As we learned earlier, normal status requires following certain conventions. This means imitating our peers, while distinguishing ourselves from the behaviors of lower-status groups and rivals. Meanwhile, achieving higher status requires distinguishing ourselves from our current status tier and imitating the practices of superiors. The end result i

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

Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions alone offers 150 definitions.

Cultural stasis is not trivial: we measure the health of our civilization through the fecundity and profundity of cultural production. And we rely on stylistic changes to define our particular moment in time and space.

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

Each status group contains a multitude of distinct conventions, which all interlock through a strong internal logic.

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

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

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