Introduction Part I. Analytic Debates: 'Understanding the Relative Autonomy of Culture' introduction; The case for culture 1. The human studies; 2. Values and social systems; 3. Culture and ideological hegemony; 4. Signs and language; Approaches to culture Functionalist 1. The normative structure of science; 2. Values and democracy; Semiotic 3. The world of wrestling; 4. Food as symbolic code; Dramaturgical 5. Out of frame activity; 6. The Balinese cockfight as play; Weberian 7. Puritanism and revolutionary ideology; 8. French catholicism and secular grace; Durkheimian: 9. Lininality and community; 10. Symbolic pollution; 11. Sex as symbol in Victorian purity; Marxian 12. Class formation and ritual; 13. Masculinity and factory labor; Post-structuralist: 14. Artistic taste and cultural capital; 15. Sexual discourse and power; Part II. Substantive Debates: Moral Order and Crisis: Perspectives on Modern Culture; The Place of Religion: Is modernity a Secular or Sacred Order? Introduction: 1. Social sources of secularization; 2. The future of religion Wolfgang 3. Civil religion in America; The debate over the 'End of Ideology': can secular reason create cultural order? 4. Culture industry revisited; 5. From consensual order to instrumental control; 6. The end of ideology in the west; 7. Beyond coercion and crisis: the coming of an era of voluntary community; 8. Ideology, the cultural apparatus, and the new consciousness industry; Modernism or post-modernism: dissolution of reconstruction of moral order? 9. Post-modernism and the dissolution of moral order; 10. The post-modern condition; 11. Modernity versus postmodernity; 12. Mapping the post-modern.

'Culture and Society is an important resource for those of us who teach courses and seminars in the sociology of culture. It is important in its scope and range: theoretical, from functionalism and neo-Marxism to dramaturgical analysis to postmodernism; disciplinary, including key contributions by anthropologists, historians and others, as well as by sociologists; and substantive, ranging from politics and work to religion and science. The volume consolidates recent progress in the social sciences' understanding of culture without turning its back on deservedly influential ideas of the past.' Paul MiMaggio, Yale University