Culturalization of Social Theory

This is an advanced seminar that diagnoses and discusses the ascendancy of ‘culture’ as a central category of contemporary social/sociological theorizing. I provisionally call it ‘culturalization’ of sociology. ‘Culture’ had not been explicitly included among the fundamental categories in the works of the classics of the discipline. To understand and explain ‘culture’ had been the job of cultural anthropology. While the founding figures of anthropology had sociological and social theoretical goals, sociologists rarely if ever professed specific anthropological commitments. Until 1980s, ‘culture’ was not treated in sociology as an independent variable (explanans) capable of explaining the discipline’s central questions. If anything, cultural ‘traits’ were supposed to be explained (explanandum) by other factors, so there was sociology of culture but no cultural sociology. In the UK, the so-called cultural studies emerged in 1970s but were ambiguous about the definition and the explanatory status of culture. In the English speaking world and elsewhere in the so-called ‘West’, the case for cultural sociology was made only in the 1990s and the 2000s, following powerful (counter)cultural narratives of post-colonial cultural studies. The arrival of culture may have been delayed but it’s been powerful. It began to permeate and transform nearly all significant discourses. To speak today of identity, gender, race, class, or power is to speak of ‘cultural construction’ of these categories, not of essential entities. Widely discussed issues such as diversity, consumption, post-coloniality, or social trauma are unthinkable without culturalist conceptualization. How come? Why now? This class is designed to approach these questions, look´at some scientific response to them, and in the process work out an understanding of what culture really is – or can be – as both object and approach, and what ramifications of the ‘culturalization of sociology’ can be discerned today.