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Making Sense of Culture SO40-FrontMatter ARI 8 July 2014 6:42 by Professor Orlando Patterson on 09/01/14. For personal use only. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2014.40:1-30. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org SO40CH01-Patterson ARI 1 July 2014 9:14 Making Sense of Culture Orlando Patterson Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2014. 40:1–30 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on beliefs, cognition, culture, meaning, norms, pragmatics, schema, values May 2, 2014 The Annual Review of Sociology is online at Abstract soc.annualreviews.org I present a brief review of problems in the sociological study of culture, This article’s doi: followed by an integrated, interdisciplinary view of culture that eschews by Professor Orlando Patterson on 09/01/14. For personal use only. 10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043123 extreme contextualism and other orthodoxies. Culture is defined as the Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2014.40:1-30. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Copyright c 2014 by Annual Reviews. conjugate product of two reciprocal, componential processes. The first All rights reserved is a dynamically stable process of collectively made, reproduced, and unevenly shared knowledge structures that are informational and mean- ingful, internally embodied, and externally represented and that provide predictability, coordination equilibria, continuity, and meaning in hu- man actions and interactions. The second is a pragmatic component of culture that grounds the first, and it has its own rules of usage and a pragmatically derived structure of practical knowledge. I also offer an account of change and draw on knowledge activation theory in explor- ing the microdynamics of cultural practice and propose the concept of cultural configuration as a better way of studying cultural practice in highly heterogeneous modern societies where people shift between multiple, overlapping configurations. 1 SO40CH01-Patterson ARI 1 July 2014 9:14 Power, power everywhere, uncoupled cultural autonomy and causation And how the signs do shrink, (Alexander 2003, pp. 11–26; cf. Friedland & Power, power everywhere, Mohr 2004b, pp. 5–11; Kaufman 2004); and And nothing else to think. outright contradiction, when deployed, in —Marshall Sahlins (2002), Waiting for the causal use of culture—bad, even racist, Foucault, Still when used to understand the poor or minority behavior; good, and desperately grasped, when O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim used to explain the racial IQ gap (Patterson For preacher and monk the honored name! 2001, Serpell 2000; see also Vaisey 2010). For, quarreling, each to his view they cling. To make matters worse, the subject is also Such folk see only one side of a thing. politically fraught, both within and outside the —Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant academy, especially in our current age of iden- Udanam vi.4 (transl. F.L. Woodward, 1948, tity, where leaders and activists as well as schol- p. 83) ars challenge each other, not only on the in- terpretation of their cultures, but also on the PART 1: INTRODUCTION very definition and meaning of culture itself (Wright 1998). Oversensitivity to identity pol- The Unsettled State of itics and claims is another reason for one of the Cultural Sociology main failings of current studies of culture, men- The sociological study of culture, like its tioned above: the flight of the vast majority from anthropological counterpart, is riddled with causality or comparative generalizations for fear academic contention: tired and tortured of being labeled racists or essentialists. Thus, conceptual contestations about the nature even though cultural sociologists (fearful of so- of culture itself (Sewell 2005, pp. 152–74; cial irrelevance) have recently begun to tiptoe Sangren 2000, pp. 20–44; cf. Patterson 2007); their way back to a consideration of inequality, debilitating uncertainty about the nature and poverty, and minority problems (see, for exam- centrality of meaning (Wuthnow 1987, pp. 64– ple, Charles 2008, Small et al. 2010), it is still 65); rejections of hard-won methodological de rigueur to eschew robust causal explanations claims (Biernacki 2012); repeated and often (Vaisey 2010), except for those who huddle be- unproductive agenda settings; sweeping dis- hind the Gallic shield of Bourdieu, often at the missals and dogmatic overreaction to the errors cost of undercutting critical components of his or biases of previous traditions of scholarship theory (Stevens 2008, p. 104); instead, a soft (Swidler 1986; cf. Friedland & Mohr 2004b, and nebulous neo-Weberian verstehen reigns, by Professor Orlando Patterson on 09/01/14. For personal use only. pp. 13–17; King 2000); the untenable ditching, in which the cultural sociologist is reduced to Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2014.40:1-30. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org with the bathwater of the Parsonian past, of little more than a mouthpiece for his or her foundational concepts such as values and norms subjects’ understanding of their culture and be- that strike most scholars in other disciplines as havior. And these understandings are plagued simply preposterous (Hechter & Opp 2001); by what Bourdieu calls the “discourse of fa- political oversensitivity, especially in regard to miliarity,” which often leaves unsaid precisely race and inequality, entailing the endless flog- what is so important that it is taken for granted ging of long dead and buried horses such as “the (Bourdieu 1977, p. 18) or is saturated with the culture of poverty” thesis (Skrentny 2008); the very essentialism that these cultural sociologists dogmatic rejection of causal explanations at one condemn in each other. extreme (Geertz 1973, p. 14) and, at the other, Another serious problem that besets socio- explanatory evasiveness more generally (with logical studies of culture is the chronic fallacy of the notable exception of some studies in social the blind people and the elephant, in which each movement and economic sociology) (Levin insists that the part of the elephant he or she 2008, Polletta 2008) or questionable claims of is touching constitutes its entirety. The main 2 Patterson SO40CH01-Patterson ARI 1 July 2014 9:14 reason for this error is the tendency by many psychology except for the rump still in the of the leading practitioners to redefine the field discipline. The frustrating part of all this is and carve out “new” agendas (for a laudable re- that an abundance of first-rate work on culture cent exception, see Binder et al. 2008, particu- among sociologists resides in the particular larly pp. 6–14). Sadly, what Wuthnow observed sections of the elephant they embrace (see in the late 1980s remains largely true: “Replica- the excellent literature reviews in Binder et al. tions fail to replicate; refutations fail to refute; 2008). This is especially true of the agenda replies fail to convince; and the dismissals typi- setters, once they get down to the empirics cally dismiss too much or too little” (Wuthnow of their craft. Thus, Jeffrey Alexander (2003, 1987, p. 7). The result is a persistent lack of con- chapters 2–4; 2012) when not pushing his sensus or rigor in defining culture, an issue that, “strong program,” has written superb studies as Small & Newman (2001) noted, “has tor- on the Holocaust and the general problems mented both sociologists and anthropologists of evil and trauma. Swidler’s (1986) widely for decades, and there is no reason to believe cited programmatic paper on culture has gone we will ever arrive at a consensus” (p. 35). Not further than most in downplaying the causal only has this undermined the cumulative pro- significance of cultural knowledge structures, cess that is essential for progress in any arena values, and norms in social life (Schudson of study, but it has also undercut the reputation 1989, p. 156), even though, as Vaisey (2009, of cultural studies generally. Although we are p. 1687) points out, it rests on the flawed repeatedly told that there has been a “cultural cognitive premise “that moral judgment would turn” in sociology and related disciplines go- have to operate through conscious thought to ing back to the 1980s (Bonnell & Hunt 1999, be causally efficacious” (see also Vaisey 2008; Friedland & Mohr 2004b, Steinmetz 1999; cf. for a more conciliatory critique of Swidler, Biernacki 2000), and indeed, the culture section see Lizardo & Strand 2010). Nonetheless, her of the American Sociological Association is now now classic works with Bellah on American one of the largest, most noncultural sociologists culture are arguably among the most powerful are still wary of culture and either shun any ex- demonstrations of the role of values, ideology, ploration of its role in their explanatory models and moral order in modern society (Bellah et al. or go out of their way to point out its lack of 1985), and her recent study of chieftaincy in importance or relevance. rural Malawi is a full-throttle, volte-face return A further problem is the baneful isolation of to the centrality of norms, values, and stable cultural sociologists from major developments cultural knowledge structures in explaining in the study of culture in the nonhistorical social social processes (Swidler 2013). Similarly, by Professor Orlando Patterson on 09/01/14. For personal use only. sciences. There have been significant borrow- Lamont’s energetic promotion of the idea Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2014.40:1-30. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org ings from cognitive psychology thanks to the of boundaries as central to cultural analysis pioneering work of Cicourel (1973), DiMaggio began as a worthwhile effort to synthesize and (1997), Cerulo (2010b), Zerubavel (1997), apply previous work on the subject (Lamont & Benford & Snow (2000), and more recent Fournier 1993). Unfortunately, the relative sig- scholars [see the special issue of Poetics (Cerulo nificance of the concept has subsequently been 2010a)]. However, these infusions have come greatly exaggerated and its emphasis misplaced from cognitive scientists who, notoriously, are from that of Barth’s (1969) definitive (though not particularly interested in culture (Hutchins increasingly neglected) statement as well as 1995, pp.
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