ASA Conference 2003 The Problem of Culture
Prologue to the Atlanta Tales
When August, with its scorching heat laid bare
The bones of France, and power failed to care
About the needs at home, and Baghdad there,
Professionals, all knowing, leave their chairs,
In number, six, to board a plane well searched
For iron relics of an Arab church;
Then thumbed and prodded to confirm their worth,
Embark committed, to pen a purging curse...
Atlanta is arguably the inspirational center of the American Civil Rights Movement today, and a fitting venue of hope for human rights. It is there Jimmy Carter built his presidential library, and the Medal of Freedom he bestowed upon Martin Luther King Jr. in 1977 rests in a memorial case beside King's 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, just yards from MLK's casket. More Blacks concentrate in Atlanta's suburbs than any other US city (ASA), and a pilgrimage to King's marble bridge over troubled waters will take you down Andrew Young International Boulevard, and give you a hearing at Ebeneezer Baptist Church of King's continuous oration, "I have a dream..." What a local contrast his Center for Non-Violent Social Change affords (honoring Rosa Parks and Ghandi), compared with the civilian desolation of Sherman's Civil War "March to the sea" from Atlanta (also a current model for US hegemony in the 21st Century).
Some would say Atlanta is the natal venue of American sociology as well, for it was at Atlanta University that W.E.B. DuBois joined a tragic history with its social structural underpinnings, and generated a commitment to social action for Black labor. This, before the first ASA meeting was held, and before Charles Peirce's many followers made their mark on things social. Peirce, who sympathized with the South over the Civil War (Wiley, 120) was nonetheless a founder of semiotics before Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics," and his descendants in Pragmatism, James and Dewey were yet to publish their instrumental works when DuBois' Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903. Lemert says (102) DuBois had the structural take on Reconstruction even earlier, and conflicted masterfully with Southern rationales for oppression re-hashed by Columbia University's William Dunning in the 1930's. Walda-Katz Fishman (458) cited DuBois on feminism and as "light years above" his contemporaries. At the turn of century, crafts of sociological practice were still mired in Southern history, Social Darwinism, racial and gender superiority.
DuBois did better for his profession, a fact acknowledged by Craig Calhoun (279) in attributing all eight awards given this year to DuBois' influence. Sociology is getting its heroes straight. Michael Borawoy intoned, "Enrich the world, the first act of public sociology." Frances Fox Piven,"a public intellectual" warned us of the corruption of money and power, and her career was awarded for benefits to the disenfranchised poor. Prizes went for explanations of two great transformations in history, to nation-states (Lachmann), and to the world system (Wallerstein). Most remarkable was the acceptance of Lewis Yablonsky, who detailed his early juvenile career resulting in the brig at Georgia Tech being built just to incarcerate him, and his work since as an expert witness on behalf of youth who serve no purpose in being put away.
This is the second conference in a row ASA has opened itself to an intellectual journey with fellow travelers. Last year it was panelists from the American Psychological Association who grounded racial profiling in sign responses and cognition. This year the APA courageously brought out an NIH study in its Psychological Bulletin (Glaser & Kruglanski, et al) which sets forth a psychological complex shared by Hitler, Reagan, Mussolini, and Bush. It is characterized by "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity." All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality." To enter so directly as professionals into the fray of world hegemony is a political act. Many travelers to ASA Atlanta had already committed a political act by signing an official resolution of the ASA calling for an immediate end to the war against Iraq.
ASA also opened itself to practitioners of the American Historical Association who are building a new intellectual history in the wake of their social history pre-occupations of the late 20th Century, while sociologists were exploring their "middle range." Once again, the macro-level is fair game for study, the works of European scholars active in such conflicts as Algerian Independence can be cited for their true content, sociologists like Saad Eddin Ibrahim--who was welcomed back as a political prisoner from jail--can be feted, and it now remains to be seen if ASA will resound in the world with ineffectual squeaks or a manifold roar.
Remember, as recently as Anaheim in 2001, Barcelona and Paris scholars stood be-numbed in ASA hallways, bitter over their poor judgment at traveling 7,000 miles to be heard by a few blank conferees in a massive hall. It was 9-11 the next month, and subsequent acts of the US Government to invade two Islamic countries, justify pre-emptive war and assassination, use the Patriot Act to persecute citizens and visa-holders, deny habeas corpus to detainees--meanwhile consolidating US infrastructure around homeland security--which has begun to shake the sleeping giant. Political Sociology revived with a start, and much of what the six sociologists I describe here heard and thought on this angry pilgrimage to Atlanta now bear that mark.
1Traveler #1 was Neo-Positivist (NP). She had a new Ph.D. in demography but hadn't found a job and sought interviews instead in her BA and MA fields of education and deviance, perhaps with a willingness to teach quantitative methods. She relied philosophically on the Vienna Circle, was a committed meliorist, and had been surprised last year to learn of Puerto Ricans who considered themselves Blacks in Chicago and had answered that way on the 2000 census. Achieved status was masquerading as ascribed, and respondents could not be teased out by a lie scale, because they were telling the truth as they knew it, even voting their "race" in city politics. During 2003, she read about DNA research on genes that jumped "racial" barriers so she was almost prepared to hear the plenary with Harris, Merritt, and Duster (60) on the measure of race declare, "Race has no biological utility" and go on to detail how anthropologists consider it a "stained concept" the ASA has had to take a stand for retaining, only because its effects are real. The Right, for example, wants to get rid of "race" to avoid entitlements--and will in CA's October election under Prop 54. Massey and Denton in Atlanta found two times the loan rejection rates of Blacks over Whites, and court cases routinely sentence Blacks to capital punishment, deny due process, or prevent undergraduate education proportionate to race in the population through a racism "as modern as the accumulation of capital." Troy Duster's book Whitewashing Race will come out this year. NP, however, felt she was losing a demographic variable.
For her BA, she had bootlegged Bourdieu into her high school study on status seeking through Coleman's "social capital" concept. Not fully aware Coleman's use (1988) would be posted on worldbank.org. and disfigure references to Bourdieu (1977), she had operationalized post high school success and found its correlates in social networks their senior year. Hearing Claudia Scholz' paper on measurement of social change (457) she was jolted to learn Bourdieu's "cultural capital" was miss-appropriated into the sociology of education as a network variable when its purpose was to analyze "class fractions and even national cultures," and his "social capital" engenders conflictual relations not social cohesion. If basic terms won't jump the Atlantic well, how will her research redress global conditions?
Apprehensive about the Presidential address (279), because its site of research had been NP’s--and Coleman's for The Adolescent Society--she feared more disappointment might be coming. Bielby’s question, " How has 'the cultural turn' changed our understanding of social categories such as gender, race, class and the way we study social processes ranging from identity formation to globalization?" was apropos. But he was content to rely on his plenary speakers to import European ideas, and his neglect of a truly "presidential address" nearly turned out to be a mistake for NP, though she did not join colleagues who left early in a stream of long pants. He did repeat Coleman's point that social life external to the schools generated new life chances schools did not provide before the1960's. But Bielby said little to bring closure to his talk, even ending it with the musical theme, "Searchin..." NP decided to search at the plenary on methods, after a session explaining deviance cross-nationally.
Melossi's paper (280) asked why incarceration rates in Italy have gone down while they are up in the US. She noted that the change appears in the last two decades as both have secularized. US militarism, feeling "selected" to spread a creed around the world, and its reward and punishment regime for violence all seem to be increasing, however, requiring greater punishments when it gets out of hand. Savelsberg explicated a theory of collective memory and memorialization in ceremony, which gets institutionalized in national laws. The test case is German law, which universally trains its lawyers to protect the nation from repeating its genocidal history in WWII, while US lawyers are trained diversely to protect individuals and vulnerable groups. Garland found a two-decade increase in US executions while capital punishment is disappearing elsewhere in the West. He contested a thesis of "American exceptionalism," reviewed an ahistorical book attributing it to vigilantism, and concluded the difference is related to popular "getting soft on crime" reactions to ACLU cases won in the 1970's.
Swidler and Clough (313) agreed the culture wars about methodology were over. NP wasn't so sure, and presenter Breiger held out a case for poor penetration. Particularly, he found correspondence analysis rationales had yet to cross over the ocean. He used a published data set of Coleman's data, as matrices of cells, which demonstrate by their magnitude an individual's power to determine outcomes--a mathematical representation of an individual's social capital, as he defined it. Then, he put up an elaborate Bourdieu chart of relationships of the same data, which demanded of the reader that he/she develop a theory of explanation, while Coleman did not. NP concluded openness characterized the European scientific model, as she limped towards the door for another interview.
Traveler #2 was a functionalist (F) and Neo-Liberal who had always "worked in the belly of the whale." He was committed to the universals of social justice Harvard's John Rawls had attributed to social contract democracies--once WWII's dependence on Parson's Social System and Western ecumenism had pulled allied democratic nations through their toughest trial--and he thought himself prepared to take on culture. Early, he had secured a copy of Spillman's handout (354), with a new definition of nation-state as discursive fields, and he was gratified her speech centered sociological work on social theory, saying work done with that guide results in more effective impacts on societies.
Straightaway, he took in session 355, which featured 9-11 as a cultural turn for sociologists. He heard Molotch circumscribe Washington D.C. and NYC urban areas as areas of fear, now a heritage, where even if social control agents "get it all wrong" regarding threats and causes of violence, there remain "real consequences" for innocent people. Better, he said, to slant your study outcomes for policy makers towards benign recommendations reaping "collateral benefits" than mindlessly fall in with the State. F wondered if Molotch was asking the research question, "to whom and for what" too openly. Like the dubious fears of crime which led to building basketball courts in these cities, Molotch concluded, at least the kids learn to play basketball.
Staples was more Orwellian in his paper on surveillance culture, pointing to "tiny brothers" that increasingly monitor the innocent through technology and stepchild programs to Total Information Awareness now being implemented despite Congress’ call for Poindexter's resignation. Foucault, he said with irony, would understand our willingness to surrender personal information, showing our worthiness. F was clearly worried about Rawls' applicability for the atomized in an electorate where less than half vote and where parties obstruct rather than pass legislation.
F remembered two sessions earlier. First, Jacob Heller (186-2) suggested that J.S. Mill offered an explanation for why the US did not develop a Labor Party while other Western nations did, and he found US unions organized for their memberships, not the nation, and did it by pushing out Blacks (descriptions from DuBois). This, he said, fits Mill's explanation of a group seen as morally inferior--like the Irish who barely escaped it by "becoming White"--moving Blacks out of the industrial system. Krier and Weller's paper examined financial accounting in late capitalism, finding "speculative management" the cultural theme which led management (e.g. Enron) to ignore company profit, and "irrationally in Weberian terms," lay off workers to create speculative moments for inflating the stock. This was neither the rational bureaucracy nor the social justice through law F had internalized from Weber.
He also heard historian Nathan Moon (186-2) clarify early works of Bourdieu on Kabilya (Outline, 1977) and France (Distinction, 1984), using Bourdieu's term "social reproduction." Bourdieu, a student of Althusser and colleague of Aron, died in January after championing French railway workers and immigrants, "les sans papiers," in the 90's. Moon's thesis was like Scholz' on Bourdieu, that critics "fail to understand the nuances of his theories of practice and habitus... and habitus is "key to defending Bourdieu against charges of utilitarianism." Also Marxism, for Moon, who doesn't think he is a Marxist. F examined the three central arguments closely, concluding with Honneth (1995) that "habitus," as a set of dispositions, serves as a "deus ex machina" in Bourdieu's interested but overdetermined actor, and he's too much an economic determinist, whether a Marxist as Jeffery Alexander finds him, or not.
F also attended a paper by Jeong-Woo-Koo (21-5) on the “Origins of the Public Sphere in Korea.” Not an opinion leader study or a normative top-down study, this work was inspired by Habermas' Frankfort School description of the European public sphere, and rests on an historical observation that private Confucian academies in the 16th--18th Century fit his definitions. Doing a mortality analysis on these academies under strong and weak kings, and accounting for bottom-up petitions for licensing and critique of the government, the author found academy longevity was extended by memorials, as academies were transformed from naive public sphere to political public sphere. F, a comparativist, thought of the near 700+ organizations in the first re-enactment of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, and its place in national memory.
To underscore F's willingness to import a cultural definition of nation-state, he also attended sessions on the world economic system. He heard Wherry and Curran (195) discuss a new "geography" of world cities like Bangkok, where forms of capital concentration by transnational companies with a global ideology are leaving localized political, cultural, and ideological functions in the shadows (195). Boris Stremlin expounded on historian Braudel's concept of the "longue duree," or very long term, when he founded the French Annales school as a world center of social sciences, joining history with atemporal sociology. Wallerstein took this perspective in creating his World System Theory, and to good effect. In fact, in his acceptance address (279), he called this a "more historical and useful social science," and one informed by both his early work in Africa, where true nation-states had not yet evolved, and by his undergraduate work at Columbia which was so interdisciplinary it had no "majors." F later saw Kentor and Yong Suk Jang's 4X6 map of global interlocking directorships rolled out (389), proving the reality of a transnational economic community studied by Wallerstein's new model. F went to the Merton commemorative session, and on the plane began underlining Bourdieu's journal Liber, to enhance his French mentalite'.
Traveler #3's practice was to do community studies (CS) by participant observation. She was looking for insights on religious and linguistic differences for her upcoming studies in Korean and Japanese-American communities which might bound them better than space did. CS went to a session called The Cultural Turn in Social Theory (34) where accents flourished. Phillip Mellor presented a wide range of theorists of the information society, featuring "the death of the social," driven by technological determinism and dehumanization where religion hardly exists at all. The model for society seemed to center on the internet. Nonetheless, he found convergence on two religious features which build on human capacities: socialization in religious terms, and religion confronting dehumanization.