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

Intentional distinction from rivals is best described as counterimitation.

Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience—and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.

Status is a purely social phenomenon; it manifests in the interactions between individuals.

Economist Jon Elster notes, “Nothing is so unimpressive as behavior designed to impress.”

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

The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of

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

Majorities commonly promote social norms that advantage themselves over minorities, and in internalizing these biased conventions, even the disadvantaged parties may come to accept them.

The literary scholar Raymond Williams called culture “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”

semantic drift: the slow change in words’ meanings over time. This principle also applies to cultural symbols, which can often come to mean the very opposite.