Contents
© 2009 by Philip Smith and Alexander Riley
First edition © 2001 by Philip Smith
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First published 2001
Second edition published 2009 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
4 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Philip (Philip Daniel), 1964–
Cultural theory : an introduction / Philip Smith and Alexander Riley. – 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-6908-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-6907-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Culture. I. Riley, Alexander. II. Title.
HM621.S57 2009
306.01–dc22
2007052261
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Preface to the First Edition: About this Book
As we enter a new millennium, “culture” seems to be one of the things that everybody is talking about, both within and outside of the academy. It is widely held that that we are living in a world where signs, symbols, and the media are becoming central to the economy, that our identities are increasingly structured by the pursuit of an image, and that inequality and civic participation are defined by discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Anecdotal evidence would seem to support this view. The trial of O. J. Simpson, for example, was not just a judicial event, but also a cultural one where symbolism, narrative, and belief intersected with race politics. Conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s and afterward was driven by deeply-seated nationalisms, each grounded in complex historical memories. The growing power of corporations like Sony and Nike is linked to the iconography and mythology surrounding their products as well as to their functional efficiency. Today the political challenges raised by feminists, gay/ lesbian activists, indigenous peoples, and racial minorities are as much about identity and cultural recognition as about economic inequality and legal rights. If we reflect on our own everyday lives, we will find that here too, culture is ubiquitous. It shapes our purchasing decisions in the mall, the television programs we choose to watch (and how we watch them), our responses to global events, our face-to-face interactions with other people, and even our sense of who we are.
In such a context the ability to understand culture becomes a vital component of competent and active citizenship. Cultural theory provides one important resource for this task. It offers paradigms, models, and concepts that can be applied in the diverse settings that we encounter in our personal, public, and intellectual lives. It is not merely an arcane academic literature, but rather a resource through which we can reflect intelligently on the world around us and, perhaps, make informed choices and assume a greater level of control. This book provides a brief introduction to the field. It is, of course, already possible to find many works on library and bookstore shelves introduction social theory. Yet these tend to marginalize cultural theory, allocating it little room and discussing key theorists from a point of view that is not directly relevant to those working in the cultural field. Such texts are typically concerned with other issues, such as divergent models of class or the state, distinctions between various network theories, and so on. These themes are not usually of central interest to those exploring meaning as a component of human experience. There are also books about specific cultural theories, theorists or theoretical issues – postmodernism, Marxism, Foucault, and so on. These tend to be narrow in focus and to assume specialized knowledge. Often the author will have an axe to grind, leading to a one-sided commentary on issues and debates.
This book is different. It provides what I hope will be seen as a balanced and wide-ranging introduction and overview of contemporary cultural theory. It assumes no specialist knowledge whatsoever, but at the same time will deal with some of the most sophisticated and complex issues in contemporary social thought. The book will be of primary interest to those working in sociology, and of substantial use to students in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies. It will also contain material relevant to cultural geography, urban studies, and history. In short, anybody with a stake in undertaking the theoretically informed investigation of culture and society will find this book a worthwhile resource.
As there is a lot of ground to cover the book moves very quickly. The style is direct rather than discursive. The intention is to provide the maximum amount of essential information and the greatest number of conceptual tools in the minimum amount of space. With an aim to helping readers acquire a basic familiarity with the area, the book contains a number of features.
Philip Smith
Brisbane, Australia, 2001
Preface to the Second Edition
The first edition of this book received considerable critical and popular acclaim. Known as “the magic book” in some student circles because of the clarity and breadth of its coverage of a sometimes difficult and wide-ranging field, it has been translated into several languages and used for reference and teaching by scholars around the globe. This is a gratifying result.
In this fully revised and expanded second edition, we have aimed for the same delicate balance of accessibility and sophistication. It will be up to our readers to decide whether or not we have attained this objective. Eight years have passed since the publication of the first edition. The field of cultural theory has continued to grow and change during that time, the stock of specific thinkers and theories has risen or fallen, new conceptual terms and arguments have emerged. In addition to attending to these shifts in the field, we have listened closely to the readers of the first edition and added sections and chapters on a number of themes and topics that they suggested were important in such a volume.
The most obvious of the changes are the two entirely new chapters at the end of the book. The two fields of cultural theory treated in those chapters (race and gender in chapter 15 and the body in chapter 16) have been the intellectual equivalent of growth stocks in recent years, with much creative work being produced and audiences both scholarly and popular expanding rapidly. Other new material focuses on late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century cultural theorists whose importance to the field has recently become more widely recognized and whose ideas help shed light on more recent theoretical developments – e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche and W. E. B. DuBois. Contemporary thinkers working in or close to traditions discussed in the first edition whose influence has risen in the new millennium have been added to the relevant chapters – e.g., Roy Bhaskar in chapter 3, Randall Collins in chapter 5, and Manuel Castells in chapter 13. Finally, many of our revisions are devoted to discussion of themes and concepts that were present at the time of the first edition but which have grown considerably in their importance in the field – e.g., computer-mediated communication and virtual reality, cosmopolitanism and globalization, narrative and performance theory.
Although a good deal of the material here is new, the overall framework outlined in the preface to the first edition remains unchanged.
Philip Smith, New Haven, USA
Alexander Riley, Lewisburg, USA
2008
Acknowledgments
We deeply thank the editorial team at Blackwell, and especially Justin Vaughan, for supporting the new edition with such enthusiasm. Sarah Dancy moved the project through the production stage with efficiency and expertise. Smith’s Yale colleagues Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman and the graduate students in the Center for Cultural Sociology provided a constant stimulus in thinking about culture. Riley’s Bucknell undergraduates road-tested the first edition as well as some of the new material in this second edition and gave the book a collective “thumbs up.” Thanks are due also to our many scholarly colleagues around the world who have provided feedback on the book and to the team of anonymous reviewers who examined our prospectus for the revised volume. The broader communities of scholars and cultural theorists in the ASA Culture Section and elsewhere, with whom we have interacted over the years, certainly have earned a mention in this section as well. A tip of the virtual hat goes to “daughterofdadust,” the amazon.com user who gave the original edition of the book a five-star rating. Finally, a special note of thanks is reserved for our families, Philippa Smith and Esmeralda and Valeria Riley, for all their support and understanding.
We dedicate this second edition to four towering and unique figures in cultural theory who have passed away since the first edition was published, in recognition of their contributions to the field: Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz.
Introduction: What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory?
At the start of any text it can be useful to define the central concept. In the case of “culture” this has proven to be surprisingly, even notoriously, difficult. According to one expert, Raymond Williams, “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language . . . because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct systems of thought” (1976: 76–7). An illustration of this diversity is the fact that, writing way back in the 1950s, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) were already able to assemble an astonishing number of definitions of culture from popular and academic sources. We begin, then, with a brief but necessary examination of some of the history of this complicated concept in order to move toward a usable definition for this book.
In its early uses in English, culture was associated with the “cultivation” of animals and crops and with religious worship (hence the word “cult”). From the sixteenth century until the nineteenth, the term began to be widely applied to the improvement of the individual human mind and personal manners through learning. This was a metaphorical extension of the idea of improving land and farming practices. For this reason we can still speak of someone as being “cultured” or, if they are uncouth, as “having no culture.” During this period, the term began to refer also to the improvement of society as a whole, with culture being used as a value-laden synonym for “civilization.” A typical usage of the time might compare the nations of Europe that had “culture” with the “barbarism” of Africa. Such an expression would have included technological differences as well as those of morals and manners. However, with the rise of Romanticism in the Industrial Revolution, culture began to be used to designate spiritual development alone and to contrast this with material and infrastructural change. Along with Romantic nationalism in the late nineteenth century, there came inflections which accented tradition and everyday life as dimensions of culture. These were captured in the ideas of “folk culture” and “national culture” which emerged around this time.
According to Williams (1976: 80), these various historical shifts are dimly reflected in the three current uses of the term “culture”:
Until very recently, the first and second of these uses were the most common, and were often synthesized in intellectual work. Aesthetes and literary critics like Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and F. R. Leavis used the term to refer to works of high art which could educate, edify, and improve those who came into contact with them. Arnold, for example, wrote that culture was “a pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know . . . the best which has been thought and said in the world . . . culture is, or ought to be, the study or pursuit of perfection . . . sweetness and light . . . an inward condition of mind and spirit” (quoted in Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 29). The German concept of Kultur also taps into this theme by broadly equating culture with civilization and with individual or collective moral progress. Such uses are often highly value-laden and elitist, seeking to validate artistic products that experts and dominant social groups consider as important or interesting.
The third usage of culture was championed by many anthropologists in the first part of the century and remains central to that discipline today. It is an interpretation that is more value-neutral and analytic. It asserts that “culture” is to be found everywhere and not just in the high arts or in Western “civilization.” It is of course this third usage of the term with which we are working in the contemporary social sciences. Yet even delimiting the concept in this way allows for a fairly wide range of social scientific definitions. Insofar as it is possible to isolate a core usage for the social sciences today, it revolves around the following themes: cultural superiority and inferiority play almost no place in contemporary academic study.
Looking back at Williams’s discussion, this prevailing understanding combines the anti-elitism, value-neutrality, and relativism of the anthropological approach to culture, with perspectives on culture as the non-material that are derived from nineteenth-century idealist and Romantic philosophy. It can also be seen as an emergent product of developments in cultural theory itself, especially the work of Parsons and subsequent innovations from structuralism, poststructuralism, and hermeneutics (we come to these later on in this text), which emphasized the autonomy of culture from other aspects of social life. Broadly speaking, the theories of culture dealt with in this book can be fit into one of two categories: (1) those that see culture as something produced by society in various ways, and (2) those that see culture as an autonomous force steering society. The trend in cultural theory seems to point in the direction of the second of these options, but debates between the two perspectives remain vivid and important and we do our best to attend to that fact throughout the chapters that follow.
Navigation through the undeniable complexity of varying definitions and conceptual boundaries applied to the term “culture” is aided by the use of heuristic devices like Wendy Griswold’s cultural diamond (see ). This is a figure that attempts to lay out the four elements involved in the production and reception of any piece of culture (the cultural object itself, its creator/s, its receiver/s, and the social world/ context in which it comes into existence and takes meaning) and the six relations between these four elements (Griswold 2003). Though Griswold is clear that this “accounting device” does not specify the nature of those relationships, it does provide a helpful visual representation of the elements and relations the cultural analyst must account for in the effort to describe or explain the meaning of a particular cultural object, whether it be a GAP t-shirt, a national memorial, or a rap CD. We should note that while the cultural diamond is quite readily applicable to material cultural objects, its utility for examining non-material culture (e.g., a pattern of belief such as racism, or a diffuse societal ethos and worldview such as the “culture of democracy”) is somewhat less clear. This is perhaps still more testimony to the complexity of the term and the difficulty involved in trying to find a single analytical lens through which to examine it.
“Theory” is a word that is perhaps as difficult to define as “culture.” We can defer to the dictionary here and define theory as “[a] supposition or system of ideas explaining something, especially one based on general principles independent of facts” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1980: 1201). Theory, then, is more than a description of, or generalization about, the empirical world. Rather, it consists of abstract and systematically ordered understandings and models that can be used to account for what actually goes on in the world. “Cultural theory,” the topic of this book, can be thought of as a literature aiming to develop such tools in a specific domain – explaining the nature of culture and its implications for social life. As we shall see, there is a broad and astonishingly diverse literature. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three core issues that are absolutely pivotal to debates in the field and which provide an underlying thematic continuity:
1 Content. Theories provide tools for understanding the make-up of culture. As we shall see, divergent traditions have understood culture as values, codes, narratives, ideologies, pathologies, discourses, and common sense, as well as in many other ways. Each of these understandings has its own repercussions for interpreting the ways that culture works and how we should study it. One of the central themes to emerge in the examination of much of the theory examined in this book is a split between theories of culture as essentially a code or text and theories of culture as action or ways of doing.
2 Social implications. Here, theory is concerned with offering models of the influence that culture exerts on social structure and social life. Theorists attempt to explain the role of culture in providing stability, solidarity, and opportunity or in sustaining conflict, power, and inequality. Cultural theory also suggests divergent mechanisms through which this influence is channeled, ranging from individual-level socialization through to macro-level institutions and social systems.
3 Action, agency, self. The connection between culture and the individual is what is at stake here. The most critical issue concerns the ways in which culture shapes human action. Some thinkers stress the constraining nature of culture, while others point to its ability to enable action. Issues relating to the cultural construction of the self, motivation, and identity are fundamental to both sets of arguments.
Throughout this text, we will find these overlapping but analytically distinct themes taking a central role as theories are described and evaluated. Chapter 1 begins this exploration with a brief survey of the role of culture in what has come to be known as classical social theory.