Margaret Frye

“culture” (a term borrowed from the German Kultur and turned into a more-or-less analytic category)

In its current iteration, the study of culture is most strongly associated with the subfield of cultural sociology, which emerged in the United States in the 1980s (with some strong Continental influences).

the core issue concerning the field is increasingly the study of meaning—and, more specifically, what it means to study meaning “scientifically.