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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Everything we point to as “culture”—customs, traditions, fashions, and fads—exists as conventions.

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

We use markers of cultural change as touchstones for our past; embarrassing haircuts help us date old photos.