Global Sociology: 11/1/08

Islam and Capitalism

Bryan Turner Islam, Capitalism and the Weber Theses

Weber’s treatment of Islam is not nearly as famous as his discussion of Calvinism and capitalism

The usual contrast is between Asian mysticism and Puritan asceticism

Turner argues that Weber was wrong to try to explain the absence of rational capitalism in Islam

instead, the real issue is Islam’s transition from a monetary economy >> agricultural-military regime

Muhammad, after all was a merchant

Weber’s theses on Islam, according to Turner

PE (Protestant Ethic) theses:

1. idealistic theory of values

Calvinist beliefs >> modern capitalism (causal)

2. necessary condition for the emergence of capitalism

no, but Protestant asceticism is necessary for rational capitalism

3. “elective affinity” of ideas and socio-economic contexts

4. Continuity between Marx and Weber: beliefs are shaped by socio-economic contexts

Turner’s analysis of Weber’s analysis of Islam

Meccan Islam was monotheistic and rejected magic

but Islam did not develop into a “salvation religion” because of 1) warrior groups who carried Islam

2) Sufi mystical brotherhoods

individual salvation was reinterpreted through jihad (holy war), suitable for warrior groups on quests for land: Islam becomes a ‘national Arabic warrior religion’

Islamic asceticism became the rigor of the military caste

Sufism provided a salvation path, but it was mystical and other-worldly

together militarism and mysticism produced the “characteristics of a feudal spirit...unquestioned acceptance of slavery, serfdom, and polygamy...simplicity of religious requirements...and ethical requirements”

Islam could thus not lift the Middle East out of feudalism and stagnation, it could not produce capitalism

Islam and Shari’a did not produce a systematic formal law tradition (only fatwa, which are ad hoc judgments)

not because of the content of the early religion, but because of the socio-economic context in which it emerged

Turner argues, however, that Islam was originally urban, commercial, and literate: Mecca

was a trading center

However, Islam provided a culture capable of uniting desert tribesmen (Bedouins) who often attacked caravan routes, with urban merchants. Islam was thus a “triumph of town over desert”

Finally, Weber blames Sultanism for the stagnation of the Middle East, because of the socio-economic conditions it produced

this is because of the “legal insecurity of the taxpaying population” in the presence of foreign troops

the arbitrariness of the tax powers of foreign troops (Selcuks and Mamelukes) could paralyze commerce

towns were merely army camps for patrimonial troops, rather than centers of commerce

patrimonial interference discouraged investments in trade and craft industry, and discouraged a bourgeois lifestyle and bourgeois-commercial utilitarianism, seeing this as sordid greediness

“Neo-Weberians”

Samuel Huntington, Cultures Count and Lawrence Harrison, “Why Culture Matters”

Huntington: author of the “Clash of Civilizations”

Culture changes much more slowly than the economy, technology

Economic and tech’l modernization can occur without modern, liberal, Western cultural values

The contemporary scholars most directly influenced by Weber’s book insist that culture, usually national cultures, i.e. “culture as system,” continues to affect the economic growth of modern nations.

To get their point, imagine, if you will, that we are living in the 1950s or early 1960s. Countries across the world are becoming independent, that is they’re rejecting colonialism. Optimism abounded, and serious scholars believed that economic growth would be more or less uniform in most developing countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

N. Africa was predicted by many to grow most quickly, because of its proximity to Europe and its pool of cheap labor.

JFK and other American leaders were openly concerned about Brazil’s economic development, its ability to compete with the US

50 years later, what happened?

There have been some notable economic successes: Germany and Japan rebuilt their shattered economies into world powers, and Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have entered the “first world,” more or less. But what about the rest of the world, especially Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East?

For the most part, low economic growth and its social correlates:

severe economic stratification

Illiteracy, especially among women

Poverty

High birth rates, population growth rates

Corruption is near-universal

Why? Some explanations:

Colonialism had deleterious effects of all sorts, e.g. drawing arbitrary borders around “nations” (as in Africa)

“Neo-colonialism” Post-colonial theory

continuing dependency: countries on the global economic periphery, e.g. Latin American countries, are beholden to core countries such as the U.S., and provide us with raw materials only

Systemic Racism: economic development disproportionately benefits white men; the global economic system is inherently racist and oppressive to minorities and women

These explanations are unsatisfying to lots of people, certainly to H&H. So Neo-Weberians look to cultural values, including

equality
civility
individualism
time orientation
religious outlook
optimism versus pessimism
“trust” and social capital
“rationality”

Later in their book, Harrison and Huntington explore the idea that cultures should be reprogrammed and modernized, that this would be better than simply giving financial aid to poor countries. And they find support among generally western-educated scholars and NGO workers from Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Cultural Anthropology

Like Weber (at times), cultural anthropologist view culture as a system.

Their analyze “cultures” in synchronic, not diachronic, terms. This is part of what makes cultural anthropology unique.

Their approach and methods are interpretive; they see cultures as texts that are open to interpretation, and contain recurring themes and symbolism

Cultural anthropology can tend to be functionalist in its thinking.

Everything in a culture serves a function

Everything in a culture is part of an integrated whole

Society is a system of mutual interdependence that must be kept in equilibrium

Cultures are necessary for human life, serve concrete needs:

For rearing and socializing children

For creating social solidarity and harmony

An implication of these functionalist views is that indigenous cultures should be protected or preserved

i.e. if Westerners tamper with one part of an indigenous culture, they may destroy the whole thing

This view was crucial for anthropology during its early years in the 20th century, when Western powers still operated systems of colonial control in “3rd world” countries.

Ruth Benedict, “The Diversity of Cultures” (Spillman)

From her undergraduate work, she had a background in literature, and in the various ways of studying a text to grasp its various levels of meaning.

She did not concern herself as much with history as did her peers. Rather, she was looking for repeated themes, for the importance given various values and beliefs, and for how all of this fit together (or didn’t).

Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was published in many editions as standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years.

Culture-and-personality:

The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is “her view of human cultures as “personality writ large.’”

Each culture, Benedict explains, chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. These traits comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics and values in each culture which together add up to a unique gestalt. For example she described the emphasis on restraint in Pueblo cultures of the American southwest, and the emphasis on abandon in the Native American cultures of the Great Plains. She used the Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures. She describes how in ancient Greece, the worshipers of Apollo emphasized order and calm in their celebrations. In contrast, the worshipers of Dionysus, the god of wine, emphasized wildness, abandon, letting go. And so it was among Native Americans. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, personal preferences amongst people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality" that was encouraged in each individual.

Other anthropologists of the culture and personality school also developed these ideas—notably Margaret Mead in her Coming of Age in Samoa (published before "Patterns of Culture") and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (published just after Benedict's book came out).

“modal personality”—cluster of traits most common to a traditional culture/social group

In Patterns of Culture she expresses her belief in cultural relativism. She desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole.

Morality, she argued, was relative to the values of the culture in which one operated.

Critics have objected to the degree of abstraction and generalization inherent in the “culture and personality” approach.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

This book is an instance of Anthropology at a Distance. Study of a culture through its literature, through newspaper clippings, through films and recordings, etc., was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies in World War II. Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists made use of the cultural materials produced studies at a distance. They were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression, and hoped to find possible weaknesses, or means of persuasion that had been missed.

Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture. Americans found themselves unable to comprehend matters in Japanese culture. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American prisoner of wars to want their families to know they were alive, and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc., while Japanese POWs, apparently, gave information freely and did not try to contact their families.

In more recent years however, Benedict's "national character" approach has been criticized as being subjective, and at times even demeaning -- she characterized Dobu people, for example, as mean-spirited and paranoid.

Anthropologists were now eager to get away from imposing their own culturally created value judgments on other societies. And Benedict appeared to have gotten caught up the mentality of her era, a mentality that wanted to see people of different nationalities in stereotyped ways. Additionally, her approach has always been criticized for not putting greater emphasis on class differences.

Clifford Geertz

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (Spillman)

In the 1970s, Geertz becomes the public “ambassador” of anthropology, much as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead had been before him. However, while Benedict was read by the educated public, Geertz is read mostly by graduate students and academics.

Like Benedict, Geertz conceptualizes culture as a text that can be read and interpreted in terms of recurring themes and symbolism. This is in stark contrast to Marxist and neo-Marxist (materialist) approaches.

Like Neo-Weberians, Geertz takes on the mantle of Max Weber. Geertz is one of the most famous and influential anthropologists ever, and as we will see, Richard Shweder, another anthropologist and a critic of the neo-Weberians Huntington and Harrison, takes on the mantle of Geertz.

Geertz’s famous phrase, quoting Weber: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs…”

The analysis of culture is therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Studying culture for Geertz thus involves doing ethnography, living with people in their communities, interviewing them, taking notes, and doing “thick description”

Thick description involves thinking about culture, that is thinking about what things mean in a social setting

Thin description, by contrast, involves simple physical description of what is happening

Interpretive understanding is as important as causal understanding

Geertz’s most famous study is of cockfighting on the Indonesian island of Bali

He argues that the system of betting reflects the status hierarchy and macho culture of the Balinese men.

The cultural practice of cockfighting “reflects” deeper truths about Balinese society.

Balinese men wager irrationally high stakes because of the social meaning of the cockfight and its outcome. People don’t remember the money they won or lost, so much as the status order of the winners and losers.

“The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong”

Richard Shweder, Moral Maps, "First World" Conceits, and the New Evangelists

Shweder writes in the tradition of Clifford Geertz, and so also of Max Weber, but his position is quite different from that of the neo-Weberians we discussed above.

He is, to put it bluntly, a strong relativist and he refutes notions of cultural superiority, certainly of western cultural superiority, or as he puts it the culture of northwestern Europe.

Nonwestern cultures are not something to be denigrated or reprogrammed, rather westerners have much to learn from nonwestern cultures and societies.

Harrison and Huntington are wrong because theories of “national culture” have long been discredited, because different cultures place different relative importance on different values, and because people from nonwestern societies who want to change their own cultures’ values do not reflect their own cultures, but rather certain western values.

We can all learn from all different kinds of cultures, from experiencing life in different cultures, so we ought to respect and preserve different cultures, which have lasted for thousands of years.

For example, Shweder applauds the rejection of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights by the American Anthropological Association in the 1940s. They argued that it was an ethnocentric document.

Durkheim and the Neo-Durkheimians

Emile Durkheim and the Neo-Durkheimians (Cultural Sociology)
Philip Smith, 9-13, 74-96

Politics
Lynn Hunt, The Sacred and the French Revolution
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Discourse of American Civil Society (in reader)

Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

One of sociology’s founding fathers, the “big three,” the other two being Karl Marx and Max Weber. He developed the core of a cultural approach to sociology almost a century before the “cultural turn” in the social sciences.

French academic, unlike Marx he was a professional academic, and as such was deeply engaged in the academic debates of his time. He did as much as anyone to establish sociology as a discipline in France in the 19^th century.

Four most famous books:

The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Key ideas in Durkheimian sociology, key contributions:

1. The study of “social facts”: a social fact is a real phenomenon that is collective in nature and irreducible to individuals’ actions. e.g. language…no such thing as a “private language”

2. Rigorous scientific methods of study: statistical analysis of survey data, data collected by French bureaucracies

3. Cultural analysis: symbols, categories, rituals, the sacred and the profane

The Elementary Forms, part of which is assigned for this course, was his last great work, and it came very late in his career, and it is where he most fully spells out his ideas about cultural processes. The book is complex, in part because in it Durkheim tries to do two things.

1) understand religion, i.e. provide a sociology of religion (lots of people are still working on this)

2) show how the modern world is still fundamentally “religious.” This is his religious sociology (fewer people see things this way, although I tend to)

1) Durkheim’s sociology of religion

Why do all human societies have religions in the first place? What are the social effects of particular religions? The economic effects? How do power, politics, and money interact with religion? From a purely economic or ecological perspective, religion and particulaly elaborate religious rituals can seem wasteful. From a Marxist perspective, religion is the “opiate of the people.” It disguises power and subtly enslaves people. But this doesn’t really answer the question of why religious beliefs come about.

Here are some answers as of the late nineteenth century:

1) Naturism: religion helps to explain natural phenomena, which are often threatening

Naturism addresses itself to the phenomena of nature, including great “cosmic forces” such winds, stars, rivers, the sky, etc., or else plants, animals, rocks etc.

2) Animism: Religion explains natural phenomena in terms of spirits, souls, divinities, demons, which are animated and conscious and inhabit natural entities. This is a kind of anthropomorphism.

Durkheim finds lots of problems with these two explanations, not the least of which is that they are both deeply condescending, and assume religion to be a matter of illusions and hallucinations totally unrelated to rationality and science.

Durkheim’s answer, based on his reading of the anthropological and sociological literature on Australian Aboriginal and Native American tribes:

First, he defines religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

This definition includes two elements: the idea of the sacred, and the idea that religion is inherently collective. By nature, i.e. because of the way individual humans are wired to interact with the world, human beings distinguish between the sacred and the profane. We’ll get back to this point later in the course. Second, religion is social. God, or the gods, are in fact society, and belief in God or the gods basically serves the interests of society as a whole.

This isn’t a course in the sociology of religion, however, so what’s most interesting to us here is that Durkheim’s sociology of religion provides the foundation for his religious sociology, you could say his cultural sociology, of the secular world.

2) Durkheim’s religious sociology

Unique for a sociologist, he emphasizes

a. the independent causal importance of symbolic classification

b. the importance of the symbolic division between the sacred and the profane

c. the social significance of ritual behavior

d. interrelations between symbolic classifications, rituals, and the creation of social solidarities

The Elementary Forms is a difficult book, in part because it is exploratory, and in part because Durkheim covers so much ground. His primary empirical case is the Australian Aborigines, whose social organization is, basically, the following:

Tribes (groups of clans)

Phratries

Matrimonial Classes

Clans

The clans each have totems—symbols based on animals and plants, and occasionally meteorological or celestial entities—and relations between totems mirrors social relations between clans as they are incorporated into phratries. In this way, aboriginal society shapes the use of symbols.

Totems are names, but they’re more like coats-of-arms to the clans. But it is more than a collective label in which individuals take pride. It also has great religious significance. It is a “sacred thing.” It keeps the profane at a distance, because of its essential properties: it heals wounds, sickness, it can makes men’s beards grow, it has power over the totemic species, it gives individuals force, courage, and perseverance, and depresses and weakens their enemies (p. 142). It surrounds ordinary objects and happenings with a kind of “religious halo.” Importantly, the idea, the symbol that is the totem has more power than the animal or plant on which it is based.

Totems have not only religious but cognitive significance as well. They shape the way Aborigines and Native Americans categorize the world around them, their own bodies and minds, and even the whole universe (i.e. their religious cosmology). Durkheim gives lots of examples, but the important thing to note is that Aboriginal and Native American categories of thought are very different from modern Western notions, which are typically based on modern science.

Society furnishes these categories to the individuals who comprise it, and in turn, by thinking in terms of the same categories and communicating with the same symbols, society is strengthened. Social solidarity is strengthened.

Finally, and this point is particularly important for us, modern societies and modern science do not reject totemism, the division of the world into sacred and profane, etc. Basically, science and rationality rely on the same universal cultural and religious notions that animate Aboriginal religion. Modern social organization is more individualistic and less tribal and clannish, and scientific rationality is sharper and clearer than aboriginal thought processes and categories, but the elementary forms of thought and group culture that underly both are the same. If we can apprehend these processes at work in the modern world, we can begin to understand the scope and the limits of our rationality.

Durkheim’s scholarly influence

Durkheimian thought permeated the French intellectual scene, and it has influenced research in various disciplines. The influence of Durkheim’s work, and particularly of the Elementary Forms, has been both direct and indirect.

Linguistics: most prominent is Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of the field of “semiotics” (the study of signs) who saw language as a social fact irreducible to anything else that emerged from the conscience collective of a society.

Literary theory: Roland Barthes’s studies in social and literary semiotics. Barthes and his colleagues have explicated the systems of symbolic classifications that regulate a wide array of secular institutions and social processes, including fashion, food production, and civil conflict.

Anthropology: Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, in which he studied societies in terms of their symbolic classifications, which are often patterned as binary oppositions. The opposition between the sacred and the profane is a cardinal one. Geertz’s interpretive studies of expressive cultural practices, such as Balinese cockfighting and American political campaigns, are also broadly Durkheimian, as they emphasize the “religious” and cultural bases of cultural phenomena. Mary Douglas’s research on purity and pollution taboos, which we’ll cover in this course, is directly Durkheimian too.

History: Michel Foucault, who often pointed out the religious and in a sense arbitrary basis of “rational” Western attitudes and practices, from sexual attitudes to such as mass incarceration.

Social Psychology: European “social representations theory” builds directly from Durkheim’s idea of “collective representations.”

Sociology: Amazingly, sociologists have been the slowest to pick up on Durkheim’s ideas. There are a number of reasons for this, but they aren’t too interesting, so we won’t get into them here. Robert Bellah has written on secular nations’ “civil religions,” basically the rituals and symbols modern democracies use. Otherwise, Durkheimian research in sociology, especially American sociology, is fairly new, only really picking up in the late 1980s. We’ll cover some of this work later in the course.

Durkheimian and Politics

Lynn Hunt, The Sacred and the French Revolution

briefly on the modern sociological debate on the F.R.

Why did the F.R. happen? Why do revolutions happen in general? Lots of sociological scholarship on revolutions.

Structural Analysis of the F.R.: Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol

peasant grievances

agricultural production and distribution

taxation

government susceptibility to revolution

centralization of bureaucratic government organizations

government policy consistency

William H. Sewell, Lynn Hunt

symbols and meanings

sovereignty of the crown versus of “the people” (shifting meanings and associations)

ideology

public rituals

symbols of the king versus symbols of the new order (the liberty tree, liberty in female form, the revolutionary calendar…)

Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Discourse of American Civil Society (in reader)

Jeffrey Alexander is a “Durkheimian” (or neo-“Durkheimian”) scholar, and in his chapter he applies and revises Durkheimian ideas in order to better understand the public response to the Watergate break-in. But there’s a long intellectual history of studies of this kind, specifically of studies of mass politics, propaganda, and the media. As far back as the 1920s, an awareness was developing that the extension of the vote and the enlarged purchasing power of the “masses” entailed expanded opportunities for both demagogues and well-meaning propagandists to further their respective causes using various symbols, fictions, myths, and utopian appeals. These opportunities have only expanded further with developments in communications technology, most notably the universalization of television.

Nowadays we take advertising, marketing studies, consumer research, political polling, image consultants, “spin doctors” and the like more or less for granted. But beginning in the 1920s social critics and social scientists began to study these processes carefully, and to rethink fundamental democratic ideals in light of new realities.

The first great writer in this tradition was Walter Lippmann, who was perhaps the most famous journalist and commentator of his day. Two of his books are relevant here: Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

In Public Opinion he developed what amounts to a social constructionist view of public opinion. It is an ideal of our democratic system, of course, that government represents the “will of the people,” that is the interests, opinions, beliefs, and values of the people. If the people’s will is disregarded, the result is tyranny and ultimately violence. What could be more basic to the American way of life? Yet by the 1920s, this ideal seemed increasingly unrealistic and naïve. Lippmann felt this as strongly as anyone, and set out to explore the fabrication of public opinion. Taking a page from Freud and other psychologists, he saw human beings as guided by “the pictures in their heads,” not necessarily by external realities. The pictures in our heads are “fictions,” which is not to say that they’re untrue, just that they’re subjective. And these fictions are socially constituted, i.e. they are part of culture. Human beings are not directly exposed to reality, but instead adjust themselves to their environments through collective culture, through “simpler models,” because the real environment is too big, too complex, and too fleeting for us to apprehend it directly. Human beings thus live in “pseudo-environments.”

In Public Opinion, and especially in The Phantom Public, Lippmann drew out the implications of this view of human nature for modern political life. “The Public” is not made up of rational individuals judging an objective reality based on their values and interests. Instead, “the public” doesn’t exist, but is for the most part created and manipulated by powerful cultural actors.

Further, for practical purposes, public opinion as such is typically “uninformed, irrelevant, and meddlesome.” Therefore, educated insiders, i.e. experts, should make society’s important political decisions, and public opinion should follow. Public opinion can and should be manipulated in order to further the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Educated experts, who will naturally have society’s best interests in mind, should make decisions and manipulate public opinion for the good of the society.

This was certainly a new democratic ideal, one that remains provocative and for many, disturbing.

One other social thinker I’ll briefly mention here is the political scientist Harold Lasswell, who published a famous book in 1927 analyzing the effectiveness of the various propaganda campaigns waged during World War I. His theoretical approach is similar to Lippmann’s, by the way.

An alternative view of these matters comes from the sociologist Robert Bellah, who is even more Durkheimian than Lippmann or Lasswell. Bellah is well known for his concept of “civil religion,” a concept he illustrates in an American context through studies of Presidential inaugural addresses and other addresses to the nation. The American civil religion is not the fabrication of any one interest group or group of experts. It goes deeper than that, and comprises myths and symbols that guide our national identity and sense of purpose. In America, the civil religion is influenced by Christianity, specifically by the Old Testament, but it is not actually Christian. Here are its fundamental ideas, as Bellah lays them out:

America was, and is, like the people of Israel, Europe was like Egypt

America escaped Europe as the Israelites escaped Egypt

also, Americans continue to escape oppression and tyranny as the Israelites escaped Egypt

God has a special mission for America

America must stand for liberty and freedom

America must be a light to other nations, and must promote these universal values

This civil religion is the source of much of our national identity, and Bellah cites as evidence for this the fact that these ideas recur again and again in American political documents, including such diverse sources as abolitionist pamphlets, civil rights speeches, and many Presidential speeches. For Bellah, this indicates that the civil religion is interwoven with the fabric of American politics.

“Binary Codes” in modern political discourse, which we imagine to be rational

Discourses have “internal symbolic logics” that can be perceived from outside. This is what cultural analysis should do.

like Sacred/Profane but with local variations

in the American case:

Actors

Democratic Code

active, autonomous, rational, reasonable, calm, controlled, realistic, sane

Counter-democratic code

passive, dependent, irrational, hysterical, excitable, passionate, unrealistic, mad

Social relationships

D: Open, trusting, critical, truthful, straightforward, citizen

C-d: Secret, suspicious, deferential, deceitful, calculating, enemy

Institutions

D: Rule regulate, law, equality, inclusive, impersonal, contractual, groups, office

C-d: Arbitrary, power, hierarchy, exclusive, personal, ascriptive, factions, personality

Alexander and Smith: revises and, more accurately, adds to Durkheimian analysis the following ideas:

“Generalization”

Values (general and elemental aspects of a culture)

Norms (regulatory conventions, customs, and laws)

Goals (mundane play of power, interest)

Social factors involved in crisis and ritual renewal

consensus about deviance/pollution of event

consensus about relevance of event

institutional social controls, including possibly the use of force

mobilization and struggle of autonomous elites and publics**

processes of symbolic representation, ritual and purification

** “incompleteness” of rituals

Organization of symbols by myths

So even modern, secular, democratic politics are discursive and cultural, and in a sense irrational

Global Sociology

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Sociology of Culture: No Class Wednesday

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Sign up to live in the Intercollegiate Research Community!

Friday, November 7, 2008

Advice for undergraduates

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Sociology of Culture Lecture Notes for Midterm Exam 2

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Sociology of Culture class readings are available here:

Monday, November 3, 2008

Sociology of Culture Review Sheet for Exam 2 (Nov. 7)

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