ABSTRACT
Culture is a framework of meaning, an aspect of virtually any causal factor one might identify, not a separate causal factor of its own. It is the background that provides the linguistic framework with which we understand the world around us. But this particular aspect of all the political, sociological, and economic factors that drive social change has been neglected in the age of positivistic social science, and is in need of emphasis. Too eager to plot the trajectories of causal mechanisms, the social scientists paid little attention to the plot lines of the agent’s own stories. They paid too little attention to figuring out what things meant to the agents involved, to gaining close, ethnographic contact with the actors, to attending to the subtleties of interpretation in “reading” what is going on in complex social processes. As many social scientists from political theory to sociology are finding, the causal processes they are identifying as important factors in social change all point back to culture.
