Interpreting Culture
eBook - PDF

Interpreting Culture

Rethinking Method and Truth in Social Theory

  1. 205 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Interpreting Culture

Rethinking Method and Truth in Social Theory

About this book

Scholars have conducted the study of culture in two general ways: as an observer science, where behavior and world-views are measurable, rational, and subject to impartial examination; and as an interpretive art, where a scholar actually participates in the understanding of cultures. In view of increasingly manifest problems with both stances, Joseph D. Lewandowski proposes an alternative, one that capitalizes on the strengths of both schools of interpretation and in fact underpins the work of major social theorists of the modern era, including Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu.
 
Gathering insights from a wide array of anthropologists, archaeologists, and philosophers and applying them to case studies in the United States, Lewandowski develops a practical model of culture and method of interpretation that are built around the concept of "constructing constellations." According to this concept—drawn from the work of Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno—cultures are made up of social fields, embedded social practices that are continually created and patterned in certain ways, akin to constellations. The constellations of embedded actions and beliefs in different settings, such as ghetto life in New York or the world of boxing in Chicago, are, Lewandowski argues, observable, measurable, and ultimately comparable.

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Yes, you can access Interpreting Culture by Joseph D. Lewandowski in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Ethnic Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. Preface
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Chapter 1. The Contemporary Logics of Social Theory
  6. Chapter 2. Method and Truth amid the Ruins of the Social
  7. Chapter 3. Affect and Evidence in the Logic of Constructing Constellations
  8. Chapter 4. Method and Truth in French Social Theory
  9. Chapter 5. Constructing Urban Constellations
  10. Afterword: Constructing Constellations, or Thematizing Embeddedness
  11. Notes
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index