Bruges as Symbolic Capital

Symbolic capital and linguistic practice in street culture

.................................................................................................3 Acknowledgments.....................................................................................4 Introduction.............................................................................................5 1. Setting, synthesis and objectives........................................................

Identity Signaling with Social Capital: A Model of Symbolic Consumption

People consume not only physical goods but also social interaction, and consumer choices depend on both intrinsic motivations (preferences for consumption) and extrinsic motivations (how choices impact social interactions). In this paper, we study how social identity, preference, and utility from social interaction shape consumer behavior and choice in the marketplace. Our contribution is two-f...

Underwater Optics as Symbolic Form

Technologies enable new modes of perception, which transform the imagination and inspire the arts. A vivid example of this process is the transvaluation of the underwater environment in the Western imaginary. For millennia, there were only very rudimentary technologies to observe this realm of our planet that is inhospitable to human physiology for longer than a breath of air.1 Humans understoo...

Social Capital as Good Culture

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context,...

The Symbolic Language of Eikaya as the “Interpretative Miraj” of the Soul within its Existential Drama