Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) provides a focus for meaning-centered analysis in the social science tradition. The CCS incorporates scholars from diverse backgrounds, sharing an interest in understanding how culture informs and structures social life and its problems. Read more »
The Armed Forces in Transformation: Organisation and Culture
Anthony King has been studying the armed forces since 2003. The two papers – one on commemoration and one on the organisational transformation of Europe’s headquarters – grow out of this work. The papers examine two very different but potentially interrelated changes in military operations. Read more »
See Jeffrey Alexander’s recent article, “On the Autonomy of the Aesthetic: Witkin I versus Witkin II” and the reply by CCS Faculty Fellow Robert Witkin online at Music and Arts in Action (MAiA)
The Cultural Organisation of the Undead:
Haitian Voodoo, Life-Death Liminality and the Social Uses of the Zombie
Most representations of zombies occur in the realm of popular fictions. But what happens when the undead escape from the confines of popular culture and enter into realms where their presence is regarded as unwanted intrusion and uncanny intervention? What transgressions occur when the zombie leaves the world of horror films and dime-novels, and starts to stalk the halls of academia?
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The Hermeneutical Approach in the ‘Subjective Critique’
This paper is the first of a series of three papers I wrote advocating the hermeneutical approach. The other two are titled “The hermeneutical dialogue and the empiricist and (post-) structualist notions of objectivity” and “The linguistic base, some concrete theoretical images, and the special value for Chinese self-conscious social sciences of the hermeneutical approach.”
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Round Up the Unusual Suspects: Some Thoughts About Future Directions of Collective Memory Studies
Dear CCS fellow travelers,
I’m attaching recent samples of my work that will be published soon. One is a piece about silence (to be published in Social Forces) and the other one is the introduction to my new book Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (State University of New York Press). The good news for this week’s session is that you don’t have to read either of these (although feedbacks and comments are always welcome).
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Revolutionary Trauma and Representation of the War: the Case of China in Mao’s Era
For millions of Chinese who had the misfortune to live during the span of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), their personal experience must have been unbearably traumatic and painful. During the 8 years of the war, China lost three million lives in combat, and the civilian casualties is estimated to be about twenty million. And the heinous nature of the war atrocity committed by the invading army must have left indelible marks on memories and consciousness of millions of war victims, of which the Nanking Massacre and the crimes of No. 731 Special Forces are but two particularly atrocious cases. Such massively shared suffering and injustice, however, as vivid as it must have been in each war victims’ minds, remained ultimately private and individual: for many years after the building of the new state, it seldom if ever, found its way into the public sphere of expression.
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Sociology Of Knowledge, Intellectual History, Conceptual History: A Discussion
This paper takes a critical look at the argumentation and claims of the sociology of knowledge from Mannheim to Bourdieu and how it relates (or better doesn’t relate) to competing strong programs such as Cambridge-style intellectual history and (mainly) German-based conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte).
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