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American Journal of Cultural Sociology
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.46
Citation Impact (citeScore): 1
Number of Followers: 28  
 
  Hybrid Journal Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 2049-7113 - ISSN (Online) 2049-7121
Published by Springer-Verlag Homepage  [2468 journals]
  • “We love martyrdom, but we also love life”: Coptic cultural trauma
           between martyrdom and rights

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      Abstract: Cultural trauma theory illuminates the meaning-making process that collectivities undergo in the wake of tragedy. I advance this theory by attending to the role of interpretive fields, and specifically religion, in shaping the construction of cultural trauma. I approach religion as a cultural resource that offers meaning-making tools through which people negotiate the meaning and memory of violence. Based on transnational fieldwork among Coptic-Orthodox Christians, I examine competing cultural trauma narratives in response to a brutal wave of violence between 2015 and 2018. While the Coptic Orthodox Church advances a theodicy of martyrdom that transforms death into a blessing, this paper specifically explores how Copts themselves make sense of contemporary martyrdom. Three narratives emerge: First, some Copts embrace the theodicy of martyrdom, finding solace in the promise of the afterlife. Second, some Copts reject the theodicy of martyrdom in favor of a theology of advocacy that emphasizes the right to life. Third, some Copts negotiate a hybrid theology of advocacy and theodicy of martyrdom, emphasizing the right to life on earth and in heaven. These contested narratives reveal how religion shapes cultural trauma by both engaging with the problem of theodicy as well as ideas of citizenship and civic engagement.
      PubDate: 2023-06-01
       
  • The sounds of executions: sonic flaws and the transformation of capital
           punishment

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      Abstract: A robust literature addresses the historical transformation of executions, but it does so without attention to sound. To help us understand how the audible aspects of executions impacted these transformations, we develop a concept we call sonic flaws. Sonic flaws are characterized neither by their loudness nor their nuisance quality. Rather, sonic flaws are sounds that not only intrude upon but also undermine the social settings in which they are heard. As transgressions of not only the sonic but also the moral order, the notion of sonic flaws also captures sonic conflicts and resistances by sonic means. Based on an analysis of newspaper accounts of executions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we identify the construction of sonic flaws around three different types of sounds: sounds of emotions, sounds of death, and sounds of resistance. Most importantly, we show how managerial efforts to address sonic flaws turned the execution into a space guided by middle-class sensibilities and dominated by an aspiration for silence.
      PubDate: 2023-06-01
       
  • Fingerprinting, civil codes, and the origins of surveillance culture in
           the United States

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      Abstract: “Surveillance culture,” according to an influential body of scholarly work, is characterized by the habitual use of surveillance technologies that connect people and machines in webs or assemblages. The origin of this culture is pinned to the political and economic interests of private tech and the security state. This understanding of surveillance culture, however, leaves unanswered important questions about social relations, collective norms, and the broader interpretive space in which surveillance practices are located. To address them, I use civil sphere theory to explain the popularization and dissemination of mass surveillance techniques in the early-twentieth century United States. I draw on two specific popularization efforts: identity deceptions unmasked by the Chicago Police Department’s fingerprint experts; and private sector surveillance entrepreneurs, self-styled as “Fingerprint Men.” Linking these domains were surveillance narratives, stories about intimate crime that threatened the civil sphere. Surveillance narratives were effective not because they were factually accurate (they often weren’t) but because they offered riveting accounts of urban life that drew on cultural scripts concerning race, risk, and morality. Historical and cultural analyses of these narratives shed new light on surveillance culture as a space of semantic relationships among discourse and symbols.
      PubDate: 2023-06-01
       
  • Rusty gardens: stigma and the making of a new place reputation in Buffalo,
           New York

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      Abstract: This article develops a conceptual framework to explain how local actors engage in grassroots reputational making activities to separate themselves, their homes, and their city from stigmas that mark places with bad reputations, and how these reputational making activities become institutionalized in urban regeneration practices. Through a case study that draws from field notes and 36 in-depth interviews in Buffalo, New York, this paper examines how ordinary residents mobilized through garden tourism to make a new place reputation in relation to the Rust Belt stigma. Residents mobilized through one of two cultural frames: reputational reframing or reputational expansion. Reputational reframing is the discourses, narratives, and social activities geared toward changing an existing place’s reputation in relation to external stigmas. Reputational expansion is the discourses, narratives, and social activities geared toward diversifying or seeking inclusion into the emerging place reputation. The extent that local actors use reputational expansion was conditioned on the degree of their perceived success of reputational reframing. This study has broader implications on how place reputations matter in the debates over urban regeneration in ordinary American cities.
      PubDate: 2023-06-01
       
  • Capital and distinction or goods and traditions' Toward a
           post-Bourdieusian cultural theory

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      Abstract: Few theoretical traditions dominate the sociological study of culture as does that of the late Pierre Bourdieu. Yet the Bourdieu that dominates is not the only Bourdieu there is, for Bourdieusian sociology is comprised of two incompatible philosophical strands—naturalism and interpretivism. In turn, the first goal of this essay is to make the case that cultural sociologists are wrong to give primacy to naturalist Bourdieu, as we so often do. And in order to accomplish this, I advance a critique of naturalist Bourdieu using the theoretical and normative resources afforded by interpretivist Bourdieu. However, this critique is only the first part of a larger project of theoretical translation and reconstruction. Despite the substantial sociological insights contained in interpretivist Bourdieu, for explanatory, ethical, and political reasons, I maintain that a superior critical cultural theory ultimately requires an alternative theoretical vocabulary. “Naturalism and interpretivism” presents brief accounts of naturalism and interpretivism. In “The two Bourdieus: naturalist versus interpretivist,” I flesh out how they manifest in Bourdieu’s sociology, presenting, in ideal-typical form, the basic outlines of what I call naturalist Bourdieu and interpretivist Bourdieu. In “Moving beyond Bourdieu,” I argue that, although the latter is far superior to the former, its economistic vocabulary is parasitic on the normative vision animating Bourdieu’s project. So, in order to bring Bourdieu’s cultural theory more in line with his political ambitions, I propose replacing the language of “capital,” “distinction,” and “fields” with the anti-naturalist language of “goods,” “traditions,” and “spheres.” In “A post-Bourdieusian cultural theory,” I bring together the work of Taylor, MacIntyre, Walzer, and others to sketch the outlines of a post-Bourdieusian cultural theory.
      PubDate: 2023-05-16
       
  • The resurgence of antisemitism: insights from cultural sociology

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      PubDate: 2023-05-11
       
  • Protest Event, Political Culture, and Biography: Post-protest Local
           Activism in Russia

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      Abstract: A biographical approach in social science is usually applied to study the life courses of a particular group of people or to explain individual action and meaning-making through biographical determinants. This article aims to develop the biographical approach by showing how it can be used to explain changes in political culture resulting from protest events. Using the case of post-protest local activism in Russia as an example, it demonstrates that a focus on activists’ biographies allows researchers to better understand how the nationwide protest event of 2011–12 changed the political culture of local activism. By focusing on biography, researchers can discover a very important feature of a protest event: its ability to make possible the meeting of people with biographical trajectories that would ordinarily take them in different directions. Consequently, events create opportunities for bringing opposite meanings, skills, and schemes of action together, thereby, allowing a cultural change to emerge. The article suggests that the proposed explanatory model develops biographical sociology by giving biography more power, informs the sociology of event, social movement studies, and political culture theories.
      PubDate: 2023-04-13
       
  • Correction: “Something other than real life:” digital life resistance
           in the civil sphere

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      PubDate: 2023-04-11
       
  • Consumption in the Black community: major themes and new developments

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      PubDate: 2023-04-04
       
  • ‘Walking the talk’: transposition of religious culture in OWS

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      Abstract: This paper analyzes the participation of Kundalini Yoga teachers in the Occupy Wall Street social movement. While much of the existing literature on the intersection of social movements and religion focuses on how religious culture supports activism, I examine how actors with strong religious commitments attempt to expand the scope of their participation within a predominantly secular social movement. Using the concepts of transposition and creative action, I demonstrate how these yoga teachers adapted their culture through the operations of framing and linking, appropriation, and secularization to enact normative commitments across different settings and audiences. After presenting empirical evidence that supports these assertions, I discuss the implications of my findings for recent debates over how culture shapes action, particularly the intertwining roles of deep culture, consciousness, and creativity.
      PubDate: 2023-03-22
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00191-8
       
  • What is Durkheimian' Thoughts on boundaries, paradigms, age and
           creativity

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      PubDate: 2023-03-10
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00188-3
       
  • Appropriating the civil sphere: the construction of German collective
           identity by right-wing populist actors during the Covid-19 pandemic

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      Abstract: This paper considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on right-wing populists’ constructions of German collective identity. In their “Covid-19 crisis” narratives, German populists attempted to rearrange the discursive and institutional space of the German civil sphere through a symbolic inversion of the heroic signifier and legitimization of violence against perceived enemies. To analyze such discursive dynamics, this paper utilizes multilayered narrative analysis, drawing on the synthesis of civil sphere theory, the anthropological conceptualization of the relationship between mimetic crisis and symbolic substitution of violence and the sociological narrative theory of the sacralization and desacralization of heroism. This analysis structures the investigation of positive and negative symbolic constructions of German collective identity by German right-wing populist narratives. The analysis shows that although German right-wing populists are politically peripheral, their affective, antagonistic and anti-elite narratives contribute to the semantic erosion of the liberal democratic core of the German civil sphere. This in turn reduces the ability of democratic institutions to control violence and leads to the restriction of civil solidarity.
      PubDate: 2023-03-04
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00189-2
       
  • From multiculturalism to antisemitism' Revisiting the Jewish question
           in America

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      Abstract: Previous scholarship suggests that American Jews have been the beneficiaries of a multicultural mode of incorporation since the 1960s. If so, what explains the recent resurgence of antisemitism in the United States' Evidence of such a resurgence is adduced in the form of increasing antisemitic incidents and changing patterns of cultural representation. The contemporary resurgence of antisemitism is then traced in part to problems of boundary definition and identity that multiculturalism generates. These problems lead to anxiety within the core group about the continuing viability of its own identity and the national identity, which fosters antisemitic efforts to reestablish hierarchical boundaries that multiculturalism has obscured. The article provides additional support for this thesis by means of a historical comparison to cultural attitudes toward Jews in the Calvinist tradition, particularly among the Puritans. Although the Puritans were not multiculturalists, their identification with Jews gave rise to similar problems of boundary definition and identity, which the Puritans resolved by redefining the boundaries of their community to exclude Jews. The article’s conclusion discusses the implications of this argument for the relation of Jews to the civil sphere in the United States today.
      PubDate: 2023-03-04
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00185-6
       
  • Transcendence, fast and slow: Infinite Jest and the dynamics of a cultural
           splash

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      Abstract: This paper builds on two leading models of artistic practice, the “network-building” and “autonomous sphere” approaches, to show how an expressive work can reverse the normal antinomy between artistic recognition and commercial success and become an immediate crossover hit. Focusing on a single “pointy” case from the world of literature—the 1996 novel Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace—I ask whether a set of unique social dynamics attends the process of making a “cultural splash.” In the case of Infinite Jest, success came from occupying an intermediate position in the “space between fields” and eliciting a complex, mutually referential response from cultural intermediaries. In this way, the book attracted samplings of recognition and renown, the contrasting reputational ingredients associated with an enduring cultural appeal. Nevertheless, the novel’s declining reputation in recent years suggests that we should differentiate a cultural splash from the better-known dynamics of canonization and classicization. In the paper’s final section, I conceptualize a cultural splash as an effect generated by works that undergo a “fast transcendence” by unmooring themselves temporarily from the limiting effects of being counted as “art” or “pop.”
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-021-00148-9
       
  • Everything’s going according to Plan(demic): a cultural sociological
           approach to conspiracy theorizing

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      Abstract: In this article, I examine the case of a viral film entitled “Plandemic,” its sequel, and the epidemiologist that is its main subject, and develop a cultural sociology of conspiracy theorizing through the concept of “performative conspiracy.” I argue that the Plandemic case represents a cultural performance within the (ongoing) serious social drama of the Covid-19 pandemic. I focus primarily on the “alternative” narrative put forth by the Plandemic case; however, the (Western/US) “mainstream” narrative becomes clear as well. Both call upon the same sets of binary oppositions, chief among them, science vs. blind faith, truth vs. deception, and evidence vs. supposition. Audiences, who are themselves fragmented and differentiated, are exposed to multiple narrative paths. Within the mainstream, they encounter an apocalyptic-turned romantic story, in which science, evidence, and the truth, the sacred trio, will lift humanity out of perilous danger. Plandemic’s alternative narrative begins in a tragic tone and builds apocalyptically into a tale of terror, waged by the very same forces of science, truth, and evidence, to create a “plague of corruption” that will “kill millions.” To conclude, I reflect on the potential implications of the increasing popularity of conspiracy theorizing about Covid-19.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-021-00144-z
       
  • Bushwhacking: accounts as symbolic violence in the arts-based
           gentrification of Bushwick, Brooklyn

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      Abstract: A sizable body of research on arts-based gentrification has documented how artist residences have been strategically deployed by developers to kick-start capital reinvestment and lure so-called “creative class” professionals into formerly disinvested neighborhoods. Yet researchers rarely investigate how actual occupants of such residences perceive their role in neighborhood change. Addressing this gap, this article examines how residents of CastleBraid—a controversial luxury apartment complex designed for artists in Bushwick, Brooklyn—mediate tensions between their espoused preferences and the well-known negative consequences associated with gentrification. Drawing on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that CastleBraid residents meaningfully account for gentrification through the practical logic of a particular group habitus which reinforces a shared identity and validates their presence in Bushwick. Moreover, I argue that these gentrification accounts constitute a form of symbolic violence which obscures underlying patterns of spatial inequality through misrecognition and the denial of gentrifiers’ privilege. Throughout, I argue that a renewed engagement with Bourdieusian theory may facilitate insights into gentrifier meaning-making that transcend the usual stylized typology of gentrifiers.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-021-00149-8
       
  • Remembering the dreams, forgetting the war: commemoration and narrative in
           Japanese girls’ culture

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      Abstract: In early twentieth-century Japan, girls’ magazines provided their young readers with a site to creatively express themselves, but when these magazines became channels of propaganda in WWII-era Japan, much of that independence was suppressed and the popularity of the magazines faded. Nevertheless, in 2009, a 100-year commemorative issue of one of the most influential magazines, Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend), was published. In this study, we explore what was included, excluded, and marginalized in the commemorative issue and how editorial choices were made. Bringing together research in cultural sociology, memory studies, and Japanese girls’ culture, we investigate how Shōjo no tomo was made to fit with contemporary contexts of gender identity and collective memory of the war. Our data show that themes about creative independence were preserved and elaborated, emphasizing expression and empowerment through writing, while support for war was marginalized and an anti-war interpretation was highlighted. The lead editor of the commemoration reconstructed narratives of shōjo identity and agency to justify these editorial choices and to deemphasize contradictions between feminism and nationalism in Japan. Our study contributes to research on commemorative practices by highlighting how narrative accounts of identity and agency can be transformed through successful commemorations.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-021-00142-1
       
  • The return of antisemitism' Waves of societalization and what
           conditions them

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      Abstract: This essay employs societalization theory to explain the disturbing renewal of publicly antisemitic beliefs and actions in contemporary Western societies. These new explosions of anti-Jewish hatred are caused, not by increases in antisemitic feelings, but by the weakening of prohibitions against their public expression. Since Western civil spheres introduced such prohibitions in the early nineteenth century, there have been waves of societalization stigmatizing antisemitism and continuous backlash movements against them. The German backlash culminated with the Holocaust and triggered a powerful societalizing movement that allowed massive Jewish incorporation into Western societies. This post-Holocaust societalizing movement, however, was highly variable, both temporally and spatially, and in recent decades the deleterious effects of such incompleteness have been exacerbated by declining Holocaust memory, new symbolizations of Israel, and shifts in progressive ideologies. Utopian hopes for “never again” have been dashed. Yet, even as antisemitic narratives are once again providing cultural fodder for backlash movements, another wave of societalizing protest is gathering force inside Western civil spheres.
      PubDate: 2023-02-28
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00184-7
       
  • The eternally rescued: the Jews and the boundaries of Danish civility

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      Abstract: In this paper, we argue that proximity to primordial(ized) Danish civil values has generally saved the Jews in Denmark from violent antisemitism. Combining Alexander’s (The civil sphere. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) account of an assimilatory mode of civil incorporation with his concept of “societalization” (Alexander in Am Sociol Rev 83(6):1049–1078, 2018; What makes a social crisis' The societalization of social problems. Wiley, Hobroken, 2019), we discuss how “re-societalizing” antisemitism led to strong enactment of anti-antisemitism and increased Jewish sub-group anxiety in the civil sphere. Anti-antisemitism in Denmark has historically been integrated into cultural codes and historical narratives in the civil sphere. We analyze how the 2015 terror attack in Copenhagen and a public debate about male circumcision caused a wave of reassurance of one of the core values in the Danish civil sphere, namely Jewish safety. Speeches from consecutive prime ministers and an ensuing “action plan against antisemitism” presented by the government in early 2022 demonstrate how contemporary antisemitism becomes integrated into a historical narrative of mutually ensured Danish civility between the majority and the Jewish minority. We conclude that despite its precarious character and the social anxiety provoked by societalization of antisemitism over the last seven years, civil solidarity within an assimilation mode of incorporation has proven to be surprisingly empowering and attractive for the Jewish minority in the Danish case.
      PubDate: 2023-02-11
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00186-5
       
  • The American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Volume 10 (2022)

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      PubDate: 2023-02-08
      DOI: 10.1057/s41290-023-00187-4
       
 
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