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

Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail:

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

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

Humans have an innate predisposition to imitate, but in modern times we must reconcile this with a moral duty to be distinct. To gain status, then, we must balance four specific requirements of imitation and distinction: To secure normal status, we must imitate group conventions. To avoid low status, we must counterimitate rival conventions. To gai

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

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

Intentional distinction from rivals is best described as counterimitation.

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

economist Anthony Heath’s assertion: “The fact that there is a social norm does not . . . automatically entail that it will be obeyed. Everyone has his price: the benefits of conformity must be compared with the benefits to be obtained elsewhere, and there is bound to be some level of alternative benefits that will successfully tempt the individual