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Topic 3: Interplay
INTERPLAY: Race, Class and Gender Boundaries
Symbolic Boundaries Research Network
Online Conference, Feb. 10-14, 2003
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From: Peggy Levitt plevitt@wellesley.edu
Wellesley College & the Hauser Weatherhead Centers, Harvard University
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (16:56)
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I am interested in encouraging more conversations between sociologists of immigration and sociologists of culture. My work is on transnational migration. The frequent, widespread movement back and forth of people, ideas, and practices between communities of origin and destination, and the economic and cultural transformations that result have prompted many scholars to acknowledge that international migration is no longer a one-way process. Research on transnational migration examines the multi-level social, economic, political, and religious ties that link migrants and nonmigrants across borders and analyses the ways in which these challenge conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, migrationís continued impact on sending communities, and the iterative relationship between them. As more and more individuals live transnational lives, what can the sociology of culture tell us about how they simultaneously draw upon and are shaped by more than one national cultural repertoire? To the extent that migrants locate themselves within transnational social fields, how does the boundary-making they do and the way they select cultural elements change? How must we revise accepted notions of mobility and status when migrants construct identities and measure their achievements with respect to multiple, sending- and receiving-country reference groups?
From: Elizabeth A. Armstrong
Indiana University, Bloomington
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003 (23:10)
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Between Moral and Aesthetic Boundaries?
In Distinction, Bourdieu treated the ability and the inclination to see objects through an "aesthetic eye" as inextricably linked. He asserted that part of having the cultural competence to decode art was having the moral detachment necessary to do so. In his view, the tendency to refer to the morality of an object when assessing its artistic merit reflected a working-class sensibility, while the emotional detachment necessary to attend to features beyond the "sensible properties" of the work was characteristic of the elite or cultured eye.
Lamont, in Money, Morals, and Manners, rejects Bourdieuís conflation of the aesthetic and the moral. She argues that "moral boundaries are one of the blind spots in Bourdieuís theory" (p. 184), and that he "downplays the importance of moral character as a status symbol" (p. 185). In contrast, Lamont characterizes moral, economic, and aesthetic boundaries as distinct. She found that the relative importance of these forms of boundaries varied by context. For example, she found that aesthetic boundaries were less important to Americans than to the French. Lamont, however, treats these three dimensions of classification as independent of one another. While there are hints in the book about how these forms of exclusion are interrelated, generally she treats them as three distinct systems.
In recent work on how college students interpret sexually themed photograph, Martin S. Weinberg and I found that neither Lamontís clear distinction between "morals" and "manners" nor Bourdieuís conflation of the moral and aesthetic seemed to describe the ways in which the respondents drew moral and aesthetic boundaries. Moral and aesthetic boundary-making seemed to be, for this group of respondents, more distinct than Bourdieu would predict, but more interconnected than Lamont would predict. Respondents assessed the image presented to them using both moral and aesthetic criteria, shifting back and forth between the two frameworks. They seemed to have available to them, or to create, a hybrid moral-aesthetic framework. They viewed the morality of the content as relevant to the imageís aesthetic quality, and the formal, technical properties as influencing the morality of the image. This usage of culture suggests a resonance between aesthetic and moral cultural schemas in the broader culture. Historians and some cultural sociologists have observed that in the United States distinctions between moral/immoral and high/low culture have long been associated (Beisel 1992; Beisel 1993). Pornography is simultaneously viewed as immoral and as a low-brow genre.
In this context, the question I pose for discussion is this: In what ways might moral, aesthetic, and economic dimensions of classification be differently intertwined in different times and places? Might the moral and the aesthetic be more deeply linked in some contexts, while the moral and the economic might be more tightly connected in other contexts? In a given society, might the moral and aesthetic be more tightly linked in reference to making distinctions in some arenas (i.e., about sexuality, perhaps particularly womenís sexuality) than others? How might we go about empirically researching these questions?
From: Richard Alba
The University at Albany, SUNY
Thursday, Feb 10, 2003 (11:10)
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Here's a working paper entitled:'Blurred vs. bright boundaries:
Second generation assimilation and exclusion in comparative perspective'
FIRST DRAFT
PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE
Abstract:
In all immigration societies, the social distinction between immigrant and second generations, on the one hand, and natives, on the other, is a sociologically complex one, a fault line along which other differences and distinctions pile up. Building on a comparison of second-generation Mexicans in the U.S., North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany, this paper argues that the concepts associated with boundary processes offer the best opportunity to investigate assimilation to the mainstream and exclusion from it in a comparative way. The difference between bright boundaries, which allow no ambiguity about membership, and blurred ones, which do, is hypothesized to be associated with the prospects and processes of assimilation and exclusion. The way in which this difference is institutionalized in different societies is examined in the key domains of citizenship, religion, language, and race. The analysis leads to the conclusion that blurred boundaries generally characterize the situation of Mexicans in the U.S., with race the great, albeit not well understood, exception, while bright boundaries characterize the European context for Muslim groups.
You may download the whole paper here.
From: Michele Lamont
Harvard University and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Thursday, Feb 8, 2003 (11:10)
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My most recent work on boundaries has followed two directions. First, I have become interested in the role of symbolic boundaries in processes of social inclusion. I am focusing on the range of repertoires that blacks use to demonstrate to themselves and to others that they are equal to whites. More specifically, I ask: what do blacks identify as common denominators across races? What principles do they use to ground the similarity, commonality, or compatibility of races? Drawing on the writings of Bruno Latour on how to make facts resistant, I examine precisely what kinds of evidence or proofs blacks point to, to demonstrate that these principles hold up.[1] I get at this question by asking interviewees if they believe that whites and blacks are equal and why, and what they view as the main differences and similarities between the two groups. I also ask them whether they share something essential with other blacks and what are their commonalties.
These questions provide a point of entry for unpacking the cultural categories through which everyday anti-racism is experienced and practiced by ordinary and extraordinary African-Americans (I have extended the research conducted on the anti-racism of African-American workers (see Lamont 2000) by considering the anti-racism of members of the African-American elite as well as how marketing executive specializing in the African-American market believe that Blacks use consumption to achieve cultural membership [2]) Everyday anti-racism is a topic has been largely neglected to date, in favor of the study of anti-racist practices at the organizational or social movement levels in the black power movement or in contemporary anti-racist NGOs for instance. A study of everyday anti-racism will help us understand how people bridge boundaries, the frequently neglected counterpoint to the more often studied topic of social exclusion. My inquiry will be informed by a broader research agenda centered on the study of commensurability, that is, of how units that are constructed as different from one another are made comparable.[3] Over the next few years, I plan to focus my energy on a comparative study of social inclusion that will consider how anti-racist rhetorics vary with the system of inequality within which subjugated population are located. I have yet to finalize the research sites. This project will be part of a major new research program on "Successful Soceities" funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Second, I am currently exploring how academics who serve on interdisciplinary funding panels in the social sciences and the humanities differentiate proposals that deserve funding from others.[4] I am concerned with the customary rules of evaluation, the institutionalized scripts of excellence mobilized by panelists, and similarities and differences across disciplines. Of particular relevance to the study of boundary work is the process by which panelists negotiate outcomes by speaking to what they believe to be the criteria most valued by their colleagues. I am concerned with analyzing the extent to which panelists view the boundaries that separate the best proposals from the others as "objective" or porous and subject to manipulation. This project can be understood as a case study of the process of symbolic boundary work as it happens. The project draws on observation of panel deliberations and on interviews with panelists serving on twelve funding panels over a two year period.
[1] Bruno Latour, 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[2] See Michele Lamont, 2001. "Religion and African-American Anti-Racist Strategies." Public lecture presented at the Institute for Advanced Study of Religion, Yale University, May 3. Also MichËle Lamont and Virag Molnar (2001, "How Blacks use Consumption to Shape Their Collective Identity: Evidence from Marketing Specialists."Journal of Consumer Culture, 1 (1): 31-45) showed that marketing specialists believe that blacks use consumption to signify and acquire equality, respect, acceptance, and status. They prioritize a market-driven notion of equality that equates social membership with high socioeconomic status. They believe blacks display visible signals of high status (e.g., expensive clothes) in order to counteract racism, to conspicuously distance themselves from the ghetto blackstereotype, and, as one respondent put it, to disconfirm the view that blacks are uninteresting,i.e., unlikely to bring benefits through networking .
[3] This question can be approached in terms of looking at the place of material vs. symbolic types of evidence that are offered, or the place of normative a opposed to positive evaluations . On this issue, I am inspired by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, 1987.
Les economies de la grandeur. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; and Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens. (1998). Commensuration as a Social Process.Annual Review of Sociology. 24: 313-43..
[4] see Gregoire Mallard, Michele Lamont and Joshua Guetzkow, 2002. "The Pragmatics of Evaluation: Beyond Disciplinary Wars in the Assessment of Fellowship Proposals
in the Social Sciences and the Humanities." Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, Chicago. Also Joshua Guetzkow, Michele Lamont and Gregoire Mallard. 2002. "Originality and moral qua academic quality in the social sciences and the humanities." Unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, Princeton University.
From: Maria Kefalas
Saint Joseph's University, Sociology
Thursday, Feb 8, 2003 (11:10)
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In my work I strive to bring the sociology of culture into the study of class. The question that informs all my work on working- and lower-class women is „How do social actors create meaning and order in their lives?¾ My understanding of culture is that it exists in the activities of our daily lives. Culture is the key to making sense of our place in the world. To that end, as an ethnographer, I travel to working- and lower-class urban neighborhoods and study the objects and routines of daily life to excavate the rarely articulated purpose and meaning orienting people¼s lives.
For my first book, Working-Class Heroes I studied the boundary work working-class women engaged in to create distinctions between clean and dirty and respectable and poor. After over five years of participant observation with a group of working-class wives and mothers in a Chicago neighborhood, I learned that women use the appearance of their homes and the domestic sphere to make social declarations about their respectability and their identities as decent, hardworking women and mothers. The activities that take place in, around, and through the house power the house¼s material form with cultural and symbolic electricity. As one of the young mothers I came to know in my time in the neighborhood explains, „I see the house, everything about it, it¼s all a part of me. It¼s a reflection of me. I am so proud of it. We really wanted a house so we could add on. And in the room over there I have walls of fame for [my daughter], [my son], my husband, and me. Like I have all the kids¼ prizes and drawings up on the wall. Isabella¼s stuff from the Brownies is there and Bobby¼s awards from work are there too. I have my appreciation certificates from the school for my volunteer work. I want my kids to see how much I do for them. I hope it will matter to them. I wanted the room next to the kitchen when they come home after school or if they are playing with their friends. Oh yes, this house means so much to me.¾ In this world, a house embodies a woman¼s very identity as „good mother¾ and „good woman.¾
One of the main goals of my new collaboration with poverty scholar Kathryn Edin for a book tentatively titled Promises I Can Keep is to bring culture back into the discussions of motherhood and family among lower-class women. The challenge, clearly, becomes talking about culture and class without falling into the culture of poverty-trap. (Overtly) cultural analysis has become anathema in poverty research, so when social scientists do study the links between poverty and (single) motherhood, they tend to focus on the structural factors that come to bear in a women¼s decision to engage in sexual relations and conceive a child, bear a child, and subsequently decide not to marry.
For this new research, Edin and I take a decidedly different route. Instead of asking why poor single women have children, we ask what role children play in the lives of the low-income single mothers who raise them. As women talked about how motherhood had transformed lives, these conversations shed light on how poor women may be drawn to motherhood, not simply pushed by social forces beyond their control. Economically marginalized women understand motherhood, even in the face of poverty and beyond the respectability of marriage, as a kind of symbolic solution.
Lawmakers and taxpayers often see children born to young, economically disadvantaged women outside of marriage as impediments to a woman¼s future achievement, short-circuiting any opportunity for a better life. Though some women express this kind of regret, most do not. Instead they credit their children for virtually all that they see is positive in their lives. Women described motherhood¼s influence in two ways: first, they recounted lives that were chaotic and spinning out of control. In motherhood, women claimed they had found the emotional wherewithal to escape the destructive behavior that characterized their teenage and early adult years. An overwhelming majority point to the birth of a child as a turning point, a sudden source of psychic motivation for a new and positive direction. Childbearing also serves as a path to validation for poor women who have not succeeded in other domains. In the simplest terms, many young mothers find that parenting is something they¼re good at, and good parenting serves as a road to a precious and hard-earned social esteem, and in some cases, respectability. When 15-year-old Crystal, a cherubic teenager with a Rubenesque features and breathtaking blonde hair that falls to the middle of her back, discusses her life as a mother, she invokes a religious fatalism to explain how 9-month-old Serena and her baby¼s father, Christian, have, for a moment at least, provided her life with purpose and direction, a precious sense of order. She declares having a child at fourteen may be „a blessing.¾ „You know, maybe God gave you [a baby] to you so you could calm down. You know, God chose you to have a baby so you could let yourself calm down. To stop being what you are to be something better. I felt that God let me to be with Christian to change, to get back to school, to calm down so I wouldn¼t be hurt. That¼s what I feel.¾
On the surface, such cavalier fatalism might send shivers down the back of any middle class reader imagining how a young woman, barely more than a child herself, would bring an innocent baby into the work to make the young mother¼s life better. Such selfishness seems to violate the very definition of a good mother. And yet, in Destiny¼s account I argue there is a heroic hopefulness and optimism that unites all women who become mothers. And the irrationality is no different than the sort of fevered expectations that push upper-class women to define successful childrearing in terms of their child¼s future achievements and accomplishments. Destiny is more truthful and frank than the upper-class women who proclaim that the sacrifices they make for their children lead them to expect nothing in return. But, what does Destiny seek in her child: A love that will give her the strength to overcome the very real dangers of drugs, violence, and despair in her tough Philadelphia neighborhood. Does Destiny seek meaning and order in her life in her role as a mother? Destiny¼s counterparts, the privileged young women living in affluent suburbs, struggle to gain purpose in their lives as well - even if they do not face the identical hurdles Destiny does. Moreover, like Destiny, they will stumble on that path too purpose, meaning, and order in their lives. However, rather than choosing young motherhood as way to claim control and purpose, these more socially privileged women¼s missteps might lead them to eating disorders or ectasy, the „social ills¾ that plague the young and affluent. But, what often gets lost in the moralistic debates about poverty and early and non-marital childbearing is that young women such as Destiny hope to create something profound and good in motherhood. Indeed, young women like Destiny believe a baby and motherhood, even when you are young and poor, can (hopefully) bring purpose, meaning and order to lives spinning out of control.
From: Sarah Corse
University of Virginia
Thursday, Feb 8, 2003 (11:10)
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In the past, my thinking about symbolic boundaries has focused on national identity and nation-building through literature as a process of distinction from significant others, e.g., England for early Americans and both England and the US for post-war Canadians (Nationalism and Literature, 1997, Cambridge). I have recently, however, been working on the sociology of art with Bethany Bryson and am now trying to think through contemporary American tastes and "uses" of personal art displayed in domestic contexts. Halle's seminal work on this topic (Inside Culture, 1993, Chicago) is resolutely critical of Bourdieu's notions of habitus and attendant developments of this line of thinking by others, especially DiMaggio. Although I'm sympathetic to some of Halle's issues with both the conceptual formations and empirical evidence, I think it's too easy to dismiss Bourdieu's emphasis on the connections between art and class as irrelevant, at least in the American context and in this day and age. Many scholars emphasize themes of cultural convergence and/or omnivorous consumers and argue the traditional "high" arts are simply one choice among many highly differentiated taste systems and lifestyle choices (e.g., Crane, L. Levine, Gans, Peterson). Such arguments seem to deny the continued and widespread legitimacy of high art's claim to status.
Nonetheless, the majority of people do choose to put things on their walls. And most of them seem to think of those items, at least in a loose sense, as "art" and as having something important to say about identity and about taste. Therefore, of course, artistic display practices are, in part, about the boundaries people draw - and redraw over time - between themselves and others. The questions then become about the specific mechanisms of these boundary-making (meaning-making) activities. How, for example, do people come to "prefer" abstract art? Is it a process of class reproduction that occurs in early family socialization and creates a complex, deep perceptual apparatus (as Halle believes Bourdieu argues)? Or is it a relatively simple process in which a person is exposed to a few abstract paintings here and there and learns to see colour and images of the natural world within them, thus developing a "taste" for them (as Halle argues)? And, perhaps most interestingly, how do we demonstrate these processes - and the myriad of others that are called upon when people "choose" "art" that they "prefer" - empirically?
From: Tanya Golash Boza Tanya@unc.edu
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (13:06)
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The concept of blurred versus bright boundaries is an innovative concept in that it could be used to cross-nationally compare immigrant experiences. However, I wonder if the Mexican case appears to be blurred not because the boundary is blurred for all Mexicans, but because the boundary is bright for some Mexicans and blurred for others.
As you point out in the paper, some Mexicans more closely proximate whiteness than others. Thus, it is conceivable that Mexicans that are viewed as white will be able to cross over the boundary, abandon the Mexican-hyphenated identity, and assimilate into (white) American society. Meanwhile, the boundary remains bright for mestizo/Indian Mexican-Americans.
Thus, the question is: in this dichotomous framework, how does one distinguish between a bright and a blurry boundary when the boundaries vary immensely for the individuals within the group?
From: AL Young, Jr.
University of Michigan
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (13:18)
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At present, most of my thinking about symbolic boundaries is situated in a study that I have been conducting on African American scholars who research and teach about the African American experience. One of my points of interest with these scholars is how they think about audiences for their scholarship. Many of these individuals came into the academy, at least in part, because they wanted to be of service to African Americans, a public constituency that they (and many others) deemed to be in need of support. Another motivating factor was that these scholars also developed a keen sense of intellectual intrigue or fascination with one or more problematics in African American life, and wanted to explore these concerns in the most appropriate milieu for such pursuits. After securing positions for themselves in the academy these scholars went about pursuing either or both of these goals by engaging research, which introduces the issue of audience. Clearly, these scholars write for the academy (both because of an inherent desire to do so and because their professional success and stability is contingent upon their doing so). However, many of these scholars also desire to reach other, considerably non-academic, audiences with their work, and thus continually strive to reconcile with the challenge of meeting the standards of the academy while also making sense (quite literally) to people who are far removed from this arena. A project at hand for these scholars, then, is how to transcend boundaries while also trying to work within them in order to maintain their professional stature. My work, therefore, aims to explore boundary transcending and boundary maintenance as mutually occurring phenomena for a certain category of social actors. While boundary transcending and boundary maintenance unfolds in simultaneous fashion in many contexts and with many other categories of social actors, my point is to explore how this develops for actors who conscientiously strive to make both happen around the same set of concerns.
Some of the more specific questions that I pursue in this inquiry include, 1) whether these scholars maintain any distinctions between desired and actual audiences for their work and how they manage this situation, 2) whether and to what extent thinking about non-academic audiences effects the ways in which they write for academic audiences, 3) what these and other issues about audience means for their sense of the social utility of scholarship, and 4) whether scholarly engagement is a primary or partial engagement for them in terms of socially connecting with audiences outside of the academy. In the next year or so I hope to be able to offer some formidable statements about how boundaries may become more rigid or robust at certain moments, yet elastic or fluid at others. In doing so, I aim to enhance the boundary discussion in the direction of understanding how boundary stability along certain lines may effect or promote boundary transcendence along other lines, and vice versa.
From: Dustin Kidd dkidd@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, Sociology
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (14:08)
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Beauty
This posting is partly in response to Elizabeth Armstrong's discussion of moral and aesthetic boundaries, and partly just an attempt to articulate some thoughts I've had in developing my dissertation and sharing my work with artists and art scholars.
The socioogy of culture has made important, and causal, connections between art systems and other social fields--class, gender, race, religion, to name a few. Broadly, the sociology of culture has linked art systems to the construction and maintenance of power. But we haven't, I believe, made the claim that art is reducible to power, but only that art is infused with the dynamics of power.
In my discussions with artists, and to a lesser extent, with art scholars, I am asked again and again: "what about beauty?" While I can point out that we tend to valorize those forms that are socially deemed 'legitimate', and that the concept of legitimacy is always connected to power, I cannot say that every encounter with a work of art is purely an experience of power, nor can I say that the work of the artist is reducible to 'doing' power. Cleary, power is an important and relevant category, but it is important to take the artist very seriously when she says that she is pursuing beauty.
I also cannot treat beauty as a 'natural' concept. It clearly varies across social space. So I am left with the conclusion that beauty is a largely under-theorized social category. Can anyone point me towards social theory that attempts to explain beauty as a social concept?
From: Bethany Bryson bryson@virginia.edu
University of Virginia
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (15:09)
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I just want to draw your attention to the posts over in "CHANGE" by Tilly (Boundary Activiation), Ollivier (Conspicuous Openness), and Friedland (Institutional Boundaries). I think all of them are relevant to Inteplay.
From: Neil McLaughlin nmclaugh@mcmaster.ca
sociology, McMaster University
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (14:06)
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Professor Youngís project on African-American academics is an important and fascinating one that relates to a larger discussion of the role of the public intellectual and the public intellectual sociologist (as discussed recently in footnotesÖ).. Do we live in an ìage of expertsî dominated by specialist and technical knowledge? Or does there still exist ìpublic intellectualsî producing sophisticated commentary on social, political, and cultural issues addressed to the general educated public. Studying African-American intellectuals is an important topic in its own right, but I think it will be vitally important for these larger debates as well as for cultural sociological work on boundaries.
The phrase ìpublic intellectualî entered academic discussion about knowledge in modern society with Russell Jacobyís The Last Intellectual (1987). Public intellectuals, by my definition, are authors who write about issues of culture, politics, science, morality or economics to the general public after having gained extensive respect among specialized researchers or scholars in a particular academic discipline or area of expertise (Kadushin 1974; Brint 1994). Public intellectuals must go beyond textbook writers who introduce a discipline or sub-discipline to students and communicate serious ideas to a general audience outside the university context (Znaniecki 1965). Public intellectuals are distinct from celebrity intellectuals -- writers or cultural workers who tend to be famous largely for being famous but who are not respected by experts in the fields they comment on (Coser 1965). Public intellectuals emerge from the ranks of university professors or from networks of high status journalists and/or independent intellectuals. In an ideal world, public intellectuals help define intellectual standards and stimulate rational debate among journalists, popular writers, electronic media, teachers and the general educated public (Wolfe 1998), contributing to the sustaining of a ìpublic sphereî along with lines suggested by Habermas. And as sociologist Ed Royce has reminded us, sometimes the most important public intellectuals are the local intellectuals not the nationally famous celebrities (Royce 1996)
The role of public intellectual is shaped by the specific institutional arrangements and cultural and historical context of knowledge production in distinct societies. The ìpublic intellectualî is not an occupation, since intellectuals who perform this function can be employed as professors, journalists, think-tank scholars, electronic media professionals, free lance/ independent writers, and professionals employed by government and industry. The public intellectual is not a profession since they are not subject to a licensing procedure, educated by formal credentials or represented by a professional association. Public intellectuals are not elected or appointed, but emerge out of network, market and professional dynamics. The public intellectual, furthermore, is not created or sustained within any one formal organization. Nor do they represent the interests of any particular political ideology, perspective or interest. Conservative, religious or neo-liberal intellectuals, it seems to me, are part of the public intellectual universe as much as are the traditional left-wing public intellectuals whom Jacoby had in mind when writing his The Last Intellectual (1987).
It is easy to come up with examples of famous public intellectuals, both internationally and in Canada where I am based. David Riesman, Margaret Mead, Michael Harrington, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Barbara Ehrenreich, Francis Fox Piven, William Julius Wilson, and Cornel West are obvious examples of public intellectuals in the United States. George Grant, Marshall McLuhan, John Ralston Saul, Janice Stein, Linda McQuaig, Mark Kingwell, and Charles Taylor come to mind in the Canadian context. And there are less well-known but equally important local based public intellectuals in the various cities we all live in. We lack, however, an adequate theory of public intellectuals. It seems to me that the empirical study of African-American intellectuals could help us develop this theory.
Lewis Coserís work offered us a broad framework for understanding the role of the intellectual in society (Coser 1965; Coser 1984; Coser, Kadushin and Powell; 1982). Following in the Coser tradition, for example, Charles Kadushin argued that elite intellectual life in the United States is shaped largely by the informal networks and ìsocial circlesî that operate around public intellectual magazines and journals (such as The New Republic, The New Yorker, Commentary, Dissent, etc.) as well as the networks around The New York Times and The New York Review of Books (Kadushin 1974). We will further the development of a theory of public intellectuals, in my view, by synthesizing three distinct traditions: comparative historical sociology, the sociology of occupations and organizations, and the study of social movements. Myself I am trying to figure out ways to link our discussions of symbolic boundaries to these debates I am more familiar with.
1) Attempts to define, measure and operationalize the ìpublic intellectualî must remain linked to the rich literature in the sociology of knowledge, ideas and political sociology that insists on an understanding of how intellectuals are shaped by the histories, cultures and institutional arrangements of particular nations. Nations have different histories and cultural traditions and the institutions (publishing, think tanks, universities, the state, electronic media, for example) associated with ideas and knowledge are organized differently in distinct national societies. A theory of the public intellectual must therefore be historical and comparative.
2) We must purge our thinking of any romantic notions of intellectuals as a universal class beyond interests or ideology and instead see public intellectuals as a subset of the general category of knowledge professionals linked to particular organizational, status and political interests. Steven Brintís book In An Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professions in Politics and Public Life, argues that knowledge in modern society is created by professionals situated in five somewhat distinct (although obviously overlapping and linked) spheres of social purpose. Answering the societal level question ìknowledge about whatî and ìknowledge for what,î spheres of social purpose are ìsets of interrelated occupations and organizationsî that can be categorized in five different spheres: business services, applied science, culture and communications, civic regulation and human services. I think it would be useful to look at the audiences that African-American intellectuals write for with this scheme in mind (conservative African-American intellectuals differ from Cornel West, say, partly by the audiences they write toÖ). And clearly when one introduces political differences, boundaries are a factor as ethnic loyalties become politicized and contested.
3) In addition, public intellectuals must be understood with the use of contemporary theory and research in social movements. Sociologists have emphasized that social and intellectual movements (such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, protestant reform, positivism and the movements of the 1960s), have historically played an important role in creating intellectuals with the motivation, networks and the skill to reach the public beyond the professionalized and specialized networks of traditional academics (Coser 1965; Kadushin 1974; Galliher and Galliher 1995; McLaughlin 1998a). Intellectuals often gain the skills, motivation and experience of moving beyond their purely professional training by involvement in social movements. The movement for civil rights and African-American equality, in this view, would create public intellectuals ìwho are back and are black,î the catchy title of a journalistic account some years ago. But just as clearly the links between ideas and social movements create boundary problems for African-Americans academics trying to create professional careers in specialized modern universities AND write about issues for the public with regards to the African-American experience.
I would love to hear more from Professor Young about his research, and what he is finding with these issues in mind.
Neil McLaughlin
From: Syed Ali sfa8s@yahoo.com
Int'l Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship, New School U., sort of
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (22:44)
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A note on ethnicity and boundaries -- it's all about Fredrik Barth. The study of ethnicity in sociology mostly, but to a lesser degree in anthropology has been stamped by people like Joane Nagel and Susan Olzak and others whose works over the years (like Donald Horowitz and Paul Brass) have addressed issues of ethnicity and how the boundaries around ethnic groups come to be, how they come to expand and contract, and how they become more or less salient. It's kind of interesting that hardly anyone in the conference has mentioned Barth since his work on boundaries is readily applicable beyond studies of ethnicity. His idea that ethnicity/ethnic group is not a cultural checklist, but rather we need to examine the boundary to tell us what the ethnicity/ethnic group is can easily be used to study any type of community -- scientific, artistic, etc.
What's also interesting is how Barth has sort of disappeared recently. For studies of ethnicity, and in studies of immigrant populations he is rarely mentioned. Which is a shame because all this talk of assimilation, segmented assimilation etc that is going on in sociology of migration circles is at a lower level of theory than Barth's theory of boundary maintenance. In the circle of studies of immigration and assimilation in the US, you would get the impression that strength of ethnic ties is a function of time in country, which I would say is a silly thing to imply. In many places around the world, groups remain just that, groups, aloof from others, after sometimes hundreds of years living cheek in (by?) jowl with others. In other places and other times, immigrants and immigration were barely taken notice of by natives; the distinction was not even relevant. So we need more thinking and rethinking of Barth is my point.
I did a little of this (shameless plug) in an article in Soc Forum, 2002, 17(4), where I looked at how ethnic identity varies within a given population, using caste among Muslims in Hyderabad, India as a case study. I linked the constructivist idea of ethnicity as a process of collective identity formation, with the ìdeconstructedî idea of symbolic ethnicity (Gans)as not associated with a collectivity to understand why caste is important for some, but not others. The backdrop to this is to divorce the idea of symbolic ethnicity from the process of immigrant assimilation, and to bring it more in line with the idea of ethnic boundary creation, maintenance and dissolution.
From: Michele Lamont mlamont@wjh.harvard.edu
Harvard U./Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003 (00:25)
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Dear Suzanne,
Your point about the distinction between symbolic and social boundaries reproducing the traditional subordination of the symbolic to the social is very well taken. Nevertheless, I think that it is needed if we are to have any analytical leverage in developing a better understanding of the social processes that lead to the emergence and rigidification of boundaries. Moreover, class-based moral boudnary work is a very different type of phenomenon than, say, residential racial segregation. Each requires different analytical tools (the former is captured via social representations, while the later can be measured by an index). In Money, Morals, and Manners, I proposed that we look at symbolic boundaries are a necessary but insufficient condition for the drawing of social boudnaries.
As for the potential subordination of the symbolic to the social, my only response is to keep reminding our colleagues that cultural structures are structures, and that considerable work goes into producing taken for granted intersubjective definitions of reality (see how hard Bush is working nowadays).
I think it would be very difficult for our network to be more proprietary or active in policing the work being done on boundaries. It is simply everywhere (see my 2002 ARS review (with Virag Molnar) for a small sampling of what is being done). Moreover, it is a field that is not developing in a cumulative fashion, despite efforts (my own and that of others) to systematize it. As a sociologist of knowledge, I am puzzled by why this is. Perhaps we would find an answer if we were to examine the process by which other fields, such as the sociology of organization, came to be organized around clearly defined and widely agreed-upon paradigms. Perhaps it is simply too early for systematization and more empirical work needs to be done. Clearly there is a lot of excellent work being done on a range of issues, as illustrated by the work described in this virtual conference. Perhaps we need competing interpretations of what the "field" (if there is one) is about and where it is going. Ideally, this is what this conference would generate. But folks are being awfully careful.
Thanks for your contribution, which gave me the opportunity to think aloud, for what it is worth.
Michele
Michele
From: Nina Eliasoph eliasoph@ssc.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin
Thursday, Feb 13, 2003 (12:08)
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Dear Suzanne and Michele,
I'm finding your dialogue very productive and interesting--I wonder what
you both would think about some similar questions that I wrote in the
"Change" section, under Roger Friedland's entry.
I've never been such an "internet fiend" before--I hope it's not over the top
to be participating so avidly!
From: Sara Curran curran@princeton.edu
Princeton University
Thursday, Feb 13, 2003 (13:46)
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I, like Peggy Levitt, have been working with the idea of boundaries in relation to migration processes (in Thailand) and intergenerational relations (in the U.S.). I am interested in the interplay between symbolic and material resources flows as individuals negotiate global and local identities. My current project focuses on Thailand, but I have also considered these ideas in relation to social change in the U.S. I arrived at the idea of boundaries, because of a concept in the migration literature, embedded relations, developed by Portes in a series of individual and co-authored articles. To be embedded implies a bounded set of social relations. Migrant assimilation studies suggest that an important element for understanding immigrant assimilation and accommodation to destinations is the degree to which immigrants are embedded in a set of social relations that includes both symbolic and material resources to facilitate opportunities. For example, for migrants immigrating to the United States, the network of relationships they become enmeshed within mediates the profound dislocation resulting from their immigration. This notion of ìembeddednessî at first worked well for me as the lives of the Thai individuals I was getting to know so well began to take form. As I considered the usefulness of embedded relations, I had to overcome what I perceived as a limitation of the current conceptualization - in so far as it priviledges the group's enforcement capabilities over the individual. Based on my ethnographic work in Thailand, it struck me that to consider how groups deploy symbolic and material resources to effectively define a social category - one must also consider the extent to which individuals are multiply situated or variably embedded in a range of social relations. In other words, what about the concept of being "disembedded" or dislocated from sets of bounded social relations?
In my field work experience, there was such a lot of variability in life outcomes, and sometimes the social relationships an individual was embedded within created bounded solidarity and enforced trusted exchanges and social conformity, but sometimes they did not. Granted, many of the daughters of villagers seemed more likely than sons to yield to social pressures resulting from being embedded in traditional relationships, but there were also plenty of accounts about wild daughters or daughters who behaved liked sons and enjoyed having fun ñ accounts provided by brothers, parents, and daughters themselves and observed by me. So, although the embedded explanation was appealing to me, as a social scientist I was still left wondering about alternative explanations: where was individual volition and how might it explain the seemingly haphazard character of social change I was observing and hearing about?
At the end of this research project, as I reflect on the cumulative life stories I have gathered and experienced, I can begin to describe a process where individuals make choices or take up chance opportunities that can further embed them in their current sets of social relations or extricate them from those relationships. The process of extrication, or disembedding, is disruptive and can be disorienting, but can also offer opportunities for refashioning social relationships and identities. The process of disembedding can generate risks and opportunities and result in competing identities and social forces that require extra effort to negotiate. Negotiating a place in a new world, re-embedding oneself in a set of social relationships that can be part old and new, or all new, is one way in which individual volition interacts with social structures to yield a diversity of outcomes. Becker describes these chancy life outcomes as a product of contingencies and intercontingencies that on the surface seem random, but once the complex collection of events that lead to a particular outcome are detailed, reveal overlapping sets of social relationships. And, I would add, it is how we are embedded within multiple sets of social relationships and how we move between these sets that affects the life chances presented to us, our willingness to take them up, how sets of social relationships cohere around us, define our identities and shift boundaries of social categories. The process of embedding, disembedding, and re-embedding ourselves shapes both our individual life outcomes and the character of social life as a whole. The life stories I have observed from Thailand provide a profound glimpse at this process, as the social change that occurred there was so rapid, dramatic, and disruptive.
I'll be curious to see what others think about this idea. I posted these ideas in the interplay session, because I was thinking about interplay between material and symbolic resources, as well as the interplay between social category, group, structure and individual.
Thank you Bethany and Michele for this opportunity!
Sara
From: Sara Curran curran@princeton.edu
Department of Sociology - Princeton University
Friday, Feb 14, 2003 (09:17)
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Just a quick addendum to my preceding note. "Embeddedness" originally comes from the economic sociology literature - from which it was quickly picked up by parts of the immigration literature. The literature in this area of economic sociology is particularly apt and I would call for more "interplay" along this boundary between cultural sociology and economic sociology.
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