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All the reading materials (required and recommended) will be posted on the class Moodle page. Please make sure to enroll yourself in the course Moodle page, QPSC503 Politics and Culture (2024S), via the URL below before coming to the first class meeting.
https://2024.moodle.icu.ac.jp/course/view.php?id=296
Spring 2023 [Registration: April 5 and 8]
Week 1 (Apr 12) - Course Introduction (no assigned reading)
Week 2 (Apr 19) - The Conceptual and Methodological Issues in the Studies of Politics and Culture
Assigned reading: Jepperson & Swidler 1994 “What Properties of Culture Should We Measure?” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture 22, 359-371.
Recommend: Max Weber 1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), Vol. 1, Chapter 1, pp. 3-26.
Week 3 (Apr 26) - Is Geertz a Subjectivist or an Intersubjectivist?
Assigned reading: Clifford Geertz 1973 The Interpretations of Culture (New York: Basic Books), Chs. 1 (Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture) and 6 (Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example), pp. 3-30 and 142-169.
Recommend: Geertz 1983 Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books); Swidler 1995 “Cultural Power and Social Movements,” in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), Ch. 2 (pp. 25-40).
Golden Week (May 3) - no class.
Week 4 (May 10) - What Intersubjective Models Do We Have for Empirical Research?
Assigned reading: Charles Taylor 1971 “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Review of Metaphysics 25(1), 3-51, assigned pages: 3-35.
Recommended: Rabinow and Sullivan 1979 “Introduction The Interpretive Turn: Emergence of an Approach,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), 1-21, esp. 4-6; Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann 1967 The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Penguin Books), Preface, Introduction, and Part One, 7-61; Maurice Natanson 1970 “Phenomenology and Typification; A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz,” Social Research 37(1): 1-22;
[Please note that the midterm assignment is due by May 17, preferably before the class, via email.]
Week 5 (May 17) - How and To What Extent Do We Contextualize the Subject-Matter?
Assigned reading: Marshall Sahlins [1982]2000 “Individual Experience and Cultural Order,” in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York: Zone Books), 277-291.
Recommended: Sahlins 1981 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press); Sahlins 1985 Islands of History (Univ. of Chicago Press), Introduction and Ch. 5 (Structure and History); Sahlins 2013 What Kinship Is--and Is Not (University of Chicago Press), xi-x, 89 pages; Sewell Jr, William H. 2005 “A Theory of the Event: Marshall Sahlins’s ‘Possible Theory of History,’” in his Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Univ. of Chicago Press), 197-224.
Week 6 (May 24 Christian Week) - Boundary Approaches and Culture
Assigned reading: Fredrik Barth 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown), Introduction and “Pathan Identity and Its Maintenance” (the seventh chapter in the volume).
Recommended: Barth 1998 [1969] “Preface 1998” and “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press); Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, and Marek Jakoubek, eds. 2018. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today: A Legacy of Fifty Years (Routledge); Erisken 2015 Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (Pluto Press).
Week 7 (May 31) - Boundary Approaches and Difference-Based Interactions
Assigned reading: Giuseppe Sciortino 2012 “Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press), Chapter 14.
Recommended: Jeffrey C. Alexander 1992 “Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification: On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 289-308; Alexander 2004 “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological theory 22(4): 527-573; Lamont, Michèle, and Robert Wuthnow 1990 “Betwixt and Between: Recent Cultural Sociology in Europe and the United States,” in Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Syntheses, ed. George Ritzer (Columbia University Press), 287-315; William H. Sewell, Jr. 1999 “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), Ch. 1 (pp. 35-61).
Week 8 (June 7) - Approaches to Religion in Cultural Analysis
Rhys Williams 1996a "Religion as Political Resources: Culture or Ideology?" J of the Scientific Study of Religion 35(4): 368-378.
Recommended: Geertz 1973 “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretations of Culture; Williams, Rhys H. 1996b "Review Essay: Politics, Religion, and the Analysis of Culture." Theory and Society 25(6): 883-900; Billings, Dwight B. 1990 "Religion as Opposition: A Gramscian Analysis," American Journal of Sociology 96(1): 1-31; Philip Gorski 2021 “The Past and Future of the American Civil Religion,” in Civil Religion Today: Religion and the American Nation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Rhys H. Williams et al. (New York: NYU Press), Ch. 1; Gorski 2017 American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton UP).
Week 9 (June 14) - Religious Difference in a Postcolonial Context
Assigned reading: Saba Mahmood (2016), Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton UP), Introduction and Part I (Chs 1-2).
Recommended: Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford Univ. Press); Asad, Talal 2012 “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Cambridge Univ. Press), 36-57; Asad, Talal 2006 “Trying to Understand French Secularism," in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hend de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (Fordham Univ. Press), 494-526; Asad 2003 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford Univ. Press.; Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Harvard Univ. Press).
[Reading day: June 17]
[Exam period: June 18 -24]
Final assignment due by Monday, 24 June 2024.
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Additional Recommended Materials
Keyes, Charles F. 2002. “Weber and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 233-255.
Lichbach, Mark L. 2003. “Cultural/Interpretive Theory,” Chapter 5 of Is Rational Choice Theory All of Social Science? University of Michigan Press.
Archer, Margaret S. 1985. “The Myth of Cultural Integration,” British Journal of Sociology 36(3): 333-353.
Schudson, Michael. 1989. “How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efficacy of Symbols.,” Theory and Society 18(2): 153-180.
Turner, Victor. 1977. “Process, System, and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis,” Daedalus 106(3): 61?80.
Asad, Talal 1983 "Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz," Man 18(2): 237-259; Asad 1993 Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173-193.
Jones, Paul K. 2016. “Marxist Cultural Sociology,” in The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. David Inglis and Anna-Mari Almila (London: Sage), pp. 11-25.
Sherwood, Steven Jay, Philip Smith, and Jeffrey C. Alexander. 1993. “The British Are Coming … Again! The Hidden Agenda of ‘Cultural Studies?’” Contemporary Sociology 22(3): 370-75.
Friedland, Roger, and John Mohr. 2004. “The Cultural Turn in American Sociology,” in Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, ed. Roger Friedland and John Mohr (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 1-68.
Polletta, Francesca 2004 “Culture Is Not Just in Your Head,” in Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion, ed. Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), Ch. 7 (pp. 97-110).
Jasper, James M. 2017 “The Doors that Culture Opened: Parallels between Social Movement Studies and Social Psychology,” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 20(3): 285-302.
Gray, Colin S. 1999. "Strategic culture as context: the first generation of theory strikes back," Review of international studies, 25(1), pp.49-69.
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