Aims

By the end of the course, students will be able to:
connect or link 'culture' to other components of the structure of a social formation and
a given social conjuncture;
understand the process of the 'social construction of reality', and its importance in
the social dynamic;
differentiate between the various functions of cult

Main themes

- To study the process of the social construction of 'objective' elements of this same social reality.
- To differentiate between the various sociological approaches to an analysis of culture identifying the 'strong' and 'blind' points of each of these approaches.
To analyse the 'impact' of culture on the process of building categories, groups and classes, the structural relations between the various (economic, social and political) kind of social formation.
To differentiate between the various issues of cultural policies in the Belgian social
formation.

Content and teaching methods

Content
Construction of a sociological analytical issue of culture: forms of the existence of
culture; the functions of creation, of cognitive and moral integration, of sociation and dissociation, and of the construction and destruction of social identities; culture as a means of action.
Culture as a means of action in relation to theories of domination, of power as conflictual
cooperation, of exchange, of gift and of counter gift.
An analysis of processes of cultural internalisation.
The issues of cultural policies: the democratisation of culture, cultural democracy, and
the relative autonomy of cultural life; the inter cultural and a comparison of cultures.
Methodology
A lecture and a complete syllabus, but additional notes on situation analyses, a corpus of supplementary reading, and prior reading will be required to boost students' questioning of the teacher.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Students will be able to choose between:
(a) presentation of written work on a sociology of culture issue, the subject of which
will already have been approved by the teacher (this written work, which will be submitted before the examination, will be the subject of a presentation and of questions during the oral
examination), and
(b) presentation of a traditional oral examination based on a corpus of 'transversal' questions to be set by the teacher.
Syllabus + reference reading list and guidance on reading.

Other credits in programs