ABSTRACT
Although it has once been conventional to treat culture as a “characteristic” or “feature” of societies, many cultural sociologists now emphasize the importance of examining grounded cultures. But this move has often lacked sufficient attention to what it entails. My intention here is to present the theoretical stakes of this shift to analyzing culture from a micro-or meso-level of analysis. Culture should be conceptualized as a set of actions, material objects, and forms of discourse held and used by groups of individuals. In this view culture is a tool that is situated in particular communities of action, shaping the contours of civic life (Fine and Harrington 2004). As a result, culture is tied to the existence of shared pasts and prospective futures. Breaking from treating culture as belonging to large-scale social systems (macro-
cultures), an approach that emphasizes the “micro-” or “meso-”level of analysis needs to be specified. I examine how culture can be linked to interacting groups and to wellnetworked population segments, focusing on the development of idiocultures, subcultures, and countercultures. Such a perspective, grounded within social psychology, suggests that the locus of culture need not to be limited to society-based populations, but can be analyzed in light of social worlds and communication networks. I extend the idea of culture by emphasizing that it is a form of practice that is linked to local understandings and social relations. A microsociology of culture is a valuable addition to more structural, institutional, and societal views. Sometimes social scientists, as well as the larger public, comfortably refer to the char-
acteristics of American culture, French culture, or Brazilian culture. Such analyses have value in providing strategies to understand societies in the context of their exceptionalism, looking for means of differentiating a people or a nation from those who stand outside constructed boundaries. However, because of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral diversity within a geographically based population, any analysis that assumes a national culture is necessarily limited and imprecise. A national culture is in practice a many-splendored thing, splintered in various ways, while holding to an ideological claim of unity. In its totality a national culture is somewhat akin to a mist, everywhere and nowhere, sensed but invisible. Often culture is treated as something that people have-or
are “given”—by virtue of their location within a spatial community, rather than something that they shape or construct. Admittedly, nations and regions have elements of a “collective character” that reveal
themselves in societal representations. However, the microsociological goal is to determine how these values and beliefs operate in group space and how multiple group cultures, similar to each other through a circulation of members, weak network ties, or common milieux, affect the belief in a national culture, given institutional support through media representations and collective commemoration. Locale matters through the interactions within groups, but also through the shared imagination of larger systems. Ultimately cultural domains are transmitted and displayed through action, a recogni-
tion that privileges examining locales in which culture is performed. The study of culture properly belongs to the analysis of groups-from primary groups (including families) to interacting small groups (clubs, teams, cliques) to networked segments that are tied together through their ongoing interaction, communication, spatial co-presence, or consumption (populations based on age, race, gender, or region). I begin with the most molecular level of analysis-the domain of face-to-face groups and their linkage to group idiocultures-and then examine larger communities based upon socially differentiated networks that form subcultures and countercultures, the latter implying some level of resistance to hegemonic cultures.
