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1 Introduction
We say, “The wind is blowing,” as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow. We speak as if the wind were separate from the blowing, as if a wind could exist which did not blow.
(Norbert Elias 1978, p. 112)
When you read the word “wind,” think about “culture.” Is it like the wind? Some cultural material – for example habits and gestures that are part of distinctive social repertoires – has its primary existence when people act it out. Other culture – a movie, for example – might seem different from the wind because there is a physical object called “the film.” However, things are not so simple. Movies exist as very long strips of celluloid (or, increasingly, digital files), but when people talk about “the movie” they typically are not referring to the physical object at all. Indeed, films have very little significance unless people see them. This circumstance identifies a central puzzle about culture: the physical aspects of objects like films and paintings make culture seem like a thing in itself – a view that is reinforced insofar as we think of culture as external to us as individuals, and potentially capable of influencing the ways we act. Yet either people embody culture in daily life, or it lacks any social vitality and ends up gathering dust on a shelf in some warehouse. Culture is not the wind, but like the wind, it is difficult to describe with a language that treats it solely as though it were a material object.
When the sociologist Mustafa Emirbayer issued his “manifesto for a relational sociology” (1997), he quoted Norbert Elias about the wind to illustrate his argument that the “language” of sociology is sometimes not up to the task of analyzing the social world. Sociological descriptions, Emirbayer warned, too often focus on static things and conditions rather than dynamic, unfolding processes. To help redress this imbalance, in this book we explore a variety of languages that offer different ways to talk about culture in relation to social processes and everyday life.
The importance of being open to analysis through multiple languages becomes obvious when we consider a basic sociological point: a variety of issues call for consideration even in relation to a single overall set of events. In turn, diverse languages help explore diverse issues. Consider how things have changed in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These attacks, and other ones since, have had many different consequences – economic, political, psychological, and so forth – in diverse corners of the world. When we focus specifically on the cultural aspects, numerous questions emerge for people both in the U.S. and around the world. Some of the questions are controversial even as questions, leaving to one side how they might be answered:
- What sort of cultural milieu, and social processes of recruitment within it, would bring people to carry out acts that result in the deaths of large numbers of innocent people, and kill the perpetrators in the process?
- How do mass media in various parts of the world portray events in moments of social crisis, and how do their portrayals affect subsequent events?
- Are the West and the Islamic world undergoing a basic cultural “clash of civilizations,” as Huntington (1996) calls it?
- Why is enormous world sympathy for the people of the United States as victims of the 9/11 attacks accompanied by resentment among significant numbers of people in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere of the United States government as a dominating global power, or even a terrorist state?
- What is considered terrorism by different peoples and states, and how are their definitions tied to issues of national identity? How, for example, have Palestinians and Israelis experienced 9/11?
- How do the destabilizing activities of relatively small groups of people – the Irish Republican Army or the Chechnian rebels in Russia, for example – affect wider social movements and the hearts and minds of people more broadly? Why do they sometimes amplify conflict, and under other conditions precipitate movement toward resolving conflicts?
- How, in the near term and over a longer period of time, are memories of terrorist events enshrined in people’s minds, in public rituals, and at public memorials in various parts of the world? (See Figure 1.1.)
Figure 1.1 On September 11, 2002, a service was held at the cathedral in Copenhagen, Denmark – the Vor Frue Kirke – in memory of those who died in the 9/11 attacks a year earlier. Yet despite widespread sympathy about the attacks, many Danes are deeply suspicious of United States foreign policy in their wake.
Source: J.R. Hall photograph.
- What about relationships in various parts of the world between peoples of different ethnic identities: will they change on the basis of world-historical tensions? Will changes fuel further tensions?
These are serious questions, much more serious than ones that are often raised about culture. Which goes to show that, as Ann Swidler (1986) observed, culture becomes more important in unsettled times of social unrest, revolution, war, and the like. In unsettled times, core cultural meanings are destabilized; in effect, they may come up for grabs. It is not this book’s purpose to address the above questions directly, but to show how the sociology of culture can provide people with the tools to explore these as well as diverse other cultural matters – high and low, ephemeral and august. To do so, we submit, requires the “sociological imagination.”
C. Wright Mills (1959) is well known for his call for people to develop the sociological imagination in order to identify connections between our personal lives and the social and historical contexts in which we live. Not so widely noted, Mills made the following comment about cultural symbols: “their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful” (1959, p. 37). Culture, in his view, is not a frivolous or derivative topic of study; it is central to any understanding of society. To see that Mills was right, one need only note the diversity of culturally focused public issues – for example, about “multiculturalism,” efforts to ban fox hunting, teaching the “Western canon,” the global spread of fast food, and the issues raised above about 9/11. Like Mills, we believe that making sense of the social world requires a sociological imagination, and we also believe that the fully developed sociological imagination requires a deep appreciation of culture. However, there is still the puzzle that we posed at the outset about finding the languages to talk about culture.
Culture, Sociology, and Cultural Studies
How should culture be studied, and what specifically do sociologists have to contribute? After all, there are a number of scholarly approaches. During the twentieth century, anthropology as a discipline laid a central claim to the study of culture (although up until the 1960s, and to a somewhat lesser degree thereafter, anthropologists concentrated on less developed societies). Historians certainly studied culture before the 1970s, but earlier in the twentieth century they were primarily interested in intellectual history – the great ideas. Like these other fields, sociology has a long but uneven history of engagement with issues of culture.
From its origins in the nineteenth century, sociology has been defined by a tension between science and interpretation. This tension largely accounts for the unevenness. Early social theorists were centrally concerned with culture. Karl Marx gave an important place to ideology and consciousness in his theory of revolution; Emile Durkheim explored both normlessness (anomie) and the power of collective rituals; and Max Weber analyzed religious validation of self-denying asceticism in relation to an increasingly rationally organized capitalist social order (see Martin 2001). During the early twentieth century, some sociologists sought to theorize culture in “scientific” ways, for example as the stuff of transmission from one generation to the next (Park and Burgess 1921), as the effect of association (Cooley et al. 1933), or as societal adjustment to the environment. Others – such as Alfred Schutz (1967), George Herbert Mead (1934), and Karl Mannheim (1937) – focused on cultural meanings and their interplay with the creative activities of social selves that emerge from interaction.
Whether scientific or interpretive, from the 1930s onward cultural concerns got pushed aside, especially in the U.S. and Britain, where sociologists strongly embraced the idea of progress through science, and increasingly pursued quantitative research and general theoretical formulations. By the middle of the twentieth century, sociology in the United States was becoming established as a legitimate scientific discipline within the growing institutional field of the modern research university. In this context, Talcott Parsons famously described the frames of reference of action as three systems – culture, society, and personality. Culture, in this formulation, is an overar-ching system of meaning. This cultural system provides (or fails to provide) social norms of conduct that sustain society as a system by integrating personalities into it (Parsons 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951).
Yet, as Elizabeth Long (1997) points out, even in the brief historical period of the 1950s and 1960s when Parsons was at the peak of his significance, important sociologists chose cultural interpretation over grand theory. At the beginning of the 1950s, David Riesman and two colleagues wrote a widely read book, The Lonely Crowd (1950). In it, Riesman described a succession of American character types, from the tradition-directed person, to the inner-directed person oriented to self-perfection in the world of work, to the other-directed person who is less interested in achievement than in social acceptance – gained with a “glad hand.” At the end of the 1960s (which didn’t really happen until the 1970s) Riesman’s theme surfaced once again, in Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), which presciently argued that the emergence of postindustrial society was creating a disjuncture between the cultural identities appropriate to social worlds of leisure versus those of work.
Parsons’s dominance came between these two bookends. By the end of the 1970s, his holistic view of culture as a totalized normative system was becoming displaced by sociologists who looked in more fine-grained ways at cultural processes in everyday life. Like their colleagues in other fields, many sociologists of culture in the 1970s and 1980s became engaged by French theories of language and discourse. Indeed, since the 1960s culture as a subject of inquiry has changed radically. For anthropologists, historians, literary critics, feminists, philosophers, and scholars in the emerging domain of cultural studies, as well as for a wide range of sociologists, investigations of culture now provide ways to link our understandings of history, texts, and social life. Culture has become a touchstone that draws the social sciences and the humanities into interdisciplinary conversation with one another.
Nowhere is the new interdisciplinary emphasis more obvious than in the domain of cultural studies. Yet the relations between cultural studies and more traditional academic disciplines have involved certain tensions over how to study culture. Granted, the tensions are to some extent fueled by stereotypes that academics sometimes construct about approaches with which they disagree. It is all too easy for advocates of cultural studies to portray sociology as an aspiring science that uses quantitative “number crunching” to unmask “laws,” thereby denying the existential and cultural bases of social life. By the opposite token, some sociologists (along with other scholars) would like to dismiss cultural studies as based on the outlandish belief that the world is nothing but a set of texts, with no reality outside the meanings of those texts. It is thus important to consider the origins of cultural studies and its relation to sociology.
What are those origins? Clearly, in the early post-World War II era, culture became an increasingly central feature of social life in Western societies, notably in the explosion of popular culture marked by the advent of rock ’n’ roll music in the 1950s and the emergence of strong countercultural movements during the 1960s. When scholars began to kindle a renewed interest in culture, some of them – including sociologists – began to gravitate toward interdisciplinary and avowedly political approaches. Specifically, in Britain Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall and their followers sought to understand the culture of industrial working-class people while simultaneously encouraging social change (T. Miller 2001; Maxwell 2001). Their efforts led to the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 (discussed in Chapter 7).
British approaches to cultural studies are marked by a strong commitment to substantive analysis powered by interdisciplinary eclecticism. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, practitioners of cultural studies in Britain drew on a variety of theoretical inspirations, from the early twentieth-century Marxist Antonio Gramsci to the famous French thinker Michel Foucault. The French scholars – not only Foucault, but also Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others – emphasized the analysis of texts and discourses, and their ideas were especially influential when cultural studies began to be taken up in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. There, it became especially strongly established among scholars in the humanities who – also influenced by the emergence of feminist theory and postcolonial studies of cultural domination – were seeking to break out of the strictures of an elite-defined literary and artistic canon.
Despite the eclectic character of cultural studies, they almost always critique power and engage explicitly with politics. As Lawrence Grossberg describes the project, it both operates within academic disciplines and nevertheless critiques the (sometimes implicitly political) restrictions of those disciplines. As for the question of whether the world can be reduced to its textual representations, Grossberg is quite clear. Despite a focus on discourse, in the final analysis cultural studies “is not interested in the discourse per se but in the articulations between everyday life and the formations of power. Thus it ends with a different understanding of the context than that with which it began” (1997, p. 5). In essence Grossberg presents cultural studies as a politically inspired project that employs theories of representation to understand constraints on change that derive both from the power of culture and from the exercise of power by groups that use culture as a tool of domination. This project would certainly seem at odds with the tradition that conceives of sociology as an impartial, or value-neutral, scientific practice. Yet two points are worth making. First, Max Weber, the sociologist who proposed value-neutrality as an approach to sociology, did not argue that inquiry should be completely unmotivated by politics; indeed, he thought it very difficult to avoid political and other value interests. What he sought were circumstances where politics did not dictate how research was conducted or what answers would be acceptable (J.R. Hall 1999, ch. 2). Second, Grossberg acknowledges the important contributions that work within disciplines can make to cultural studies.
Defining the sociological contribution to cultural studies would be much simpler if we could say definitively what constitutes the sociological perspective on culture and what does not. But the truth is that the development of cultural studies since the 1960s and the resurgence of interest in culture among sociologists, along with a gradually increasing and uneven transdisciplinary dialogue, make simple pronouncements impossible. Important developments in poststructuralism, critical theory, feminism, subaltern studies, as well as the mutual poaching by conventional disciplines, have created circumstances where no single discipline can claim to monopolize the subject matter that falls within its domain. In our view, this is all to the good. The present book will be read by some in relation to the ongoing debate about how to study culture and in what venues. However, we regard this debate as a largely metaphysical one based on rather abstract issues about the boundaries of things called disciplines. Trying to resolve such a debate seems like a policing task that is not particularly helpful for analyzing and understanding culture. In particular, we do not think it useful to reproduce turf battles by staking out some territory that supposedly constitutes the sociological perspective on culture. Instead, the “sociology on culture” that we explore is multifaceted, and it pays little respect to boundaries, either ones that inoculate sociology from ideas that supposedly lie “outside” it or, conversely, other boundaries that would protect cultural studies, anthropology, history, or other domains from sociological poaching.
Given our view, then, why the sociology of culture? The reason is simple. We agree with Grossberg about the relevance of disciplines. They have been important sites in the development of methodological strategies, theories, substantive knowledge, and debates that can be very useful in cultural analysis. Precisely at the time when specific topics of cultural studies – from popular culture and mass communications to music history, literary criticism, art history, visual studies, and cultural history – are undergoing rapid change and development, it is useful to take stock of how sociological thinking can contribute to the analysis of culture. To build from Grossberg’s comment about the connection between culture and everyday life, culture is always a social phenomenon, thus subject to analysis through various sociological lenses. Textual or discourse analysis will be insufficient as an approach to culture, and so would be a sociology that hoped to ignore texts and discourse (Grindstaff 2000). For this broad agenda, we think that cultivating the sociological imagination can best be facilitated by engaging myriad languages and perspectives of the social sciences and humanities, while cultivating cultural studies can be enhanced by developing the sociological imagination. It is this interchange that we advocate.
Thinking About Culture Sociologically
To begin with, there are some basic issues about how we might try to talk about culture that will benefit from some sociological attention. These have to do with defining culture, whether to distinguish between culture and society, and how to use clear concepts without stereotyping the things to which they refer. Let’s consider each of these issues in turn.
Defining Culture
On the surface, debating definitions may seem trivial. But those who write about “culture” sometimes mean very different things by the term, and they thereby fit culture into alternative theories that offer radically different understandings. Anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century defined culture as the way of life of a people, or as what an individual needed to know to survive in a society, or as what could be learned by an individual and passed down in a society. Sometimes social...
