Abstract
The webs of meaning in which people are suspended extend through the various groups, organizations, associations, and institutions in which they operate.1 In their everyday lives, people move in and through family relations embedded in neighborhoods, into fields of work, the state, the market, the media, politics, sport, religion, and many more. Each of these fields is shaped by institutions and discourses that structure the existing codes, conventions, the ways of thinking, talking, and being. These codes, conventions, and so forth are enacted in specific contexts and interactions. We can see each context, whenever humans interact with one another, as the spinning of a new web of meaning, albeit that for most people there are only a few, very fine differences from the last web that was spun, whether among family members, neighbors, or colleagues. And yet while all of these fields and contexts have particular webs of meaning, they are embedded in an overall culture of meaning.2 When people go into a local shop to buy some groceries, the meaning that is created is shaped not just by the specific cultural codes of what can be said and done in the context of the exchange of goods and money but, as part of a wider culture; it is also shaped by language, codes of civility, and state laws. Buying groceries is a common event across the world, but the specific web of meaning that is spun in the interaction between the shopkeeper and the customer each time, in each place, is slightly different.
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Notes
In her analysis of how culture shapes action, Swidler refers to codes, contexts, and institutions. She sees codes as semiotic structures of meaning that evolve among people in specific contexts and uses the examples of giftgiving and card-sending. The codes and the ways in which they are used will vary according to the specific context. As well as codes and contexts, culture is also shaped by institutions, which she sees as shared narratives, practices, and capacities that enable people to employ different strategies. See Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2001), 160–185. However, I think, following Bourdieu, it is important to see people as operating in social fields in which there are dominant and subordinate positions as people struggle to attain different forms of capital and to legitimate their positions.
See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), 94–115. But where I differ from both Swidler and Bourdieu is that while people are rational, instrumental, and strategic in their struggle for capital, they have to be emotional and reasonable in their struggle to bond and belong and to love and care for each other.
Bourdieu sees the field of power as the struggle between the value and distribution of economic capital (income, wealth, and property) and the value and distribution of cultural capital (knowledge, education, and culture). See Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 76; David Swartz, Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997), 136–142.
For Bourdieu, meaning is conflated with habitus. But the problem with his conception of habitus, as Alexander points out, is that it is a structural reduction, a structure that reproduces domination. It does not allow for independence of language, symbols, and meaning and of individuals continually recreating and sustaining meaning. See Jeffrey Alexander, Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, 1995), 136–149.
The relation between economic and religious interests was central not just to Weber’s sociology of religion, it was also central to his conception of culture. He saw religion as providing fundamental views about the purpose, ends, and means of life and that this shaped people’s actions. When one understood the logic of the Protestant ethic, one could explain the economic behavior of Calvanists and, therefore, why modern capitalism emerged when it did. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958), esp. 232.
For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between culture and action, see A. Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986), 273–286;
Stephen Vaisey, “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (2009), 1675–1715;
Vaisey, “Socrates, Skinner and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking about Culture in Action,” Sociological Forum 23 (2008), 603–613;
Swidler, “Comment on Stephen Vaisey’s ‘Socrates, Skinner and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking about Culture in Action,’” Sociological Forum 23 (2008), 614–618.
Again, this is derived from Geertz’s definition of religion. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90.
Habitus is central to Bourdieu’s way of reading, understanding, and investigating the social world. It focuses attention on the embodied dispositions, ways of thinking and being, into which people are socialized. These dispositions become almost automatic, taken-for-granted, second-nature ways of being. For Bourdieu, all forms of identity, personal meaning, subjectivity, and sense of self are structured within habitus. “To speak of habitus is to assert that the individual, and even the personal, the subjective, is social, collective. Habitus is socialized subjectivity.” Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 126. It is within habitus that individuals are socialized into their identities and their social relations with others. See, Craig Calhoun, “Social Theory and the Politics of Identity,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 11;
James Bohman, “Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint: Agency in Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. R. Schusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 132. We can take it from this that any sense of identity is derived within “the limits of the system of categories he (the individual) owes to his upbringing and training.” Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 126. Identity can be seen as an arbitrarily constructed story that one tells about oneself to create an ongoing sense of coherence and logic about oneself, the events and experiences that constitute one’s life.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion,” in Identity: A Reader, ed. P. Du Gay, J. Evans, and P. Redman (London: Sage, 2000), 298. Identity, then, from a Bourdieusian perspective, is the socially structured story that constitutes oneself as constant, intelligible, and responsible. “The social world, which tends to identify normality with identity understood as the constancy to oneself of a responsible being that is predictable, or at least intelligible, in the way of a well-constructed history (as opposed to a history of an idiot), has available all sorts of institutions of integration and unification of the self” Bourdieu, “The Biolographical Illusion,” 299. However, rather than seeing Mark as “an arbitrarily constructed story,” it would be better to see him as a bricoleur of meaning, someone who uses the cultural ingredients into which he was socialized to create an ongoing, durable, but transposable sense of self that enables him to create and sustain meaning with his customers as well as his loved ones.
In his study of world religions, Demerath distinguished cultural Catholics as those who were not really believers, and while they attended church sporadically they had a good deal of contempt for some of the church officials and policies. But they still saw Catholicism as part of their national and family cultural heritage. See N. Jay Demerath III, Crossing the Gods: World Religions and Worldly Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 43. For a description of Irish Cultural Catholics and how they differ from other types,
see Tom Inglis, “Catholic Identity in Contemporary Ireland: Belief and Belonging to Tradition,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 22.3 (2007), 205–220. We will return to this in chapter 8.
Kathleen Lynch and Judy Walsh, “Love, Care and Solidarity: What Is and Is Not Commodifiable,” in Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice, ed. Kathleen Lynch, John Baker, and Maureen Lyons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 31–53.
In his study of working-class schoolchildren back in the 1970s, Paul Willis found that there some pupils opted out of the formal school culture that was oriented to educational success and, instead, focused on trying to avoid confrontation with the formal requirements and have a good time. Later, they took a similar attitude to work: it was more about maintaining relationships, being able to get on with colleagues, than about personal success. See Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977), 22–49.
Analyzing the ways in which culture operated in and through social class was a major feature of Bourdieu’s work. Class position is structured through a habitus that structures the way people see and understand themselves within the class structure. For Bourdieu, what are objective social structural realities become internalized as subjective dispositions. “The categories of perception of the social world are, as regards their most essential features, the product of the internalization, the incorporation, of the objective structures of social space. Consequently, they incline agents to accept the social world as it is, to take it for granted, rather than to rebel against it, to counterpose to it different, even antagonistic, possibles. The sense of one’s place, as a sense of what one can or cannot ‘permit oneself,’ implies a tacit acceptance of one’s place, a sense of limits (‘that’s not for the likes of us,’ etc.), or, which amounts to the same thing, a sense of distances, to be marked and kept, respected or expected,” Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14.6 (1985), 728.
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© 2014 Tom Inglis
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Inglis, T. (2014). Money and Success. In: Meanings of Life in Contemporary Ireland. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413727_4
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