Help needed: looking for the right name of a concept

[samwise]

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

[o.j.]

I think you mean cultural production: the active and creative use of available symbolic materials in ways shaped by people's structural position…(see: Willis, also Hebdige)

[samwise]

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

[o.j.]

Not sure it is entirely right though. I am guessing you have looked at cultural hegemony. If you find out let me know too please!

[Alterman]

You might also want to look at Simmel's paper on "fashion," where he discusses the ways certain styles connotes social status and serve as class markers.

 

"the fashions of the upper stratum of society are never identical with those of the lower; in fact, they are abandoned by the former as soon as the latter prepares to appropriate them."      

 

Fashion.
Author(s): Georg Simmel
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62, No. 6 (May, 1957), pp. 541-558
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2773129 .    

Edited January 14, 2014 by Guy F

[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.

[NoSleepTilBreuckelen]

Great answers here already! I'll chime in that I would call this cultural reproduction. Similar to what o.j. said about cultural production, but including change over time (like you described in the use of oriental rugs as tablecloths in the Netherlands), since cultural signs change and are appropriated differently through reproduction.  I second the recommendation of Hebdige! 

[Forsaken in LA]

cultural palimpsest?