M. Jacobs – The Blackwell Companion To The Sociology Of Culture

Автор: M. Jacobs
Название книги: The Blackwell Companion To The Sociology Of Culture
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Политология и Социология
Страницы: 520
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This collection of original, state-of-the-art essays by prominent international scholars covers the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture.
Provides an invaluable reference resource to all interested in the cultural structures and processes that animate contemporary life
Contains 27 essays on the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture, including art, science, religions, race, class, gender, collective memory, institutions, and citizenship
Reflects and analyzes the “cultural turn” that has transformed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.

The ‘‘cultural turn’’ of the past few decades has reconceptualized ‘‘culture,’’ even
while making it the central focus of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.
It rejected, among older theories of culture, the Parsonian conception that
culture comprised a relatively consensual system of values and norms that provided
evaluative grounding for the other subsystems of action. The varied proponents of
the cultural turn objected to this and other conceptions for a number of reasons. Its
emphasis on internalization of objective structures restricted possibilities for human
agency. It ignored the full range of human subjectivities, even while essentializing
categories of status distinction. The theory seemed to describe a cultural system too
closed to accommodate the burgeoning definition of identity differences or the
urgent need for dramatic social change.
Taking the diffusion of cultural authority in contemporary societies as its premise,
the cultural turn embraced a more pluralistic conception of culture, one that recognizes
variations in social and individual experience and expresses commitment to
values of equality and tolerance. As more people of different types are recognized as
cultural actors, the position of culture within society and the terms of its analysis
have been transformed. Culture comes to be seen not primarily as a distinct or
overarching system of belief, but as something more pervasive and integral to
everyday life – indeed, as the very medium of lived experience. The cultural turn,
however, reopens the two overriding problematics that older conceptions of culture
had once seemed to resolve: how to maintain social solidarity amidst the celebration
of difference, and how to ground normative evaluation of action amidst the decline
of cultural authority.
The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture demonstrates both the
promise of the cultural turn and the outlines of a path for moving beyond it. Taken
together, the 28 original essays collected in this volume constitute a cutting edge of
the sociology of culture. The volume is framed by consideration of theoretical issues
central to the cultural turn: agency and structure, constructivism and essentialism,
system and difference. Successive sections in the volume explore the operation of culture as cultural systems and as processes of meaning-construction in everyday
life; as axes of group identity and of collective memory; as the animating energy of
institutions and of local, national, and global citizenship. This body of inquiry across
such a broad spectrum of substantive topics reveals, unsurprisingly, significant
variation in ideas and methods. Emergent from these essays, however, is a new
approach to the problematics created by the cultural turn – a gathering reconceptualization
of culture that starts to define a basis of solidarity in the very recognition
of difference, as well as a new basis for evaluative judgment in the absence of
prescriptive cultural authority. This newly emerging conception of culture is an
aesthetic one, which offers possibilities for intensifying and re-imagining the experience
of civic life.