Cultural Sociology

Career gatekeeping in cultural fields Abstract This paper presents a comparative analysis of career gatekeeping processes in two cultural fields. Drawing on data on appointment procedures in German academia and booking processes in North American stand-up comedy, we compare how gatekeepers in two widely different contexts evaluate and select candidates for established positions in their respective field and validate their decisions. Focusing on three types of gatekeeping practices that have been documented in prior research—typecasting, comparison, and legitimization—our analysis reveals major differences in how gatekeepers perform these practices across our two cases: (1) typecasting based on ascriptive categories versus professional criteria, (2) comparisons that are ad-hoc and holistic versus systematic and guided by performance criteria, and (3) legitimation by means of ritualization versus transparency. We argue that these differences are related to the social and organizational context in which gatekeepers make selection decisions, including differences in the structure of academic and creative careers and the organization of the respective labor markets in which these careers unfold. These findings contribute to scholarship on gatekeeping in cultural fields by providing comparative insights into the work of career gatekeepers and the social organization of career gatekeeping processes.

What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology? Abstract Can cognitive neuroscience contribute to cultural sociology? We argue that it can, but to profit from such contributions requires developing coherent positions at the level of ontology and coherent epistemological views concerning interfield relations in science. In this paper, we carve out a coherent position that makes sense for cultural sociology based on Sperber’s “infra-individualist” and Clark’s “extended cognition” arguments. More substantively, we take on three canonical topics in cultural sociology: language, intersubjectivity, and associational links between elements, showing that the cognitive neurosciences can make conceptual and empirical contributions to the thinking of cultural sociologists in these areas. We conclude by outlining the opportunities for further development of work at the intersection of cultural sociology and the cognitive neurosciences.

How do performances fuse societies? Abstract This article discusses Jeffrey Alexander’s work on social performances. All societies, says Alexander, need a measure of integration—they need to be “fused”—for a common, properly social, life to be possible. In simple societies, this is achieved by means of rituals; in complex societies, it is achieved by means of the theater. In both cases, performances are understood in analogy with “texts” which are “read.” Although explicit interpretations indeed are crucial for our understanding of a performance, audience members make sense of what they see in more direct, more embodied, ways as well. Cognitive neuroscience can help us understand how performances affect us and thereby how societies are fused.

Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition Abstract Cognitive cultural sociology has exhibited a preference for the neuro-scientific wing of cognitive science that generally sees cognition as a process occurring in individual minds. This preference has contributed to the individualistic cast of cognitive cultural sociology. Other theoretical frameworks can help cognitive cultural sociology out of this pickle. The paper identifies the distributed cognition approach as a valuable theoretical framework capable of integrating many of the individual/neurological insights of cognitive cultural sociology with the more macro perspectives adopted by most cultural sociologists. The article describes the distributed cognition approach, emphasizing its affinity for some of the theoretical and analytical models already in use by a wide range of cultural sociologists. Features that it offers include a de-emphasis on the inside/outside boundary of the individual person as marking the limit of cognition, attention to heterogeneous networks of information and meaning propagation, and a strong role for culture not just in providing content for cognition but in actually shaping the distributed cognition process. The concept of distributed cognition has the potential to enhance, but not replace, the concept of culture by suggesting fruitful new avenues for exploring the pathways of information and meaning propagation that constitute cognition in its distributed form.

Ron Eyerman: a retrospective

The Israel BBQ as national ritual: performing unofficial nationalism, or finding meaning in triviality Abstract Concerned with how nationalist cultural codes are embedded in everyday life, studies of “nationalism-from-below” mistake nationalist meanings for the contents of official messages. Rather than studying the reception of spectacles and symbols produced from above, the article suggests looking at unofficial nationalism and focusing on the nationalist meanings of traditions and customs—especially those related to ritual and food—that are common to broad strata of the population but have almost no state involvement. Using the anthropological history of Israeli Independence Day as an exemplary case, and focusing on how people spend their country’s national day, the article examines the failure of official nationalism to design the holiday’s popular traditions. Next it surveys the development of what has become the popular mode of celebrating the day—the picnic and cookout. In due course, this practice was ritualized and iconized as representing “Israeliness,” an identity that is more ambivalent than the seamless images circulated from above. I argue that the meanings of unofficial practices, because of their triviality, lie not in the symbolic codes they enact, but rather in the synchronicity that ritualizes and iconizes a “way of life,” forms national solidarity, and imbues the performance with nationalist meanings.

Money talks

Staging communism: state control and the Chinese Model Opera Abstract In this paper, we draw on the case of Chinese Model Opera during the Cultural Revolution to demonstrate not only an extreme case of political control over cultural production but to consider the role of the state’s involvement in the consumption side of cultural politics. In addition to a textual analysis of the videos and librettos of 11 Model Operas, we analyze 274 reports and reviews related to Model Operas in the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) from the period 1964 to 1976, as well as supplement government documents. Our analysis of Chinese Model Opera extends our theoretical understanding of the potential relationships between political power and culture. Totalitarian regimes that take culture seriously, understanding art as a crucial resource in the reconstruction of society, may expand their involvement to direct not just what type of art is produced, but the conditions of its viewing, interpretation, and evaluation.

Racial remembering in urban politics Abstract Sociologists typically understand the way actors remember and invoke historical events in political debate to be primarily strategic, demonstrating that the past is used to make a case for policy in the present. Yet how actors remember the past also shapes their worldviews and approaches to policy in the first place. While some scholars acknowledge the more foundational role remembering plays in politics, this approach remains underdeveloped at the local level. In this article I examine the role memories of Boston’s school desegregation crisis of the 1970s have played in contemporary school reform processes, specifically in efforts to revise how students are assigned to schools at the city and neighborhood levels. Through interviews with policy-making participants and community advocates, I find that while actors on different sides of the debate draw on common narratives of Boston’s school desegregation crisis, they dispute the relevance of these events to the present. I find that some actors draw on memories of the crisis to assert a mnemonic closure from a racist past, while others, advocating distinct approaches to student assignment, argue for mnemonic bridging of institutional racism from the past to the present. This analysis demonstrates that social remembering is a central component of urban cultural politics, with racial discourses structuring how policy actors understand relationships between the past and the present to arrive at distinct policy conclusions. To suggest these processes are purely strategic masks the discursive power of racial ideologies which inform participants’ understandings of the past and their approach to the distribution of urban resources.

The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional attraction in competing interpretations of the Dyatlov pass tragedy Abstract Mystery plays a fundamental though not fully acknowledged role in modernity, serving as an important means for the re-enchantment of social life. Thus, under certain conditions, seemingly unimportant events can attract enormous attention and emotional involvement. One of those cases is the Dyatlov Pass Tragedy that occurred in 1959 in the Northern Urals, where nine hikers died under mysterious and still unknown circumstances. Nowadays, a half-century later, there are thousands of lay researchers searching for the truth and constructing competing explanatory accounts. In this paper, I propose the ‘trigger-narrative model,’ explaining the relation between mystery, governing narratives, and forms of sacrality, and apply it to the Dyatlov case. I argue that mystery is a ‘complex emotional attractor’—a symbolic mechanism shaped by the configuration of ‘elementary attractors’—‘strange’ things, symbols, or events, challenging commonsense narratives, which eventually maintains uncertainty and emotional tension. Every pattern of perception concerning mystery can be characterized by the tie between a trigger and its corresponding narrative; this tie is based on the transgression of the narrative by a trigger event. This model allows us to understand the cultural construction of mystery, which is crucially important for explaining how deep cultural structures energize people’s urges, concerns, and fascinations.