19
Cultural Sociology
Isaac Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander
A foundational principle of cultural sociology is that meaning is relational – that
the meanings of symbols, words, tropes, metaphors, ideologies, and so on emerge
in concert and contrast to other meanings of social import. This is as true of the
terms “culture” and “cultural sociology” as it is of anything else. In particular, cultural
sociology in its current use and meaning emerges both diachronically in contrast
to the humanities, anthropology and the sociology of culture, and synchronically
in relation to the core sociological terms of structure, action, and critique.
FROM THE HUMANITIES TO CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY, VIA THE
SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE
The old-fashioned definition of culture, which had as its institutional locus the
humanities departments of elite Western universities in the early and mid-twentieth
century, referred to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought
and said.” Culture was, according to this definition, intellectual and artistic activity
and the artifacts produced by this activity, and to have culture was to possess the
ability to interpret these artifacts, and the taste to distinguish the good ones from
the bad ones. Simultaneously, Western anthropology developed a totalizing concept
of culture that was expected to do the comparative work of differentiating the
peoples of the world. Culture was thus the counterpoint to the concept of “human
nature” which formed the subject of physical anthropology.
Over and against these definitions, the sociology of culture has developed a more
nuanced, and more critical, account of the role of the symbolic and the artistic in
society. The pretensions of the humanities’ definition of culture, and the construction
of the literary, dramatic, and musical canon that went along with it, were revealed
as the tools of social exclusion and the maintenance of hierarchy. Furthermore, by
carefully examining the aesthetics of both popular cultural artifacts, and the creative
cultural activities of classes, races, and genders traditionally excluded from the realm
The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory Edited by Bryan S. Turner
© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-16900-4
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 379
of high arts production and appreciation, the sociology of culture has been essential
to the deconstruction of the high/middle/lowbrow culture typology. Meanwhile,
historical sociology has shown the connections between the anthropological imagination
and various nationalist and colonialist projects of nineteenth-century Europe,
whereby the totalizing concept of culture was complicit in the exoticization and
simultaneous subordination and colonization (and sometimes extermination) of
native populations. Extensive debates about the political valences and historical
guilt of the concept of culture have ensued. But perhaps more importantly for
ongoing empirical research, sociologists have found the anthropological concept of
culture to be underspecified; for sociology, differentiating culture from nature is not
enough. Rather, culture must be defined in relation to society, history, and individual
psychology, and, furthermore, the differentiation between culture and nature must
be itself be examined historically with an eye towards its varying social effects (many
anthropologists have also come to this conclusion). Thus while sociology has drawn
extensively on symbolic, structuralist, and linguistic anthropology for its own studies
of culture, it has resisted the temptation to directly conflate culture with the social
as such, and the culture/society distinction has been a productively unstable one.
In approaching culture as a social object of study, then, the sociology of culture
forms a sub-field alongside the sociology of religion and the sociology of science,
and takes within its purview both high literature and pulp fiction, Fellini films and
Hollywood schlock, art music and rock “n” roll. With the advent of the production
of culture perspective in the 1970s, centered around the work of Richard Peterson,
and the concepts of field and cultural capital, drawn from the work of Pierre
Bourdieu, this sub-field has gained both empirical purchase and theoretical sophistication.
In taking culture as its object of study, however, the sociology of culture
tends to bring to bear both methods and theories which were designed for the study
of other sociological phenomena, and tends, still, towards the inclination that social
structure and the actions of individuals can be used explain culture, as opposed to
the other way around. This is the basic meaning of “reduction” which, by tracing
culture’s “reflection,” “mediation,” “expression,” “determination by,” “isomorphism
with,” or “homologous relation to” deeper and more real social networks,
class tensions, or material realities, explains culture and gives the sociology of
culture its name.
Yet the sociology of culture so constituted begs certain questions, and remains
theoretically incomplete, and it is in the encounter with this incompleteness that
one finds the origins of cultural sociology. Why are social actors so interested in
cultural artifacts in the first place, as opposed to other, functional equivalent, status
markers? Does the role of culture in modern and late capitalistic societies exceed
its use as a tool for buying and selling, and status differentiation? Despite their
suspicions about how modern rationality emptied the world of meaning, both
Durkheim and Weber had moments where they viewed the construction and use of
social meaning as the most basic social process in all societies, and Marx made clear
in his passage on commodity fetishism that the supposed difference between a
“civilized” Englishman and an African “savage” was an illusion – both worshiped
at the altar of something that, for them, gave life meaning.
It is thus that cultural sociology emerges from the opposition between the humanities
and the sociology of culture to offer both a concrete and an analytic definition
380 ISAAC REED & JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
of culture. Concretely, culture refers to those social objects and activities which are
primarily or exclusively symbolic in their intent or social function, such as art,
music, and sports. Analytically, culture refers to the symbolic and ideational element
of any social action, social relationship, or historical pattern. Culture is signifiers
and their signifieds, gestures and their interpretation, intended and unintended
meanings, written discourse and effective speech, situational framing and scientific
paradigms, moral and political ideals, and so on. The methodologies for studying
culture so conceived range widely, and include surveys of attitudes and beliefs, participant
observation, ethnography, structured and unstructured interviews, textual
analysis of written and visual media, and conversation analysis. Ultimately, however,
all of these methods involve the interpretation of meaning, and thus cannot be
mapped directly from the methods of the natural sciences, though the extent to
which scientific methods can be adapted to the study of culture is a matter of significant
dispute.
What must be remembered, however, is that non-reductionist cultural sociology
remains interested, ultimately, in the explanation of social action – it is not a return
to the full, un-ironic engagement of aesthetics, and it is not a version of de gustibus
non est disputandum (on this, see Born, forthcoming). The point is not to give up
on the explanation of taste – or on the explanation of any other social phenomenon
– but rather to approach this task of explanation from a perspective that makes
meaning central, and refuses to set the relationship of meaning to society in advance
as one in which real interests, structures, and opportunities drive the ephemeral
imaginations of those who interpret culture.
This brings us the central terms of sociological theory in relation to which cultural
sociology defines itself, and which, in its more ambitious theoretical moments, it
attempts to reform: structure, action, and critique.
CULTURE AS STRUCTURE
Repeatedly in sociological theory and research, culture is distinguished from social
structure. Talcott Parsons distinguished the cultural from the social system in a
strictly analytic fashion (his student Niklas Luhmann would later claim that this
should in fact be a concrete distinction). And Parsons suggested that the study of
culture in all its symbolic elaborations could be left to anthropology, and that sociology
could focus on the place where culture and social structure met, namely, on
the institutionalization of values and norms. Structural functionalism suggested that
culture, through normative interpenetration, could perform an integrative function
in the service of social equilibrium, and thus that social change came with a breakdown
in value consensus (as in Chalmers Johnson’s theory of social revolution).
These assertions were subjected to relentless attack for suppressing the role of
strife and domination in society (and in the use of culture). However, it is perhaps
more instructive, now, to notice a deeper problem with structural functionalism,
namely its interpretive deafness. By approaching culture as “norms and values,”
structural functionalism not only projected certain liberal ideals onto its model of
society, but, more significantly, evacuated meaning from culture, robbing its analysis
of nuance and empirical specificity. For, an engagement with the multiple layers of
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the symbolic immediately reveals that culture in modern societies is neither homogenous
nor consensual. Rather, the size and makeup of collectivities that share certain
symbolic articulations vary significantly (from small religious cults to large voting
populations), and these symbolic articulations are contested both within and without
collectivities.
Mid-century Marxism and post-1960s conflict theory insisted that culture was
more of a guarantor of hierarchy, exploitation, and inequality, and thus saw culture
as ideology. And though the political commitments and theoretical presuppositions
of conflict theory were fundamentally at odds with those of Parsonian functionalism,
one can discern in the studies of the objective basis of systematically distorted
communication, and in references the political and economic functions of ideology,
very similar problems to those that plagued the structural-functional approach. Here
too, culture is assumed to be relatively uniform, at least in its social effects, and its
study is guided by theoretical intuitions about the workings of the social system,
and in particular the exploitation of labor. Thus Marxist repudiations of culture as
ideology also suffered from a lack of musicality, and inattention to the empirical
details of culture’s varied production, performance, and reception.
In both cases, these problems were exacerbated by imagining social structures as
hard, real, and external to the actor, in opposition to culture as a more pliable and
less efficacious possession of individual minds. Furthermore, both structural functionalism
and Marxism were embedded in teleological philosophies of history and
social evolution that enabled them to locate the appropriate relations between social
structure and culture in an a priori theoretical manner. As these teleologies came to
be seen as more the meaningful, ideational constructions of sociologists’ own cultures
than ontological certainties about actual societies, the strict scientific distinction
between social structure and culture began to break down, as did the various
conceptions of their relationship. This breakdown created an opening for sociology
to develop the tools necessary for a more sensitive and empirically sophisticated
approach to culture in its collective forms. This has been accomplished by studying
culture as a structure in its own right, a theoretical development that has taken three
central forms.
The study of symbolic boundaries, associated with the work of Michele Lamont
(Money, Morals and Manners, 1994), has shown how actors construct and maintain
meanings as a mode of ordering, including, and excluding their fellow humans, over
and against the exigencies of social structure. Thus, the economic basis for class is
overwritten by an attribution of certain moral qualities to certain humans, based
on criteria (including religion, race, and so forth) that may cross-cut the expectations
of more reductively minded sociologists who would map class consciousness directly
onto economic position, and so on.
The study of discourse and its relationship to power, based on the pioneering
work of Michel Foucault, has enabled sociologists to examine not only articulated
boundaries, but also unstated exclusions, and more generally the cultural construction
of certain taken-for-granted “positivities” of modern life. Thus one can examine
from a reflexive historical perspective how certain kinds human subjects (for
example, insane people and medical patients) and social problems (for example,
homosexuality) came to be of such great concern, and how their meaningful construction
affected the way they were dealt with, inside and outside of mainstream
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society. Though Foucault’s work has been largely appropriated in the humanities as
a set of theorems concerning power and knowledge more appropriate to critical
theory than to empirical sociology, his early studies of madness, medicine, and the
episteme of the classical and modern ages are in fact rich historical reconstructions
of landscapes’ meaning, and their essential role in the social processes of treatment,
exclusion, and philosophical understanding. These issues are developed in Foucault’s
Madness and Civilization (1988 [1964]) and in Mukerji (1990).
Finally, the conception of culture as a structure in its own right has enabled the
sociological transformation of a set of tools from literary theory and semiotics.
Culture can be studied as a social text, replete with codes, narratives, genres, and
metaphors. Then, culture can be examined in both its concrete and analytic autonomy
from social structure, which enables us to isolate and make clear its effects
(and its varying political valences) from a sociological point of view. So, for example,
the long struggle for women’s rights in the United States can be seen as a discursive
battle for civil inclusion, according to which a new set of actors came to be coded
in a democratic and morally positive way (see Alexander 2006). This conception of
culture suggests, moreover, that social structures themselves are interpreted variably
by social actors, and thus must be attended to hermeneutically by cultural sociologists,
with an eye to their meaningful aspects, their locality, and their historical
specificity (see Alexander 2003; Geertz 1973).
Culture in action
Since culture is often contrasted to social structure, and furthermore associated with
subjectivity, then it should not be surprising that it has often been erroneously conflated
with action and its related terms: agency, reflexivity, and consciousness.
However, as culture has become recognized as a structure in its own right, the relationship
of culture to action has become a key component of sociological theory
and research. The ongoing debate about culture and action has its roots in two different
sociological traditions, both of which contribute to contemporary cultural
sociology. On the one hand, the analytic tradition, descending from Parsons’s formalization
of Max Weber’s means–ends approach to action, approached culture in
terms of the ways culture sets the ends of action. Action is thus structured not only
by interests, but by norms as well. Originally opposed to economistic accounts of
social action, the strictly analytic approach to purposive action has been revived in
contemporary sociological debates about agency and rationality. But a deeper understanding
of the role of culture for action has been developed from within this tradition
by recognizing culture as an internal environment for action, arguing thus that
culture orients action by structuring subjectivity. Social actors respond to sets of
internal typifications of the social world and thus are dependent upon meaningful
symbolization in setting their goals, and in imagining how they can go about
meeting them. By reintroducing the symbolic as an environment of action full of
rich narratives and morally and emotionally loaded oppositions, this approach
integrates the expanded approach to culture-as-structure elaborated above.
On the other hand, the pragmatic tradition, descending from George Herbert
Mead and Herbert Blumer, rejects the means–ends characterization of action
outright, and suggests instead that actors constantly negotiate situations in an
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 383
improvisatory way, attempting to make sense of and solve both social and physical
problems as they arise. Originally, because of its distance from the analytic abstractions
of the Parsonian tradition, and its tendency towards methodological individualism,
this tradition was not really oriented towards culture per se, though it had a
conception of the use of symbols and framing on the micro level. Increasingly,
however, the descendants of this tradition have developed a conception of cultureas-use
that conceives of the knowledgeable agent as the link between culture and
society. It is actors, in social situations, that draw on culture when institutional
consistency breaks down.
Thus the contemporary debate is structured by two positions, that of culture-inaction
(illustrated in Swidler 1986), and that of culture as thick environment for
action (see Alexander 1988). Both approaches have significant insights to offer. The
first emphasizes that actors continually work to render coherent and solvable discursive
and institutional problems that arise in the flow of social life. The second
emphasizes the way in which the social world is constructed for the actor by previous
interpretations and collective languages. In either case, these approaches suggest
the importance of culture for the study of social life. For example, we should
perhaps discuss the discursive repertoires of politicians, and the resonance of these
repertoires with the shared codes of their audience-electorates, as opposed to the
“revealed preferences” of either. The contrasts between the two approaches have,
however, produced significantly different forms of theory and research.
One important manifestation of the symbolic interactionist tradition has been
Gary Fine’s development of the concept of idiocultures, whereby small groups
develop an idiosyncratic set of meanings (beliefs, knowledge, and customs) that
forms the basis for mutual understanding and further interaction and action. Thus
cooks in various classes of restaurants develop an aesthetic language that enables
them to communicate with each other concerning the manifestly practical problems
of smell and taste.
Alternately, Robin Wagner-Pacifici has developed the concept of social drama
within the more analytic tradition of action and its environments, so as to enable
the study of social situations where symbolic and physical violence interact. In
studying terrorist kidnappings, standoffs between government and its discontents,
and surrenders, she develops a deep understanding of morally loaded environments
for action. When the social fabric is breached, actors must work within certain
dramatic frameworks, and with certain obtainable identities. Thus, in a standoff
between the Freemen of Montana and the US government, it was a mediator who
had fought in Vietnam and, like some of the leaders of the Freemen, had formed
his core identity in the crucible of that experience and its subsequent narration who
was able bridge the symbolic gap between the antagonists. Action was deeply structured
by the symbolic environments of traumatic memory and the enactment of
masculinity.
The specificity of the kinds of meanings that are enacted, however, points to both
the possible misinterpretations of the relationship between action and culture, and
to the way forward in the theoretical debate. For the exclusive emphasis on culture
as it is used by actors can support the naturalistic approach to social structure and
thus an understanding of culture as unstructured and primarily the possession of
individuals. In this conception, it is meaning-less institutions that set the parameters
384 ISAAC REED & JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
of the action problem, and culture is merely the way actors make sense of things
as they are solving it, perhaps important for filling out an explanation, but not
essential to it. The environments to action approach is faced with a similar danger,
for insofar as it retains vestiges of Parsons’s action frame of reference, it can be
taken to indicate that sociology can produce, in theory alone, a mechanistic explanation
of the interaction of norms and interests that will apply everywhere, regardless
of cultural differences.
Perhaps most significantly, it is important that action theory be prevented from
becoming a sort of existential meditation on the capacities (or incapacities) of
human freedom, rather than a way to examine the social contingencies of actually
existing meaning. If the knowledgeable agent becomes a sort of philosophical and
methodological hero, whose reflexivity about her location in structure ultimately
makes her the master of the cultural formations in her head, then the sociological
purpose of examining cultural structures is vitiated, as collective meaning formations
melt away in the face of agency and knowledge as developed by Anthony
Giddens in The Constitution of Society (1984).
Thus the way forward in the action-culture debates lies in the development of a
meaning-full account of action through a theorization of social performance, by
linking action theory to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology and Kenneth
Burke’s literary theory, but also Judith Butler’s reconception of the poststructuralist
tradition of social thought. By thinking of social situations of varying scope (from
small group interactions to media events watched by millions) as dramas being
played out on a public stage, with certain actors and audiences, props and social
powers, emergent scripts and cultural backgrounds, we can conceive of the exigencies
of social action in a thoroughly cultural way that does not reduce meaning to
social structure. Action, then, is the putting into scene of certain intended and
unintended meanings. This is to say that the theorization of action not only has to
take into account cultural structures, but must further focus on how actions are
themselves interpretations of these structures, and thus responds to logics of meaning
and identity underneath the interests and norms that were once supposed to do the
work of explaining them; this argument is developed in Alexander, Giesen, and Mast
2006.
CULTURE AND CRITIQUE
The sociologically inspired critique of culture used to be based almost entirely on
references to the social as existing outside of culture itself. It was thus diametrically
opposed to the sense of criticism associated with the detailed reading of the literary
canon, and with humanistic studies more generally. The obvious exception was
Marxist literary criticism, in particular that of Georg Lukács and Raymond
Williams, which entered into literary texts themselves to find the logics of ideology.
While their work foreshadowed the development of cultural studies, it remained
nonetheless within the discourse of suspicion about culture, usually understood as
bourgeois culture (and its discontents). This, in the course of twentieth-century
criticism and the invention of cultural studies, was expanded into the study of the
many varieties of hegemonic culture, to the point where Gramsci’s term was no
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 385
longer associated with a specifically Marxist perspective, but rather used as the
touchstone of cultural criticism from the perspective of almost any dominated or
oppressed social group.
There is, in this form of cultural study, a deep and ongoing tension between the
process of debunking ideology, and the more diffuse and obscure process of “deconstruction.”
The latter term – taken from Derrida but usually combined with a Foucauldian
analysis of power/knowledge – has, at times, produced an overarching
suspicion of all norms and normalcy, and indeed the very process of making normative
claims about how society should be ordered. This has had a strange effect on
the academic left, introducing a strand of extreme skepticism which would be
entirely incomprehensible to Marxists with a strong sense of the utopian promise
of revolution. In reforming the project of critique, cultural sociology attempts to
avoid this aspect of the postmodern turn.
Instead, cultural sociology aims to connect the normative orientation towards
democracy, social inclusion, and the critique of power with the interpretation of
cultures, asking what the basis is, in extant social meaning, for the improvement of
the conditions under which humans live together. The project of hermeneutics, once
associated with the conservative aesthetic hierarchies of the German philosophical
tradition, can now be seen as a rich source of critique in a post-positivist and postorthodox-Marxist
age, as exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer. The epistemological
implication of his work is that sociological critique must abandon its
pseudo-scientific assumption of an exterior stance or view from nowhere, and
develop critical distance through extensive engagement, dialog, and interpretation.
Thereby, critical perspectives on contemporary societies will share some of the
empirical purchase of cultural sociology, and will attend to the communicability of
new normative understandings of justice and equality. More generally, insofar as
sociological critique is no longer beholden to scientific certainty, revolutionary
upheaval, and the genre of debunking, its normative repertoire of critical tropes,
subtle ironies, and imagined ideals can be expanded (for a fuller version of this
argument, see Reed 2007).
THE CULTURAL TURN IN SOCIOLOGY:
EMPIRICAL MANIFESTATIONS
Ultimately, then, the theoretical reorientation implied by cultural sociology has
enabled sociologists to approach a variety of sub-fields of empirical research from
a different perspective. This is what is known as “the cultural turn.” Though the
end goal is often the same – the explanations of sets of patterned social actions – the
means to that end now involve ferreting out the varied meanings of a dominant
discourse, examining the signification systems embodied in rituals, and asking how
social life is lived according to symbolic frameworks.
Sociology’s ongoing preoccupation with modernity, and the history of state formation,
has led to a focus on the constitution of nations as collective identities. In
explaining economic takeoff in western Europe, the consolidation of the power of
states, and the emergence and importance of democratic publics and the free press,
sociologists have increasingly focused on the construction of nations as “imagined
386 ISAAC REED & JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
communities” and “discursive fields,” and nationalism as “a unique form of
social consciousness” (for example in Anderson 1991; Greenfeld 2007 [1992];
Spillman 1997).
The sociology of sex and gender has likewise experienced a cultural overhaul.
While feminist and queer theory have questioned the naturalness of the sex/gender
distinction, sociological research has examined the effects of actually existing cultural
schemas of gender and sex for social outcomes, including family structure,
women’s tendency to join or opt out of the workforce, and the ongoing existence
of sexism in wage levels and status attainment. These studies examine gender as
both a highly rigid structure of meaning, but also its varying enactment by women
and men who attempt to negotiate the political and economic contradictions of
modern society (for instance in Blair-Loy 2003; Hays 1996; Stacy 1990).
Finally, sociology’s longstanding normative concern with democracy and its
incipient populism has also taken a cultural turn. For example, analyses of American
political participation and activism have investigated how certain meanings either
enable or discourage civic participation. The results have often been counterintuitive:
doctrines of individual empowerment encourage activity and public responsibility,
while norms of civility and politeness discourage political conversation and
involvement which is developed in Eliasoph (1998) and Lichterman (1996).
REINTERPRETING THE CLASSICS
Culture has thus moved towards the center of sociological discourse, as both a topic
of study and a perspective from which to view the social. As reinterpretation is a
primary form of theoretical advance, the perhaps predictable result of this has been
that, simultaneously, the classics of social theory have come to be seen in a new
light. New readings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim have
emerged.
While all twentieth-century Marxisms have given more importance to culture
and ideology than did the crude economic Marxist orthodoxy that followed Marx’s
death, the turn to culture in the 1960s and 1970s is evident in the increasing attention
given to Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital, as well as to the
importance of the early, humanist, and perhaps even idealist-Hegelian, Marx. Either
way, Marx is read as attentive to the capacity of meaning as a social force. One
important result of this has been the way structuralist and poststructuralist theories
of language have merged with Marxist historiography to produce a central thesis
concerning postmodernism, namely that the postmodern age is one in which the
workings of capitalism are increasingly dependent on signifiers as well as signifieds,
that is, on the relational field of social symbolism. These approaches are illustrated
in Jameson (1992) and Baudrillard (1981 [1972]).
Likewise, the last 40 years have seen a recovery of Weber’s sociology of art, as
well as continuing debate over The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
However, most significantly, the concern with culture has also entered in to Weberian
debates about the consolidation of state power and the institutionalization of
rational bureaucracy. Here, sociologists have increasingly read Weber as a hermeneutic
student of rationality as cultural form specific to Western history. In doing
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 387
so, Weber’s concerns are read as not so different from Foucault’s, and bureaucracy
is less a mechanism to be uncovered than a form of symbolic action to be interpreted.
This interpretation is developed in Gorski (2003).
Finally, the cultural turn in sociology has seen a renaissance and reconsideration
of Durkheim later works, and in particular, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(1912). This work has come to be seen as a key prolegomenon to the symbolic study
of society as general project, including to the study of the role of culture in modern,
industrial societies. Durkheim is thus read as uncomfortable with the materialist
interpretations given to The Division of Labor in Society and as having made a key
epistemic break in the years between the publication of Suicide and Elementary
Forms (see Alexander 1986). As a result, Durkheim can be seen as a precursor to
cultural structuralism in his emphasis on the autonomy of symbolic forms, and the
importance of belief and ritual for the organization of society.
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY: “NEW CLASSICS”
Another aspect of this process of reinterpretation has been the emergence of new
classic texts, required reading for any cultural sociologist. Though the cultural
sociological canon, if there is one, is a dynamic and expanding group of texts, here
we mention three.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s essay, “The Construction of the Historical World in the Human
Sciences” (1976) marked the author’s departure from psychologism and entry into
the study of meaning as itself a structure. It thus sets the stage for twentieth-century
hermeneutics, and, eventually, for cultural sociology itself. Dilthey begins from
German Romanticism’s emphasis on the internal self and the complexities of subjective
experience, and thus rejects any equation of the social and natural sciences. But
he also rejects the notion that the human sciences and the interpretation of history
are thus doomed to be unsystematic and arbitrary in their conclusions. Rather, he
suggests that the interpretation of society and history must look towards the shared,
background meanings which make individual subjectivity and experience possible,
and that these meanings will contain the key to producing explanations of historical
events and social phenomena.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1998) provided the essential
tools for the task Dilthey had set. In his structural theory of language, linguistic
signs are divisible into signifier and signified, and meaning is determined relationally
and is thus “arbitrary and conventional.” Saussure’s ideas on language – already
intended, in his writings, to describe processes of symbolization more broadly –
became the basis for structural anthropology, and more generally, the theoretical
movements of structuralism and poststructuralism. Saussure’s theory of meaning
provides cultural sociology with the ability to study chains of signification empirically,
and thus map in detail the collective representations to which Durkheim
attributed so much force.
The essays collected in Clifford Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures (1973) brought
Saussure’s and Dilthey’s insights together, and helped launch the contemporary cultural
turn. Geertz’s controversial concept of “thick description” articulated the
methodological inclination of cultural sociology to get inside actors’ meanings. But
388 ISAAC REED & JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
it was what Geertz brought to his own efforts at thick description which expanded
indefinitely the scope of cultural sociology. Geertz was able to use the concepts of
humanistic and aesthetic criticism – such as genre, trope, metaphor, etc. – to describe
social phenomena such as sporting events, the performance of state power, and
religion. In his later work, Geertz suggested that this effort represented a “blurring”
of genres of academic writing – between literary criticism and anthropology, for
example. This may be so. But what Geertz’s work also suggested was a new, selfsustaining,
and coherent genre of sociological writing, in which the tools of criticism
were put to a different, and distinctly sociological use, namely, the development of
understanding for the purpose of social explanation.
FURTHER THEORETICAL QUESTIONS FOR CULTURAL
SOCIOLOGY: REFRAMING “INTERPRETATION”
As a burgeoning paradigm for empirical research, cultural sociology – which began
as an argument against the reductionisms of the sociology of culture and the cynicism
of Marxist literary criticism – must confront its own positive knowledge claims,
rather than rest content as a counterpoint or “alternative” to the mainstream sociological
instinct to be suspicious of culture. This is to say that, in the future, cultural
sociology must come to a fuller self-understanding, through an examination of the
epistemologically and methodologically fraught term interpretation.
First, cultural sociology must provide a self-consistent account of the role of the
investigator in social analysis. Though most cultural sociologists accept neither scientific
norms nor postmodern normlessness as the parameters for their truth claims,
what norms they do accept is an important issue to discuss in the abstract. In particular,
it seems clear that sociologists want the meanings they reconstruct to be
translatable, so that cultural comparison is possible, so as to perceive more clearly
the varied relationships of meaning in action. Thus even single case studies or ethnographies
implicitly contain a comparison, at least to the investigator’s own meaningful
social contexts, and this comparative consciousness forms an important basis
for the development of theory and research in cultural sociology. Thinking along
these lines intersects with advances in the sociology of knowledge, and in particular
with the sociology of science in the form of the “strong program” associated with
David Bloor.
The second question concerns how forms of interpretation common to cultural
sociology may apply outside the domain of what is either analytically or concretely
called culture. A lot of work within poststructuralist theory has examined the symbolic
and discursive basis for what sociologists are more likely to call social structure,
namely, institutional formations, social sanction and exclusion, and even
violence, as argued in Butler (1989). The extent to which these aspects of social life
can actually be explored empirically, however, remains to be explored in terms of
the philosophy of social science. Thus, for example, we need to ask how even the
reconstruction of political strategies and economic exigencies involves the interpretation
of highly reified and strictly executed meaning.
Finally, cultural sociology – which frequently claims the importance of local knowledge,
the contingency of interpretation, and the constructedness of social reality over
CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 389
and against the more standard forms of social structural analysis – must come to terms
with the historical dimension of sociological analysis. Both “culture” and “history”
are terms which, in academic discourse, tend to be used to defy the universalist claims
of sociological theories that aspire to scientific status. Thus it is not surprising that
many of their theoretical concerns and epistemological quandaries overlap. History,
as a profession, has taken on board – to a certain degree – the claims of culture. Cultural
sociology, likewise, should take on the great problems of comparative-historical
sociology – the transition to modernity, the origins and maintenance of capitalism,
the nature of the colonial encounter, the causes of social revolutions – which have for
so long been comprehended under the aegis of political economy.
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