Strong/weak opposition corresponds to an important distinction between kinds of people in our
society – those who can take care of themselves and those who cannot → conceptual difference
between independence and dependence.
3. The good/bad opposition separates people by their motivations for trying to make money.
4. Civilization/wilderness opposition.
The myth is not a theoretical effort to analyze an institutional contradiction but a conceptual and
unconscious effort to live with the contradiction by providing a model of action which can utilize and
overcome it.
Week 2: The Civil Sphere – Jeffrey Alexander
Civil Sphere: A distinct social realm based on solidarity and democratic ideals, distinct from the state
and the market.
Binary Cultural Codes: Symbolic oppositions (e.g., pure/impure, rational/irrational) that structure civil
discourse.
Civil Repair: The process by which civil actors try to restore or expand the moral integrity of the civil
sphere.
Civil society: sphere or subsystem of society that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically
separated from the spheres of political, economic, family and religious life.
- Sphere of solidarity in which individual rights and collective obligations are tensely intertwined.
- Depend on resources and input of other spheres.
- It is homologous.
- The discourse of civil society is concrete, not abstract.
Binary codes supply the structured categories of pure and impure into which every (potential) member of
civil society is made to fit.
- When citizens make judgements about who should be included in civil society and who should
not, they draw on systematic, highly elaborated symbolic code.
- A symbolic structure takes different forms in different nations and regions.
The binary discourse occurs at three levels: motives, relations, and institutions.
- Motives: what kinds of people are necessary for viable democracies to form?
- (Social) relationships: how do such civil and uncivil people get along? → the positive side
describes the symbolic qualities necessary to sustain civil society, while the negative side
describes the solidarity structure in which mutual respect and expansive social integration has
broken down.
- Institutions: what kinds of organizations would be formed by these kinds of persons, which these
kinds of relations?
Civil narratives of good and evil
- The positive side of this structured set provides the elements for the comforting and inspiring
story of a democratic, free and spontaneously integrated social order, civil society in an ideal
typical sense.
- If people cannot rationally process information and tell the truth from falseness, they will be loyal
to leaders for purely personal reasons and will be easily manipulated by them in turn.
- They are ruled by calculation, rather than by conscience.
- Such persons subject themselves to hierarchical authority.
