Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste; and functions as the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgements of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".
In sociology, habitus is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character.
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
In sociology and anthropology, symbolic capital can be referred to as the resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige or recognition, and serves as value that one holds within a culture. A war hero, for example, may have symbolic capital in the context of running for political office.
In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structure is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure.
In a society, high culture encompasses cultural objects of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteems as being exemplary works of art, and the intellectual works of literature and music, history and philosophy, which a society considers representative of their culture.
In the field of sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person that promote social mobility in a stratified society. Cultural capital functions as a social relation within an economy of practices, and includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power; thus cultural capital comprises the material and symbolic goods, without distinction, that society considers rare and worth seeking. There are three types of cultural capital: (i) embodied capital, (ii) objectified capital, and (iii) institutionalised capital.
In aesthetics, the concept of taste has been the interest of philosophers such as Plato, Hume, and Kant. It is defined by the ability to make valid judgments about an object's aesthetic value. However, these judgments are deficient in objectivity, creating the 'paradox of taste'. The term 'taste' is used because these judgments are similarly made when one physically tastes food.
The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Culture in the sociological field is analyzed as the ways of thinking and describing, acting, and the material objects that together shape a group of people's way of life.
In sociology, distinction is a social force whereby people use various strategies—consciously or not—to differentiate and distance themselves from others in society, and to assign themselves greater value in the process. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu described how those in power define aesthetic concepts like "good taste", with the consequence that the social class of a person tends to predict and in fact determine his or her cultural interests, likes, and dislikes.
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is mostly concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.
Cultural reproduction, a concept first developed by French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, is the mechanisms by which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings are transmitted from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience across time. In other words, reproduction, as it is applied to culture, is the process by which aspects of culture are passed on from person to person or from society to society.
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
In sociology, academic capital is the potential of an individual's education and other academic experience to be used to gain a place in society. Much like other forms of capital, academic capital doesn't depend on one sole factor—the measured duration of schooling—but instead is made up of many different factors, including the individual's academic transmission from his/her family, status of the academic institutions attended, and publications produced by the individual.
In cultural and social studies, configurations are patterns of behaviour, movement and thinking, which research observes when analysing different cultures and/ or historical changes. The term “configurations” is mostly used by comparative anthropological studies and by cultural history. Configurational analysis became a special method by the Stuttgart school of Historical Behaviour Studies during the 1970s and later by body culture studies in Denmark.
Educational capital refers to educational goods that are converted into commodities to be bought, sold, withheld, traded, consumed, and profited from in the educational system. Educational capital can be utilized to produce or reproduce inequality, and it can also serve as a leveling mechanism that fosters social justice and equal opportunity. Educational capital has been the focus of study in Economic anthropology, which provides a framework for understanding educational capital in its endeavor to understand human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology.
Theories of consumption have been a part of the field of sociology since its earliest days, dating back, at least implicitly, to the work of Karl Marx in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sociologists view consumption as central to everyday life, identity and social order. Many sociologists associate it with social class, identity, group membership, age and stratification as it plays a huge part in modernity. Thorstein Veblen's (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class is generally seen as the first major theoretical work to take consumption as its primary focus. Despite these early roots, research on consumption began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century in Europe, especially Great Britain. Interest in the topic among mainstream US sociologists was much slower to develop and it is still not a focal concern of many American sociologists. Efforts are currently underway to form a section in the American Sociological Association devoted to the study of consumption.
In sociology, field theory examines how individuals construct socialfields, and how they are affected by such fields. Social fields are environments in which competition between individuals and between groups takes place, such as markets, academic disciplines, musical genres, etc.
Anthropology of food is a sub-discipline of anthropology that connects an ethnographic and historical perspective with contemporary social issues in food production and consumption systems.
Cultural amalgamation refers to the process of mixing two cultures to create a new culture. It is often described as a more balanced type of cultural interaction than the process of cultural assimilation. Cultural amalgamation does not involve one group's culture changing another group's culture (acculturation) or one group adopting another group's culture (assimilation). Instead, a new culture results. This is the origin of cultural amalgamation. It is the equivalent to the melting pot theory.
