Cultural Sociology

In this article, I analyse how Brazilian sociology articulates the relationship between culture and power, which is one of the central problems of cultural sociology. I analyse two theoretical traditions, culturalism and institutionalism, which traverse different areas of Brazilian sociology. Broadly speaking, the approach of culturalism takes culture as a dimension that structures power relations (culture over power), while institutionalism considers that the structure lies in the institutionalised power relations that produce the cultural codes of political culture (power over culture). I conceive of political culture as an expression of an Ethos, and show how it is considered either as a cause or an effect of the historical nation building process. In Brazilian sociology, the notions of culture and power pose a permanent interpretational challenge for both classical and contemporary scholars. This makes the discussion about the relationship between culture and power a key element in understanding past and present historical processes in Brazil. I seek to understand the variations of meaning regarding these notions and their implications for Brazilian sociology. In this sense, this article is a cultural sociology of cultural sociology in Brazil, or, in other words, an analysis of the cultural foundations of Brazilian sociology.

Using data from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, I investigate whether education’s influence on the likelihood of visual and performing arts attendance in the USA varies by race-ethnicity. The results reveal that education increases the odds of attendance for both Whites and non-Whites, but it has a stronger impact upon the former than the latter. Unlike Whites, education’s effect on attending visual and performing arts activities for non-Whites is insignificant for high school diploma recipients when compared to their counterparts with some college education.

These findings suggest a racial-ethnic bias in visual and performing arts attendance net of education that connects to the European roots of “legitimate” art in modern western society and the history of US racial discrimination. European Americans have dominated the USA’s social institutions for centuries and have held prejudices against minorities’ artistic capabilities since the colonial era. Consequentially, they could determine which arts genres provide valuable cultural capital. Conversely, minority art communities have only recently acquired the resources for self-sustainability. This likely limited their ability to develop formal institutions within their own communities to support the arts.

This article aims to lift the veil on white sexuality by studying how young people ‘perform’ this within the Rotterdam techno scene. It relies on previous work that has highlighted that white sexuality is, like whiteness itself, rarely recognized, let alone referred to as white. This is also true of the sexuality practised by young people in the techno world. Our extensive observations and in-depth interviews conducted for this study identified that both ravers and cultural studies scholars construct an image of techno as a sexual ‘counter-space’ in which erotic agency can be experienced away from the confines of traditional hook-up sex. This space, they argue, is produced by the affective powers of ecstasy and electronics, which help young ravers to have a heightened sense of control over their sexual impulses, muting sexual desires that lead to hooking-up and, simultaneously, enabling them to feel ‘loved-up’ on themselves on the dance floor. We contend that, with discourses like these, ravers unintentionally reproduce white superiority in the ways they claim transcendence over their own sexual culture and corporeality.

Architecture is inextricably entangled with time. Illustrating this point, the article explores two moments of architectural production centred on London in the mid-19th century: the ‘Battle of the Styles’, a struggle over the social meaning of historicist architectural design and its suitability for state-funded public buildings; and the proto-modernist Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. While ostensibly involving different cultural orientations to pasts-presents-futures, both cases reflect how political claims can involve the mobilisation of temporalised architectural forms. The general contention is that architecture is a culturally experimental space through which nation-states and architects seek to orientate otherwise abstracted notions of temporality. While there is no straightforward or singular correspondence between temporality and architectural sites, the built environment is pushed and pulled by states’ politicised claims regarding time and temporality. Architecture always involves the materialisation of particular and partial visions of the world as is, as was, and as could be; temporal registers in the built environment involve the stabilisation of some ways of being and the displacement of others. The political basis of these processes can be illuminated sociologically.

Physical attractiveness is increasingly framed as a meritocratic good that involves individual benefits, such as higher wages or success in the partner market. Investing in one’s physical appearance is thereby seen as a means to increase one’s human capital. While the positive effects are well documented, its counterpart, the dark side of physical appearance, has received much less attention from social science research. This article sheds light on the negative effects of physical appearance using a theoretical framework based on the cultural sociology of Bourdieu, integrating both structure and agency perspectives. Using data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) from 2014, we demonstrate that unattractiveness is socially stratified by economic, cultural, and social capital. The article highlights the relevance of cultural factors (e.g. forms of cultural capital and cultural practices) for the analysis of the interplay between physical appearance and stratification as well as the relevance of physical appearance for cultural sociology.