Symbolic Boundaries

Chapitre 9 Une redéfinition identitaire par horizons. Les Franco-Mauriciens entre Maurice et l'Afrique du Sud : identité, stratégies migratoires et processus de recommunautarisation. Thèse pour le Doctorat en Science Politique, présentée par Catherine Boudet le 03 décembre 2004, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux, Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses, 642 pages.

This article examines the incomplete transformation of the Kurdish Hizbullah from an illegal underground organisation to a social and political movement influent in the Kurdish Turkey. The article contextualizes Hizbullah's transformation within the broader social and political developments after 2000s. After a critical evaluation of the reconfiguration of the Kurdish political sphere in Turkey, the article critically addresses the Hizbullah's conversion to civil society. It analyses the Hizbullah's strategies of reorganisation and mobilisation through associations, political activism and public celebrations under the AKP rule. While acknowledging the political and social impact of this reconfiguration, this article also underlines the limits of this process, with a special focus on the Kurdish question and the ambivalent approach to Kurdish identity and martyrdom promoted by the political leaders and supporters of the movement. Relying on boundary making theory, the article argues that the Hizbullah's attempt to rearticulate religion and ethnicity to broaden its political and social base remains circumscribed by the hegemonic aspirations of the Turkish state on the one hand, and the ongoing antagonism with the Kurdish national movement on the other.

This article explicates the process through which individuals become right-wing citizens in contemporary Japan. By incorporating insights from the sociology of emotion, this article complements the existing analyses that emphasize the cognitive process that makes individuals resonate with right-wing ideologies and frames. Drawing on original and secondary interview data with 46 right-wing citizens and ethnographic observations of activities by right-wing groups, it explores how such feelings as shock, fear, anger, and affective bonds shape the mechanism of political conversion along with the cognitive process and ideological socialization. In particular, short-run emotions can motivate individuals to take part in political activism through which they learn about how they should (not) feel in particular situations. Participation in right-wing activism re-shapes short-run emotions into long-run emotions that tend to sustain their commitment by justifying symbolic boundaries between “us” and “them.”

El Estado chileno ha construido históricamente un relato de nación en torno a la homogeneidad racial/cultural. La inequidad ha sido así usualmente leída en clave de clase social. Pero la reciente llegada de inmigrantes afrodescendientes ha evidenciado la relevancia de los cuerpos para comprender patrones de integración social en el país. A partir de diez entrevistas a mujeres colombianas en Santiago, este artículo indagará en cómo éstas dan sentido a su sexualización en Chile, para analizar como raza, género y nacionalidad confluyen en la construcción de discursos identitarios que les permiten escapar de roles victimizantes y posicionarse como sujetos con agencia.

This is the intro for a special issue that I edited for American Behavioral Scientist (Volume 48 / Issue 11). It featured contributed articles by Scott Appelrouth, Willian F. Danaher, Joseph A. Kotarba, Paul Lopes, Jan Marontate, Vaughn Schmutz, Erin Trapp, and Jean Van Delinder.

Various scholars have described an array of social and cultural changes in Western societies that have contributed to the erosion of traditional cultural hierarchies. Some fear that the once-vaunted positions of the performing and visual arts, for example, are being undermined by commercialization—whereby crucial choices about the production and dissemination of works are increasingly informed by the economic bottom-line rather than by aesthetic concerns. Alongside the declining hierarchy and growing commercialization of the arts, some scholars point to the rapid expansion in the volume and variety of cultural goods in the global marketplace and the weakening of national boundaries and cultures, which, to an unprecedented extent, has destabilized and “deterritorialized” global cultural flows to an unprecedented extent. Of course, the impact of the heightened pace and reach of globalization on cultural fields remains a topic of debate in the literature. Certain scholars take a more positive view when arguing that globalization serves to “relativize” national boundaries and strengthen a sense of belonging to a world society, while others take a more negative view when arguing this international flow is better described as an asymmetrical imposition of cultural goods from the United States and other affluent countries on the non-Western world.

Yet, amid this vibrant debate, a growing body of comparative research shows significant cross-national variation in both the degree of change in cultural hierarchies as well as in the extent and impact of cultural globalization.  However, most studies focus on a single country or on a single point in time, thereby making it difficult to examine the territorial and temporal aspects that lie at the core of the globalization debate. By focusing on changes in the musical field in four countries from 1955 to 2005, our aim is to build on upon cross-national comparative research that addresses how cultural hierarchies change over time and, in particular, to explore what relationship such changes have to the degree of international orientation to musical actors.

Music provides an interesting case by which to explore such changes because it has experienced considerable “de-hierarchization,” as indicated by the waning status of classical music relative to popular music. Using media coverage in elite newspapers in the four countries from 1955 to 2005 as an indicator, this chapter considers whether there is an increasingly global orientation towards musical “actors” (e.g., soloists, ensembles, composers) over time in the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. If so, to what extent has this occurred and how is such attention distributed temporally? Is there a greater attention towards “non-Western” countries in newspaper coverage of music, as suggested by de-territorialization? By exploring such questions, we aim to address the relationship between cultural classification systems and cultural globalization from the vantage of these nations, while taking into account their respective relationships with music from other nations around the globe. 

Much of the debate about the impact of globalization on cultural fields focuses solely on popular cultural forms (e.g., hit songs; Achterberg et al. 2011). We diverge by focusing simultaneously on forms of both high culture (e.g., classical music) and popular culture (e.g., rock music). This makes sense because the emergence of Western high culture and popular culture as salient distinctions went hand in hand (DiMaggio 1982, 1991). Hence, the creation of a field devoted solely to “transcendent” music of the past occurred alongside the creation of a large-scale field devoted to “faddish” music of the present, with the former emphasizing a “logic of consecration” and the latter a “logic of commodification” (Dowd 2011). Their connected trajectories continue in the present, including a “blurring” of their boundaries. For example, scholars have noted a shift towards consecration occurring in popular music—as when some (but not all) rock is celebrated as art (Schmutz 2005; Schmutz & Faupel 2010; Van Venrooij & Schmutz 2010)—and a shift towards commodification in classical music—as when orchestras perform music from Hollywood soundtracks (e.g., Star Wars) in an effort to offset shrinking audiences and declining funding (DiMaggio 1991; Dowd & Kelly 2012). Indeed, the “de-hierarchicalization” mentioned above deals squarely with the relative positioning of classical and popular musics. Hence, we shall see below how both fare in the face of globalization.

The sociology of music has become a vibrant field of study in recent decades. While its proponents are well aware of this field’s contributions and relevance, we focus here on demonstrating its merit to the broader sociological community. We do so by addressing the following questions: What is music, sociologically speaking? How do individuals and groups use music? How is the collective production of music made possible? How does music relate to broader social distinctions, especially class, race, and gender? Answering these questions reveals that music provides an important and engaging purchase on topics that are of great concern to sociologists of all stripes---topics that range from the microfoundations of interaction to the macro-level dynamics of inequality.

In this interview, Michèle Lamont discusses her intellectual trajectory in relation to other sociologists and research fields. The starting point is her relationship to Bourdieu's field theory in 1980s Paris. She describes how her empirically grounded work developed as a critique of Bourdieu's oeuvre yet draws heavily on it. A common thread in her work is a focus on social and symbolic boundaries and their relation to evaluation and pluralism, which she has extended from her early studies of class boundaries to empirical and theoretical work, ranging from more general cultural processes of inequality and stigmatization, to knowledge production and evaluation in academia. The importance of cumulative work in sociology and the value of a plurality of criteria of worth across different domains emerge as two central themes in the interview. Finally, Lamont reflects on the current status of the sociology discipline and its role in the public sphere. The interview took place in Lund on 7 March 2018, where Lamont was invited keynote speaker at the Sociologidagarna 2018 conference. michèle Lamont är professor i sociologi och African and African American Studies och Robert I. Goldman Professor i European Studies vid Harvard University, och var under 2016-2017 ordförande för American Sociological Association. Hennes arbeten har utforskat ämnen som sociokulturella gränsdragningar, ojämlikhet och stigmatise-ring, kunskap och bedömningssprocesser, social förändring och kvalitativa metoder. Bland hennes senaste verk finns den samförfattade boken Getting respect: Responding to stigma and discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel (2016). ANDERS HYLMÖ är postdoktor i forskningspolitik vid företagsekonomiska institutio-nen, Lunds universitet. Han disputerade hösten 2018 vid Sociologiska institutionen vid Lunds universitet på avhandlingen Disciplined reasoning: Styles of reasoning and the mainstream-heterodoxy divide in Swedish economics. Hans forskningsintressen rör sig främst kring gränslandet mellan vetenskapssociologi och forskningspolitik och innefattar kvalitetsbedömning, vetenskapliga stilar och gränsarbete. Sociologisk Forskning, årgång 56, nr 2, sid 167-179. © Författaren och Sveriges Sociologförbund, ISSN 0038-0342, 2002-066X (elektronisk).

Taking its point of departure in the case of Salt, a small town located next to Girona (Catalonia), this paper analyses the everyday negotiation of the emerging ‘super-diverse’ reality outside the metropolis, yielding a specific focus on the role of space. Via an analysis of the social production of space in this rural-urban locality, accounting for the contested understandings of space and belonging, the dominant narrative of ‘native flight’ is challenged. In fact, often research on social problems in poor neighbourhoods ignore the deep connections between everyday interactions in space and the inherent structural tensions, due to ethnic, racial, class and/or gender inequalities. Instead, in this paper focus is put on the vernacular groupings put in practice in the specific context of a small town thereby revealing how the dominant narratives neglect how this is embedded within the ‘social production of space’.

Skáldsagan Mánasteinn: Drengurinn sem aldrei var til (2013) eftir Sjón segir frá þremur viðburðaríkum mánuðum í lífi drengsins Mána Steins haustið 1918. Á þessum stutta tíma gýs Katla, spænska veikin gengur yfir og Ísland öðlast fullveldi frá Dönum. Í greininni er líkamsorðræða Mánasteins skoðuð með hliðsjón af kenningum Judith Butler, Mary Douglas og Michel Foucault er lúta að líkamanum sem menningarlegri smíð. Samkvæmt Douglas eru hættusvæði líkamans beintengd hættusvæðum samfélagsins og allt það sem ógnar mörkum samfélagsheildarinnar er talið félagsleg mengun (e. social pollution). Foucault fetar svipaðar slóðir í alsæiskenningu sinni, en samkvæmt henni viðheldur borgarsamfélagið formgerð sinni með eftirliti og ögun líkama þegna sinna. Máni Steinn er samkynhneigður og er líkami hans því á skjön við hugmyndir þess tíma um hvað telst heilsteyptur og heilbrigður líkami. Frávik frá hinum „heilbrigða“, gagnkynhneigða líkama skapar óeiningu innan heildarinnar og því leitast samfélagið við að útskúfa Mána. En koma spænsku veikinnar til Reykjavíkur umturnar stigveldi samfélagsins og afbyggir viðteknar hugmyndir um líkamann. Aðgreining heilbrigðra og smitaðra þurrkast út og líkaminn verður vettvangur þar sem ósættanlegar andstæður renna saman. Í óreiðuástandi spænsku veikinnar verða landamæri líkamans óskýr og mörk samfélagsins verða að sama skapi fljótandi.



Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (Mánasteinn: Drengurinn sem aldrei var til, 2013) by Sjón tells of three eventful months in the life of Máni Steinn in the fall of 1918. In this short period the volcano Katla erupts, the Spanish flu rages and Iceland regains its sovereignty from Denmark. Building on Judith Butler’s, Mary Douglas’s and Michel Foucault’s theories regarding the body as a cultural construct, this article focuses on body discourse as presented in Moonstone. According to Douglas there is a direct link between boundaries of the body and boundaries of society. Everything that endangers the stability of society’s boundaries is considered social pollution. Foucault’s theory on panopticism likewise identifies surveillance and discipline of citizens’ bodies as means of maintaining society’s social structure. Because Máni Steinn is queer, his body is considered abnormal according to the period’s definitions on what constitutes a healthy and stable body. Aberrations from the „healthy“, heterosexual body creates divergence within society's fabric. To regain the appearance of a „pure“ society Máni needs to be hidden or banished from it. Yet the arrival of the Spanish flu to Reykjavík deconstructs conventional definition of the body and unravels the social hierarchy. The distinction between the healthy and the infected is obliterated, as the body becomes a site where irreconcilable opposites merge. During the turmoil of the Spanish flu boundaries of the body become as unstable as society's boundaries become fluent.

This article explores how symbolic boundaries between youth and adulthood shape experiences of upward and downward social mobility among EU migrants. Drawing on 56 biographical interviews with Italians who moved to England after the 2008 economic crisis, and focusing on three individual case studies, the article reveals that normative understandings of adulthood emerge as a central concern from participants' biographical accounts, and that they mobilise unequal forms of cultural, economic and social capital to maintain a feeling of synchrony between social ageing and social mobility. Drawing on Bourdieu and the sociology of adulthood, the article proposes the concept of 'synch' to explore how tensions in the relationship between social ageing and social mobility shape experiences of migration. This allows for an innovative theoretical bridge between cultural class analysis, adulthood studies and migration studies, and for a better understanding of how intersections of class and age shape intra-European migrations.

Debates over religious accommodation in liberal-democratic states are common. I offer a framework for making sense of their often-abrupt eruption, unpredictable dynamics and variation across jurisdictions, arguing that they are best understood as instances of competitive group boundary construction and maintenance. Religious believers' interest in honouring their group's customs is not only based on individual devotion but also reflects their interest in maintaining a sense of coherent religious group identity. Liberal-democratic societies simultaneously create liberal-democratic subjects, through public schooling and other means, including immigrant integration policies. These parallel processes of group formation can intersect, sparking conflict. I outline the social mechanisms that generate conflict, illustrating my argument through reference to the debate over ritual male circumcision in Germany.

This paper demonstrates four different ways to posit the concept of ONE, and proposes that our mistaken assumption of the simplicity of ONE as the building block of numbers can be considered the riddle underlying complexity theory (the ultimate riddle).
      A complete outline of the Flux Logic is included in the Appendix. (An updated version is included as an Appendix in my book "Bellybuttons" which uses the Flux Logic for its arguments)  The original article was an expansion of a chapter by the same name in the author’s book Thick, explaining William James’ extreme stance on Pluralism. It has been left intact, to show the supporting conjectures as they were worked out. 
      The complete logical structure is, for better or worse, a TOE (or Theory of Everything), that, in a rather Jamesian fashion provides a conceptual structure bridging logical and physical space.    Interpreted broadly it provides a “Calculus of Tolerances in the Calibration of Meaning” that could be applied to the sustainability of cultures (or individual psyches) in environments over stated periods. It could be considered an update of the old Bentham/Mill rationale of a Pleasure/Pain Calculus. However, as in accounting, the bottom line calibration of meaning/value is a matter of fiat, according to the space/time unit under consideration, i.e. “the universe of discourse.”