What is Cultural Sociology?. Lyn Spillman

also affect how people navigate old age. For instance, some people see their goal as bodily preservation, while others focus on maximizing enjoyment. Some people understand help from their social ties as a general obligation, while others see helping in terms of specific exchanges. Individuals’ cultural resources are an important influence on how successfully they pursue their goals, too: for instance, how they navigate medical bureaucracies (Abramson 2015, 134, 143).

      Justin Farrell investigates another topic which may initially seem irrelevant to culture: the environment. He explores processes of meaning-making about environmental protection, and their implications for environmental issues. His in-depth examination of persistent and interconnected conflicts surrounding Yellowstone, America’s first and most iconic national park, suggests that the disputes among different stakeholders are generated by the different “socially constructed stories that give them meaning and direct their lives” – whether those stories are about, for example, rugged individualism, old-western heritage, indigenous religion, or the intrinsic value of non-human animals. Such stories create a moral and spiritual context for environmental disputes like those at Yellowstone, yet culture is so deeply ingrained that individuals often fail to recognize the influence of the moral culture within which they are embedded, or even to be able to give a coherent account of their beliefs and behaviors – “taken for granted as fundamental to reality” (Farrell 2015, 14, 9).

To take another example, globalization is necessarily a large-scale process which often seems to happen behind our backs and beyond daily life. Yet even so, examining meaning-making processes sheds new light on how economic globalization is expressed in intimate interactions and takes on different significance in different contexts. For instance, Kimberly Hoang’s (2015) observations and interviews in four different Vietnamese hostess bars uncover links between macro-level flows of capital and trends in the informal economy around intimacy and gender performance. Hostesses in some bars oriented to elite Vietnamese businessmen, who want to display Vietnamese economic progress with conspicuous consumption and “Pan-Asian modernity,” project expensiveness and Western-influenced standards of beauty, including lighter skin and rounder eyes. By contrast, hostesses in bars oriented to Westerners stick to an earlier type of gender performance, and with their darker skin tones, smoky eye makeup, and simple clothes they reinforce ideas of Western dominance by playing into images of an exotic Vietnam in need of aid.

      Attentive to the rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories embedded in their research sites, these authors contribute significant new knowledge about topics of central concern to sociologists and the general public alike. By investigating the social construction of everyday life in hiring, old age, environmental conflict, and globalizing cities, they shed light on both consensus and conflict, solidarity and power. They analyze cultural forms, like the criteria for evaluation used by hiring companies, and the stories people tell about the environment. They analyze interaction processes, like the different ways old people engage with health providers, or the negotiations between women and their clients in Vietnamese bars. And they show how institutions, organizations, and fields – from hiring organizations to global financial flows – shape meaning-making processes.

Conclusion

How can we learn to understand culture better? How can we learn more about shared assumptions we take for granted, cultural differences which puzzle us, cultural power which affects us despite ourselves, and cultural conflict which frequently erupts in society?

      The first step is to develop a reflective orientation to the culture surrounding us. Attention to rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories sensitizes us as observers to meaning-making we might otherwise take for granted. We also need to understand the historical ambiguities of the concept of culture. Remembering that, historically, the idea of culture was used to label two quite different things – a separate realm of society, or a feature of entire groups – helps guard against unnecessary confusion. Beginning to think of culture as meaning-making process is a way to encompass both historical senses, as well as the enormous variety of meaning-making we see in the world.

      Against this background orientation, the remaining chapters in this book offer an extended answer to the question “what is cultural sociology?” by explaining and demonstrating many of the conceptual tools cultural sociologists now use to help us understand meaning-making better. What do you need to know to do cultural sociology? Each chapter will offer a different angle of vision on cultural processes and illustrate different conceptual tools for understanding culture. The following chapter examines how and why cultural sociologists analyze cultural forms. Chapter 3 surveys the various ways cultural sociologists examine meaning in interaction. In chapter 4, we explore larger-scale processes of organized cultural production. Against this background, chapter 5 provides a summary overview, sketches a critical assessment of this book using the tools of cultural sociology, demonstrates debates and differences among cultural sociologists, and suggests how to begin to use the conceptual tools of cultural sociology. Throughout, we see contributions to many general political and economic topics central to sociologists, such as inequality, identity politics, social movements, and organizations. We also see contributions to our knowledge of specialized cultural products like the arts, popular culture, religion, and science.

Sociology has come a long way in understanding “the social construction of reality” since Berger and Luckmann coined the term in the sixties. Building on many interdisciplinary influences, as well as the sociological classics, sociologists stopped marginalizing the idea of culture, and cultural research and theory boomed. It is time for a stocktaking of what we have learned and how we now understand meaning and meaning-making processes. The following chapter discusses the biggest innovation in sociological understanding of culture: the analysis of cultural forms and their independent influence on meaning-making processes.