Cultural Analysis

The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas

Robert Wuthnow, James Davison Hunter, Albert J. Bergesen, Edith Kurzweil

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135174736
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Phenomenology in Philosophy

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas.

This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation.

1Introduction

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While theories, methods, and research investigations in other areas of the social sciences have accumulated at an impressive pace over the past several decades, the study of culture appears to have made little headway. The major theorizing, as well as the bulk of empirical work, that has been done in the social sciences since the Second World War has tended to pay little attention to the cultural factor. The Marxist tradition has, of course, been notorious for its neglect of the cultural realm. Even in the more interesting variants of American and British neo-Marxism, culture often continues to be dismissed as little more than ideological subterfuge. The structural-functional perspective, as advanced principally by Parsons, identified culture as an autonomous system of action, but failed largely in its efforts to promote research investigations of this system. Symbolic interactionism, ostensibly concerned with symbolism and meanings, developed chiefly around the perceptions of individuals in microscopic settings rather than with the larger patterning of cultures themselves. Other perspectives in social psychology, while paying heed to cultural phenomena such as beliefs and attitudes, have been equally caught up with the individual psyche rather than devoting theoretical effort to the investigation of culture. In substantive fields the story has been much the same. The study of social movements has shifted increasingly toward examining the resource base from which collective behavior is able to emerge, rather than giving weight to the goals, frustrations, or legitimating symbols of challenging groups — nuts and bolts have replaced hearts and minds. In the field of formal organizations, research has shifted away from norms and goals to the selective rationality of markets and environments. Studies of status attainment, one of the more popular topics in the social sciences, deal almost entirely with formal models of inter- and intra-generational transmission, even though (ironically) the concept of occupational prestige seems an obvious candidate for cultural analysis. Social networks studies focus exclusively on interpersonal linkages and exchange. Even in social psychology where the relation between ‘culture and personality’ still occupies a position of formal importance, research has come to focus more on life events, stages of development, support networks, and social roles than on the influences of culture. On the whole, it may be only slightly presumptuous to suggest that the social sciences are in danger of abandoning culture entirely as a field of inquiry.

All of this is of little concern as long as the alternative approaches and theories are able to get by without recourse to the idea of culture. But the denial of culture has been difficult to sustain in actual practice. For all its materialism, Marxism does continue to posit the existence of ideology and neo-Marxists raise questions about the legitimating assumptions of the state — surely aspects of culture. Social movements make use of symbolism and ritual and themselves become figments of the cultural world as they are given public definition and historical meaning. Formal organizations struggle to maintain the moral commitment of employees and clients and their behavior is greatly influenced by ideas and information received from other organizations. Status, in actuality, remains the product of negotiation and display in ways far more significant than mathematical attainment models have been able to explain. Networks exist only in so far as actors are capable of transmitting messages, overtly or inadvertently, to one another about their relative positions and intentions. Life events, feelings, and other aspects of the self coalesce as formative dimensions of the personality in no way other than through the mediation of symbolic gestures and reflection.

These examples not only indicate the numerous areas and ways in which cultural factors surface in social life; they also give a sense of what culture is and how it may be defined. For present purposes, culture may be provisionally defined as the symbolic-expressive aspect of human behavior. This definition is sufficiently broad to take account of the verbal utterances, gestures, ceremonial behavior, ideologies, religions, and philosophical systems that are generally associated with the term culture. There are some special advantages as well in defining culture this way, as will become evident in subsequent chapters.

It will also become apparent, however, that theorists of culture remain sorely divided on how best to define culture and what aspects of it to emphasize. That this should be so is a reflection of how little progress has been made in the study of culture. With only a few exceptions, this field remains an impoverished area in the social sciences. Its importance, though debated, is sufficiently evident that efforts need to be made to promote the study of culture. But thus far, these efforts have been largely unproductive.

Limiting assumptions

Why has the study of culture failed to advance? To some, the answer is straightforward. Some time ago, according to this interpretation, social scientists discovered that culture actually made relatively little difference in human affairs and for this reason ceased applying their best efforts to its investigation. They turned from the ephemeral realm of attitudes and feelings to the more obdurate facts of social life — income inequality, unemployment, fertility rates, group dynamics, crime, and the like. For others, an equally straightforward explanation is probably evident. Moods, feelings, beliefs, values — the stuff of which culture is comprised — cannot be studied, however important, without great difficulty and expense. These phenomena are tough to operationalize and measure. Those who try, moreover, invariably face critics who argue that rich, personal, empathic description is the most that can be hoped for in the realm of culture, while those who rely on empathic description hold no match to social scientists in other areas who can wield precise statistics and rigorous tests of formal propositions.

But these views are more symptomatic of conventional wisdom about culture than they are helpful as diagnoses of the problem. They reflect the very assumptions that have inhibited progress in the study of culture. These limiting assumptions need to be unmasked at the outset.

The first is the assumption that culture consists primarily of thoughts, moods, feelings, beliefs, and values. This is a common view in contemporary social science. Culture is that residual realm left over after all forms of observable human behavior have been removed. It consists of the inner, invisible thought life of human beings, either as individuals or in some difficult-to-imagine collective sense, as in notions of ‘collective purpose’, ‘shared values', and ‘intersubjective realities’. What people actually do, how they behave, the institutions they construct, and the physical exchanges of money and power in which they engage, however, are not a part of culture.

This view of culture has gradually evolved and been defended on the basis of selective readings of classical social theory until it is now a prevailing assumption in the social sciences. It is rooted fundamentally in the familiar, common-sensical Platonic dualism between mind and body. But it has taken on sophistication from modern theoretical work. From Marx the idea has been inherited that culture is an aspect of ‘superstructure’, separated as it were from the more objective and consequential elements comprising the social ‘infrastructure’, namely, means of production and social relations. From Weber a counterargument has been derived which asserts the importance of culture. But in the Weberian view culture is nevertheless a matter of ‘ethic’ and ‘spirit’, still differentiated from concrete social arrangements involving social classes, the state, and technology. From Durkheim the notion has evolved (particularly in the work of interpreters like Guy E. Swanson) that culture is a set of shared beliefs, often misguidedly oriented toward gods and other mysterious forces, but which in reality are mere reflections of the power configurations within societies. From Parsons one learns to separate the ‘cultural system’ from the ‘social system’, the one seemingly comprised of little more than the social scientists' assertions about collective values, while the other represents the actual realm of human interaction. In conventional accounts of social psychology, a world of ‘attitudes' populated by mental and emotive predispositions is set off from the world of behavior.

The point is sufficiently evident. In standard social scientific discussions of culture the human world is divided in two, objective social structure on the one hand, subjective thoughts and perceptions on the other, and the cultural part is defined as the most fluid, unconstrained, and least observable category of non-behavior. Having defined culture in this way, it is not surprising that social scientists have found it difficult to make headway with the analysis of culture.

A second limiting assumption is closely related. If culture consists of thoughts and feelings rather than behavior, then the relation between these two realms is an obvious question to explore; hence come studies relating subjective perceptions to objective circumstances, attitudes to behavior, opinions to voting, ideology to revolutions, class consciousness to class, alienation to inequality, and so on. Yet the focus of these studies has not been to understand culture, but in essence to explain it away. It would scarcely do (for building an empirical social science) to explain the observable activities of human actors in terms of unobservable cultural predispositions. Indeed, studies attempting to do so have been disappointing in being able to pin down stable relations. Rather, it has proved more attractive to argue that patterns of observable behavior are the real sources of ideas.

To put the issue more clearly, studies of culture have been inhibited by the assumption that culture can only be understood by relating it to social structure. This is reductionism. Instead of treating culture as an interesting phenomenon in its own right, social scientists have reduced it to some other level. Instead of attempting to understand religion, one attributes it to differences in social class. Instead of dealing with the internal characteristics of ideology, one seeks its roots in vested interests. Now, there is value in this approach for certain purposes, just as there is value in reducing human behavior to the functioning of chemical impulses. But social scientists have generally resisted such attempts as far as social structure is concerned on the grounds that much of value is overlooked. They have been less conscientious in dealing with culture.

Cultural analysis has also been limited by the assumption that only individuals have culture. This supposition is another form of reductionism. At one level it makes sense, of course, to limit culture to individuals. If culture is indeed nothing more than thoughts and feelings, then, to be sure, individuals are the only ones who can think and feel. But in other areas of the social sciences advances have been made only by abandoning this assumption. Durkheim's classic study of variations in suicide rates was conceivable only by assuming that these rates were independently interesting apart from the actions of individuals. So with Marx. The study of capitalist class relations implied something of importance that even individuals were neither aware of nor able to control.

The study of culture has been restricted in two significant ways by equating it with the thoughts and feelings of individuals. It has been limited in scope. And it has focused on a limited question. The problem of scope is the more obvious of the two. The logical course of inquiry, if culture is strictly an attribute of individuals, is to probe into the subjective consciousness of individuals: find out what they think and feel; in short, study the construction of subjective meanings. This, of course, is an endless task if one wishes to do it well. One individual's views are likely to be quite different from those of the next. But more importantly, one misses the broader dimensions of social life — institutions, classes, organizations, social movements. To the extent that culture is a part of these at all, it exists only in the heads of individual members. The other problem — focusing on a limited question — has also been inhibiting. This is the question of consistency. To the extent that patterns within culture have been studied at all, they have been defined largely in terms of consistency: do logically compatible attitudes actually go together with one another in people's minds? But only individuals can be credited with consistency or inconsistency. This question makes sense only if culture is regarded as a property of individuals. And even individuals seem remarkably capable of withstanding inconsistent attitudes. Thus, for all the research that has been made possible by survey techniques and quantitative analysis, little has been learned about cultural patterns.

The thrust of these arguments is to suggest that cultural analysis has been inhibited, not so much by a simple failure to specify testable propositions or to employ rigorous methods, but by deeper assumptions about the nature of culture itself. These assumptions have relegated culture to the realm of subjective thoughts and feelings held by individuals and have attempted to explain them away rather than identify systematic patterns among the elements of culture itself. So defined, it is little wonder that culture has remained poorly understood, if not genuinely misunderstood.

What is needed before cultural analysis is likely to advance is a fundamental respecification of the premises concerning culture. Its definition, what its main elements and indicators are, its relation to social structure, and how its changes need to be rethought, as it were, from the ground up. This task has, in fact, begun and much insightful progress has been made, but the work thus far has occurred primarily on the fringes of established social science and has involved considerable borrowing from other traditions. To date, these emerging approaches have not been well understood or critically examined.

Four perspectives on culture

Over the past quarter century, four approaches to the study of culture have been pursued with growing interest and with some success. Largely outside the mainstream of social science, these approaches have been oriented primarily toward the realms of meaning, symbolism, language, and discourse. Each is rooted in deeper philosophical traditions themselves quite distinct and in significant ways alien to the so-called ‘positivist’ tradition of contemporary social science. The first, and perhaps most familiar of these, is phenomenology; the second, cultural anthropology; the third, structuralism; and the fourth, critical theory.

These approaches are largely European in origin and for this reason have remained relatively obscure to American audiences. As each has developed in recent decades, there has nevertheless been a growing (some would say, cult-like) amount of interest in them to the extent that it is probably fair to suggest that the major assumptions that are now beginning to reorient work in the area of culture stem largely from one or more of these traditions.

Each of these approaches has been the locus of important theoretical contributions. It is possible to find competing views within each, but each approach has produced at least one influential writer whose work on culture has made substantial contributions in its own right. This volume focuses on the contributions of these four writers: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas.

Each writer has contributed significantly to the discussion of culture. Each has borrowed major assumptions from the theoretical tradition from which his or her work has emanated, but has also rejected certain elements of this tradition, borrowed ideas from others, and attempted to mold a more adequate framework for the analysis of culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the work of each writer, to summarize their contributions to the analysis of culture, and to suggest common perspectives which point toward an emerging framework for the investigation of culture.

Peter L. Berger and phenomenology

Phenomenology derives ultimately from Hegel and reflects a rich tradition of philosophical theorizing about the human condition, as evidenced in the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Schutz, and others. Much of this work is concerned with questions of ontology and epistemology; that is, with issues oriented toward the very basis of being and knowing. There is, in fact, a distinct theological flavor to much of this work in that it is deeply concerned with questions of ultimate meaning, existence, and transcendent being.

Applications of phenomenology to the social sciences stem primarily from the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, more importantly, Alfred Schutz. The work of these writers re-emphasizes the call that had been put forth earlier by Weber, Mead, and others to give special consideration to the role of subjective meanings in social life. It stresses the ‘inter-subjectivity’ or shared understandings on which social interaction is based and argues for descriptive research oriented toward a more empirically grounded understanding of the ordinary perceptions and intentions of social actors in daily life.

Peter L. Berger (with various co-authors) has emerged since the middle 1960s as a leading proponent of the phenomenological approach and, more generally, as one of the most thoughtful and well-respected theorists of culture. He has written voluminously on topics in a number of fields including the sociology of knowledge, religion, theology, modernization, sociological theory, and public policy. Utilizing and significantly revising the phenomenological perspective, he has created an impressive conceptual apparatus capable of dealing with such micro-sociological problems as the internalization of values as well as more macroscopic problems such as the cultural construction of institutions, ideologies, and changing societal patterns.

Berger was born in Vienna in 1929 and grew u...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The phenomenology of Peter L. Berger
• 3 The cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas
• 4 The neo-structuralism of Michel Foucault
• 5 The critical theory of Jürgen Habermas
• 6 An emerging framework
• Bibliography
• Index