Katie Donnelly Culture syllabus: Course overview (for students): This course is an introduction to the sociology of culture. We will study the emergence of the field of cultural sociology and trace key changes in the way cultural sociologists have thought about what culture is and how to measure it. Readings will primarily be sociological articles and books though at times we will bring in materials from other disciplines, such as anthropology, or non-academic sources such as documentary film or podcasts. By the end of the course students will understand what culture is in the sociological sense, how it shapes seemingly intimate parts of ourselves like our personalities and worldviews, and the relationship between culture and structural forces in the (re)production of inequality. Course overview (guide): This course is designed for undergraduate students, who may or may not have taken other sociology courses, as an introduction to the field of cultural sociology. A key aim for this course is to expose students to both theoretical and empirical work in the field. Oftentimes, cultural sociologists get bogged down in academic debates over the definition of culture or the right way to measure it, and though these are important, and we will discuss these debates in the course, I do not want that to be the central focus. In my opinion, much more is gleaned from empirical investigations of the way culture works in everyday life, so I have attempted to construct a syllabus that reflects that. Similarly, I have not limited the syllabus to purely sociological sources, though they do comprise the overwhelming majority of assigned readings. Sociology of culture has many of the same forefathers as anthropology and I have included several anthropological texts in this syllabus, both classics and contemporary work. Additionally, I have included some non-academic sources, like podcasts and documentaries, either as assigned materials or as in-class activities or as an option for further study. I did so for several reasons. One, I am especially interested in thinking about how academics can communicate their work to broader audiences and I feel that journalistic and artistic forms of expression and information sharing are particularly good at changing public opinion and debate. Two, having students create a journalistic/artistic project, as I assign in the week in culture and bodies, forces them to have a deep understanding of the readings and concepts and to be able to distill them in a quickly digestible form. It is easy to skim readings and discuss them in class without truly understanding them but having to communicate those readings to a less knowledgeable audiences forces deeper engagement. Finally, not all sociology majors are going to want to become academics. In fact, most will not. Something I found frustrating as an undergraduate was that I didn’t really know what to do I could do with a sociology major beyond academia and I know that some of my peers found courses less engaging when they didn’t see their practical relevance. Though on the whole this course is fairly academically-oriented, including diverse materials will hopefully demonstrate to students how these concepts can be applied in creative ways and that they have relevance beyond the walls of the university. I did not include readings from classic sociologists like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. I did so because I anticipate that student will be exposed to these readings in other courses like introduction to sociology and sociological theory. Again, while I want to lay out the foundations of the field and familiarize students with its key debates, I also tried to approach it from a fresh angle—to think about things that excite me that don’t tend to be on traditional cultural sociology syllabi.

What I find really fascinating are the intersections and interactions between culture and other domains like structure and biology. What are the lines between these domains? Where do these lines blur? How are culture, structure, and biology co-constituting? I have tried to develop a syllabus that speaks to those questions by including weeks on topics like personality, pain and the body, and stratification and inequality. I want students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions about how the world works. To me, this is the fundamental contribution of cultural sociology, whether we choose to use words like declarative/non-declarative or values and schema, whether we see culture as symbols or as practices. Grading: Assignments (30%) Midterm (15%) Final (25%) Participation (30%) Assignments:

- Assignment 1 (due on first day of class): the first assignment is for the students to write a 1-2 paragraph definition of culture. We will revisit these definitions later in the course.

- Assignment 2 (due week 2): students will be asked to select a field site. They will be revisiting the site throughout the course, so it should be somewhere easily accessible. I will emphasize to students that the field site doesn’t need to be exceptionally “interesting”…it can be a dining hall, the lobby of a building, it could be a sports team or drama club, any space or group that they have access to. For assignment 2, they will simply be asked to spend a few hours at that site writing detailed notes of their observations (I will instruct students to focus on “objective” observations rather than subjective impressions or interpretations of what they see and hear).

- Assignment 3 (due week 3): now that students have read Becker’s “Becoming a Marijuana User,” they can use that article as an example for their own research project. I will ask them to return to their field site a second time to collect more data and then write a memo with some preliminary analyses in the style of Becker and other phenomenological/interpretive cultural sociologists.

- Assignment 4 (due week 4): continue to visit field site. Turn in memo with field notes and reflections.

- Assignment 5 (due week 5): reflecting on what we’ve learned in the class so far, students will update their definition of culture and then write a few paragraphs about how this new definition differs from the original and why they made the changes that they did.

- MIDTERM (due week 6): 10-page paper on their field research. Students are now familiar with culture as tool-kit, culture as practice, and phenomenological approaches to culture We have thought about how culture shapes our personalities and identities, as well as our values, morals, and worldviews. Students will have to draw on these different theories and concepts to write an original cultural analysis of their field site.

- Assignment 6 (due week 7): have students conduct and in-depth interview with one or two people from their field site. They should develop an interview guide that asks about processes or interactions they’ve personally observed. How do people’s accounts

align with or differ from the behaviors that students have observed? Do these accounts or narratives change students’ thinking on their site? Students should turn in notes/transcripts from their interviews as well as a memo with their reflections on the interview and updated thoughts on the analysis they turned in for their midterm.

- Assignment 7 (due week 8): continue to visit field site. Turn in memo with field notes, connecting them to the week’s readings.

- Assignment 8 (due week 9): same as above. - Assignment 9 (due week 10): as described in the week 9 section, students will work

in pairs to create a mini-podcast or mini-documentary that looks at something broadly related to culture and the body/pain. Students should feel free to be creative with this assignment and draw on a wide variety of sources to demonstrate the interaction between culture and biology in a powerful and thought-provoking way. Students will be given class time to work on this in addition to the out-of-class time they will spend on it.

- Assignment 10 (due week 11): now that we’ve read about culture and the reproduction of inequality I will ask students to think about how structural forces like class, race, and gender affect the processes they have been observing in their field site. How do structural and cultural forces operate together? Do the compound one another? Clash with each other? Turn in a memo with reflections on this.

- FINAL: For the final, students will revise and expand upon their midterm papers. Students should include at least 15-20 sources from the course and may draw upon other material as well to write a 15-20-page cultural analysis of their field site. Students should provide quotations from their interviews and excerpts of their fields notes as evidence for their claims.

Week 1: What is culture? Griswold, Wendy. 1987. “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture.”

Sociological Methodology 17:1-35.

Griswold, Wendy. 2013. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. London: Sage 1-18 [Chapter 1: Culture and the Cultural Diamond]

Patterson, Orlando. 2014. “Making Sense of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 40: 1-30. Sewell, William Jr. 1999. “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New

Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, eds. Victoria E. Bonnell, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Richard Biernacki. Berkeley: University of California Press 35-61.

Additional Readings Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" American Anthropologist Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1873 "The Science of Culture"

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922 "The Subject, Method and Scope of this Inquiry" Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa Small, M. L., Harding, D. J., & Lamont, M. (2010). Reconsidering culture and poverty. Annals of

the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629, 6–27. Week’s aims: This week’s readings are designed to introduce students to the concept of culture in the sociological sense. Culture has many popular definitions. It is sometimes used as shorthand for a set of national beliefs and customs; other times it refers to high-brow arts and entertainment; and still other times it describes the environment of organizations or groups. Students are therefore likely to hold many preconceived notions of what culture is that may or may not align with each other or with the sense in which it will be used in the course. Thus, our first task will be to develop our own definition of culture—based on careful reading of sociological texts—with which we can orient ourselves for the remainder of the course. The goal for the end of this session will be to have a small written statement, no more than a few sentences, outlining our agreed upon definition of culture. Summary of readings: There are four required readings for this week: two by Wendy Griswold (1987, 2013), one by Orlando Patterson (2014) and one by William Sewell Jr. (1999). All authors acknowledge that the definition of culture is vast and contested. Sewell (1999) explains that in the 1970s when culture was primarily the domain of anthropologists there was general consensus about what it was, but as history, sociology, literary studies and other disciplines began to incorporate culture into their studies in the 1980s and 90s, different views emerged. Sewell distinguishes between two senses of the term culture: 1) a theoretical aspect of social life and 2) a literal community with shared meanings and practices. Griswold (2013) adds a third sense of the term that connotes the arts and refinement. She traces the roots of this linkage to the 19th century when humanists feared that that expressive forms were in danger of being lost in the wake of industrialization. Culture then became seen as the antithesis to civilization and was elevated to a rarified status. At the same time, early anthropologists began thinking about culture in Sewell’s second sense of the term. While they saw culture as a fairly neatly bounded set of norms, values and behaviors, more recent scholarship has complicated this notion, arguing that culture often lacks coherence (Sewell 1999). These articles mainly deal with culture in the first sense, as an analytical category, though they touch on the notion of culture as a bounded group (e.g., Patterson’s “configurations”). There are two key debates in scholars’ conceptualizations of culture as an analytical category: 1) the role of meaning and 2) the role of symbols vs practice. Meaning in the classical sense was straightforward, but as post-modernist and post-structuralist thinking complicated the notion of objectivity, scholars began to challenge the idea that stable meanings exist. This pushed some sociologists towards a “verstehen” approach, focusing on subjective and intersubjective understanding, while others adopted a symbolic interactionist approach, emphasizing how meanings are maintained through semiotics like symbols, rituals and

language. While it remains unsettled whether one can or should attempt to understand meaning at the individual level, both Sewell (1999) and Patterson (2014) suggest at least at the group-level, meaning-making is central to cultural analysis. Sewell argues that semiotic communities must have “thin coherence” in order to engage in mutually meaningful symbolic action. Likewise, Patterson argues that meaning is public and because it is so, individuals routinely engage in meaning maintenance in order to harmonize their relations with others. Griswold, Patterson and Sewell all acknowledge a debate between culture as a system of meanings/symbols and culture as practice, yet all essentially dismiss it as a false dichotomy. Patterson argues that the ability to use cultural symbols effectively is itself a form of cultural knowledge, while Sewell conceptualizes culture as the semiotic dimension of social practice. Three of the additional readings (Tylor 1873, Malinowski 1922, and Mead 1928) show how early anthropologists conceptualized culture. Tylor views culture as an all-encompassing system of human knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, customs, laws and habits, while Malinowski views culture as a tool developed to meet basic human needs. Tylor held an evolutionary view of culture, believing all cultures eventually progress to the same final state, while Malinowski took a functional view of culture and sought to understand cultural meaning in its context. Mead shared this goal and further sought to understand how culture shapes personality. The Abu-Lughod reading demonstrates how culture can become reified as an unchanging thing and the dangers that entails, such as when pundits look to “cultural” explanations for terrorism. She argues that cultural boundaries are not stark but fluid, and that political and historical factors must also be taken into account when attempting to understand behaviors or events. The Small et al. article also offers a useful definition of culture by explicating seven of its key concepts. Activities/teaching tools: After allowing time for open-ended discussion of the readings, we will develop a definition of culture as a class using the following questions as guides:

1. Should we understand culture as analytical category or cultures as bounded groups? Can Patterson’s concept of sociocultural configurations help us move past this dichotomy?

a. To give students an example of culture in the bounded sense, we can talk about heritage days where one can find Irish and Italian stands…then push them to say what it really means to be Irish/Italian (time period/dress/language...what about in globalized world?)

b. I will also refer Griswold’s bread metaphor to help students understand the idea of culture as an analytic category. Griswold talks about how we can study the economics of bread, politics, etc. or the meaning it has (e.g., the eucharist, “bread and butter,” breaking bread…)

2. What is the role of meaning in culture? Is meaning individual or public? If public, how can we be sure meanings cohere? What does Sewell mean when he argues that cultural communities must at least have “thin coherence?’

a. To help students understand the concept of thin coherence, I will introduce the idea that we may all call colors the same name but perceive them differently.

We can never know how each other truly sees each color, but we have at least “thin coherence,” agreeing that certain shades have certain names.

3. What is the role of practice in culture? Should we think of practice and meaning as oppositional? Or as Sewell argues, is there meaning in practice?

a. To tease this apart, I will ask students to think of examples in which the same symbols can be used in different ways to different ends (e.g., a wealthy vs. poor person wearing tattered jeans)

Week 2: The Culture Turn Becker, Howard. 1953. “Becoming a Marihuana User,” American Journal of Sociology 59: 235-

242.

Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. [Intro and chapters 1-3]

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books,

1973). [“Thick Description”] Additional Readings; Douglas Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pp. 1-10, 20-23,

36-38, 42-44, 51-58. Schutz, Alfred. “On Multiple Realities.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5 (1945),

533-76.

Wuthnow, Robert. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 18-65 [Chapter 2: Beyond the Problem of Meaning] *included this as a counter point to the focus on meaning

Week’s aims: This week we will be covering the culture turn in sociology (and academia more broadly). Students will likely be familiar with the scientific method and positivistic thinking but may be new to phenomenology and other interpretive approaches. This week’s readings are designed to expose them to early examples of such approaches. In class we will contrast the style of research used by these authors with that of traditional positivistic scholars. Summary of readings: Berger and Luckmann’s seminal work The Social Construction of Reality pushes sociology beyond positivist thinking focused on causality to an interpretive approach focused on understanding subjective meaning and the ways in which such meaning constructs the objective social world. They argue that reality is socially constructed, and that sociology must analyze the process in

which this occurs. Formerly, sociology of knowledge was concerned primarily with ideas, that is intellectual traditions. Berger and Luckman argue that while that is important, the main object of study should be commonsense knowledge, or what they call everyday reality. While we are capable of transcending this reality (e.g., in dreams or philosophy), we spend most of our time in and attention on the “here and now.” This here and now is comprised of both objective facts and subjective meanings and Berger and Luckmann argue that it is our job as sociologists to determine how the latter construct the former. Berger and Luckmann outline three foundations of knowledge in everyday life: 1) that the reality of everyday life is an intersubjective world, 2) that face-to-face interaction is the prototypical case of social interaction and all other forms become progressively anonymous the farther removed they are from this case, and 3) human subjectivity can be objectified and two important cases of objectification are signs and symbols; language is a key semiotic system through which we objectivate our subjectivities. Becker’s “Becoming a Marihuana User” and Geertz’s essay on thick description echo many of the sentiments put forth in The Social Construction of Reality. Geertz states his allegiance with Weber in believing that culture is primarily semiotic and that it is thus the task of the anthropologist (or sociologist) is interpretive. Like Berger and Luckmann he deemphasizes causality and instead argues we should seek to understand the “interworked system of construable signs” that is culture. A particular illuminating quote from this work is Geertz’ assertion that culture “is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be casually attributed, but a context, something within which they can be intelligibly described” (p.14). The way to do this is through thick description. While thin description might accurately describe objective facts, thick description imbues such facts with the ethnographer’s interpretation of their culturally specific subjective meaning. Becker gives a concrete example of how to conduct a cultural analysis in the manner suggested by both Geertz and Berger and Luckmann. Taking the case of marijuana use, he argues that prior attempts to explain the use of the drug with motivational or pre-dispositional accounts are misguided. Individuals are not destined to become marijuana users, he argues, rather they are able to become users of the drug when their conception of the drug experience becomes enjoyable. This process occurs socially, in the same way that an acquired taste for certain foods or beverages develops. Individuals have to learn 1) the proper technique to smoke marijuana so that it will produce effects, 2) to recognize and connect such effects to the drug, 3) to enjoy these sensations. Thus, in line with the theoretical dispositions of Geertz and Berger and Lucman, Becker moves away from causal analysis and towards a phenomenological understanding of human behavior. Additional readings include Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger which explores how we construct semiotic boundaries and the function of rituals in doing so; Shutz’ On Multiple Realities which served as inspiration for Berger and Luckmann as it explores the structure of the commonsense world of everyday life that they see as their object of study; and finally Wuthnow Activities/teaching tools:

I will prepare a slideshow to give students a sense of the history of the field and help them situate the culture turn within it. I will start by giving biographies of early positivistic sociologists and anthropologists like Parsons and Tylor and emphasize that an early goal of the field of sociology (and anthropology) was to establish it as scientific, hence the strong positivistic stance. Then I will give biographies of Berger and Luckmann and describe The Social Construction of Reality and its consequences on the field. I will also try to weave in historical context throughout the presentation (i.e., events occurring in America and Europe during the time of the culture turn). I believe a historical/biographical approach to presenting these readings will help the material stick with students. Additionally, we will leave some time for discussion of the readings, in which I will encourage students to think about how Becker’s work illustrates some of the tenets put forth in the other two readings. Week 3: Culture as tool-kit Swidler, Ann. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51

(April 1986), 273-86.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–1715. Tavory, Iddo and Ann Swidler. 2009. “Condom Semiotics: Meaning and Condom Use in Rural

Malawi.” American Sociological Review 74(2):171–89. Additional Reading Lizardo, Omar. “Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative

and Nondeclarative Modes.” American Sociological Review 82, 1 (2017), 88- 115.

Week’s aims: The goal of this week is to introduce students to the tool-kit theory of culture. Last week students learned of the semiotic shift in cultural studies which upended positivistic thinking. This shift left a gap: how then does culture relate to behavior? Can we only interpret culture? Or can we use culture to explain behavior? Swidler attempts to fill this gap with her theory of tool-kits and strategies of action. We will read this as well as Vaisey’s dual-process theory which attempts to integrate Swidler’s post-hoc justification centered theory with earlier motivational theories of culture using recent developments in cognitive science. Summary of readings: In “Culture in Action,” Ann Swidler outlines her influential “tool-kit” theory of culture. In her view, culture does not instill in individuals ultimate values which motivate their action, rather it gives them a repertoire (“tool-kit”) of habits, skills, and styles with which they can develop strategies of actions. Swidler defines strategies of action as collections of actions that are influenced by “habits, moods, sensibilities and views of the world” and argues that culture

determines the shape and organization of such collections. Individuals do not have one strategy of action but many (hence the tool-kit metaphor) and use different strategies in different settings. Swidler argues that it is these patterns of action which are enduring, not values, for the same strategy of action may be applied to several different ends. Strategies of action only change during “unsettled times,” or periods of cultural uncertainty (which can be at the individual or collective level). This theory in significant in that it provides a new way to think about causality in cultural terms after the phenomenological shift in the field raised doubts about earlier motivational accounts of behavior. Vaisey offers a counterpoint to Swidler, arguing that she went too far in dismissing the motivational nature of values. He attempts to integrate her tool-kit approach with other value-driven explanations of behavior in a dual-process model of action. His critique of the tool-kit model is that it rests on the false premise that for values to motivate action, actors would have to be aware of this and make deliberative choices. Cognitive science suggests that while we do make deliberate decisions some of the time, more often we operate on an automatic level. Vaisey argues that these automatic responses are culturally conditioned. Thus, culture shapes action both consciously and subconsciously, in the first case through deliberation and justification and in the second through internalized schemas. Vaisey believes forced-choice surveys are the best way to get at the culture-action link and illustrates this with a survey of teens, finding that their behaviors (smoking, drinking, lying) are correlated with moral statements made years prior. Tavory and Swidler (2009) illustrate the tool-kit theory with the empirical example of condom usage in Malawi. They present us with a puzzle: condom usage in Malawi is very low despite public awareness of the risks of unprotected sex in a context with extremely high HIV/AIDS risk. Malawians have fairly good knowledge of and access to condoms, yet the routinely do not use them. Tavory and Swidler develop the concept of a “semiotic axis” or “a dimension that delineates on array of possible meanings” of a practice like condom use (p.172). They show how three semiotic axes—sensual pleasure, the dangers of condoms, and love and trust—frame local understandings of condom use. Using a condom in a committed relationship signals mistrust or promiscuity, and thus tends to be avoided even when partners fear AIDS and understand that condoms reduce their risk of contracting it. Activities/teaching tools: I think these readings can best be learned through an in-class debate followed by a group discussion. In the former part of the class students would be arbitrarily divided in to 1) motivational, 2) justificatory, and 3) dual-process camps and defend each perspective. Then we can discuss how oppositional these theories really are and whether there is common ground among them. For example, to me Vaisey’s idea that we have cultural-cognitive structures built from experience that allow us to respond to stimuli in automatic ways doesn’t sound all that different from Swidler’s strategies of action, expect perhaps in the degree of consciousness one has of the cultural objects being drawn upon. We can also discuss limitations of each of these theories. For instance, it is unclear to me how, in Swidler’s mind, individuals go about choosing the proper strategy of action for different circumstances. I am also unclear on the distinction between settled and unsettled times and why

values have more motivational force in settled times, while doctrine, symbol, and ritual do so in unsettled times. I also have questions about Vaisey’s theory, for instance when internalized schemas differ from deliberate justifications, what happens? Why are some things “moral intuitions” and others consciously stated values and beliefs? Vaisey argues that we are capable of deliberation when required by social action…is this the only time our actions are deliberate? I am also curious where Vaisey thinks moral differences arise from, once demographic/geographic variables are accounted for? Finally, I am skeptical that forced-choice surveys are truly the best way to understand the culture-action link. In class I would pose these questions to students in an open-ended discussion format. Week 4: Culture as practice Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Ch. 2: “Structures and Habitus”] Gross, Neil. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74, 3

(2009), 358-79.

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. "Doing gender." Gender & society 1, no. 2 (1987): 125-151.

Vaisey, Stephen and Lauren Valentino. 2018. “Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences.” Poetics 68:131–43.

Additional Readings: Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1993), 74-111. [Chapter 2: The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods]

Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101(1):1–37. Week’s aims: This week we will be exploring the idea of culture as something that is practiced. Bourdieu and Gross give us broad theoretical frameworks for thinking about culture and human behavior as practice or habit; Vaisey and Valentino make a case for integrating this view of culture with recent developments in psychology and the cognitive sciences that fall under the umbrella category “Judgement and Decision Making” (JDM); and West and Zimmerman apply a culture-as-practice lens to the realm of gender. Summary of readings: In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu develops his concept of the “habitus.” For Bourdieu, habitus is central to the construction of a theory of practice, which he sees as a prerequisite to understanding “the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of

internality” (72). This dialectic lies at the root of habitus, which Bourdieu defines as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” and “strategy-generating” practices that enable “agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations” (72). Habitus is acquired and enacted, internalized and externalized. It is what structures people’s actions and goals, though we are not necessarily of these goals or the fact that our action is directed towards them. Bourdieu rejects theories, such as those of Jean-Paul Sartre, that fail to recognize individuals’ habitus and treat actions and interactions as “a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world” (74). The influence of Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is evident in Swidler’s theory of cultural repertoires. The notion that deeply ingrained, subconscious cultural values, patterns and schema inform individuals’ “strategies of action” is distinctly Bourdieusian. However, Bourdieu’s habitus appears to be more tightly bounded than Swidler’s cultural toolkits. He sees habitus as a historical product that informs both individual and collective practices and argues that it is closely linked with social class. For him, in fact, it is one of the main mechanisms of social reproduction. This does not mean that every individual within a certain social group thinks and acts in an identical manner, rather, Bourdieu says, “each individual system of dispositions may be seen as a structural variant of all the other group or class habitus” (86). This variation results from the fact that each individual represents a unique integration of experiences (i.e., the family, the school, etc.) In this way, habitus is reminiscent of Simmel’s “web of group affiliations,” which we will be reading next week. West and Zimmerman similarly take a culture-as-practice viewpoint in their article “Doing Gender.” In it, they argue that gender is not something innate nor, as previously conceptualized, a role that is enacted in certain social settings. Gender is “omnipresent” and is recurrently constituted through interaction. They draw on Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of “gender displays” (we will be reading Goffman next week), conceptualizing gender as something that is performed, but they go beyond Goffman arguing that gender is not a peripheral matter but an essential identity that shapes all other interactions. West and Zimmerman’s theory also aligns with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Although Bourdieu mainly talks about habitus in connection with social class, the idea that individuals have certain dispositions and ways of responding to situations that are enduring and reproducible, and that these dispositions and behaviors are both internalized and externalized through social interaction is shared by both theories. Neil Gross advances a practice-oriented approach to thinking about causality in social research. He disputes the rational actor view of mechanisms and, like Bourdieu, argues instead that social actors respond to problem situations in habitual ways. These responses form chains or aggregations which become the mechanisms linking larger social phenomena. While Gross’s theory aligns with Bourdieu’s in many ways, he distinguishes the two by noting that a pragmatist approach to mechanisms views behavior as less strategic than Bourdieu’s habitus does. That is, though Bourdieu moves away from the rational actor paradigm, he often sees habitus as serving to maintain class position. Gross on the other hand believes actors often have diverse motives or no explicit motive at all for their behavior and argues that pragmatist theory is better position to accommodate this diversity. Vaisey and Valentino argue that sociologists should integrate judgement and decision-making theory (JDM) into their work. They address common protests put forth by sociologists and make

a case for why those protests are misguided. This work is relevant to our topic this week because the explicitly address cultural sociologists like Bourdieu and Gross who see human behavior as something that is often habitual and unreflective and reject the choice/preference language of rational choice theory and JDM. Vaisey and Valentino argue that JDM scholars agree that choices and preferences may be implicit and thus the two approaches are not incompatible. This reading is also helpful in a practical sense because it discusses many of the theories and concepts we cover this week and in prior weeks in very simple, straightforward terms. Activities/teaching tools: There was recently a short film (about 20 minutes long) released at the Tribeca Film Festival called “Framing Agnes” which is based on Garfinkel’s study of a transsexual woman called Agnes. West and Zimmerman draw heavily on this case study in their article, I think it would be interesting to watch the film and then use this example to think through the ways culture is practiced in the context of gender, weaving the other readings we had this week into our discussion. Week 5: Culture, Identity, and Personality Simmel, Georg. 1955., “The Web of Group Affiliations.” Trans., Reinhard Bendix. Selection:

Pp. 127-43 in Conflict and The Web of Group Affiliations. N.Y.: Free Press.

Simmel, Georg. “Metropolis and Mental Life.” Goffman, Erving. 1973. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, NY: Overlook

Press. [preface, introduction and chapter 1: performances]

Peterson, Richard, and Roger Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61(5):900–907.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion,

and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224.

Additional readings: Frye, M. (2012). Bright Futures in Malawi’s New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions

of Identity. American Journal of Sociology, 117(6), 1565–1624. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press. - Select my own page numbers; suggested: [pp.11-17, 114-134, 169-179, 226-244, 250-

259, and 456-457.] Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick, “Beyond Identity” Theory and Society, 29 (2000), pp.

1-47

Hagen, Steve. 2011. Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Aware Right Now, Every Day. Tuttle Publishing. *if you are curious to learn more about the interdependent concept of self

McGinn, Kathleen L. and Eunsil Oh. 2017. “Gender, Social Class, and Women’s Employment.”

Current Opinion in Psychology 18:84–88. *on how independence vs interdependence varies within the U.S. by gender and class

Spiegel, Alix. “The Personality Myth.” NPR.Org. Retrieved July 29, 2019

(https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/482836315/the-personality-myth). *this is more of a psychology perspective, but including it as additional since it relates to the topic and is an interesting listen

Week’s aims: This week’s readings are aimed to challenge students’ conceptions of personality. We typically think of personality as something inherent and fixed, but these readings suggest that personality is culturally constructed. Ranging from classical works like Simmel’s “Metropolis and Mental Life” to more recent work on cultural omnivorousness, this week’s texts will demonstrate how personal taste, expression of emotions, motivations, and fundamental conceptions of the self vary along cultural lines. The Goffman reading will also serve as an introduction to the dramaturgical approach to culture, an important strain of recent research. Summary of readings I have included two readings from Simmel: “Metropolis and Mental Life” and “Web of Group Affiliations.” Each reading shows how social context and location shape what we think of as personality or identity. Written in the context of the industrial revolution which brought about profound societal upheaval, Simmel’s “Metropolis and Mental Life” explores how city-life shapes social interactions and expressions of individuality. Simmel asserts that a fundamental motive of individuals is to resist “being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.” In the modern era this becomes simultaneously an easier and a more difficult task. While group boundaries become loosened in the metropolis granting individuals greater freedom of expression, it also becomes more difficult to stand out. This latter point emerges from the division of labor that accompanies the emergence of cities. In rural, de-industrialized societies, objective (collective) and subjective (individual) culture are virtually one and the same, but as society grows more complex the two diverge. Specialization allows for a broadening of consumption and therefore a growth of objective culture. At the same time, specialization stifles individual wholeness of personality. Simmel also argues that metropolitan environments facilitate money economies which lead to de-personalized, intellectual social relations and a blasé attitude. These two phenomena (money economy and intellectualistic attitude) are mutually reinforcing and it cannot be determined which is cause and which is effect. In “Web of Group Affiliations,” Simmel puts forth a model of individuality that is based on the intersection of several social groups with which the individual is associated. Simmel describes the changing nature of group affiliations between the medieval period and modern times. According

to him, in the past group affiliations were largely based on geography or other “external or schematic criteria”, whereas in modern times they are largely based on interest or “rational criteria” (though proximity is not totally irrelevant). Simmel argues that this development gives man greater freedom because he is no longer so tightly bound to preordained groups, but instead has the ability to select in to group memberships on the basis of his interests. He provides a geometric analogy for this theory, arguing that in the past man was embedded in a series of concentric circles, with family at the center, followed by the locality, the state, etc. The modern man however is in a web of circles which intersect each other but no single circle fully absorbs the individual. Simmel believes that the groups with which an individual is affiliated influence personality. These groups form a “system of coordinates,” so that as the number of groups a person belongs to increases, his social position becomes more precise. Additionally, as his group memberships multiply, the likelihood that any other person occupies the same space decreases, thus the uniqueness of his personality increases. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman similarly suggests that personality is socially constructed, suggesting that individuals are like actors in a play putting on performances for others in social interactions. While we are attempting to convince others of our role, we also must have some degree of belief in our performance. Oftentimes this belief becomes an integral part of our personality. Goffman outlines three components of social “fronts” (i.e., the performances we put on for others): setting, manners, and appearance. Setting refers to furniture, décor, physical layout of spaces; manners refer to the disposition of the actors; and appearance refers to signals of the actor’s social status (e.g., clothing, looks, age, race, etc.). These components are carefully selected by actors to increase the credibility of their performance and elicit the desired response of the social other (who is part audience and part co-actor). Thus, Goffman takes a view of personality that is highly calculated and relational in nature. Markus and Kitayama compare Western and Eastern conceptions of the self and the implications these differences have for understanding human cognition, emotion, and motivation. They argue that in Western societies like the U.S. the self is thought of as a bounded, independent entity, while in Eastern societies like Japan the self is seen as something fundamentally connected to others, or interdependent. These different conceptions of the self are tied to normative expectations of how to navigate the social world as well as, Markus and Kitayama argue, individuals’ phenomenological experience of the world. They outline the ways in which understanding these divergent construals of the self challenges traditional psychological theories that are premised on the Western construal (e.g., fundamental attribution error, secure attachment theory, etc.). Peterson and Kern offer a concrete, empirical example of how aspects of one’s identity (artistic taste) can shift with cultural transformations. They demonstrate that while high-status individuals previously signaled this status via high-brow, exclusive tastes for arts and entertainment forms like opera, they now signal status via “omnivorous” taste of both high-brow and low-brow art forms. They posit that this shift occurred alongside various cultural and structural changes, such as globalization, expansion of the media, and the shift from ethnocentrism to cultural relativism as a dominant mode of thought. They test these claims using longitudinal survey data of individuals’ music taste and find both cohort and period effects, with younger cohorts and survey takers in the later period demonstrating more omnivorous tastes.

Activities/teaching tools: This week we will have a class discussion about what personality means to the students and whether and how these readings altered their concept of personality. We will also try to connect this week’s readings to some of the concepts discussed earlier in the course. Some possible guiding questions are below. Questions:

- How does the Markus and Kitayama reading speak to the phenomenological view of culture we learned about in the second week?

- How does Peterson and Kern’s idea of a value change in concert with other changes (structural, art-world) relate to the tool-kit/value debate? Does it take one side? Reconcile different points of view?

- How do Peterson and Kern measure taste? What assumptions does their methodology entail? (e.g., that music taste serves as status marker)

- In light of the Markus and Kitayama reading, do we think that Goffman’s theory is specific to societies with independent notions of the self? Or does it apply to societies with interdependent construals? If not, how might it be tweaked to do so?

- Recently, there has been much debate about the way globalization and technology like mobile phones and social media have influenced our identity and the way we interact with each other. How do Simmel’s essays shed light on this debate?

- In what ways to Simmel and Goffman overlap and in what ways do they contrast? o (e..g, both think of personality as culturally constructed…Simmel thinks of

individual as overlap of his memberships/influenced by broader economic/structural factors…Goffman sees personality as something relational, enacted in interaction).

Week 6: Values, Morals and Worldviews Abend, Gabriel. 2014. The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics.

Princeton University Press. [Ch. 1] Wuthnow, R. (1996). Poor Richard’s Principle: Recovering the American Dream through the

Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money. Princeton University Press. [Intro and Ch. 5 “Accounts”]

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2017. Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the

American Right. New York: The New Press. [read: Preface, Ch. 1, and Part 3; skim remaining portions of book]

Additional readings; Durkheim, Emile. 1995 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free

Press. [Introduction, “Origins of These Beliefs”, “The Negative Cult and Its Functions--the Ascetic Rites”, Conclusion]

Frye, Margaret. 2017. “Cultural Meanings and the Aggregations of Actions: The Case of Sex and

Schooling in Malawi.” American Sociological Review, 82(5): 945-976. Week’s aims: This week we will investigate how culture shapes the things we hold dear: our values, morals, and worldviews. The Abend reading lays down some theoretical infrastructure for thinking about morality in sociological terms. Wuthnow illustrates how moral views are influenced by broader historical trends and structural factors, and how these views in turn shape the way we relate to economic activity. In the chapter we will focus on, he investigates how organizations provide individuals narratives through which they come to understand the meaning of their work. And finally, Hochschild examines how individuals’ (and communities’) political views are shaped by various cultural institutions. Summary of readings: Wuthnow’s Poor Richard’s Principle investigates the moral underpinnings of work and economic life. Wuthnow argues that as technocratic views of work and money espoused by political economists replaced earlier holistic accounts, morality and meaning has become increasingly separated from economic life leading to a sense of restlessness and unfulfillment among the American people. In order to address this issue, he suggests, we must first understand how individuals think about work and money in the context of their broader life goals and values. In chapter five, Wuthnow describes how occupational institutions shape the accounts individuals provide to explain the meaning behind their work. Corporations have picked up on the dissonance resulting from people’s struggle to reconcile work and moral consideration and have increased rhetoric about “corporate culture” and company “values and beliefs” in response. In interviews with employees across several fields, Wuthnow finds that interviewees echo corporate narratives. They describe their work as fulfilling because it provides them with variety and control, allows them to utilize their talents and has a familial atmosphere. This rationale mirrors language found in company brochures and websites. Interestingly, interviewees use this rationale even when their work contains little variety, they have little control over it, and when their career paths were less of a deliberate choice than a product of chance. This chapter illustrates how individual values and morals can be shaped by institutions and organizations. Gabriel Abend has also looked at how people understand their moral obligations in the context of business. In his book The Moral Background, Abend outlines a theory of morality as comprised of two layers: first-order morals and the moral background. First-order morality includes normative and behavioral patterns. That is, it describes what people in a given society or group consider to be right or good, what actions or behaviors they consider acceptable or unacceptable. These things can generally be articulated by people if you ask them. The moral background, however, describes the basis for these moral views. It determines what objects are subject to moral evaluation and what reasons can suitably be used to support moral positions. The moral background is more concealed than first-order morality as it “generally manifests itself as an intuition” (Abend 2014, p. 30). Abend argues that the moral background enables people to address two questions: 1) what makes things moral or immoral and 2) what compels people to act morally

and be moral in general. In his words, “the background provides people and organizations with understandings and accounts they can invoke if they need to” (Abend 2014, p. 34). Similar to Swidler’s theory of cultural toolkits, the moral background provides people with a “conceptual repertoire” with which to reason through ethical dilemmas and justify behaviors and beliefs. The conceptual repertoire is one of six elements Abend sees as comprising the moral background. The others are: grounding (why is something moral/immoral; why should we care), object of evaluation (what objects are capable of being morally evaluated; which are evaluated most often), method and argument, metaethical objectivity (do real and absolute answers exist to moral questions? Are these answers relative? Or do they not exist at all?), and finally metaphysics (shared assumptions about the nature and goals of human beings and the broader world). Certain members of society act as “practical ethicists,” creating and disseminating persuasive moral arguments constructed on the basis of these elements. These people include politicians, teachers, religious leaders and business ethicists. After he sets up his theory of the moral background, the remainder of Abend’s book is a historical analysis of the moral background underlying business in America between 1850 and 1930. In Strangers in their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild also explores how culture shapes individuals’ values and worldviews, focusing specifically on what she terms “The Great Paradox.” The paradox she refers to is that oftentimes communities who stand to benefit the most from government intervention and regulation are the same ones whose citizens are most ardently opposed to big government and instead favor Tea Party style conservative politics. Based on fieldwork in a Louisianan community, Hochschild finds that part of the explanation for this paradox lies in what she calls the “social terrain” of the community, including industry, the state, religion, and the media. However, beyond these contextual factors, Hochschild argues another force is at work in shaping the political views of those she studies: their “deep story.” Hochschild’s respondents have a strong sense of the American Dream and how to attain it in a way that is fair. They see governmental programs and policies, like affirmative action or welfare, as unfair. They believe such policies are allowing people to “cut the line” that they have been diligently waiting in. In their minds, people should not receive “handouts” from the government but follow the tenets they value to achieve success: hard-work, endurance, belief in God. Many of the people she talked to endured great hardships related to poverty, pollution, and other factors that theoretically government could solve. Yet, they believe that because they dealt with them individually others should too. Thus, ironically, their hardship makes them more opposed to regulation and government spending. Activities/teaching tools:

- What is Abend’s concept of practical ethicists? Who are the practical ethicists in Wuthnow’s chapter on accounts? What about in the community Hochschild studies?

- Abend argues people have a conceptual repertoire with which they reason through moral dilemmas. Think about one of the individuals in Hochschild’s book and an ethical dilemma they faced. Describe their conceptual repertoire…how did they reason through this problem? …. what are the bases of the moral arguments they make?

- How does Wuthnow’s concept of a moral vacuum relate to the anxieties Hochschild’s respondents feel about liberal elitism?

- Wuthnow’s respondents describe the value of their work in language that echoes corporate narratives…can you think of examples in Hochschild’s book where institutions and organizations similarly shape the values of individuals?

Week 7: Narratives, Accounts, Storytelling Mills, C. Wright. 1940. “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive.” American Sociological

Review 5(6):904–13.

Orbuch, Terri L. 1997. “People’s Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:455–478.

Polletta, Francesca. 2011. “The Sociology of Storytelling.” Annual Review of Sociology 37:109 130.

Scott, Marvin B., and Stanford M. Lyman. 1968. “Accounts.” American Sociological Review

33:46–62. Somers, Margaret. 1994. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network

Approach.” Theory and Society 23(5):605–49. Swidler, Ann. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

2001) [Chapter 6: Love and Marriage] Tilly, Charles. 2006. Why? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [read chapter 1, skim other chapters] Week’s aims: This week’s readings center around the idea that culture shapes the narratives we tell about ourselves and the world around us. This idea is closely aligned with the previous two weeks on identity and worldviews, but it focuses specifically on rhetoric and the way we string together disparate events into a coherent, temporally sequenced whole. Summary of readings: Mills argues that speech allows us to coordinate diverse actions. He believes that social actors often do not have explicit motives for their behavior but construct these motives after the fact when they are called upon to do so. Rather than providing the “true” reason for their behaviors, individuals offer socially and situationally acceptable justifications. These “vocabularies of motive” as he calls them shape the way we view each other and ourselves. Scott and Lyman build on Mill’s vocabulary of motives by developing the concept of account-making. Accounts are verbal statements used to explicate events. Scott and Lyman argue that individuals are forced to “account” for their behavior when it is subject to negative valuation. They must justify their actions

in a socially satisfactory manner through a narrative account. Orbuch and Sommers extend this argument even further, suggesting that we don’t only construct accounts for each other, but for ourselves as well. Together, their articles suggest that accounts and narratives allow us to make sense of our daily lives and perceive a sense of order or meaning in them. Thus, narratives are essential in processes such as coping with psychological stress and identity formation. In Why?, Charles Tilly focuses on one specific type of account: justifications. He develops a typology of the ways in which individuals justify their behavior to others, arguing that we employ either conventions (common, socially acceptable reasons for events), codes (reasons that appeal to authority, such as law or religion), technical accounts (e.g., the way an expert might explain an event), stories (explanatory narratives), or a combination of these techniques to explain our behavior. Such justifications serve a relational purpose, that is they confirm, establish, negotiate, or repair relations between the actor offering the justification and the recipient of it. The chapter that I am asking students to read gives the example of 9/11 and the various ways different actors (e.g., the media, the military, family of victims) might “explain” that event. Students have already read Swidler’s concept of the “tool-kit;” they will now read its application in her book Talk of Love. We will read the chapter on love and marriage, where Swidler illustrates how people develop beliefs about love and marriage that draw from diverse sources such as Hollywood portrayals of love stories, as well as their own experiences in relationships. While these various depictions are often at odds, individuals are able to reconcile them into a coherent whole by selectively drawing on one or the other depiction as the situation calls for. This chapter thus provides an empirical exploration of the way culture seeps into the narratives we tell ourselves and others about our lives and relationships. Activities/teaching tools: In class, students will think of a question they want to ask others that would elicit and account or justification, for example: why did you chose this university, why did you vote for a certain political candidate, why did you wear the outfit you are wearing, etc. Then they will go out into campus and ask a handful of people (5-10…or however many they can ask in about 30/35 minutes) to give a short explanation to their question, taking notes on these responses. Then they will come back to the classroom and use the readings to help understand their “results.” Are there patterns in the reasons people give? Can they develop a typology of reasons similar to Tilly’s? What cultural sources might people be drawing on in their explanations? Week 8: Linguistics Basso, Keith H. Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache.

UNM Press, 1996. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, and Tyrone A. Forman. 2000. “‘I Am Not a Racist But…’: Mapping

White College Students’ Racial Ideology in the USA.” Discourse & Society 11(1):50–85. Bonnet, Francois. 2014. “How to Perform Non-Racism? Colour-Blind Speech Norms and Race

Conscious Policies among French Security Personnel.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(8):1275–94.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language." Et

Cetera 1, no. 4 (1943): 197. Additional Readings:

Gumperz, John J. 1982. "Social Network and Language Shift" (ch.3) and "Conversational Code

Switching," (ch. 4), pp. 38-99 in Discourse Strategies. N.Y.: Cambridge University Press. Week’s aims: This week’s readings illustrate how culture is inscribed in the very language we use and how language in turn can influence the way we experience the world. Whorf’s article explores the latter possibility, arguing that the way we perceive things as fundamental as time and space is structured by culturally specific vocabularies and grammars; Basso examines the role of place names in carrying on cultural tradition and history; and Bonilla-Silva and Forman and Bonnet demonstrate how language can obscure and reproduce racial inequality. Summary of readings: In "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," Whorf argues that language—its vocabulary and grammar—structures how we perceive and experience the world. To illustrate this, Whorf compares conceptions of time and space in Western and Hopi cultures and examines the ways in which these conceptions are structured by language. One example is the way we (Westerners) refer to time or temporal processes using numeric language. While this language describes aggregates as we objectively experience them (e.g., there are five paperclips on my desk), we do not objectively experience time in this way (i.e., we don’t experience five days, only the present moment). Yet we use the same linguistic structure in both cases. By contrast, the Hopi only use numeric language for the former type of entity. They do not objectify time, but instead express it in a way that captures the way we subjectively experience it, that is as something that “becomes later and later.” This theory which has been termed the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” has been rejected by subsequent scholars in its strong version as too deterministic, yet many accept it in the weaker sense that linguistic categories have the ability to influence thought and behavior. In Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso develops the idea of place-making, that is developing a sense of place. He argues that places serve as symbols of past events and as ways to remember them. The history of places is constructed and revised collectively. In his study of the Apache Native American tribe based in Cibecue, Arizona, Basso learns that place names take on central significance. They believe that in speaking place names they are “quoting the ancestors,” and place names are often associated with specific stories, such as the origin story of the tribe. Beyond documenting history, place names and their accompanying stories often serve a moral purpose in the Apache tribe. If a member of the tribe violates a behavioral code, he might be brought to a specific place and told a story of that place in which someone else who similarly violated the code suffered negative consequences as a way of keeping moral order. This book demonstrates the

power of language and names to create personal and cultural relationships to place, as well as to reinforce the values and norms of the community. The remaining two readings, Bonilla-Silva and Forman’s “I am not a racist, but…” and Bonnet’s “How to perform non-racism,” deal with the racialization of language. Both articles demonstrate how individuals (usually whites) use “color-blind” speech, that is speech that avoid explicit mention of race, to reinforce the racial status quo in subtle ways. Bonilla-Silva and Forman find that their respondents use semantic maneuvers to avoid being labelled racist. When they express views that are potentially problematic, such as being against interracial marriage, they use “face-saving” techniques like displacement (e.g., “I’m not opposed to interracial marriage per se, but worry that it would negatively affect their children…”). Similarly, Bonnet finds that French security guards avoid using racial categories when discussing security problems. Instead they use ostensibly neutral terms like “youth” or “urban youth” to talk about shoplifters, though in reality they are referring to youth of color. When they do engage in explicit race talk, for instance noting that most shoplifters are North African youth, they often manage this with either 1) contrition (seeming sorry to mention race) or 2) defensive assertiveness (e.g., the offenders are people of color and that is just a fact). Activities/teaching tools: Two alternative activities:

1.) Have students make “place maps” where of important/routine places in their lives and name them. Then pair up with another student and share the stories of those places, paying attention to the personal and cultural significance of the places.

2.) Have students do a linguistic analysis of texting or a social media platform. What is the vocabulary and grammar of that language community? What are the norms and values? How do they differ from everyday face-to-face language norms?

Week 9: Feeling culture: pain, suffering, and the body Frank, Arthur. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, IL. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1989. "Death without Weeping" [Ch. 8 “(M)Other Love: Culture,

Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking”] Hochschild, Arlie. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.” American Journal of

Sociology 85 (1979), 551-75. Spiegel, Alix. “Invisibilia: For Some Teens With Debilitating Pain, The Treatment Is More

Pain.” NPR.Org. Retrieved July 23, 2019 (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/09/700823481/invisibilia-for-some-teens-with-debilitating-pain-the-treatment-is-more-pain).

Additional readings: Leschziner, Vanina and Adam Isaiah Green. 2013. “Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate

Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field.” Sociological Theory 31(2):116–44. Myers, Fred. 1979. "Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order among

Pintupi Aborigines" Ethos

Week’s aims: This week we will think about how things that on the surface might seem like they have nothing to do with culture, such as pain, sickness, and other bodily experiences, are in fact culturally influenced. We explore topics ranging from disease and disability to mother love and grief to emotion, considering how the experience of each is culturally constructed. Summary of readings: In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank explores how our experience of illness is shaped by the cultural narratives surrounding it, which he calls “illness stories.” Drawing on published and unpublished stories of personal experiences with illness, media portrayals of disease, hospital advertisements, academic theory, and his own experience with cancer, Frank develops a typology of illness narratives and outlines the implications of each for the way the ill perceive their sickness. There are three forms of illness narrative. First is the restitution narrative, a modernist narrative propagated by the medical and pharmaceutical community where illness is something that can be eradicated so that the afflicted can return to their “normal state” of health. Second is the chaos narrative. This narrative, Frank notes, is not really a narrative as it has no structure, no narrative arc. This is the way those living in the chaos of their illness express their experience. While he argues this is truer than the restitution narrative, it’s lack of coherence means that it is not communicable. The final narrative form is the quest narrative, which is the one Frank advocates for. This narrative sees illness as a journey, one that changes the ill and gives them a new perspective on life. The authors of the quest narrative believe they have an ethical responsibility to share their story to help others who may be suffering. These narratives correspond to a typology of bodies that he also develops. According to Frank, individuals’ response to illness varies along four dimensions: 1) control, 2) body-relatedness, 3) other-relatedness, and 4) desire which create four body types: 1) the disciplined body, 2) the dominating body, 3) the mirroring body, and 4) the communicative body. The fourth type is Frank’s ideal type and it is the one able to tell the quest narrative. This body is associated to itself, relates to others, recognizes control as contingent, and is desire producing. The communicative body and the quest narrative it tells is distinctly post-modern as it has reclaimed its voice and experience from institutional authority. It rejects the idea that all problems can be fixed and all truths can be known, instead recognizing that suffering is a part of the human experience and that we have a social duty to share our experiences of suffering to help others. Nancy Scheper-Hughes also explores the cultural underpinnings of illness and suffering, this time in the context of the shantytowns of Brazil. There, child mortality is so high that mothers have adopted what would seem from the outside as a cold-hearted attitude towards the survival of their children. If babies are not seen as “fighters,” mothers often neglect them and leave them for dead believing that is their destiny. Such behavior is sanctioned by the community and grief for the loss

of such a baby is seen as inappropriate. Scheper-Hughes shows that it is not the case that mothers in these shantytowns are incapable of loving their children, but that they have developed cultural mechanisms for dealing with the structural realities of starvation and institutional neglect the lead to high child mortality rates. In this context, resources must be allocated wisely to the children deemed most likely to survive. To defend this efficiency model morally, the community employs religious and spiritual language calling premature deaths “god’s plan” and speaking of illness as curses beyond their control. In “Emotion Work,” Arlie Hochschild argues that emotions are managed according to cultural norms. Feelings are suppressed or evoked as the social situation calls for. In this way, her work is reminiscent of Mill’s “Vocabulary of Motives.” Hochschild distinguishes her theory or emotions from two other dominant views: Freud’s psychoanalytical perspective and Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective. Unlike Freud, Hochschild’s emotion-management perspective focuses on how people feel consciously not unconsciously; and unlike Goffman, Hochschild doesn’t see emotion-management as people trying to appear a certain way but actually trying to feel a certain way. She gives the example of a woman beginning to date a man who worries about getting to attached so actively tries to be less interested. She is not only trying to appear less interested, but to actually be less interested, and consciously acknowledges that this took a lot of work. This woman is attempting to abide by socially sanctioned feeling rules, rules which vary across cultural contexts. Activities/teaching tools: Students will pair up to choose a topic that interests them under the umbrella of pain, suffering, and the body. They will then research how culture shapes the experience of their topic drawing on a wide array of sources such as media portrayals, institutional materials (e.g., rules, regulations, medical textbooks, etc.), personal stories, or anything else they find relevant. Arthur Frank’s Wounded Storyteller should serve as a guide. Because I want students to be creative in their cultural analysis and because this is a short-term assignment I will not ask them to consult the academic literature on their topic. They will work on this in class and at home over the next week and then present their findings in class next week. They may do a traditional presentation or use a creative format such as a mini-podcast or a mini-documentary (I will encourage the latter option). They can refer to the Bodies podcast under additional readings for an example of a podcast that covers similar themes. Week 10: Cultural reproduction of class, gender, and race inequality Rivera, Lauren. 2015. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press. Pp. 1-27 [Chapter 1: Entering the Elite]

Ho, Karen. Liquidated: an ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press, 2009. [Chapter 1] Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as property." Harv. L. rev. 106 (1992): 1707. Ridgeway, C. L. 2009. “Framed Before We Know It: How Gender Shapes Social Relations.”

Gender & Society, 23(2), 145–160.

Additional Readings: Binder, Amy. "Constructing Racial Rhetoric: Media Depictions of Harm in Heavy Metal and

Rap Music," American Sociological Review 58 (1993), 753-67.

Binder, Amy J., Daniel B. Davis, and Nick Bloom. "Career funneling: How elite students learn to define and desire ‘‘prestigious’’jobs." Sociology of Education 89, no. 1 (2016): 20-39.

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, and Manning Marable. Souls of black folk. Routledge,

2015. [Chapter 1: Of Our Spiritual Strivings] Khan, Shamus. 2012. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Lareau, Annette. “Cultural Knowledge and Social Inequality.” American Sociological Review

80 (2015), 1-27. Rivera, Lauren A., and András Tilcsik. "Class advantage, commitment penalty: The gendered

effect of social class signals in an elite labor market." American Sociological Review 81, no. 6 (2016): 1097-1131.

Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New

York: Columbia University Press. [Introduction and Ch. 1]. Week’s aims: The goal of this week is understanding how cultural understandings can create and reproduce social inequalities, focusing on three domains: class, race, and gender. Summary of readings: In her book Pedigree, Lauren Rivera illustrates how elite reproduction occurs through hiring practices in elite professional service firms (EPS), such as finance and consulting firms. She argues that employers at these firms define and evaluate merit in such way that it favors students from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds. This happens both through resume screening, where prestigious extracurricular activities and credentials are highly valued, and through job interviews, in which interviewers look for intangible qualities and soft skills in interviewees that mirror their own personalities and experiences. Overall, the hiring process ensures that people coming from privilege and wealth enter jobs that allow them to maintain their privilege and wealth and that people from disadvantaged backgrounds face steep barriers to entry. Karen Ho looks at a similar process in chapter one of Liquidated but focuses on recruitment rather than hiring. Ho describes top financial firms as targeting their recruitment efforts at hyper-elite institutions like Princeton and Harvard. Recruiters care less about students’ particular qualifications, such as relevant coursework, and more about the status marker of the institution as a whole. They entice students with promises of lavish lifestyles and frame Wall Street as the logical next step for these students. Wall Street is filled with brilliant minds, their argument goes; it is where top students like those at

Ivy League universities belong. Students, even those pursuing seemingly distant majors such as religion, find these arguments compelling, especially as they move closer to graduation and are confronted with the uncertainty of their futures. Thus, both the recruiting and hiring processes in elite fields like finance reproduce socioeconomic advantage through the employment of cultural narratives. Cheryl Harris looks at the reproduction of privilege in a different domain: race. She argues that in America, through the development of slavery and the conquering of native lands, whiteness has become a property to be guarded. Much like tangible property, whiteness translates into economic and social value and white Americans often engage in efforts to protect against infringement on this property. Because race is culturally constructed, evidenced by phenomena such as “passing” (when Black individuals are perceived as white and able to integrate into white society), white identity is something that individuals often vigilantly defend, especially when they possess less property in other forms. This Harris argues is why racism tends to be the most pernicious among working class whites. Harris asserts that the institutionalization of whiteness as property through laws regulating the distribution of social benefits has led to the persistence racial oppression despite civil rights advances. To address racial disadvantage in this country, Harris says we need to stop thinking of justice in the corrective sense but instead in the distributive sense. That is, we need to think not in terms of guilt and innocence but in terms of entitlement and fairness. She sees affirmative action as a potential mechanism for redressing the racialized legacy of our country. Finally, Cecilia Ridgeway’s piece illuminates the ways in which hegemonic gender stereotypes shape social interaction and in turn become institutionalized, thus perpetuating structural gender inequalities. Ridgeway argues that gender is a “primary frame,” or an immediate, often subconscious way we define ourselves in relation to others in social situations. We are all aware of hegemonic beliefs about the essential nature of men and women, whether or not we personally subscribe to them, and generally expect others to hold these beliefs. Therefore, when engaged in a collective task, we tend to act in ways that conform to and reinforce these beliefs, for example by deferring to men as the more competent group members or expecting women to be nurturing and warm. Primary frames like gender (other primary frames include race and age) interact with secondary frames that describe an individual’s institutional role (e.g., boss, mother, teacher). Depending on whether the institutional role is flexible or highly constrained, gendered or gender neutral, gender stereotypes become more or less salient. Through these gendered interactions, gender beliefs become “re-inscribed into new organizational procedures and rules…[and] in this way, the gender structure of society can be projected into the future” (Ridgeway 2009, p. 153). Activities/teaching tools: We will spend part of today’s class doing student presentations of last week’s assignment. Then we will spend the remainder of the class discussing this week’s readings centered around the question: how does culture relate to structure? Week 11: Pricing culture: money, markets, and consumption

Almeling, Rene. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. University of

California Press. [Introduction and Chapter 1]

Mears, Ashley. “Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent,”

American Sociological Review 80 (2015): 1099-1122. Wherry, Frederick F. 2012. The Culture of Markets. Polity Press. Cambridge, UK. [Chapter 1] Additional readings: Healy, Kieran. Last Best Gifts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Vedantam, Shankar. “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part Of Who We Are.”

NPR.Org. Retrieved July 23, 2019 (https://www.npr.org/2019/06/28/736942500/i-buy-therefore-i-am-how-brands-become-part-of-who-we-are).

Zelizer, Viviana. 1981. “The Price and Value of Children: The Case of Children’s Insurance.”

American Journal of Sociology 86: 1036-56. Week’s aims: This week’s goal is to introduce students to the idea that markets are cultural and that the way we price and value goods and services is shaped by cultural norms and moral codes. Students may have an idea of the economy as a separate sphere from culture and society and the aim of this week is to demonstrate that the economy is actually constituted by social relations. Summary of readings: Chapter one of Fred Wherry’s Culture of Markets looks at a traditional economic concept of supply and demand through a cultural lens. Wherry argues that market demand does not simply reflect individuals’ innate “revealed preferences” but that these preferences are themselves culturally constructed. Demand can be generated through three distinct processes. First, tastes emerge through social networks or what Wherry calls “brand communities.” It is through these networks that people learn how to use certain goods or products and why using them is beneficial or enjoyable. Goods can also serve as a status marker or as a symbol of group membership. In some cases, the purchase of goods can also do relational work, forming, maintaining, or repairing social relations. The second mechanism through which demand is produced is path dependency. Historical accidents leave lasting legacies that shape consumer preferences today. Wherry offers the example of QWERTY keyboard. This keyboard was designed to keep the keys from sticking on typewriters. Now that we use computers this arrangement is no longer necessary and there are in fact more efficient layouts, but the QWERTY keyboard has become so ingrained that no new designs have caught on. Finally, demand can be produced through marketing manipulation. Marketers tap into psychological and sociological insights to sway consumers to purchase their products. They make appeals to authority, identity, and authenticity to promote their brands. Overall, Wherry emphasizes that market demand is “ not simply the aggregation of lots of individuals who just happen to like or to dislike similar things; instead, market demand reflects processes that generate meaning and that assert a sense of belonging to a group” (p. 42).

Almeling echoes the sentiment of this work, looking at how we commodify the body, and particularly when and why we don’t. She argues cultural beliefs about gender shape the ways in which we assign value to human bodies. Comparing the marketing and recruitment efforts of egg and sperm donation agencies, Almeling finds that both social and biological factors affect how donation is framed in the male and female context. Male donors are assumed to be motivated by a desire to make money and advertisements, such as those featuring dollar signs, reflect this assumption. Female donors, on the other hand, are expected to be altruistic, offering recipients the gift of life. If agencies suspect women are in it for the “wrong reasons” they may turn them away. However, contrary to what we’d expect based on gender and value, women are paid more for egg donation than men are for sperm donation. Here, Almeling says, is where biology comes in. Eggs are a finite resource while sperm is replenished. Additionally, the procedure for extracting eggs is much more invasive than that of sperm donation. Together, the biological facts drive up the amount of compensation women receive. However, cultural factors still come into play in the framing of that compensation. While sperm donation is seen a service that is paid for, egg donation is seen as a gift that is rewarded with a financial “thank you.” Ashley Mears also explores gender, labor, and compensation. She conducts an ethnography of VIP night life in New York City, Miami, the Hamptons, and Cannes, asking why women recruited by promoters essentially work for free to attract customers to the clubs. Promoters invite conventionally attractive women to clubs to create an atmosphere that will attract other paying customers. While promoters are paid by the venues, these women are not. They do receive perks such as free alcohol or meals, but Mears notes that these are not commensurate with the profits they generate for the clubs. Furthermore, while women may be going to have fun at times, they are also often treated like workers and can be chastised for not meeting expectations, such as wearing the wrong outfit or trying to bring an unattractive friend. Why do women consent to this exploitation? Mears argues that promoters work hard to construct intimacy with these women, calling them “friends” and framing the work they do as fun and entertainment. The relational work these promoters engage in “facilitates exploitative exchange by couching surplus value in nonmarket terms” (p. 1119). Activities/teaching tools: Have students develop and advertising campaign for a product of their choosing and then write a few paragraphs about what cultural phenomena they are tapping into. Who are they targeting with this campaign? What cultural symbols are they utilizing and why? Ask them to think about how the advertisement can simultaneously draw on extant cultural meanings and create new ones. Week 12: Method and Measurement

Bail, Christopher A. 2014. “The Cultural Environment: Measuring Culture with Big Data.”

Theory and Society 43(3–4):465-482. Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014. “Talk is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal

Fallacy.” Sociological Methods & Research 43(2):178–209. Tavory, Iddo and Stefan Timmermans. 2009. “Two cases of ethnography: Grounded theory and

the extended case method.” Ethnography 10(3): 243-263. Vaisey, Stephen. 2014. “The ‘Attitudinal Fallacy’ Is a Fallacy.” Sociological Methods &

Research 43(2):227–231. Week’s aims: The goal of this week is to explore the different types of methods available to cultural sociologists and think critically about the strengths and weaknesses of each. Summary of readings: Bail calls for cultural sociologists to take advantage of “big data”—the recent exponential proliferation of data of varying forms, including audio and text-based data which is of particular relevance to cultural sociologists. Bail argues that while data scientists have developed sophisticated methods for harnessing and analyzing such data they often struggle with interpreting it or using it in meaningful ways. Cultural sociologists, on the other hand, have the expertise to do so but tend to study micro-interactional processes as those are best suited to traditional methods like ethnography and interviews. While these techniques are an important part of cultural sociology’s methodological repertoire, Bail points out that they are not able to deepen our understanding of meso and macro level processes. For instance, while ethnography can illuminate the internal logics of a field, it is not particularly useful in delineating the boundaries of the field or the relationships between fields. Big data, by contrast allows researchers to extract all text from a discursive field, allowing for such investigations. Bail also highlights the potential of automated text analysis techniques such as topic modeling to uncover cultural categories/schemas from large corpuses of text. These computational methods do not replace human expertise but in fact require it to be successful. Thus, these tools can augment and refine current qualitative text analysis procedures. Finally, Bail underscores the utility of big data in studying processes that unfold over time. We now have digital archives of books, speeches, websites…almost any type of textual data imaginable. Using such data, we can measure how cultural categories or fields emerge, transform, or dissolve over time. Jerolmack and Khan develop a concept they call “attitudinal fallacy” which they define as “inferring situated behavior from verbal accounts” (p. 179). They argue that this fallacy is routinely committed by survey and interview researchers, though they focus on the latter as it along with ethnography is commonly thought of as a qualitative technique. Jerolmack and Khan provide several examples of cases in which what people say and what they actually do are not in line and thus suggest that we should not take verbal accounts as evidence of anything other than verbal accounts. This is not because people are lying or hiding their “true” feelings or intentions, but because behavior is highly situational, depending on social context. If we care about the link between meaning and action than ethnography is a better suited method as it observes behavior in situ and researchers can triangulate evidence from verbal accounts and observations. Vaisey responds to this article by pointing out that while there are cases in which attitudes and behaviors are incongruent, this is the exception rather than the rule. Situations and contexts matter, Vaisey acknowledges, but they do not wholly determine behavioral outcomes. Rather it is the interaction of attitudes and contexts that does so. Furthermore, Vaisey critiques a second point in the

Jerolmack and Khan article: that self-reported behavior is unreliable. In fact, Vaisey points out, self-reports have proven to be highly reliable. While people may not be able to articulate why they do the things they do, they are very good at reporting what it is they do. The final reading explores the differences between two different styles of ethnography: extended case method (ECM) and grounded theory (GT). Tavory and Timmermans argue that each style of ethnography is grounded in different epistemological assumptions and thus has different theoretical implications. Extended case method rests of a-priori theoretical framing. Researchers have a theory they want to develop or refine so attempt to find a case that does not fit theoretical expectations in order to do so. By contrast, researchers engaging in grounded theory go into the field with no theoretical priors and instead construct theories during research that help them explain how the social actors they study construct and negotiate meaning in their everyday lives. ECM is thus better suited to macro theories, like those of neo-Marxism, while GT aligns more with theories like symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and actor-network theory. Tavory and Timmermans note that this reflects each methods differential view of narratives. While ECM rejects narratives as fantastical or illusionary—arbitrary stories imposed by researchers—GT sees narratives as things that while not necessarily reflecting “Truth” do in fact exist, separate from researchers, in institutions and inter-subjectively between actors in a field. Activities/teaching tools: Ask students to think about what techniques they have been using in their own field research. What issues or concerns to these readings raise? How might some of the different methods presented this apply to their own work? Could their work be augmented or altered by using something like big data?