American Cultural Sociology

Although scholars have argued that plot is key to narrative's effects, no one has studied empirically how people interpret stories told along different plotlines. This has left unexamined an important puzzle: how do time-and place-specific beliefs intrude on the operation of plot genres in shaping narrative's meaning? On the basis of a survey and focus-group study of how women interpreted first-person stories of an acquaintance rape told along different plotlines, we argue that what stands in the way of adapting old stories to new purposes is less plot than character. The same events can be inserted into different genres of plot to yield quite different moral messages. But audiences' expectations of characters are more rigid. Time-and place-specific ideas about how people properly behaveabout how ambitious women should be, for example, or how emotional men should belimit audiences' ability to imagine them playing the roles associated with different plots. Plots are transposable; characters are less so.

In this article, I examine the case of a viral film entitled "Plandemic," its sequel, and the epidemiologist that is its main subject, and develop a cultural sociology of conspiracy theorizing through the concept of "performative conspiracy." I argue that the Plandemic case represents a cultural performance within the (ongoing) serious social drama of the Covid-19 pandemic. I focus primarily on the "alternative" narrative put forth by the Plandemic case; however, the (Western/US) "mainstream" narrative becomes clear as well. Both call upon the same sets of binary oppositions, chief among them, science vs. blind faith, truth vs. deception, and evidence vs. supposition. Audiences, who are themselves fragmented and differentiated, are exposed to multiple narrative paths. Within the mainstream, they encounter an apocalypticturned romantic story, in which science, evidence, and the truth, the sacred trio, will lift humanity out of perilous danger. Plandemic's alternative narrative begins in a tragic tone and builds apocalyptically into a tale of terror, waged by the very same forces of science, truth, and evidence, to create a "plague of corruption" that will "kill millions." To conclude, I reflect on the potential implications of the increasing popularity of conspiracy theorizing about Covid-19.

Avec plus de 86 acceptions déjà répertoriées, la notion de communauté n’a rien à envier à celle de culture, synonyme dans certains contextes, et qui a connu à bien des égards une fortune semblable. Il en va de même pour les succès scientifiques et mondains d’« identité » ou de « tradition ». Comment un concept peut-il imposer l’illusion d’une telle transparence ?

This article aims at sketching a synthetic and original approach to decrypt the process of the formation of national identities. The theoretical framework proposed tries to combine different perspectives of nationhood (‘from above’ versus ‘from below’, constructivist versus performative and so on), which may appear to be contradictory but can be actually complete each other in a heuristic and novel way. The process of nationhood is explained within two major interactions. The first refers to the relationship between the materiality and practices of everyday life, on the one hand, and the engendered representations and symbolic patterns, on the other hand; the second focuses on the inputs provided by communication systems and the motivations/strategies of the social agents. The first dimension refers to the referential aspect of national identity, while the second dimension raises the issue of power (the role of institutions, devices and strategies) underlying its formation. This model also aims at establishing a research agenda for the study of national identities in all their complexities and dimensions. An example is presented to showcase its heuristic value. A comparative study of two LinkedIn migrant groups illustrates how different types of habitus, linked to social structures, engender, when transformed into meaning through specific communication processes, distinct patterns of thought about nationhood.

In this article, I compare contemporary mnemonic battles concerning three issues: child sexual abuse, the Vietnam war and American slavery. Analyzing the rhetorical dynamics between contentious mnemonic agents in each case, I detail the formal cultural strategies that define different mnemonic disputes in order to elucidate the ways agents use autobiographical memories in contests for mnemonic authority. Mnemonic battles take three principal forms: disputes over the existence, the nature and the relevance of the past. Each case I present is most aptly characterized as one of these three types. More, each illustrates a different way that actors achieve the formal alignment and social interdependence of autobiographical and collective memory claims when defining a contested past. Such an approach provides a useful analytic guide to understanding public struggles for mnemonic authority in a contemporary cultural milieu marked by a new ethic of autobiographical storytelling. Beyond demonstrating how dynamics of contention form around memory, I show how agents coordinate personal and collective memories to shape the dynamics of contention.

Realism has predominated in discussions about the coronavirus pandemic where politicians, authorities, and commentators debate over the substance and consequence of scientific facts. But while biology played a crucial role in triggering the pandemic, the resulting crisis developed through a social process. In this paper, I argue that the coronavirus pandemic in Britain was successfully framed as a crisis, but that the ritualization of solidarity normally generated by this meaning was compromised. Through an analysis of media coverage and official statements from the government, I trace the discursive construction of the crisis through the deployment of battle metaphors. Building on this discourse analysis, I show how the symbolic alignment of the pandemic and the Second World War revived symbols and tropes that informed the cultural construction of pandemic heroes. To explain why the intensity of the crisis framing was not matched in ritual performance, I consider how the government...

Since the World Health Organization (WHO, February 2, 2020) reported that the spread of coronavirus disease has been accompanied by a "massive infodemic," the COVID-19 outbreak has become a national and international battleground of a struggle against misinformation. Fact-checking outlets around the world have been actively counteracting false and misleading information surrounding the pandemic. In this article, we conceptualize fact checkers in terms of the "interpretative power" that journalism holds in processes of political performances (Alexander in Soc Theory 22(4): 527-573, 2004, in: The performance of politics. Obama's victory and the struggle for democratic power. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 2010). Drawing on virus-related fact checks from Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) database, we make two arguments. First, we argue that the new phenomenon of specialized "fact checking" might be considered as a further explicitly differentiated element of Alexander's model of cultural performance, which fulfills a double duty: trying to contribute to further "de-fusion" (separating audiences from actors when the latter lack authenticity and credibility) on the one hand, and working to overcome it on the other. Second, we explain how new fact-checking practices have become a reflexive supplement to the news media of the civil sphere that might be able to help the civil sphere's communicative institutions to defend truthfulness in a manner that contributes to democracy.

This paper documents an exchange for healthy human subjects of medical experiments brokered and carried out by a labor union (The United Mine Workers of America) and the federal government (The US National Institutes of Health). The organizations legally established the exchange in a 1960 contract; jobless people took part in the exchange throughout the decade; and the exchange served as a ''prototype'' for additional exchanges between NIH and organizations in blue-collar communities. The exchange was successful because the organizations negotiated two ''dissonant descriptions'' of the same action to manage two different audiences-one legal, one vernacular. The case engages three issues in cultural sociology. First, the episode illustrates how philosopher GEM Anscombe's concept of ''action under a description'' solves a puzzle embedded in studies of culture-inaction and offers a way to more systematically study symbolic action. Second, it demonstrates precisely how organizations, paradoxically, use the language of voluntarism to accomplish market goals. Third, it illuminates the terms of engagement with new commodities and markets in the age of biocapital and in doing so helps deepen understandings of moral markets.

This article probes the evaluative frameworks applied to the consumption and consumers in a large corpus of texts written between 1920 and 2000. Scrutinizing English-language texts dealing with the virtues and shortcomings of market capitalism, the analysis first dissects the representation of consumption and consumers and the consequential post-WWII transition from a conceptualization based on purchasing power to one based on the idea of consumer choice and consumer well-being. The article then explores the increasing centrality of consumption and consumer choice in the debates between market-critical progressives and the advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. It is only after the decline of neoconservatism and the rise of the consumerist libertarian stance that consumption comes into its own as the central point of contestation between progressives and those who pushed for a more laissez-faire brand of capitalism. Once the theme of consumption took center stage, it allowed the marketcritical progressives and their laissez-faire adversaries to meet each other in a common thematic arena. When consumerist libertarianism began to dominate on the right-wing side of the debate, the contest between critics and proponents of expansionary market capitalism metamorphosed into a genuinely ideological struggle over the significance and meaning of consumer choice and consumer well-being.

Using the case of the undocumented immigrant youth movement, we examine how successful political mobilization depends upon the availability and adaptation of symbolically powerful cultural schemas. Analyses of 33 in-depth, semistructured interviews and participant observations suggest that the existence of a cultural schema of 'coming out,' and the undocumented immigrant youth movement's innovative use of it, allowed movement leaders to address potential adherents' fears of publically revealing their immigration status and promote social movement participation. In adapting this cultural schema to the needs of this new movement context, national leaders increased the resonance of 'coming out' by pairing it with the schema of immigrants living in 'the shadows.' California leaders practiced additional cultural innovation by using 'coming out' to refer specifically to public and risky forms of disclosure and using other language to identify safer or more private forms of disclosure. We show how talk of coming out is shaped by positionality, so that movement leaders and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals are more likely than others to speak of coming out as undocumented. This extends previous research on the importance of culture for facilitating successful political mobilization.

Concerned with how nationalist cultural codes are embedded in everyday life, studies of "nationalism-from-below" mistake nationalist meanings for the contents of official messages. Rather than studying the reception of spectacles and symbols produced from above, the article suggests looking at unofficial nationalism and focusing on the nationalist meanings of traditions and customs-especially those related to ritual and food-that are common to broad strata of the population but have almost no state involvement. Using the anthropological history of Israeli Independence Day as an exemplary case, and focusing on how people spend their country's national day, the article examines the failure of official nationalism to design the holiday's popular traditions. Next it surveys the development of what has become the popular mode of celebrating the day-the picnic and cookout. In due course, this practice was ritualized and iconized as representing "Israeliness," an identity that is more ambivalent than the seamless images circulated from above. I argue that the meanings of unofficial practices, because of their triviality, lie not in the symbolic codes they enact, but rather in the synchronicity that ritualizes and iconizes a "way of life," forms national solidarity, and imbues the performance with nationalist meanings.

Since the World Health Organization (WHO, February 2, 2020) reported that the spread of coronavirus disease has been accompanied by a "massive infodemic," the COVID-19 outbreak has become a national and international battleground of a struggle against misinformation. Fact-checking outlets around the world have been actively counteracting false and misleading information surrounding the pandemic. In this article, we conceptualize fact checkers in terms of the "interpretative power" that journalism holds in processes of political performances (Alexander in Soc Theory 22(4): 527-573, 2004, in: The performance of politics. Obama's victory and the struggle for democratic power. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 2010). Drawing on virus-related fact checks from Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) database, we make two arguments. First, we argue that the new phenomenon of specialized "fact checking" might be considered as a further explicitly differentiated element of Alexander's model of cultural performance, which fulfills a double duty: trying to contribute to further "de-fusion" (separating audiences from actors when the latter lack authenticity and credibility) on the one hand, and working to overcome it on the other. Second, we explain how new fact-checking practices have become a reflexive supplement to the news media of the civil sphere that might be able to help the civil sphere's communicative institutions to defend truthfulness in a manner that contributes to democracy.

The study of rumor is used to examine claims about "live organ harvesting" told by a new religious movement, Falun Gong. The veracity of the rumor is debated and its truth status remains unsettled. I argue that an unsettled rumor told by a marginal community is a problem for the sociology of rumor. This problem is partly resolved by examining how the rumor fits within the culture of its carrier group. An analysis based on ethnographic materials and publications shows how mythic significations evoked by the rumor within Falun Gong influenced how participants communicated to non-Falun Gong audiences. Advocates of the rumor attempted to align its details with deeply held meanings shared within the Falun Gong community. Because non-Falun Gong audiences did not share these mythic associations, such rhetoric made the rumor less plausible to general audiences. How rumor details were represented contributed to public skepticism but has no bearing on the truth status of the underly...

In this article, we highlight the social processes involved in the construction of cultural trauma and repair, and how these processes are digitally mediated. In national news coverage following hurricane Katrina, a number of displaced residents saw threats to a particular cultural identity they shared with the city. This motivated them to blog. Through their blogging, they took part in constructing cultural trauma and repair. Drawing largely on interview data and qualitative content analyses of blog posts of New Orleans resident bloggers, we show how geographically scattered individuals used blogs to foment cultural trauma by directing each other's attention to these threats. We then demonstrate how they engaged in cultural repair by producing culturally affirming counter-narratives and physical collective actions. With this research, we build on existing literature in cultural trauma theory in three ways. We identify the nuanced and long-term processes that underlie the construction of both cultural trauma and repair. We highlight how digital media allow users to transcend the boundaries between carrier agents and audiences. We illustrate the duality of digital media in the creation of cultural trauma and repair, where the media serves as both the field upon which collective identity is contested, and a tool wielded in these battles.