ABSTRACT
Having gone some way towards establishing a working definition of the concept of culture, however volatile and transient, it is appropriate thatwe should attempt to account for both the recognition of change and the experience of consistency in our everyday relations with cultural formations. ‘Cultural reproduction’, though no longer the catch-all explanatory device that it once was, is nevertheless a useful analytic tool to this end and a particularly fertile area for social theory.1The idea of cultural reproduction makes reference to the emergent quality of the experience of everyday life, albeit through a variety of theoretical positions.The concept serves to articulate the dynamicprocess thatmakes sensible the utter contingency of, on the one hand, the stasis and determinacy of social structures and, on the other, the innovation and agency inherent in the practice of social action. Cultural reproduction
allows us to contemplate the necessity and complementarity of continuity and change in social experience. To that end it both preserves the homeostasis between the elements of any semiotic system, such as culture, but also provides for the possibility, and inevitable nature, of its evolution.
