The differentiation of culture and the complexities of understanding

The concept of culture initially gained prominence in American social science through the diffuse conception of anthropologists for whom culture was everything not biological or psychological in human conduct. Thus, “culture” included all aspects of social relationships and institutions as well as such practices as tool-making. In the 1950s, Talcott Parsons and others proposed a sharp analytical distinction between cultural and social systems, the former viewed as complexes of symbols, the latter as systems of social relationships and the institutions that stabilize them. Jeffrey Alexander has been a prominent advocate of culture in this analytical mode, emphasizing the need for methodical hermeneutics in order to study specific cultural systems and complexes of culture. He has also shown that conceptualizing culture as simply “symbol systems” is an unworkable simplification. However, the analytical aspect of cultural studies should be extended in two additional respects. First, it is important to distinguish among the four subsystems of culture that Parsons distinguished in later writings – constitutive, moral-evaluative, expressive-artistic, and scholarly-scientific – as hermeneutics must be used differently in the four types of culture. Second, one must examine how culture enters into concrete occasions of social action in combination with elements of social relationships, personality patterns, and uses of mind. The present paper explores both of these latter aspects of the study of culture, focusing on norms as elements of moral-evaluative culture.