Homology (sociology)


Homologies are "structural 'resonances'...between the different elements making up a socio-cultural whole."
Examples include Alan Lomax's cantometrics, which:
Richard Middleton argues that "such theories always end up in some kind of reductionism – 'upwards', into an idealist cultural spirit, 'downwards', into economism, sociologism or technologism, or by 'circumnavigation', in a functionalist holism." However, he "would like to hang on to the notion of homology in a qualified sense. For it seems likely that some signifying structures are more easily articulated to the interests of one group than are some others; similarly, that they are more easily articulated to the interests of one group than to those of another. This is because, owing to the existence of what Paul Willis calls the 'objective possibilities' of material and ideological structures, it is easier to find links and analogies between them in some cases than in others."