ABSTRACT
The concept of culture the author espouses, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, the author takes culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations. Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Accounts of socialization help to explain the perpetuation of ideologies about gender roles. Psychoanalytic theory provides us with a theory of social reproduction that explains major features of personality development and the development of psychic structure, and the differential development of gender personality in particular.
