Symbols and Social Life: The Growth of Cultural Studies

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Culture Section to become one of the largest divisions of the American Sociological Association in just three years has been widely noted, and yet the great interest in among sociologists is not yet fully represented in the pages of the leading American sociology journals. More than is the case for much work in the discipline, the evolving revitalization of the concept in sociology can be traced in focused collections of essays and in topical issues of specialty journals. See, for example, Peterson (1976, 1983); Wolff and Routh (1977); Coser (1978); Kamerman and Martorella (1983); Melischek, Rosengren, and Stappers (1984); Rees (1985); Calhoun (1989); Desan, Ferguson, and Griswold (1989); Foster and Blau (1989); and Pankratz and Morris (1990). What is more, much of the work that has given new impetus to studies in sociology has appeared in monographic studies of the sorts reviewed in the eight essays that make up this review symposium. While scholars today generally agree that comprises symbols in which alternative patterns of conduct are more or less clearly encoded, the revitalized interest in the concept has not produced a new orthodoxy in its use. In fact, virtually every denotation of the term culture ever employed in sociology can still be found. Nonetheless, the weight of usage has shifted significantly. The 1950s' functionalist view of as a coherent set of norms, values, and beliefs mirroring social structure, for example, is seldom found in contemporary sociological work beyond the four-color introductory textbooks. For recent reviews of studies in sociology see Wuthnow and Witten (1988); Blau (1988); and Peterson (1989). Oversimplifying the range of usages, one may say that is used in two quite different ways, one deriving from anthropology and the other deriving from the humanities via the sociology of knowledge tradition. The first sees as codes of conduct embedded in or constitutive of social life. In this sense scholars may speak, for example, of the of a nation, a class, a corporation, a gang, or a scientific research laboratory. Here is to social structure roughly what the genetic code is to a species of living organisms. Such cultural codes may be discovered in ethnographic observation, attitude surveys, patterns of cultural choice, or the content analysis of documents. The second general perspective sees in the symbolic products of group activity, be they those of artists, religionists, scientists, lawyers, taste makers, the folk, the mass media, and the like. In this perspective represents the symbols that people use to encode and convey various forms of information: knowledge, power, authority, affect, merit, beauty, and virtue. Such symbolic elements also serve individuals and groups to identify those of like kind and to mark distinctions from others. Scholars employing this usage of focus on how such symbolic codes are produced, what they teach, and how they are used in the competition between classes and collectivities ranging in size from nations to scientific research laboratories. Crosscutting the distinction just mentioned

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