How to Do Things With Words

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.

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Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation

La fabrique du patrimoine : « De la cathédrale à la petite cuillère »

L'élite artiste : excellence et singularité en régime démocratique

The image of the great artist as a suffering visionary is a recent invention, observes sociologist Nathalie Heinich - an invention rooted in the "canonisation" of Vincent van Gogh as a cultural hero for the twentieth century. Heinich explores how and why the impoverished and mentally tormented van Gogh came to be glorified shortly after his suicide at the age of 37. Did the secular art world need a rebel-saint of its own? In considering this possibility, the author explores the history of efforts to celebrate van Gogh, whether in biographies or on T-shirts, showing how the details of his life have been constructed according to the pattern of a Christian saint's rise to recognition. These biographical details circulated first as anacdotes, then as historical truths, and finally became legendary motifs defining individual greatness. At the time of van Gogh's death, early modernists hailed the work of this young self-taught painter as that of a reforming prophet. Public interest stirred when the unique and tragic aspect of the artist's personal life came to light. In these stories, the figure of van Gogh oscillated between godlike asceticism (he lived on very little, did not get married, did not eat much, and devoted his life to his work) and demonic frenzy (he drank, went to brothels, and offered a piece of his own flesh, his severed ear, to a prostitute). His legend became one of victim and sacrificer, of an accursed artist who gave the world great paintings but paid the heavy price of society's ignorance. Heinich organises her book around the stages that characterise the life of a saint - deviation, renewal, reconciliation, and pilgrimage, the latter culminating in visits to van Gogh's burial site and the competition to buy his paintings or "relics. Heinich explores the economics of the art market and the themes that make up the van Gogh myth, such as the person-alisation of artistic grandeur, the celebration of the inte-riority of the creator, and the glorification of abnormality. By examining the mythology that helps drive artistic investment, she forces us to reconsider the nature of admiration and particularly the notion that obscurity during an artist's lifetime is a guarantee of true genius.

The Glory of van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration

By talking of sports in terms of a ‘quest for excitement’, Norbert Elias opened a novel perspective on the question of catharsis by putting the accent not so much on the neutralisation of emotions as on their contrary, their activation, considered as a fundamental human need. While incongruous with respect to classic, rather rationalist and puritan approaches to spectacle, this proposition allows that we reconsider a wide variety of ludic practices and give meaning to their importance in our society.

The Quest for Excitement

Dans un premier temps, je propose de distinguer differentes postures dans ce qu’on nomme l’« intellectuel » : celle du chercheur, qui comprend et explique le monde social grâce a des methodes specifiques ; celle de l’expert, qui utilise sa connaissance d’un domaine pour repondre a des demandes pratiques ; celle du penseur, qui tâche de justifier ou de critiquer une situation au nom de certaines valeurs. Ensuite, je distingue entre differents registres d’enonciation (les jugements de faits et les jugements de valeurs) ; entre les differents niveaux referentiels de l’enonciation, au niveau de l’experience commune et au niveau epistemique ; enfin, entre les differents sens attribues a la notion de valeur.Ces distinctions permettent de mieux comprendre les resistances auxquelles la question de la neutralite du chercheur se heurte aujourd’hui, et les raisons de l’ambivalence propre a notre milieu face a la question de l’engagement. A travers une application concrete au cas de l’art contemporain, la neutralite du sociologue, loin d’etre une fuite hors des preoccupations des acteurs, apparait ainsi comme une facon d’entrer autrement dans la melee.

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Nathalie Heinich

Papers

La fabrique du patrimoine : « De la cathédrale à la petite cuillère »

L'élite artiste : excellence et singularité en régime démocratique

The Glory of van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration

The Quest for Excitement

Pour une neutralité engagée