Explaining Culture: The Social Pursuit of Subjective Order

This book is about our appreciation for order and meaningfulness. It offers a new theory of that feeling inspired by Durkheim and Marx, then derives other theories to answer a range of questions: why we like to make ourselves orderly (in Chapter Three’s theory of identity and commitment), why create shared orders of meaning (in Chapter Four’s theory of culture); how we create those orders collaboratively through conversation (Chapter Five), and also through narrative, symbolic, and ritualis...