Science, knowledge, and technology

The sociology of culture force derives more from the series of exegetical questions than a body knowledge it has accumulated. The sociology of culture is of special relevance to human rights because it has the capacity to denaturalize and reenvision categories of understanding them. Wendy Griswold explicates those two traditions: the Weberian approach, on the one hand, emphasizes how culture in the form of ideas and world images shapes action by defining what people want and how they imagine they can get it. The Durkheimian approach, on the other hand, explores how representations, rituals, and symbols concretize 'collective consciousness'. The Section on the Sociology of Culture of the American Sociological Association is the largest and fastest-growing section, whose continued vitality is presaged by its claiming the largest contingent of graduate student members. Global and local, universalistic and particularistic, essential and constructed, instrumental and expressive, structure and agency-these semantic tensions describe the deep structure of the sociology of culture.