About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about whether culture is thick, thin, or both, focusing in particular on: (i) Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim as early thinkers in sociology; (ii) the idea of culture as a ‘fuzzy concept’, being one that is contested and without consensus; (iii) Brian Steensland’s definition of culture from his 2011 book, Sociology of Culture; (iv) Mishler and Pollack’s 2003 paper, which introduced the idea of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ culture; (v) Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture as that which is acquired by a person as a member of society; (vi) understanding thick culture as a tangible prerequisite for social life; (vii) understanding thick culture as being essential for social life, fundamental to who we are, pre-existing and outliving us, holistic, externally bounded and externally homogenous, a coherent cluster of orientations, and durable; (viii) criticisms of conceptualising culture as ‘thick’, by viewing it as essentialist, reductionist, conservative and empirically unjustified; (ix) understanding thin culture as empirical, constructivist and rational, endogenous, individualist, relatively unbounded and diverse, heterogeneous and ambivalent, as well as being dynamic and in a constant state of flux; (x) Zygmunt Bauman’s proposition that late modernism encourages individuals to believe in their own uniqueness; (xi) Paul Gilroy’s ‘changing same’, used to describe how migrant populations combine past, present and future in a dialogue between what is constant and what is changing; (xii) Andreas Reckwitz’s proposal that there is a conflict between perceptions of thick and thin culture in postmodernism; (xiv) two key questions to consider being whether formulations of culture as thick and think are in contest (with examples) and whether the future of how culture is thought about is promising.

About the lecturer

Dr Jon Mulholland is Associate Professor of sociology in the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Mulholland’s research interests are in the role of race and ethnicity in the fields of health and illness. Some of Dr Mulholland’s recent publications include ‘Social embedding, artisanal markets and cultural fields: Quality, value and marketing in the cases of new wave custom motorcycles and boutique guitar pedals.’ (2022) and ‘Advancing the embedding framework: Using longitudinal methods to revisit French highly skilled migrants in the context of Brexit’ (2023).