ABSTRACT

Making Culture, Changing Society proposes a challenging new account of the relations between culture and society focused on how particular forms of cultural knowledge and expertise work on, order and transform society. Examining these forms of culture’s action on the social as aspects of a historically distinctive ensemble of cultural institutions, it considers the diverse ways in which culture has been produced and mobilised as a resource for governing populations.

These concerns are illustrated in detailed case studies of how anthropological conceptions of the relations between race and culture have shaped – and been shaped by – the relationships between museums, fieldwork and governmental programmes in early twentieth-century France and Australia. These are complemented by a closely argued account of the relations between aesthetics and governance that, in contrast to conventional approaches, interprets the historical emergence of the autonomy of the aesthetic as vastly expanding the range of art’s social uses.

In pursuing these concerns, particular attention is given to the role that the cultural disciplines have played in making up and distributing the freedoms through which modern forms of liberal government operate. An examination of the place that has been accorded habit as a route into the regulation of conduct within liberal social, cultural and political thought brings these questions into sharp focus. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, history, art history and cultural policy studies.

chapter |4 pages

Introduction

part |65 pages

Culture: veridical, material and compositional perspectives

chapter |16 pages

After culture?

chapter |21 pages

Civic laboratories

Museums, cultural objecthood and the governance of the social

part |37 pages

Anthropological assemblages

chapter |15 pages

Making and mobilising worlds

Assembling and governing the Other

chapter |20 pages

Collecting, instructing, governing

Fields, publics, milieus

part |36 pages

Governing through freedom: aesthetics and liberal governance

chapter |17 pages

The uses of uselessness

Aesthetics, freedom, government

chapter |17 pages

Guided freedom

Aesthetics, tutelage and the interpretation of art

part |36 pages

Habit and the architecture of the person

chapter |16 pages

Habit, instinct, survivals

Repetition, history, biopower

chapter |16 pages

Habitus/habit

Freedom/history

chapter |2 pages

Afterword