Abstract
Wayne H. Brekhus, an associate professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Missouri, has a long history of research in the fields of cultural sociology, cognitive sociology and social identities. His latest monograph, Culture and Cognition, stands in this line of tradition, although this publication exceeds his earlier work in scope and demand.
Brekhus starts with the observation that thinking is perceived as an individualistic and singular characteristic of man, while in reality, it is deeply influenced by the social and cultural environments of each person. Hence, the individual and how it situates itself in the world, is based on cognitive, on social and on cultural preconditions. Consequently, his main task for this book is ‘to convey the breadth of cognitive sociology and its analytic observations about the social construction of cognitive processes and to demonstrate the social complexities and multidimensionality of social reality’ (p. 20). What Brekhus provides is thus an inductive, pluralistic approach which introduces the reader to the social construction of the self and the social construction of culture.
The book is structured into five analytical chapters and one concluding chapter. In the first chapter, Brekhus acknowledges perception and attention as central processes of cognition and the social construction of reality. They are tied to specific cultures of seeing and framing reality, such as to highlight or ignore social settings and to deliberately direct interpretations into specific ways by framing or priming. The second chapter focuses on processes of ‘classification, categorization, boundary work’ (p. 59ff.), indicating that socially influenced perception, as shown in the first chapter, also leads to socially influenced processes of classification within which boundaries are constructed and maintained. Brekhus analyses this complex by the examples of classifications of race, nature and civilization, purity/impurity metaphors, styles of boundary building and boundary crossing, and emphasizes the fluidity of categorization making. Categories and classifications are necessary for meaning making. They are communicated through narrative strategies such as metaphors, implicit comparisons, categorizations, and analogies. By using the example of cultural frames attached to money, the author emphasizes how meaning making by narrative means often involves moral framing, for example with regard to ‘frugality’, or to constructions of ‘deserving’, and ‘undeserving’. Therefore, cognitive processes like perception, classification and meaning making are important for the construction of social identities with regard to authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility. Hence, identities are multidimensional constructs whose different attributes of the self have to be brought into balance with demands from the socio-cultural context. This adaptability includes for example code switching, identity migration and other forms of identity mobility, in which different identities are employed with respect to the individual, the group, and the culture.
In the last chapter, the author describes how cognitive processes of identity construction are aligned with concepts of how we perceive time, of aspects of individual and collective memory and finally, how temporal framings of events also direct the interpretation of them. Marked (mostly negative) events are deliberately perceived and cause, for example, an overrepresentation of the event in the collective memory and the narrative reconstruction of the past. Highly structured and temporally sequenced talk shows evoke different moral messages; power relations are represented through the temporal order in which people take part in public actions.
In the concluding chapter, Brekhus offers a glimpse of the contributions and possibilities of a cultural sociology of cognition concerning aspects of cognition and social action, of power and social inequalities, and of general social patterns (p. 171).
As Brekhus states, this ‘diversity in what sociologists of culture and cognition study, how they study it, and how they locate and define the role of culture may appear to pose challenges for coherence, but this challenge is also an opportunity’ (p. 193). At least within the frame of this book, Brekhus overcomes this obstacle of coherence and provides an introduction to the topic, which is characterized by very precise and appealing language, and a clear and elegant inductive structure. Nevertheless, this publication should not only be a starter for academics and students. Due to its breadth of examples and contextualization, which include canonical texts as well as the newest research findings, it also is a useful source for researchers of this subject who want to widen their horizons. However, Brekhus’ otherwise excellent study lacks a reflection on the methodological challenges and opportunities. How can we approach the study of Culture and Cognition methodologically and how far do these approaches differ from traditional methods? Nevertheless, the monograph is highly recommended because it manages to give a huge, and complex field of study a consistent, rigorous, and logical structure, which as such not only justifies, but also calls for a further exploration of Culture and Cognition.