What is Cultural Sociology? by Lyn Spillman

Author:Lyn Spillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

The socio-historical context of meaning-making: beyond reflection theory

Why do we sometimes expand the focus of our questions about meaning-making beyond symbolic forms and interaction? As we saw in chapter 2, analyzing symbolic forms in depth helps us understand more about the ways in which conventions and the structure of signification influence meaning-making. As we saw in chapter 3, analyzing interaction helps us learn more about how intentionality and referentiality in the use of symbolic forms influence meaning-making. But as John Thompson points out, a fifth feature of symbolic forms is also crucial. Symbolic forms are also “contextual” in ways that extend beyond interaction: they are “always embedded in specific socio-historical contexts and processes within which, and by means of which, they are produced, transmitted, and received.” Symbolic forms “bear the traces … of the social conditions of their production” (Thompson 1990, 145, 146).

If we all lived in small, undifferentiated, face-to-face groups with little outside contact almost all our lives, as was perhaps more common in pre-modern times, then the socio-historical contexts and processes shaping symbolic forms might be mostly restricted to the interaction processes we explored in the previous chapter. (Even so, we might wish to consider how specialized cultural producers – like religious officials, or other ritual specialists – might have a disproportionate impact on processes of meaning-making in the small group; and we might wish to delve deeper into forgotten ways in which the historical and ecological context had shaped our group’s symbolic forms.) But obviously, most of us do not live in small, undifferentiated, isolated groups, and almost no-one has really done so for centuries. The structured social contexts in which symbolic forms are now embedded extend far beyond small groups, in both their scale and their temporal range.

Founding sociologists were all preoccupied in one way or another with the transition from traditional to modern societies, and they all offered ways to think about how the large social changes in emerging modernity created broad cultural changes. They also offered trenchant commentary about the cultural conflicts and cultural changes their societies faced. As their ideas were integrated into sociology, however, “culture” mostly came to be seen as a large-scale, macro-social property of entire societies: modern societies in general, capitalist societies in general, democratic societies in general, or entire nation-states. Sociologists mostly assumed that social structure determined culture, and therefore that culture reflected social structure. This assumption was pervasive not only in theories of ideology, which emphasized cultural power, but also in functionalist theories which highlighted how meaning-making supported social integration (Spillman 1995).

Some of the most innovative developments in cultural theory in the first part of the twentieth century were made by Marxist theorists who revised the theory of ideology to improve “reflection theory” to better understand cultural power. Many of these developments extended reflection theory to take better account of topics we have explored in previous chapters: symbolic forms (Lowenthal 1961; Lukács 1971 [1923]) and the dynamics of practice and interaction (Gramsci 1971; Williams 1973).

They also grappled with

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