How culture works.

This article presents an analysis of cultural objects, their significance and tries to find out the answer of the question as to "How a culture works?" Culture is not something imposed on or done to a person; it is constitutive of the person. Culture is not separable from social structure, economics, politics, and other features of human activity. If one thinks of culture as the symbolic dimension of human activity and if one conceives its study as the study of discrete symbolic objects (art, literature, sermons, ideologies, advertisements, maps, street signs) and how they function in social life, then the question of what work culture does and how it does it, is not self-evidently foolish. Indeed, it can then be understood as a key question in sociology, anthropology, and history. The relevance of a cultural object to its audience, its utility, is a property not only of the object's content or nature and the audience's interest in it but of the position of the object in the cultural tradition of the society the audience is a part of. That is, the uses to which an audience puts a cultural object are not necessarily personal or idiosyncratic; the needs or interests of an audience are socially and culturally constituted.