ABSTRACT
Cultural hegemony refers to the dominant features of thought within a social order, to the way in which general conceptions of reality are diffused through institutions and serve to inform the values, principles, and social relations of its citizenry. Counter-hegemony and alternative-hegemony are Raymond Williams' way of identifying the forms of resistance, sources for alternative action, and challenges to thought and convention that occur outside or at the edge of the dominant practices. For Williams, democracy is not only a form of political activity, but an irreducible feature of cultural life, best illustrated by the way in which emergent forms of expression produce new meanings. Ideologies are the result of a complex social-symbolic process Clifford Geertz calls patterns of interworking meaning. Like Geertz' ideology, James Carey's signifying practices of science, religion, and survival constitute modes through which men actively formulate the social meanings of a culture.
