ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, an emerging “sociology of culture” began by applying standard sociological methods to studies of the production and marketing of cultural artifacts – music, art, drama, and literature. By the late 1980s, the work of cultural sociologists had broken out of the study of cultureproducing institutions and moved toward studying the place of meaning in social life more generally. Feminism, which in the 1970s was concerned above all to document women’s experiences, has increasingly turned to analyzing the discursive production of gender difference. Since the mid-1980s the new quasi-discipline of cultural studies has grown explosively in a variety of different academic niches – for example, in programs or departments of film studies, literature, performance studies, or communications. In political science, which is well known for its propensity to chase headlines, interest in cultural questions has been revived by the recent prominence of religious fundamentalism, nationalism, and ethnicity, which look like the most potent sources of political conflict in the contemporary world. This frenetic rush to the study of culture has everywhere been bathed, to a greater
respectively), and he argues that such an approach is not incompatible with the Geertzian notion of culture as a system of meanings. Sewell points out some shortcomings of the Geertzian approach in order to explain the rise of alternative conceptions which sought to couch culture more in the realm of the non-cognitive or habitual practices of our daily lives. Sewell insists there is nothing mutually exclusive about these approaches. This argument is one that readers should keep in mind when considering the later readings by both AbuLughod and Latham in Part One.
