Showing papers in "Cultural Sociology in 2008"

Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of Web 2.0

Abstract: The movement toward what has been described as Web 2.0 has brought with it some significant transformations in the practices, organization and relations of music culture. The user-generated and web-top applications of Web 2.0 are already popular and widely used, the social networking site MySpace already having more than 130 million members worldwide. By focusing specifically upon the presence of the popular music performer Jarvis Cocker across various Web 2.0 applications, this article seeks to open up a series of questions and create opportunities for research into what is happening in contemporary music culture. This exploratory article lays out an agenda for research into music culture and Web 2.0 that is not only concerned with the implications of Web 2.0 for music, but which also attempts to understand the part played by music in making the connections that form the collaborative and participatory cultures of Web 2.0 and the flickering friendships of social networking sites.

Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music

Abstract: Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millenaire music style called glitch, a style characterized by sonic fragments of technological error. While we learn a lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this contemporary style of music using Bourdieu's categories alone. The paper pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach with actor network theory.

Behind the Policy Mantra of the Inclusive Museum: Receptions of Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Museums and Science Centres:

Abstract: The new UK policy framework for museums aims to reconfigure their social role and organizational identity. Central to this process are the Government's generic concepts of social exclusion/inclusion incorporated into museum policies to make museums more socially responsible and responsive through their contribution to tackling social exclusion. Based on accounts, views and experiences of a cross-section of staff from two science museums and two science centres in the UK, this article examines the ways in which the concepts of social exclusion/inclusion are mediated and configured in museum professionals' perceptions, interpretations and practices. I argue that the concepts of social inclusion/exclusion do not map onto organizational actors' interpretations and experiences in the way envisaged and demanded by the policies. I also highlight some of the unintended consequences and tensions that can arise in the course of museums' and museum professionals' attempts to balance the social inclusion role with ot...

The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations

Abstract: Powerpoint and similar technologies have contributed to a profound transformation of lecturing and presenting information. In focusing on pointing in powerpoint presentations, the article addresses aspects of this transformation of speech into `presentations'. As opposed to popular attacks against powerpoint, the analysis of a large number of audio-visually recorded presentations (mainly in German) demonstrates the creativity of these `performances', based on the interplay of slides (and other aspects of this technology), speech, pointing and body formations. Pointing seems to be a particular feature of this kind of presentation, allowing knowledge to be located in space. Considering powerpoint as one of the typical technologies of so-called `knowledge societies', this aspect provides some indication as to the social understanding of knowledge. Instead of `representing' reality, knowledge is defined by the circularity of speaking and showing, thus becoming presented knowledge rather than representing know...

Up on the Roof: The Embodied Habitus of Diasporic Capoeira

Abstract: The majority of the popular martial arts in Britain are of South East Asian origin. One exception is the Brazilian dance and martial art capoeira, which has grown in popularity in the UK over the past twenty years at the same time as it has become a global phenomenon. Brazilian teachers have spread across the globe to create what the article calls diasporic capoeira.The ethnographic research reported here focuses on how Brazilian capoeira teachers in the UK create and sustain a habitus for their students using a contrastive rhetoric. Teachers in the UK routinely stress the similarities and differences between the habitus of capoeira in Brazil and its habitus in the UK. Variations in the habitus of capoeira in the UK, at the individual and the institutional level are explored drawing upon the ethnographic data on capoeira groups, teachers and students.

Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program: The Human Sciences and Cultural Sociology

Abstract: What did Clifford Geertz mean? What was his significance? What did he signify, crystallize, and make possible? These are contentious questions, have been, and will continue to be. There have been decades already of fighting about “Geertz.” Such interpretive disputes are the lot of every exemplary figure. Interpreting is a way of positioning, of saying who we are, in relationship to an intellectual icon, placing ourselves alongside him, against him, or somewhere in between. Lack of agreement, not only about propositions but also about presuppositions, is the reality of intellectual life in the human sciences.

`True Stories' of Canada Tim Hortons and the Branding of National Identity

Abstract: This article discusses the connection between brands, national identity and the social and historic practices of the Canadian nation-state. Specifically, it examines the long-running `True Stories' ad campaign of Tim Hortons coffee shops, Canada's most successful quick-service restaurant chain. These ads insert Tim Hortons into customers' stories about travel, endurance and adventure, and authorize Tim Hortons itself as both the site and source of Canada's self-image.This authorization occurs in three ways: 1) by taking advantage of a space generated by overt, statist, bureaucratic management of Canadian identity and culture, 2) by locating national identity within mundane, sensual consumptive desire, and 3) by capitalizing on the ambiguities of articulating Canadian national culture, especially within the context of an officially multi-cultural project.

Memory and Sacrifice: An Embodied Theory of Martyrdom

Abstract: We use a reputational approach to create a theory of martyrdom that synthesizes scholarship on the body politic, cultural symbols, and collective memory. The making of a martyr, a contested social process, depends on both the resources of the martyr's supporters and the cultural context into which the martyr's image is introduced. Our approach is well suited to analyzing how martyrs are used `on the ground' and given cultural and material utility. We highlight the attention paid to the conception and reception of the martyr's corporeal body, in particular, as a source of identity and meaning, giving emotional weight to social ideas about death and sacrifice. Control over martyrs' bodies derives from the cultural and political intricacies of reputational entrepreneurship, thus employing the body as a medium of culture. To examine this concept of embodied martyrdom, we examine the cases of Joan of Arc, John Brown, and Che Guevara.

Culture As (And After) Production

Abstract: This paper discusses the contribution of Richard A. Peterson to the discipline of sociology in general, and the sociological study of cultural production and consumption more particularly. It illustrate the main tenets of the 'production of culture' perspective proposed by Peterson from the early 1970s onwards, its intellectual genealogy, and the impact this perspective has had on the development of the sociology of culture in different countries. The paper also considers some of the criticisms addressed to the production of culture approach by scholars who have insisted on more interpretivist or critical analyses of culture. The paper concludes by arguing for the heuristic usefulness and epistemological relevance of an approach to cultural analysis which, while still cultivating a sense for the specificities of cultural objects as symbolic representations and meaning structures, is empirically focused on institutions and forms of social organization.

Producing Cultural Sociology: An Interview with Richard A. Peterson:

Abstract: The name of Richard A. Peterson is associated with at least two major issues in the field of sociology: first, the production of culture approach to cultural analysis, probably still his most relevant contribution to contemporary sociology; and second, the cultural omnivore hypothesis, which currently is a central theme in empirical research on cultural consumption and stratification. Both these issues (and the first in particular) are discussed in this interview, together with other more specific and specialized topics, mostly linked to Peterson's equally influential work as a sociologist of music. Overall, the interview offers both a comprehensive reconstruction of Peterson's intellectual career and also an autobiographical assessment of his contribution to the sociology of culture.

Maximal Interpretation in Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a New Epistemology

Abstract: The defining epistemological tension of the “cultural turn” is the question as to whether culture should be brought in as one more cause in the study of society and history or whether culture constitutes a world unto itself whose study necessarily eschews explanation and invites or even demands interpretation instead. The strong program in cultural sociology is but one example of a mode of research and research in the human sciences that has forced itself to navigate, mitigate, or live with (and perhaps sublimate) this tension between explanation and interpretation. Insofar as the strong program as it was defined by Alexander and Smith1 is proposed as a research program in the Lakatosian sense, and insofar as it intends to produce sociologists who present at annual meetings of sociological associations, address the discipline at large through publication in core sociological journals, and internalize the imperative to explain social behavior/action, then it necessarily takes on the burden of explanation and the problem of making clear to a set of scientistically inclined gatekeepers why “culture matters.” However, insofar as the strong program is “strong” precisely in its willingness to put meaning, rather than social structure as it has usually been conceived in sociology, at the center of its program of study, it engages a series of influences and imperatives from hermeneutics, poststructuralist theory, and the more literary and humanistic disciplines that are of only passing interest to most sociologists.

Nathalie Heinich's Sociology of Art - and Sociology from Art

Abstract: The French sociologist Nathalie Heinich has carried out innovative sociological analyses of the field of art since the 1980s. While she is a major figure in French sociology, most of her books are as yet not translated into English.The article seeks to communicate the main contours of Heinich's ideas to an Anglophone audience, by outlining the nature of her most important works concerned with modern and contemporary art, particularly concentrating on her most recent publications. Heinich's advocacy of a descriptive, interpretative sociology of art — as opposed to a `critical' sociology in the manner of Bourdieu — is depicted and considered. The article also traces out her growing orientation towards the development of a`sociology of values'.

`To Locate in the Tenor of Their Setting the Sources of Their Spell': Clifford Geertz and the `Strong Program' in Cultural Sociology

Abstract: In their formulation of “the ‘strong’ program in cultural sociology,” Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith state that sociology “for most of its history” has been dominated by “culturally unmusical scholars.”1 In trying to understand the transformations and crises of modern society, sociologists “emptied” rather than focused “the world of meaning.”2 Even if there were glimmers from the classics,3 sociology, both as theory and method, came to suffer “from a numbness toward meaning.”4

The Balinese Cockfight Decoded: Reflections on Geertz, the Strong Program and Structuralism

Abstract: The essay by Geertz on the Balinese cockfight is by far his most famous and influential piece of work. Why? Using resources from the Russian formalism of the early 20th century, the article uncover...

Cultural Classifications in Literary Education: Trends in Dutch Literary Textbooks, 1968—2000:

Abstract: This article examines how cultural classification processes develop over time. Specifically, we analyse author selection in literary textbooks for Dutch secondary education, and how this selection has changed since the 1960s. The content analysis of 34 literary textbooks addresses both structural properties of classifications (levels of consensus, hierarchical order and innovation) and background characteristics of selected authors. Results show textbooks increasingly focus on a more limited group of authors, raising the overall levels of consensus and hierarchy. At the same time, textbooks have become more heterogeneous and innovative, inasmuch as they increasingly include female, ethnic minority and semi-literary authors as well as authors who recently made their debut. These results suggest, first, that literary experts continue to influence curriculum content and, second, that the erosion of boundaries between `high art' and `low art' may not be as clear-cut as has recently been suggested.

Common Sense and the Collaborative Production of Class

Abstract: In the USA, economic inequality, while arguably one of the most material sites of `difference', is often one of the least visible. The presence and meaning of class in daily life may be more vague than at any other time in US history. This article examines how commonsense knowledge about class leads people to engage in practices that systematically disorganize the presence of social and economic capital. The over-arching analytical framework builds a performative analysis of class by situating the personal agency of talk within broader cultural discourses that shape and constrain possibilities for talk. I draw from ethnomethodology and post-structural discourse analysis to analyze talk about class in 1600 pages of transcript from interviews with 23 people. By linking the interpretive practices of talk in interviews to the circulation and repetition of cultural knowledge in discourses, I demonstrate how class identities are constituted through conditions not generally associated with economic processes.

Our Lady Hates Viscose: The Role of the Customer Image in High Street Fashion Production

Abstract: This article seeks to lift the lid on the `black box' of fashion production by exploring the role of the customer image within the working practices of UK high street womenswear retailers. Following production of culture and symbolic interactionist approaches to the culture industries, the author suggests that the customer images — that is, practitioners' notions of the likes and dislikes of target customers — facilitate teamwork by smoothing conflicts that arise through the division of labour between designers, buyers and merchandizers. The customer image serves as an ordering principle that helps fashion workers to narrow down the wealth of competing ideas and generally guides their decision-making processes. The creation of colour palettes and `storyboards', as well as the selection and modification of sample garments, will be used as examples of how the ordering principle is applied by designers, buyers and merchandizers throughout the production process.

The Role of Gender in `Expressive' Abuse at Abu Ghraib

Abstract: We analyze the court-martial of Sabrina Harman, one of the alleged `seven rotten apples' associated with specific incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, vis-a-vis the Parsonian distinction between `instrumental' and `expressive' pattern-variables. The Parsonian distinction between instrumental and expressive roles served a multitude of functions simultaneously, and especially given the masculine code of the military. We move beyond Parsons to introduce the new concepts of `expressive abuse', `expressive torture', and `instrumental misuse of expressive functions' to capture the overall thrust of the courts-martial as well as important aspects of the abuse at Abu Ghraib as revealed through testimony, government reports, interviews, and other sources of data. Both co-authors were participant-observers at the courts-martial of Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England, and draw upon the testimony and data from those trials in addition to the documents that are cited.

Book Review: Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (eds) The Aesthetics of Everyday Life New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, $73 hbk (ISBN 0—231—13502—5), $26.50 pbk (ISBN 0—231—13503—3) 240pp:

Abstract: of inordinate complexity. But Gillespie all too often assumes uncritically a USbased perspective is valid for discussing copyright and culture in general. The way the European Union has reacted to copyright issues, or the way the emerging powers of China or India have reacted, are sadly all too absent from Gillespie’s analysis. However, even with these two weaknesses Gillespie establishes a complex and thorough basis for cultural sociology to engage with one of the most important emerging issues of culture. This is, ultimately, an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated account of copyright and culture that could form the starting point of debate for anyone interested in this essential complex of issues.

Book Review: Robin Wagner-Pacifici The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2005. xii +210 pp. ISBN 0—226—86978—4 (cloth), 0—226—86979—2 (paper)

Abstract: Robin Wagner-Pacifici is probably best known for a study of ‘terrorism as social drama’, The Moro Morality Play, published in 1986, long before the events of 9/11 taught the rest of us to think in this way. Her new book is equally original. Relatively few sociologists or historians have taken surrender seriously as a possible research topic (though more of them than I had realized, as her bibliography shows). In order to combine a contribution to social or cultural theory with a sense of the ways in which surrender is experienced, the author has selected three case-studies. The first comes from 1625, the surrender of Breda – a city now in The Netherlands, and not, as the author claims, in Belgium – by the Dutch commander Justin of Nassau to the Spanish commander Ambrogio Spinola. The second dates from 1865, when General Robert E. Lee and the army of Northern Virginia surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. The third occurred in 1945, when the Japanese surrendered to Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. These three examples, together with others that are discussed more briefly, underlie Wagner-Pacifici’s theory, which she describes as a ‘political semiotic’, an attempt ‘to grasp surrender’s deepest meanings and mechanisms’, its ‘deep structure’. Her principal contribution is to distinguish what she calls three ‘semiotic phases’: the performative, the demonstrative and the representational. Like other cultural sociologists at work today, such as Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues, Wagner-Pacifici knows the work of John Austin and uses it effectively to argue that surrender is a ‘performative’ event that transforms a situation. Like many postmodern sociologists (whether or not they are postmodernist as well), she takes representation seriously. Indeed, her choice of the surrender of

Book Review: Kevin Rozario The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and The Making of Modern America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 313 ISBN: 13: 978—0-226—7250—3:

Abstract: entangle the theoretical complexities percolating in the various essays, and explain the relationships between the chapters and sections to each other, the editors opt instead to set out their own point of view, explicitly advocating an ‘aesthetic conceptualization of culture’ and proclaiming that ‘the outline of an aesthetic conception of culture’ emerges from the book (p. 11). This is puzzling because the volume contains a diversity of approaches (and terminologies). In addition, the explicit promulgation of an aesthetic conception of culture in the introduction is confusing because it leaves the reader wondering whether this is a ‘companion’ to the ‘sociology of culture in the broad or narrow sense of the term. To be sure, the editors maintain that “to describe culture as aesthetic is not to reassert the primacy of art as subject matter in the sociology of culture, but rather to use art as a model of and model for culture” (p. 10). Nevertheless, because alternative conceptualizations are not provided, the reader is left either with the impression that the editors are shoehorning the various essays into their own perspective, or that the book might be a companion to ‘the sociology of culture’ in the narrow sense of the term after all. Finally, while it is inevitable in edited volumes of this sort that themes will overlap and essays will fit into multiple sections, the logic and ordering of selections appears arbitrary, and the placement of some chapters seems counterintuitive. For instance, virtually every essay in the book could have been included in the section vaguely titled “Cultural Systems”, but only one of the five chapters (Rhys Williams’ ‘“Religion as a Cultural System”: Theoretical and Empirical Developments Since Geertz’) specifically refers to the ‘cultural systems’ concept, while several chapters not in this section (including Nancy Weiss Hanrahan’s own piece, ‘Difference and Cultural Systems’) do, thereby obscuring the meaning of the term. In sum, though it is probably not an appropriate text for undergraduate students and others unfamiliar with the basic concepts and issues in the sociology of culture, this companion volume does conveniently situate important essays by pivotal authors under one cover, making it a handy reference tool for those in the field.