Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice(Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

American sociology is in the midst of a cultural turn. Where sociologists once spurned culture, today they embrace and explore it, seeking to understand the construction of social forms and the way culture matters. Problems of meaning, discourse, aesthetics, value, textuality, form and narrativity, topics traditionally within the humanists' purview, have come to the fore as sociologists increasingly emphasize the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames and cognitive schema in their theorizations of social process and institution. Matters of Culture is an introduction to some of the best theorizing in cultural sociology, focusing in particular on questions of power, the sacred and cultural production. With a major theoretical introduction that lays out the internal structure of the field and its relation to cultural studies and contributions from leading academics Matters of Culture offers students and professors alike a representative range of the types of cultural sociological analysis available.

Table of Contents:
1. The cultural turn in American sociology Roger Friedland and John Mohr; Part I. The Place of Culture: 2. Culture and continuity: causal structures in socio-cultural persistence Orlando Patterson; 3. Theorizing hermeneutic cultural history John R. Hall; 4. Cultural studies as fin-de-siècle culture Mark A. Schneider; Part II. Sacred and Profane: 5. Private devotions and the sacred heart of Elvis: the Durkheimians and the (re)turn of the sacred Richard D. Hecht; 6. The social marking of the past: toward a socio-semiotics of memory Eviatar Zerubavel; 7. On the social construction of moral universals: the 'Holocaust' from war crimes to trauma drama Jeffrey C. Alexander; Part III. Culture and Power: 8. Social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, and participation Nancy Fraser; 9. Are we all in the closet? Notes towards a sociological and cultural turn in queer theory Steven Seidman; 10. Why (not) Foucault? Reflections on power, fascism and aesthetics Simonetta Falasca Zamponi; Part IV. Products and Production of Culture: 11. Audience aesthetics and popular culture Denise D. Bielby and William T. Bielby; 12. Grounding the postmodern: a story of empirical research on fuzzy concepts Magali Sarfatti Larson; 13. How art works: form and function in the stuff of life Harvey Molotch; 14. Ethnosympathy: reflections on an American dilemma Jon D Cruz.

About the Author :
Roger Friedland is Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and has published extensively in both disciplines. He is co-founder with John Mohr of the Cultural Turn conferences at UC Santa Barbara. John W. Mohr is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. He has published articles across a wide range of topics in cultural sociology and is co-founder with Roger Friedland of the Cultural Turn conferences at UC Santa Barbara.