Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

As we learned earlier, normal status requires following certain conventions. This means imitating our peers, while distinguishing ourselves from the behaviors of lower-status groups and rivals. Meanwhile, achieving higher status requires distinguishing ourselves from our current status tier and imitating the practices of superiors. The end result i

Meanwhile, the fragmentation of culture into the “long tail” has diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion.

anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s description of culture as “best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters” but instead as “a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions—for the governing of behavior.” Conventions create habits and patterns of behavior through carrots of social

Intentional distinction from rivals is best described as counterimitation.

conventions are the individual units of culture.

Everything we point to as “culture”—customs, traditions, fashions, and fads—exists as conventions.

Culture, writes anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, consists of “meaningful orders of persons and things.” Conventions explain not only why certain persons do certain things, but the origin of collective meanings and orders. To follow the same arbitrary rules as another individual is to be part of the same “collectivity.” As groups share certain pract

Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions alone offers 150 definitions.

anthropologist A. L. Kroeber notes, “We have no record of cultureless human societies.”