The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis

Tony Bennett, John Frow, Tony Bennett, John Frow, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780761942290
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"A genuine one-stop reference point for the many, many differing strands of cultural analysis. This isn?t just one contender among many for the title of ?best multidisciplinary overview?; this is a true heavyweight."
- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

"An achievement and a delight - both compelling and useful."
- Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London

With the ?cultural turn?, the concept of culture has assumed enormous importance in our understanding of the interrelations between social, political and economic structures, patterns of everyday interaction, and systems of meaning-making.

In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, the leading figures in their fields explore the implications of this paradigm shift. Part I looks at the major disciplines of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, asking how they have been reshaped by the cultural turn and how they have elaborated distinctive new objects of knowledge. Parts II and III examine the questions arising from a practice of analysis in which the researcher is drawn reflexively into the object of study and in which methodological frameworks are rarely given in advance.

Addressed to academics and advanced students in all fields of the social sciences and humanities, The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis is at once a synthesis of advances in the field, with a comprehensive coverage of the scholarly literature, and a collection of original and provocative essays by some of the brightest intellectuals of our time.

PART I

Frameworks of Analysis

INTRODUCTION

It is clear from our discussion in the general introduction that it is impossible to tie the term ‘culture’ to a single concept or to a simple history of usage. It is better understood as referencing a network of loosely related concepts that has been shaped by the relations between the different histories and fields of usage with which the term has come to be entangled. A significant factor here has been the different meanings deriving from the ways in which the concept has been used and interpreted in the social science disciplines on the one hand and in the humanities on the other. These different disciplinary articulations of the concept are the focus of the contributions composing this first part of the book, which also assesses how the ‘cultural turn’ has affected developments within, across and between these different disciplinary ensembles.

The first group of chapters explores the role that the concept of culture has played in the social sciences, beginning with Eric Gable and Richard Handler’s discussion of its role in the history of anthropological thought. Kay Anderson then looks at the role that questions of cultural analysis have played in constructing the human/nature divide that has played a key role in the development of, as it is sometimes still known, human geography. Valerie Walkerdine and Tony Bennett then examine the forms of cultural analysis that have been associated with the development of psychological and sociological thought. Peter Burke’s discussion of cultural history provides a bridge into the next group of chapters focused mainly on text-based disciplines. James English’s account of the role that the analysis of form has played in the development of literary studies is followed here by Tia DeNora’s consideration of music as both text and performance. Mieke Bal then examines the relations between art history and the more recent development of visual culture studies. The next two chapters – Tom Gunning’s discussion of film studies and Toby Miller’s account of broadcasting – are concerned with the forms of cultural analysis that have been developed in relation to the two main media systems of the twentieth century. The final set of chapters explores the role played by a number of interdisciplinary perspectives in developing new and distinctive forms of cultural analysis. We include here Ien Ang’s account of the development of cultural studies, initially in Britain and subsequently as a wider international formation, and Griselda Pollock’s discussion of the varied traditions of cultural analysis that have been associated with the development of feminist theory and politics. Daniel Miller then reviews recent developments in the field of material culture studies, arguing the need for a dialectical perspective capable of taking account of the relations between subjects and objects, while Andrew Pickering, writing from a contrasting perspective, outlines the role that is accorded the relations between persons and things in the perspectives of posthumanist science studies and technoscience.

Our brief to all our contributors was that they should write an engaged account of their topic, reviewing and assessing its most salient characteristics from the vantage point of their own position within the contemporary debates associated with the fields of cultural analysis in question rather than aspiring to a position of Olympian detachment. In responding to this brief, Eric Gable and Richard Handler seek to untangle the history of the relations between anthropology and the ‘culture concept’ that is most commonly associated with that discipline: that is, culture as the organized system of beliefs, customs, and practices comprising the way of life of a particular, territorially defined population. They see this as a task of untangling precisely because the histories of this concept and those of anthropology have sometimes followed separate paths, and sometimes converged, in ways that disqualify their often implicit equation with one another. Although focusing their attention for the greater part on the twentieth-century history of the discipline, they first show how Franz Boas’s work broke with the hierarchical and evolutionary assumptions informing Edward Tylor’s initial formulation of the ‘culture concept’ to propose a more pluralist understanding of cultures as bounded wholes that had a value and validity that needed to be understood on their own terms rather than – as had been the case throughout anthropology’s earlier association with the history of colonialism – comparing non-Western cultures unfavourably to Western ones. Gable and Handler then turn their attention to the subsequent history of the relations between anthropology and fieldwork, paying special attention to the development, from Bronislaw Malinowski to Margaret Mead, of the ‘participant observation’ approach in which the anthropologist seeks to learn another culture by living it. After reviewing how Anglo-American anthropology was influenced by French structural anthropology, and by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular, Gable and Handler examine the revival of a Boasian orientation in anthropology as evidenced by the work of Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz and David Schneider. They conclude by assessing the varied forms of critical political self-reflexiveness that now inform contemporary anthropological approaches to culture.

Kay Anderson’s concerns overlap with those of Gable and Handler at many points. She starts by reminding us that geography was included among the cultural sciences long before the emergence, since the 1980s, of ‘cultural geography’ in response to the perspectives of the ‘cultural turn’. However, she is equally clear that these perspectives have significantly revised what had earlier been the distinctive signature of geography’s contributions to cultural analysis: that is, the influence of space and place on the distribution and organization of human meaning systems and practices. The influence of structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics decisively shifted approaches to these questions by effecting what Anderson characterizes as a ‘move from a positivist understanding of space as a “surface” on which people, events and so on are distributed and arranged, to a notion of space as relational and co-constitutive of social process’ (Chapter 2). Anderson then asks what light this perspective throws on the history of earlier geographical understandings of the relations between space, place and human cultures. Adopting a posthumanist perspective derived from contemporary feminist thought and the related challenge to essentialist conceptions of the nature/human divide emerging from the work of Bruno Latour, she reviews the ways in which earlier Enlightenment and evolutionary conceptions of the geographical relations between space, place and culture equated the essence of humanness with distance from nature. In assessing the consequences of such conceptions for indigenous peoples who, throughout the history of colonialism, were seen as closer to nature and therefore less human than their colonizers, Anderson also shows how colonial encounters with indigenous peoples – and with Australian aborigines in particular – often unsettled the logic of such humanist ontologies.

Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman also remind us that, at first, psychology too was closely related to the cultural sciences. However, the emerging dominance of Anglo-American psychology in the early twentieth century, its commitment to an experimentally derived cognitive universalism, and the parallel parting of the ways between psychology and psychoanalysis saw an end to this until the 1960s, when the disciplinary hegemony of such conceptions was challenged from a variety of quarters. In reviewing these challenges and placing them in their appropriate political and theoretical contexts, Walkerdine and Blackman’s main concern is to trace the various attempts to develop discursive, narrative, social and cultural psychologies, and to consider the influence of all of these on the development of critical psychology. Focusing initially on cultural and narrative psychology, they show how perspectives derived from Soviet linguistics were translated into programmes of research by Michael Cole, Sylvia Scribner and others that incorporated a cultural perspective into American psychology. They then turn their attention to the parallel development of social psychology in Britain. This sets the scene for an analysis of the more general international currency of the linguistic and discursive turns in psychology and, in the context of these, the influence of the Althusserian and Lacanian approaches to subjectivity in reformulating the concerns of Freudian psychoanalysis. In considering the influence of the Foucauldian school of discourse psychology and the psycho-social approach to the understanding of subjectivity, Walkerdine and Blackman conclude by outlining those directions in current research which they believe offer a route beyond the social/psychic dualisms that have reflected a continuing failure to satisfactorily integrate the social and the psychological mechanisms of subject formation.

Tony Bennett considers the relations between sociology and culture from three perspectives. The first of these focuses on sociological analyses of those practices and institutions which comprise culture as a distinctive level, field or subsystem of society: literary, musical and artistic institutions and texts, and the media and entertainment complexes comprising the culture industries. In reviewing these traditions of work, Bennett outlines the different ways in which sociologists have sought to explain social and historical variations in literary and artistic forms and practices, focusing particularly on sociological accounts of such genres as tragedy and the novel. He then considers the consequences of the ways in which literary and artistic forms are classified and organized into cultural hierarchies, and moves on to review different sociological accounts of the development of distinctive literary and artistic fields or systems, and of the nature and value of aesthetic experience. Bennett’s second main concern is with the role that the analysis of culture, understood as particular sets of beliefs and values, has played in the more general theoretical and political concerns of sociology. He illustrates this by considering the role of such conceptions in the work of Émile Durkheim through to contemporary sociological constructions of ‘social problems’ in the literature focused on the roles of social or civic capital in securing social inclusion or social solidarity. Finally, Bennett reviews a range of different accounts of the role of culture in constructing the social that derive from different interpretations of the ‘cultural turn’. His discussion here encompasses Stuart Hall’s account of ‘new ethnicities’, Foucauldian accounts of discourses and their role – in the context of governmentality theory – in ordering the social, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, and Bruno Latour’s approach to the social.

In his account of cultural history, Peter Burke argues that while the concept – in the Germanic notion of Kulturgeschichte – is over 200 years old, it is only in the context of the cultural turn that cultural history has assumed a recognizable intellectual profile and influence alongside economic, social and political history. And it is only since the 1990s that it has achieved significant institutional form as reflected in the titles of journals, academic positions and programmes. It is, though, Burke suggests, a term that sometimes disguises as much as it reveals if account is not also taken of the significantly different meanings and uses of the concept of culture that it encompasses. He distinguishes three main understandings of culture, each of which has quite different implications for the project of a cultural history. According to the first, culture is interpreted as a synonym for the arts, with the tasks of cultural history accordingly being defined as being concerned with the development and functioning of specific artistic practices and institutions and, sometimes, the respects in which the relationships between these add up to a more encompassing account of the history of high culture. The second inverts the structure of attention associated with this conception to focus on popular cultural practices, and in particular the ways in which these have been shaped in opposition to the field of high culture. The third tradition adopts a more anthropological perspective to focus on the role of cultural practices in everyday life, no matter whether ‘high’ or ‘low’. In examining these different traditions, Burke considers the relationships between cultural history and parallel tendencies in neighbouring disciplines – sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and cultural geography, for example – and reviews some of the key conceptual and methodological problems that the project of a cultural history needs to address.

The focus of James English’s account of literary studies is ‘to trace the longstanding connection between literary form and institutional form, between scholars’ concern with the formal particulars of “literature itself” and their collective, ongoing struggle for recognition and security in the modern university’ (Chapter 6). No matter what phase of its history is considered, he argues, the contention that the defining characteristic of literary studies consists in its capacity to analyse the formal organization and operations of literary texts has been central to its claims to distinctive forms of academic legitimacy and authority. Exactly how such claims have been pitched, however, and the consequences that have followed from this, have varied significantly depending on how the relationships between literary studies and other disciplines have been organized in different historical moments, national settings and institutional contexts. It is on the shifting contours of what has been at stake in literary studies’ commitments to the analysis of form that English focuses his attention. This ranges across the influence of the programmes of formal analysis proposed by the Russian Formalists, Practical Criticism and the New Criticism and the reaction against these by the moral and communitarian forms of criticism associated with the Arnold-Leavis-Williams tradition – which nonetheless remained deeply affected by a formalist impulse – through to moments of Theory in American literary criticism. It is also, English suggests, the continuing influence of formalist principles of textual analysis on the methods of cultural studies that explain why cultural studies, while imaginarily opposing itself to literary studies, has in fact served as the vehicle through which the reach of formalist techniques of analysis has been expanded beyond the narrow confines of the literary canon to encompass all cultural practices.

A concern with aesthetic form and its analysis has been equally strong in the history of Western musicology, albeit that its influence has been challenged by the development of new forms of socio-musical analysis that have significantly expanded the repertoire of methods that the study of musical practices can now draw on. To trace the paths and the logics of these transformations is the task that Tia DeNora sets herself in her account of the relations between cultural and musical analysis. Her starting point is with the high/low music distinctions of the modern Western musical system. Taking a leaf out of Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of the autonomization of art and literature in the course of the nineteenth century, DeNora examines the related processes through which a composer-centred musical canon was differentiated from other musical forms. A failure to take adequate account of the relativity of this musical system is, for DeNora, one of the main shortcomings of Theodor Adorno’s otherwise exemplary – and, for twentieth-century musicology, absolutely indispensable – contributions to musical theory. But it is, DeNora notes, echoing some of the points made by James English in his discussion of literary studies, a contribution focused largely on the analysis of musical forms. In approaching these as capable of generating distinctive cognitive effects with specific political consequences that might be read off from their formal properties alone, DeNora argues, Adorno’s work did not adequately question some of the founding assumptions of the composer-centrism of the modern Western musical system. Her concerns in the rest of the chapter consequently focus on a broadened set of approaches to the analysis of the socio-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Advisory Panel
• Notes on Contributors
• INTRODUCTION: VOCABULARIES OF CULTURE
• PART I FRAMEWORKS OF ANALYSIS
• PART II CURRENT ISSUES
• PART III RESEARCH THEORY AND PRACTICE
• Index