Paul Lichterman

Culture in Interaction 1

How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is “culture in interaction,” which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life.

The search for political community : American activists reinventing commitment

1. Personalism and political commitment 2. Personalized politics: the case of the US Greens 3. Speaking out in suburbia 4. Imagining community, organizing community 5. Culture, class, and life-ways of activism 6. Personalized politics and cultural radicalism since the 1960s 7. The search for political community Appendices.

Religion and the Construction of Civic Identity

Studies of religions public roles typically concern the ways in which religious frameworks justify opinions and actions. This article draws from participant-observation research to show how people also use religion to define the boundaries of group identities and relationships. Importantly, people do this in situation-specific ways that we cannot predict from peoples religious reasons for public actions. Evidence comes from two religiously-based organizations sponsored by the same local religious coalition, studied during 1998 to 2000 in a midsized U.S. city. One group is an alliance of lay people representing different churches, who organized volunteering and community development projects with a low-income minority neighborhood. The other is an alliance of clergy, representing different churches, that organized public events against racism. In each case, group members used religious terms to argue sharply over civic identity despite sharing the same religious reasons for their goals. Resolving the disputes required redefining or reemphasizing the boundaries of collective identity. The dynamics highlighted in my analyses provide new ways of understanding how people use religion to include or exclude others in civic relationships. Even more broadly, they reveal how religion can enhance or impede collaboration across social status and religious divides.

Religion in Public Action From Actors to Settings

Contemporary social research often has located religion’s public influence by focusing on individual or collective religious actors. In this unitary actor model, religion is a stable, uniform feature of an individual or collectivity. However, recent research shows that people’s religious expression outside religious congregations varies by context. Building on this new work, along with insights from Erving Goffman and cultural sociology, an alternative, “cultural-interactionist model” of religious expression focuses on how group styles enable and constrain religious expression in public settings. Illustrating the model are two ethnographic cases, a religiously sponsored homeless advocacy organization and a secondary comparison setting from an activist campaign for housing, both from a U.S. metropolitan area. Shifting from actors to settings and group styles clarifies the interplay between religious and nonreligious culture over time. The shift refines our understanding of how religion’s civic or political effects work, as in the case of building social capital for collective action. The cultural-interactionist model enables us to track historical change in everyday group settings. It promotes further research on historically changing ways of managing religious diversity, and diverse ways of constructing a religious self.

Social Capacity and the Styles of Group Life Some Inconvenient Wellsprings of Democracy

This article introduces a concept of social capacity and offers a method of studying it. Social capacity is peoples ability to work together to organize public relationships, rather than give responsibility for those relationships wholly to state actors or the flux of market exchange. The article proposes that to study social capacity, we examine the everyday group styles of civic life. Those culturally patterned styles enable and constrain a groups ability to imagine and organize its public relationships with the wider social world. The article applies this approach to the “networking” style of a church alliance in a Midwestern U.S. city, whose members were responding to the welfare policy reforms of 1996. Investigating group style allows a focus on civic relationships, or potential civic relationships, across “sectoral” domains and avoids reifying “civil society,” “state,” or “market.” This analytic approach also avoids the elisions and silences that the popular social capital concept often invites.

Interpretive reflexivity in ethnography

Many would argue that ethnographic knowledge claims are partial. Many say this predicament demands the researcher’s self-reflexivity about ethnographic claims. Commonly, ethnographers perform reflexivity by discussing how their research may reflect interests or biases that accompany their positions in hierarchies of domination. Positional reflexivity uneasily straddles a realism that claims to know which position(s) affected the research, and a normativism that aims to demystify what we claim to know. Both stances suppress the interpretive work that researchers and researched constantly are doing. In a more interpretive practice of reflexivity, ethnographers explore how they figured out other people’s meanings in the field, instead of focusing on correlations between their claims and their social position. Interpretive reflexivity considers social positions within ongoing circuits of communication between researcher and researched. Since interpretations are part of explanation in much ethnography, interpretive reflexivity widens our ability to assess causal as well as interpretive claims.

Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography

We propose three interlinked ways that theory helps researchers build causal claims from ethnographic research. First, theory guides the casing and re-casing of a topic of study. Second, theoretical work helps craft a clear causal question via the construction of a contrast space of the topic of investigation. Third, the researcher uses theory to identify social mechanisms that condense causal accounts. We show how each step can accommodate the everyday meanings typically central to ethnographic research’s contributions. This tripartite role for theory thus preserves ethnography’s traditionally recognized strength in interpretive validity, while realizing ethnography’s potential for offering causal, and partly generalizable, accounts that can engage the wider sociological discipline. The discussion brings ethnographic research into conversation with recent debates on the role of mechanisms, comparative and counterfactual thinking in causal accounts. We illustrate and defend our argument for theory in ethnography with an extensive analysis of a contemporary ethnographic monograph along with briefer attention to parallel uses of theory in two other ethnographic studies.

Beyond Dogmas: Religion, Social Service, and Social Life in the United States1

Forty years ago, not one but three prominent sociologists—Peter Berger (1967), Thomas Luckmann (1967), and Talcott Parsons (1967)—each published sweeping statements on religion in the modern world. They had the United States particularly in mind. Their arguments differed, but each implied that religion had become highly sequestered, residing mainly inside congregational worship and private rumination. Their assessments became descriptive as well as normative common sense for many sociologists, a kind of dogma. Over the past two decades, criticisms of classical versions of the secularization thesis, debates about culture wars, the renaissance of interest in Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on civic life, and a steady stream of works about the Christian Right show that the dogma’s hold on the sociological imagination has weakened. Whether or not religion’s institutional power has decreased in the United States, many researchers now investigate the wider social roles of congregations and other religious organizations rather than assume a priori that these are too insignificant to study. Some sociologists have been exploring closely what religious groups do in local community life. Jay Demerath and Rhys Williams asked that question in the case of Springfield, Massachusetts, and have continued exploring the issue theoretically as well as empirically (Demerath and

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt, Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexanders cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obamas Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face-to-face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexanders performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexanders concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.

Religion and Social Solidarity

To understand religion’s relation to social solidarity, scholars frequently rely on the neo-Tocquevillian synthesis. This approach assumes that the number of citizen associations or volunteer groups in a society is a good indicator of social solidarity. In addition it invokes a “unitary actor model” of religion that treats individuals and groups either as continuously religious or non-religious. The neo-Tocquevillian synthesis has become an increasingly inadequate way to understand religion’s relation to social solidarity in societies characterized by porous institutions and loose, detachable social ties, rather than tightly bound groups. In this post-Tocquevillian scenario, religious expression may cross group or institutional boundaries more readily, and voluntary, solidarity-sustaining activities take a variety of forms, some of them very individualized. In light of these realities, this essay proposes an alternative, “pragmatist” approach that studies religious expression in different public settings rather than taking individual or collective religious actors as the object of study. Different settings are organized by different group styles that shape opportunities for religious expression. Those styles give different opportunities for participants to connect religion to acts of solidarity—be those casual volunteering or projects carried out by more traditional associations. A case of a church-sponsored organization that advocates for homeless people’s needs in a large US city illustrates the benefits of the pragmatist approach.