Recovering the primitive in the modern: The cultural turn and the origins of cultural sociology

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110328
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Intellectual Revolution ◽  
New Research ◽  
Cultural Turn

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cultural Turn

This book examines the independent debates and modes of thought that have developed in the field of cultural sociology. It describes a variety of pathways for engaging in cultural sociology, all of which offer a template for elucidating the ways that meaning shapes social life. It offers an account of the origins of cultural sociology and how it has grown into the maturity it enjoys today, focusing on the so-called “cultural turn”—an epochal transformation in the human sciences—and the need to reflect on what could be learned from adjacent disciplines about cultural analysis. It also explores the major differences and disagreements between a “cultural sociology” and a “sociology of culture,” the impact of cultural sociology on other academic disciplines of inquiry, the tensions within the field, and a cultural sociological approach to power and solidarity.

European Tapestries

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Metropolitan Museum ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Art Form ◽  
New Research

Tapestry, the most costly and coveted art form in Renaissance and Baroque Europe, has long fascinated scholars. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, researchers delved into archival sources and studied extant tapestries to produce sweeping introductions to the medium. The study of tapestry, however, fell outside mainstream art history, with tapestry too often seen as a less important “decorative art” rather than a “fine art.” , Also, tapestry did not fit easily into an art history that prioritized one master, as the making of a set of large-scale tapestries required a team of collaborators, including the designer, cartoon painters, and weavers, as well as a producer/entrepreneur and, often, a patron. Scholarship on European tapestries in the Early Modern period, nevertheless, flourished. By the late 20th century art historians turned attention to the “decorative arts” and tapestry specialists produced exciting new research illuminating aspects of design, production, and patronage, as well as tapestry’s crucial role in the larger narrative of art and cultural history. In 2002, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition and catalogue, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, spotlighted the art form, introduced it to a broad audience, and brought new understanding of tapestry as art. A sequel, the Met’s 2007 exhibition and catalogue, Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, followed. Other major museums presented ambitious exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues with substantial new research. In addition, from the late 20th century, institutions have produced complete catalogues of their extraordinary European tapestry holdings, among them: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Patrimonio Nacional in Spain; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. At the same time, articles and books exploring specific designs, designers, producers, and patrons appeared, with some monographs published in the dedicated series, Studies in Western Tapestry, edited by leading scholars Guy Delmarcel and Koenraad Brosens, and produced by Brepols. Tapestry research has often focused on the works of well-known designers and their exceptionally innovative work, such as the artists Raphael (b. 1483–d. 1520) or Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577–d. 1640). High-quality production at major centers, including Brussels or at the Gobelins Manufactory in France, has also captured scholars’ attention, as have important patrons, among them Henry VIII of England (b. 1491–d. 1547) or Louis XIV of France (b. 1638–d. 1715). Newer directions for research include the contributions of women as weavers and entrepreneurs, the practice of reweaving designs, and the international reach and appeal of Renaissance and Baroque tapestry beyond Europe.

Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Alexander ◽  
Ronald N. Jacobs ◽  
Philip Smith
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cultural Turn

This article introduces the reader to the current status of cultural sociology as a specific mode of inquiry. It first discusses the pre-history of cultural sociology, tracing its origins in the demise of Parsonian functionalism from the mid-1960s onward, the cultural turn in sociology through the 1980s, and the emergence of an increasingly confident cultural sociology as an alternative paradigm to the once dominant sociology of culture. The article then considers the impact of cultural sociology, especially on well-established research areas such as economic sociology. It also examines the tensions marking “best practices” in contemporary cultural sociology as a dimension of social life, including the tension between discourse and materiality, the link between public ritual and everyday life, and the question of method and epistemology.

The Radical Presence in 20th-Century US Literature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan M. Wald
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
New Research ◽  
Literary Radicalism

At the start of the last century a modern tradition of literary radicalism crystallized with inspiring results. From 1900 onward, socialists and bohemians yoked their ideals to become a marathon of forward-thinking activist cultural workers. For the next three decades, writers and intellectuals of the Left, such as Max Eastman (1883–1969), were oracles of enchantment in a world increasingly disenchanted, initially by the international war of 1914–1919 and subsequently by a decline in popular political defiance as capitalism consolidated. Still, the adversarial dream persevered during the violence and later, often in little magazines such as the Masses, Liberator, Seven Arts, and Modern Quarterly. Since the 1920s, literary radicalism meant creativity in the service of an insurrection against political power combined with a makeover in human relationships. With the economic catastrophe of 1929 and the triumph of Nazism in 1933, what might have been a generational succession morphed into a paradigm shift. This previously self-governing literary radicalism was now multifariously entangled with Soviet communism during its most awful hour. An unofficial state of emergency escalated so that a range of journals—this time, New Masses, Modern Monthly, and Partisan Review—once more served as barometers of the depth and breadth of radical opinion. Bit by bit, a strange new ethos enveloped the literary Left, one that blended heroism, sacrifice, and artistic triumph with fifteen years of purge trials in the Soviet Union, mortifying policy shifts in the international Communist movement, and relentless domestic repression against the organized Left in the United States. By the end of this phase, in the reactionary post–World War II years, most adherents of communism (not just the pre-dominant pro-Soviet Communism, but the other varieties of communism such as Trotskyism and Bukharinism) desperately fled their Depression-era affiliations. The upshot was a blurring of the record. This occurred in ways that may have seemed clever for autobiographical concealment (by one-time literary radicals who feared exposure or embarrassment at youthful excesses) but became maddening for future scholars wishing to parse the writers’ former convictions. As literary radicalism passed through the Cold War, 1960s radicalization, the late 20th-century culture wars, and into the new millennium, the tradition was routinely reframed so that it faces us today as a giant puzzle. New research and scholarship emerge every year to provide insights into a very complicated body of writing, but there is a fretful ambivalence about its actual location and weight in literary history. Not surprisingly, most overall scholarly histories, chronicles, and anthologies do not include the category of literary radicalism as a well-defined, principal topic. This is because enthusiasts of the last twenty-five years brilliantly championed the tradition less under the rubric of “literary radicalism” than as the fertile soil for a blooming of gender-conscious, multicultural, and polycentric legacies connected to the Left but primarily rendered as eruptions of American literary modernity onto the world stage. These revisionist images came to us in discrete volumes about black writers, women writers, regional writers, children’s writers, Jewish writers, and so forth. Nonetheless, such celebratory portraits remained in competition with a dark double, a notion that nearly all literary radicals were wanting in artistic value. This skeptical appraisal was entrenched in an older scholarship, a point of view that is partly an aftereffect of the long shadow that the Communist imbroglio cast on its entire legacy.

Historiography

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Moyer
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
History Of ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
New Research

History was one of the main disciplines identified with the humanist movement; Renaissance humanists wrote many works of history and edited, translated, and published the historical works of ancient predecessors. Most of these works remain available only in their original editions. While some of these writers received financial support for their historical writings during their lives, the profession of historian as it is now understood developed much later. How to evaluate the writing of history in the Renaissance was therefore not a simple matter for 20th-century scholars. From the time of Jacob Burckhardt through much of the 20th century, many scholars identified the Renaissance with particular mental attitudes, including especially a sense of historical anachronism often contrasted with medieval mentalities. Erwin Panofsky expressed this approach most famously (see General Overviews). By the later decades of the 20th century, humanistic uses of language and rhetoric began to receive more serious attention, as did the Renaissance use of ancient models in history writing and elsewhere. Accordingly, more scholars became interested in the forms and genres of history writing during the Renaissance. These approaches required close readings of individual historical works; therefore much late-20th- and early-21st-century scholarship has been less general than before and more focused on individual authors, or on regional traditions bounded by politics and language. By the “linguistic turn” of the late 20th century, modern scholars were also less troubled by the rhetorical and political goals and uses of some Renaissance historical writings than their earlier 20th-century colleagues had been; indeed, these goals might themselves become important topics of investigation. Along with historians of art, who became interested in the uses of visual media in constructing political images of states and rulers, historians have begun to examine the ways Renaissance writers used their pasts to give meaning to their present. Another point of collaboration between history and the history of art has been antiquarian scholarship, which has grown rapidly and become a field in its own right. Research has also turned to questions of the use of sources by Renaissance historical writers. Nineteenth-century historians may have claimed that they were the first to take seriously the use of documentary source materials, but it is now clear that Renaissance historians often did so as well. The wealth of new research will surely continue to reshape our understanding of historical thought and writing during the era of the European Renaissance.

“Band Wagon and Gravy Train”: uses and abuses along the Silk Road

Afghanistan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Warwick Ball
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Ancient Trade ◽  
International Image ◽  
Academic Discussion ◽  
The Silk Road

The Silk Road as an image is a relatively new one for Afghanistan. It appeals to both the pre-Islamic and the perceived Islamic past, thus offering an Islamic balance to previous identities linked to Bamiyan or to the Kushans. It also appeals to a broader and more international image, one that has been taken up by many other countries. This paper traces the rise of the image of the Silk Road and its use as a metaphor for ancient trade to encompass all contacts throughout Eurasia, prehistoric, ancient and modern, but also how the image has been adopted and expanded into many other areas: politics, tourism and academia. It is argued here that the origin and popularity of the term lies in late 20th century (and increasingly 21st century) politics rather than any reality of ancient trade. Its consequent validity as a metaphor in academic discussion is questioned

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

scholarly journals Run to the hills: Forest growth responsiveness to drought increased at higher elevation during the late 20th century

2021 ◽  
Vol 772 ◽  
pp. 145286
Author(s):  
Marín Pompa-García ◽  
Marcos González-Cásares ◽  
Antonio Gazol ◽  
J. Julio Camarero
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Forest Growth ◽  
Late 20Th Century
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