Meaning and Interpretation: Contemporary Cultural Theories - Detailseite

Meaning and interpretation are central categories of qualitative social research, and one of the key concepts for sociology more generally. In most general terms, the subdiscipline of cultural sociology today treats meaning as its object of study and interpretation as its method. But there are different theories of ‘meaning’ and manifold formalizations of ‘interpretation’. This class is designed to present and discuss some of contemporary (mostly English speaking) models of interpretation of meaning. Although there are several foundational traditions of sociology in terms of ‘culture‘ and ‘qualitative’ study (e.g. Florian Znaniecki and William Thomas), as well as ‘meaning‘ (Sinn, Bedeutung) and interpretive ’understanding‘ (Verstehen), notably dating back to Dilthey and Weber, none of them back then gave rise to a subdiscipline explicitly devoted to culture and cultural explanation. It was not until 1980s that ‘culture’ began to be treated as an independent explanatory variable in ist own right (explanans) rather than something to be explained in other terms. Prior to that, in the UK it was social anthropology that had established itself as the original science of culture, focusing mostly on what it understood as pre-modern societies, and later the so-called cultural studies emerged in 1970s. It became the discipline that critically thematized contemporary modern cultures. While the former had to deal with its colonial baggage, the latter was ambiguous about the independent explanatory status of culture. In this context, especially in the USA but elsewhere in the so-called ‘West’ as well, a variety of strong arguments for separate ‘meaning-centered’ interpretive cultural sociology were made. It happend ‘only‘ in the 1990s and congealed in the 2000s. Despite various critiques, it profoundly affected many strands of sociology. Today, widely discussed issues such as identity, gender, nationalism, civil society, diversity, consumption, media, post- and de-colonial problems and social trauma are unthinkable without meaning-oriented culturalist conceptualizations. This class focuses on deep reading of some of the key ‘classic‘ and contemporary theoretical texts that explain what culture is – or can be – both as ontological object (e.g. structure of social meanings) and epistemological perspective (interpretive reconstruction). The questions of what makes social phenomena ‘meaningful’ and how to interpret them are perennial questions of social sciences, of crucial importance not only to post-positivist qualitative disciplines but to all who wish to understand what it means to be human.

Literature and Course Structure

Week 1:                21st of April: INTRODUCTION: INTERPRETATION OF/AND MEANING

Week 2:                28th of April: MEANING-CENTERED CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Texts:

Main (Referat):

Geerz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Culture, New York: Basic Books (chapters 1 + 15).

Auxiliary:

Alexander, J.C. et al (eds.) 2011. Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences. New York: Palgrave.

Marcus, George E. & Fischer, Michael M.J. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Second Edition 1999. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, esp. pp. 17 to 44.

Week 3: 5th of May: MEANING-CENTERED CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

Texts:

Main:

Alexander, Jeffrey. 1987. ‘What Is Theory?’ In: Alexander, J. Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–21 (Lecture 1)

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–26 (introduction + chapter 1)

Auxiliary:

Kern, Thomas. 2018. Jeffrey Alexander und die Kultursoziologie (343–349). In: Moebius, Stephan et al. (Hrsgb.) Handbuch Kultursoziologie, Band 1. Springer.

Weeks 4:              12th of May: INTERPRETATION AND SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE

Texts:

Main:

Reed, Isaac. 2009. Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology. In: Reed, I. and Alexander, J. (eds.) Meaning and Method. The Cultural Approach to Sociology. Boulder: Paradigm.

Reed, Isaac. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use ofTheory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–65, 163–171 (introduction + epilogue)

Auxiliary:

Excerpts from selected peer-reviewed articles by Isaac Reed’s devoted to the topic

Week 5: 19th of May: INTERPRETIVE KNOWLEDGE: MEANING & DISCOURSE

Texts:

Main:

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (excerpts)

Auxiliary:

Kendall, Gavin & Wickham, Gary. 1999. Using Foucault’s Methods. London: Sage (excerpts)

Week 6: 26th of May: CULTURE IN (SOCIAL) ACTION

Texts:

Main:

Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture In Action. Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review 51(2): 273 – 286.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love. How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (excerpts)

Auxiliary:

Vaisey, Stephen. 2008. Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action. Sociological Forum Vol. 23, No. 3: 603 – 612.

Swidler, Ann. 2008. Comment on Stephen Vaisey’s ‘Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action’. Sociological Forum Vol. 23, No. 3: 614 – 618.

Week 7: 2 of June: CULTURAL PRODUCTION / CULTURAL CONSUMPTION

Texts:

Main (production):

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity (excerpts)

Peterson, Richard. 2000. Two Ways Culture is Produced. Poetics 28, 225–233.

Main (consumption):

 Illouz, Eva. 2009. Emotions Imagination and Consumption: A new research agenda. Journal of Consumer Culture 9(3): 377–413

Woodward, Ian. 2011. Towards an object-relations theory of consumerism: The aesthetics of desire and the unfolding materiality of social life. Journal of Consumer Culture 11(3): 366–384.

Auxiliary:

Santoro, Marco. 2011. From Bourdieu to Cultural Sociology. Cultural Sociology 5(11): 3 – 23

Week 8: 9th of June: LOSS OF MEANING: TRAUMA & MENTAL HEALTH

Texts:

Main:

Davis, Christopher, & Nolen-Hoeksma, Susan. 2001. Loss and Meaning. How Do People Make Sense of Loss. American Behavioral Scientist, 44(5): 726–741.

Alexander, J.C. et al. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Introduction).

Auxiliary

Taylor, Diana (ibidem) Staging Traumatic Memory, pp. 190–211.

Alan Fontana and Robert Rosenheck. 2005. The Role of Loss of Meaning in the Pursuit of Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Journal of Traumatic Stress, Vol. 18, No. 2: 133–136

Alexander, J.C. et al. (eds) 2016. Narrating Trauma. On the Impact of Collective Suffering. London: Routledge.

Sehgal, Parul. 2022. The Case Against the Trauma Plot. The New Yorker. January 3 & 10 Issue

Week 9: 16th of June: CULTURAL PERFORMANCE 1: CULTURAL PRAGMATICS

Texts:

Main:

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2006. ‘Cultural Pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy’. In: Alexander, J., Mast, J., Giesen, B. (eds). Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 29–90 (chapter 1)

Auxiliary:

Excerpts from the rest of this edited volume.

Week 10:              23rd  of June: CULTURAL PERFORMANCE 2: CULTURAL REPERTOIRE

Texts:

Taylor, Diana. 2005. The Archive and The Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. (Introduction + excerpts, pp. 1 – 78)

Week 11:              30th of June: THE MEANING OF THE BODY: SENSE & THE SENSES

Texts:

Main:

Johnson, Mark. 2009. The Meaning of the Body. Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Auxiliary:

Classen, Contance. 2012. The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch. Chicago: Uni Illinois Press.

Week 12:              7 th of July: CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY OF ARTS & AESTHETICS

Texts:

Main:

de la Fuente, Eduardo. 2013. Why Aesthetic Patterns Matter: Art and a “Qualitative” Social Theory. Journal for the Theory ofSocial Behaviour 44:2

de la Fuente, Eduardo. 2007. The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts. Cultural Sociology, Volume 1(3): 409–425

Auxiliary:

Larissa Buchholz. 2022.The Global Rules of Art. The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy. Princeton University Press

Week 13:              14th of July: INTERPRETATION AND SOCIAL CRITICISM

Texts:

Walzer, Michael. 1985. Interpretation and Social Criticism. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.