Now published in English for the first time, this book sheds new light on Bauman’s work prior to his emigration and illuminates the intellectual climate of Poland in the late 1960s. Bauman’s pursuit of a semiotic theory of culture includes a discussion of processes of individualization and the intensification of global ties, anticipating themes that became central to his later work. Though this book stands as a testament to a historical moment, it also transcends it. ‘[W]e live in an age that seems, for the first time in human history, to acknowledge cultural multiplicity as an innate and fixed feature of the world, one which gives rise to new forms of identity that are at ease with plurality, like a fish in water’, writes Bauman - a statement that is as true today as it was when he penned it in the 1960s.
Sketches in the Theory of Culture is a strikingly prescient reflection on culture and society by one of the most influential social thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities and to the many readers of Bauman’s work.
Table of Contents
A Message in a Bottle: on the Recovered Work of Zygmunt Bauman vii
Dariusz Brzeziński
From the Author 1
Part I Sign and Culture
I The Origins of the Semiotic Theory of Culture, or the Crisis of Cultural Anthropology 7
II Towards a Semiotic Theory of Culture 31
III Man and Sign 62
IV The Problem of Universals and the Semiotic Theory of Culture 94
V Some Research Problems in the Semiotic Theory of Culture 119
Part II Culture and Social Structure
I Cultural and Extra-Cultural Organization of Society 155
II Economics, Culture, and Typologies of Societies 172
III Cultural Determinants of the Research Process 203
IV Three Observations About Problems of Contemporary Education 216
V Masses, Classes, Elites: Semiotics and the Re-Imagination of the Sociological Function of Culture 231
Afterword 251
Zygmunt Bauman, 2016
Notes 256
Index 269
