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Culture and Everyday Life CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE How should we understand what we do in everyday life? In what ways are our everyday habits and routines shaped by culture? What is ‘culture’ and how does it impact on everything we think and do? If we want to understand how people in different parts of the globe think, feel, value, act and express themselves, we have to examine the cultures that they create and are in turn created by. This lively and accessible new book reconsiders the different views as to what culture is, how it operates and how it relates to other aspects of the human (and non- human) world. Key areas covered include: • Culture and nature • High culture versus popular culture • Modern and post-modern culture • Globalization and culture The book discusses many of the major thinkers on culture, from Matthew Arnold to Bakhtin and Bourdieu. Theoretical arguments are illustrated with everyday examples from sport, art and the mass media, to car culture and global cuisine, making this a highly informative guide to the sociology of culture that will be indispensable reading for students of sociology and cultural studies. David Inglis is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He writes in the areas of the sociology of culture and social theory. He has authored numerous books and articles in these areas, including Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas (Polity, 2003, with John Hughson), and he is editor of The Sociology of Art (Palgrave, 2005). THE NEW SOCIOLOGY SERIES EDITOR: ANTHONY ELLIOTT, UNIVERSITY OF KENT, UK The New Sociology is a book series designed to introduce students to new issues and themes in social sciences today. What makes the series distinctive, as compared to other competing introductory textbooks, is a strong emphasis not just on key concepts and ideas but on how these play out in everyday life—on how theories and concepts are lived at the level of selfhood and cultural identities, how they are embedded in interpersonal relationships, and how they are shaped by, and shape, broader social processes. Forthcoming in the series: Religion and Everyday Life STEPHEN HUNT (2005) Culture and Everyday Life DAVID INGLIS (2005) Community and Everyday Life GRAHAM DAY (2005) Self-Identity and Everyday Life HARVIE FERGUSON (2005) Consumption and Everyday Life MARK W.D.PATERSON (2005) Globalization and Everyday Life LARRY RAY (2006) The Body and Everyday Life HELEN THOMAS (2006) Nationalism and Everyday Life JANE HINDLEY (2006) Ethnicity and Everyday Life CHRISTIAN KARNER (2006) Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life IAIN WILKINSON (2006) CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE DAVID INGLIS LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 David Inglis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-00520-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-31926-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-31925-0 (pbk) To J.U. The greatest of mentors CONTENTS SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xii Introduction: culture and the everyday 1 1 Culture, ‘nature’ and everyday life 15 2 Modern culture and everyday life 27 3 ‘High’, ‘popular’ and ‘low’ cultures in everyday life 53 4 Globalization, culture and everyday life 77 Conclusion 95 BIBLIOGRAPHY 100 INDEX 107 SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD ‘The New Sociology’ is a series that takes its cue from massive social transformations currently sweeping the globe. Globalization, new information technologies, the techno-industrialization of warfare and terrorism, the privatization of public resources, the dominance of consumerist values: these developments involve major change to the ways people live their personal and social lives today. Moreover, such developments impact considerably on the tasks of sociology, and the social sciences more generally. Yet, for the most part, the ways in which global institutional transformations are influencing the subject matter and focus of sociology have been discussed only in the more advanced, specialized literature of the discipline. I was prompted to develop this series, therefore, in order to introduce students—as well as general readers who are seeking to come to terms with the practical circumstances of their daily lives—to the various ways in which sociology reflects the transformed conditions and axes of our globalizing world. Perhaps the central claim of the series is that sociology is fundamentally linked to the practical and moral concerns of everyday life. The authors in this series—examining topics all the way from the body to globalization, from self-identity to consumption— seek to demonstrate the complex, contradictory ways in which sociology is a necessary and very practical aspect of our personal and public lives. From one angle, this may seem uncontroversial. After all, many classical sociological analysts as well as those associated with the classics of social theory emphasized the practical basis of human knowledge, notably Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and George Simmel, among many others. And yet there are major respects in which the professionalization of academic sociology during the latter period of the twentieth century led to a retreat from the everyday issues and moral basis of sociology itself. (For an excellent discussion of the changing relations between practical and professional sociologies see Charles Lemert, Sociology After the Crisis, Second Edition, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004.) As worrying as such a retreat from the practical and moral grounds of the discipline is, one of the main consequences of recent global transformations in the field of sociology has been a renewed emphasis on the mediation of everyday events and experiences by distant social forces, the intermeshing of the local and global in the production of social practices, and on ethics and moral responsibility at both the individual and collective levels. The New Sociology Series traces out these concerns across the terrain of various themes and thematics, situating everyday social practices in the broader context of life in a globalizing world. In Culture and Everyday Life, David Inglis deftly traces the emergence of culture as a specific field of sociological analysis, analysing with great flair the contradictions of the historical and political split between ‘culture’ and ‘society’. This is a most wonderful introduction to the sociology of culture for both the beginning student and teachers in the field, in part because Inglis’s great strength lies is his tenacity in pursuing what sociology in particular and social theory in general contribute to a wider appreciation of the dynamics of culture, all of which he contrasts and compares with related fields, most notably the currently fashionable terrain of cultural studies. In the very broadest terms, Culture and Everyday Life can be read as an introduction to the sociological analysis of cultural practices and artistic forms—from poetry to Picasso, Marxism to MTV, aesthetics to Americanization or Western imperialism. The word ‘culture’ thus charts within its historical unfolding, as Inglis powerfully demonstrates, a broader history of sociological thinking in particular and a generalized account of social life as a whole. ‘Culture’ here means access to certain sociological angles on artistic and aesthetic activity, as represented in the intellectual departures of leading social theorists such as Georg Simmel, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Pierre Bourdieu, amongst many others. But the book is much more than a definitional mapping of culture from the perspective of sociology. For ‘culture’, as Inglis rightly notes, is among one of the most complex words in the English language—scooping up as it does ideas and ideologies, everyday practices and lived experience, fine living and pre-packaged lifestyles, lofty high and standardized mass forms, mass and minority cultures. If the sociology of culture can thus be approached in terms of underwriting the power, multiplicity and autonomy of the cultural field itself, it also encodes a number of central sociological issues. These include, as Inglis subtly charts, questions of human agency and social structure, imagination and routinization, the radically new and the force of tradition, interpersonal change and social consensus. Recast in this way, he allows us to grasp the degree to which the relations between cultural discourses and social interests are complex and variable ones—at times seamlessly interwoven and homogenizing, and at other times a matter of contradiction and heterogeneity. A sociological theory of culture has most value, according to Inglis, when it can illuminate the institutional processes by which this doubleness is constituted and reproduced. Throughout the postmodern 1980s and apolitical 1990s, we have seen a turn within the social sciences and humanities to the notion of culture as never before. Culture became, in effect, a vital preoccupation of the academy as a means of both creatively engaging with new globalizing forms of sociality as well as defensively turning away from various pressing public political issues, from poverty and famine to drugs and debt. On balance, Inglis makes a case for the defence of cultural sociology, thinking that the political gains have outweighed the losses.
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