This paper brings Bourdieu's trilogy of theoretical concepts habitus, capital and field to bear on the concept of European identity. By employing a framework analysis of secondary qualitative data in the form of in-depth interviews undertaken with young Scottish adults, it is hypothesised that individuals with knowledge or experience of Europe and European culture are more likely to positively identify with Europe and the European Union than those with either little or no knowledge or experience at all. The results support the hypothesis and the argument is advanced that social groups who stand little or nothing to gain from identifying with Europe are indeed highly unlikely to do so. The author offers specific suggestions for future research.
This article takes the main arguments made by Bourdieu in his late work On Television and Journalism and applies them to the empirical case of the production of discursive visions of Italy and the Italians in Britain from approximately 1840 to the present day. In doing so, Bourdieu's field theory is applied in order to examine and compare the range and diversity of the Italian visions produced at around the mid-point of the 19th century — a period of high cultural autonomy in England — with those produced in the present day. In the account of the present day, the dominant assemblage of discursive practices and the fields from which they derive is explicated and the extent to which these visions are shaped by the `audience ratings' mindset is scrutinized.The article concludes by reflecting on the analytical utility of Bourdieu's field theory for understanding inter-cultural representation.
There is today persistent debate in journalism and politics about social generations. Social scientists point out that young(er) people across the planet today seem to be in increasingly similar socio-economic, political and cultural situations. These involve shared forms of experience, as well as means of dealing with often highly challenging circumstances. A major debate at the intersection of social theory, globalization studies and youth studies is whether it makes sense to say that ‘younger’ people across the world today constitute one single ‘global generation’. Such ideas have been promoted by leading social theorists like Bryan S. Turner and Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. The analysis of social generations stretches back to Karl Mannheim’s pioneering statements in the 1920s. It has been argued that the Mannhemian tradition is in many ways outdated, and needs to be subjected to profound refurbishment, so that it may better understand cross-border, trans-national, ‘cosmopolitan’ phenomena, involving global generations and the forces and mechanisms which create them. This paper argues that claims about ‘global generations’ made by the theorists are muddled, especially in terms of conflating generations and age cohorts, and are often deterministic. The problems derive partly from imperfect readings and usages of Mannheim’s original ideas. It is shown that these are much more ‘cosmopolitan’ and attuned to cultural phenomena than critics allege. While the paper is sceptical as to the potential of the global generations concept in general, nonetheless the ongoing relevance of Mannheim for future endeavours to improve uses of it are underlined.
In Fellini-Roma (1972), the film director Federico Fellini includes a sequence about an imaginary ecclesiastical fashion show, a display of ever more outlandish clerical clothing designs. Fellini brought together various elements that, in conventional cultural coding, do not seem to fit together: secular fashion design and catwalks, and Catholic practice and ceremonial. The sequence juxtaposes and intermingles these apparent incompatibles. Surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the nature and significance of this sequence. Yet it is complex, being simultaneously satirical and empathetic, as well as camp and carnivalesque. The paper reaches back in time, reviewing the history of Catholic vestments, to show that the sequence also dramatizes the fact that sartorial fashion and Church garb have overlapped and informed each other historically. The appeal of the sequence for various types of audience has been enhanced in the internet age, and the paper considers how it has become an increasingly ubiquitous reference-point for the fashion industry, bloggers, and cultural critics, especially when the latter want to thematize controversies about male homosexuality in the Church today. Fellini’s presentation of catwalk Catholicism is both a rich object of scholarship, and a multivalent vehicle used by actors for various contemporary purposes.
What constitutes the field of ‘cultural sociology’ today? Where has it come from, and where is it going? And how has the journal Cultural Sociology played a role in the field over the journal’s 15 years of existence? This article comprises a dialogue between one of the current editors, Christopher Thorpe, and one of the founding editors, David Inglis. Reflecting on these questions, the dialogue also touches on major issues in cultural sociology today; these include the continuing legacy of Bourdieu, the presence of Actor Network Theory, differences between critical-theoretical and Yale School conceptions of cultural autonomy, neo-liberalization processes, the status of postcolonial sociological ideas in the field, attempts to decolonize sociological accounts of culture, and the interplay between mainstream and ‘productively weird’ kinds of cultural sociology.
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