Thursday, July 11, 2024
Friday, January 16, 2015
Three articles on the state of the union from outside parties...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/09/global_rankings_study_america_in_warp_speed_decline_partner/?utm_source=huffpost_politics&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange_article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/is-this-country-crazy_b_6451880.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/09/global_rankings_study_america_in_warp_speed_decline_partner/?utm_source=huffpost_politics&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange_article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/is-this-country-crazy_b_6451880.html
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Modern Cultural Theory Spotlight: Pierre Bordieu
Taken from : http://theory.routledgesoc.com/category/profile-tags/cultural-capital
Biography:
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was born to a working-class family in a small village in southern France called Denguin. Bourdieu’s father was a small farmer turned postal worker with little formal education, but he encouraged a young Bourdieu to pursue the best educational opportunities his country had to offer. Bourdieu took his father’s advice, eventually gaining admittance to one of France’s most prestigious universities, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied philosophy under the famous Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser.
After receiving his doctorate, Bourdieu took a teaching position in Algiers, Algeria in 1958. Algeria was at that time a French colony, but a war was underway between France and an Algerian independence movement. During this time, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic fieldwork among the Kabyle, Algeria’s largest indigenous group. Based on his fieldwork, Bourdieu published his first book, The Algerians, which was an immediate success. Later, Bourdieu would also use this fieldwork to write Outline of a Theory of Practice, one of his first and most influential theoretical statements.
Bourdieu’s rising reputation as a leading social theorist landed him a position as Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and later, in 1981, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.
Bourdieu was a prolific academic writer. He published more than 25 books and over 300 articles and essays over his career. He was also a leading public intellectual in France, speaking out and organizing protests against what he saw as the unfair and exploitive aspects of neoliberal economic policy and globalization. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu was known as one of France’s greatest scholars and one of the most influential social theorists in the world.
How Bourdieu Matters Today
It is hard to overestimate the influence Bourdieu has had on social theory. Bourdieu’s works have been translated in over two dozen languages and many are already considered classics in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Not only sociologists, but also those in anthropology, cultural studies, and education consider Bourdieu required reading for anyone trained in their disciplines. Bourdieu’s understanding of sociology as a “combat sport” that critically takes on and exposes the underlying structures of social life has also had a strong impact on the academic field, particularly in his home nation of France.
Key Concepts:
Cultural Capital
While he didn’t consider himself a Marxist sociologist, the theories of Karl Marx heavily influenced Bourdieu’s thinking. Marx’s influence is perhaps most evident in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Like Marx, Bourdieu argued that capital formed the foundation of social life and dictated one’s position within the social order. For Bourdieu and Marx both, the more capital one has, the more powerful a position one occupies in social life. However, Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital beyond the economic and into the more symbolic realm of culture.
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc. that one acquires through being part of a particular social class. Sharing similar forms of cultural capital with others—the same taste in movies, for example, or a degree from an Ivy League School—creates a sense of collective identity and group position (“people like us”). But Bourdieu also points out that cultural capital is a major source of social inequality. Certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others, and can help or hinder one’s social mobility just as much as income or wealth.
According to Bourdieu, cultural capital comes in three forms—embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. One’s accent or dialect is an example of embodied cultural capital, while a luxury car or record collection are examples of cultural capital in its objectified state. In its institutionalized form, cultural capital refers to credentials and qualifications such as degrees or titles that symbolize cultural competence and authority.
Habitus
Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences. Bourdieu often used sports metaphors when talking about the habitus, often referring to it as a “feel for the game.” Just like a skilled baseball player “just knows” when to swing at a 95-miles-per-hour fastball without consciously thinking about it, each of us has an embodied type of “feel” for the social situations or “games” we regularly find ourselves in. In the right situations, our habitus allows us to successfully navigate social environments. For example, if you grew up in a rough, crime ridden neighborhood in Baltimore, you would likely have the type of street smarts needed to successfully survive or steer clear of violent confrontations, “hustle” for jobs and money in a neighborhood with extremely low employment, and avoid police surveillance or harassment. However, if you were one of the lucky few in your neighborhood to make it to college, you would probably find that this same set of skills and dispositions was not useful—and maybe even detrimental—to your success in your new social scenario.
Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing. In one of his major works, Distinction, Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus. Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.” The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.
Field
Along with Bourdieu’s notion of a “feel for the game” came his theory of the game itself. Bourdieu understood the social world as being divided up into a variety of distinct arenas or “fields” of practice like art, education, religion, law, etc., each with their own unique set of rules, knowledges, and forms of capital. While fields can certainly overlap—education and religion, for example, overlap in many religiously-based colleges and universities in the United States—Bourdieu sees each field as being relatively autonomous from the others. Each field has its own set of positions and practices, as well as its struggles for position as people mobilize their capital to stake claims within a particular social domain. In art, for example, Bourdieu noticed that each generation of artists sought to overturn the established positions of those who came before them, only to be critiqued by the next generation of “avant-garde” artists who sought their own powerful positions within the field. Much like a baseball or football field, social fields are places where people struggle for position and play to win.
Associated Writing out Loud:
Distinction
The Forms of Capital
Associated Interactive Readings:
Forms of Capital
More on:
France loves its intellectuals. So much so that they even make documentaries about them! To get a “behind the scenes” look at the intellectual habitus of Bourdieu himself, check out “Sociology is a Martial Art” on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csbu08SqAuc
Go to your library and check out Loic Wacqant’s ethnography of a boxing gym on Chicago’s south side for an up-close and personal look at the fighter’s habitus. Wacquant, a prominent social theorist in his own right, was one of Bourdieu’s students:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/?view=usa&view=usa&ci=9780195168358&cp=24297
We’ve included two key readings from Bourdieu in the Social Theory Re-Wired reader, but Bourdieu wrote more—a lot more! To find your way through his many writings, we suggest you take a look at this handy online bibliography:
http://hyperbourdieu.jku.at/hyperbourdieustart.html
Pierre Bourdieu’s death from cancer in 2002 was a big loss to social theory and to those in France who turned to him as a political voice on behalf of the dispossessed. Read his obituary in the Guardian here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/jan/28/guardianobituaries.books
Biography:
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was born to a working-class family in a small village in southern France called Denguin. Bourdieu’s father was a small farmer turned postal worker with little formal education, but he encouraged a young Bourdieu to pursue the best educational opportunities his country had to offer. Bourdieu took his father’s advice, eventually gaining admittance to one of France’s most prestigious universities, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied philosophy under the famous Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser.
After receiving his doctorate, Bourdieu took a teaching position in Algiers, Algeria in 1958. Algeria was at that time a French colony, but a war was underway between France and an Algerian independence movement. During this time, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic fieldwork among the Kabyle, Algeria’s largest indigenous group. Based on his fieldwork, Bourdieu published his first book, The Algerians, which was an immediate success. Later, Bourdieu would also use this fieldwork to write Outline of a Theory of Practice, one of his first and most influential theoretical statements.
Bourdieu’s rising reputation as a leading social theorist landed him a position as Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and later, in 1981, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.
Bourdieu was a prolific academic writer. He published more than 25 books and over 300 articles and essays over his career. He was also a leading public intellectual in France, speaking out and organizing protests against what he saw as the unfair and exploitive aspects of neoliberal economic policy and globalization. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu was known as one of France’s greatest scholars and one of the most influential social theorists in the world.
How Bourdieu Matters Today
It is hard to overestimate the influence Bourdieu has had on social theory. Bourdieu’s works have been translated in over two dozen languages and many are already considered classics in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Not only sociologists, but also those in anthropology, cultural studies, and education consider Bourdieu required reading for anyone trained in their disciplines. Bourdieu’s understanding of sociology as a “combat sport” that critically takes on and exposes the underlying structures of social life has also had a strong impact on the academic field, particularly in his home nation of France.
Key Concepts:
Cultural Capital
While he didn’t consider himself a Marxist sociologist, the theories of Karl Marx heavily influenced Bourdieu’s thinking. Marx’s influence is perhaps most evident in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Like Marx, Bourdieu argued that capital formed the foundation of social life and dictated one’s position within the social order. For Bourdieu and Marx both, the more capital one has, the more powerful a position one occupies in social life. However, Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital beyond the economic and into the more symbolic realm of culture.
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc. that one acquires through being part of a particular social class. Sharing similar forms of cultural capital with others—the same taste in movies, for example, or a degree from an Ivy League School—creates a sense of collective identity and group position (“people like us”). But Bourdieu also points out that cultural capital is a major source of social inequality. Certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others, and can help or hinder one’s social mobility just as much as income or wealth.
According to Bourdieu, cultural capital comes in three forms—embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. One’s accent or dialect is an example of embodied cultural capital, while a luxury car or record collection are examples of cultural capital in its objectified state. In its institutionalized form, cultural capital refers to credentials and qualifications such as degrees or titles that symbolize cultural competence and authority.
Habitus
Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences. Bourdieu often used sports metaphors when talking about the habitus, often referring to it as a “feel for the game.” Just like a skilled baseball player “just knows” when to swing at a 95-miles-per-hour fastball without consciously thinking about it, each of us has an embodied type of “feel” for the social situations or “games” we regularly find ourselves in. In the right situations, our habitus allows us to successfully navigate social environments. For example, if you grew up in a rough, crime ridden neighborhood in Baltimore, you would likely have the type of street smarts needed to successfully survive or steer clear of violent confrontations, “hustle” for jobs and money in a neighborhood with extremely low employment, and avoid police surveillance or harassment. However, if you were one of the lucky few in your neighborhood to make it to college, you would probably find that this same set of skills and dispositions was not useful—and maybe even detrimental—to your success in your new social scenario.
Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing. In one of his major works, Distinction, Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus. Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.” The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.
Field
Along with Bourdieu’s notion of a “feel for the game” came his theory of the game itself. Bourdieu understood the social world as being divided up into a variety of distinct arenas or “fields” of practice like art, education, religion, law, etc., each with their own unique set of rules, knowledges, and forms of capital. While fields can certainly overlap—education and religion, for example, overlap in many religiously-based colleges and universities in the United States—Bourdieu sees each field as being relatively autonomous from the others. Each field has its own set of positions and practices, as well as its struggles for position as people mobilize their capital to stake claims within a particular social domain. In art, for example, Bourdieu noticed that each generation of artists sought to overturn the established positions of those who came before them, only to be critiqued by the next generation of “avant-garde” artists who sought their own powerful positions within the field. Much like a baseball or football field, social fields are places where people struggle for position and play to win.
Associated Writing out Loud:
Distinction
The Forms of Capital
Associated Interactive Readings:
Forms of Capital
More on:
France loves its intellectuals. So much so that they even make documentaries about them! To get a “behind the scenes” look at the intellectual habitus of Bourdieu himself, check out “Sociology is a Martial Art” on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csbu08SqAuc
Go to your library and check out Loic Wacqant’s ethnography of a boxing gym on Chicago’s south side for an up-close and personal look at the fighter’s habitus. Wacquant, a prominent social theorist in his own right, was one of Bourdieu’s students:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/?view=usa&view=usa&ci=9780195168358&cp=24297
We’ve included two key readings from Bourdieu in the Social Theory Re-Wired reader, but Bourdieu wrote more—a lot more! To find your way through his many writings, we suggest you take a look at this handy online bibliography:
http://hyperbourdieu.jku.at/hyperbourdieustart.html
Pierre Bourdieu’s death from cancer in 2002 was a big loss to social theory and to those in France who turned to him as a political voice on behalf of the dispossessed. Read his obituary in the Guardian here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/jan/28/guardianobituaries.books
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Writing Assignment #3: An Ethnography of Yourself
Recently, a friend of mine who is Chinese asked me what "American Food" was. She has lived here for several years, but she only cooks Chinese food and when they go out to eat they nearly always eat Chinese. She thinks that American food is summed up by hamburgers, pizza, and fried chicken. Of course, as an American, I explained that there was a lot more to American food than just that stereotypical description, but I had to admit that I had a hard time explaining what constituted "American Food" even though I was talking about my own culture. Partly it's because I generally don't prepare American food in my home- (I like to cook ethnic foods) but I also realized that American food was not only WHAT we eat, but also HOW we eat. For example, Americans are quite likely to eat in our cars, to drink large amounts of water or soft drinks, to have particular foods reserved for breakfast, lunch or dinner, to serve particular foods to guests, and to otherwise eat in a particular style that is recognizably American even if the actual things we eat might be harder to classify as strictly "American."
I polled my American friends on their thoughts about American food, and I found it helpful in forming my own understanding. It occurs to me that this idea of self-reflection about an aspect of your own culture, coupled with some good old fashioned ethnographic methods- formal or informal interviews, participant observation, etc. would be a good final paper assignment for this class.
In the case of your paper, I want you to consider your cohort- the so-called "Millennial" generation, or "Generation Y." The United States is a complex society with many subcultures, and part of our postmodern identities is that we belong to many subcultures concurrently. Add to the fact that sometimes we belong to what we might consider mutually exclusive groups- some people have a Jewish mother and a Christian father, for example. You might be of Puerto Rican descent, however, but not identify with that particular ethnic heritage. Identity gets rather complicated, and I would venture to think that most people in your generation don't spend a lot of time thinking about the "zeitgeist" of your particular generation. Nevertheless, you belong to an age cohort whether you like it or not, and you will be stereotypes based upon how others see your age cohort as well. It's best to give it some serious consideration.
Your assignment is to read the previous posts on this blog that deal with Generation Y, then to do some further research from readings you can find online or in print in the popular press. You may look in peer reviewed academic journals if you like, but you are not required to do so. Then you are to conduct some field research among your friends, family, acquaintances, trying to figure out what "Millennial culture" is all about. What are the differences between how Millennials are understood by "outsiders" (the "etic" view- in this case Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, and "The Greatest Generation") versus the view of "insiders" (the "emic" view of the Millennials themselves). As a Millennial, how much to you agree with the emic and etic characterizations of your respondents? To what extent do you consider yourselves to be "of" this cohort as opposed to being merely "in" or "from" this cohort? What might anthropologists specifically have to offer in the analysis of generational labels, identities, cultures, and the culture clash that can arise from a generation gap?
Your paper should be about five pages long, conform to the guidelines I have posted previously, and is due on the last day of class. If you want your paper back with comments, you should provide me with a self-addressed, stamped envelope and I will mail it to you.
I polled my American friends on their thoughts about American food, and I found it helpful in forming my own understanding. It occurs to me that this idea of self-reflection about an aspect of your own culture, coupled with some good old fashioned ethnographic methods- formal or informal interviews, participant observation, etc. would be a good final paper assignment for this class.
In the case of your paper, I want you to consider your cohort- the so-called "Millennial" generation, or "Generation Y." The United States is a complex society with many subcultures, and part of our postmodern identities is that we belong to many subcultures concurrently. Add to the fact that sometimes we belong to what we might consider mutually exclusive groups- some people have a Jewish mother and a Christian father, for example. You might be of Puerto Rican descent, however, but not identify with that particular ethnic heritage. Identity gets rather complicated, and I would venture to think that most people in your generation don't spend a lot of time thinking about the "zeitgeist" of your particular generation. Nevertheless, you belong to an age cohort whether you like it or not, and you will be stereotypes based upon how others see your age cohort as well. It's best to give it some serious consideration.
Your assignment is to read the previous posts on this blog that deal with Generation Y, then to do some further research from readings you can find online or in print in the popular press. You may look in peer reviewed academic journals if you like, but you are not required to do so. Then you are to conduct some field research among your friends, family, acquaintances, trying to figure out what "Millennial culture" is all about. What are the differences between how Millennials are understood by "outsiders" (the "etic" view- in this case Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, and "The Greatest Generation") versus the view of "insiders" (the "emic" view of the Millennials themselves). As a Millennial, how much to you agree with the emic and etic characterizations of your respondents? To what extent do you consider yourselves to be "of" this cohort as opposed to being merely "in" or "from" this cohort? What might anthropologists specifically have to offer in the analysis of generational labels, identities, cultures, and the culture clash that can arise from a generation gap?
Your paper should be about five pages long, conform to the guidelines I have posted previously, and is due on the last day of class. If you want your paper back with comments, you should provide me with a self-addressed, stamped envelope and I will mail it to you.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
First, a great post-apocalyptic dystopian novel: A Canticle for Leibowitz. (1960)
Second, a rather unorthodox take on dystopian societies, one that draws from history rather than science fiction, is the 1986 Roland Joffe film "The Mission," which I highly recommend (The soundtrack by the legendary Ennio Morricone is awesome as well!).
Third, the non-linguistic work by Noam Chomsky I mentioned was Manufacturing Consent. A video about the book is available on Netflix or Amazon instant video.
For that matter, in the interview with Steven Pinker we watched, he noted a 1972 article about Chomsky's linguistic work in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I dug that up, along with another article about dissent within the linguistic ranks, and you should read those articles for class. You can download PDFs of those documents here and here.
Finally, I remembered the story about my daughter mispronouncing something that plagued me a few classes ago. She is learning to read, and she was trying to spell "tree." She started it with "C-H..." and we stopped her. Then she SAID "tree" confused that we were telling here that she was wrong, and what she had been saying all along was "Chree." (Try it- it's very hard to distinguish from "tree.") So while she had been saying "Chree" all along, we had been hearing "Tree." There's a good example of binary opposition of phonemes there.
Monday, April 14, 2014
More articles on Gen Y...
I took the Pew Research Center's "How Millennial Are You?" quiz. I got 89%. I'm probably more "millennial" than some of my students who actually ARE "millennial." I'm barely Gen X (I was born in 1967- the traditional beginning of the cohort is 1965), but I've never really identified with Gen X. I can't say that I truly identify Gen Y either, but I appreciate them more than most people my age (unlike most of my friends, I'm surrounded by Gen Y and have been working with them for years).
So today I saw yet another article about the Gen Y crowd and decided to do a quick search for some previous articles about Millennials and the workplace. I found some items from 2012 and 2013 respectively in the Washington Post and New York Times.
Washington Post, August 2012:
How those spoiled millennials will make the workplace better for everyone
New York Times, March 2013:
Do Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?
And here is the article from today....
Daily Herald, April 2014:
The Millennials are coming. Will we be ready?
It will be interesting to see what sort of changes this generation can make, and how the predictions turn out.
Today's teenagers are the best-behaved generation on record
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/25/5748178/todays-teenagers-are-the-best-behaved-generation-on-recordTuesday, April 8, 2014
The Existential Conundrum of Millennials
We've talked a bit about "Millennials" and we can most easily fir them into the spectrum of ideas we associate with "Subcultures."
Here's a junior from New York University who has written an essay making a broad claim about the "culture" of Millennials that might explain some of the attributes that are commonly attributed to them.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/my-so-called-opinion/?_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=opinion&_r=0
This fits into our previous discussion of postmodernism, and reminds me of Alan Bloom's 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/allan-bloom-closing-of-the-american-mind.html
I'm curious to see what your reaction would be to these pieces.
Here's a junior from New York University who has written an essay making a broad claim about the "culture" of Millennials that might explain some of the attributes that are commonly attributed to them.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/my-so-called-opinion/?_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=opinion&_r=0
This fits into our previous discussion of postmodernism, and reminds me of Alan Bloom's 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/allan-bloom-closing-of-the-american-mind.html
I'm curious to see what your reaction would be to these pieces.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)