Research
What does it matter what human rights mean?
Kate Nash
The cultural politics of human rights disrupts taken-for-granted norms of national political life. Human rights activists are engaged in imagining the practical deconstruction of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens through which national states have been constituted. They envisage a world order of cosmopolitan states in which the rights of all, including non-citizens, would be fully respected. How likely is it that such a form of society might be realised through their activities? Is collective responsibility for human rights currently being shaped in cultural politics? If so how, and with what consequences? Download PDF»
American Pop Frankenstein? Andy Warhol, Iconic Experience and the Advent of the Pop Society
Steve Sherwood
Pop as a cultural phenomenon remains largely underappreciated and undertheorized. This article draws upon the classical work of Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life along with more contemporary theorists such as Jeffrey Alexander in attempting to acknowledge the creative dimension of American pop culture. Cultural critics on both the left and right, such as C. Wright Mills and Daniel Boorstin, saw the rise of the Pop Society as reflecting the trivialization of culture as well as the increasing “dumbing down” of the American public in favor of such things as the “cult of celebrity.” Rather than substance, its critics argued that the Pop Society was driven solely by the media and entertainment. While Andy Warhol has been largely viewed as an emblem of the “profane” aspects of American culture, I draw on recent work such as Elizabeth Currid’s The Warhol Economy to argue that the representation of Warhol, like the Pop Society, also has its “sacred” dimension. Pop and its icons can be both emancipatory and liberating and are a necessary dimension of any healthy civil society. Where critics see Warhol as a kind of Pop “Frankenstein,” a deeper appreciation of his work and Pop culture enables us to see him as the iconographer of the symbols that unite us. Download PDF»
The World Bank Engages With Faith Institutions: On The Need To Shift Gears
Carlo Tognato
In an effort to identify convergent agendas for cooperation, the World Bank has been engaging with faith institutions over different issues, such as the fight against poverty and diseases and the quest for a more humane approach to economic globalization. Cooperation, however, could run much deeper and give rise to much less contingent partnerships between the two parties. The purpose of this paper is to explain how. This will also allow me to show how major foundations that run programs on religion, culture and society as well as academia can work together with multilateral economic agencies to produce organizational change within the latter. Download PDF»
On the Cultural Macro-embeddedness of Money and Central Banking: A neo-Durkheimian Perspective
Carlo Tognato
In the course of the past few decades independent central banks have been regarded as one of the purest institutional distillates of modern rationality. Occasionally, however, and quite paradoxically, religious metaphors and narratives percolate into the monetary sphere and transform it. Within the sociological profession only Pierre Bourdieu has taken notice of such a phenomenon and has indirectly used Durkheim to tackle it. The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether a Durkheimian reading of monetary affairs is analytically suitable, to what extent it is so, and what implications it may have upon monetary studies. Download PDF»
Market Reenchantment and its Theoretical Significance
Carlo Tognato
The new economic sociology has traditionally conceived the market as a deculturalized and desocialized space. During the past three decades, however, a research tradition has developed that has progressively recovered the cultural and non-instrumental dimension of the market. This admits the possibility of a generalized phenomenon of reenchantment of a sphere that would allegedly be condemned to an inexorable disenchantment. Such a trend, though, has not pushed as far as recognizing that market reenchantment often takes up a religious form. The goal of this paper is to show that a systematic analysis of the religious reenchantment of the market can serve as a heuristic to push ahead the frontier of cultural analysis within the new economic sociology, particularly with reference to the study of the macro-cultural embeddedness of economic action and of the micro-macro link in the economy. Download PDF»
Looking “East:” An exploratory analysis of western disenchantment.
Timothy Phillips and Haydn Aarons
The marked presence of Eastern spiritual ideas in the religious imaginings of Western peoples is a significant feature of the faith landscapes of contemporary societies (King 1999). In particular, Confucius, Buddhism, meditation and yoga have attracted significant Western audiences (Pond 2003). A substantial body of writing has emerged to provide historical, biographical and instructional perspectives on the general phenomenon and divergent spiritual strands within it (Goldstein 2002; Prebish and Baumann 2002). Yet, to date there have been few dedicated sociological studies of the subject. Our aim here is to report the results of an exploratory quantitative sociological analysis of a group of Eastern spiritual practitioners in Australia. Download PDF »
What do Australians think about globalization? Public and personal dimensions.
Timothy Phillips and Robert Holton
Globalization in one shape or form continues to attract interest and engagement among citizens and scholars alike. Among citizens there is both hostility towards and support for different aspects of the multiple processes that go to make up globalization (Holton 2005), such as free trade, migration, and exchange of cultural ideas and practices (Bean 2002; Holton and Phillips 2001; Smith and Phillips 2006). Yet we still know very little about how far opinion is divided “for” or “against,” and whether this differs between men and women, young and old, richer and poorer, and a range of other social indicators. Nor do we know whether people welcome some features of globalization and dislike others. Finally it is also unclear how far attitudes about globalization, considered in the abstract, carry forward into, or are inconsistent with everyday behavior. Do Australians who are more positive about globalization, for example, actually participate in global processes, more than those who do not? Download PDF »
Structure, culture and community: The search for belonging in 50 urban communes.
Stephen Vaisey
Driven by the popularity of social capital theories, the concept of community has enjoyed a renaissance in sociology. Yet much research in this area relies on exclusively “structural” thinking, attributing group identification to mechanisms like the arrangement of physical space, power relations, or high investment requirements. Often neglected is a strand of theory that attributes gemeinschaft to shared moral order and culture. Using data from the Urban Communes Project, this paper directly tests the influence of both structural and cultural mechanisms in producing the the experience of community. The results show that while both structural and cultural mechanisms are correlated with high levels of gemeinschaft, the evidence supports the existence of shared moral order as the most likely proximate mechanism. Further analyses using a modified probabilistic form of Ragin’s Fuzzy Set Analysis, however, illustrate how culture and structure combine to sustain — or inhibit — the experience of community. Download PDF »
Beyond the code: New aesthetic methodologies for the sociology of the arts.
Sophia Krzys Acord
Current methodological approaches to the sociological study of art worlds have contributed to the abandonment of the artistic oeuvre from the sociology of the arts. It is time to redress this shortcoming and recover the particularity of the art work as a key, material factor in how social actors construct and experience the social world within an artistic space. Focusing on the study of curators as artistic gatekeepers, this article outlines a new visual methodology for the sociology of the arts which incorporates the use of audiovisual technology and running commentary to develop the interview as a collaborative process between informant and researcher. Download PDF »
Art and assassination as public performance.
Ron Eyerman
On November 2, 2004 the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed while cycling to work in the morning rush hour on a busy street in the heart of Amsterdam. His killer was clad in traditional Moroccan dress and the murder was carried out with the help of two knives, one for slitting the victim’s throat and the other for pinning a (five-page) note to his chest. Written in Dutch verse, the note contained an indictment of Western society and was addressed not to van Gogh but to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and member of the Dutch parliament and two other well-known politicians, one an outspoken right-winger and the other an Amsterdam alderman who, like Hirsi Ali was also a Muslim. In addition to being an outspoken proponent of Muslim women’s rights, Hirsi Ali had written the screen play for a short film directed by van Gogh… Download PDF »
Globalization as collective representation: The new dream of a cosmopolitan civil sphere.
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Paper presented at the University of Trento. By its friends and its enemies alike, globalization is hailed as a revolutionary, path-breaking, weltgesichte phenomenon. It is solving the world’s economic problems or condemning more and more of the world’s people to poverty. It creates equality and cooperation or deepends inequality and hegemonic domination. It opens the way for world peace or for a new and nightmarish period of terrorism and war… Download PDF »
Performance and counter-power: The civil rights movement and the civil sphere.
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Paper presented at Il Mulino, “The New Cultural Sociology,” Bologna. Sociologists have written much about the social forces that create conflict and polarize society, about the fragmenting structures and compelling powers of political, economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender groups. But they have said very little about the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of civic solidarity itself. They are generally silent about the sphere of “fellow feeling” — brotherly, sisterly and human feeling — that makes society into society and about the processes that fragment it… Download PDF »
Public intellectuals and civil society.
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Intellectuals are actors who can exercise judgment because they themselves are free floating, independent of particular commitments. They are defined as those motivated by such general categories as justice and truth. They make statements on behalf of humanity, in order to serve Rousseau’s general will, the real interests of which everyday actors, because they are prone to bias or irrationality, are not themselves consciously aware. Download PDF »
Performance and power.
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Forthcoming in Culture, the newsletter of the ASA’s Sociology of Culture Section. In this brief essay, I wish to approach the phenomenon of power from the perspective of “cultural pragmatics,” a new approach to social action as social performance. I am persuaded that this new understanding has large implications for theories of social structure and change. … Download PDF »