This chapter delves into a comprehensive understanding of cultural life by distinguishing between its institutional structures, termed “scaffolding”, and its affective, embodied processes, referred to as “plumbing”. We will suggest dominant social theories often overlook the subtle yet constitutive forces of emotion, affect, and bodily attunement that underpin everyday experience. The chapter defines “scaffolding” as the formal rules and normative systems structuring social life, and “plumbing” as the neurocomputational architecture enabling human individuals to develop within and navigate these structures. By drawing on various disciplines, this chapter demonstrates that these two dimensions are intertwined and how cultural practices operate on both structural and visceral levels. Power is not only externally imposed but also internally felt and reproduced. This chapter offers a framework that reconceptualizes culture as a lived, affectively charged practice, providing a nuanced account of how humans inhabit and reshape their social worlds.