Life's a beach but you’re an ant, and other unwelcome news for the sociology of culture

The sociology of culture has happily been able to get by without any strict definitions of culture, but most of us seem to assume that culture is some sort of complex cognitive web (say of signs or symbols) that is largely shared across persons and mirrored in aspects of their interiority. I argue that this is unlikely, because of what we know about the limitations to our cognitive powers. I present a selective review of such results and make a few arguments for the implications regarding our understanding of culture.