A Methodological Framework For The Sociology of Culture

A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture
Author(s): Wendy Griswold

Source: Sociological Methodology, Vol. 17 (1987), pp. 1-35
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/271027
Accessed: 30-01-2019 16:35 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

extend access to Sociological Methodology
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 16:35:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
A METHODOLOGICAL
FRAMEWORK FOR THE
SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE
Wendy Griswold
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Drawing on analytic techniques from the humanities and social s

propose a framework for research in the sociology of culture th
sczentific and sensitive to the particular characteristics of cultura
this paper, I maintain that to be complete and persuasive,
analysis must include (1) the intentions of creative agents, (2) the
reception of cultural objects over time and space, (3) the comprehension of
cultural objects in terms of intrinsic and heuristic genres, and (4) the
explanation of the characteristics of objects with reference to the social and
For their suggestions on this essay, I thank Misty Bastian, Mabel Berezin,
Jeffrey Brooks, Paul DiMaggio, John Hall, John Padgett, Bernice Pescosolido,
Katheryn Ragsdale, Ann Swidler, Harrison White, Robert Wuthnow, members of
the Culture and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago, and two anony-
mous readers for Sociological Methodology.
2 WENDY GRISWOLD
cultural experience
framework based on
criteria of parsimo
competing explanat
framework and vali
to a puzzle regarding the changes a Western popular fiction genre
underwent when it was reproduced in Nigeria.
An assumed gap between the "two cultures" of the sciences and

the humanities has handicapped the sociology of culture. The two
research strategies that reproduce this dichotomy-the institutional
and the interpretive-are rarely brought into articulation with one
another. This division of labor, between those who offer subtle yet
ungeneralizable interpretations of cultural phenomena and those who
reduce cultural phenomena to univocal indicators of social institutions,
has created a social science of culture that is either inattentive to
science or insensitive to culture. Thus, the term sociology of culture, so far
as it has been realized empirically, is an oxymoron.
On the one hand, interpretive approaches to culture, which
replicate traditional humanities procedures in their focus on cultural
objects in all their complexity and richness of nuance, produce striking
insights into cultural phenomena, but they do not encourage general-
ization or testing. In Marxian interpretations, for example, generaliza-
tion is unnecessary because relations of social power, ultimately based
on economic relations and mediated through hegemonic institutions,
are assumed to generate the sociocultural dialectic. The goal is to
figure out the mutual construction of class interests and ideological
expressions through social and cultural practice. In neofunctionalist
interpretations, which privilege neither side of the sociocultural interac-
tion, generalization is unhelpful because of the variability of human
experience, and perhaps even undesirable because "there are enough
general principles in the world already" (Geertz 1983, p. 5). The
neofunctionalist's goal is to dissect particular symbolic systems operat-
ing under the most abstract of social laws. Like slivers of dialectical
moments, such bits of local knowledge are rather more tasty than they
are scientifically nutritious.
On the other hand, institutional approaches, which emphasize
collective action and the organization of social resources in the produc-
tion of symbolic goods, initially seem more satisfying insofar as they
METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE 3
lead from sociological strong suits and operate at a level somewhere in

between the laws of the social system and the idiosyncracies of concrete
cases. They make causal claims that can be tested and generalized to
other cultural data; hence, they seem more scientific. But theirs is the
satisfaction of modest aspirations; they make little attempt to investi-
gate the multiple, often ambiguous characteristics of cultural objects
per se. These institutional studies have different objectives, and for
them, culture is an index of some social reality. Thus, they treat
cultural objects as if they were the same as other objects of production
and consumption, except possibly for their aura and their related
ability to demarcate status positions (e.g. Bourdieu 1984). An approach
to culture that is uninterested in meaning, or in how cultural objects
differ from porkbellies, seems destined to continue to play a marginal
role in cultural, though perhaps not social, analysis.
Is it possible to respect, to respond to, and to explain or use in
explanation the particular characteristics of cultural data-shared
significance embodied in form-while retaining the persuasive tech-
niques of social science? Cultural analyses that do more than simply
describe how cultural production and consumption are organized are
typically directed toward one of two ends. Either analysts try to
account for cultural objects themselves, as in research that asks why a
painting, a shared belief, a scrap of religious doctrine, or a television
show took the form that it did, or they try to make inferences about the
nature of a society from the nature of its cultural objects. Both types of
investigation require the analyst to make hypothetical interpretations
about the meaning of the cultural items in question.1 In either case, it
' Robert Wuthnow (forthcoming) argues that since the subjective is ulti-
mately inaccessible to sociologists, they would be wise to go "beyond the problem
of meaning" and concentrate on the synchronic mapping of cultural systems, i.e.
on the relations among symbols. Using observable discourse about meanings that
can be found in a text, survey responses, or other behavioral residues, sociologist
should examine relationships among the elements of the particular discourse and
the relationship among these and other cultural components from other contem-
poraneous discourses. Through such examinations, one can develop a matrix of
symbolic elements, thereby arriving at the cultural configurations and categories
operative in a particular time and place through which all experience is mediated.
Such mapping is worthwhile, but Wuthnow's discouragement regarding meaning
may be premature for three reasons. First, meaning need not be conceptualized
only at the individual level (Wuthnow is surely right that sociologists are ill
equipped to undertake this) or only at the level of entire social orders (as
interpretive and hegemony theories would have it). Rather, it can be viewed as a
4 WENDY GRISWOLD
is tempting to reduce the cultural data to a single pertinent dimension

(the meaning) and show that this dimension is analogous to, depends
on, or contributes to a social phenomenon. Furthermore, in either case,
standard scientific desiderata of validation, replication, and generaliza-
tion tend to seem irrelevant, if not impossible.
The time for an advance beyond this methodological impasse
seems ripe: Institutional boundaries between the social sciences and the
humanities are becoming blurred (Geertz 1983), and the field of the
sociology of culture is becoming more organized and self-aware.2
Encouraged by these trends and drawing on methods developed for
sociology, cultural anthropology, art history, and literary criticism, I
propose a bridge whose foundations, firmly planted on both sides of the
disciplinary gap, will support modes of analysis that are at once more
firm and more supple than those currently available. This paper will
attempt to show how the sociology of culture can both subject its
cultural interpretations to the definitional precision and validation
criteria typical of the social sciences and be as sensitive to the multi-
vocal complexity of cultural data as art history or theology. Only when
the insights and findings of sociology of culture meet these two method-
ological objectives can the artificial gap between the two cultures be
closed and sound theory construction become possible.
A cultural methodology that does not throw meaning overboard
in some sort of disciplinary triage begins by focusing cultural analysis
on the point at which individuals interact with a cultural object. I use
the term cultural object to refer to shared significance embodied in form,
i.e., to an expression of social meanings that is tangible or can be put
into words.3 Thus, a religious doctrine, a belief about the racial
property of specifiable social categories and groups, which are empirically acces
ble and comparable. Second, the mapping of a cultural system is fundamentall
just semiotic elaboration; sooner or later the sociologist will want to draw conn
tions to the social order. The third problem is leakage: A lot of cultural data g
lost when one looks only for commonalities across symbolic systems. This price m
not need to be paid.
2 The new Sociology of Culture section of the American Sociological
Association is evidence of this.
3 This definition of cultural object, and its pragmatic specification in analy-
sis, is somewhat narrower than Talcott Parsons's use of the term. Parsons defined a
cultural object as any pattern reproducible in the action of another person (see
Alexander 1983, pp. 40-41). A cultural object and its partial meaning must be
capable of being articulated by an agent, either a social actor or the analyst of
social action; a pattern to which no particular meaning can be attached would not
be included under my definition.
characteristics of blacks, a sonnet, a hairstyle, and a quilt could all be

analyzed as cultural objects; the analyst must designate just what the
object in question is. The analysis centered on this interaction is
thereby organized by four actions: intention, reception, comprehension,
and explanation. One dimension of this typology is defined by the
person performing the action-the social agent or the analyst. The
other dimension is defined by the person's attitude toward the cultural
object's meaning-constituted in the object or embedded in the social
world. Thus, the social agent intends and receives; the analyst compre-
hends and explains. Intention and comprehension involve understand-
ing the meaning of the cultural object as constituted by the object
itself, internal to it, while reception and explanation involve framing
the cultural object in relation to some larger, external system of
meaning. Thus, the four actions delineated by crossing the two dimen-
sions involve the agent and the analyst in both the internal character
and the external connectedness of the cultural object.
This essay will discuss each of these actions in turn, starting with
intention. Intention is the social agent's purpose in light of the con-
straints imposed on him or her in the production and social incorpora-
tion of cultural objects. In my discussion of intention, I make extensive
use of the insights offered by art historian Michael Baxandall (1985) on
the reconstruction of creative agents' probable intentions. Reception,
which is considered next, is the social agent's consumption, incorpora-
tion, or rejection of cultural objects. Diffusion over time and space adds
a particularly interesting complication to reception analysis; I illus-
trate some of the pitfalls of temporal diffusion by considering E. P.
Thompson's (1966) argument regarding Methodism's role in the devel-
opment of working-class consciousness. Comprehension is the analyst's
consideration of the internal structures, patterns, and symbolic carrying
capacities of the cultural objects. Genre is the key here, and I suggest
that the sociological analysis of culture would benefit from incorporat-
ing the useful formulations of genre offered by literary critics E. D.
Hirsch (1967) and Adena Rosmarin (1985). Explanation is the analyst's
drawing of connections between comprehended cultural objects and
the external social world, connections that are mediated by reception
and intention. In my discussion of explanation, I begin by comparing
the analytic strategies of sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann
(1964, [1967] 1970) and cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1983).
Using their common ground as a base, I proceed to assemble the
elements discussed into a general analytic framework for cultural
6 WENDY GRISWOLD
analysis. Finally, I turn to the critical issue of validation. After setting

out three validity criteria for the sociology of culture-parsimony,
plenitude, and amplitude-I demonstrate their application with an
extended example from my own research on popular Nigerian fiction.
INTENTION
Agents, particularly producing agents, have intentions. Central

to the analytic framework proposed here is some social agent, or
agents, interacting with some cultural object. Sociologists must not
reduce intention to an agent's individual psychology or consciousness,
but this does not mean that the concept is not analytically useful.
While it is futile to try to get at the subjectivity of any particular
individual, it is possible to reconstruct probable intentionality of any
agent whose context and behavior are known.4 The purpose of doing
so is to separate the individually idiosyncratic from the socially in-
fluenced by determining the degree to which intentionality has been
shaped by social elements, which may be shared, and the degree to
which cultural outcomes are themselves shaped by intentions.
The simplest and most typical approach to intention is to
attempt to connect a cultural object to its producing agent by asking,
for example, why Piero della Francesca organized the elements of his
painting Baptism of Christ in a certain way, or whether John Donne
intended his poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" to be about
death or departure. Taking the former as an illustrative problem,
Baxandall (1985) suggests that the tracing of plausible intention
amounts to the reconstruction of the "charge" and "brief" that an
artist held at the time of his creation of some particular work. The
charge, a general and immediate prompt for an agent to act, may be
internally generated or may come from an external and quite explicit
source. Piero was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the church of
Sansepolcro sometime around 1450; thus, in Baxandall's terms, Piero's
client gave him the charge, "Altarpiece!" This charge entailed a set of
social expectations (local wisdom about altarpieces) and the particular
concerns of those wealthy enough to commission them: An altarpiece
' Arguments for the necessity of determining intentionality in historical and

sociological texts can be found in Skinner (1969) and Jones (1977).
must represent a recognizable scriptural passage, it must be instructive,

it must be emotionally moving and able to instill reverence, it must be
clear and memorable, and it must reflect the taste and wealth of the
client who paid for it.
For any given charge, the analyst may construct a brief, which
is a list of constraints and influences, clustered by their sources and
types, that together constitute the artist's probable intention. Piero's
brief would look something like this:5
Immediate circumstances: (1) church in Borgo Sansepolcro, Piero's
native town; (2) altar width requires tall, narrow painting; (3) client
requires that all, or almost all, of painting be done by Piero, not his
students; (4) client requires that subject be Christ's baptism.
Piero's training and experience: (5) fifteenth-century Italian artists'
familiarity with commensurazione (interdependent proportion and per-
spective); Piero's particular expertise (he wrote treatises on mathe-
matics and perspective); (6) Piero's contract, which probably stipulated
colors and amount of gilding to be used; (7) Piero's 1439 stay in
Florence, when Donatello was finishing the Cantoria of the Cathedral,
a monumental work of public art.
Local conditions: (8) community expectations regarding the di-
dactic function of altarpieces; (9) familiarity of learned members of
community with biblical narrative of Christ's baptism (Matthew 3);
(10) shared assumptions regarding the mystery and cosmic significance
of Christ's baptism as a historical event.
Physical media and constraints: (11) working on two-dimensional
plane, using paint and gilding; (12) picture had to be organized
vertically because of tall, narrow shape of central panel of the al-
tarpiece imposed by small size of the altar.
Aesthetic conditions: (13) Piero's normal employment of rose color
to denote importance; (14) Piero's normal representation of angels
statuesque, undifferentiated, no off-shoulder garments, no wreaths; (15)
conventional representations of angels in Renaissance paintings of
5 The actual contract between Piero and his client for the Baptism no
longer exists, but a 1445 contract for one of his similar commissions does.
Baxandall does not set out the brief as a numerical list in his chapter on Piero, so I
have followed the format he used in an earlier chapter (see pp. 26-32). I have
constructed the brief only as it relates to one strand of Baxandall's analysis, that
having to do with the spatial arrangement of the pictorial elements; the entire brief
would be considerably longer.
8 WENDY GRISWOLD
Christ's baptism, even though not found in biblical account; (16) other
conventions of Renaissance religious painting.
Such a brief has several useful features: It includes constraints
from the narrow, institutional market and from the broader, cultural
market of ideas; it incorporates elements from the agent's biography,
including information on other artists to whom he responded; and it
draws on the mentalities of the artist's social group and the groups to
which he had to appeal.
Baxandall's purpose in constructing a brief is to solve puzzles
associated with the art object in question. For example, longstanding
puzzles in the Baptism of Christ include (a) the prominence of the three
very different angels in the left foreground, (b) the removal of the
spectators, some dressed in oddly Byzantine costumes, into the right
background, (c) the change in the river around Christ's feet (the water
behind Him is reflective, but the water below Him is transparent), and
(d) the remarkable resemblance of the landscape to the region around
Sansepolcro. After seducing his readers with an iconographical ex-
planation based on symbolism of the doctrine of the Three Baptisms,
Baxandall offers a far simpler problem-solving approach-the prob-
lems having been set by the brief. Given his need to tell the scriptural
story (items 4, 8, and 9 in our brief) on a tall, narrow plane (2, 11, 12),
and given his expertise in commensurazione (5), Piero chose a vertical
organization in which the narrative moves forward in space as it moves
ahead in time. According to this reading, the oddly dressed men in the
background are the Pharisees and Sadduces mentioned in Matthew.
The three angels are, in separate actions, cueing the observer to attend
with devotion to the central action (8, 10). The strange drape one angel
seems to be wearing is in fact Christ's cloak, indicated by its rose color
(3, 13). The unusual wreaths, off-shoulder garments, and differentiated
attitudes of the angels were drawn from Piero's study of Donatello's
dancing angels (3, 7, 14, 15). The water below Christ's feet becomes
transparent because the original painting had a shower of gold coming
from God, a divine spotlight that illuminated the water around Christ's
feet; traces of the original gilding are still visible in a few spots (6, 1 1).
The localization of the story bespeaks the need to communicate the
scriptural message directly and intimately to the residents of Sanse-
polcro (1, 4, 8, 10); the use of such localizing techniques is a common
device in Renaissance religious painting (16). Baxandall emphasizes
the efficiency and parsimony of such an "iconographically minimalist"
reading of the painting: There are no hidden meanings, just a painter's

intentional solutions to some problems set by his charge and brief. Such
a reading does not bar more elaborate iconographical analysis-cult-
ural works do contain complex symbolic matter after all-but corre-
sponds to the scientific sense that simpler explanations are to be
preferred over complex ones because of their greater generalizability.
Notice that intention, represented by the agent's brief and the
relationship of that brief to the cultural outcome, is discovered not by
getting inside the agent's head-this naive reductionism is repudiated
by those who lay the greatest emphasis on intentionality-but by
constructing probabilities to answer some questions about cultural
objects. E. D. Hirsch (1967), a literary critic who has given the fullest
account of such probabilistic procedures, poses this problem: How
might one decide whether John Donne, in his poem "A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning," intended the reader to understand the lovers as
being parted by death or by distance? The internal evidence of the
poem supports either reading; therefore, the critic must look externally.
An examination of how the word valediction was usually used in the
early seventeenth century, how Donne used the word in other poetry,
what Donne's circumstances were at the time of writing the poem, and
what reading makes the best use of the "compass" metaphor within the
poem leads to the strong probability (which can almost never be a
certainty for a longstanding cultural puzzle, unless entirely new evi-
dence should appear) that Donne intended his "Valediction" to refer
to departure, not to death.
Nor is intention to be confused with consequences.6 A cultural
object may fail to realize the intentions of its creative agent in two
ways: Either the agent may be unable to formulate the object in accord
with his intentions, or the object may not "work" as intended on its
recipients because of an inappropriate setting, misunderstandings, in-
terpretations at odds with the agent's own, and similar communicative
infelicities. If Piero had been unable to obtain gold, he would have
failed to carry out his intention of glorifying Christ with a heavenly
spotlight; when the gilding wore off, his intention of indicating sacred-
ness was no longer realized because of a material failure. His original
6 In this respect, as in others, parallels between the present discussion of

intention and speech-act theory will be noticed. The cultural object is like Austin's
10 WENDY GRISWOLD
intentions, as constructed by the analyst, are not altered by the

subsequent reception of his work.
RECEPTION
As in the Donne example, a focus on intention usually involves

the question, What made a cultural object the way it is, i.e., why did a
social agent involved in its production give it its particular characteris-
tics, which the analyst has specified in terms of structures, symbols, or
patterns? A different type of question (or a different phase of the
analysis) asks, How is the cultural object received? Varieties of this
type of question might be concerned with the object's differential
impact among different social categories or groups, its influence, its
popularity, its meaning for those who appropriate it. For all such
questions, the social agent is the receiver. (Of course, a receiver may
also be a producer in a different agent/object interaction. Piero
"received" Donatello's angels and incorporated them into his own
intentional brief for the Baptism.) Hans Robert Jauss (1982, pp. 20-45)
has described literary reception as a reader situating a text against his
"horizon of expectations," a horizon based on his social and cultural
experiences. For the analyst attempting to reconstruct such a horizon,
Jauss offers seven suggestions (all of which may be extended beyond
Jauss's specifically literary concerns): (1) take the past reader's point of
view; (2) understand the history of the genre and the literary frame of
reference at the time of the work's appearance (the initial horizon); (3)
examine the effect of the work on its audiences; (4) find the question
that the work originally addressed; (5) locate the work diachronically
by understanding its historical position in literary history; (6) locate it
synchronically by understanding the system of contemporary literary
works at its historical moment; and (7) relate literary history to general
history by showing, among other things, how literature affects its
readers' social horizon of expectations. The substitution of artist for
(1962) performative speech act: Its very existence is supposed to perform some
action. Intention is like elocution: The cultural object, like the speech act, is
designed to have some force and is directed toward a certain objective, although
the intended objective in both cases may not be achieved. Moreover, cultural
objects are often intended to work like indirect speech acts, that is, by implication,
given a certain context and presupposing that the recipient possesses a certain
knowledge (Searle 1975).
(implied) reader in at least the first six of the above the

similarities between Baxandall's and Jauss's programs; the seventh
(and its reverse) is the particular concern of both Marxist literary
critics and sociologists. Thus, the receiver's horizon and the producer's
brief are analogous constructs; they are ways by which the analyst
makes sense of the interaction between the social agent and the cultural
object. The construction of a receptive horizon, like the construction of
a brief, is an exercise in probability.
There are at least five types of reception, which are related but
not congruent. These are interpretation (the meaning-construction
produced by any particular agent or group of agents), market success
(popularity, indicated by commercial success, by number of converts,
or by some other measure of immediate esteem accorded to a cultural
object), impact on fields of cultural reference (a cultural object's
influence on the framing of other cultural objects), canonization (the
acceptance of a cultural object by that elite group of specialists who
may legitimately talk about value), and endurance (the persistence of a
cultural object over time at either the elite or popular level). These
forms are interactive, but their mutual relations are neither obvious nor
inevitable. Art historian Francis Haskell (1976) offers one especially
convoluted example: Early Italian painting enjoyed little popularity
among English collectors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-
ries, but after the Napoleonic Wars, English artists, returning to Italy,
rediscovered many of the "gothic" Italians like Giotto. Their champi-
oning triggered a revival of interest among collectors in the 1830s and
1 840s. But in 1850, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-a group of
artists who, though knowing rather little about early Italian painting,
felt Raphael and the Renaissance masters had been overrated-
alarmed conventional thinkers and, as a consequence, depressed the
market for early Italian paintings. The Pre-Raphaelites cloaked their
own artistic manifestos in an air of mysterious significance. Victorian
public indignation toward this school, whose members were suspected
of being papists, blasphemers, and imposters, was projected back on
the early Italians ("the sins of the sons were visited on the fathers").
Paradoxically, the momentum of the rediscovery of early Italian
painters was restored only by the growing agreement that these " primi-
tives" should not be held responsible for the unfortunate development
in contemporary art; instead, they could be happily subsumed under
the favorite Victorian banner of progress, for after all, they had been
the forerunners of Raphael. Such a case, which exemplifies Jauss's
12 WENDY GRISWOLD
second, fifth, and sixth theses particularly well, reveals the instability of
receptive horizons over time (see also Griswold 1986).
Because cultural production and reception are such fluid cate-
gories, the analyst must be careful to specify both the agent and the
cultural object of any particular interaction under consideration. For
example, a novel is a cultural object that is the product of a producer's
brief (intention). It is received by a reviewer, who may be understood
as operating within a certain horizon of expectations, and this reviewer
interprets and frames the novel. The reviewer then has a charge to
produce a new cultural object ("Review!"), and his interpretation and
framing become part of his brief, as do his market circumstances and
intended audience (the receivers for whom he is producing). The
readers of the review receive (interpret, applaud, despise, frame, value,
remember) the review and may do the same with the original cultural
object (the novel); they may also produce new cultural objects (another
novel, a term paper on the novel, a verbal account of the novel or of
the review to a friend), working the novel and perhaps the review into
the intentional brief. This example also raises the issue of genre (of
novels, of reviews, of term papers): Any of these genres, or types of
genres, may be addressed in terms of Jauss's seven theses, but they
must not be confused. The issue of genre specification will be addressed
below, but the point for now is that the analyst must keep straight the
specific framing of the particular social agent/cultural object interac-
tion under consideration while recognizing that his or her overall
investigation may involve any number of discrete interactions among
different agents and objects.
A consideration of reception demonstrates the indispensable role
comparison plays in elucidating cultural meanings for social actors.
Comparison is useful even for developing hypotheses of originating
intention (Donne's typical use of the term valediction compared with
that of his contemporaries), but sociologists, although they must rely on
intention as a tool for investigation, are usually more concerned with
significance, i.e., with the relationship between a cultural object and
some human beings beyond its creator.7 Here, neither an assumed
7Here, I am adopting only part of Hirsch's distinction between meaning

("that which is represented by a text ... what the author meant by his use of a
particular sign sequence" [p. 8]) and significance ("a relationship between that
meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything" [p. 8]).
For my purposes, it is simpler to use the term intention to refer to the creator's
objective meaning buried in a cultural object nor a hypothetical

intentional context of a creative agent are as important as the construc-
tions and reconstructions made by the recipients who interact with the
object, and significant reconstructions are only obvious in comparison
with other constructions. For example, according to Eugene Genovese
(1974), slave owners believed Christianity taught their chattels the
virtues of humility and service in expectation of an otherworldly
reward, so they were tolerant of limited amounts of missionary activity
(so long as the evangelists did not teach dangerous skills such as
literacy). The slaves, on the other hand, constructed a gospel whose
characteristics were quite different from those understood by their
owners-a gospel emphasizing freedom, individual dignity, earthly
salvation, and even a heavenly sanctioned deviousness ("steal away to
Jesus"). Similarly, a recent study of my own demonstrates that three
different groups of recipients regularly construed different meanings
from George Lamming's novel In the Castle of My Skin: American
readers believed it was about race, West Indian readers believed it was
about identity and nation building, and British readers believed it was
a poetic depiction of growing up, without a political or social message
(Griswold 1987). In cases such as these, any discussion of meaning and
significance beyond reconstructions of the originating agent's intention
(whether that of Jesus or of Lamming) depends on systematic compari-
sons.
So far, I have treated the interactions proceeding to and from a
cultural object as if they were static, but this is only a convenient
fiction. Because they are multivocal, cultural objects are never fixed,
and the analyst must be able to treat a cultural phenomenon in terms
of its characteristics as a process, as movement through space and time.
The dynamic nature of a cultural object is perhaps most obvious in its
reception, i.e., in its impact on a human agent. A parallel interaction,
also dependent on culture as process, is influence-the impact of one
cultural object on another. To point out the error of envisioning
influence as only a forward movement over time-A begat B begat C
intended meaning, as Baxandall does, and significance to refer to a relationship

between the cultural object and anyone or anything other than the creator at the
moment of creation (one's past work could come to have new, unsuspected,
significance that was not part of the original intention). Meaning denotes any
relationship between a cultural object and a human agent or, more broadly,
between a cultural object and any other element of the interactive framework;
thus, it subsumes both intention and significance.
14 WENDY GRISWOLD
- Baxandall uses billiard balls as a metaphor of influence: An agent

operating at time 2 bounces off a cultural object created at time 1, and
the position of both is changed by the impact. Haskell's example of the
relationship between the early Italian painters and the Pre-Raphaelites
illustrates this nicely.
Some art historical questions may be approached in relatively
synchronic terms, for example, through Baxandall's concept of the
"period eye," the cognitive style of a particular group at a particular
time and place; but temporal and spatial diffusion are at the heart of
most social scientific investigations. Typical issues and questions involv-
ing diffusion are how French class relations are perpetuated by culture
(Bourdieu 1984), how Soviet newspaper accounts of collectivism and
anti-individualism appeared in the 1920s, well before these became
state policy (Brooks 1986), and how the Western detective novel was
imported and adapted to readers' common sense in Meiji Japan
(Ragsdale 1986). The methodological imperative can be expressed as
follows: If a cultural object produced at time,, place, moves to (i.e., is
analyzed as it exists at) t2p1 or t1p2 or t2p2, the institutional and
causal connections among the elements are multiplied accordingly.
Once again, the analyst must keep this straight.8
In his familiar account of the reception of Methodism by the
English working class, E. P. Thompson (1966) exemplifies some of the
pitfalls of ignoring temporal diffusion and of insufficiently specifying
the social agent and the cultural object. Thompson argues that be-
tween 1780 and 1832, Methodism succeeded "in serving simultaneously
as the religion of the industrial bourgeoisie... and of wide sections of
8 The complexity is compounded by the fact that the analyst may also be
understood as an agent at t p>. This raises the problem of objectivity, for the
analyst is always implicated in his choice and treatment of analytic objects. For
example, a reception study of The Catcher in the Rye has shown the different
responses of readers at t1 (1951), when the novel first appeared, and at t2 (the late
1 950s and 1 960s), after it had become a youth classic and had been belatedly taken
up by the literary criticism establishment (Ohmann and Ohmann 1976). The
analysts themselves, however, exist at t3 (1976). They have an interest in the
ideological underpinnings of the process of canonization and are working at a time
when the construction of the canon is a topic of lively debate in literary criticism.
This position influences their selection of problems and materials. A student of the
sociology of knowledge (an agent at t4) might analyze the scholars who chose to
study canon formation, and so on ad infinitum.
the proletariat" (p. 355). It suited the needs of the former by inculcat-
ing into the latter an "inner compulsion" toward work, discipline, and
asceticism without expectation of profit in this world, and it attracted
the proletariat by its enthusiasm, a theological hodgepodge of enter-
taining emotionalism, community, and consolation. Methodism thus
played a critical role in transforming undisciplined craftsmen and
peasants into the submissive work force required by the industrialists.
This is a plausible thesis, but should we be persuaded by it? To
put the question positively, How might the application of a more
systematic analytic method have resulted in a firmer case for
Thompson's hypothesis? First, it is extraordinarily difficult to pin down
the cultural object-the body of essential Methodist doctrines-in
Thompson's account. Wesley, himself, in keeping with his pragmatic
and experimental approach to theology, was inconsistent in his em-
phases, and from the very beginning, the Methodist movement was
divided between Calvinism and Arminianism, between faith alone and
some attention to works, between enthusiasm and decorum (Knox
1950). Our confidence in the cultural object is not increased by
Thompson's temporal eclecticism in supporting his argument, i.e., by
his reliance on texts ranging from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a best-seller
since the 1560s and omnipresent in English Protestant churches, to Dr.
Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures, which appeared in 1835. Probably the
best solution to the complexity of the cultural object is to restrict our
gaze to a particular agent. Given the time period that Thompson
considers, the best candidate would be Jabez Bunting, "the dominant
figure of orthodox Wesleyism from the time of Luddism to the last
years of the Chartist movement" (Thompson 1966, p. 352). The last
years of the Chartist movement were the late 1840s, well beyond
Thompson's period, but a bit later, Thompson limits his immediate
argument to the period from 1790 to 1830, which he says are the
decades in which Methodism successfully indoctrinated the working
class and the years of "the rise and dominance of Jabez Bunting"
(p. 375, n. 1). Thompson seems to have accorded Bunting dominance
in two periods: 1790 to 1830, and 1811 (the beginnings of Luddism) to
the late 1840s. Therefore, let us restrict this agent's time to the
approximate years of overlap: 1810 to 1830. The task now would be to
designate the cultural object for Bunting at that time-according to
Thompson, it would be a selection of the harshest components of the
Methodist hodgepodge-and to construct a brief that might elucidate,
16 WENDY GRISWOLD
or redefine, aspects of this cultural object. Such a procedure could be

done, but Thompson hasn't done it; most of his evidence, even that
regarding Bunting himself, falls well outside the time period in ques-
tion. One would also have to position Bunting in a social
group-Methodist preachers-and show the degree to which he repre-
sented that group. Even Thompson admits that Bunting's dominance
was by no means complete, and other sources stress the variety of
opinions even among those who remained within the Methodist Con-
nexion. Then there is the question of Bunting's, and Methodism's,
actual impact. Methodist membership never exceeded 4.5 percent of
English adults, and by the time it reached this peak (about 1840),
softening and liberalizing tendencies had been at work for over a
decade (Hempton 1984, p. 12; Thompson 1966, p. 375, n. 1). By
shifting the agent in question from Bunting to some set of recipients,
one could argue that the 4-5 percent who were converted were
especially influential among their working-class peers, insofar as they
tended to be skilled artisans rather than the poorest among the working
class (Hempton 1984, p. 14). But of course, it was this artisan group
that was especially radical in the "radicalism of tradition" (Calhoun
1982), so one might just as well argue that Methodism contributed to
the revolutionary impulses of the time. Thompson himself, contradict-
ing his main argument, lends support to this view in his discussion of
the "reactive" Methodist political rebels who retained the earnestness,
sense of calling, organizational capacities, and sense of personal re-
sponsibility associated with their sect (p. 394).
The purpose of this example is not so much to question
Thompson's thesis as to point out that even such a clever cultural
analysis, sensitive to interpretive and institutional factors, fails to
convince because of a general, and correctable, methodological heed-
lessness. The failure to specify the cultural object, the switching of
agents, the failure to specify the connections between agents and social
groups, and the casual attitude toward temporality cripples Thompson's
argument. What we end up with here-what we too often end up with
in cultural analysis-are some general suggestions implying how a set
of social experiences engage in some mutually reinforcing dialectic with
some cultural objects. Such a dialectic may well exist, but without a
more precise specification of the connecting elements involved, the case
is not firmly established.
COMPREHENSION
For the analyst, comprehension means understanding those

characteristics of the cultural object that bear on the investigation.
Such understanding requires both inclusion-the analyst "takes in"
the object-and utility-the analyst "grasps" the object, "gets a
handle on it," in order to do something with it. But cultural objects
seldom have handles, nor do they come in clearly demarcated units of
meaning to be gathered up like apples. The analyst faces a figure/field
problem: How is he to designate, even provisionally, those characteris-
tics that will be helpful to his explorations of meaning and social
connectedness and that will be available to the understanding of
others, i.e., replicable?9 How is a scientific comprehension possible?
Comprehension entails apperception, the interpretation of a new
cultural object in terms of what is already known. Thus, genre is the
key to analytic comprehension. Genres, as they have been understood
in literary theory, are classifications based on similarities and dif-
ferences. Making generic distinctions involves sorting, seeing the simi-
larities in different literary objects, abstracting the common elements
from a welter of particular variations. Since the Renaissance, the
dominant view among critics has been that genres are arbitrarily
defined; such definitions are often practical, but the critic should not
fall for the "superstition" that genres have any ontological status
(Croce [1922] 1978, p. 449). Like the critic, the sociological analyst,
being practical, may grasp cultural objects through the provisional
construction of genre. Employing a convenient fiction for the time
being, the analyst may treat genre as if it were a property of a cultural
object, thereby emphasizing that object's similarity to and differences
from other cultural objects. Thus construed, genre may be a variable
or a constant in cultural analysis.
Two conceptions of genre that come from literary criticism
provided by Hirsch (1967) and by Rosmarin (1985)-clarify the link
9 Interpretive analyses, unlike institutional analyses have attempted to

designate such characteristics but have been notoriously resistant to methodological
specification. Thus, there exists an impasse between the notion that one rich
interpretation is as good as the next and the notion that sociologists have no
business interpreting culture anyway.
18 WENDY GRISWOLD
between comprehension and genre. In some respects, the two are

explicitly opposed. Hirsch's primary interest in genre lies in its capacity
to offer clues to an author's intended meaning, while Rosmarin sees
genre as a pragmatic decision made by critics to facilitate their
criticism. Hirsch advocates a method of probabilistic analysis to narrow
the field toward an increasingly precise reconstruction of authorial
intention ("intrinsic genre"), while Rosmarin looks for syllogistic ex-
pansiveness (the best genre decision by the critic is that which will
lead to the longest and most fruitful chain of syllogisms). For the
sociological analyst, however, their points of agreement are more
significant. Both regard genre not as some property of the literary text
but as an inherently social relationship. For Hirsch, the relationship is
between the author and the interpreter; the author must work within
the reader's set of generic expectations, or the author's meaning will
not be communicated. Thus, genre is constitutive as well as heuristic.
Rosmarin's concern is also with commnunication, although the agents
she focuses on are critics and their readers. In addition to this shared
concern with the social, both theorists emphasize the historical con-
tingencies of genre, as opposed to some Aristotelean fixity. For Hirsch,
history constitutes the background for the author's generic choices; for
Rosmarin, history is the background for the critic's practical choices. In
both cases, genre is neither obvious nor unchanging.
Previously, I pointed out that there are two types of social
agents in relation to cultural objects: the producer (or originator, or
creator) and the recipient. These may be better understood as phases of
agency, and when the phase changes, the cultural object changes too:
The recipient of a sonnet becomes the producer of another sonnet or of
a critical essay.10 The producing agent has some idea of what genre he
is working in; that is, he intends his cultural object to fit into, or refer
to, one or more known classifications having particular characteristics.
This sense of genre, constitutive in Hirsch's typology, forms a part of
the agent's brief; Piero knew that the genre of altarpieces implied
certain things that all altarpieces had in common. In empirical cultural
10For precision's sake, one should avoid thinking of an agent as a mediator.

Mediation is simply the combination of the reception and production of different
cultural objects. For example, the disk jockey, a classic gatekeeper, selects from a
large number of records clamoring for attention and produces a "Pick of the
Week" or "Top Ten." To say that the disk jockey mediates between recording
artists and audiences is true enough, but it obscures the two separate actions
involved.
analysis, the analyst reconstructing the creative agent's brief attempts

to understand his intrinsic genre. But to comprehend the cultural
object for his own practical purposes, the analyst makes generic
decisions of his own, treating genre as a heuristic in his attempt to get a
comparative handle on the objects in question.
For example, in Thompson's Methodism case, either Wesley or
Bunting could be analyzed as a producing agent. But the genre Wesley
was working in was Anglicanism; his cultural object was a version of
Anglicanism that incorporated his own theological beliefs and doctrines,
for he had no intention of founding a sect that would be outside the
English Church or, in our terms, outside the Anglican genre. Thus,
Wesley's constitutive genre was different from Bunting's, which was
Methodism; Bunting's cultural object was one type of Methodism
within the now well-established Methodist movement. Because their
genres were different-Anglicanism versus Methodism-their briefs
were different. The cultural analyst, before undertaking genre con-
struction in its heuristic sense for his practical research, should attempt
to reconstruct Wesley's or Bunting's constitutive genre and the inten-
tions behind it. Then the analyst may try to comprehend the Methodist
movement as a whole, either by locating it within some broader genre
or by taking it as a genre itself, i.e., as a classification of widely shared
religious beliefs and practices (taken as cultural objects here) distinct
from other religious genres. If he takes Methodism as a genre, he
regards it as a set of beliefs and practices having some common
elements and distinct from other Protestant sects of the time; to
comprehend this genre, he must focus on the similarities among all
cultural objects within the class labeled "Methodist" and clarify the
distinction between objects within and without the Methodist category.
(This appears to have been Thompson's decision, although his empha-
sis on Bunting's harsh variety of Methodism belies his choice of
Methodism as a whole.) The analyst might make different generic
decisions in his attempts to comprehend Methodism. He might take
Methodism itself as a cultural object within the genre of English
Protestant sects, distinct from the established church, or he might
consider the genre to be eighteenth-century European sectarian move-
ments, distinct from contemporary secular social movements, or he
might select one from a number of other possible classifications. In
each case, the analyst makes a decision about genre that has conse-
quences for comparative and causal statements. He sets up a classifica-
20 WENDY GRISWOLD
tion by postulating boundaries that will allow him to perceive common

or varying characteristics among cultural objects within and outside
the genre. Then, at the explanation stage of the analysis, he links these
common or varying characteristics to the external social world.
This process of comprehending the cultural object by establish-
ing provisional, heuristic genres exemplifies Rosmarin's pragmatism.
But I want to emphasize my agreement with Hirsch's contention that it
is desirable to give temporal privilege to the producing agent's mean-
ings, especially including his generic decisions. This helps the analyst
elucidate parts of the cultural object in question, its distinctiveness and
its affiliations, and it enables him to construct better genres of his own
based on their analytical utility. Piero's reconstructed brief provides
data on his intended genre (altarpiece), which can be used as evidence
even when the analyst is focusing on a different genre (Piero's paint-
ings) and asking why one particular work is different from his others.
The sociologist may ultimately be more concerned with significance
than with intention, but the latter is a way to the former.
EXPLANA TION
While comprehension refers to the generic specification of the

cultural object, and intention and reception refer to the interaction of
objects and agents, explanation is the analyst's connection of cultural
objects, through social agents, to the external world beyond the crea-
tive community. My consideration of explanation builds on the theories
of two of the most astute analysts of cultural phenomena: Lucien
Goldmann and Clifford Geertz. Goldmann ([1967] 1970), a Belgian
Marxist sociologist influenced by Lukacs, postulated that over the
course of their histories, social groups (by which he meant classes and
class fractions) develop shared categories of understanding that tran-
scend what any individual group member possesses. The artist, who is
unusually though perhaps unconsciously receptive to the mental cate-
gories of his group, incorpQrates homologues of these categories in his
artistic or literary works. In keeping with this program of "genetic
structuralism," Goldmann defined the comprehension of cultural works
more narrowly than I have in the discussion of genre. For him,
comprehension was the elucidation of structures within the works. In
the case of masterpieces, whose coherence is especially profound by
definition, these structures organize most of the features of the work.
Explanation then becomes a matter of finding homologies between
these structures and the mental structures, or collective categories, of

the artist's social group, which shares a historical position and predica-
ment. In his well-known application of this analytic method, he
connects the tragic vision articulated by Racine and Pascal with the
existential, ultimately political despair embodied in radical Jansenism,
with which they were associated (Goldmann 1964). For example,
Racine's plays characteristically have an authority figure who is both
all powerful and totally impervious to petition, uninfluenced by the
principal characters. Goldmann saw such a figure as structurally
equivalent to the omnipotent, predestining, yet absent God of the
Jansenist movement within French Catholicism. This God, in turn, w
homologous to the French king's position in relation to the noblesse de
robe: The king created them, they were completely dependent on him
for their social being, yet they were unable to influence him in any
way. And the very existence of the noblesse de robe was the result of the
rise of French absolutism: Beginning in the sixteenth century, the
monarch sought to gain power relative to the old nobility by creating a
new administrative nobility. Goldmann's general method, and its ap-
plication to this particular case, may be represented as follows:
Cultural - Structures Mental Social group's - Class Other

objects, structures position relations historical and
especially of social in that in period economic
masterpieces group period factors
Pascal's - Tragic vision- Extreme - Noblesse de - 1 7th-century- Causes of

Pensjes, Jansenism robe France rise of
Racine's absolutism
plays
Comprehension Explanation
Goldmann's explicit concern with m

Geertz's equally explicit rejection of methodological specification be-
yond "thick description." But in spite of his vigorous denial of gener-
alizing intent or systematic procedures, Geertz's actual practice in
interpretive analysis may be schematically represented in similar fash-
ion. As an anthropologist who has studied forms of collective expression
from cockfights to funerary customs, Geertz has considered a broader
range of cultural objects than Goldmann, and his research lacks
Goldmann's special emphasis on masterpieces (although cultural en-
durance seems to weigh heavily). Geertz examines cultural perfor-
mances for their enacted signs and symbols, not just structures, and he
22 WENDY GRISWOLD
is particularly interested in the local cognitive styles that give meaning

to these symbols. In his explanations, he argues that this cognitive style
originates in the social and cultural experience of a society, without
according primacy to the relations of conflict between classes (as
required by Goldmann's Marxist assumptions). One case will illustrate
his implicit methodology. Geertz takes as his cultural object of analysis
the poetry that is improvised and sung, accompanied by music and
dancers, at Moroccan festivals such as weddings (Geertz 1983, pp.
109-17). This poetry embodies certain proverbial themes: the hopeless-
ness of passion, the virtue of assertiveness, the inevitability of death. It
also contains numerous contentious statements, both formulaic (women
are not to be trusted) and particular to the occasion ("See how many
shameful things the teacher [who is present at the wedding feast]
did;/He only worked to fill his pockets"). Indeed, the performance
itself may be a contest between two poets trading insults and trying to
outdo each other. In the performance of this poetry, Geertz finds the
intersection of the sacred and the profane, the intersection of the
divinity of the Quran as Allah's direct word, and thus the divinity of
language in general, and the everyday struggles of human beings to
gain advantages for themselves and their groups. An educational
system that emphasizes recitation of memorized texts and an everyday
style of communication that is combative, manipulative, and eloquent
prepares poets and their audiences to regard oral poetry as charged
with power through its very moral ambiguity, drawn from the region
"between the discourse of God and the wrangle of men" (Geertz 1983,
p. 117). Intention of the producer and reception by the audience are
based on their shared sensibility, or as Geertz put it, "art and the
equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop" (p. 118). The
general structure of Geertz's method, and its specific application to
Moroccan poetry, may be represented thus:
Cultural- Signs and --Matrix of A people's social -A people's social and

objects symbols sensibility and cultural cultural experience
(anything) in performance (local) experience experience (extended)
context (proximate)
Moroc- Sung verses - Glorification Education stresses-Quran as Allah's word,

can in public of language, recitation, habits recitation as worship,
poetry performance, assumption that of agonistic patterns of social
patterns of poetry is vehicle interpersonal conflict (e.g. between
proverbs and for social conflict communication sexes, villages, status
argumentation groups)
This parallel schematization brings out several differences be-

tween Geertz's and Goldmann's styles of cultural explanation. Geertz is
not willing to generalize from one "local" result to another; Goldmann
is, and he is confident about which variables have causal primacy. The
two represent extremes that suggest the intermediate: the possibility of
generalizing beyond the strictly local while remaining agnostic about
ultimate causality in any particular case. Also, while Goldmann con-
centrates on artists and their class backgrounds, Geertz brings in a
wider variety of human agents (poets, wedding guests, hosts who place
certain demands on the poets) operating in and through a variety of
institutions (the performance context of a wedding, an educational
system that emphasizes memorization of texts). Such breadth seems
desirable, at least as an initial strategy, in attempting to understand
complex cultural phenomena without imposing preconceived ideas too
hastily. Yet, while Geertz seems to imply a matrix of sensibility for an
entire society (indeed, for all Islamic societies), Goldmann talks about
the mental structures of distinguishable social categories or groups
within the larger society. Goldmann's program more accurately repre-
sents sociological capacities than do the extremes of either psychologi-
cal reductionism or the assumption that all members of a society share
a common knowledge and sensibility.
Drawing what seems to be most useful from both methods, one
arrives at a framework for cultural analysis that may be schematically
represented as follows:
Cultural- Structures, --Agent- Mentality Matrix of -Social and- Social and

object symbols, and situation local cultural cultural
patterns of social sensibility experience experience
group or (proximate) (remote)
category
Several features of this framework require comment. First (moving

from left to right), the cultural object under examination is identified
by the analyst as anything that fits the general definition of shared
significance embodied in form. The model does not assume that
masterpieces are different from lesser works, that so-called high culture
is different from popular culture, or that tangible cultural artifacts are
different from systems of ideas, beliefs, values, or practices. Cultural
24 WENDY GRISWOLD
objects are distinguished from their surrounding socioeconomic context

not by their ontological status but by their analytic use. When the
analyst attends to the significance, the meaning beyond itself, of a
particular human artifact, idea, or piece of behavior, he may thereby
consider it a cultural object; the same artifact, idea, or behavior might
be considered a commodity or an element of the social structure in a
different analysis.
Second, symbols, patterns of symbols or relations, and formal
structures are available components for the comprehension of any
cultural object. To comprehend a cultural object, one begins with the
genres, distinctions, and comparisons used by the experts on the object
in question. There are two types of experts: the academic specialist on
the subject, and the local informant who actually interacts with the
object in question. For example, sociologists studying a religious sect
should determine the analytic and comparative categories used by
theologians to talk about sects-beliefs and practices, eschatology,
theodicy, liturgy, what the sect is grouped with and differentiated from
-and examine the terminology and assumptions of sect members
themselves. Sociologists studying novels should comprehend their data
using the terms of literary critics-genres like "Gothic novel" or
Kunstlerroman, narrative structure, characterization, themes, imagery,
moral content-and the terms authors or readers use to talk about
novels. Experts' categories do not constitute the sociologist's final
resting point, but in any unknown country, it pays to listen to what the
natives have to say. Then, if the experts' conceptions of genre are
inadequate for the social scientist's purposes, he may provisionally
construct his own genre. Goldmann chose to group Pascal and Racine
together regardless of their intentions, defining a genre of the tragic
vision that he could then link to the politico-economic position of the
noblesse de robe. Similarly, Geertz established an implicit genre of
glorified agonistic language to illustrate the relationship between
Moroccan wedding poems as cultural objects and the Quran as part of
remote cultural experience.
Third, the pivot of the framework is the agent. The agent may
be a cultural producer (prophet, artist), recipient (audience member,
person operating in a particular ideological context), mediator (editor,
preacher, impressario, media figure, arts administrator), or any other
social actor. The essential point is that for a sociological analysis, there
must be a specifiable, observable, behaving agent who interacts with a
cultural object and for whom a probable structure of intention (a brief)

can be constructed. This does not mean that the analyst must be able
to ascertain subjective, let alone conscious, meaning at the individual
agent's level, but it does mean that the analyst should know enough
about the agent's social and historical context, and about his im-
mediate productive or receptive conditions, to produce a justifiable
reconstruction of his intentionality.
Fourth, the agent is understood as someone who subscribes to,
participates in, or reacts to the mentality of some specific social
categories or some more formally organized social groups. Such cat-
egories and groups constitute the intermediate variable between agent
and society. Categories refers to divisions by class, sex, race, ethnicity,
age, cohort, education, occupation, and geographic location, and to
any combination of these typical sociological variables, as in studies of
working-class teenage boys. Groups denotes formal membership or
face-to-face contact. Mentality is a short-hand (lesignation for cognitive
style, orthodoxy-heterodoxy-doxa (Bourdieu 1977), shared knowledge,
common sense, group consciousness, and the rmental structures favored
by Goldmann. Thus, intentions are influencedi by an agent's concrete
situation and by his membership in social categories and groups.
Fifth, the idea of local sensibility has been adopted from Geertz
to distinguish the ways of thinking and behaving characteristic of the
most immediate spatial and temporal context of groups and agents
from those more distant. More than one social category and group
participate in a given local sensibility, which sets the ideological
context for the more particular concerns and attitudes of the group in
question. Conversely, many social groupings cross localities, and in
some types of analyses, this may be the more important consideration.
Sixth, the local sensibility, and any particular group's participa-
tion in it, is shaped by the social (especially economic and political)
and cultural experience of the people in question. Such experience may
be arbitrarily divided between the more proximate and the more
remote, as in Geertz's interpretation of the remote influence of the
Quran through the more proximate patterns cif Islamic education.
Finally, it must be remembered that every element on the
explanatory side of the heuristic is linked to or separated from its
neighbors via social institutions. Flows of influlence are not automat
but are channeled and mediated. This is apparent, for example, in the
transmission of African cultural knowledge (social and cultural experi-
26 WENDY GRISWOLD
ence) to the slaves of the New World (local sensibility).11 Since certain
types of religious knowledge were passed on only through the elders of
the West African peoples from which the slave trade drew, and since
the slave trade was largely restricted to teenagers and young adults,
there was a rupture between remote and proximate experience that
made it institutionally impossible for these elements of African culture,
despite their significance, to reappear in the local sensibility of the New
World. Similarly, much sociological attention has been paid to the
disproportionate representation of certain categories, and not others,
among agents involved in the actual production of cultural objects.
The exploration of social institutions need not be the ultimate goal of
sociocultural analysis, but such institutions do constitute indispensable
variables in the explanation of cultural phenomena.
Now, taking the framework developed in the examination of the
explanatory procedures of Goldmann and Geertz, one may add inten-
tion, reception, and comprehension in terms of genre. The final frame-
work, applicable to all modes of cultural analysis that aspire to deal
with the cultural object and at the same time provide a comprehensive
explanation, now looks like this:
Cultural-Genre: Agent(tip), -Mentality- Matrix of-Social and -Social and

object structures, with intentions of social local cultural cultural
symbols, and receptive categories sensibility experience experience
patterns of horizon of and groups (proximate) (remote)
likeness and expectations
difference
A cultural analysis that pays attention to the elements and connections

of this framework will produce findings that meet our criterion of
sensitivity to the specific characteristics of cultural phenomena and our
scientific desiderata of rigor and potential for generalization.
VALIDI7Y
A methodological framework is only that. It does not constitute

a theory, although its application may generate better theories. Nor
does it address the vital issue of validity. In this final section, I explore
" This example comes from discussions with Orlando Patterson.
the question of validity in cultural analysis using an extended example,

and I use the example to sketch the movement from framework to
theory building.
Validity may be understood in two senses. The narrower sense
denotes applicability or appropriateness, as when a scale measures
what it is supposed to measure. For example, Hirsch (1967) argues that
an interpretation made by a critic is valid if it corresponds to the
meaning intended by the author. But Hirsch goes on to distinguish
between "valid" and "correct," and this distinction bears on the
second sense of validity. The critic, or analyst, can never know for
certain whether or not his interpretation is correct: "The aim of the
discipline must be to reach a consensus, on the basis of what is known,
that correct understanding has probably been achieved" (p. 17). Two
interpretations may both be valid, but they cannot both be correct. If
analysis turns up two equally probable interpretations, further research
should be conducted to determine which interpretation is more
probable, i.e., more consistent with the evidence and with the standards
of the discipline (p. 173). This is the second meaning of validity: An
interpretation is valid if it is deemed sound by an accepted standard of
authority, in this case a discipline.
Using the analytic framework set out in this essay, we can say
that an inference is valid (1) if it connects two or more elements of the
framework and if the connection, or correspondence, is a correct one
based on the best available evidence and (2) if it meets the standards of
social science. Such standards, though not yet specified for cultural
analysis, include parsimony (if two connecting hypotheses are equally
supported by the evidence, the simpler one should be favored), pleni-
tude (if two connecting hypotheses are equally supported by the evi-
dence, the one that illuminates more characteristics of the cultural
object should be favored), and amplitude (if two connecting hypotheses
are equally supported by the evidence and meet the criteria of
parsimony and plenitude, the one that seems to illuminate the greatest
range of cultural objects should be preferred). (Adherence to this last
standard ultimately results in a respecification of the genre in question.)
To determine what constitutes the best evidence, we may follow
Hirsch's suggestion: In the event of conflicting evidence, that from the
narrower class of phenomena should be considered the more weighty.
For example, if we were seeking to understand John Wesley's attitude
toward Arminianism at some point in his career (agent at t,), evidenc
28 WENDY GRISWOLD
from his own writings and actions outweighs evidence from those of
other Methodists (same agent), evidence from other Methodists out-
weighs that from other evangelicals (narrower class of agents), evidence
from his writings and actions near the time of interest outweighs that
from more remote periods, and so on.
Let us apply the framework to an example that includes criteria
of validity and considerations of genre. The topic is contemporary
Nigerian popular fiction, specifically those reworkings of the Western
romance novel formula that are currently written by Nigerian authors
for local consumption. The general question to be investigated involves
cross-cultural transmission: What happens when a cultural genre from
one society gets transported, reproduced, and adapted by another? To
answer this question, the researcher must examine the interaction
between social change and culture. The specific research problem is as
follows: While Nigerian popular romances resemble the formula estab-
lished in Western romances, a significant proportion of them have
endings radically different from the Western model. In Western
romances, a young woman and a young man work through obstacles
and mutual misunderstandings to realize their love for each other.
Many of the Nigerian romances have radically different endings; the
young female protagonist does not end up engaged or married to the
male hero. What accounts for this difference, for this deviation from a
formula that in other respects is adapted rather faithfully? Several
hypotheses occur:
1. Nigerian authors have insufficiently absorbed the essentials of
the Western formula; thus, because of their inexperience with the
genre, they include discordant elements."2 This hypothesis emphasiz
the author's role as producing agent. Testing it would require examin-
ing both the authors' institutional settings (career lines and opportuni-
ties for publication) and their social and educational backgrounds. An
authors' brief could be constructed.
2. Nigerian readers of romance novels are different from West-
ern readers, and these differences, probably attributable to class, age,
12 Ragsdale (1986) has noted a similar pattern in the importation of the

Western detective novel formula into Meiji Japan. Japanese adaptors and writers
did not immediately grasp the role of clues-their own detectives' procedures
depended on a close analysis of social relationships-and their adaptations of the
Western novels often contained clues that were misspecified or otherwise uncon-
nected with the plot. Later writers grew more adept at working with the conven-
tion, although they retained their emphasis on social relationships as well.
and sex, give them different tastes, which their popular authors seek to
satisfy. Here, the focus is on readers as receiving agents. The demo-
graphic characteristics of readers, their intentions, and their horizon of
expectations might have to be discovered to test this. This hypothesis
also depends on an institutional setting in which readers' tastes actually
influence cultural production.
3. Nigerian publishers filter out novels with traditional Western
endings. This is an organizational, production-of-culture argument that
requires the analyst to look for selective pressures of editors and
publishers in their capacity as gatekeepers.
4. The Nigerian conception of love differs from the Western
conception; therefore, the Nigerian treatment of love in fiction differs.
This is an interpretive, reflection argument connecting a cultural object
to remote sociocultural experience. This type of hypothesis is typical of
sociological approaches that take cultural objects seriously and that are
sensitive to their capacities as symbolic, collective representations. Such
an argument often appeals to humanistic concerns (it explains previ-
ously obscure aspects of the cultural object in question) and is hard to
disprove because of its interpretive nature.
5. Not the Nigerian conception of love but their conception of
stories, of narrative structures differs from the Western conception.
Therefore, the treatment of any number of themes in Nigerian fiction
differs from their treatment in Western fiction. Here, the emphasis is on
the persistence of form rather than the reflection of content. This is also
an interpretive hypothesis; thus, it is hard, but essential, to assess its
validity in comparison with the fourth hypothesis.
More hypotheses could be generated, but these are sufficiently
representative for our purposes. Now, by applying the framework to
the hypotheses, we can make an initial attempt to compare their
probabilities.
1. Given the popularity of imported Western romances with
Nigerian readers, and given the commercial institutional context of
popular fiction, it would behoove local authors to figure out the
essentials of the formula, along with appropriate adaptations, quickly.
If the Western formula may be said to have been established in the late
1960s and early 1970s in the West13 (time1, place1), one might expect
13 In this example, the West is Britain, Canada, and the U.S. The romance
formula was originally developed by Mills and Boon in Britain, but the line was
later taken over by Harlequin, a Canadian firm. During the romance boom of the
1970s, publishers in the U.S. were the most active and innovative. Although the
30 WENDY GRISWOLD
that the authors at time2, place2 (Nigerian authors in the late 1970s)
would have made errors but that these errors would begin to disappear
at time3, place2. This has not been the case; while the bulk of Nigerian
romances do follow the traditional Western formula and end with a
marriage, those deviating from it are among the more recent novels.
2. Nigerian romances are published by commercial publishers
whose livelihoods depend on their responsiveness to the preferences of
their market; therefore, the nature of that market is very influential in
publishing decisions. However, there does not seem to be much evi-
dence supporting the hypothesis that particular characteristics of
Nigerian romance readers, in comparison with their Western counter-
parts, influence the endings of romance novels. While romnance novels
are held in low critical esteem in the West, they are not consumed by
readers of meager education or low social class. Like readers of fiction
in general, Western romance readers tend to be affluent, young, and
well-educated members of the middle class; they differ from the
general profile only in that they are overwhelmingly female (Radway
1984). Nigerian readers are also disproportionately educated and
affluent; they constitute a small fraction of their society, for the
majority of adult Nigerians are illiterate in English. They are also
disproportionately Christian, urban, arnd "modern" (Schmidt 1965).
Therefore, for example, they and their families would be far more
likely to reject arranged marriages for individual choice than would
their rural counterparts. Many have received Western educations, as
have a high percentage of their authors. It seems likely that the readers
of the romance novels are also predominantly female, at least in
comparison to Nigerian readers as a whole, since the majcority of
protagonists are female. They may be somewhat younger than their
Western counterparts; literacy is far higher among younger cohorts in
Nigeria, there are more people in the younger cohorts, and a number
of Nigerian romance novels take place in university settings involving
students, something that is unusual in Western novels. Of course, aside
from their educational, class, and age characteristics, Nigerian readers
have vastly different social experiences than Western readers, but there
seems to be no reason to suppose that these differences create different
horizons of expectations regarding the satisfactory outcome of a fic-
formula has developed over the two decades of its existence, its heroines having
grown more independent, more career oriented, and more sexually adventuresome,
differences among the three major producing countries remain slight.
tional love affair. If anything, the Nigerian readers' relative youth

might make them more optimistic.
3. Unlike some publishers of serious literature, Nigerian pub-
lishers of popular fiction are not subsidized; hence, they are entirely
market dependent (an important item in the brief of the publisher-
as-agent in our framework). Nigeria is a signatory of the Geneva
(1952) version of the Universal Copyright Convention, so local pub-
lishers are not competing with pirated copies of foreign books to any
significant extent. Locally produced books tend to be cheaper than
imports, so publishers do not need to offer something different to
compete with imported romances. The same publishers publish books
with traditional and atypical endings. There seems to be no evidence
that they are selecting against traditional stories, and there is no
obvious motivation to do so, so far as we can discern from our brief for
Nigerian romance publishers.
4. The Nigerian and Western conceptions of love may differ,
but this possible difference does not seem to have had much influence
on the popularity of Western-style romances among that segment of
the Nigerian population that reads fiction. If we respecify the genre in
question to be Nigerian fictional depictions of love in any form
(including short stories and chapbooks), we find that as far back as the
1950s and early 1960s, stories depicting individual romantic choice and
advocating a "follow your heart" attitude were the most popular with
Nigerian readers, in spite of strong social norms to the contrary
(Schmidt 1965). Now, taking the genre to be the romance novel itself,
as a single class, we note that Western-authored romances of the
Harlequin variety continue to be immensely popular in Nigeria, out-
selling the locally produced novels. Therefore, we see that Nigerian
readers are clearly not put off by alien depictions of love. Furthermore,
even the majority of locally produced romances have traditional happy
endings (it is the presence of a significant minority of other types of
endings that we are seeking to explain). The reflection theory (different
conceptions of love get reflected in different literary outcomes) is
inadequate because it ignores the actual producing and consuming
agents of popular fiction and because it is insufficiently comparative
across genres.
5. Nigerian readers and authors are close to and familiar with
oral literary traditions and styles. The dominant narrative mode was
oral until the present generation, and oral narrative still predominates
over literary forms in rural Nigeria. Oral narratives are distinguished
32 WENDY GRISWOLD
from written narratives by their episodic structure: One thing follows

another, and the literate pattern in which the early parts of a text
prefigure or set into motion events of the later part is absent. Plot
structures within the African oral tradition are unified by the fact that
a single character is undergoing the series of experiences, not by any
logical or necessary connections (Schmidt 1970). Such narratives have
no endings; they simply break off when the story-telling context
changes. Similarly, the Nigerian romances under consideration here
just seem to break off at some point in the heroine's romantic career;
she has lost her lover but she will get another, or so the episodic
narrative structure, with one woman and several men, seems to suggest.
A comparison of Nigerian romance fiction, detective fiction, and
"literary" fiction shows that the same pattern of loosely connected
episodes and irresolute endings or outcomes not prefigured by earlier
parts of the narrative recurs in all three. These three genres are
narrower, and hence may be assumed to carry more explanatory
weight, than "the romance novel." Thus, if the cultural puzzle is the
occasionally radically different outcomes Nigerian authors choose to
end their otherwise typical popular romances, the hypothesis that the
oral form persists even when Western genres are adapted by Nigerian
writers seems to be most consistent with the existing evidence.
Additional criteria for this explanation include parsimony,
plenitude, and amplitude. The oral-influence hypothesis (5) is clearly
more parsimonious than the related different-conceptions-of-love hy-
pothesis (4), because it does not involve an elaborate symbolic decod-
ing, nor does it attempt to get inside the heads of readers or authors.
(The first three, institutional hypotheses might be equally parsimoni-
ous, but there is considerable evidence against them; institutional
evidence supports the fourth and fifth hypotheses about equally.) The
oral-influence hypothesis meets the criterion of plenitude; i.e., it ex-
plains other characteristics of the cultural objects that were not part
the original puzzle. For example, the Nigerian romance novels show a
relative lack of characterization, background setting, and scenic de-
scription; it is characteristic of oral literature to slight these, although
all three are standard in the Western novel tradition (Schmidt 1970;
Obiechina 1967; Crowder 1966). The hypothesis also meets the ampli-
tude criterion, especially in comparison with the fourth hypothesis; i.e.,
it sheds light on more serious literature and on other popular genres,
such as Nigerian detective fiction.
If subsequent research across a variety of genres continues to

support the oral-influence hypothesis of cultural transmissions from
more to less literate societies, then we will be a step closer to a theory of
the endurance of formal, as opposed to substantive, cultural attributes,
which itself would constitute a considerable advance on the cultural lag
theory. The purpose of this example, however, has not been to promote
such a theory or even to solve the particular puzzle of the atypical
endings; the research on this problem is still under way."4 Instead
example is intended to sketch how a cultural analysis can proceed with
the systematic deliberation suggested by our framework, and to show
how the validity of some hypotheses, even those involved in interpreta-
tion, can be tested.
More generally still, this essay has attempted to raise the
methodological consciousness of those undertaking cultural analysis. I
have suggested an analytic framework that incorporates a full range of
cultural, social, and institutional elements, that lends itself to compara-
tive analysis over time and space, that allows for the assessment of the
validity of different hypotheses regarding cultural-social ties, and, thus,
that contributes to theory development. However, the success of the
essay will be measured not so much by the adoption of this particular
framework as by its- ability to stir debate among cultural sociol-
ogists-debate over research design, variable specification, and the
comparative scientific status, hence persuasiveness, of different cultural
study outcomes. Disciplinary boundaries that lack intellectual justifica-
tion have begun to dissolve, and the field of the sociology of culture is
becoming institutionalized; therefore, the time is right for debate over
such fundamental methodological issues. As is true for any area of
scholarly discourse, the strength of the field will not be manifested by
an agreement over a set of answers and solutions, but by a shared
concern with and controversy over the most important questions.
REFERENCES
ALEXANDER, JEFFREY C. 1983. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Vol. 4. Berkeley

sity of California Press.
AUSTIN, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University
Press.
14 Preliminary findings from comparisons of the romance novel between

Nigeria and the West can be found in Griswold and Bastian (forthcoming).
34 WENDY GRISWOLD
BAXANDALL, MICHAEL. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of

Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press.
BOURDIEU, PIERRE. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans-

lated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
BROOKS, JEFFREY. 1986. "Information and Power: Soviet Mass Print Media
1921-1928." Paper presented to the Culture and Society Workshop, University
of Chicago.
CALHOUN, CRAIG J. 1982. The Question of Class Struggle. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.
GROCE, BENEDETTO. (1922) 1978. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguis-
tic. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. Boston: Nonpareil.
CROWDER, MICHAEL. 1966. "Tradition and Change in Nigerian Literature." Tri-
Quarterly 5:117-28.
GEERTZ, CLIFFORD. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology.

New York: Basic Books.
GENOVESE, EUGENE D. 1974. Roll, Jordon, Roll. The World the Slaves Made. New York:
Pantheon.
GOLDMANN, LUCIEN. 1964. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensees of
Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine. Translated by Philip Thody. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
. (1967) 1970. "The Sociology of Literature: Status and Prob-

lems of Method." Pp. 582-609 in The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader,
edited by Milton C. Albrecht, James H. Barnett, and Mason Griff. New York:
Praeger.
GRISWOLD, WENDY. 1986. Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the
London Theatre 1576-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1987. "The Fabrication of Meaning." American Journal of Soci-
ology 92:1077-117.
GRISWOLD, WENDY, AND MISTY BASTIAN. Forthcoming. "Continuities and Recon-

structions in Cultural Transmission: The Case of the Nigerian Popular Romance
Novel." Poetics.
HASKELL, FRANCIS. 1976. Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and
Collecting in England and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
HEMPTON, DAVID. 1984. Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
HIRSCH, E. D., JR. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
JAUSS, HANS ROBERT. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy
Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
JONES, ROBERT ALUN. 1977. "On Understanding a Sociological Classic." American
Journal of Sociology 83:279-319.
KNOX, R. A. 1950. Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference
to the XVII and XVIII Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OBIECHINA, E. N. 1967. "Transition from Oral to Literary Tradition." Presence
Africaine 63:140-61.
OHMANN, CAROL, AND RICHARD OHMANN. 1976. "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher
in the Rye." Critical Inquiry 3:15-37.
RADWAY, JANICE. 1984. Reading the Romance. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
RAGSDALE, KATHERYN. 1986. "Reading and Reformulation: Western Detective

Stories in Meiji Japan." Master's thesis, Department of Sociology, University of
Chicago.
ROSMARIN, ADENA. 1985. The Power of Genre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
SCHMIDT, NANCY. 1965. "An Anthropological Analysis of Nigerian Fiction." Ph.D.

diss., Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University.
. 1970. "Nigerian Fiction and the Oral Tradition." Pp. 25-38 in
New African Literature and the Arts, vol. 2, edited by Joseph Okpaku. New York:
Crowell.
SEARLE, JOHN R. 1975. "Indirect Speech Acts." Pp. 59-82 in Syntax and Semantics.
Vol. 3, Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan. New York:
Academic Press.
SKINNER, QUENTIN. 1969. "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."

History and Theory 8:3-53.
THOMPSON, E. P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.
WUTHNOW, ROBERT. Forthcoming. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural
Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

A Methodological Framework For The Sociology of Culture

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Methodological Framework For The Sociology of Culture

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture

Author(s): Wendy Griswold

American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

Drawing on analytic techniques from the humanities and social s

An assumed gap between the "two cultures" of the sciences and

lead from sociological strong suits and operate at a level somewhere in

is tempting to reduce the cultural data to a single pertinent dimension

characteristics of blacks, a sonnet, a hairstyle, and a quilt could all be

analysis. Finally, I turn to the critical issue of validation. After setting

Agents, particularly producing agents, have intentions. Central

' Arguments for the necessity of determining intentionality in historical and

must represent a recognizable scriptural passage, it must be instructive,

reading of the painting: There are no hidden meanings, just a painter's

6 In this respect, as in others, parallels between the present discussion of

intentions, as constructed by the analyst, are not altered by the

As in the Donne example, a focus on intention usually involves

(implied) reader in at least the first six of the above the

7Here, I am adopting only part of Hirsch's distinction between meaning

objective meaning buried in a cultural object nor a hypothetical

intended meaning, as Baxandall does, and significance to refer to a relationship

- Baxandall uses billiard balls as a metaphor of influence: An agent

or redefine, aspects of this cultural object. Such a procedure could be

For the analyst, comprehension means understanding those

9 Interpretive analyses, unlike institutional analyses have attempted to

between comprehension and genre. In some respects, the two are

10For precision's sake, one should avoid thinking of an agent as a mediator.

analysis, the analyst reconstructing the creative agent's brief attempts

tion by postulating boundaries that will allow him to perceive common

While comprehension refers to the generic specification of the

these structures and the mental structures, or collective categories, of

Cultural - Structures Mental Social group's - Class Other

Pascal's - Tragic vision- Extreme - Noblesse de - 1 7th-century- Causes of

Goldmann's explicit concern with m

is particularly interested in the local cognitive styles that give meaning

Cultural- Signs and --Matrix of A people's social -A people's social and

Moroc- Sung verses - Glorification Education stresses-Quran as Allah's word,

This parallel schematization brings out several differences be-

Cultural- Structures, --Agent- Mentality Matrix of -Social and- Social and

Several features of this framework require comment. First (moving

objects are distinguished from their surrounding socioeconomic context

cultural object and for whom a probable structure of intention (a brief)

Cultural-Genre: Agent(tip), -Mentality- Matrix of-Social and -Social and

A cultural analysis that pays attention to the elements and connections

A methodological framework is only that. It does not constitute

" This example comes from discussions with Orlando Patterson.

the question of validity in cultural analysis using an extended example,

toward Arminianism at some point in his career (agent at t,), evidenc

12 Ragsdale (1986) has noted a similar pattern in the importation of the

tional love affair. If anything, the Nigerian readers' relative youth

from written narratives by their episodic structure: One thing follows

If subsequent research across a variety of genres continues to

ALEXANDER, JEFFREY C. 1983. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Vol. 4. Berkeley

14 Preliminary findings from comparisons of the romance novel between

BAXANDALL, MICHAEL. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of

. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans-

CALHOUN, CRAIG J. 1982. The Question of Class Struggle. Chicago: University of

GEERTZ, CLIFFORD. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology.

. (1967) 1970. "The Sociology of Literature: Status and Prob-

GRISWOLD, WENDY, AND MISTY BASTIAN. Forthcoming. "Continuities and Recon-

RAGSDALE, KATHERYN. 1986. "Reading and Reformulation: Western Detective

SCHMIDT, NANCY. 1965. "An Anthropological Analysis of Nigerian Fiction." Ph.D.

SKINNER, QUENTIN. 1969. "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."

You might also like