The Reality Of Social Construction By Dave Elder Vass

In the Chapter 3 of “The Reality of Social Construction”, Dave Elder-Vass examines the academic views about culture and rules. He calls cultural realism the view according to which culture and rules exist independently of people. In this chapter, the author explains the reason why he does not agree with the academic view of culture.
What is culture? How we can define it? According to Jay, culture can be defined as a combination of “practices, rituals, institutions and material artefacts, as well as texts, ideas and images”. However, Elder-Vass says that is possible to define culture only considering its ontological nature. The culture can be subjective, that is it exists as the mental proprieties of individuals, or objective, depending on something beyond the individual. Therefore, Elder-Vass affirms that culture has subjective and objective features. Regarding to the subjective perspective, it does not consider one of the most important property of culture: in order to exist it has to be shared. Emile Durkheim offers a view that combines subjective and objective perspectives: in his opinion people act based on their representations. There are individual representations, that are individual beliefs and dispositions, and collective representations, that are shared across a society. Durkheim says that the

I think it could considered an examination and a critique of authors who discuss about cultures and rules. I found very interesting the last part about the connections between rules and norms, in particular social norms, and how these are implicitly followed. I find this part very interesting because during the last year at my home university I studied the work of an author, Harold Garfinkel, who tried with his studies to undermine social habitual norms using the ethnographic