Jennifer C. Lena

“culture” (a term borrowed from the German Kultur and turned into a more-or-less analytic category)

In its current iteration, the study of culture is most strongly associated with the subfield of cultural sociology, which emerged in the United States in the 1980s (with some strong Continental influences).

the core issue concerning the field is increasingly the study of meaning—and, more specifically, what it means to study meaning “scientifically.

A central theme of this work is unpacking what meaning-making actually entails.

Culture has turned from something that everybody in a given society has—whether that society is defined by national boundaries, language, or history—into a more stratified and segmented category.

specific set of scripts, narratives, embodied practices, and schemas

Defining our problem as that of the duality of interpretation and measurement

Interpretation, in its most basic form, is the process in which sociologists reconstruct that which is known or understood between people.

logic of meaning that iteratively transubstantiates interpretation and measurement

first, that meanings always arise historically from other meaning structures, and second, that any act is predicated on a deeper meaning structure, whether theorized as “schemas,” “discourse,” or a more embodied language, such as that of “habitus.”