Richard Peterson and cultural theory: From genetic, to integrated, and synthetic approaches

Abstract

To trace the importance of Richard Peterson for theories of culture in effect this article maps developments over the past thirty years. Initially, Peterson introduced the production-of-culture approach as a grounded theoretical perspective, rather than a formal theory. Theoretically, this perspective was undergirded by assumptions about culture as genetic code. From this point of departure, Peterson subsequently moved to consider cultural consumption. Specifically, his analysis of ‘culture classes’ and characterization of cultural ‘omnivores’ moved beyond narrower structuralist class theories of consumption. Given these two strands of cultural analysis - of production and consumption - the question arose of how to arrive at an integrated theory of relations between the two. A review of the sociologies of Wendy Griswold and Howard S. Becker suggests two central issues: overcoming the binary division of production versus consumption, and incorporating theories of meaning formation and deployment. But these issues in turn require a synthetic theory rather than simply the integration of production and consumption approaches. Recent developments toward a synthetic theory of culture reach a point anticipated by Peterson in the 1970s, in that they theorize the production of meaning in the course of social life.