Poetics最新文献

The paper aims to determine how cultural taste and social tolerance coincide and which symbolic boundaries they relate to. The empirical analyses scrutinise three taste orientations – omnivorousness, univorousness and ‘categorical tolerance’ (Lizardo & Skiles 2016) – to answer the following questions using two nationally representative surveys on cultural taste in Finland: (1) How did the cultural taste orientations change between 2007 and 2018 when considering musical like, dislike and ambivalence? (2) How do socio-political attitudes associate with cultural taste orientations and socio-economic factors, and can we observe change in these dynamics between 2007 and 2018? A longitudinal research design is used to explore whether there are changes in taste that tap to symbolic exclusion, inclusion or ambivalence. The results show that the omnivores and the univores are on many accounts situated on the opposite ends of the liberal-conservative axis. Their views deviate from each other, although the polarization in this sense has diminished in a decade. In addition to their wide-ranging taste and advantageous social position, we found the omnivores’ social attitudes to be very liberal, postmaterialist and more tolerant than the average. The absence of ambivalence among the univores suggests very rigid symbolic boundary-drawing by them. The social indistinctiveness of the categorical tolerants was quite visible, and it indeed increased over time. However, the categorical tolerants’ responses, particularly in 2018, were in most part inflated by their inability to neither agree nor disagree with the socio-political statements. Through a systematic analysis of various taste orientations over time, the study contributes to the understanding of cultural taste and symbolic boundaries by way of providing a gauge of the social, political and moral ambience in the society. The findings suggest growing tolerance in general, and decreasing polarization between the extreme taste orientations, omnivorism and univorism. However, the increased symbolic inclusion and ambivalence (of the categorical tolerants especially) are perhaps engendered by the features of modern social (media) reality, whose ubiquitous presence potentially affects how willingly people make judgements, whether social or cultural, and how much of personal values and tastes are communicated publicly in general.

This paper examines the composition and transition of symbolic boundaries in the New York art world of painting and sculpture from 1940 to 1969 through social network analysis of inter-organizational ties between art venues. As culture-led redevelopments become more controversial in the age of neoliberal urban management, recent studies make it clear that symbolic boundaries and boundary works of urban cultures become more important topics for urban studies. So far, existing research on symbolic boundaries in urban culture has focused on social class and urban organizations, such as amenities and business establishments, and have pointed to the loss of the symbolic boundary between the museum and the gallery, this paper will show that more diverse changes were occurring in addition to such changes while following the critical methods of the previous studies. Utilizing the exhibition histories of 43 prominent American avant-garde artists based in New York, I obtain affiliation network data of artists-by-art venues. Based on the affiliation data, this paper examines the social networks among art venues, such as museums, galleries and universities, using block modeling and other methods of social network analysis.

This article aims to explore the relationship between symbolic action and critical junctures by looking at early responses to the Covid-19 epidemics that broke out in Italy in late February and March 2020. In this regard, Italy's lockdown in the context of the Covid-19’s pandemic that shook the world in Spring 2020 provide material for an analysis of what happens of the relationship between processes of meaning-making and the alignment to an emerging and progressively more generalized disaster culture in an extreme condition in which the room for symbolic action becomes more and more limited. I argue that the new politics of performance that was shaped during the lockdown, with huge limitations both to the spaces of expression and to the morality of performance, can be analyzed effectively in order to to gain insight on the collective dimension of social life in a case in which there is a programmatic, top-down intervention on one of the crucial requisites for the production of symbolic action, namely, the co-presence of participants. Keywords Cultural Sociology; Social Performance; Scripts; Covid-19; Contemporary Italy Funding This article was supported with funds from the “SOCDIST” strategic project of the University of Trento, 2020-2022.

The sociology of disaster has paid scant attention to states’ cultural response—states’ effort to use meaningful narratives and symbolic actions to address issues about citizens’ suffering and death to enhance their legitimacy and secure citizens’ support. Our paper starts to address this gap by asking: How do states culturally respond to massive disasters? How effective are their responses? What can explain the efficacy of their cultural responses? We propose a perspective based on the cultural sociology of the state and cultural theories of trauma, theodicy, and performance. We illustrate this perspective in a comparative study of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States. We argue that the efficacy of their cultural responses depended on whether and how effectively they addressed the key components of the meaning structure of disasters through compassionate reaction to citizens’ suffering and death, convincing accounts of states’ accountability, and cogent narratives about the long-term consequences of disasters on citizens. Both states struggled to address these issues at various points in their respective disasters, and their cultural responses were shaped by their political structures. The findings also speak to an enduring debate over whether democratic or authoritarian regimes perform better in disaster responses. We eschew the exclusive focus of the debate on administrative responses and its simplistic correlation between regime type and responses.

What kind of event is climate change? Theories of events inevitably begin with rupture. An event depends on the experience that the ground has dramatically shifted. Yet the ambiguity of rupture in climate change—which cannot be experienced in any one instance—makes climate change more difficult to emplot. Moreover, it is an event defined as much by how actors see the future unfolding as by its present or past. Tying the theory of events with that of future-making, we focus on three important forms of eventfulness that we find in the current climate change debate: scientific modes of eventfulness, the radical eventfulness of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, and what we call the “sensible” eventfulness of European Union and United Nations functionaries, as it is gleaned from climate change documents such as the European Green Deal. As we show, each form of eventfulness constructs a different temporal landscape, populated by different actors and actions, entailing different stances towards the future and different kinds of projects. Focusing on the tensions within each form, we then show that understanding these forms of eventfulness can also help us understand how different actors fused climate change to other events, such as that of the global Covid-19 epidemic.

Why are some educated youths continuously fascinated with K-pop despite the increasing anti-Korean sentiment in China? In this study, I explore this puzzle to address the relationship between fans’ contextualized subjectivities and their choice of cross-border fan object. Bridging transcultural fan studies with the sociology of taste, I draw upon the concepts of cultural homology and cultural distinction to conduct a thematic analysis of the taste discourses emerging in the K-pop groups on Douban (www.douban.com). The findings show how this transcultural taste arises from the symbolic fit between the polysemic K-pop text and Chinese followers’ neoliberal aesthetics of idol cultures that value idols’ professional self-development and fans’ consumerist autonomy. These aesthetics are reiterated in K-pop followers’ attempt to reconcile their taste and national loyalty in strategic patriotic performances that negotiate between the official and popular nationalisms in China. The online talk of K-pop is also a process of distinction through which those fans confirm their shared subjectivity by critiquing the domestic mass culture and distinguishing themselves from the nationalist C-pop consumers. Chinese fans’ taste for K-pop, as I conclude, symbolically articulates these educated youths’ condition as neoliberal patriotic subjects in China's transitions to authoritarian capitalism.

Using data from large scale Annual Social Surveys of the CBS in Israel, the current research focused on patterns of digital inequality among Israeli mothers between 2014 and 2019. The main purpose of the current study was to investigate digital inequality among mothers based on their marital status when controlling for their socioeconomic status (SES) and to clarify whether the patterns of digital inequality are stable or changeable over time. Among both single and married mothers the highest adoption rates were found for seeking information and social media, while internet use for study and e-government services were the lowest. Digital inequality among mothers is best explained by social class, rather than by the difficulties and restrictions of single motherhood. Both groups of mothers were consistent in their pace of digital use adoption over time, so if effective intervention strategies are not introduced, between-group gaps will continue to exist. Policymakers' implementation of our specific recommendations may produce beneficial effects for the promotion of Internet use among single mothers.

Empirical studies generally report that aspiring a career in the performing arts is risky business. Within the contemporary European context of neoliberal capitalism, the particular workforce is inclined to occupy a precarious socio-economic position. We aim to contribute to this body of research by discussing how risk and precarity in the artworld are macro- and meso-governed by existing structures and micro-managed by agents. Our data stem from empirical research conducted among members of the contemporary dance population in Brussels and Berlin. We focus for the most part on qualitative findings from longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork to discuss how the informants live up to a bohemian work ethic that is framed by a more general symbolic economy. In this paper, we argue that within the longstanding sociological agency-structure debate, the outlined bohemian work ethic ties in with the concept of an autonomous heteronomy. Furthermore, despite the relatively different socio-economic macro structures in both locales, we come to conclude that the very similar symbolic economy seems to have a much greater impact on artistic and economic risk taking than the specific social security policy and welfare approaches.

Through a case study of Typhoon Morakot, which landed in Taiwan in 2008 and caused massive destruction to many aboriginal communities, this paper explores how narratives of disaster impact individual survivors’ emotionality and reflexivity. We draw on 45 in-depth interviews and engage the literatures on cultural trauma, emotion work, and reflexivity. We find that in framing their experiences, most survivors drew upon narratives of government incompetence or ethnic-environmental injustice, which circulated respectively in Taiwan's mainstream media and a counter-hegemonic public. To a lesser extent, some survivors hybridized these two frames while a few others followed the government's official narrative that the government did nothing wrong. Our analysis highlights a sharp contrast: the injustice frame prompted survivors to express ethnic pride, assert righteous anger, and display an eloquent reflexivity, whereas the other three frames prompted survivors to express their frustrations as grief rather than anger, and oftentimes engage in the emotion work of gratitude-display and self-censorship and ultimately develop a silenced or split reflexivity. This study advances the cultural sociology of disasters by conceptualizing how disaster narratives shape the emotional aspects of post-disaster recovery. Furthermore, we highlight how covert silences in ahistorical disaster narratives can be detrimental to all in an age of environmental crises.