Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates [Paperback]

Jeffrey C. Alexander (Editor), Steven Seidman (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An extremely useful compilation of writings...on the relationship between culture and society. So much well chosen erudition, so neatly presented, this work may lay to rest the futile question of priority between culture and society." Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association

Product Description

This volume brings together the major statements by the leading contemporary scholars of cultural analysis on the relation between culture and society. Part One surveys the range of current analytical debate over culture, focusing on the relationship of culture to social structure and power. While individual contributions differ in defining the nature of culture and its relation to society, they are in agreement in assessing the relative autonomy of culture and the centrality of symbolic analysis. Part Two turns to substantive debates, including those over the role of religion, secular ideology, and mass culture and brings to light disputes about the meaning of modernity. The book testifies to the remarkable development in the past two decades of a cultural paradigm for social and political analysis.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (August 31, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521359392
• ISBN-13: 978-0521359399
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #629,376 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not for the layperson, February 6, 2005

By	a reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (Paperback)

Have you ever watched a movie or TV program that started out badly, but you kept watching in the faint hope that it would eventually get better as it went along, but it never did? Alexander and Seidman's "Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates" left me with precisely that feeling.

A bit of context: I teach an undergraduate interdisciplinary course, and I am looking for a new textbook that students could use. I selected this book because of its advertised content as well as the inclusion of some seminal thinkers in the field of sociology -- Saussure, Geertz, and Foucault, to name a few. However, this book -- published in 1990 -- is a collection of 31 short articles (culled from texts and journals) that were already 5 to 15 years old at the time of publication and apparently have not been updated since then.

The book is broken down into two sections: "Analytical debates: Understanding the relative autonomy of culture" and "Substantive debates: Moral order and social crisis - perspectives on modern culture." In each section there are various subsections (e.g., "Marxian approaches to culture," "Modernism or postmodernism: Dissolution or reconstruction of moral order?", each with two or three articles addressing the theme. However, the target audience is academe and not the layperson, given the impenetrable prose and countless references to other authors and social theories.

A few excerpts may serve as examples of the level of complexity. "I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives" (Lyotard, 1984, p. 330). "Introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies -- and individual consciousness and an individual unconscious[ness] apart from public opinion and behavior (Marcuse, 1975, pp. 287-88). "The danger of academism is obviously inherent in any rationalized teaching which tends to mint, within one doctrinal body, precepts, prescriptions, and formulae, explicitly described and taught, more often negative than positive, which a traditional education imparts in the form of a habitus, directly apprehended uno intuito, as a global style not susceptible to analytical breakdown" (Bordieu, 1968, p. 208). If these three quotes resonate with your understanding of culture and society, then this is the book for you!

There are a few bright spots in this book. Robert Bellah's entry on "Civil religion in America" is well worth a look in light of recent developments. Marshall Sahlins' "Food as Symbolic Code" is another interesting consideration of a topic we take for granted. However, a reader who is looking for cross-cultural analysis and discussion of contemprary debates in society would be hard-pressed to find many answers while wading through all 370 pages of this theoretical text.