samwise

Thanks again Decaf. I'm looking into your suggestions. As I have to make myself familiar with these concepts and with the sociological framework they belong to, it might take a little while before I am able to reply as to what concept matches my description (or the intentions I tried to convey) best.

Thank you very much Decaf, I'll look into that.

First of all I apologise for my abysmal English, I'm not a native speaker and hardly ever write in English. I'm trying to get started on my MA thesis Medieval Archaeology and am trying to apply a concept from sociology or anthropology to an archaeological phenomena in the Netherlands, but sadly my brain has got all confused about the right terminology. In my memory, the concept I was looking for was "Cultural Lag". But this - after some research, proved to be very very wrong. Next one I tried was "Cultural retention", but this doesn't seem to fit the description of the phenomena I have in mind. So I hope someone on this forum might be able to help me. I'm looking for the name of the concept that I'll describe as follows: In material culture, you see that certain objects (large and immobile as in a castle or small and a mobilia as in certain jewelry) are used by the elite to stress their elite position. Sometimes these objects are literally legally restricted to specific high status elite members, other times it's a matter of social restraints on the ownership and or use of these specific objects. Allways with a certain kind of fluidity. When time passes, the topranking elite loses interest in these specific markers of their social status and identity and adapt others, often kind of simultaneous to people lower down on the social the piramid that start adopting (and adapting) them. For certain objects this can literally continue over centuries, percolating down the social strata until people don't even remember why they really really want such an object, but really really do. An example of this proces in The Netherlands might be the Persian rug as a table cloth. Once (if I'm correct in the 16th C) only affordable by the highest elite, now it is hardly ever seen outside grubby pubs visited by the lower working class. I'm racking my brain for the right conceptual tag but am completely stuck. Does anyone have an idea? Sam