CASOS Working PAPER

"An Invisible and Insuperable Barrier: Enculturation, Stratification, and Ritual Interaction"(PDF file)
Author: Carter T. Butts

Abstract
Previeous work on the sociology of culture has suggested a linkage between societal stratification and cultural differentiation. Here, a simple model is introduced in which culture emerges from ritual interactions between individual actors embedded within a larger social system. It is shown that this process leads to path dependence in actors' institutional affiliations, and that this in turn reproduces an equilibrium distribution of cultural practices across institutions. A simple virtual experiment is considered which compares path dependence across conditions, and some preliminary implications for the sociology of culture are presented.