Essays
-
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness - Giesen, Bernhard
In the following remarks, we present new developments in social theory and cultural analysis that converge in a particular focus on a third perspective beyond the distinction between inside and outside. This focus on “thirdness” transcends the classical structuralist paradigm of binary classification. It is especially sensitive for the analysis of sudden surprises, paradoxical twists, and disturbing events in history and social life and, thus, contrasts to the assumption of progress and orderly linear development. We outline this new paradigm with respect to three different domains: garbage, monsters, and victims. -
Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning - Carroll, Glenn R.
Consumers and scholars show increasing interest in authenticity in products, services, performances, and places. As typically used, authenticity is an attribution that is socially constructed and appears in many domains of social life. The interest in authenticity presumes that its attribution conveys value and emerging evidence agrees. Authenticity, however, carries some very different meanings, including those about classification, morality, craftsmanship, and idiosyncrasy. Parsing these various interpretations requires attention to cultural and historical context. -
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism - Schilt, Kristen
“Born this way” has become a rallying cry for many LGBTQ people, and a succinct slogan for the political logic behind mainstream US‐based gay and lesbian equality activism in the late 2000s. This short phrase—“born this way”—invokes the idea that sexual orientation is an innate, essential part of a person that cannot be changed or acted upon by others. Following this logic, homosexual people and their relationships must be incorporated as a valid part of the social fabric and be afforded the same state‐based rights and benefits as heterosexual people and their relationships. Such an understanding of homosexuality as an innate essence stands in contrast to much sociological theorizing that situates sexual identity categories—as with all identity categories—as social constructs that emerge and shift across particular political, historical, and geographical contexts. In this essay, I argue that sociologists need to find ways to think empirically about this essentialist logic. I pose the question, what cultural work does “born this way” logic perform in everyday interactions around social difference, and how does it shape popular, academic, and legislative ideas about such differences? I offer a comparative analysis of the use of essentialism as an explanatory framework for social difference in four cases—race, gender, sexual orientation, and weight. I unpack the ways in which invoking “born this way” as a frame or strategy can be used both to discount the possibility of social interventions into inequality and to make a claim that inequality can only be alleviated through social interventions. Within this analysis, I further explore how social constructionist critiques of biological determinism are taken up or dismissed. I end with ideas for an empirical agenda that highlights the variations in social reactions to different identity‐based claims of biological essentialism and illustrates the importance of using an intersectional lens when examining the social outcomes of such logic. -
Cultural Conflict - Mullins, Ian
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is commonly used today in the social sciences. I describe the history of social scientific approaches to cultural conflict as they developed from the post‐World War II period through the 1980s; emphasizing how changes in the ways scholars conceptualize culture correspond to changes in how conflict is investigated. I argue that a pendulum‐like swing has occurred between, what I refer to as, inequality‐based approaches and value‐based approaches to the study of conflict. Researchers deploying inequality‐based approaches tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms within political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed as a by‐product of a group's position within a particular institution, and as such, is considered to reflect members' collective interests (or institutionally produced needs). Value‐based approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher's attention to fundamental differences in what people believe, and how these beliefs lead to contentious relations between various groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these approaches, culture is seen as enduring sets of schemas, or value systems, that direct action. This essay then turns to the debate over particular value‐based approaches to cultural conflict that emerged in the 1990s and presents emerging alternatives to these approaches. I conclude by presenting work that represent the current state of scholarship on cultural conflict and discuss how increased cross‐disciplinary collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research and develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict. -
Cultural Consumption - Rössel, Jörg
Research on cultural consumption is a flourishing field across different disciplines within the social sciences. It refers to the consumption of goods and services with primarily aesthetic functions and only secondarily instrumental uses. We present the main theoretical approaches, empirical methods, and results of research on the main dimensions of cultural consumption, the explanation of correlations between these dimensions and social positions, and the impact of cultural consumption on the reproduction of structures of resource inequalities in societies, focusing in particular on Bourdieu's foundational work. Future research should move beyond this approach by developing more precise concepts and more systematic mechanism‐based theoretical explanations. We suggest an approach based on rational choice theory, because we deem it capable of overcoming the severe limitations of practice theories. Furthermore, we propose more rigorous methods for theory development and the establishment of causal claims, such as agent‐based modeling, longitudinal analysis, and experimental methods. -
Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes - Kitayama, Shinobu
Cultural neuroscience emerged during the past decade at the intersection of cultural psychology, several subfields of human neuroscience, genetics, and epigenetics. In the present essay, we define the field, provide a selective review of its empirical accomplishment, and discuss its future directions. Cultural neuroscience conceptualizes the human mind as biologically prepared and grounded and, at the same time, as socially and culturally shaped and completed. This young field initially started as an effort to expand preceding behavioral work in cultural psychology with novel brain imaging methods. Increasingly, however, the field is poised to address the interplay between biology, environment, and behavior, as shown in our review of recent empirical work on (i) culture and the self, (ii) culture and genes, and (iii) multicultural identity. The future of the field hinges on several key initiatives including the use of brain stimulation methods, expansion of its database to cultures other than North America and Asia, and a more comprehensive analysis of gene–culture coevolution. In conclusion, we observe that further investigation of culture, brain, and genes may lead to an important insight that to study cultural diversity is no less to affirm the unity of humans as a common biological species. -
Cultural Psychology, Socialization, and Individual Development in Changing Contexts - Trommsdorff, Gisela
This essay discusses two major emerging trends in the study of culture and psychology. One trend can be observed in the reconciliation of cross‐cultural and culture‐indigenous approaches due to conceptualizing culture in a value‐ and norm‐oriented framework of cultural meaning and cultural minds. A second trend is based on questions of culture learning and socialization, reconciling the nature–nurture debate. Developmental studies integrating biological and socialization conditions in cultural contexts are complemented by selected studies on culture‐specificities of self‐regulation, prosocial behavior, caretaker's implicit theories on parenting, and intergenerational relations. The meaning‐making function of socialization is seen as a major process in culture learning and the development of cultural mindsets. I conclude with questions regarding socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural changes, suggesting a major research goal for an emerging science of cultural psychology: to provide a scientific basis for better understanding culture‐psychological conditions and consequences of fundamental ongoing changes related to cultural diversity and to accelerating intercultural connections. -
Culture and Cognition - Cerulo, Karen A.
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology. Scholars working in this area address how aspects of both social structure and culture impact the ways in which social actors think. From the literature, one learns about specific processes and styles that individuals adopt when engaged in thought, cognitive patterns that characterize certain groups or communities, and thought styles that emerge in specific situations and social contexts. New works pay special attention to the links between mind, body, and sociocultural context. In this essay, I define the general focus of the field, review its intellectual roots, discuss recent turns in its literature, and identify issues for future research. -
Culture and Globalization - Wherry, Frederick F.
How should we define culture and globalization? How does each affect the other? And what are our shortcomings in understanding the heterogeneous outcomes for cultural production and expression in a globalizing world? This essay begins with foundational understandings among sociologists, political economists, and anthropologists regarding the facets of globalization and the way that it is shaped by and in turn shapes local cultures. The essay turns to the widely varied, disjointed attempts to explain the phenomenon and then offers suggestions for advancing studies of culture in the context of globalization. -
Culture and Movements - Polletta, Francesca
Scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of culture in social movements' emergence, trajectories, and impacts. Culture is no longer conceptualized as a subjective lens through which people perceive objective structures, but rather as a key dimension of those structures. This has allowed researchers to shed new light on why certain areas of social life come to be contested when they do, as well as to understand the limitations on activists' ability to act strategically, and the sometimes surprising ways in which movements have influence. We focus on one vein of research: the role of institutional schemas in spurring mobilization and accounting for its effects. Schemas are accepted ways of doing things—doing business, obstetrics, race relations, or Internet protest. Research has investigated both the conditions in which institutionalized schemas become vulnerable to challenge and whether winning the acceptance of a new institutional schema counts as movement success. -
Culture and Regimes: The Democratizing Force of Emancipative Values - Welzel, Christian
This essay argues that high‐quality democracy cannot persist in the absence of emancipative values, as much as autocracy cannot persist in their presence. Support for democracy, by contrast, is an altogether misleading indicator of a public's affinity to democracy because what support for democracy means depends entirely on emancipative values: In the presence of emancipative values, people support democracy out of a genuine appreciation of the freedoms that define democracy; but in the absence of emancipative values, people typically misunderstand democracy in authoritarian ways that revert the meaning of support for democracy into its own contradiction: support for autocracy, that is. Hence, autocracy is often more legitimate in people's eyes than the support ratings for democracy suggest. Accordingly, the prospects of democracy are bleak where emancipative values remain weak. These insights provide good reasons to consider emancipative values as a study object of foremost importance, if we are to understand the cultural foundations of democracy. -
Culture as Situated Cognition - Oyserman, Daphna
Culture‐as‐situated‐cognition (CSC) theory proposes that culture can be thought of at three levels. At the highest level, culture is a human universal, a “good enough” solution to universal needs. At the intermediate level, culture is a specific meaning‐making framework, a “mindset” that influences what is attended to, which goals or mental procedure is salient. At the most proximal level, culture is a set of particular practices within a specific society, time, and place which influences what feels fluent and to‐be‐expected. Cross‐national comparisons demonstrate that differences exist. To understand what observed differences imply for underlying process, a situated cognition framework and experimental methods are needed. Indeed, individualistic and collectivistic mindsets are accessible cross‐culturally, so both can be primed. Whether an individualistic or collectivistic cultural mindset is salient in the moment matters, resulting in downstream consequences for meaning making, self‐processes, willingness to invest in relationships, and for complex mental procedures. Between‐group differences arise in part from momentary cues that make either individualistic or collectivistic mindset accessible. Within a culture, people experience cultural fluency if situations match their expectations and cultural disfluency if they do not. Cultural disfluency has downstream consequences for choice and behavior. Moving from one culture to another is difficult because people experience many situations in which they either do not know what to expect or their expectations are not met and feedback as to the nature of the mismatch is almost always ambiguous. For these reasons, while cultural processes are universal, acculturation is often fraught, lengthy, and incomplete. -
Economics and Culture - Roland, Gérard
We survey recent research on the economic effects of culture. We discuss definition and measures of culture used in research. We highlight the strong inertia of culture, document its effects on institutional change, and discuss other economic effects of culture, such as on innovation and growth. -
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts - Ojalehto, Bethany
The relation between culture and concepts has long been a fascinating topic for layperson and scientist alike. But often this topic has generated more heat than light—strong claims have been paired with weak evidence, and anecdotes have been more common than empirical data. More recently, however, interdisciplinary research programs have begun to demonstrate that interest in the relation between culture and concepts is not misplaced. In this essay, we review prior, emerging, and potential future trends in culture and concepts research. Changing conceptions of culture are in turn affecting how culture is studied as well as our understanding of concepts. -
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity - Laitin, David D.
In economics and political science, there is evidence from large cross‐sectional datasets and field experiments that neighborhoods, villages, cities, and countries with higher levels of cultural diversity have lower levels of generalized trust, lower quality of public goods, and poorer economic performance. However, in social psychology, organizational behavior, and computer science, there is evidence that diverse populations are collectively better able to solve complex problems with creative solutions. The next generation of research, crucial for the globalized world that is undermining homogeneous communities, will utilize experimental research designs (such as those based on natural or quasi‐natural experiments, laboratory experiments, and randomized experiments in controlled natural settings) to better understand the mechanisms sustaining underperformance of diverse communities and to identify interventions that enable community members to take advantage of the problem‐solving promise of diversity to yield social and economic benefits. -
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology - Lorentz, Kirsi O.
Archaeologists have excavated mortuary contexts and the remains of the dead since the beginning of activity within their discipline. The study of these remains has taken place under different rubrics, including burial archaeology, mortuary archaeology, archaeology of the dead, funerary archaeology, osteoarchaeology, human bioarchaeology, and archaeology of death. The study of mortuary contexts and accompanying artifacts has largely taken place in separation from the study of the human remains. Does the study of the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which these are found, constitute an archaeology of death, or an archaeology of funerary remains, as tacitly implied by the titles of numerous publications focusing on such remains? Recently it has been claimed that we have never had an archaeology of death (Robb). Indeed a search for published archaeological research focusing on the concept of death, and the variation of conceptualizations of death in past societies, currently produces scant results. Archaeological publications with titles that refer to funerary remains tend to focus on selected aspect(s) of funerary practice, mostly those related to the disposal of the dead, whether through burial or other means. If we take the term funerary to mean that which pertains to funeral rites or burial, it is clear that a wider range of evidence needs to be considered for a comprehensive funerary archaeology to emerge. This essay focuses on the current status and future potential of archaeological research on funerary practices, contexts, and death. Calls for bringing the human body, the corpse, and the skeleton into the center stage in studies of mortuary archaeology have already been made by many, and attempted by a few. Key issues for future archaeological research on death and funerary practice include ensuring a true research emphasis on past conceptualizations of death, considering a wider range of evidence pertaining to death and funerary practice (not just burial or other body disposal contexts), and as necessitated by the latter, finding a way to successfully integrate research traditionally conducted within widely different disciplinary realms. -
History and Materiality - Joyce, Rosemary A.
Studies of the newly emerging field of materiality examine the various ways in which physical objects that populate the environments we inhabit affect us socially, psychologically, and culturally. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences are actively engaged in such studies of what they term the new materialism. It examines how “things” shape tour worlds in decisive ways. This essay reviews the development of this exciting new area of investigation and outlines promising directions for study going forward. -
Production of Culture - Schmutz, Vaughn
The production of culture (POC) perspective emerged as a way to understand the external conditions that influence symbolic components of culture. Moving beyond a simple “reflection” theory of cultural production, this perspective directed attention to the processes by which culture is made. POC scholars have demonstrated how factors such as technology, law and regulation, organizational form, industry structure, careers, and markets influence the production, distribution, and reception of cultural products. First, we review foundational research that addresses the “six facets” associated with the POC perspective as well as related work on cultural industry and classification systems. Next, we address cutting‐edge work that offers new insights and methodological savvy to classic POC concerns with innovation and diversity, gatekeeping processes, and the consequences of categories in symbolic production. Finally, we discuss opportunities for future work that has the potential to move POC scholarship forward while addressing fundamental sociological questions about fields, networks, and processes of classification, valuation, and evaluation. The increasing conceptual and methodological diversity that characterizes production of culture research promises to keep it a vibrant area of inquiry for years to come. -
The Material Turn - Mukerji, Chandra
There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power. It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under‐examined forms of social life—particularly the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault's analysis of political embodiment, work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled with social practices. -
The Role of Death Denial in Culture and Consciousness - Solomon, Sheldon
Independent lines of theoretical inquiry in evolutionary psychology and existential psychodynamic psychology propose that the awareness of the inevitability of one's death would undermine the viability of consciousness as an adaptive form mental organization in the absence of death‐denying cultural and psychological affectations. In accord with this view, empirical research derived from terror management theory demonstrates that intimations of mortality have a pervasive effect on a wide range of human beliefs and behaviors.