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Consensus on Culture in American Sociology: Reply to Smith

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Abstract

In his contribution to this issue, Smith argues that sociology’s house of culture is built on a foundation of sand. In my brief response to Smith, I dispute the claim that culture is in trouble and question the methods and motives behind Smith’s critique. I then indicate the common ground characterizing the work of contemporary culture scholars. Drawing upon my fieldnotes and observations of culture in action, I define culture as a suprasubjective system of signification creating intersubjective senses or ideas that are distinct from the materiality, function, immediacy, or face value of any particular people, objects, words, thoughts, and actions. I argue that this culture concept, which I see as theoretically consistent with the work of most cultural sociologists and sociologists of culture, satisfies many of Smith’s requirement that an acceptable culture concept specify culture’s location, powers, limits, and relationship to subjectivity, and clearly theorize meaning and its relationship to culture.

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Notes

  1. Author’s independent analysis of American Sociological Association section tallies available at http://www.asanet.org/sections/CountsLastFiveYears.cfm.

  2. Jeffrey Alexander, Karen Cerulo, Paul DiMaggio, Gary Alan Fine, John R. Hall, Michele Lamont, John Mohr, Lynette Spillman, Ann Swidler, Diane Vaughn, Robert Wuthnow, Viviana Zelizer, to name just a few leading sociologists working in the area of culture.

  3. In his contributions to a debate about critical theory on the sociology blog, orgtheory.net, Smith wrote, “Cultural sociology, for instance, has been screwed up by some of this for a long time, for example in the form of the great influence of Swidler’s 1986 piece, which launched more problems than it answered” (https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/a-word-on-critical-realism/)

  4. For example, Lyn Spillman (1997, 2012) uses quite different types of data to make different cultural sociological arguments about nationhood and the operation of capitalist business enterprises.

  5. I believe this sense of culture and cultural meaning is compatible with Reed’s (2011) ”landscapes of meaning”, but, as I have argued elsewhere (Voyer 2015), Reed’s theory of culture in action places too much emphasis on the intentional, goal-oriented behavior of individuals.

  6. ” Meaning is a primal or first-order fact of human existence that is difficult to define precisely. Yet the making of meaning is real, important, and ineliminable in human life (Smith 2010, p. 49).

  7. While subjectivity is not an important element of culture, it is often a very crucial element of research on the impact that culture has on human life.

  8. “The reflecting subject, in search of meaning, self-understanding, is a linguistic subject, a subject which is given to and which knows itself by means of the language it inhabits” (Madison 1995, p. 81).

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Correspondence to Andrea M. Voyer.

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Voyer, A.M. Consensus on Culture in American Sociology: Reply to Smith. Am Soc 47, 442–453 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-016-9310-4

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