Sociology of Culture

Sociology of culture is an independent discipline of a public nature, which up to the present time has a number of unresolved theoretical, methodological and practical problems.

First of all, the researchers themselves discover the uncertainty of the volume of the main concept of the discipline - "culture". It is practically all-encompassing, and its boundaries are so blurred that almost any manifestation of social life can be described by this concept. At the same time, the understanding of the subject that the sociology of culture explores may vary depending on the interpretation of the term "culture", the variety of methodological and theoretical orientations that are chosen for carrying out a specific study.

This discipline became one of the most influential trends of the western culturology of the twentieth century, which was introduced by the sociology of M. Adler.

The cultural and social began to be understood as a parity of the whole and its component parts. According to L. White, culture should be considered as an aspect of all possible social interrelations, therefore sociology can not separate the cultural from the social.

When studying culture from the point of view of sociology, it is important to define an approach, to identify an active or value component that allows uniting separate elements of culture into a system, analyzing data at different hierarchical levels, applying the methods of both sciences.

The most important representatives of the sociology of culture, whose work served as the solution of important methodological and theoretical issues in these fields, were M. Weber and A. Weber, T. Parsons, Leslie White, R. Merton, A. Mohl, and others.

Culture - this is the process, and the object of research, which deals with the sociology of culture. Culture is a special qualitative state of society, which is characterized by certain material and spiritual indicators of development (production, science, art, education, sport, health, social protection of citizens, law, politics, etc.)

In order to understand more clearly all the points that are touched on by the discipline of problems, one must understand that it is a specific branch of knowledge located at the intersection of two areas: sociology and culture. Hence it follows that the sociology of culture studies the laws of the development of culture itself , the forms of its manifestation in the activities of people.

There are several approaches in which the sociology of culture explores its object. In one group approaches that tend to describe the culture in its static are combined. Within the framework of this group, such groups of theories are distinguished as the subject, value (axiological), symbolic, text (semiotic) theories.

The second group consists of hikes that describe the dynamics of culture. They can be defined as activity, game, communicative, technological theories. The third group includes theories that are called subject (focusing on the media of cultural activity) and dialogues (answering the question of how the culture self-organizes itself).

All the above theories and approaches exist in the interaction and complement each other.

The sociology of culture studies contradictory tendencies and factors that influence the genesis of culture and the overall picture of culture from the point of view of the development of society. This knowledge constitutes separate layers of complex and dependent elements: creative activity and methods ("technologies") of people's activities; Creation, preservation, assimilation and translation of ideas, ideas, cultural values; Analysis of cultural phenomena, etc.

In the cultural context of sociology, he studies stable and repetitive forms of people's relations within the framework of social communities, the dynamics of the development of emerging cultural relations, which allows us to judge the degree of development of social relations and cultural progress or regression.