November, 2008

American Sociological Association Culture Section Mary Douglas Book Prize 2008 Comments on behalf of the Book Prize Committee - Robin Wagner-Pacifici (chair), Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Eva Illouz

Honorable Mention Recipients:
Paul McLean – The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence
Andrew Perrin – Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life
Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics
Co-winners:
Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere
George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa

Message from the Chair: Cultural Sociology and Cultural Studies - Mark D. Jacobs, George Mason University

Writing in Lingua Franca, a now-defunct journal of academic politics and gossip, the NYU physicist Alan Sokal (in his personal life, a left-wing activist) recounts the outline of a satirical article he successfully submitted to the cultural studies journal Social Text, whose editors didn’t recognize the article as a spoof of the stiflingly politicized quality of their scholarship. The heavily-footnoted Social Text article was hilariously entitled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (1996).

Call for Papers - Comparative Sociology

Comparative Sociology (www.brill.nl/coso) is a quarterly international scholarly journal published by Brill of Leiden, Netherlands dedicated to advancing comparative sociological analyses of societies and cultures, institutions and organizations, groups and collectivities, networks and interactions. In addition, book-length manuscripts may also be submitted to the related book series, International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology (www.brill.nl/issa).

2008 Suzanne Langer Student Paper Award - Sociology of Culture Section, American Sociological Association Report to Council - David Smilde Committee Chair

The 2008 Suzanne Langer Student Paper Award committee consisted of Susan Pearce of East Carolina University, Paul Lopes of Colgate University, and David Smilde of the University of Georgia. By our February deadline we received twenty-one electronic submissions. Our overall impression of this group of papers was amazement at the quality of the submissions. Fully a third of them were already published, and many of them would probably have been serious contenders in the general article competition.

2008 Winners of Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article - ASA Section on the Sociology of Culture

The Geertz Prize committee (Wendy Griswold, Paul Lichterman, Jeremy Straughn), having reviewed the twenty-seven articles nominated, has awarded the prize to two articles. These are, in alphabetical order:

Lizardo, Omar. 2006. “How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks.” American Sociological Review 71: 778–807.

and

Mizrachi, Nissim, Israel Drori, and Renee R. Anspach. 2007. “Repertoires of Trust: The Practice of Trust in a Multinational Organization amid Political Conflict.” American Sociological Review 72:143–165.

The Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power, and History (2007-08) - Elizabeth Cherry and Erin Winter, University of Georgia

The Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power, and History (GCPH) is organized by Elizabeth Cherry, David Smilde, and Erin Winter and receives funding from UGA’s Center for Humanities and Arts. Following a workshop format, the GCPH emphasizes collaborative, in-depth discussion of papers in progress. In 2007-08, the workshop discussed papers presented by five visiting and six local scholars. While the particular foci of our work varied greatly, the papers cohered around three main issues in the sociology of culture—methods, narrative, and symbolic boundaries.

Culture and its Others: The 2008 Anniversary Symposium - Suzanna Crage (Indiana University), Nikole Hotchkiss (Indiana University), Sara Skiles (University of Notre Dame), Michael Strand (University of Notre Dame)*

Clifford Geertz once argued that if you want to know what a science is about, don’t look at its theories or findings, or even listen to what the scientists themselves say about it. Instead, look at what the scientists actually do. Thus, to understand anthropology, it is necessary to understand ethnography; similarly, if this year’s culture symposium was any indication, to understand cultural sociology it is necessary to understand “boundary crossing.” Crossing disciplinary boundaries and borrowing knowledge from other fields is what cultural sociologists actually do. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the ASA culture section, then, this year’s symposium—“Culture and Its Others”—asked the 150 section members in attendance to consider how cultural sociologists relate, borrow, learn and share knowledge and approaches across a range of disciplinary boundaries.

Fourth Annual UCSD Culture Conference: Calhoun, Swidler and Others Address “Crisis, Emergency, and Global Processes” - Lisa Nunn, UC San Diego

Emergency and Crisis as cultural categories were the theme of this year’s Annual Culture Conference at the University of California, San Diego on May 9, 2008. Now in its fourth year, this event took on a global perspective.

Culture Section Jumble - Kate McFarland