American Journal of Cultural Sociology最新文献

While not particularly popular or well-known in anglophone sociology or even cultural sociology, there seems to be a renaissance of Luhmann’s work. This essay discusses three recent books on and from Luhmann, which cover the famous Habermas–Luhmann debate, give us a taste of what can been called Luhmann’s empirical cultural sociology and, finally, discuss his theory of society. I will place these books in the context of contemporary cultural sociology, with a focus on the strong program and civil sphere theory. There are a few things that cultural sociologists can learn from Luhmann’s work as well as from works on Luhmann—without having to become disciples ourselves. This includes also more general lessons about theorizing and how we should incorporate insights from other theoretical frameworks. I advocate a pragmatic and eclectic approach to Luhmann’s work, which needs to be rescued from the hands of his most orthodox followers. Finally, I urge my fellow cultural sociologists to follow Luhmann in his ambition to develop a fully-fledged theory of society. The last years have shown that a truly cultural sociology is possible—maybe the next years will show that a cultural sociological theory of society is possible too.

When and how do collective traumas and victimhood narratives lead to exclusionary and antagonistic outcomes? Through the empirical examination of how the never-implemented Sèvres Treaty of 1920 has become a central trauma in Turkish political culture, this article demonstrates that when the collective traumas emerge as “trauma of victimization,” the outcome will likely be exclusionary and antagonistic. Trauma of victimization emerges when groups situate historical traumas and injustices at the center of their identity and their interpretation of contemporary events either in the role of “tragic victim” or “victimized hero.” The article examines how the Sevres Treaty first emerged as a symbolic national trauma in dichotomous relation to the triumph of the new nation-state and later transformed into the trauma of victimization when the media, political, and state actors connected the contemporary events to the Sèvres threat first in the role of tragic victim and later in the role of victimized hero. It proposes that the framework of “trauma of victimization” provides a more nuanced understanding of not only the Sèvres narrative but also the rise of historical victimhood narratives in right-wing populist and authoritarian movements and regimes.

How does socioeconomic status relate to the self-narratives youth craft in higher education? This article examines in-depth interviews with 96 students at a broad-access public university to illuminate how narratives of the transition to adulthood are shaped by socioeconomic inequality among youth who enroll in the same postsecondary institution. Although most students across backgrounds agreed that they were “not yet adults,” there were differences in the ways they described their paths to adulthood. Less socioeconomically advantaged students characterized their journeys as stalled, focusing on difficulties obtaining traditional markers of adulthood. These participants struggled to incorporate college experiences into their narratives and engaged in self-deprecation and self-blame. Meanwhile, more socioeconomically advantaged students highlighted personal growth in college to portray themselves as individuals with potential, who were positioned for future success. These findings provide unique insight into higher education’s role in cultural reproduction and have implications for students’ opportunities transitioning to postbaccalaureate life.

Previous studies hypothesize that countries discriminate between refugee groups of different backgrounds depending on cultural similarity to the host population and whether they flee from a rivaling regime. We argue that these explanations miss how political actors frame the collective identity of the host nation and the refugees in political discourse, and the nation state-specific cultural repertoires they draw on. The different responses of the German and Polish governments to Syrian and Ukrainian refugees are a case in point. While Poland welcomed Ukrainian and rejected Syrian refugees, Germany differentiated relatively little between Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in terms of its admission policy. Based on a qualitative analysis of parliamentary debates in Germany and Poland, we show that the German government employed mostly “cosmopolitan” frames by highlighting Germany’s humanitarian orientation, the commitment to international law, and the principles of liberal democracies. In contrast, the Polish government employed mostly “communitarian” frames by highlighting Poland’s national sovereignty and drawing strong cultural boundaries.

The dominant sociological view is that there are too many public crises. This article points to a different problem, namely the tendency for societalization to stall and for too few public crises to be fully realized. Anchored in a detailed analysis of the response to the UK Metropolitan police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the article explores how crisis-events unfold, from their early conception in media coverage through to their treatment as events to be investigated and reviewed. A particular point of focus is the role of a soft legal realm in handling the second of these phases of societalization. In sketching out the work, principles and functions of the soft legal realm, the article suggests that we conceive of this as an interstitial institution, one that, in the early twenty-first century, has become predominantly responsible for the translation and treatment of would-be public crises in the UK, and beyond. The article ends by identifying a set of key threats to the legitimacy of this institution in managing the messy border relations of the civil and non-civil sphere.

In the last two decades, slum tourism in the Global South has witnessed remarkable growth, evolving into a highly professionalized industry. This trend underscores shifting dynamics between the Global North and South in the contemporary world. Adopting Edward Said’s Orientalism as our theoretical framework, we analyze the intricacies of slum tourism within the broader context of globalization. Our semantic network analysis of 5749 TripAdvisor reviews of slum tours in Cape Town, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Manila, and Nairobi reveals the persistent tradition of “othering” the Global South in today’s supposedly civilized world. We argue that globalization’s momentum has introduced novel elements to the classical paradigm of Orientalism. Fueled by neoliberal consumption patterns, poverty and misery in the impoverished South are repackaged as “culture” and “diversity,” perpetuating the Orientalist gaze in a seemingly benign and “respectable” manner that inadvertently obscures the structural inequalities behind poverty. Nonetheless, dissenting voices persist, reshaping the post-Orientalist discourse. Through our analysis, we aim to uncover the complexities of power, identity, and resistance, offering insights into the intricate dynamics of postcolonial interactions in our globalized era.

To capture the deep world of meaning between audiences and actors in social performances, cultural pragmatics offers a helpful tool: by its logic, performances are successful when fusion is achieved between the actor, their audience(s), and a text. This paper reimagines fusion from the perspective of the audience. Drawing on illustrations from multi-year ethnographic findings of the podcast “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” this paper considers the audience’s relationship to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who recently published an essay and series of tweets about her belief that biological “sex is real.” In response, her audience fractured into debate about how to respond: some chose to leave the fandom while others, conscious or not of the socio-political implications, stayed on. But amidst the fray, a distinct audience emerged—one that, through the words “the books belong to us,” was simultaneously able to retain their devotion to the text and cut off all ties to Rowling. This theoretical outline synthesizes cultural pragmatics with reader-response theory to reimagine fusion in all social performances as a continuum from complete fusion to complete de-fusion, with fission states possible when audiences wrest interpretive authority over the text away from the actor and appropriate fusion.

We use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to capture the institutional logics of love and intimacy among a random sample of American university students. Comparing the theoretical assumptions of field theory and the institutional logics approach we explore whether institutional logics of intimacy exist, what kinds of practices are gathered in these logics, and whether these institutional logics are shaped by the actors’ field capitals, viz. gender and social class. Using survey data collected from a random sample of 1315 students from a large Pacific university (PU) we find that institutional logics of intimacy come in multiple forms: abstinence, loving sex and hookup sex, each characterized by its specific doings, feelings, and sayings. Our analyses further suggest that the logics of intimate practice have their own internal order, or grammar, which is only weakly conditioned by persons’ class or gender positions in the social structure. Although the perduring logics of intimacy are largely autonomous from persons’ positions in the field, the effects we do find largely echo Armstrong and Hamilton’s account of college life as a class project of young privileged women whose social networks formed through the Greek party scene (Armstrong and Hamilton in Paying for the Party. How College Maintains Inequality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2013). Constellations of meaningful practice, not distributions of capitals among persons, overwhelmingly organize the pathways of practice.

A core component of sociological studies of behavior and decision-making is understanding how people navigate their cultural toolkits. In this article, I explain how cultural tools are translated into goals. I argue that structure not only informs the barriers and opportunities people face in pursuing goals, but informs how they evaluate their goals to determine which are worth pursuing through “experiential frames” produced by prior experiences. Using Young’s (The minds of marginalized black men: Making sense of mobility, opportunity, and future life chances, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004) distinction between ideals (dreams), aspirations (goals with clear courses of action), and expectations (goals with clear courses of action viewed as achievable), I demonstrate this by analyzing the economic mobility goals of 34 Section 8 voucher holders living in New York City and the experiential frames that informed those goals. I find that while most respondents would like to achieve economic upward mobility, they evaluated goals that would reproduce their socio-economic position as aspirations or expectations through their experiential frames with housing, employment, education, and navigating the labor market. The findings contribute theoretically to the sociology of the future and the cultural sociology of goals.

Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything but stable and self-evident. Indeed, states continuously change the number of racial categories, their labels, and methodology for classification. Yet, despite the instability that characterizes official racial classification, colonial distinctions between Western and non-Western continue to shape racial taxonomies. This article advances an analytic of recursion to explain this continuity. Recursion refers to cultural processes that sustain and reanimate colonial logics of race beyond formal colonial contexts. I highlight three processes in particular: recuperation, modification, and reinscription. I demonstrate the utility of a recursive analytic through a historical analysis of the twentieth-century emergence of the novel Dutch race category “non-western allochthone.” Examining government reports and social science research on immigrant populations, I trace how state officials and prominent social scientists drew on and recalibrated a colonial binary distinction between Europeanness/whiteness and non-Europeanness/non-whiteness to distinguish supposedly assimilable from unassimilable migrants. A recursive analysis illuminates how changes to official taxonomies do not necessarily unsettle, and may even rest on, durable colonial conceptions of race.