Theoretical Foundations
Key Concepts in Social & Cultural Theory
Structure — how social order is organized and reproduced
Bourdieu
Habitus
Durable, embodied dispositions that generate practice without conscious deliberation — the internalized “feel for the game.”
Bourdieu
Field
A structured social space with its own rules, stakes, and positions. Practice is always field-specific.
Giddens
Structuration
Structures are both the medium and outcome of social practice — agents draw on rules and resources that their actions simultaneously reproduce.
Durkheim
Social Fact
Phenomena external to and coercive of individuals; irreducible to psychology and the proper object of sociology.
Lévi-Strauss
Bricolage
Making meaning by recombining whatever cultural materials are already at hand — the logic of mythological and everyday thought.
Meaning — how significance is made and interpreted
Geertz
Thick Description
Interpretation that unpacks layered, context-dependent meanings behind social action — not just behavior, but what behavior means to those doing it.
Geertz
Deep Play
Activity where stakes exceed rational calculation, revealing what a culture cares about at its core.
Weber
Verstehen
Interpretive understanding of social action from the actor’s point of view; the methodological foundation of interpretive sociology.
Weber
Ideal Type
An analytical construct that exaggerates essential features for comparative purposes — a heuristic, not a description.
Bourdieu
Doxa
The unquestioned assumptions of a field; what goes without saying because it goes without being seen.
Power — how domination operates and naturalizes itself
Foucault
Discourse
Systems of knowledge/power that define what can be said, thought, and known in a given era — not just language but rules governing legitimate speech.
Foucault
Biopower
Power operating on populations through the management of life — health, reproduction, sexuality, and death.
Gramsci
Hegemony
Domination achieved through consent rather than coercion; ruling class ideas naturalized as common sense across society.
Bourdieu
Symbolic Violence
The imposition of meaning as legitimate while concealing the power relations behind it — domination experienced as natural.
Bourdieu
Capital
Resources conferring advantage in four forms: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic. Convertible across fields but not freely.
Embodiment & Ritual — how the social is lived in the body and in time
Mauss
Techniques of the Body
Socially learned, culturally specific ways of using the body — a precursor to both habitus and embodiment theory.
Turner
Liminality
The threshold state in ritual process — betwixt and between, stripped of prior status, open to transformation.
Turner
Communitas
The egalitarian, boundary-dissolving social bond that emerges in liminal spaces; anti-structure as a social force.
Durkheim
Collective Effervescence
Heightened emotional energy generated by ritual gathering; the experiential basis of the sacred.
Douglas
Pollution & Taboo
Dirt is “matter out of place” — not an objective category but a relational one defined by symbolic boundaries.
Exchange & Interaction — how social bonds are built and performed
Mauss
The Gift
Gifts are never free — they carry obligations to receive, reciprocate, and give again, binding relationships and encoding hierarchy.
Goffman
Dramaturgy
Social life as theatrical performance: front stage vs. back stage, impression management, face-work.
Simmel
The Stranger
Near and far simultaneously — a social position enabling both objectivity and perceived threat.
Appadurai
Scapes
Global flows of people, technology, finance, media, and ideology — the building blocks of the modern imaginary.
Weber
Rationalization
The historical displacement of tradition and enchantment by calculation, efficiency, and bureaucratic logic — and its “iron cage.”
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