Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates / Edition 1

by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Steven Seidman

Overview

This volume brings together the major statements by the leading contemporary scholars of cultural analysis on the relation between culture and society. Part One surveys the range of current analytical debate over culture, focusing on the relationship of culture to social structure and power. While individual contributions differ in defining the nature of culture and its relation to society, they are in agreement in assessing the relative autonomy of culture and the centrality of symbolic analysis. Part Two turns to substantive debates, including those over the role of religion, secular ideology, and mass culture and brings to light disputes about the meaning of modernity. The book testifies to the remarkable development in the past two decades of a cultural paradigm for social and political analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521359399
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/31/1990
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction Part I. Analytic Debates: 'Understanding the Relative Autonomy of Culture' introduction; The case for culture 1. The human studies; 2. Values and social systems; 3. Culture and ideological hegemony; 4. Signs and language; Approaches to culture Functionalist 1. The normative structure of science; 2. Values and democracy; Semiotic 3. The world of wrestling; 4. Food as symbolic code; Dramaturgical 5. Out of frame activity; 6. The Balinese cockfight as play; Weberian 7. Puritanism and revolutionary ideology; 8. French catholicism and secular grace; Durkheimian: 9. Lininality and community; 10. Symbolic pollution; 11. Sex as symbol in Victorian purity; Marxian 12. Class formation and ritual; 13. Masculinity and factory labor; Post-structuralist: 14. Artistic taste and cultural capital; 15. Sexual discourse and power; Part II. Substantive Debates: Moral Order and Crisis: Perspectives on Modern Culture; The Place of Religion: Is modernity a Secular or Sacred Order? Introduction: 1. Social sources of secularization; 2. The future of religion Wolfgang 3. Civil religion in America; The debate over the 'End of Ideology': can secular reason create cultural order? 4. Culture industry revisited; 5. From consensual order to instrumental control; 6. The end of ideology in the west; 7. Beyond coercion and crisis: the coming of an era of voluntary community; 8. Ideology, the cultural apparatus, and the new consciousness industry; Modernism or post-modernism: dissolution of reconstruction of moral order? 9. Post-modernism and the dissolution of moral order; 10. The post-modern condition; 11. Modernity versus postmodernity; 12. Mapping the post-modern.

Editorial Reviews

"An extremely useful compilation of writings...on the relationship between culture and society. So much well chosen erudition, so neatly presented, this work may lay to rest the futile question of priority between culture and society." Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association

From the Publisher