John Frow

The Sage handbook of cultural analysis

Introduction: Vocabularies of Culture PART ONE: FRAMEWORKS OF ANALYSIS Anthropology and Culture - Eric Gable & Richard Handler Cultural Geography: An Account - Kay Anderson Psychology and Cultural Analysis - Valerie Walkerdine & Lisa Blackman Sociology and Culture - Tony Bennett Cultural History - Peter Burke Literary Studies - James F. English Culture and Music - Tia DeNora Visual Analysis - Mieke Bal Film Studies - Tom Gunning Broadcasting - Toby Miller Cultural Studies - Ien Ang Feminism and Culture: theoretical perspectives - Griselda Pollock Material Culture - Daniel Miller Culture: Science Studies, and Technoscience - Andrew Pickering PART TWO: CURRENT ISSUES Culture and Nation - David McCrone Culture and Modernities - Joel S. Kahn Globalization and Cultural Flows/Networks - Diana Crane Colonialism and Culture - Christopher Pinney Indigenous Culture: The Politics of Vulnerability and Survival - Tim Rowse Cultural Property - John Frow Culture and Economy - Timothy Mitchell Culture, Class and Classification - Mike Savage Analysing Multiculturalism Today - Ghassan Hage Culture and Identity - Simon Clarke Culture, Sex and Sexualities - Elspeth Probyn & Gilbert Caluya Cultural and Creative Industries - David Hesmondhalgh Cultural Technologies - Celia Lury Cyberculture and New Media - Tiziana Terranova PART THREE: RESEARCH THEORY AND PRACTICE Ethnography - Johannes Fabian & Vincent de Rooij Visual Anthropologies - Sarah Pink Thinking by Numbers: Cultural Analysis and the Use of Data - Justin Lewis Discourse Analysis - Lilie Chouliaraki Cultural Activism - Pepi Leistyna

Discipline and discipleship

This is an electronic version of an article published in Textual Practice.

Is Elvis a God?: Cult, Culture, Questions of Method

The fame of major stars, and especially dead ones, has been entangled throughout the 20th century with a religious vocabulary: the figures of apotheosis, ritual, cult, and sacrifice are the staple of the most banal analyses of high celebrity. I ask whether the idea of a religious dimension to stardom can and should be taken literally, and what kind of rethinking both of stardom itself and of the methodological concerns of cultural studies such a move might entail. I explore various usages of the categories of the sacred and the numinous in order to ask whether they are formally empty or carry a set of meanings relevant to the sorts of transcendence peculiar to stars, and I seek to locate that transcendence in the structures of repetition and seriality in which the being of stars is grounded. I conclude by questioning the secularization thesis which has sought to explain away apparently vestigial religious categories, and by asking what it would mean for cultural studies to abandon it.

Michel de Certeau and the practice of representation

This is an electronic version of an article published in Cultural Studies.

Accounting for tastes: some problems in Bourdieu's sociology of culture

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.

Discourse and Power

This is an electronic version of an article published in Economy and Society.

Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Intellectual Property Organization negotiations in 1997 and, currently, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment are the legal instruments for the globalization and deregulation of international trade. My paper focuses on some of their implications for the free circulation of knowledge. For, if the rhetoric of globalization is all about the freeing-up of access to and the removal of regulatory controls from formerly restrictive and protected industries, one of the effects of these new legal regimes has, nevertheless, been to institute increasingly severe restrictions on cultural flows. Common to all of them is the fact that they define knowledge as property, and then seek to map out an appropriate regime of property rights. The restriction of illegal copying of software and of audio- and video-recordings, and the enforcement of patents on biological, agro-chemical and pharmaceutical patents are the leading edge of this new wave of incursions into the public domain that is supposedly protected by intellectual property law; with the extension of patent law to previously exempt areas, with strong moves towards the protection of facts in databases, and with the erosion of fair use exemptions, the very notion of a public domain of knowledge from which writers, artists, scientists and scholars can draw is seriously threatened.

The literary frame

(c) Copyright 1982 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. No part of this article may be reproduced photocopied or distributed through any means without the permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Antipodean fields: Working with Bourdieu

The papers collected in this special issue of the Journal of Sociology seek both to develop a sense of the cumulative impact of Bourdieu’s work on Australasian (‘antipodean’) debates, and to get a sense of how these debates might raise questions regarding the portability of Bourdieu’s categories. We discuss the distinctive disciplinary orientations of the uptake of Bourdieu’s work both here and internationally, and propose some explanations of the ways in which the antipodean uptake has modified its focus and conceptual force. These have to do, first, with the salience of different and more fluid models of the structural variables of class, gender and ethnicity; second, with a questioning of the nation-state as the ‘natural’ border of cultural fields; and third, with the way Indigeneity, in both Australia and New Zealand, is seen to transform the ‘mainstream’ culture and thereby to challenge many of the conventional ways of thinking about such things as cultural artefacts, cultural markets, and the ‘rules of art’.

Knowledge and class

This is an electronic version of an article published in Cultural Studies.