Introduction to Sociology of Culture I

The course offers the basis for the general understanding of culture and provides key conceptual tools for cultural analysis. It includes structural as everyday aspects of culture. It begins by outlining the relationship between culture and society, culture and art, high/low brow culture, language-culture and culture-identity.
It then proceeds by explaining core concepts of historical materialism (base-supra-base; class conflict, alienation, fetishism, false consciousness); hegemony (Gramsci); ideology and ideological state apparati (Althusser), subject, discourse and power (Foucault). The course also includes preliminary readings of Freud on unconscious, mass psychology and identification. The course concludes with a review of collective identities, memory and (invention of) tradition.