Jeffrey A. Halley

Teaching Mexican American Experiences through Film: Private Issues and Public Problems.

This article focuses on the use of feature films as a pedagogical tool in sociology classes. Sociological and cinematic representations are used to contribute to an understanding of the Mexican American experience. An interpretive procedure, or hermeneutics, is used as a methodology that provides an encounter between the students experience, film, and social science texts. As well, the Millsian relation between personal problems and social issues are developed within the context of the material. The cinematic construction of reality is analyzed as the effect of the constraints of the Hollywood production system, and the operation of ideology, including representations of ethnicity and gender

GENDER IN THE CULTURE OF MEXICAN AMERICAN CONJUNTO MUSIC

This article examines the role of gender in the culture of conjunto music, a Mexican American musical genre. It describes how gender is articulated with factors of ethnicity and class in the context of the conjunto setting and performance. The authors examine the structure of gender relations, socialization, and resistance, and they attempt to identify the effects within patriarchy on the forms of adaptation and power available to women in conjunto settings. Conjunto is an arena in which conventional gender identity and gender inequality are reproduced, reinforced, and contested.

Professions and Burgertum : Etymological Ships Passing, Night into Day

None of the continental languages, either historically or during postwar decades, developed indigenously synonyms for professions or roughly equivalent terms. Even today, instead of studying professions in particular, continental sociologists typically study much broader socio-economic and socio-cultural formations. Thus, when Anglo-American sociologists were developing the sociology of professions before and after World War II, European sociologists had difficulty envisaging the point of the exercise. We review the evolution of the Anglo-American sociology of professions, the etymological divide just noted, and how the Continents received Burgertum approach to middle class occupations differs from a professions approach.

Resistance to the Bureaucratization of Culture: Lessons from the Chicano Arts Scene

n this article we compare two strategies by which Mexican American comI munity arts centers attempt to link themselves to the communities they serve. Community arts centers are organizations that promote the culture of the community through the various arts. The two strategies stem from very different underlying values and appear to be incompatible. One strategy can be characterized as a “grass-roots” or socially rational approach to art; the other embodies a more cosmopolitan or formally rational concept of the arts. We explore the implications of both strategies and conclude that the formally rational strategy compromises the values of communities by trading them for universalized values; the grass-roots strategy, on the other hand, provides for the local resources necessary to uphold a community’s solidarity. Each strategy, in our view, expresses different ideas about the nature of the community. The grass-roots oriented strategy tends to emphasize indigenous voices, whereas the formally rational strategy emphasizes extralocal voices and interests. This investigation extends our earlier research on the impact of a major national foundation initiative on a community-based cultural arts center located in a large Southwestern city in the United States with a majority Mexican American population. As we described in a previous article, the arts organization had a wide variety of arts programs in dance, theatre, music, visual art, and literature, all of which had a very strong “Chicano” cultural expression.’

Culture and rationalization: The impact of a national foundation initiative on a community‐based cultural arts center∗

This article discusses the impact of a major national foundation initiative on a Mexican American community-based cultural arts center located in a large Southwestern city in the United States. Its focus concerns problems posed by rationalization for activities that are instrumentally oriented versus those oriented toward issues of value and identity (Weber, 1947). Weber makes us sensitive to this distinction between formal and substantive rationality. For Weber, formal rationality is expressed by bureaucracy, science, and technology. It orients action to formal rules, and privileges calculability and control. Substantive rationality, on the other hand, is oriented to the ends of human action, and is concerned with human values and needs. The problem with formal rationalization for Weber is that it increasingly becomes a form of domination in everyday life. Bureaucracy and technology cannot give meaning to the world, and instead drive out considerations of ultimate ends and values of action. Rather than establishing values, bureaucracy merely administers them. From this point of view, cultural organizations, e.g., community groups and churches, would be expected not only increasingly to

Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art

In Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art, Jeffrey A. Halley and Daglind E. Sonolet offer an account of the very lively Francophone debates over Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the domain of the arts and culture.

Culture, Theory, and Critique: Marx, Durkheim, and Human Science

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the status of Emile Durkheims work in the United States, and on the prospects of its rehabilitation in light of the crisis of theory engendered by the critique of the theory of the sign and the paradox presented by the application of terms that invoke an inertial view of culture to everyday discourse. Design/methodology/approach – How is it possible to reconcile the most general aspect of the internal life of the sociality that Durkheim places under the name of “solidarity,” with the theoretically expansive idea of social movements and with an idea of a generative culture radically different from the inertial institutional concept attributed to Durkheim? Our argument depends on conceiving of society as a course of activity, therefore, according to internal relations among subjectivities and objectivities. The main ontological assumptions of the human sciences are that humans and human affairs are essentially social and that sociality is irreducible and irrepressible. That difference lies at the heart of every attempt to identify something as unitary, complete, and stable. Findings – Culture is tied to social movements, where the latter are thought of as expressions of the “becoming” of society. An understanding of the dynamics of culture requires revisiting dialectics and “internal relations.” The challenge to the idea of meaning based on the exchange of signs requires a reformulation of basic categories of human science. When the social is thought of as historical, it is necessary to think of history as immanent rather than as a condition or temporal course. Therefore, one is driven back to Marx by way of Hegel, where “history” refers to the contradictory character of whatever can be said about the social. It follows that every instance of unity is merely ostensible and cannot be relied on as a primary referent of a social science. Research limitations/implications – “Culture” can no longer stand for something inert; rather, it appears as radically generative and reflexive. Further, it is not independent of economic reality, though it has the sort of weight that makes economism impossible. Originality value – This chapter will stimulate more insightful appreciations of the work of Emile Durkheim, relative to his typical reception in U.S. social science. For instance, to reappropriate Durkheim for theoretical purposes, it is necessary to work through the problems raised by poststructuralism and the literature of ethnomethodology and its adjacent areas of research, with attention to the ontological presuppositions of theories of human affairs and the epistemological requirement of all the human sciences, that theory find itself in its object and its object in itself.