Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226468143 ISBN 13: 9780226468143

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, 1993

Synopsis

How are boundaries created between groups in society? And what do these boundaries have to do with social inequality?

In this pioneering collection of original essays, a group of leading scholars helps set the agenda for the sociology of culture by exploring the factors that push us to segregate and integrate and the institutional arrangements that shape classification systems. Each examines the power of culture to shape our everyday lives as clearly as does economics, and studies the dimensions along which boundaries are frequently drawn.

The essays cover four topic areas: the institutionalization of cultural categories, from morality to popular culture; the exclusionary effects of high culture, from musical tastes to the role of art museums; the role of ethnicity and gender in shaping symbolic boundaries; and the role of democracy in creating inclusion and exclusion.

The contributors are Jeffrey Alexander, Nicola Beisel, Randall Collins, Diana Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Joseph Gusfield, John R. Hall, David Halle, Richard A. Peterson, Albert Simkus, Alan Wolfe, and Vera Zolberg.

About this title

About the Author:

Michèle Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and professor of sociology and African and Africa American Studies at Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0226468143
• ISBN 13: 9780226468143
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 364
• Editor: Lamont Michèle, Fournier Marcel