What is culture?

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels All of my social science professors have asked the class to define “culture” and no one is ever able to give a concise or satisfying answer. If a culture is discretely bounded and object-like, how do we understand the culture of people in borderlands, or migrants, …

Bourdieu and Swidler – Structures and the Habitus

Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week’s reading was the second chapter of Pierre Bourdieu‘s Outline Of A Theory Of Practice, on Structures and the Habitus. Bourdieu writes the worst, most opaque prose of any social theorist. The second paragraph of this chapter includes the phrase “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” Later: “the habitus, which at every …