Archive for December, 2006

Meeting 18 Dec 06 - Natural Symbols

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

This meeting: Natural Symbols by Mary Douglas
Next Meeting: 3 January 2007, Cultural Theory by Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky
This week's reading was Natural Symbols by Mary Douglas. It forms the backbone of grid-group analysis, which was used to develop Cultural Theory.
Douglas' intention with the book was to develop a tool that could be [...]

First Meeting (Tue 12-12-2006)

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

The meeting discussed the Grid/Group typology introduced by Mary Douglas in Chapter nine of her book “in the active voice”; ‘Cultural bias’. The typology opposes the dimension of individuation to that of social incorporation. ‘Grid’ refers to the rules to which individuals are subject in the course of their interactions whereas ‘Group’ is defined in [...]

Starting up the blog

Saturday, December 9th, 2006

Koichi and I decided to start a little reading group in the James Martin Institute to discuss texts about cultural theory, as we are both using the theory in our research. There are a number of others in the Institute who use and/or critique the theory, and this is a way for them and [...]

A reading group set up initially by the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization doctoral students to discuss cultural theory texts