What is Cultural Sociology?

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Lyn Spillman. What is Cultural Sociology?

Contents

Guide

Pages

Series title. What is Sociology? Series

What is Cultural Sociology?

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

Rituals, symbols, values, norms, and categories

The idea of culture

Culture in sociology

Cultural sociology and processes of meaning-making

Three lenses on meaning-making processes

Conclusion

2 Making Meaning Central

Convention, structure, and materiality in symbolic forms

Cognitive categories and symbolic boundaries

Schemas, frames, valuation, commensuration

Discursive fields, binary codes, narratives, and genres

Materiality and iconicity

Conclusion

3 Meaning and Interaction

Intention and reference in processes of meaning-making

Habitus and practice

Cultural repertoires and strategies of action

Idiocultures and subcultures

Group styles and scenes

Performance

Conclusion

4 Producing Meaning

The socio-historical context of meaning-making: beyond reflection theory

Cultural reproduction, change, and the problem of “articulation”

The production of culture

Cultural fields

Conclusion

5 Conclusion: Landscapes, Stages, and Fields

Foundations and presuppositions of cultural sociology

Landscapes, stages, and fields

Exploring the cultural sociology of What is Cultural Sociology?

What is missing from What is Cultural Sociology?

Debates and difference among cultural sociologists

Using the conceptual tools of cultural sociology

References

Index

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LYN SPILLMAN

I also thank Jonathan Skerrett, who motivated the project, Karina Jákupsdóttir, for her patience in seeing it through, and Justin Dyer, for his impressive copy-editing. The manuscript benefited from the comments of three anonymous reviewers. Michael Strand also offered helpful comments. Colleagues and students in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame create a stimulating environment for doing cultural sociology, and certainly enriched the picture presented here in many ways. Rebecca Overmyer provided enormous help by preserving time for this work among other responsibilities. Rachel Keynton, Robert Mowry, and Lilly Watermoon contributed essential background research at different stages of the project. I benefited from extended critical conversation on many of the topics included here with participants in my cultural sociology seminars. Especially fond thanks go to the seventy students who have worked with me over the years in preparation for advanced field examinations: I always finish our meetings feeling privileged by the opportunity. Russell Faeges helps in all these ways and many more and I thank him, too, for his sustained support.

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For Berger and Luckmann, structured patterns of social relations in groups are internalized by individuals in everyday life, and individuals then reproduce and sometimes change those patterns. For instance, an individual might internalize hierarchical family relations and then go on to live them out anew. Internalization is mediated by “signs” generated by surrounding social relations. So a child might understand family hierarchy through practical signs of interactional deference or explicit symbols of authority. This perspective on “the social construction of reality” synthesized disparate strands of social theory, from the macro to the micro – theories of objective social structure, theories of interaction, and phenomenological theories of subjective experience. Essentially, Berger and Luckmann offered a distinctively sociological vocabulary for understanding processes of meaning-making – in other words, for understanding “culture.”

So although sociologists were often vague about the concept of culture through the mid-twentieth century, they came to view what were essentially cultural processes through the lens of concepts like “ideology,” “collective conscience,” “interpretation,” and “the social construction of reality.” For some sociologists, the widespread acceptance of these ideas resolved uncertainties about analyzing culture. For many others, though, ideas like “the social construction of reality” were useful as signposts but opened more issues than they resolved. How does the dialectical social construction of reality operate in practice? What does this idea suggest about how to do sociological research on culture?

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