Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Soc. Culture Final Exam Review Sheet
Sociology 4260 Cultural Theory (Summer II 2008)
Prof. Gabe Ignatow
Review Sheet for Final Exam (Wednesday August 12 at 11am in class)
You should be able to define and discuss all of the following terms:
Cultural capital
Social capital
Economic capital
Power field
Social space
Symbolic violence
habitus
Kabyle
Symbolic boundaries
Boundary work
Moral boundaries
Cultural boundaries
Socioeconomic boundaries
Cultural specialists
For-profit workers
Musical dislikes
Cultural omnivores
High-status exclusiveness
Educated tolerance
Symbolic racism
Patterned tolerance
Multicultural capital
“tolerance line”
Production of culture
Culture industries
Gatekeepers
Sponsors
American character
American novels
European novels
Copyright law
Social facts
Social solidarities
Totemism
Ritual
The sacred and the profane
Collective effervescence
Watergate
American Civil Religion
Democratic code
Counter-democratic code
Soc. Culture Final Exam Lecture Notes 3
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
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
also, Americans continue to escape oppression and tyranny as the Israelites escaped
God has a special mission for
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
Cultures of Technology
Technology is a big target for cultural theory, because in modern societies, and in much modern social theory, technology’s relationship to culture and society is a deterministic one. Technology is, in Alexander’s phrase, a “dead hand” pushing social and cultural change.
Technological developmentsà society, social change
e.g. gun powder, steel production colonial conquest
windmill food production
automobile residence patterns
commercial jet airliner travel, business, residence
personal computer work patterns
internet communication patterns, privacy
Technological developmentsà culture
e.g. automobile “car culture”—decorate our cars, value our cars as more than mere transportation, etc.
mass production, industry modern art, modern design
streamlined airplanes art deco design
television cultural degradation, massification
cable television cultural fragmentation
industrial machinery social science theories (e.g. Freudianism, systems theory)
email written and spoken language
Yet social scientists are beginning to recognize that the converse is true as well, and have been paying increasing attention to the ways social organization encourages or impede technological innovation.
societyà technological innovation
Economic approaches—e.g. Robert Merton, Neil Smelser and others have argued that high labor costs encouraged the industrial revolution (they also argued for the importance of Methodist values)
Network theorists—point to the role of interpersonal and interorganizational ties in fostering technological advances (e.g. Powell 1999)
The “cultural turn” in the social sciences has thus far yielded fewer insights on technological innovation. (However, there is a large literature that is critical of the incursion of technology into cultural life, although theoretically, this literature shares the presuppositions of research that celebrates the effects of technology in the modern world, i.e. that technology is the causal agent in cultural change: e.g. Neil Postman 1993; Talbott 1995; Charlene Spretnak 1997; Shelly Turkle 1997; Slouka 1995; Ullman 1997).
Cultural historians have made more progress, and in recent years have begun to rewrite the role of technology in Western culture. Beginning in the late 1960s and ’70s, historians began to reconsider the relationship between technology and religious culture in the West since the Middle Ages.
White, for example, traces contemporary moral approval of technology to a Christian ascetic tradition that, contrary to Weber’s famous argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, preceded the Calvinists and instead goes back throught the monks to Jewish roots.
The Christian embrace of technology, i.e. the equating of technological progress and spiritual virtue, can be traced back through monastic iconography to the ninth century. Since that time, the “medieval affirmation that technological advance is morally benign” has been essentially unanimous, and remains an axiom of the modern West.
Recently, even more ambitious and far-reaching efforts have been made to illuminate the powerful, persistent influence of religion in fostering technological innovation. Noble (1997), echoing White, has carefully documented what he argues is a millennium-old trend in western culture, wherein particular strands of Christian religious faith have inspired and grounded the development of the “useful arts.” From Benedictine monks’ innovations in machine design, metal-casting, glass-making and tinning, to Freemasonry, space exploration, and computer technology, in the West, millenarian and eschatological religious understandings have long inspired technological achievement.
Noble argues that the Western tradition of religiously inspired technological experimentation has been shrouded by a century and a half of “secularist polemic and ideology” (p. 4). Yet the modernist intellectual tradition running from Marx to Habermas (outlined in Alexander 1992: 299-305) fails to explain popular religious construals of a range of 20th-century technological phenomena, from the atom bomb to artificial intelligence, the possibility of human cloning, and the promise of computer technology (cf. Noble 1997: 115-142).
Alexander on the “Sacred and Profane Information Machine”
Alexander takes on both Weber’s rationalization thesis and Marx’s commodification thesis, and for that matter he is not enthusiastic about any broad, deterministic theory of social change. E.g. McDonalization, rationalization, commodification, modernization, globalization, and so on. Nor is he a fan of rational-choice models of individual behavior, nor Realpolitik models of collective behavior. Why? Because he is a cultural theorist, and wants to show how culture and meaning and nonrational processes are a part of all social processes.
For Alexander, cultures are like languages, loosely structured by binary codes (sacred/profane, good/evil)
Social scientists ought to be able to read cultures like texts, that is to understand, in an empathetic way, cultures as systems of meaning for social groups.
As Durkheim and Weber tried to understand Australian aborigines, Native Americans, and Calvinists, so we should try to understand contemporary, modern cultures.
Alexander critiques neo-Marxists and critical theorists (we will read some of this work later) for being anticultural, for assuming that technology and economics drive social and cultural change, just as Marx argued that control of the means of production (the base) drives changes in the superstructure (schools, religions, values, culture, ideas, politics).
Alexander argues that it is impossible for a society to be dominated by technological rationality, as Weber, Marx and others have long predicted, because the “mental structures” of humankind are, in crucial respects, unchanging. Human rationality never exists in a pure form, but is always tied into irrational systems of psychological defense, systems that are both primordial and cultural.
In a sense, Alexander wants to do for the personal computer, for modern technology, what Freud did for the mind and Weber did for capitalism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: reveal its cultural and irrational dimensions in a rational way.
The personal computer and the internet have had profound effects on modern society. As such, and as Durkheim would have expected, the rhetoric and legitimating myths of the computer age are rife with religious themes. Alexander examined religiously based popular conceptions of technology in the United States—generally a religious, Christian country, but one that has been at the forefront of most modern technology—between the end of the second world war and 1975 (roughly the dawn of the age of the personal computer), and unearthed a Durkheimian pattern. In popular magazines (Time and Newsweek) and lay technology magazines (Popular Science), innovations in computer technology were introduced to the public wrapped up in a “transcendental and mythical discourse...filled with wish-fulfilling rhetoric of salvation and damnation” (p. 308). Alexander finds apocalyptic themes, themes of salvation, and even themes of the computer as the antichrist, the devil. Time and again, the marvels of computer technology were treated as sacred, existing at a remove from the profane world, and computer specialists as lay priests, intermediaries between technological divinity and the laity. Time, for example, wrote in 1965 of the “new breed of specialists [which] has grown up to tend the machines,” who “ have formed themselves into a solemn priesthood of the computer, purposely separated from ordinary laymen [and] speak[ing] an esoteric language that some suspect is just their way of mystifying outsiders” (Time, April 1965; qtd in Alexander 1992: 310). Completing their analogy three years later, Time wrote: “When we want to consult the deity, we go to the computer because it’s the closest thing to God to come along” (Time, March 1968).
“Idea Hamsters” on the “Bleeding Edge”: Profane Metaphors in High Technology Jargon
This was my first published article, and in a sense what I ended up doing was extending Alexander’s argument, which has roots in both Freud and Weber.
1) I argue that sacredness is not a consensual part of modern/postmodern culture the way it perhaps once was, and that the profane is worth thinking about more.
2) I argue that we can use theories of metaphor, and develop methods of analyzing metaphors, that can teach us a lot about culture. We can borrow ideas and methods from linguistics and cognitive psychology.
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/categories/jargonWatch/
So it turns out that
This profane jargon has increased over time, and there is more of it in
This jargon is structured in a binary way, that is in terms of a binary code, of
sacred/profane = technological progress/backwardness
For theorists of technological rationalization,
Soc. Culture Final Exam Lecture Notes 2
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieuàsymbolic boundaries, quantitative techniques for sociology of culture (compare with cultural anthro)
Forms of capital (social, economic, cultural)
Social Space or Field
Habitus: bodily and cognitive imprint of social position
Why workers don’t like to eat fish (removing bones too dainty) or work on keyboards
Categories of refined/unrefined versus masculine/feminine
(1) A break with Marxists: (I.e. 'objective' reality). Bourdieu is interested in RELATIONSHIPS, on more levels than just the economic, and argues that how people
interpret and make sense of their relations matters (this is the subjective element).
(2) A break with "intellectualism": The theoretical class (i.e. the one we as scientists define) is not necessarily the class that exists in-the-world.
(3) A break with Economics: There are more dimensions to the social world that just economics.
(4) A break with “Objectivism” in favor of a symbolic understanding of social structure.
He also has s definite focus on POWER STRUGGLES.
Social Space: A geographic/mathematical metaphor for how people are arranged in society. Bourdieu defines social space as:
"a (multi-dimensional) space constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties active in the social
universe under consideration, that is, able to confer force or power on their possessor in that universe." (p.229).
The points to keep in mind with this def:
(1) Social space has multiple dimensions (ex economic, educational, cultural, etc.: n dimensions) These dimensions can usually be categorized as a form of
Capital.
(2) "...constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution..." This mean that how
much and what kind of the particular capital one has is the basis for sorting along the dimensions.
(3) "...by the set of properties active in the social universe under consideration, that is, able to confer
force or power on their possessor in that universe." The quantity or quality (i.e. point 2) of a given good only matters to the extent that the good in question
is 'active' in the social world of interest. This part of the definition implies an element of contextual specificity. Two groups' relative position depend on the
particular 'field' that is active. If we're dealing in the economic field, then the relative position of $$ matters, if we're dealing with the educational, then
that's what matters. [note, that this discussion is about one dimension at a time, Bourdieu does not think that way - this is for illustration only, the point is that in
some struggles, the relative value of a given dimension will change.].
Power follows from the ability to mobilize capital.
The social space is a field of forces -- the system of relations, alliances, and power struggles. His vision of social space is NOT one that is (necessarily)
static, but instead constantly infused with power struggles. Thus we see the world as a system of 'objective power relations.'
Is this paranoid? Overdramatic??
This allows us to see the social world in two ways, as the positions themselves thusly: (take culture and econ as examples)
Hi Culture
|
| A
|
|
Poor ---------------------------- Rich
|
| B
c |
|
Low Culture
In this picture, the three groups are arrayed on these two dimensions (thus C is poor and holds mainly 'low culture' values, A is rich with 'high culture' , etc).
Because these positions are at the same time relations, because domination follows from the ability to utilize this capital, we could instead view this picture
as:
A -> B-----> C
\ _____/
Where A dominates (a little) B, and both B and A dominate C. What Bourdieu wants to claim is that these systems of relations are in constant contest -- not ONLY
in who gets to be WHERE, but what having a certain quantity/distribution of a good GIVES you, ie what it MEANS.
The dimensions are the elements that give power (education, money, social contacts, etc) in general, these elements form types of CAPITAL. The four
general types of capital for Bourdieu are:
1.Economic Capital: How much money one has.
2.Cultural Capital: The systems of value and meaning a person can draw on, what counts as 'good' for a group. (the main distinction is between
high and low culture for Bourdieu, thus the difference between a person who listens to Garth brooks and goes to the bowling alley every weekend versus a
person who reads Shakespeare, drinks fine wine, and goes to the museum all the time).
3.Social Capital: The set of relations one can draw on: who you know that MATTERS.
4.Symbolic Capital. : the extent to which one has the power to institute, to NAME, to define who is who. Symbolic power rests on RECOGNITION, i.e., give or take, legitimacy (Weber).
Bourdieu argues that each of these types of capital is transformable (to some extent), i.e. able to be converted and reconverted, one to the other. Thus if you have enough money you might get to know a new
set of important people, etc.
The two dimensions along which each type of capital are arrayed is Volume and composition. Thus the AMOUNT of money one has, and the TYPE of
money matter (i.e. cash vs stocks vs gold vs land).
Classes on Paper:
On the basis of the distribution of the various forms of capital, we can find groups of people who have 'similar' distributions. These are 'classes' in the
logical sense -- people who occupy the same cell in a cross-tabulation. BUT, we can't necessarily assume that these classes are self-recognized. This is the
long standing differentiation between classes in-themselves vs. classes for themselves.
What exists is a space of relations, out of which may or may not emerge a class per se.
essential questions are spirited away:
Don’t explain how the formal ‘classes’ of social scientists are related to the actual, living classes in society.
One must account for how actors see the world to make sense of how they act. That is, we ned to look to the social construction of identity.
1) 'Objective': People see the world differently because they occupy a different space in the world.
2) 'subjective': The tools brought to bear, the language used, are all the products of previous struggles, and influence the meaning of the very dimensions
that people array themselves along.
Thus, not only are people seeing the world from different spaces, but the very view of that space, the relevant value of any given quantity/quality
distribution is different depending on a group's past history of struggle.
While Bourdieu argues that people TEND to accept the position they find themselves in, there is social change, and it comes from struggles for power related
to (1) and (2).
in an earlier essay, Bourdieu writes
“Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories which make it possible, are the stake par excellence of the political struggle, a struggle
which is inseparably theoretical and practical, over the power of preserving or transforming the social world by preserving or transforming the categories of
perception of that world.”
These are social categories: racial, social class, economic categories, that change over time
So being able to define the dimensions of status, to identify the subject of political debate and shape the way issues are seen to be related are all symbolic actions,
and they are the means through which politics are carried out. Thus, being able to control these means gives one control of political outcomes. The power of
naming is crucial.
Examples:
? Political rhetoric about abortion: proponents use ‘right-to-choose’ language, opponents use ‘rights-to-life’ language.
? Use of the word ‘Liberal’ in presidential campaigns
Symbolic Capital: Any capital when it is perceived by an agent as self-recognized power to name, to make distinctions.
It follows that objective power relations reproduce themselves in symbolic power.
The power to create titles
Citizenship is bestowed by the government,
The definition of ‘adult’ or ‘graduate’
“It is the most visible agents, from the point of view of the prevailing categories of perception, who are the best placed to change the vision by changing the
categories of perceptions. But they are also, with a few exceptions, the least inclined to do so.”
Why? Because they benefit from the current arrangement. That those in power control the means to power creates a cycle, whereby they reenforce the power
that they have. Bourdieu refers to this as the “circle of symbolic reproduction”.
Symbolic power rests on legitimate recognition your brother-in-law can’t declare you a graduate of the university. The title ‘graduate’ can only be made by
those with legitimate control of symbolic power.
Symbolic order and the power of naming.
Symbolic power can be arrayed along a dimension of intensity/legitimacy:
Insult Official Naming
I-----------------------------------------------I
Low power High Power
We can think about the proliferation of titles in current work and occupations. This rise (sanitary engineer, executive assistant, vice president, e.g.) follows FROM the
desire of groups to NAME THEMSELVES, and thus make their own distinction. The move in contemporary society to provide all with a new name, is a struggle for legitimate power. Racial epithets are the imposition of place by a ruling class on a
ruled class, and when the POWER associated with those epithets can be reversed, then the group has gained the symbolic upper hand.
e.g. minority groups referring to themselves in terms of racial “slurs”—not just the N word—Chinese, Jews, immigrants in
Bourdieu points out that rewards separate a title from a task. Thus, a part-time person doing the same work as a full time person will likely be paid less (even by the
hour) than the person who officially occupies the position. Or, for example, a nurse and a doctor often do exactly the same things, but the doctor will make
more.
Because symbolic power is a useful power, something that can be used to gain resources in multiple dimensions, it is clearly the subject of controversy.
Groups fight over the right to control the naming process.
“Every field is the site of a more or less openly declared struggle for the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field.” (p.242)
Alliances in the Political Field
Those who occupy similar, but distinct social spaces (or who are in similar, but distinct patterns of social relations) tend to form alliances (though, again,
not necessarily).
How do people at the bottom of a symbolic power system gain capital to change the present point of view?
Bourdieu says it happens through alliances with those who have the ability to control symbols. For example, the intellectuals will ‘embezzle’ symbolic power for
the workers. These alliances occur where there is a similarity in their position in the structure, across dimensions of the structure. Thus, workers are the
dominated group in the production/economic realm, while intellectuals are the dominated group in the cultural realm. The one helps the other because of the
similarity of their situation. For Bourdieu, this was Marx’s error: to look only within the economic realm for the emergence of classes.
isn’t Bourdieu himself an example of why he is wrong?
too Parisian, too French, and perhaps too old
Soc. Culture Final Exam Lecture Notes 1
Michelle Lamont: Money, Morals, & Manners
Symbolic Boundaries and Status
The study of “symbolic boundaries” and “cultural repertoires” is an important theoretical area within cultural studies, and it is mostly a French-American venture.
Lamont’s research is especially qualitative and interpretive. Her writings are based mostly on interviews she has conducted over the years with, e.g., middle class Americans and French citizens, working class Americans and others.
Lamont is from
Her theoretical ideas:
“symbolic boundaries” the types of lines that individuals draw when they categorize other people
“high-status signals”
“boundary work” work of maintaining distinctions between one’s own group and other groups
Types of symbolic boundaries
moral boundaries
drawn on the basis of moral character
honesty, work ethic, integrity, consideration for others
socioeconomic boundaries
wealth, power, professional success
cultural boundaries
education, intelligence, manners, taste, command of high culture
People in different countries value these boundaries differently. For example in
In both countries socioeconomic boundary work seems to be on the upswing
e.g. New Yorkers seeing Midwesterners as parochial
Businessmen seeing intellectuals as unrealistic
accountants, bankers, marketing executives, realtors
Social and cultural specialists seeing businesspeople as materialistic
e.g. artists, social workers, priests, psychologists, researchers, teachers
French seeing Americans as puritan moralists
She compares American and French members of the upper middle class
Midwesterners versus New Yorkers
Parisians versus residents of
Businesspeople versus social and cultural specialists
So Bourdieu looks at the social world and sees groups in conflict over forms of capital, attempting to reproduce their capital in their children, and struggling over symbols that define their existence. Naturally, one wonders whether his ideas reflect social reality, say, in
Questions like these are Michele Lamont’s starting point. To answer these questions, she employs a number of concepts, most of which are not terribly original (and many of which overlap):
1) symbolic boundaries, boundary work
2) high-status signals
3) evaluative criteria, “criteria of purity” (Mary Douglas)
4) cultural resources versus structural situations
5) structures of thought that organize perceptions of others (think of Foucault’s modes of objectification and dividing practices, and of Berger and Luckmann)
Her method is the individual interview—not the statistical analysis of survey data: Bourdieu’s method—which tends to corroborate a view of “boundary work” that is more individualistic than Bourdieu’s analyses of “social space.”
Her main findings:
1) symbolic boundaries and “boundary work”
looser boundaries in
moral boundaries are important, and Bourdieu ignores them
moral and socioeconomic boundaries are more important in the
cultural boundaries are clearer and stronger in
symbolic boundaries are nation-level phenomena: there’s less regional variation within countries than one would think (NY versus
“social trajectory” matters a lot in people’s evaluative criteria, i.e. upwardly versus downwardly mobile (Bourdieu does not overlook this at all, though)
cultural specialists versus for-profit workers: occupational area matters a lot more in the
Much of this is likely due to the high level of geographical mobility in the
Diverse ways of experiencing high culture—more emotional, social, “self-actualization” in
Excerpt from film “The Dinner Game”
Bethany Bryson
“Anything But Heavy Metal”: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes
Music has many roles in social life, creating solidarities and encouraging political resistance.
People engage with music in many different ways in different areas of life.
Music becomes part of people’s identities, the way they identify themselves and draw closer to or else distance themselves from other groups and individuals.
While social exclusion is a well-understood sociological phenomenon, “symbolic exclusion” is the topic of Bryson’s paper. Symbolic exclusion is, in a word, taste.
Symbolic exclusion is a form of Lamont’s boundary work, the work of drawing lines between ourselves and others so as to establish our place in the social world.
Bryson examines musical exclusion and musical tolerance
From Bourdieu, we expect that elites will behave in a snobbish manner regarding music and musical tastes, excluding, or discriminating against, certain types of lowbrow music
Yet the opposite seems to be true: highly educated people are more musically tolerant than are people with less education, that is they are more open to more different kinds of music
Yet she finds that educated people are more tolerant generally but also very intolerant to low-status music, or music associated with uneducated people, such as country or gospel music in the
She calls this patterned tolerance
She refers to multicultural capital
Hypotheses
High Status Exclusiveness (wealth, education, occup prestige)à dislike more genres (not confirmed)
Educated Tolerance Educationà fewer dislikes
Symbolic Racism: Racist Whites will dislike non-white music (confirmed)
Patterned Tolerance: People who dislike few genres will dislike those types of music associated with people with less education
College students don’t listen to, or they say they dislike: heavy metal, rap, gospel, country
There exists a “Tolerance Line” between high-statues cosmopolitanism and low-status group-based cultures
The Sociology of Culture and Cultural Production
Philip Smith, 167-182
Richard Peterson, Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music (in reader)
This is a different area of cultural studies from what we have seen so far in this course, although it resembles in some ways Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critical Theory, as it is focused on cultural products including mass media and popular culture—music, films, television, novels etc.
We can call this perspective the production perspective
Less abstract than much of the theory we have dealt with so far, less general, philosophical
More concrete
This is good and bad, depending on your appetite for social and cultural theory, which can be visionary, imaginative, and sometimes difficult
The Production Perspective is a current approach; that is people are using it and developing it today to study things they care about
The production perspective covers several fields, including communications, media studies, and sociology
When we talk about culture here, we are talking about
Culture as an institutional sphere devoted to the making of meaning
i.e. art, music, theater, fashion, literature, religion, the media, education
This definition is from William Sewell, from the start of the course
So culture here is not values or ideas or beliefs or rituals or identities (as in cultural studies and other areas)
In the production perspective scholars study the culture industries, although they do so more carefully than Horkheimer and Adorno ever did
RECEPTION STUDIES
Remember how Horkheimer and Adorno imagined audiences, i.e. the reception of culture…?
For Critical Theorists, audiences are basically passive, “narcotized” – they accept whatever popular cultural products are spoon-fed to them
We still see evidence of this kind of Marx-ish understanding of reception in the British Cultural Studies tradition
you will remember the ideas of dominant reading and oppositional reading
People actually go out and study how people receive mass media, for example how people from different class backgrounds interpret television shows that are very nationalistic
How people can creatively and reflexively interpret cultural products
How people actually watch TV or read in their everyday lives
Together, these sorts of studies lead us to question Critical Theory’s model of the passive consumer
e.g. “Watching Dallas”
On the other, cultural critics often regarded
e.g. in 1983 Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, proclaimed
Since Horkheimer and Adorno, and before them as well, “professional intellectuals” have been dismissive of American-style consumer culture. Many analysts see popular culture as not just entertainment. They think it has obvious, manipulative ideological effects.
Ien Ang studied the reception of
So reactions in
Katz and Liebes, two American-Israeli social scientists, studied the reception of
Israeli Arabs
New immigrants from
Immigrants from
Kibbutzniks
These were compared to similar groups in
They watched the show, then participated in an “open structured” discussion and filled out questionnaires.
They found that people interpreted the show in very different ways, sometimes incorrectly.
Some of the Moroccan Jews claimed that the show made them more proud of their Jewish identity and their moral standards (as compared with the
They conclude that the discourses of ordinary people about
Also we learn to think carefully about the “mass” audience, which is not as uniform in its interpretations and the way cultural products are consumed as some theories suggest
How do people interpret the Coca Cola/Turkey commercial? How do people in Turkey watch and interpret MTV?
The Production of Culture
The “production perspective”
Alternative to strict market-based accounts of culture industries
H&A: the “culture industry” (singular)—shapes our knowledge and interpretation of current events, other cultures, international opinion of the
So much for cultural reception studies.
Why do people watch certain movies, certain kinds of movies, with certain themes?
Why are certain forms of music, television, film, and literature popular in certain places at certain times?
Where do museums come from? Concert halls? Libraries? Monuments? War memorials?
Sociologists discuss certain categories of people: gatekeepers and sponsors
Gatekeepers are taste-makers who work within and outside corporations to separate out certain cultural products (films, bands, songs, actors, television shows) because they believe they will become popular and profitable. These people work as agents, and for media corporations. They have to be hip, on the cutting edge of fashions.
Sponsors are wealthy and powerful individuals and organizations who provide resources (money, social and political connections) to promote certain cultural products and projects (museums, orchestras, theatres) that suit their tastes and interests. Sponsors include wealthy patrons, municipal governments, and even states.
At different times, due to social, technological and economic changes, different networks of sponsors and gatekeepers can emerge, leading to cultural changes and the popularization of new genres of art and music (e.g. impressionist painting in the early 19th century, which was initially rejected).
Richard Peterson, Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music
Rock music, or some form of it, is a nearly universal form of music. Where did it come from? Why? And why did it begin in 1955? If we are interested in these sorts of questions, a production of culture perspective can be very useful, as it is very concrete, pointing to specific social, economic, and technological processes that shape what we listen to, eat, and watch.
In 1955 a rock aesthetic replaced the jazz aesthetic in American popular music
Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Perry Como à Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and many more
Can we use a supply side explanation to account for this change? That is, people like Elvis Presley came and revolutionized the music scene?
But at any given time there are many creative, special talents, most of whom do not get recognized
What about a demand side explanation? That is, at some points in time there are major demographic changes, e.g. more young people, and they demand different kinds of music and other cultural products that reflect their own lives, not the lives of their parents’ generation. People want music that speaks to them.
In the case of rock music, the oldest of the baby-boomers was only 9 years old in 1955.
Richard Peterson argues that it was changes in the commercial culture industry itself that led to the popularity of rock music. These changes were legal and technological and business changes.
1909 “United States Copyright Law”—protected artists from sheet-music companies
ASCAP—American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers—formed to collect royalties from public performances—dominant by 1930s
As late as 1950 an oligopoly of only 18 music publishers controlled all the music which could reach the public ear. Everything.
The ASCAP oligopoly produced safe, smooth, melodic music with muted jazz rhythms and harmonies.
The work of black musicians in the blues, jazz, and r&b and later soul was excluded, as was Latin and country music. These musical forms were only for local audiences, and were not national.
In 1939 BMI, a new licensing agency, was formed by radio networks, but could not induce publishers and songwriters to defect from ASCAP. So instead, they began signing black, Latin, and country music singers and songwriters.
ASCAP, the musical oligarchy, failed to come to terms with radio networks over licensing fees in 1939, so these networks turned to BMI and began to provide exposure to black, Latin, and country music, although change was slow and rock had not yet been invented.
Technology and Patent Law
Deal between two brokered by government
RCA small disks are durable, can be shipped by mail, hold singles, allowed for musical experimentation
1947—FCC approves more broadcasting stations
Popularization of TV and transistor radio—cheaply made by Japanese—encourages “Top 40” radio format
Paul DiMaggio, Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture (in reader)
Here we have a more general article presenting ways of theorizing popular culture, and contrasting these to purely economic approaches and other approaches. This is typical of economic sociology, another area in which Paul DiMaggio is active.
He is generally concerned with the quality of cultural products available to the public. This informs his research on museums and other cultural institutions.
Discusses “mass society” and “mass culture” arguments about popular culture, which like Critical Theory itself presume a decline in the quality of cultural products available to, in this case, Americans
abundance, diversity, vitality à homogeneity, blandness, triviality
rationalization, individualization and alienation, creation of big national markets and homogeneous tastes and preferences
Mass culture is criticized by both cultural conservatives and radicals
conservatives: mass culture uses sex and violence to make money (the lowest common denominator), does not respect traditional religious values
radicals argue that elites create bland, dumb mass culture products to encourage people to consume uncritically
e.g. Critical Theory, Habermas and the “colonization of the life world”
Innovation becomes rare as market forces rule: cultural products must appeal to the lowest common denominator, base urges…and large markets
DiMaggio argues that Mass Culture theories rest on one of two simplistic economic assumptions
free market assumption: what the public wants, the public will get (conservative)
monopoly assumption: a few organizations control cultural production and dictate taste (radical)
But there’s absolutely nothing concrete about these sorts of assumptions, and this is where a bit of sociological realism is needed. Real cultural products (books, movies, television programs, music) are produced by for-profit organizations that face the constraints of the market. Some are produced by not-for-profit organizations that face other constraints and pressures.
But, then again, some culture industries seem to follow the mass culture model. Others seem to follow a niche or specialization model.
books, records, films, television programs
versus
television programs, mass-circulation magazines, school textbooks, mass-market paperback novels
What determines the form of particular culture industries, and the degree of creativity they allow artists?
DiMaggio follows Peterson and others in arguing that degree of oligopoly in a culture industry is the key to understanding its degree of creativity and innovation versus homogeneity
DiMaggio wants to know if this is true for the culture industries as a whole, not just for popular music
Makes a few assumptions
Managers in culture industries want to create predictability, reduce uncertainty
Latent Demand for a diverse range of cultural products
Innovation comes from below (from artists), is not really encouraged by culture industry bureaucracies
So he argues that managers in culture industries want to control markets, to prevent competitors from entering them, and to control creative talent so that they create cultural products in a regular, predictable, efficient way
So American television executives (only three networks) had been able to control their industry for a long time (until cable and satellite TV), while the recording industry has had uneven success at doing this
Brokerage Systems of Administration
Brokers – essentially agents who represent artists to corporations, and corporations to artists, but generally work for the corporation
Entrepreneurial Brokers – brokers do not work for culture industry firms
Centralized Brokers – network television, textbooks
See Table on p. 160
DiMaggio finds that, generally, culture industries have become less concentrated over the last few decades due partly to technology (cable and satellite TV, CDs, DVDs) and also to demographic specialization.
The Critical Theory “nightmare” of cultural homogenization is probably unfounded.
Wendy Griswold, American Character and the American Novel (in reader)
She addresses literary theory, in particular the assumption, broadly held, that literature (and cultural products generally) reflect changes in society. So to understand history or modern society, one can learn a lot by studying changes in cultural products like art, literature, and music.
Like DiMaggio’s analysis of the claims of Critical Theory and other cultural critics (conservative and radical), Griswold’s analysis is sociologically realistic and, in a sense, deflating
We can begin by wondering where the novel form came from in the first place, how and why it became so popular.
Popular novels were a product, in part, of the rise of the British middle class in the 18th century, and especially of housewives who could not read Latin and were not interested in poetry, but who were literate in English and wanted entertainment.
18th century was also a time of great interest in the human personality.
Also the rise of booksellers (rather than wealthy patrons) who paid authors by the number of pages.
The result is the novel, which is not too hard to read, devoted to the individual personality and character, and to topics of interest to middle class women.
But nineteenth century American novels are not like this. They are usuallyabou men or boys fleeing society, having adventures in the wilderness far from women (Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Last of the Mohicans, Red Badge of Courage. Why?
Something about the “American character”? Something about the national psyche? Puritan morality?
Wendy Griswold did a sociological study. She took a random sample of American novels published from 1876-1910.
She hypothesized that overall, the content of these novels would not be so different from that of European novels, because European critics tended to focus on what made American novels unique and ignored those that looked a lot like European novels.
Then she wanted to find economic, legal, organizational factors that could explain the uniqueness of American novels. She finds this in copyright law, which allowed legal piracy (copying and selling) of novels by foreign writers until the late 19th century (1891). Publishers made huge profits this way (how could they not?)
Griswold hypothesizes that American novels will be different from European novels until 1891 (because until then they needed to be unique to sell well), but afterward they would become more conventional, concerned with love, marriage, money, morality etc. This is just what she found.
For example, in the earlier period American novels were much more likely than European novels to depict social mobility.
In the earlier period American novels were much more likely to have middle class protagonists, while European novelists had upper class protagonists.
Social reform (prison reform, temperance, treatment of women, cruelty to animals) was more prominent in American novels in the first period, less so in the second period.
American novels were more likely to be set in small towns in the first period.
American novels were more likely to be humorous in the first period.
All of this supports a sociological perspective, in particular a production of culture perspective, on the novel.
Snobs and Cultural Omnivores
Richard Peterson and Roger Kern, "Changing Highbrow Tastes: From Snob to Omnivore"
When we read Bourdieu, we may sense that he’s not entirely right when it comes to the contemporary scene. Do ambitious people really sip wine, go to museums, etc to lift their status and distinguish themselves from others?
Isn’t that all a bit too Parisian, and too old?
Peterson and Kern discuss why this “snob model” is right for certain locations and certain historical periods, such as the late 19th century in the
Anglo-Saxons wanted to distinguish themselves from recent immigrants from
Sociologists interested in the arts, media, taste, status, high culture and so forth sometimes refer to Bourdieu’s approach as the “snob model”
But the snob model does not seem to capture the tastes and interests of elites in
Rich white suburban teenagers listen to rap music. College students listen to world music, Latin music, Afro-Caribbean, rap, popular music.
P&K discuss highbrows, snobs, and omnivores.
Highbrows – like elite culture – classical music and opera
Snobs – highbrows who do not participate in lowbrow (cultures of poor marginal groups, such as blacks, youth, isolated rural people) or middlebrow (commercial, mass cultural) activities
– a perfect snob refuses to engage in any lowbrow or middlebrow activities
these are very rare in the
you could probably find a few in
Omnivores – enjoy a wide range of lowbrow and middlebrow cultural activities
Remember Bethany Bryson’s article on Musical Dislikes -- patterned tolerance and multicultural capital
P&K find that “omnivorousness is replacing snobbishness”
Omnivores do not like everything, but they are open to appreciating everything
In a way it is opposed to snobbishness, which is based on rigid rules of exclusion
Discriminating omnivorousness replacing snobbishness reflects multiculturalism and relativism in society over ethnocentrism
Omnivores appreciate music differently than other people. They do not identify with it.
Why the shift from snobbishness and to omnivorousness
devaluation of snobbishness because of widespread availability of highbrow culture in the media
rising education levels
geographic migration and social class mobility have mixed people holding different tastes
mass media presents lots of cultural materials to many people
value change from group prejudice, supported by racist social science, to tolerance and diversity
art world change from 19th century European scene, where theorists in the European Royal Academies believed that there were absolute standards of beauty and vulgarity
This consensus was swept away by market forces and aesthetic entrepreneurs in the 20th century (impressionists, Picasso, expressionists, minimalists, postmodernists)
Obviously the value of art was a product of its social circumstances, not of the art itself
generational politics Youth culture has become a viable alternative to “adult” culture
globalization and new elites for whom inclusion and omnivorous is probably a more useful way to create distinction than exclusion and snobbishness
