Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

Edited by
Carlo Ruzza, Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, UK
Hans-Jörg Trenz, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Mauro Barisione, University of Milan, Italy
Neil Fligstein, University of California, US
Virginie Guiraudon, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France
Dietmar Loch, University of Grenoble, France
Chris Rumford, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal
Holloway, University of London, UK
Maarten P. Vink, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary themes
in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has turned
increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and the social
and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes comprise both
institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of social transnationalism.
Europeanization and globalization are also about changing power relations as
they affect people’s lives, social networks and forms of mobility.
The Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology series addresses linkages
between regulation, institution building and the full range of societal repercus-
sions at local, regional, national, European and global level, and will sharpen
understanding of changing patterns of attitudes and behaviours of individuals
and groups, the political use of new rights and opportunities by citizens, new
conflict lines and coalitions, societal interactions and networking, and shifting
loyalties and solidarity within and across the European space. We welcome pro-
posals from across the spectrum of Political Sociology including on dimensions
of citizenship; political attitudes and values; political communication and pub-
lic spheres; states, communities, governance structure and political institutions;
forms of political participation; populism and the radical right; and democracy
and democratization.

Titles include:

Luis Bouza Garcia

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE EU
Agenda-Setting and Institutionalisation 1997–2012
Andreas Müller
GOVERNING MOBILITY BEYOND THE STATE
Centre, Periphery and the EU’s External Borders
Apostolis Papakostas
CIVILIZING THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Distrust, Trust and Corruption
Armando Salvatore, Oliver Schmidtke and Hans-Jörg Trenz (editors)
RETHINKING THE PUBLIC SPHERE THROUGH TRANSNATIONALIZING
PROCESSES
Europe and Beyond
Matthias Kortmann and Kerstin Rosenow-Williams
ISLAMIC ORGANIZATIONS IN EUROPE AND THE USA
A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi, and Peter Ullrich (editors)
CONCEPTUALIZING CULTURE IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

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Conceptualizing Culture in
Social Movement Research
Edited by

Britta Baumgarten
CIES Lisbon, Portugal

Priska Daphi
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main, Germany

Peter Ullrich
Technische Unversität Berlin, Germany
Selection and editorial matter © Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi and
Peter Ullrich 2014
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Conceptualizing culture in social movement research / edited by Britta
Baumgarten, CIES, Portugal; Priska Daphi, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt/
Main, Germany; Peter Ullrich, Technische Unversitat Berlin, Germany.
pages cm. — (Palgrave studies in European political sociology)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Social movements—Research. 2. Culture. I. Baumgarten, Britta.
HM881.C646 2014
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Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgements xvii

1 Protest and Culture: Concepts and Approaches in Social

Movement Research – An Introduction 1
Peter Ullrich, Priska Daphi, and Britta Baumgarten

Part I Theorizing Culture from Different

Perspectives beyond the Mainstream

2 Feeling–Thinking: Emotions as Central to Culture 23

James M. Jasper

3 “A Whole Way of Struggle?”: Western Marxisms, Social

Movements, and Culture 45
Laurence Cox

4 Reassessing the Culture Concept in the Analysis of Global

Social Movements: An Anthropological Perspective 67
June Nash

Part II Culture as a Framework for Movement

Activity

5 Culture and Activism across Borders 91

Britta Baumgarten

6 Comparing Discourse between Cultures: A Discursive

Approach to Movement Knowledge 113
Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller

7 Culture and Movement Strength from a Quantitative

Perspective: A Partial Theory 140
Jochen Roose

v
vi Contents

Part III Internal Movement Culture

8 Movement Space: A Cultural Approach 165
Priska Daphi

9 Movement Culture as Habit(us): Resistance to Change in

the Routinized Practices of Resistance 186
Cristina Flesher Fominaya

10 Memory and Culture in Social Movements 206

Nicole Doerr

11 Embodying Protest: Culture and Performance within

Social Movements 227
Jeffrey S. Juris

Part IV Impact of Social Movements on Culture

12 Moving Culture: Transnational Social Movement
Organizations as Translators in a Diffusion Cycle 251
Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak

13 Memory Battles over Mai 68: Interpretative Struggles as a

Cultural Re-Play of Social Movements 275
Erik Neveu

Index 300
Figures and Tables

Figures

8.1 Different degrees of material reference in spatial

meaning-making 174
12.1 Cycle of diffusion 262

Tables

2.1 Five types of feelings 29

13.1 Opinon poll results 280
13.2 The doxa memory of 68 in 1988 283

vii
Contributors

Britta Baumgarten is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for

Research and Studies in Sociology – CIES (Lisbon University Institute,
Lisbon, Portugal). She works on current Portuguese social movements
against austerity, movements of the poor in Brazil, and the changed
frameworks for action of these movements over time. Furthermore she
is interested in transnational cooperation of movement activists and
political participation of groups usually excluded from political deci-
sion making. She studied Sociology at the University of Bielefeld and at
the Instituto Superior de Ciências de Trabalho e da Empresa in Lisbon
and holds a PhD from the University of Duisburg-Essen. She worked
as a researcher in the project “UNEMPOL – The Contentious Politics of
Unemployment in Europe” and as a postdoc researcher of the Research
Group “Civil Society, Citizenship and Social Movements in Europe” at
the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. In 2013 she was a guest researcher
at the NPMS at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis in
Brazil. She is a founding member of the research network “New Perspec-
tives on Social Movements and Protest” of the German Research Council
(DFG), member of the Council for European Studies Research Network
on European Social Movements, and a member of ISA. Her publications
include Geração à Rasca and beyond: Mobilizations in Portugal after
12 March 2011, Current Sociology, 61(4):457–473 (2013); The Mobiliza-
tion of the Unemployed in Germany”. pp. 57–88 in The Mobilization of
the Unemployed in Europe, edited by Didier Chabanet and Jean Faniel,
Palgrave Macmillan (with Christian Lahusen, 2012); Interessenvertretung
aus dem Abseits. Erwerbsloseninitiativen im Diskurs über Arbeitslosigkeit,
Campus (2010); and Das Ende des sozialen Friedens? Politik und Protest
in Zeiten der Hartz-Reformen, Campus (with Christian Lahusen, 2010).

Laurence Cox co-directs the Master of Arts in Community Educa-

tion, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland
Maynooth and runs a PhD research programme in participatory action
research in social movement practice. He is Founding Co-chair of the
Council for European Studies’ Social Movements Research Network,
with Cristina Flesher Fominaya. He is also the co-editor of the global
social movements journal Interface and has published widely on the

viii
 Notes on Contributors ix

alterglobalization movement, social movements and culture, activist

sustainability, working-class community organizing, research methodol-
ogy, and new religious movements. His work has appeared in Rethinking
Marxism; Ecopolitics Online; Irish Journal of Sociology; Sociological
Compass; Emotion, Space and Society; Journal of Global Buddhism;
Contemporary Buddhism; and numerous edited collections. He is the
author of Buddhism and Ireland and co-editor of Understanding European
Movements; Marxism and Social Movements; Ireland’s New Religious Move-
ments; and Silence Would Be Treason: Last Letters and Writings of Ken
Saro-Wiwa. He is currently working on the development of a system-
atic Marxist theory of social movements (with Alf Gunvald Nilsen)
and (with Brian Bocking and Alicia Turner) the extraordinary life of
U. Dhammaloka, a Dublin-born migrant worker who became a Buddhist
monk and anti-colonial activist in early 20th-century SE Asia. Cox has
been involved in social movements for over 25 years.

Priska Daphi is a research associate at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/

Main, Germany. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Humboldt-
University Berlin, a MSc in Political Sociology from the London School
of Economics and Political Science, and a BA from the University of
Maastricht. She is a founding member and research fellow at the Insti-
tute for Protest and Social Movement Studies in Berlin, Germany.
Her research addresses cultural dimensions of social movements,
in particular collective identity, narratives, and images. She is also
interested in transnational dimensions of mobilization and space. Her
recent publications include “Breaks and Continuities in and between
Cycles of Protest. Memories and Legacies of the Global Justice Movement in
the Context of Anti-Austerity Mobilisations”, in The Transnational Dimen-
sion of Protest. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, edited by D.
della Porta & A. Mattoni (with Lorenzo Zamponi, in press); “Collec-
tive Identity across Borders: Bridging Local and Transnational Memories
in the Italian and German Global Justice Movement”, in Understanding
European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-
Austerity Protests, edited by L. Cox & C. F. Fominaya (2013); and “Images
of Surveillance: The Contested and Embedded Visual Language of Anti-
surveillance Protests”, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change,
35 (with Anja Lê & Peter Ullrich, 2013).
She is spokesperson of the Working Group on Social Movements of
the German Political Science Association (DVPW) and board member
of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network on Social
Movements. She is a member of the research network “New Perspectives
x Notes on Contributors

on Social Movements and Protest” funded by the German Research

Foundation (DFG).

Nicole Doerr has a PhD from the European University Institute,

Italy, and an MA summa cum laude in Political and Social Sci-
ences from the Institute d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, France. After
her Marie Curie Fellowship at UC Irvine, USA, and at Harvard Uni-
versity, USA, she started her new position as Assistant Professor in
International Relations at Mount Holyoke College, USA. Her work
addresses questions of political translation in culturally diverse social
movements in Europe, the United States, and in South Africa, and
questions of gender, intersectionality, political discourse, and visual
analysis. Her academic writings have been published in Mobiliza-
tion, Globalizations, Feminist Review, Social Movement Studies, Journal
of International Women’s Studies, European Foreign Affairs Review,
Partecipazione e Conflitto, Berliner Debatte Initial, and European Polit-
ical Science Review. Her most recent book (co-authored with Alice
Mattoni and Simon Teune) is Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social
Movements.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya is Senior Lecturer at the University of

Aberdeen, UK, and Marie Curie Fellow at the National University Ireland
Maynooth. She has an MA and a PhD in Sociology from the University
of California, Berkeley, USA, and a BA summa cum laude in Interna-
tional Relations from the University of Minnesota, USA. She has won
numerous international merit awards, including the National Science
Foundation Fellowship, and the German Marshall Fellowship. She was
Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Sci-
ence at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, before joining the
Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen in 2009. She
has been researching and participating in European social movements
since the early 1990s. Her work has been published in Contemporary
Social Science, Sociological Inquiry, Sociology Compass, International
Review of Social History, South European Society and Politics, and other
journals and several edited collections. She is a founder and editor
of Interface Journal, associate editor of Social Movement Studies, and
founding co-chair of the Council for European Studies Research Net-
work on European Social Movements. She is co-editor of Understanding
European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-
Austerity Protests (2013), and author of Social Movements and Globalization
(2014).
 Notes on Contributors xi

James M. Jasper teaches in the PhD programme in Sociology at the

Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. A former edi-
tor of Contexts magazine, he holds a BA from Harvard and an MA and
PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His work centres
on politics and culture, and his authored, co-authored, and co-edited
books include Nuclear Politics, The Animal Rights Crusade, The Art of
Moral Protest, Restless Nation, The Social Movements Reader, Rethink-
ing Social Movements, Passionate Politics, Getting Your Way, and
Contention in Context. With Jan Willem Duyvendak, Jasper recently
launched a book series, Protest and Social Movements, with Amsterdam
University Press. More information is available on his website, www.
jamesmjasper.org.

Jeffrey S. Juris is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Depart-

ment of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University, USA.
He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California,
Berkeley, and is the author of Networking Futures: The Movements against
Corporate Globalization (2008), Global Democracy and the World Social
Forums (co-author, 2008), as well as numerous articles on social move-
ments, transnational networks, new media, and political protest in
Spain/Catalonia and Mexico. In addition, he is the co-editor of Insurgent
Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political (2013).
He has also conducted collaborative research and published on Occupy
Boston, including a 2012 article in American Ethnologist called Reflec-
tions on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging
Logics of Aggregation. Currently he is working on a new book on free
media and autonomy in Mexico.

Reiner Keller holds a Chair in Sociology at Augsburg University,

Germany. He completed his PhD in 1997 at the Technical University
Munich, Germany, and received his habilitation in 2004 at Augsburg
University. From 2006 to 2011 he was Full Professor of Sociology at
the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His main research inter-
ests are in the areas of discourse research, sociology of knowledge
and culture, risk sociology, social theory, French sociology, and qual-
itative methods. He is currently directing a research project on the
development of qualitative methodologies in French and German soci-
ology since the 1960s (funded by the German Research Foundation,
DFG). Between 1999 and 2009 he was a member of the DFG-funded
Munich Research Center on Reflexive Modernization (directed by Ulrich
Beck), involved in several research projects focusing on the shifting
xii Notes on Contributors

of boundaries between nature and culture in areas such as aesthetical

surgery, doping, brain death, and medicalization of behaviour. Since
2011 he has been Chair of the sociology of knowledge section of the
German Sociological Association; he is also a member of the European
Sociological Association, the Society for the Social Study of Scienes &
Technology, the Association Francaise de Sociologie, and the Association
Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Francaise. His publications
include Michel Foucault (2008), Müll – Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion
des Wertvollen (2009), Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse. Grundlegung
eines Forschungsprogramms (2010, English version to be published in
2015), Doing Discourse Research (2013), and Methodologie und Praxis der
Wissenssoziologischen Diskursanalyse (2012, edited with Inga Truschkat).

Olga Malets is Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Chair of Forest

and Environmental Policy of the Technische Universität München,
Munich. After completing her master’s studies at the Central European
University, Hungary, she was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Insti-
tute for the Studies of Societies, Germany, and obtained her doctoral
degree from the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on the
emergence and national implementation of transnational standards of
good corporate conduct, in particular in the areas of environmental
protection and land use. She examines the role of social movements
and business actors in governing the use of natural resources. She is
presently working on an edited volume project comparing the dynamics
of emergence and operation of private and hybrid forms of transnational
governance across several fields, including environmental protection,
labour rights, accounting, and copyright. Her publications include The
Translation of Transnational Voluntary Standards into Practices: Civil Soci-
ety and the Forest Stewardship Council in Russia, Journal of Civil
Society 9(3):300–324, 2103; From Transnational Voluntary Standards to
Local Practices: A Case Study of Forest Certification in Russia, MPIfG
Discussion Paper 11/7, 2011; The Effect of Expertise on the Quality of
Forest Standards Implementation: The Case of FSC Forest Certification in
Russia”, Forest Policy and Economics 11(5–6):422–428 (2013, with Maria
Tysiatchniouk).

June Nash is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Graduate Center

of the City University of New York, USA. She has taught at Yale Uni-
versity and New York University. She has worked in Chiapas, Mexico,
with Mayas in the late 1950s and 1960s, with tin mining communities
of Bolivia from 1969 to 1984, and with feminist and working-class
 Notes on Contributors xiii

movements in the 1980s. She returned to Chiapas in 1990 to record

the transition from semi-subsistence economy of cultivators and arti-
sans to producers in a world market, and continues to revisit field
sites in Chiapas, Guatemala, and Bolivia. She received the Conrad
Arensburg Award for ethnological studies in 1993, the American Anthro-
pological Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1995, and the
Kalman Silvert Award of the Latin American Studies Association in
2004. Since 2006 the Society of Latin American Anthropologists has
been awarding graduate student papers with the Nash-Roseberry Award.
From 1974 to 1977 June Nash was a member of the board of the
American Anthropological Association and from 1990 to 1993 presi-
dent of the Society for the Anthropology of Work. She is a member of
the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological
Society, and the Society for the Anthropology of Work. Her publications
include We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploita-
tion in Bolivian Mining Communities (1979); Mayan Visions: The Quest
for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization (2001); Practicing Ethnography
in a Global World: An Anthropological Odyssey and Consuming Interest:
Water, Rum, and Coco Cola (2007); and From Ritual Propitiation to Corpo-
rate Appropriation in Mesoamerica. Cultural Anthropology, 22(4):621–639,
2007.

Erik Neveu is Professor of Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes

Politiques in Rennes, France. He received a PhD in Political Science
from the University of Rennes (1981) for research on ideology in
French spy novels and was appointed Full Professor in 1982. He
was Director of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Rennes (2004–
2009) as well as member and vice chair of the executive commit-
tee of the European Consortium for Political Research (2003–2009).
His research topics are social movements, journalism, and the pub-
lic sphere, gender studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of
15 individual or edited books and of numerous articles in French
and international journals (Brazilian Journalism Review, European Jour-
nal of Communication, European Journal of Political Research, Jour-
nalism Studies, Mobilization, Mots, Political Communication, Politix,
Réseaux, Revue Française de Science Politique, and Sociologie du Tra-
vail). His books concerning social movements and/or culture include
Sociologie des mouvements sociaux (5th edition 2010); Introduction aux
Cultural Studies (2nd edition 2010, with Armand Mattelart); and Lire
le Noir: enquête sur les lecteurs de récits policiers (with Annie Collovald,
2013).
xiv Notes on Contributors

Jochen Roose is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology,

Free University Berlin, and Associate Researcher at the Institute for
Protest and Social Movement Studies, Berlin. While working at the
Social Sciences Research Center Berlin, he prepared his doctoral the-
sis on the Europeanization of national environmental organizations
in the United Kingdom and Germany. While continuing to work
on the environmental movement, he further pursued research on
Europeanization, particularly the transnationalization of everyday life
in border regions. Among his funded research are projects on the
effects of the German environmental movement and the attribu-
tion of responsibility in debates on European politics (with Jürgen
Gerhards). An additional research interest is research methods. He is
a member of the German Sociological Association and its sections on
political sociology and sociology of Europeanization. His publications
include Die Europäisierung von Umweltorganisationen. Die Umweltbewegung
auf dem langen Weg nach Brüssel (2003); Vergesellschaftung an Europas
Binnengrenzen. Eine vergleichende Studie zu den Bedingungen sozialer Inte-
gration (2010); The German Environmental Movement at a Crossroads,
Environmental Politics 8(1), (1999, with Dieter Rucht); Neither Decline
nor Sclerosis. The Organisational Structure of the German Environ-
mental Movement, West European Politics, 24(4):55–81 (with Dieter
Rucht, 2001); “Die quantitative Bestimmung kultureller Unterschiedlichkeit
in Europa. Vorschlag für einen Index kultureller Ähnlichkeit”, Kölner
Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 64(2), 2012; “How European
is European Identification?” Journal of Common Market Studies,
51(2), 2013.

Peter Ullrich is head of the research unit “Social Movements, Tech-

nology, Conflicts” at the Centre for Technology and Society, Associate
Researcher at the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Stud-
ies and fellow at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (all at
Technische Universität Berlin). His current research projects are about
governmentality and subjectivity of protesters under video surveil-
lance and about anti-Semitism as a discursive field. He studied cultural
sciences, sociology, German language and literature, philosophy and
theory of science in Leipzig. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the
Free University Berlin (2007) and another doctoral degree (in Med-
ical Sociology, 2011) from Leipzig University, where he was chair
of a research project on biographies of elderly psychoanalysts. His
main research interests are situated in the field of social movements
(cultural, discursive, and governmentality approaches), surveillance
 Notes on Contributors xv

studies, policing, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and anti-Semitism.

He is a founding member of the research network “New Perspectives
on Social Movements and Protest” of the German Research Council,
member of the EU Marie Curie Network “European Protest Move-
ments” and of the Council for European Studies Research Network
on European Social Movements of Columbia University. In addition
to several articles on a wide range of protest-related issues in theory
and methodology, he is the author of several books, such as Gegner
der Globalisierung? Mobilisierung zum G8-Gipfel in Genua [Opponents of
Globalisation? The Mobilisation to the G8 Summit in Genoa], 2003;
Begrenzter Universalismus [Bounded Universalism], 2007; Die Linke, Israel
und Palästina. Nahostdiskurse in Großbritannien und Deutschland [The
left, Israel and Palestine. Middle East discourses in Great Britain and
Germany], 2008; and Deutsche, Linke und der Nahostkonflikt. Politik
im Antisemitismus- und Erinnerungsdiskurs [Germans, the Left and the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Politics in the Discourse on anti-Semitism
and Remembrance], 2013. He has also co-edited several volumes, such
as Prevent and Tame. Protest under (Self)Control, 2010; Kontrollverluste.
Interventionen gegen Überwachung [Loss of control. Interventions against
surveillance], 2009; and Kritik mit Methode? Forschungsmethoden und
Gesellschaftskritik [Critique with methodology? Research methods and
critical theory], 2008.

Sabrina Zajak is Junior Professor of Globalisation Conflicts, Social

Movements and Labour at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr
University Bochum. Until June 2013 she was a research assistant at
the Research Centre for Civic Engagement at the University of Berlin.
She is also a member of the research group “Institution Building across
Borders” of the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies in
Cologne. Between October 2007 and January 2011, she was a PhD stu-
dent at the International Max Planck Research School on the Social
and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE), where she
worked on her PhD on transnational labour rights activism between
state and private politics (completed in May 2011). From August 2009
to February 2010, she was a visiting scholar at the Department of Sociol-
ogy at Harvard University. Her research interests include transnational
governance, transnational political sociology, social movements, civil
society and labour relations in China. Her most recent publications
include Transnational Private Regulation and the Transformation of Labour
Rights Organisations in Emerging Markets: New Markets for Labour Support
Work in China”, Journal of Asian Public Policy, 6(02):178–195, 2013;
xvi Notes on Contributors

Transnational Studies and Governance, in Governance across Borders:

Transnational Fields and Transversal Themes, edited by L. Dobusch, P.
Mader, and S. Quack, 2012. In the Shadow of the Dragon: Transnational
Labor Activism between State and Private Politics a Multi-Level Analysis
of Labor Activism Targeting China (2012); and Weniger Demokratie trotz
mehr Partizipation? Politische Beteiligung unter Internationalisierungsdruck.
Vorgänge, 2:15–22, 2011.
Acknowledgements

The editors are indebted to several people for their help and critical
feedback. First of all, we wish to thank all the volume’s authors, who
patiently responded to our requests for revisions. We are also grateful
to the guests of the two authors’ workshops in Berlin (The two 2-day
long workshops took place in December 2011 and March 2012 and
were financed by the German Research Council) that were organized
with the research network “New perspectives on social moments and
protest”, who commented on earlier versions of the chapters. In addi-
tion to the authors, the following people provided valuable feedback:
Robin Celikates, Hella Dietz, Marion Hamm, Melanie Müller, Andrea
Pabst, Andreas Pettenkofer, Dorothea Reinmuth, Maite Tapia, and Simon
Teune. Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox also contributed
highly useful comments on the first draft of the volume proposal. Our
special thanks go to Jochen Roose for his immense efforts in creating and
sustaining the research network that made this volume a reality. We also
want to thank Philippa Grand and Naomi Robinson from Palgrave
Macmillan for their help in creating this volume. Furthermore, we are
grateful to Matthew Rockey for his careful proofreading and Franziska
Scholl and Moritz Sommer for their organizational and editorial support.
The volume was funded by the German Research Council (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

xvii
1
Protest and Culture: Concepts and
Approaches in Social Movement
Research – An Introduction
Peter Ullrich, Priska Daphi, and Britta Baumgarten

Culture has become a very prominent concept in social movement

research. Despite its omnipresence, however, the concept of culture is
often employed in an unsystematic and unnecessarily limited fashion.
This is crucially due to the fact that culture is frequently used as a sim-
ple addition to existing models rather than as an approach in its own
right. Recent approaches have started to address some of these short-
comings but remain marginal. This volume aims to systematize the
different concepts of culture in social movement research by comparing
approaches, assessing (theoretical) shortcomings, and presenting new
ways of cultural analysis in the study of social movements and protest.

Movements and culture – A long journey

There is a long tradition of including culture in social movement

research. One of the earliest sociological theories, the mid-19th-century
Marxist class theory already constituted a theory of social movements
and culture – though it assigned culture a secondary role. The pre-
dominant reading of Marx and Engels sees ideologies, forms of group
consciousness, and other aspects of the social superstructure (i.e., cul-
ture) as derivatives of the economic base (although potentially fostering
mobilization). Early 20th-century Marxist theories, for example by
Gramsci and Lukács, assigned a larger role to culture as a force in its own
right which shapes social reality, for example through the production
of hegemonic meanings in civil society. They theoretically addressed
the relations between social movements, social change, and culture.
Since that time, addressing these relations has certainly lost none of its

1
2 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

significance, although the degree of attention given to them in academic

protest research has varied significantly over time.
Culture has recently been among those fields of research which have
remarkably and constantly gained in strength and importance. This is
true for the social sciences in general as well as the humanities, where
we can discern a wide institutionalization of scientific institutions on
culture (institutes, university courses, journals, conferences). An impor-
tant factor in this development, of course, was the “cultural turn” of the
social sciences (cf. Chaney 1994; Reckwitz 2000). This turn also applies
to research in the field of social movements, protest, and contention,
where culture is on the rise again.
The introduction of culture in social movement research from the
1980s onwards led to a range of innovative concepts that have influ-
enced literature on social movements considerably. Especially, the fram-
ing approach (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988; Gamson and
Modigliani 1989; Oliver and Johnston 2000), New Social Movement
Theory (Dalton, Kuechler, and Bürklin 1990; Offe 1985; Eder 1986;
Calhoun 1993), and collective identity (Melucci 1989, 1996; Touraine
1981; Taylor and Whittier 1992; cf. Daphi 2011) are cultural approaches
that belong to the core of current social movement theory. They address
questions of how people make sense of their world and actions, how
they render cultural products meaningful, and how they interpret their
grievances as political for themselves and others. These distinct cul-
tural approaches to social movements have produced a number of
empirical contributions (e.g. Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Johnston
1991; Gerhards and Rucht 1992; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Eder 2000;
Haunss 2004; Flesher Fominaya 2010; Daphi 2013). In addition, exist-
ing models, such as the political opportunity structures (POS) approach,
included cultural factors with respect to “cleavage structures” (e.g. Kriesi
et al. 1995; Hutter 2014) and “cultural” or “discursive opportunity struc-
tures” (e.g. McAdam 1994; Koopmans and Kriesi 1997; Koopmans and
Statham 2000; Goldberg 2001; Ferree et al. 2002; Ullrich 2008).
On the conceptual level of defining culture,1 the existent cultural
approaches within this mainstream of current social movement theory
vary greatly (Hamm 2011). They apply Weberian concepts of culture
as values and beliefs (many approaches of the New Social Movement
Theory, see above) – culture as a readily available set of usable prac-
tices (most prominently in Anne Swidler’s toolkit metaphor of 1986) or
culture as organizing schemata of cognitions in the framing approach
(see above) and the cognitive approach (Eyerman and Jamison 1991).2
Only a few of the attempts to date, such as anthropological approaches
 Peter Ullrich et al. 3

(Salman and Assies 2007), apply a broad cultural science-based con-

cept of culture, which Reckwitz defines as a complete “cultural research
programme” beyond disciplinary boundaries, taking a “total” and not
“partial” perspective on culture, allowing the researcher to analyse
“each subject matter of the arts and humanities [ . . . ] as a cultural
phenomenon” (Reckwitz 2004:1). With this broad cultural research pro-
gramme in mind, many shortcomings of the current social movement
theory become apparent, which we will outline in the following.

Conceptual shortcomings

Despite the considerable advances which the aforementioned litera-

ture represents, in several respects the use of concepts of culture in
social movement research has remained limited and fragmented. This
is mainly due to three tendencies of dealing with culture, which will be
elaborated below: First, a focus on certain dimensions of culture; sec-
ond, a narrow definition of culture; and third, a misleading opposition
drawn between culture and structure. In all three of these tendencies,
the persistence of existing models of social movements – which are very
limited with respect to culture – plays an important role.

One-dimensionality of culture
Research on movements and culture often focusses on particular dimen-
sions of culture only. This means that other dimensions as well as links
between the dimensions are often ignored. In this vein, in particular,
the focus on culture in terms of values, frames, or media discourses
means that cognitive aspects are often favoured over emotional, rit-
ual, habitual, and not least collective dimensions of culture. Connected
to the latter, there is also a bias towards a strategic concept of culture
in social movement research. These biases partly have to do with the
fact that scholars only gradually – and often cautiously – incorporate
developments of cultural approaches in anthropology, cultural studies,
(post-)structuralism, German Kulturwissenschaften (cultural science), or
Western Marxism (see Nash and Cox, this volume).
Culture is often considered in cognitive terms. The cautious cultural
turn in social movement studies was characterized by a neglect of other
dimensions like emotions (Jasper 1998; Aminzade and McAdam 2001;
Goodwin and Pfaff 2001). Crucially, this is linked to the predominance
of frame analysis approaches in cultural research on social movements
(Benford 1997). Also, this is often connected to a focus on the indi-
vidual rather than the collective level of culture, locating culture in
4 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

the participants’ heads and reducing it to a cognitive category, or at

least a category with a cognitivist bias. Yet much cultural theorizing
emphasizes aspects which cannot be attributed to individuals or the
aggregation of their actions and cognitions. Artefacts and symbols, for
example, have not only subjective but also intersubjective meanings
attached to them. Hence language, discourse, and other symbolic sys-
tems of meaning can and should be researched as collective phenomena
without attributing them to individual actions and views.
Connected to the cognitive bias, another obvious and challenging
aspect is the “instrumentalist-structuralist lens” (Johnston 2009:3; see
also Pettenkofer 2010), which often guides cultural approaches in social
movement research and therefore addresses mainly strategic questions
of movement success and effectiveness. Ann Swidler’s (1986:277) often-
cited phrase “People know more culture than they use” (our emphasis) is
prototypical of that view. Movements may use culture, but movements
also have culture without always strategically applying it. As rational-
istic and positivist approaches, “resource mobilization” and “political
opportunity structures” have dominated movement research since the
1980s (at least in the United States) and have not been overcome or
complemented by cultural approaches. Cultural approaches rather came
in the shape of culturally enriched variants of them, sharing the basic
focus of their forerunners: They were still dominantly interested in
questions of movement success and were elaborated, focussing on a
certain type of movement typical of the United States (Eyerman and
Jamison 1991:27). Also, research following the very prominent framing
approach – though conceptually not necessarily focussed on strategy –
often focusses on the more or less efficient use of framing strategies
(Snow et al. 1986; Klandermans 1988; Snow and Benford 1988; Gerhards
and Rucht 1992) for which “collective action frames are ideological
tools” (Babb 1996:1033). While success, strategies, and tactics are impor-
tant aspects of social movements, cultural dimensions beyond the realm
of explicit intentions and instrumentalization need to be taken into
consideration too.

Narrow definition of culture

Culture is often also restricted to certain societal subsystems or spheres
of social life (cf. Reckwitz 2004:6 ff.). On the one hand, the term “cul-
ture” may be employed to denote a particular area of society such as
theatre, painting, music, and so on. This constitutes a narrow, sec-
toral application of the concept of culture, sometimes restricted to
“high culture”. Many studies on movement culture employ a similar
 Peter Ullrich et al. 5

notion of culture, focussing on so-called cultural movements (e.g.

Paris 2000) concerned with “identity politics” (Darnovsky, Epstein, and
Flacks 1995; cf. Haunss 2004). The term “cultural movements” has
been coined by the literature on New Social Movements (see Buechler
2000:45 ff.), highlighting that certain movements follow different logics
of action and are primarily concerned with issues of lifestyle, identity,
or self-expression.
On the other hand, there are broad notions of culture. These broad
notions do not limit culture to a certain area of society but claim that
it underlies all social actions. They draw, for example, on Max Weber’s
notion of meaningful action (Weber [1922] 1978:§1). Weber’s stress on
meanings as causes for human behaviour was taken up by Clifford
Geertz (1973) in his argument for the methodological premise of thick
description. In this regard, Geertz famously stated: “Man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to
be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning”
(1973:5). Hence, the concept of culture is applied to all areas of society,
because everything in society is symbolically mediated. As narrow defi-
nitions of culture prevail in social movement research, this broad notion
is employed only very marginally.

Culture vs structure?
Culture is often misleadingly presented as a counterpart of struc-
ture. Many scholars antagonistically distinguish between structural
approaches dealing with material resources, organizations, and insti-
tutions and cultural approaches dealing with issues of reception and
interpretation (e.g. Smith and Fetner 2007). Hence, the structural
and structuring character of culture is marginalized. This antagonistic
labelling ignores key cultural theorists’ insights about emergent struc-
tures of meaning as entities influencing social action in their own right,
such as Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) “symbolic universes”, Clifford
Geertz’s (1973) “webs of meaning”, or Foucault’s (1969) concepts of
“episteme”, “archive”, and “discourse”. These are of high importance for
the formation of social relations, subjects, institutions, and also collec-
tive actors like social movements. Such theories all stress that actors are
motivated or restricted not only by material or hard incentives but by
culture too, which they take into account as a heavy argument against
the idea of free actors (Melucci 1989; Polletta 2006; Baumgarten and
Ullrich 2012). Therefore, these theories have great potential for social
movement research, as will be shown in this volume.
6 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

Addressing lacunas
In this short discussion of the literature, it has become apparent that
social movement scholars often use culture as a “soft concept”, filling
in for questions left unanswered and restricting it to certain spheres.
Particular aspects of culture are simply added to existing models, leav-
ing their theoretical core untouched (e.g. through enriching political
opportunity structures with cultural opportunities). In contrast, the
cultural paradigm aims at analysing the dependency of all social prac-
tices and artefacts of a contingent symbolic order. Recently, some social
movement scholars have also started addressing culture in such a more
comprehensive way – including aspects that so far have been largely
overlooked, such as rituals, emotions, and memories. These contribu-
tions, however, have so far only met with little interest and remain
largely unconnected to mainstream social movement research. We
invited some of the respective scholars to contribute to this volume.
The aim of this volume is to systematize the concepts of culture in
social movement research – with respect to both established approaches
to culture and more recent developments. In this way, this volume
provides an overview on the state of the art of research on cul-
ture in social movements. This includes not only a recapitulation of
approaches but also the systematic search for their shortcomings, blind
spots, and contradictions, as well as the introduction of recent devel-
opments in cultural approaches to social movements that address these
shortcomings. The volume contributes to the systematization of recent
and not so recent cultural approaches in social movement research in
three ways.
First, the contributions in this volume all have a strong conceptual
focus. In contrast to other collections of studies of movement culture,
which largely focus on presenting empirical studies (Laraña, Johnston,
and Gusfield 1994; Darnovsky, Epstein, and Flacks 1995; Johnston and
Klandermans 1995; Jasper 1997; Meyer, Whittier, and Robnett 2002;
Johnston 2009), this volume focusses on theory. With this in mind,
each of the contributions answers critical questions about the con-
ceptualization of culture, which allows the different approaches to
be systematically compared and connected. These questions include:
(1) How is culture defined and how does it relate to other existing
approaches to culture? (2) Which questions can be answered with the
specific approach of each contribution and which questions would be
better dealt with in another approach? and (3) Which aspects of culture
are highlighted in this approach and why? Contributors have elabo-
rated these questions during a series of authors’ workshops in order
 Peter Ullrich et al. 7

to fine-tune the differentiations and connections between the volume’s

individual chapters. Within this framework of a thorough analysis of
theories and concepts, empirical examples from a variety of countries
and types of movements are employed as a means of illustration.
Second, while all may agree on the structuring character of cul-
ture, authors still represent different traditions of cultural research.
Some approaches focus more on the analysis of culture as a macro-
phenomenon, and others on the micro-practices of the production of
culture. The volume thus includes contributions that address the differ-
ent possible relations between culture and movements resulting from
this: Culture as a framework or formative condition of social move-
ments (Part II); social movements’ internal culture – both influencing
movement actions and being shaped by them (Part III); and culture and
cultural change as a result of social movement activity (Part IV). Address-
ing all three relations allows an integral insight into culture’s different
roles in social movements.
Third, within each part of the volume, each contribution addresses
different aspects of culture and different fields for the empirical applica-
tion of the concepts.
After an introduction to each chapter below, we provide three criteria
for distinguishing cultural approaches with respect to the aspects, loca-
tion, and awareness of culture addressed. Each criterion of distinction
will be elaborated in detail, helping to distinguish the approaches to
culture presented in this volume as well as others.

The volume’s structure

The volume is divided into four parts. The first provides a conceptual
introduction and an overview of existing research. Building on that ana-
lytic base, the following parts elaborate on the three levels of relations
between culture and movements.

Theorizing culture from different perspectives beyond the

mainstream (Part I)
Contributions in the first part assess mainstream approaches to move-
ments and culture, identifying several conceptual shortcomings by
juxtaposing them with major cultural theories that so far have largely
failed to enter social movement research, in particular Western Marxism,
anthropology, and the sociology of emotions.
James Jasper examines the role of emotions in culture as a particu-
lar form of what he calls “feeling-thinking”. He shows that while the
8 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

literature on social movement research has begun to address emotions,

its relation to culture remains obscure. Defining culture as mean-
ings shared by individuals, he argues that emotions are key to how
meanings operate – they are a form of thinking rather than its oppo-
site. He shows how emotions influence social movement culture with
respect to internal dynamics such as collective identification, external
engagement, including strategic decision making and recruitment, and
morality.
Laurence Cox points to the neglect of Western Marxist writing within
research on movement culture. He explores the merits of Western
Marxist theories in examining movement culture with respect to their
consideration of three propositions: The everyday, the processual, and
the dialogical (conflictual) nature of movements, which make them an
expression of popular culture.
June Nash analyses movement culture from an anthropological per-
spective – the discipline par excellence for cultural theory. Exploring
mechanisms of cultural change, she shows how social movement studies
can learn from anthropology’s notion of culture and its methodological
perspective that cultural change is not simply a one-way absorption but
a process of both change and adaption.
The following three parts each address a different layer of the rela-
tionship between social movements and culture as described in the
previous section: culture as a framework or formative condition of
social movements (Part II); social movements’ internal culture (Part
III); and culture and cultural change as a result of social move-
ment activity (Part IV). All contributions elaborate on a particular
approach to culture and specify its application to the study of social
movements.

Culture as a framework for movement activity (Part II)

To understand social movements, it is important to analyse them in
relation to their context. In social movement research, this context is
specified in various ways, for example as political opportunity structures
(McAdam 1994) or as discourse (Gerhards and Rucht 1992; Ferree et al.
2002; Ullrich 2008; Baumgarten 2010). Social movements act embed-
ded in a framework, and culture is an important part of this framework.
Their degree of freedom to act is partly restricted. Not only does the con-
text of social movement action define opportunities and restrictions for
the movement, but it also affects their cultural assets at a less reflected
level (habitus, rituals, structures of knowledge). Yet, contributions differ
in their conception of the relevant contexts.
 Peter Ullrich et al. 9

Britta Baumgarten focusses on the impact of cultural differences

on activism of social movements based in different countries, thus
highlighting the role of national contexts. She argues that cultural dif-
ferences related to nation states are structured in a certain way that
differs from other types of differences between social movements. To
illustrate this argument, she outlines five causes for national differ-
ences: (1) national politicians as a target of social movement activism;
(2) country-specific media systems and a national focus of media atten-
tion; (3) legacies of prior policies and their impact on civil society infras-
tructure; (4) prevalence of cultural models; and (5) the state’s impact
on collective identity. Differences between movements from different
countries are not only to be understood as obstacles for cooperation but
also as fruitful sources of new ideas.
Peter Ullrich and Rainer Keller introduce the Sociology of Knowledge
Approach to Discourse (SKAD), which highlights the formative power
of national and other discursive contexts. In contrast to Baumgarten,
they are not interested in transnational cooperation but in understand-
ing national discursive specificities through international comparison.
They apply mainly Foucauldian concepts such as discourse or power–
knowledge regimes to elaborate on the structuring aspects of culture.
Their approach hints at the boundaries of movement knowledge, which
is enabled as well as restricted by its discursive context.
Jochen Roose is interested in culture from a comparative perspective,
too. He argues for the use of quantitative methods in the application
of a theoretical framework for measuring the impact of the nationally
specific distribution of values and beliefs on mobilization strength. He
develops a set of hypotheses for a “partial theory”, specifying the mobi-
lization effects of value patterns in a society or its subgroups, considering
CATNETs, support for movement issues, polarization, previous protest
experiences, and the acceptance and cultural influence of mobilizing
groups.

Internal movement culture (Part III)

The chapters in Part III analyse another layer, namely internal move-
ment culture(s). This part addresses both structuring and structured
aspects of movement culture with respect to internal dynamics. The
contributions analyse culture produced by social movements and its
functions within social movements. Rather than focussing on move-
ment outcomes or the rise of movements, emphasis is placed on
processes of creating internal practices, collective identities, and the
obstacles of cooperation between various actors’ worldviews (Polletta
10 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

and Jasper 2001; della Porta 2008; Polletta 2008). The contributors of
Part III add new perspectives to the research on internal movement
processes: space, memory, habits, and performances.
Priska Daphi focusses on the aspect of space in movement culture
based on a critical review of the spatial turn in movement studies. The
author argues that instead of equating space with social space or an
objective physical structure, space should be considered in terms of spa-
tial meaning-making. Daphi specifies the role of space in movement
culture with respect to three dimensions: (1) the orientation of activists
in their immediate physical surrounding (e.g. during protest events), (2)
their categorization of objects and actors into entities based on physical
proximity, and (3) the synthesis of different places into more abstract
clusters based on symbolic association.
In her contribution, Cristina Flesher Fominaya advocates a habitual
approach to movement culture. While social movement scholars often
address culture in terms of explicitly articulated identities, frames, or
ideologies, the author highlights the implicit and routinized symbolic
systems in movement culture. Tracing the idea of culture as habit(us)
in diverse theoretical traditions, ranging from Durkheim, Mead, and
Goffman to Bourdieu, she shows how a habitual notion of culture is cru-
cial in understanding movement dynamics – in particular, with respect
to barriers to cooperation across movement subcultures, as shown in the
case of autonomous movements in Spain.
In her contribution, Nicole Doerr stresses the role that memories
play in movements’ internal culture. She proposes a multidimensional
approach to memory that addresses both different layers and con-
flicts in memorizing. Critical of defining memory as a subcategory
to other aspects of movement culture, Doerr highlights the multi-
ple forms of remembering through images, stories, performances, and
discourse. Furthermore, Doerr stresses the importance of interactions
between memorizing and silencing for understanding internal dynamics
of movements.
Finally, Jeffrey Juris develops a performative approach to movement
culture. In opposition to more static approaches, the author stresses
that it is primarily through performances that alternative meanings,
values, and identities are created, embodied in social movements, and
communicated to the outside. To illustrate this, Juris identifies multi-
ple dynamics of meaning-making in different types of performances,
namely in macro- and micro-level performances at protest events (e.g.
counter-summits), protest theatre, and musical performances.
 Peter Ullrich et al. 11

Impact of social movements on culture (Part IV)

The impact of social movements on general culture is elaborated in
Part IV of the volume. In particular, this part emphasizes the way in
which culture is structured by movement activity. There has been a
large debate on the outcomes of social movements (Giugni, McAdam,
and Tilly 1999; Bosi and Uba 2009). Apart from the general difficulties
in measuring outcomes of social movement activity (Earl 2000; Kolb
2007), cultural outcomes are specifically hard to measure since they
are often long-term effects, and not directly striven for in a strategic
manner. They may be connected to new (internal) movement practices
and lifestyles which are translated to other environments and there-
fore also contain more unintended consequences than other types of
outcomes. However, there is no disagreement that the impact of social
movements on culture is potentially vast – for example, in the case of
the effects of women’s movements on language, everyday practices, and
the institutionalization of equal rights claims.
Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak observe how cultural change is fostered
by transnational civil society actors who promote the transnational
diffusion of culture and are therefore engaged in translating between
global norms and local practices, which – due to feedback processes –
constitutes a diffusion cycle.
Erik Neveu focusses on the construction of collective memory of
protest events. In his approach, culture is defined as contested social
memory that involves struggles between actors with different degrees
of power. The impact of social movements on culture is conceptu-
alized differently in these two chapters. On the one hand, Malets
and Zajak observe strategically oriented action by a limited num-
ber of actors in a rather short time frame – the transfer of cultural
products, like certain practices or values. These products may change
during the process of diffusion. Initially they are, however, parts of
a culture that are considered as fixed items for export. Erik Neveu,
on the other hand, takes a long-term view on the construction of
a part of a national culture resulting from a major social movement
event: the protests in France in 1968. The movement actors them-
selves are rather marginal in the processes of meaning-making about
this event. They may be conceptualized as strategically acting. This
question is not, however, central for explaining cultural outcomes.
Long-term processes of a conjuncture of actions cause cultural out-
comes that in Neveu’s case were rather unintended by the main actors
of the event.
12 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

Different cultural approaches: Aspects, location, and

awareness of culture

While the volume’s four parts represent basic theoretical dimensions

of cultural analysis, the presentation has also shown the importance
of more criteria in distinguishing cultural approaches to social move-
ments, and we will elaborate on these in the following. In the multitude
of distinctions, three criteria seem of particular relevance: The first con-
cerns the question of which aspects of (a broad notion of) culture are
most relevant or accessible to analysis. The second criterion is whether
culture is looked at primarily from the individual or more from the col-
lective or emergent social level. The third deals with the question of the
extent to which culture is consciously or unconsciously created, used,
or simply “working”. These three questions provide another important
systematization of different approaches to culture in social movement
research.

The realm of culture: Particular aspects

As discussed above culture may be defined both narrowly and broadly.
With good reason, none of the authors in this volume restrict culture
to so-called cultural movements. This would mean, conversely, denying
cultural traits of allegedly “non-cultural” movements (e.g. the workers’
movement). However, contributors to this volume do employ broader as
well as narrower notions of culture: While, for example, Daphi or Malets
and Zajak clearly advocate a broad conceptualization of culture – where
there is nothing in society which is not also cultural – Jasper and in par-
ticular Roose follow a narrower definition, with culture defined in terms
of the distribution of values (Roose) and “feeling-thinking” (Jasper).
Positioning themselves somewhere in between, several contributions
employ the term “culture” broadly but focus on a specific channel of
meaning-making in their concrete analyses: Ullrich and Keller on dis-
course, Doerr and Neveu on narratives, Juris on performance, and Daphi
on space. These contributions highlight the persuasive theoretical power
and attractiveness of a broad cultural concept, while also confronting
the vast practical challenges for a holistic research approach.

The locus of culture: The individual vs the collective

There is a deep distinction which has had long-lasting conceptual impli-
cations within the social sciences and dates back to two of its founding
fathers: Max Weber (e.g. [1922] 1978) and Émile Durkheim (1965). These
two names differentiate theoretical traditions which do not agree about
 Peter Ullrich et al. 13

the locus of the social – a truism in general sociology as well as in protest

research. The contributions of this volume follow both traditions.
The Weberian tradition, on the one hand, is focussed on the inter-
subjective (i.e., social) component of individual behaviour, attitudes,
and values. The Durkheimian tradition, on the other hand, represents
a radical conceptual shift away from the everyday perception of soci-
ety. It insists that the social is an entity in its own right. Consequently,
Durkheimian approaches aim at explaining social facts through other
social facts, while the individualistic tradition in sociology rather sees
the social as the cumulative result of the agency of individuals (and
groups/organizations). Reality is always more complex and often it does
not fit into antagonistic binaries. Yet, for heuristic reasons the dis-
tinction between these two traditions is helpful. Cultural theorizing
usually has a strong affinity with the Durkheimian tradition, reflected
in Durkheim’s reception in ethnology, systems theory, structuralism,
and post-structuralism; however, in social movement research this view
is not always shared, as has been shown in the first part of this
introductory chapter.
Many contributions to this volume locate culture somewhere in
between or, more precisely, combine advantages of both traditions.
However, some tend to emphasize the collective or the individual level
more. Ullrich and Keller, for example, drawing on Foucault, radically
stress that the locus of culture is not the individual but the social,
conceptualized as the movements’ discursive contexts, to which they
ascribe great formative powers. Nonetheless, they also admit that this
emergent-level culture is influenced and transformed through collective
and individual practices as well. Accordingly, other authors stress the
mediating role of performances (Juris), rituals (Nash, Flesher Fominaya,
Juris), collective spatial meaning-making (Daphi), and collective memo-
ries (Doerr, Neveu) in creating and/or stabilizing culture.
Jasper’s and in particular Roose’s contributions – without being
methodologically individualistic – focus more on the individual level.
Jasper examines the role of emotions in the creation of culture –
focussing on a phenomenon that is usually ascribed to the individual.
He argues that emotions are socially shaped and not biological expres-
sions and that the character of a movement is heavily influenced by
(collectively shared) feelings of those constituting it. Roose, on the other
hand, opts for an analytical (i.e., non-holistic) approach to culture for
the sake of enabling quantitative research strategies, which rely on (ana-
lytically) breaking up culture into indicators (values and beliefs) and
their distribution.
14 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

In the cultural analysis of the collective level, authors take into

account many different collectivities. While some look at the culture
of the movement or movement sectors (all contributions in Part III),
others stress the importance of the broader societal cultures movements
are embedded in, like everyday culture (Cox, Nash) or national cul-
tures (Baumgarten, Ullrich and Keller, Roose, Malets and Zajak). Yet
even those stressing the role of national culture do not consider nations
to be cultural containers in the sense of methodological nationalism,
but rather stress the persistence and importance of nation states as
significant formative contexts alongside other contexts.

The actor of culture: Conscious and unconscious agency

In sociological thinking, a central question is to what degree actors (con-
sciously) reflect upon their behaviour and how (or if at all) to capture
those parts of human behaviour that are unconscious or not reflected
on. The answers given also vary among approaches of culture in social
movement studies.
Max Weber’s classical distinction between social action and behaviour
and his four types of rationality are among the cornerstones in con-
ceptualizing actors. Apart from the notion that social action is always
oriented towards the other, Weber argued for the necessity to explain
social action in terms of the actor’s intentions. His four types of action
all underlie a model of a reflecting actor (Weber [1922] 1978). In this
line, rational choice theory (Elster 1989) focusses on those aspects of
action that actors are reflecting upon and presumes that they decide
strategically. Action that does not fall into this category is treated as
a residuum that cannot be explained by this line of thinking. Others,
however, hold that quite a great deal of human agency is not reflected
upon at all and thus cannot simply be treated as a leftover. According
to Schütz (1932), actors usually do not reflect consciously upon their
everyday actions. Reflection starts only in situations where routines are
challenged. Berger and Luckman (1967) build upon Schütz when they
observe that actors reduce complexity by routine actions. Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus also strongly entails unconscious aspects of social
action (Bourdieu 2007), as does Jasper (1998) in terms of emotions and
Merleau-Ponty (1976) with non-verbal communication. Additionally,
there are various theories that are not genuinely interested in actors and
their reflection at all, because they do not need a theory of action to
answer their research questions, for example the Foucauldian discourse
analysis (Foucault 1969), governmentality studies (Rose 1996; Bröckling,
Krasmann, and Lemke 2000), or systems theory (Luhmann 2010).
 Peter Ullrich et al. 15

Both ways of conceptualizing actors in relation to culture can be

found in this volume’s contributions. Neveu’s contribution applies
the conscious and strategic “use” of culture. Memory is presented as
the result of intended and unintended outcomes of action that is
reflected on and often strategic. In Malets’ and Zajak’s processes of
translation, the concept of a conscious and often strategic actor who
creatively makes use of norms, ideas, or repertoires is employed. Alter-
native approaches are rather interested in activities that have an impact
without being actively or consciously reflected on. Looking at these
aspects of social movements helps to understand conflictual internal
movement dynamics, discourses, and obstacles to cooperation. Flesher
Fominaya’s concept of internal movement culture stresses these very
aspects. Referring to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, she shows how prac-
tices that are usually not reflected upon can lead to clashes between
movements. James Jasper’s approach to emotions in this volume high-
lights by defining the not-reflected aspects of activism. Ullrich’s and
Keller’s as well as Roose’s contributions also conceptualize their actors as
rather not reflective. In both chapters, however, the question whether
actors reflect upon cultural impacts is of minor importance for the
argument. Culture is thought of as having an effect independently of
the actors’ reflection on this impact, and this impact is considered to
be vast.

Outlook

In systematically unearthing the different concepts of culture in social

movement research, this volume provides an important contribution
to research on movement dynamics, their causes, and results from the
perspective of cultural theories. In doing so, the contributions in this
volume not only introduce innovative approaches to movement cul-
ture but also link movement research to long-standing cultural theory
from other disciplines. This may also help to overcome, at least partly,
the often rather strong separation between social movement and protest
studies on the one hand and general social theory on the other. We hope
the volume’s overview and comparison will inspire future research on
movement culture. By presenting a wide variety of approaches to social
movements and culture, we invite our readers not only to inform them-
selves about promising concepts of culture and their application and
to learn about their strengths and weaknesses; but we also hope to
enable readers to find a well-suited approach for their own research
questions.
16 Protest and Culture – An Introduction

Notes
1. See Reckwitz (2000, 2004) for an excellent overview of the development of
concepts of culture in the arts and humanities.
2. This account is heavily influenced by Marion Hamm’s yet-to-be published
doctoral thesis (2011), which develops a systematization of cultural concepts
in social movement theory.

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Part I
Theorizing Culture from
Different Perspectives beyond
the Mainstream
2
Feeling–Thinking: Emotions as
Central to Culture
James M. Jasper

In the past generation, the effects of culture have been acknowledged

throughout the human sciences, including the study of social move-
ments. The shared tools by which we make sense of the world – through
schemas, narratives, frames, practices, identities, and so on – are now
seen to permeate and define both structures and action. An exten-
sive cultural toolkit is available to those who study revolution, protest,
and other forms of mobilization (overviews include Jasper 2005, 2007;
Johnston 2009). Even structural approaches to social movements have
learned to incorporate cultural factors (Kurzman 2004; Smith and Fetner
2007:46; Tilly 2008).
In the past I suggested that cognition, morality, and emotion are three
strands of culture, tightly interwoven but analytically distinct (Jasper
1997). Today I would propose a stronger image – that feelings are forms
of thinking. It is a potentially misleading exercise to tease out abstract
cognitions from all the bodily processes through which we come to
grips with the world. Most scholars’ idealist focus on finished products
(frames rather than framing, thoughts rather than thinking, codes rather
than encoding and decoding) prevents them from seeing the many ways
that feeling–thinking operates in human action.
Emotions went from being highlighted in crowd theories, to being
ignored in the structural paradigms of resource-mobilization and
political-opportunity theory, to being faintly and grudgingly acknowl-
edged in cultural paradigms (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2000).

I thank Jeff Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and the other members of the Yale Center
for Cultural Sociology for comments and lively discussion of the ideas in this
chapter, and the editors of this volume for extensive comments on earlier drafts.

23
24 Feeling–Thinking

Although reluctantly at first, the interpretive turn of the 1990s even-

tually opened a place for emotions, but without fully rethinking what
emotions mean for other cultural concepts such as frames, ideologies,
identities, and narratives. A more comprehensive recognition of the
emotions involved in cultural meanings is the goal of this chapter.
Emotions play a central role in creating meaning at all stages of
social movements (Jasper 2011). They help focus the attention of the
individuals and small groups who first notice and care about an issue.
They are central to the recruitment of new participants and the reten-
tion of old, for instance, through frame resonance. They are the core
of the collective identities that movements both draw upon and cre-
ate. Emotions also guide choices about tactics. The emotions of other
players, such as opponents, the police, and legislators, help explain
what kinds of impacts movements can have. They also help explain the
decline of social movements, whether through burnout, fission, success,
or repression.

Missing emotions

I see culture as meanings that are shared by individuals, along with

the words, artworks, rituals, and other things perceived as embodying
those meanings. Meanings exist in people’s central nervous systems,
aided by external props and messages from others: they are inside us
even as they are shaped, supported, and triggered through interaction
with the outside. Nonhuman objects and technologies constrain and
construct actions jointly with humans (Latour 2005), and they are aids
and occasions for the construction of meaning. But only humans create
meanings, through their use and interpretation of these objects.
This view contrasts with some sociologies of culture that emphasize
the objective reality of culture, “outside human heads” as it were. This
is Karl Popper’s “third world” of theories, stories, books, artworks, build-
ings, and more. These meanings tend to be seen as systems, as featured
in French structuralism’s use of language and text as the paradigm for all
cultural meanings. This influential tradition explicitly prefers the struc-
tured langue to the embodied, experienced parole. In the case of its most
famous exponent, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the meanings are derived from
the structure of the human brain, which imposes binary contrasts on
the world. Without some such source, it is difficult to link meanings
to human beings. In my view, objective structures of meaning have an
impact on social life only when they are subjectively felt by individuals.
Along these lines, Margaret Archer (1988) distinguishes the virtual
systems of cultural meanings, with their logical relationships to one
 James M. Jasper 25

another, from the physical world of human interactions. For cultural

systems to have an impact on social life, they must be taken up by
actors: as rhetorical references, as inspiration, as filters of information,
as reasons for or against certain actions. Humans use cultural meanings
to persuade themselves and others. (Her insistence on the autonomy of
the cultural system from the world of interactions allows Archer to criti-
cize a number of kinds of conflation of the two, for instance, Marxism’s
tendency to derive cultural meanings from class position and conflict.)
In my view, culture has no meaning for humans – and no impact on
them – until it enters their brains.
Archer (1988) helps us deal with an argument occasionally put for-
ward to counter the usual contrast between culture and structure:
cultural meanings are themselves structured. This is true, to give the
French tradition its due, but it has little to do with the usual use
of the term “structure” as a system of legal rules, resource distribu-
tions, and political legitimacy that operates to constrain strategic players
such as protestors (Kitschelt 1986; Kriesi et al. 1995). Culture too con-
strains, but in different ways, Archer explains. Players borrow, absorb,
and deploy meanings from available cultural repertories as they react to
other players.
Theoretical approaches that grow rapidly, as culture has, almost
always have something missing at their core, and what’s missing is usu-
ally a tight definition of their central concept: “resources” in resource-
mobilization models of protest, “opportunities” in political-opportunity
theories. The popularity and extendability of a new idea depend on
not restricting it too much, too soon: they depend on conceptual
overextension (Jasper 1997:39–41). Cultural analysis is similar: it cen-
tres around meaning, but it has done an inadequate job of telling us
what meaning is.
Emotions are key to understanding how meaning operates. Rather
than the opposite of thought, emotions are forms of thinking, and as
such are a part of culture mixed together with cognitive propositions
and moral principles and intuitions. Cognition and morality can moti-
vate action because they are saturated with emotions. Thinking and
feeling are built out of the same raw materials: neurological activity,
biochemical products, muscle contractions, bodily sensitivity to what is
going on around us, and so on. There are dozens of tiny processes that
go into feeling–thinking, the vast majority of them operating beneath
our conscious awareness.
Emotions represent one of the frontiers of cultural research today, not
only in work on social movements, but in cultural sociology more gen-
erally. As long as cultural models and interpretations do not explicitly
26 Feeling–Thinking

acknowledge and analyse the emotions at their heart, they will remain
poorly specified and provide distorted accounts of human action and
understanding.
We have missed this central role of emotions in part because of a
lingering idealism that reduces thinking to neat constructions: tightly
packaged, measured, counted, and delivered, whether these are ideas or
frames or narratives. The study of culture has focused on thoughts rather
than thinking, langue rather than parole, narratives rather than stories:
finished products rather than social and psychological processes. We see
here the shadow of early cognitive science, which saw the brain as oper-
ating like a computer, in what I call the “calculating brain model”. This
fits well with French structuralism, in which culture is a set of codes.
Computers operate on the basis of codes, but the human brain does not.
There is a second reason that scholars have failed to recognise the
commingling of feeling and thinking. The companion to the calculating
brain model is a vision of emotions as eruptions or, in groups, a form of
panic, which in both cases short-circuit “normal” thought. For millen-
nia, elites have feared those beneath them and turned to the panic model
to demonstrate why the mob had to be restrained rather than invited to
help govern (Clarke and Chess 2008). It was always the excluded who
were too emotional: slaves, women, peasants, the working classes, immi-
grants, and so on. Every step towards democracy has been shadowed by
fears of the passions.
The idealist result: social sciences that again and again create an arti-
ficial world of virtual meanings, which have logical relations with each
other as part of a system, and at best operate as an arsenal from which
real humans engaged in interactions can occasionally borrow a weapon
or two (Archer 1988). A cultural understanding of social movements,
or of anything else, must acknowledge the central role of emotions, in
processes of feeling–thinking.

Feeling as thinking

How do emotions work? Most are rough and ready appraisals of our cur-
rent situation in the world: how we are doing in relation to our goals
(conscious or not). They help us to process information and to begin to
formulate actions in response. They are composed of tiny processes by
which our body’s chemistry changes; signals are transmitted, received,
and assessed; muscles tense; pupils dilate; and – in some cases – our con-
scious minds attach summary labels to what we are feeling. The same
fMRI scans that had promised to locate each emotion in a particular
 James M. Jasper 27

part of the brain (once known as “the limbic system”) have instead
shown that dozens of parts are activated at once, interact with each
other, and respond to our labels for them. Rather than restricting the
place for culture in our understanding of emotions, recent neurology
has expanded it.
Whereas most sociologists of emotion focus on public displays,
because these are part of social interaction, philosophers and psycholo-
gists have worked to identify what emotions actually do in our bodies.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2001:23) adopts a version of the dom-
inant cognitive approach: “emotions always involve thought of an
object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance;
in that sense, they always involve appraisal or evaluation”. They are,
furthermore, salient or important “to the person’s own flourishing”
(30). Emotions are neither automatic bodily disturbances nor an overly
calculating, reflexive awareness.
Most emotions are a form of information processing, often faster than
our conscious minds. They run through various parts of the brain, just
as what we call “cognitions” do. They can be observed in fMRI scans,
just as more formal thoughts can. They help humans negotiate the
world around them. A number of psychologists have come to speak
of “slow” and “fast” thinking, with the latter operating through feel-
ings more than the former does (Barrett, Salovey, and Mayer 2002;
Kahneman 2011). It is difficult to think slowly, by reducing and ignor-
ing the many flows of information our bodies contain. As long as we
recognize speed as a continuum (composed of many processes), rather
than a clear dichotomy, this formulation can avoid reproducing age-old
dualistic contrasts between emotions and rationality.
In other words, the terms “cognition” and “emotion”, as traditionally
used, imply a contrast between the two, but in fact they are built up
from the same small nervous-system mechanisms. There is more over-
lap than difference. This is why I prefer the term “feeling–thinking”,
which is in line with current work in psychology (Kahneman 2011).
What psychology tends to overlook, in its attention to the operations of
the brain, is the cultural context that influences the triggers for these pro-
cesses, the facial and other displays that result, and the labels we attach
to the bundles of feelings. These all provide crucial background to any
emotion. We can no longer seriously contrast emotions with culture or
with cognition.
But different families of emotions operate in different ways. Because
scholars tend to blur the significant differences among emotions, I have
developed a rough typology based on how long they typically last and
28 Feeling–Thinking

how they are felt. Urges are strong bodily impulses, hard to ignore, such
as lust, substance addiction, or the need to sleep or defecate (Elster
1999). Their impact on politics is often to interfere with promised coor-
dinated action, so that organizers try to control them (just as torturers
use them to break people down). Although definitely bodily feelings,
they are not usually labelled as emotions. I use the terms “feeling” and
“emotion” almost interchangeably, although the former has more of a
sense of a physical sensation.
Reflex emotions are reactions to our immediate physical and social
environments, usually quick to appear and to subside, and accompanied
by a package of facial expressions and bodily changes (Ekman, Freisen,
and Ellsworth 1972).
Moods last longer, so that we can carry a mood from one setting
to another; they differ from other emotions in lacking a direct object
(Damasio 2003:43; my typology is similar to his). Moods both condition
our reflex emotions and are changed by them.
There are also two types of relatively stable, long-term emotions,
which are typically a background for moods and reflex emotions. [Traïni
dubs them “reflexive” as opposed to reflex emotions (2008:194); but
they are not always reflexively recognized and considered.] Affective loy-
alties or orientations are attachments or aversions: love, liking, respect,
trust, admiration, as well as their negative counterparts. They are less
tied to short-term assessments of how we are doing in the world, and
more to elaborated cognitive appraisals of others (although the objects
need not be humans).
Finally, moral emotions involve feelings of approval and disapproval
based on moral intuitions and principles, as well as the satisfaction we
feel when we do the right (or wrong) thing, and when we feel the right
(or wrong) thing, such as compassion for the unfortunate or indignation
over injustice.
Many general models of emotion are based on one of these cate-
gories as an exemplar, and apply poorly to the others. By adopting
reflex emotions – fear, anger, joy, surprise, disgust, and disappoint-
ment – as the paradigm for all emotions, most authors exaggerate the
intensity, visibility, suddenness, and disruptive capacity of emotions
(Table 2.1).
In this chapter, I first examine three social contexts in which emotions
are displayed and aroused: interactions among participants, interactions
between participants and other strategic players, and interactions with
potential recruits. In a final section I argue that morality affects social
life through emotions.
 James M. Jasper 29

Table 2.1 Five types of feelings

Urges: urgent bodily needs that crowd out other feelings and attention until
they are satisfied: lust, hunger, substance addictions, the need to urinate or
defecate, exhaustion, or pain
Reflex Emotions: fairly quick, automatic responses to events and
information, often taken as the paradigm for all emotions: anger, fear, joy,
surprise, shock, disappointment, and disgust
Moods: energizing or de-energizing feelings that persist across settings and
do not normally take direct objects; they can be changed by reflex emotions,
as during interactions
Affective Commitments or Loyalties: relatively stable feelings, positive or
negative, about others or about objects, such as love and hate, liking and
disliking, trust or mistrust, respect or contempt
Moral Emotions: feelings of approval or disapproval (including of our own
selves and actions) based on moral intuitions or principles, such as shame,
guilt, pride, indignation, outrage, and compassion

Internal emotions

Participants in social movements spend more time interacting with one

another than directly engaging outsiders: they attend meetings, orga-
nize marches, listen to speeches, lick envelops, just hang out, and so
on. The best account of these activities is Randall Collins’ (2001, 2004)
description of interaction rituals. He relies on Durkheim’s classic soci-
ology of knowledge, one of the only sociological approaches to place
emotions at the centre of learning and symbol-making. Durkheim and
Collins describe the good moods that generate enthusiasm (“collec-
tive effervescence” to Durkheim, “emotional energy” to Collins) and
encourage continued participation.
Collins (2001:28–29) helps to explain what John Lofland (1982)
called the joys of crowds. “High ritual density” occurs when people are
assembled, with “bodily awareness of copresence”. They share a focus
of attention, but then also become aware of each other’s awareness.
Following Durkheim, Collins sees the outcomes of successful rituals
as including not only these feelings of group solidarity, a mood of
emotional energy (although bad moods can result from unsuccessful
rituals), symbols of the group, and new moral commitments based on
the group. Even though Collins insists on the energy of face-to-face
interactions, I believe that similar emotions (perhaps in weaker forms)
can be created in mediated interactions. We see this in art: reading a
30 Feeling–Thinking

novel about a sad event can make us sad, although perhaps not as sad
as if we saw or experienced the event ourselves.
I see two main kinds of emotional effects of interactions and infor-
mation: shared emotions and reciprocal emotions (Jasper 1998). Shared
emotions, namely feelings towards events and players outside the move-
ment that participants have in common (although never unanimously),
are an important motivational product. A movement thrives on its
members’ shared indignation, anger, sometimes even hatred, as well as
its members’ shared hopes about the future. As Collins (2001:29) puts
it, “The ritualized sharing of instigating or initiating emotions which
brought individuals to the collective gathering in the first place (out-
rage, anger, fear, etc.) gives rise to distinctively collective emotions, the
feelings of solidarity, enthusiasm, and morality which arise in group
members’ mutual awareness of their shared focus of attention.”
Those “collective emotions” are reciprocal emotions: feelings that
members of a group have towards one another, a complex web of admi-
rations, attractions, and loyalties, but also anger, jealousy, envy, and
other destructive emotions. Ever-shifting proportions of positive and
negative reciprocal emotions help explain a member’s activity level,
including the choice to remain in or leave the group.
Shared and reciprocal emotions interact. My loyalties to the group
encourage me to align my reflex emotions with theirs; contagion effects
are stronger the more I am “in tune” with those around me. Conversely,
as Collins says, each shared emotion reinforces my solidarity with the
group by reminding me how similar they are to me. I feel more empathy
with them (Heise 1998). Even shared negative emotions can reinforce
group solidarity, at least up to a point (Eyerman 2005:43).
Shared and reciprocal emotions can interact in pernicious ways, too.
Analysing the Amsterdam squatters’ movement, Lynn Owens (2009:33)
comments: “Reciprocal emotions become associated with the private
sphere, while shared emotions dominate the public arena. These distinc-
tions start merely as tendencies, but harden with time.” He describes
an interesting case of radicalization which, attempting to dissolve the
boundary between the two spheres, ended up destroying the move-
ment. The anger that is usually shared and directed outward can erode
collective solidarity if it becomes reciprocal.
The usual framework for discussing reciprocal emotions is through
collective identity. Although identities were once approached as
structurally reinforced cognitive boundaries, scholars have come to
acknowledge their strong emotional underpinnings (Polletta and Jasper
2001). We like, love, trust, admire, and simply feel comfortable with
 James M. Jasper 31

those with whom we identify; we are less likely to have those feelings
towards those outside our perceived group. And because our loyalties are
most often to “imagined communities”, we must observe the emotions
involved in the imagination: empathy and sympathy for the imag-
ined others, which can lead to indignation on their behalf or shame
if they are dishonoured (Anderson 1983). Many of the mechanisms
by which collective identities are constructed consist of interactions
between shared and reciprocal emotions, as described above.
Just as collective identity depends on the emotions we feel towards a
community that we partly or entirely imagine, so we imagine oppo-
nents. In a study of Al-Qaeda members, whom he interviewed in
French prisons, for instance, Farhad Khosrokhavar (2006) identifies sev-
eral types of humiliation as central to their motivation. In addition
to bodily shaming as in strip searches or the identification with those
shamed in this way (notably the Palestinians), Khosrokhavar discov-
ered a lively anti-Semitism around a fanciful construction of “the Jew”.
Often conflated with Israelis, Jews are seen as the source of a plot against
Islam throughout the West. Resentment feeds their sense of victim-
hood, essentializing the kind of poor treatment young Muslims do in
fact receive in France and elsewhere. Hatred, resentment, and revenge
are powerful motivators, and suicide missions seem a sensible way to
punish such a powerful enemy.
The concept of a shared ideology has, like collective identities, been
used to explain how groups are held together and how they motivate
members. Oliver and Johnston (2000:43) define ideology as “a system of
meaning that couples assertions and theories about the nature of social
life with values and norms relevant to promoting and resisting change”.
They include the cognitive and the moral dimensions of culture, but
not the emotional. Facts never motivate action by themselves (nor do
norms, as we’ll see below). They must be combined with outraged reac-
tions over present conditions and a pleasing hope for the future (shared
emotions), and usually trust, fondness, confidence, and pride in our own
group (reciprocal). Facts are not meaningful to political players without
the accompanying emotions.
Internal management of shared emotions is vital to a group. For exam-
ple, when participants in high-risk protest are threatened by opponents
or the forces of order, leaders try to calm them sufficiently so that their
reflex emotions of fear and anger do not lead them to exit or to act in
ways that would discredit the group. Goodwin and Pfaff (2001) describe
a number of mechanisms that leaders use to manage fear, including sol-
idarity with the group and the social networks that reinforce this. In the
32 Feeling–Thinking

U.S. civil rights movement, for example, songs and prayers were use-
ful not only for conveying ideological and emotional messages; they
calmed participants and sent the message to observers and police that
protestors would remain peaceful.
Leaders also manipulate the feelings of non-leaders in order to retain
their loyalty. Janja Lalich (2004) has analysed two extreme cases,
Heaven’s Gate and the Democratic Workers Party, cataloguing the
beliefs, charismatic authority, and systems of influence and control that
leaders used to retain members of tightly bounded charismatic cults.
Even the belief systems depended heavily on emotions, such as hope for
the future, pride in being special, and the deontological satisfaction of a
sense of higher purpose.
The systems of influence in the two groups primarily relied on recip-
rocal affective commitments: a sense of belonging, of comradeship, a
striving to be better, role models for each other, a sense of commitment,
the exhilaration of being born again with a renewed self, and finally a
feeling of being part of something greater than oneself. Negative risks
of these feelings included a loss of a sense of self, over-conformism, and
being cut off from anyone outside the group.
In the systems of control that Lalich (2004) describes, more formal
and explicit mechanisms seem to be driven by underlying negative emo-
tions, still mostly reciprocal. The explicit mechanisms include a sense of
purpose and accomplishment, hierarchical structures with clear lines of
authority, an increased sense of responsibility, and a group system of
justice. The motivating emotions are anxiety, guilt, and a fear of making
mistakes, as well as fears of rejection or ejection from the group.
Heaven’s Gate and the Democratic Workers Party are extreme cases,
because leaders used all these means of binding individuals to the group
primarily in order to reinforce their own positions as leaders. In both
cases leaders were secretive and acted outside both stated rules and
unstated norms. Members were taught to protect the leaders at all costs,
and criticism of leaders was absolutely forbidden. Power and status were
concentrated in the leaders and their immediate companions. But the
two groups were not unusual in the kinds of binding mechanisms they
used; all groups require some such tools in order to survive. In less toxic
groups, however, these processes are used to further the ends of the
groups, not of their leaders.
In these two groups the leaders wished all affective commitments to
be directed to them as symbolic embodiments of the group. What hap-
pens instead in most groups is that members develop strong feelings
towards their most immediate fellow members – members of their affin-
ity group, their secret cell, and other immediate companions. Strong
 James M. Jasper 33

reciprocal emotions like these are the glue of any movement, but they
can sometimes crowd out loyalty to the group or the movement as a
whole, in what I call “the Band-of-Brothers Dilemma” (Jasper 2004:13).
Reciprocal emotions are not homogeneous in a protest group. As we
have seen, leaders and non-leaders may feel differently about each other,
and leaders may often work to instil various feelings among non-leaders
that they do not feel themselves. As theories of rhetoric tell us, the orator
need not feel the emotions she hopes to arouse in her audience but
uses a number of performative techniques to achieve the desired effects.
Political persuasion deploys emotions much the way that art does.
Art and especially music are often thought to convey shared ideas
about the world, and to preserve them intact for future movements as
well (Eyerman and Jamison 1998). But much of the impact of art comes
through emotions. When we decode art for the cognitive messages and
frames they contain, we lose sight of what makes art different from state-
ments of fact and belief, namely its power to capture our attention and
to impress us. We have a kind of awe in front of what we consider beau-
tiful; a work of art is more than a neutral vehicle for delivering messages.
It puts us in a good mood that may encourage positive reflex emotions
as well as strengthening our commitments to those around us when we
experience it.
In the case of music, which has sometimes been studied as though it
were primarily a collection of lyrics that represent a movement’s ideol-
ogy, the emotional impact is crucial. More than other arts, music triggers
a number of bodily processes that make us feel “carried along” in the col-
lective activity, just as dancing and marching do (McNeill 1995; Traïni
2008; Roy 2010). Eyerman and Jamison (1998:43) suggest that the emo-
tional power of songs derives from their familiarity, but this too seems
to only scratch the surface of the gripping emotions of music. More
than other arts, music can combine shared and reciprocal emotions,
as well as combining reflex emotions, moods, and affective and moral
commitments.
Interactions among those in a movement inevitably affect how they
feel about each other, but they can also affect how members feel about
situations and players outside the movement.

External engagements

Protestors engage with a large number of other strategic players. Fore-

most, perhaps, are their interactions with various components of the
state, as either opponent or judge. Strategies may include portraying the
34 Feeling–Thinking

state as misguided or as evil, as weak to the point of collapse or as bru-

tally strong and intrusive. The point of such characterizations is to affect
the emotions of one’s own team, of state bureaucrats and officials, or of
bystanders and voters.
Leaders hope to strengthen the confidence of their own participants
by portraying the state as weak and themselves as strong. A student
of violent repression, Charles Brockett (2005:157) remarks on the con-
sciousness raising that was necessary for Central American peasants to
throw off their fatalism, emphasizing the beliefs and symbols of liber-
ation theology. He acknowledges emotions as part of this process, but
places them at the level of “the interior life of the individual, each with
one’s own idiosyncratic set of contradictions”, in contrast to “belief sys-
tems (or frames) that are socially created and available to each person”.
Emotions are thought to explain sudden explosions of action that sur-
prise everyone, but not the normal activities of mobilization – even
though Brockett also recognizes that consciousness raising “will be influ-
enced by how much trust participants have in organizers themselves
and the narratives that they tell, a trust to be won on the basis of many
intangible and largely non-cognitive factors” (160). When they are not
treated as outright interruptions and eruptions, emotions are still viewed
as different and more obscure than cognition [although Brockett also
passingly criticizes this tendency (28)].
Writing about Argentina under military rules, Amy Risley (2012:111)
also identifies some of the emotions that allow activists to mobilize
against repressive regimes: “The process of blaming security forces and
their collaborators for the atrocities of the Dirty War, casting judg-
ment upon them, publicly expressing emotions, and arousing moral
indignation in other people were all important factors facilitating mobi-
lization.” With these mechanisms, cognitive, moral, and emotional
elements are clearly fused. Understanding the regime consists of feelings
about it.
Claims of their relative weakness may also affect the emotions and
actions of state decision-makers, for instance, frightening legislators into
concessions or mistakes. Kings and dictators often flee. Extreme repres-
sion is often a panicked response, which can sometimes be effective
but also frequently backfires by stoking even broader moral outrage.
Protestors often claim moral strength in contrast to coercive power,
or insist that their strength is in non-violent pressure. They are often
caught in the Naughty-or-Nice Dilemma: “Long-term cooperation on
a range of fronts may require love and loyalty, especially if the other
player is not under our direct supervision and control. Fear is especially
 James M. Jasper 35

effective in limited engagements”, when protestors have a chance to

obtain important and irreversible objectives (Jasper 2006:107).
When the state is a judge but not an opponent, protestors often try
to discredit their opponents in the eyes of state officials. One classic
objective is to catch opponents in a lie that would undermine their
trustworthiness (Jasper and Poulsen 1993). This is merely one way to
undermine their moral standing. This kind of character attack operates
through its emotional effects, undermining others’ admiration, trust,
and liking for the opponent by stoking anger, indignation, and betrayal.
The bystander public, reached through the media, is another target
for this epidictic struggle. Activists hope to shape public perceptions of
their own character (especially on the moral dimension) as well as their
opponents’ characters. Their goal is to shape our feelings for heroes, vic-
tims, and villains (Jasper et al. forthcoming). We’ll return to this moral
work in the final section.
Human- and civil-rights movements, which were exemplars for the
political-opportunity approach to social movements, take the state as
both target and judge because they demand inclusion for excluded pop-
ulations. But the rights demanded are not only means to other ends,
such as economic advancement. They are also ends in themselves, a
form of moral recognition (Honneth 1996). Pride and shame are cen-
tral emotions to a number of movements composed of those who feel
excluded from the central institutions and values of their societies, such
as gays and lesbians (Gould 2001, 2009).
Even a shared stigma can be a source of reciprocal solidarity. Even
though shame is usually demobilizing – a kind of mood of withdrawal –
it offers a strong (culturally or legally enforced) collective identity. This
is the source of the Stigmatized Identity Dilemma: the same stigma that
you are fighting against is also the basis of your mobilization (Jasper
2010). Groups often try to transform negative stereotypes into positive
ones, for instance through new group names, rather than abandoning
the identity altogether.
The emotion work that goes into rights movements is not restricted to
national arenas but spills into international ones. Clifford Bob (2005),
for instance, examines the appeals to foreign non-governmental orga-
nizations (NGOs) that allowed the Zapatistas and the Ogoni to win
international awareness for their rights campaigns in the 1990s. Activists
had to be both sympathetic and intelligible (literally, speaking the
same language) to potential sponsors. This epidictic included emotion
work: portraying themselves as innocent victims, typically non-violent,
abused by evil villains (violent repression by dictators was their strongest
36 Feeling–Thinking

evidence, unfortunately). The same kinds of emotional appeals succeed

in a variety of arenas. Even in an era of globalization and far-flung
international networks, a great deal of politics still occurs through
face-to-face encounters.1
External engagements impose decision after decision upon protest
groups. Although often overlooked by cultural scholars, strategic deci-
sions are a central cultural process (Jasper 2004, 2006). Decisions are
based on shared definitions of the situation, norms and traditions, avail-
able know-how, tastes in tactics, and cognitive heuristics available from
memory and the media. Strategic actions carry meaning, and other play-
ers constantly observe and interpret them: players are audiences for
each other’s actions. But these actions and interpretations involve emo-
tions: each side of a dilemma carries fears, hopes, solidarities, and more.
Theorists of decisions have come increasingly to recognize the role of
emotions as a form of thinking. Observes Daniel Kahneman (2011:12),
inventor of prospect theory: “An important advance is that emotion
now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgments
and choices than it did in the past.”
Some readers will be surprised that I have avoided the term “power” in
my discussion of external engagements. For one thing, it is not an espe-
cially cultural term, as it usually denotes physical coercion or money as
opposed to persuasion as a means; but it could be defined to include
the latter (more cultural) process. More fundamentally, the term is usu-
ally circular, linked to the very outcomes that it is meant to explain
(Jasper 2012:14–16). When the sources of power are specified indepen-
dently of outcomes, they are frequently institutional arenas such as
markets or religions (Mann 1986). But within those arenas, the pow-
erless sometimes win, due to the vicissitudes of strategic interaction and
the emotions they can arouse on both sides.

Recruitment

Recruitment is a special form of external engagement, in that recruiters

hope to make outsiders into insiders. New members become attached to
the movement not only when they develop new reciprocal emotions
but also when they believe that they share emotions with existing
participants. Research on the recruitment process has highlighted the
pre-existing social networks used. At first these were portrayed in
a rather mechanical way, as “cooptable communications networks”
(Freeman 1973) that allowed “bloc recruitment” (Oberschall 1973).
But the cultural meanings and information transmitted through these
networks were soon recognized: “For all the recent emphasis on
 James M. Jasper 37

macro-political or other structural ‘determinants’ of social movements”,

wrote McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1988:713), “the immediate impe-
tus to collective action remains a cognitive one” (not emotional,
notice).
Direct personal contacts allow organizers and potential recruits to
align their frames (Snow et al. 1986). Frame alignment is generally
viewed as entailing a shared diagnosis of a problem along with a pre-
scription for what to do about it. These are fairly cognitive moments,
or schemas. What is frequently lost is the third dimension, motiva-
tional framing, which actually leads people to act to change things
(cf. Benford 1997).
Ziad Munson (2008) has recently criticized this cognitive take on
recruitment, in that people are often recruited to a cause before they
share its ideology and goals: “Individuals get involved in the pro-life
movement by participating in pro-life events, not necessarily because
they are thinking pro-life thoughts” (63). Instead, they seem commit-
ted foremost to their social networks. Their affective bonds lead them
into protest activity, and their ideas follow. Mobilization is a long and
continuing process: “A large proportion of what pro-life organizations
actually do is provide repeated situations in which a pro-life message can
be delivered to activists themselves” (66). Contrary to his own critique,
Munson slips back into an idealist view of culture as coded “messages”,
so that he can show their absence.
Frame alignment depends on the rather murky notion of resonance,
which plays the same role that “meaning” does in other forms of
cultural analysis. Resonance is the mystery at the heart of framing
that makes the concept work. Frames and other rhetoric must con-
tain meanings that are not merely intelligible but which move people
(Benford 1997).
In his version of frames, William Gamson (1995:90) describes the
emotions at the heart of their injustice component, which “refers to
the moral indignation expressed in this form of political conscious-
ness. This is not merely a cognitive or intellectual judgment about
what is equitable, but is what cognitive psychologists call a ‘hot cog-
nition’ – one that is laden with emotion.” This is a nice recognition
of feeling–thinking. But emotions seem absent from the agency com-
ponent (which “refers to the consciousness that it is possible to alter
conditions or policies through collective action”) and the identity com-
ponent (“the process of defining this ‘we,’ typically in opposition to
some ‘they’ who have different interests and values”). The sense that
change is possible is not simply a neutral calculation but a positive mood
of confidence. And the collective identities are affective commitments,
38 Feeling–Thinking

including love for one’s own group (Berezin 1997) and antipathy for
opponents (Blee 2002).
In research on the American antinuclear movement, Ed Walsh (1981)
offered “suddenly imposed grievances” as one of the mechanisms of
recruitment. At a time when grievances were out of fashion, this concept
was called upon to do a great deal of work in understanding motiva-
tion; it made grievances important once again. But suddenly imposed
grievances have an impact, not because they are grievances, but because
they are sudden. They are startling enough to arouse attention and – in
some cases – elicit action because of their emotional impact. They are,
I believe, a form of moral shock.
Moral shocks are packages of feelings that challenge a person’s
fundamental assumptions about the world, at first paralyzing them,
but forcing them to pay attention, and sometimes leading to action
as a result (Jasper 1997; Warren 2010:chapter 2; Risley 2012). They
can mobilize through sequences such as startle–anger–indignation–
frustration–further indignation but also demobilize through sequences
such as startle–fear–paralysis–sadness–depression. They can make indi-
viduals open to initial recruitment or reinforce the commitment of those
already in a movement. They can also become persuasive modules in
narratives told later (Traïni 2010/1:234; Iverson 2012).
Increasingly, analyses of mobilization mention emotions alongside
more cognitive concepts, but the cognitive concepts are easier to
study – and hence are studied more. In explaining the lack of mobiliza-
tion in the Argentine shantytown of Flammable, Auyero and Swistun
(2009:134) remark, “it is quite difficult for them to agree on what they
want to achieve—a common frame, in the language of social movement
scholarship. And, furthermore, they lack confidence in their own col-
lective energy. Disagreement and distrust in shared efficacy feed and
reinforce each other.” This mood of resignation is not explored further,
while frames are, even though the mood seems at least as important as
the frames. As Auyero and Swistun observe, the two interact. Effective
frames transform the moods of potential participants.

Morality and emotions

One direction in the cultural turn is to portray social movements

as helping to articulate the moral intuitions emerging among large
numbers of people (Jasper 1997). One function of ideology is to develop
intuitions into moral principles, and thereby to transform private anxi-
eties into public debates. But scholars, still in the shadow of Kant, have
 James M. Jasper 39

tended to view moral principles as abstract rules to be followed rather

than as impulses that actually guide and explain social interaction. This
form of idealism has prevented most scholars from seeing the emotions
that provide the motivational thrust of morality.
Values and norms are another form of idealism in the study of
morality. Twentieth-century sociology, especially under the influence
of systems theory, posited basic values as people’s moral guides: not
usually as explicit as rules, but observable in their effects. The appli-
cation of basic values to particular situations was accomplished through
norms. Neil Smelser (1963) famously argued that protest arises when
people are torn between competing norms, or blocked from fulfilling
their norms and values. Unfortunately, the causal mechanisms by which
values exerted this influence were unclear, another form of idealism. The
reader was left to imagine frustration and aggression as central. Emo-
tions were key, but scholars still tended to see emotions in a pejorative
light, as something to be contrasted with orderly thought.
Today, we can see moral principles, values, and moral intuitions as a
central part of the emotional background to a number of motivational
processes. As E. P. Thompson (1971:78) expressed it, “men and women
in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending tra-
ditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported
by the wider consensus of the community”. He also comments, accu-
rately if tersely, that such beliefs were “passionately held” (79; see also
Thompson 1978:171).
When we view morality as including emotions rather than simply
principles, we can see a number of causal mechanisms by which it affects
action. Deontological or moral pride, a sense that we have acted in ways
that we (and/or others) admire, is a strong motivation, even if it is often
combined with a fear of acting shamefully. External audiences are not
always necessary: we can be proud of ourselves even when no one else
knows what we have done; in this case pride yields a sense of human
dignity. In societies where there is a consensus over moral rules, there is
honour involved in deontological pride.
Whistleblowers and rescuers are motivated by a sense of moral indig-
nation and deontological pride, although they do not always start from
a clear moral principle that they could articulate. The path to whistle-
blowing usually begins with an effort to follow the rules, either of a pro-
fession, an organization, or the law (Bernstein and Jasper 1996). When
employees try to redress the perceived problem through the internal
procedures of their organization, they are frequently rebuffed: they are
shocked, become indignant, and take their complaints to the next level
40 Feeling–Thinking

of the bureaucracy. Eventually, after spirals of retaliation and indigna-

tion, they are forced to go outside their organization to authorities, the
media, or protest groups. Just as the recruits that Munson (2008) stud-
ied came to articulate their ideas through activism, so whistleblowers
often arrive at moral principles by having their moral intuitions violated
(Alford 2002).2 Eventually, deontological pride comes to dominate their
lives, and they rarely regret their actions despite suffering enormously
because of them.
A stubborn sense of moral pride also seems to have motivated those
who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Again, this was based not on
some set of explicit moral principles, as the idealist image would sug-
gest, but on an implicit sense of identity that the rescuers both felt
and lived out. They did not feel they had a moral choice to make;
they did not grapple with conflicting principles. According to Kristin
Monroe (2004:262), “rescue activities were not considered agonistic
moral choices so much as the natural steps on a path chosen by a prior
molding as a certain kind of human being”. Instead of calculating
interests or applying rules, the rescuers were thinking through their
emotions, which in turn were based on their connections with others,
their personal identities, and their pride in those identities. That same
sense of connection to others can lead one into immoral actions as well
(Browning 1992).
As the case of whistleblowing suggests, blame is a crucial part of pol-
itics, central to analyses of what has gone wrong (Jasper 2006:48–53).
Part of blame is the simple attribution of responsibility for having caused
or for fixing a problem, a kind of lay social-scientific explanation. But
the reason that blame is central to politics is not for its causal accounts
but for the emotions these entail. Blame tells us at whom we should be
angry and outraged, and those are the motivations that prime people to
act. Gamson (1992) suggests that blaming concrete villains intensifies
our feelings of moral outrage, although he also suggests that these must
be connected with more abstract principles in order to recognize a pat-
tern to the offenses. A great deal of cultural work also goes into avoiding
blame, as with corporations that promote the idea of markets as natural
systems with their own laws that are largely not amenable to human
interference.
If blame work is done for particular events and outcomes in order to
identify guilt, character work is done on individuals and groups who are
players in politics to establish more general character traits (good or bad;
strong or weak) (Jasper et al. forthcoming). Here we see the same interac-
tion of shared and reciprocal emotions we observed for a protest group,
 James M. Jasper 41

but directed towards other players. Our shared reactions to perceived vil-
lains create and reinforce our ongoing affective commitments towards
them, such as suspicion, hate, or fear. Conversely, our background com-
mitments towards other players will shape our emotional reactions to
what they do: we will be quicker to blame them if we already dislike
or distrust them. Our background commitments, affective and moral,
provide feeling–thinking shortcuts for making quick judgements.

Conclusions

Just as the structural models of protest that were popular in the 1970s
and 1980s were decoded to show the cultural meanings operating inside
them that gave them much of their causal force (Jasper 1998), so we can
apply the same procedure to many cultural concepts in order to see the
emotions at work inside them. Meanings are not just abstract codes like
the definitions in a dictionary; they pulse through our bodies in order
to guide and motivate action. We feel moral intuitions, the power of art,
and the rituals that bring people together.
Cultural analysts, committed to interpreting how humans construct
and deploy meanings, are well poised to understand emotions, for that
is precisely what emotions help us do. They are a form or a part of
thinking, not its opposite or its opponent.

Notes
1. See Thörn (2006) on the personal contacts so important to the anti-apartheid
movement.
2. In Jasper (1997:150) I think I overstated the initial motivating power of
explicit moral principles.

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3
“A Whole Way of Struggle?”:
Western Marxisms, Social
Movements, and Culture
Laurence Cox

Introduction: Western Marxisms, movements, culture

About this chapter

The literature on “Marxism and culture” is forbiddingly large, covering
many of the key cultural theorists of the past century, and could hardly
be covered in a single chapter except as a very casual overview.1 That
on “Marxism and social movements” might appear smaller, although
there is more activist and academic reflection on the topic, if not always
tagged with the phrase “social movement”, than might be thought.2
This chapter, however, has a narrower focus. It reflects on the work
of a number of “western Marxist” writers who have been active as theo-
rists both of social movements and of popular culture, such as Antonio
Gramsci and Györgi Lukács, EP Thompson and Raymond Williams,
Hilary Wainwright and Peter Linebaugh. In doing this, it deliberately
sets itself off from those traditions within western Marxism whose cri-
tique of popular culture has been divorced from any analysis of social
movement struggles and focuses on authors whose work has contributed
to the Marxist analysis of the relationship between social movements
and culture.
Rather than trace each individual contribution made by western
Marxists of this tendency to theories of movement or culture (or both),
it focuses on three interlinked propositions in their work which are
arguably in a particularly direct line with classical Marxist thought and

Thanks are due to the participants in the Protest | Culture workshops for their
comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

45
46 A Whole Way of Struggle?

are thus “Marxist” both conceptually and historically. It attempts to

identify these propositions as clearly as can be done without doing
violence to the authors in question.
In essence, these propositions are (1) that movement culture is
grounded in the material realities of everyday life; (2) that its shaping is
neither automatic nor static but a process of articulation, development,
and learning; and (3) that it takes place in conflictual dialogue with
opposing social groups, state power, and existing cultural hegemony.
The chapter is thus not an exercise in Marxology (establishing the
links between its propositions and classical Marxist thought), nor is it
an argument from authority in relation to other social theorists. Rather,
it seeks to establish a prima facie case for the empirical plausibility and
logical coherence, while hopefully also showing its productivity as a
research agenda via the authors cited – in my view the only legitimate
use of the argument from authority.3
While the chapter is theoretical rather than empirical in focus, it is
shaped by my own research and political engagement with counter-
cultures, alterglobalization activism, working-class community organiz-
ing, and the history of Irish Buddhism, in particular its intersection
with Asian anti-colonial movements (Mullan and Cox 2001; Cox 2006,
2010, 2011).

Defining western Marxisms

The category of western Marxism has been the subject of extensive
praise and critique. The category was initially used to define inde-
pendent Marxisms which were not subordinated to then-orthodox
Marxism–Leninism as the official state theories of the Soviet Union
and its satellites, and subsequently of the competing centres of state
Marxism [thus Kolakowski (2008) or Jacoby (2002) for western Marxism
and Mills’ (1963) definition of orthodoxy].
If so, western Marxisms might be expected to have a primary orien-
tation to popular organizing rather than post-revolutionary states and
hence to assign particular importance to human agency, popular cul-
ture, and social movements [see Gottlieb (1989) for an approach along
these lines]. Following Gramsci’s famous distinction (1971) between the
challenges faced by social movements in Russia and western Europe,
western Marxisms would be those produced by theorists of the war of
position – not only the complexity of “civil society” (including popular
culture), but also the challenges of mobilization, alliance formation, and
conflict. The authors discussed here have typically also been movement
participants, and from a Marxist point of view – where theory and
practice are understood to inform each other – this shapes their analysis.
 Laurence Cox 47

Matters are of course more complicated than that, and any schema-
tization of some of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century
is bound to leave gaps. Many western Marxists, represented perhaps
most visibly by the Frankfurt School, tended towards a critical analy-
sis of modernity which left little space for popular agency – although
Marcuse, and in a second generation Habermas and his students such as
Cohen, have returned to the theme of social movements. Althusserian
structuralism similarly tended to dismiss popular movements (although
again the poststructuralist second generation returned to the theme).
Conversely, autonomists have exalted agency in the abstract but strug-
gled to analyse actual processes of political organization (Cox 2001).
Nonetheless we can identify a century-long tradition of writers – from
Gramsci and Lukács in the founding years of the Comintern through
to Rediker and Linebaugh in contemporary academia – who have paid
substantial attention both to social movements and to the theme of
culture. While the academic reception of theorists from Gramsci to
Williams has often recognized them as major contributors to debates
on popular culture, it has often missed the extent to which – as politi-
cal activists and adult educators (Mayo 1999) – their reflections drew on
and fed back into the experience of popular movements. As O’Connor
(1989:125–126) notes of Williams,

Williams’ resources for hope include the organized working class but
also the new social movements: ecology, peace, and women’s organi-
zations. He writes this but these political intentions and movements
write him.

In particular, I will argue, this experience leads this kind of western

Marxist theorist to highlight the ways in which social movements artic-
ulate popular culture, both being shaped by it and helping to develop it
further.
Meanwhile, from a different direction – harder to articulate theoret-
ically but well developed as research practice – “history from below”
(MARHO 1983), the work of British and French Marxist historians (Kaye
1995), and much oral history (Paul Thompson 1982) have paid signifi-
cant and influential attention to the cultural underpinnings of historical
social movements. From a Marxist standpoint, where practice is the ulti-
mate test of theory, it is important to pay attention to less conceptually
oriented authors whose deployment of Marxist research methodology
has opened up fruitful new directions in research.
These two approaches – the theoretical and the empirical – come
together, I will argue, in a directional reading of popular culture and
48 A Whole Way of Struggle?

social movements which is tied up with a historical awareness of the rise

and fall not only of movements but of class consciousness and indepen-
dent popular organization of any kind, as well as with the situation of
practitioners, attempting to teach, organize, construct identities, build
alliances, support other activists, maintain networks, and so on.
The intensely active nature of popular culture and social movements,
the effort involved in developing them, and the bitter experience of
defeat have all led such movement-engaged Marxists to highlight pro-
cessual and developmental approaches to popular self-activity in ways
which are often absent not only from many academic perspectives but
also from state-centred and “mandarin” forms of Marxism.

Three western Marxist propositions

Because of the great diversity of situations which western Marxists
have engaged with as researchers or movement participants, there
seems at first glance to be an equal diversity of different literatures:
continental activist writers like Antonio Gramsci and Györgi Lukács,
associated with the failed revolutions of the immediate post-First World
War period; British-based “history from below” from Christopher Hill,
E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and Sheila Rowbotham
to contemporary US-based authors such as Peter Linebaugh, Marcus
Rediker, and James Holstun; present-day Marxist theorists of social
movements, such as Chik Collins, Colin Barker, and John Krinsky
who draw on Vygotsky, Vološinov, and Bakhtin to articulate dia-
logical theories responding to the “linguistic turn”; and less readily
classifiable figures such as C.L.R. James, Raymond Williams, or Hilary
Wainwright.
It would clearly be impossible to articulate a detailed conceptual
framework which all these authors could be said to subscribe to. How-
ever, I want to suggest that there are three important general proposi-
tions which can be identified running across many of these more specific
theories and which together constitute a relatively coherent western
Marxist analysis of social movements and culture – one which, more-
over, has shown itself over time to be a very fertile source of research
intuitions and political inspiration:

1) The cultural modes of social movement organization (from the moral

economy of the food riot via the techniques of piracy to the lan-
guages of popular unrest) draw on and reflect the broader everyday
structure of their participants’ lifeworlds, in particular as these are
shaped through their material situation – their struggle to meet basic
 Laurence Cox 49

needs and their relationships with each other and with other social
groups.
2) This is a developmental rather than a static perspective: organizing
rather than organization, culture-making rather than culture-being.
Social movement cultures articulate the bottom-up learning pro-
cesses inherent in this process, as groups develop the “local rational-
ities”, “tacit knowledge”, or “good sense” involved in daily survival
and in conflictual relationships with other groups, finding a way of
thinking more adequate to their experience, a way of being which
is more adequate to their daily struggles and needs, and developing
appropriate organizational cultures.4
3) This developmental process runs into limits set by dominant institu-
tions at various points and is thus (conflictually) dialogical: that is,
it cannot be understood separately from the encounter with power,
exploitation, and cultural authority or as distinct from the attempt
to form alliances, generalize movements, and construct alternative
possible worlds in dialogue with relationships both of consent and
coercion.

It will be seen that this is a logical order rather than a chronological

one, distinguishing three aspects of a single process which can be under-
stood as culture-in-movement rather than “movement culture” as a noun.
As I will suggest, this processual or directional approach is what distin-
guishes the western Marxist perspective from its non-Marxist offspring.
I say “offspring” because the authors covered here have been enor-
mously influential – or, to put it differently, this perspective has shown
us another way to read the social world which has proved convincing
and illuminating in a very wide range of different contexts. So much
so, in fact, that many non-Marxist authors have borrowed heavily from
it, knowingly or otherwise. This in turn strongly suggests (which is all
that can be done in a chapter of this length) that assent to any of these
propositions in isolation does not depend on being a Marxist but is a rea-
sonable conclusion for social researchers looking at a particular aspect
of the relationship between social movements and culture.
However – and here is where directionality becomes important once
again – what sets off the non-Marxist writers mentioned here is that
each of them acknowledges one aspect of the western Marxist approach
without making the connections to the others.
Thus, for example, a relationship between movement culture and
daily life is admitted, without theorizing how the one is produced
from the other. Alternatively, movements are conceptualized in learning
50 A Whole Way of Struggle?

terms, but without this learning being related back to material situa-
tions. Or again, the symbolic dialogue with power is acknowledged, but
without a sense that the dialogue can go one way or the other, that in
a revolutionary period a new common sense from below can overthrow
the once-hegemonic discourse of the old masters, while in a period of
movement defeat popular discourses can be disaggregated, silenced, and
colonized by the rulers. My discussion of non-Marxist writers is thus
double-edged: they add to the prima facie case for taking this interpre-
tation seriously, but also show what is distinctive about the processual
Marxist understanding.
In discussing each proposition, I first present it in substantive terms;
secondly I show its partial acceptance by non-Marxist writers; thirdly
I show how western Marxist authors integrate it into a wider perspective.

Social movement cultures and everyday lifeworlds

How we organize reflects who we are: this is in a sense completely unsur-

prising. No doubt there are times when we create something completely
original, times when we are schooled in a particular organizing tradi-
tion, and times when we are inspired by a movement elsewhere. In each
case, however, these initial models are passed through the filters of how
we attempt to make these ideas work in our own context and with the
people we are organizing with. More commonly, of course, social move-
ment actors do not instantly think of themselves as doing something
radically outside the ordinary (or seek to avoid the perception that they
are asking something unprecedented and perhaps illegitimate of each
other) and so tend to draw on modes of interacting, everyday life skills,
and ways of thinking which are already familiar in the lifeworld within
which they are organizing.
Thus, for example, it is unsurprising if medieval peasant movements
reproduced much of the particularism, faith in distant rulers as against
immediate exploiters, and religious morality of the world they sprang
from. At the opposite end of the scale, Linebaugh and Rediker’s work
(2000; Rediker 1987, 2004) on the politics of the Atlantic working class
shows neatly how the practice of piracy sprang from the work relations
of the commercial sailing ship, how the transmission of skills among
political radicals followed trans-oceanic trade patterns, and how the
internationalism of these radicals reproduced that of the new Atlantic
economy. From the sublime to the less grandiose, I have found in set-
ting up alternative kindergartens that organizational patterns all too
often reproduce the friendship politics of the kinds of parents who
 Laurence Cox 51

become involved – an experience paralleled in Avrich’s (2005) analysis

of anarchist school projects.
More formally, western Marxists have regularly sought to show how
social movement cultures are intimately related with the popular cul-
tures and everyday lifeworlds of their participants (Thompson 1991).
Putting the same point in a different way, they have equally sought
to show the implicit politics of popular culture (Hall and Jefferson
1991), the extent to which popular religion can mean self-organizing
under another name (Hill 1975), and so on. For western Marxists, then,
“social movement culture” is not something separate from popular cul-
ture. Effective social movements draw on neighbourhood networks,
workplace skills, popular music, local emotional repertoires, and shared
symbolic references.
Non-Marxist writers have often agreed (see also Ullrich and Keller,
this volume, and Baumgarten, this volume). Nancy Naples’ (1998) oral
history of women community organizers in poor and Latino commu-
nities in East Coast US cities shows how their “activist mothering”
extended caring relationships beyond their own families to the young
women organizers whom they mentor, as well as more broadly an ethic
of care for their communities. Lichterman’s (1996) ethnography of dis-
tinct modes of environmental organizing draws similar conclusions for
anti-toxics campaigners in poor minority communities, who resisted
being distinguished from their neighbours as “activists”. Conversely,
white service-class members of the US Green Party shared their class’s
extreme mobility and disconnection from family and community of ori-
gin, constructing new kinds of elective families in ways not dissimilar to
Maffesoli’s (1996) “urban tribes”.
Similarly, McKay’s (1996) historical account of radical subcultures in
Britain uses classic British cultural studies models of analysis, which rou-
tinely highlighted the political aspects of apparently cultural phenom-
ena (Hall and Jefferson 1991), to show that they can be equally applied
to subcultures with an overtly political edge; meanwhile, Hetherington
(2000) makes in some ways the same point in reverse when he describes
British New Age Travellers in terms of a style subculture. In all these
cases, what is being said is that how we organize reflects who we are,
quite normally and naturally.

Materialist implications
A Marxist analysis of social movement culture underlines this point,
drawing out a series of materialist implications. One is that “who we
are” is shaped by our material circumstances and struggles: at the most
52 A Whole Way of Struggle?

basic, social movements are part of the “political economy of labour”

(Lebowitz 2003), the attempt to survive and thrive in the face of rela-
tions of exploitation. These relations are not only classed but also raced
and gendered, as socialist feminist critiques of the left (Rowbotham,
Wainwright, and Lynne 1979) and black critiques of white feminism
(hooks 1981) have observed.5 Even within the context of the global
“movement of movements”, overcoming the ways in which movement
practices are shaped by social origins has proved extremely difficult
(Juris 2008; Conway 2011; Hewitt 2011; Flesher Fominaya, this volume).
Culture, in this reading, is materially determined [in Williams’ (1980)
sense of “setting limits and exerting pressures”].
A second point gives purpose to the Marxist tradition of class analysis:
not only do some social groups have more reason to mobilize around
certain issues than others [it makes less sense to recruit around fem-
inist issues in male contexts, as Messner (1997) has shown] or have
more potential for disruption (Piven 2008) than others, but different
social groups have different organizing capacities and potentials. This
need not be eternal or essential to be decisive at any given point in
time: at present, for example, it is clear that indigenous populations
in several Andean countries possess a crucial political potential which
has made them central to movement developments (Cocco and Negri
2006; Zibechi 2010). Different cultures, then, are political in different
ways (including, perhaps, in hostility to change or in inability to act
effectively).
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, how a given lifeworld is orga-
nized is already political (Thompson 1991). It is not that we first have an
apolitical lifeworld (whatever that might look like), and then (perhaps
with the addition of “culture” or “politics”) social movements arise – or
that, as Habermas (1981) suggested, movements represent the defence
of (private but authentic) lifeworlds against the logics of economics and
the state. Rather, how people conceive of, and struggle to meet, their
needs is itself a politics, which may take a range of forms: clientelism,
institutional loyalty, religion, protest, and so on – grounded in their
material situations but with wider-reaching effects (Gramsci 1971).
These situations are themselves routinely contested: if there is a sim-
ple opposition between the politics of “keep your head down” (Scott
1990) and that hostile to “ragged-trousered philanthropy” (Tressell
1993), there may well be competing clientelist networks along with
movements attempting to assert popular power outside of elite medi-
ation; or a working-class community or family may be divided between
religious and political modes of organizing. If everyday culture in this
 Laurence Cox 53

sense is at the same time everyday politics, it is not homogeneous;

and this is the point of Gramsci’s Southern Question analysis (1978) –
organizing depends on contradiction.
In this first proposition, culture appears primarily as a “whole way
of being”, a way of “doing” the everyday, including everyday organiz-
ing (or everyday music or religion with political implications). What is
highlighted is the relationship between these two apparently separate
terms, culture and social movements.

A developmental perspective on social movement culture

and knowledge

There is, it will be evident, an intellectual problem at this point. What

might be called a base-superstructure model of movement culture would
presumably propose that social movement activism is a superstructure,
reflective in some sense of a base in lifeworlds themselves structured in
material ways (e.g., of class, gender, and race). If, however, lifeworlds are
already political with a small p – that is, the way we act has implications
in terms of broader power relations within society – and if this politics
is contested, it is clear that the relationship between lifeworld culture
and movement activism cannot be simply of the kind “A produces B”
(Williams 1980).
A more workable analysis is then to say, as Alf Nilsen and I have argued
(Nilsen and Cox 2005; Nilsen 2009), that we can see social movement
culture and institutions as being developmental: articulating further
rationalities which are expressed in popular lifeworlds and attempting
to meet needs which require action beyond the lifeworld.
These “local rationalities” are local because they are organized around
particular, situated, material relationships of exploitation, power, and
cultural hierarchies. They are rationalities because they are ways of doing
things which respond to something real – the need to feed children, the
pressures of workplace management, the assertion of human dignity in
the face of racism – but also because they may be more or less adequate
to these needs (Lebowitz 2003). People’s material situation is a neces-
sary, but not sufficient, explanation for social movements; what makes
the difference is how people understand, respond to, and attempt to
transform that situation. Movements move in precisely this space: from
fear to action, for example (Nilsen 2012).
This reading has normative implications: that social movements
are not as arbitrary as the postmodernist reading (Laclau and Mouffe
1985) proposes but bear a certain situational justification in relation
54 A Whole Way of Struggle?

to their lifeworlds of origin. The implications of this critical realist

position (Collier 1994) have been teased out particularly neatly by
Wainwright (1994).
Wainwright argues that non-powerful participants in society come
to hold various forms of unofficial or tacit practical knowledge which
represent the “slave” part of Hegel’s master–slave relationship: outside
the ken or theology of managers, policy-makers, international finan-
cial institutions, and so on but nevertheless key to everyday survival
as expressions of unmet needs, “illegitimate” experiences, and unof-
ficial coping strategies. Crucially, such knowledge is best articulated
collectively. Using the paradigmatic example of feminist consciousness-
raising, she argues that it is such knowledge that social movements
develop into challenges to the existing order.
In other words, a materialist understanding of social movement cul-
ture sees it not just as situated. It also sees culture in general, and a
fortiori those aspects of culture which we can distinguish as articulated
social movements, as attempts to be adequate to this situatedness. These
attempts might be more or less successful – in the eyes of an academic
observer or, more urgently, in the eyes of local participants who argue
over how to do things as well as working things out less consciously in
relation to their actual situations.
The outcomes of these arguments are not a foregone conclusion, and
should not be reified theoretically. In contrast to the conservative impli-
cations of Scott’s (1990) “hidden transcripts” argument6 (based in part
on fieldwork in Malaysia after the British counter-insurgency campaign),
for example, the argument does not assume that hidden transcripts must
stay hidden – the fear of repression which is central to Scott’s analysis is
a historically specific condition which can be overcome (Cox and Nilsen
2014). At times, the oppressed do rise up; at others, they do not.
But if, for example, a peasant organizer has to convince other peas-
ants that the landlords or their military backers are not God-given,
trustworthy, or invincible, how can we theorize this kind of complex
consciousness?
Gramsci’s (1991) analysis of peasant consciousness, drawing in large
part on his own reflections on Sardinian life (Nairn 1982), offers a
useful contrast between “common sense” and “good sense”. Within
consciousness – and within the lifeworld – many different forces co-
exist, including both Wainwright’s tacit knowledge and the official,
hegemonic perspectives (and, indeed, those represented by the “tradi-
tional intellectuals” of older social situations, such as the village priest
 Laurence Cox 55

or lawyer, and those represented by the “organic intellectuals” of rising

groups, such as labour activists).
“Good sense”, for Gramsci, then represents that core of “common
sense” [the actually existing mixture of hegemonic attitudes, practical
good sense, and historical residues in everyday consciousness (Ytterstad
2011)] which actually expresses one’s own material situation – and
hence the needs, experiences, and problems contained in it. Ideas,
practices, movements, and institutions which are subject to fewer con-
straints of external power and exploitation enable this good sense to
be more fully expressed. Marxist writers on culture have developed this
analysis into fields as widely differing as popular religion (Barrow 1986)
and working-class Marxist theory (Macintyre 1986).
This, incidentally, is another way of stating Lukács’ often-
misunderstood position on class consciousness (1971, 2000), which he
explicitly presents as a Weberian ideal-type construction: given par-
ticular interests and a particular context, a certain logic of action is
likely to be followed, all else being equal. Of course, historically all
else is very often not equal. Since the rise of industrial capitalism, for
example, workers have routinely attempted to improve their situations
(as Thompson puts it, “no worker in history ever had surplus value taken
out of his [sic] hide without finding a way of resisting” (1966:115)), but
the forms which this has taken and the outcomes of those strategies
have been anything other than neatly predictable.
Another approach, this time highlighting the development of insti-
tutions, is Lebowitz’ “political economy of labour” (2003), which sees
human needs (understood as socially determined and themselves devel-
opmental rather than abstractly given) as continually and necessarily
giving rise, on the part of those who do not control the means of produc-
tion, to attempts to meet them. Thus family and community solidarity
are just as much a part of this process as are “cultures of solidarity”
(Fantasia 1988) or membership of unions and socialist parties; “our com-
mon history” (Paul Thompson 1982) consists, to a significant degree, of
the constantly disrupted attempt to extend this logic as far as possible
within current situations. Not, as Williams once put it, a “whole way of
life”, so much as (EP Thompson) a “whole way of struggle” (Hall 1989).
Thompson’s understanding of the development of the English work-
ing class as a learning process has been powerfully explored by Vester
(1970; see also Cox 2013). Cox (2011) explores another approach to
this Marxist analysis of social movements, according to which social
movements are developmental expressions of the materially grounded
56 A Whole Way of Struggle?

“local rationalities” of the social situations which give birth to them

(Nilsen 2010).
Here I want simply to note the value and the limitations of this analy-
sis. Its value is in offering a coherent and socially situated analysis of the
genesis, persistence, and general direction of social movements, as out-
lined above. Its limitation is that it does not, and cannot, account for
the specific history of a particular movement, campaign, or organiza-
tion. From the point of view of “movement-relevant theory”, however,
what this means is that this approach does not see the path followed
by a particular movement as inevitable; rather, it posits the movement as
necessary and its specifics as the outcomes of internal struggles, and pro-
vides – in the notions of local rationality, tacit knowledge, needs, and
so on – a yardstick by which to measure whether the organizations and
strategies currently being pursued are helpful and appropriate or not.
Non-Marxist writers have also attempted a cognitive/learning analysis
of social movements, whether in terms of the development of alterna-
tive movement knowledge (Eyerman and Jamison 1990), health and
emotional practices (Anne Scott 1998), or counter-cultures (Buckner
1971). However, without a sense of a material base, non-Marxists lack
the directional and evaluative components identified above – which
make it possible to go beyond blanket celebrations or dismissals of
movement institutions in terms of their supposed intrinsic qualities
and to ask how far they succeed in expressing the popular needs and
understandings which underpin the movement or when, and in what
circumstances, they can enable substantial social change.

Social movements, culture . . . and revolutions

Finally, we can note that the Marxist tradition proposes a specific role
for revolutionary and social movement experience in transforming “com-
mon sense” into “good sense”: Marx and Engels (1970:53) proposed
that it was only in such contexts that a whole class, rather than simply
individuals, could shift the “muck of ages”, the hegemonic perspectives
instilled into them, and come to see the world anew.
Feminism, or black pride, could not grow “one individual at a time”.
It took mass movements which shook the world to transform the ways
of seeing and thinking of a whole generation and to open new possibil-
ities for their children. One key reason for this, of course, is that local
rationalities are local: it takes the encounter with other, parallel ratio-
nalities – in the formation of social movements, and then of alliances
between social movements – to abstract from the local and construct a
good sense which is not simply a restated particularism or clientelism.
 Laurence Cox 57

This analysis, then, enables us to say something substantive about

events such as the Arab Spring (Shihade, Fominaya, and Cox 2012),
the “pink tide” in Latin America (Zibechi 2010), or the revolutions
of 1989 (Dale 2006) that goes beyond comments on “Twitter revolu-
tions” and the like. Without needing to deny their limits, ambiguities,
and problems, it becomes possible to understand these continent-wide
transformative moments as linked by more than their surfaces, with
shared “tacit knowledges” and a multiplicity of “local rationalities” com-
ing together in movements and revolutions to remake the social order
(McNally 2013).
Parts at least of the “muck of ages”, even parts which claimed to be
Marxist, were jettisoned and new understandings developed and fought
out – in Tahrir Square, for example. This, too, is part of the Marxist
analysis of culture and social movements: the understanding that rev-
olutions are necessarily also major cultural events. This is why oral
histories of the civil rights movement (Hampton et al. 1995), of 1968
(Fraser 1988), of early feminism (Sebestyen 1988), and of other trans-
formative moments (Kenney 2002) make such powerful reading: they
show this process in the most dramatic way, as the remaking of culture
in individual lives.
In this second aspect of the western Marxist approach, then, culture
appears as the developmental, contested, learning process of attempting
to develop “a whole way of struggle”: it is precisely the learning, the
development, and the contestation which are highlighted.

Speaking (back) to power

All of this brings us to the social totality. If, as I have proposed above,
social movements represent the attempt to meet popular needs, express
tacit knowledge, distil “good sense” from “common sense”, and create
more adequate institutional orders, they do this in the teeth of exploita-
tion, hegemonic cultural orders, and political power (Thompson 1976,
1993). Pace Holloway (2002), there are limits to “changing the world
without taking power”. One cannot simply “speak truth to power”
(Havel 1990), literally or metaphorically: as we know from our every-
day experience, power will bite back when challenged (this is why,
if movements are absent or repressed, Scott’s hidden transcripts stay
hidden).
A more formal way of stating this is that social movements naturally
encounter dominant institutions, or indeed counter-movements (such
as racist movements, anti-feminist backlashes, fascist mobilization,
58 A Whole Way of Struggle?

religious fundamentalism, etc.). There is, as these examples suggest, a

substantial extent to which these conflicts are fought out on the terrain
of coercion or domination: people are sacked, beaten up, vilified, killed,
and otherwise punished for opposing the social order, and in these situ-
ations (as too where the forces at stake are massively uneven) solidarity
and support become the order of the day (Olesen 2005), and the rele-
vant institutions – be they workers’ militias, civil rights lawyers, support
networks of feminist scholars, or Zapatista solidarity – are a normal part
of certain movement situations.
More important from the point of view of movement culture, how-
ever, is the symbolic dialogue that develops. As Rediker’s (2004) analysis
of the “dialogue of terror” between pirates and navies shows, such dia-
logues are not absent from situations of coercion (ní Dhorchaigh and
Cox 2011); they are, however, strategically central where what is at
stake is the search for consent. Thus, Barker’s (2006) analysis of the
struggle over language when hospitals are closed in the name of “com-
munity” and through processes described as “consultation” highlights
how movements attempt to reclaim the language of the state for their
own purposes. These particular terms, of course, like those of democracy,
were once popular languages, and the state’s use of them is intended to
elicit consent through this symbolic land grab. Similarly, Wainwright’s
(2009) Reclaim the State describes in bitter and hilarious detail the
struggle by Luton’s Exodus Collective to exercise “participatory” and
“community” agency despite the behaviour of a local state committed
in theory to furthering both and in practice to preventing any actual
participation by local movements.
That movements and the state are in symbolic dialogue with one
another – or struggle for ownership of terms like participation, democ-
racy, consultation, community – is not simply a question of linguistic
piracy or privateering, nor is it simply a question of participants inter-
nalizing someone else’s discourse (Baumgarten and Ullrich 2012), any
more than the religious radicalism of the English Revolution (Hill 1975;
Holstun 2000) simply represented a capitulation to the power of reli-
gion. At times, of course, it is both, as well as a dialogue with potential
allies.
Most centrally, however, it is part of the process of making and remak-
ing the social world, as both social movements and the state seek to
fill legitimate words (such as democracy) with opposing practical con-
tent, in different kinds of social organization. A classic document of this
was a study (Nexus 2000) carried out in the Irish working-class estate
 Laurence Cox 59

of Ballymun highlighting the contrasts between what the local state

understood by the term “consultation” and what community organiz-
ers understood by the same term. The point here – represented in part
by the commissioning of the document by the Ballymun Community
Action Programme – was the attempt to force the state to operate, within
the same language, in different ways.
Similarly, as Tovey (1993) has shown, many rural struggles over devel-
opment are not in opposition to “development” as a word but rather
represent an attempt at an alternative development, in forms and direc-
tions which meet local needs, within the same language. Of course the
same is routinely true in public struggles over expert scientific knowl-
edge or legal cases: the language of the struggle is given in advance, but
what is at stake is the content to be given to that language. Is it legit-
imate to destroy a military plane which is to be used in an illegal war,
as the Catholic Workers’ “Ploughshares” actions claim? Often, in Britain
and Ireland, juries agree that it is.
Even military conflicts routinely have aspects of this contentious
dialogue, from the Zapatistas’ reworking of Mexican national-
developmentalist rhetoric to the Italian Resistance’s use of the language
of legitimacy. This is not, then, a culturalist approach as opposed to a
political approach (Melucci 1989, 1996); rather, it is one which sees pol-
itics as inherently cultural (and vice versa): the battlefields of consent,
alliance formation, and the “war of position” (Gramsci 1971) cannot be
understood without reference to both.
Approaches such as frame theory acknowledge an element of this,
but in limited ways. In their original formulations (leaving aside the
subsequent extension and inflation of the concept) they reflect the sit-
uation of US social movements seeking to have their legitimacy (what
the “dynamics of contention” approach now calls WUNC) recognized
by the dominant order, in the first instance through “public opinion”
as constructed by mainstream media. Of course – as seen in the early
stages of the Arab Spring – the boot can at times be on the other foot,
and established elites can attempt to remake themselves in terms of par-
ticipation, consultation, or even democracy under pressure from below.
Or, as with European anti-austerity movements, there can be outright
conflict between the neoliberal discourse dominant in mainstream pol-
itics and financial institutions and the very different languages within
which movements opposed to austerity speak.
Most visibly in this third case, but no less in the other two, we see the
relationship between social movements and culture as part of the “war
60 A Whole Way of Struggle?

of position”: the attempt by a reformist movement to insert itself within

existing hegemonic frames, the acceptance of a new discourse (but not
practice) by elites struggling to hold onto power, or the battle between
such elites and radical movements over popular consent, fought out in
multiple arenas and often with very different tools (the cynical tone of
popular opinion in pub conversations as against the authoritative tone
of official expertise on television, for example).
In this third sense, culture is a field of conflict, something essentially
contested, part of the process of social change (Williams 1981).

Conclusion: The value of a western Marxist approach

This chapter has proposed that Marxist approaches to culture in social

movements are relational and developmental. Firstly, the ways in which
people interact when they develop social movements express their
own lifeworlds and material situations. Secondly, movements con-
stitute themselves as practices, ideas, and institutions which further
articulate popular ways of being. Thirdly, such complexes of prac-
tices and institutions find themselves in cultural as well as political
dialogue and contestation with opposing, and often more powerful,
forces.
If everyday culture is necessarily drawn on in movement organiza-
tion, the extent to which movements are in a position to develop their
own institutional forms or engage in symbolic dialogue is far more
constrained by broader relationships of power and conflict. From a
Marxist perspective, movements are successful to the extent to which
they are able to develop and engage with opponents while still express-
ing the needs, experiences, and knowledge articulated in popular
lifeworlds.
As the names of Gramsci, Hill, James, Thompson, Williams, or Rediker
suggest, this approach to the subject is capable of handling large-scale
explanatory questions which more micro-approaches to culture often
avoid or take for granted, and is immensely fertile in generating prac-
tical research. Indeed, social movements research, such as that by Tilly
(e.g. 1986) and Tarrow (e.g. 1998), strongly influenced by the British
and French Marxist historians, arguably draws on this tradition in ways
which their successors typically fail to acknowledge. So too does cul-
tural studies, whose foundational points of reference include Gramsci
and Williams in particular, although here the relationship is both crit-
ical and acknowledged [in British if not always in American cultural
studies (Hall and Jefferson 1991)].
 Laurence Cox 61

Implications for research

Intellectually, this Marxist approach to social movements and culture
justifies itself in enabling an explanation of cultural and movement
categories which static sets of concepts often naturalize. The rela-
tionship between organizing modes and lifeworlds, between popular
needs and movement demands, between the institutions of movement
milieux (Taylor and Whittier 1992) and the “hidden transcripts” they
express, or between the competing meanings given by movements and
official institutions to the same concepts can thus be understood as
aspects of the contested development of popular needs and lifeworlds
through movements’ own ideas and practices up to the encounter
with more powerful institutions. Movement culture, in other words,
can be thought through with moving – developmental and dialogical –
categories, rather than in the conceptual equivalent of dictionary
definitions, isolated and static.
Such an approach does not require participatory research methodolo-
gies. However, its focus on movement organizing and strategy enables
engaged researchers to draw on and tackle forms of practice-oriented
thought and experience which more formalized models often rule
out. In this respect it meets Bevington and Dixon’s (2005) call for
“movement-relevant theory” (see also Barker and Cox 2002).
More generally, Marxism has always highlighted the interrelation-
ship between theory and practice, and this is true for Marxist writing
itself. The more theoretically articulate writers in this tradition, such
as Williams or Gramsci, are nonetheless often metaphorical in their
attempts to articulate research problems, and without the example of
the rest of their writings, they would hardly have inspired such an
extensive range of successors. Conversely, Thompson (1978) was openly
hostile to overly schematic theoretical writing, but was immensely influ-
ential in a range of approaches to history precisely because of the
strength of his research practice (MARHO 1983). These examples of
good practice have had successors out of all proportion to the degree
to which they, or critics, have analysed their overt theory (substantially
in the case of Gramsci; in very limited ways for Williams; barely at all
for Thompson).
There are good reasons for this, in that (as Thompson put it) we as
writers or researchers do not always live these situations. We may be
more fluent and confident in how we articulate the needs and expe-
riences underlying a particular movement, the everyday cultures and
learning processes involved, or the complexities of the symbolic dia-
logue with power, and we may have a greater breadth of information and
62 A Whole Way of Struggle?

comparisons available to us (not always!), but we often lack the depth of

lived experience of this particular situation, and all the aspects (some only
half-recognized or tacitly assumed) which practitioners are attempting
to juggle and think through as they change how to do things.
Theorists in this tradition contribute by asking questions – about how
adequate a particular strategy is to a particular problem – rather than
arbitrarily importing external criteria. Such questions return the initia-
tive to movement participants in their identification of what the issues
are, their arguments over how to achieve the goal, and their reflections
on what their purposes are, and encourage a greater articulation and
discussion around these. If there is an external criterion, it is that move-
ments do need to work out something, take things further – that they
are movements, not a static entity to comment on but a fraught attempt
to do something.
It is appropriate, then, that writing in this tradition rarely if ever takes
the form of an authoritative pronouncement that “this is how things
are”, and tends instead to the use of metaphors, the identification of
relationships and processes, in ways which people in other movement
situations again can recognize themselves – offering a language whose
main role is to be reworked by others as they struggle to articulate their
own needs, develop their own movements, and fight their own battles.

Notes
1. There is no universally recognized Marxist concept of culture (and there
is of course a refusal to reify or eternalize such concepts within Marx’s
own thought). The 20th-century reorganizations of European capitalism saw
figures such as Gramsci (1971) attempting to elaborate a way of understanding
the ways in which culture was articulated within such societies, and to under-
stand the continuities and ruptures with earlier forms and other contexts, a
central theme in the Prison Notebooks.
2. See Barker et al. (2013) for an overview of current scholarship in this area.
3. See Nilsen (2009) and Cox (2011) for more narrowly conceptual formulations.
4. I do not here mean that there is an obvious or pre-given outcome of any of
these learning processes. Indeed, they are often internally contested as people
argue over how to speak, how to behave, and how to organize; but these argu-
ments are won or lost in relation to people’s apprehension of their situation
and needs.
5. With Gottlieb (1989), I see the integration of feminist, anti-racist, and world
systems perspectives as a deepening rather than a contradiction of materialist
perspectives which were often originally expressed primarily in relation to
social class.
6. This highlights the ways in which subaltern groups grumble, joke, gos-
sip, mock, and otherwise give backstage expression to their feelings about
the powerful but treats this (and the relative absence of overtly expressed
opposition) almost as a human universal.
 Laurence Cox 63

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4
Reassessing the Culture Concept
in the Analysis of Global Social
Movements: An Anthropological
Perspective
June Nash

E.B. Tyler’s (1871) classic 19th-century definition of culture as “that

complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, custom, and
many other capabilities and habits acquired by man as members of
society” provided a unifying concept for the emerging discipline of
anthropology. During its formative years in the second half of the 19th
century, social anthropology was engaged in the holistic and compar-
ative study of the capacity of the human species to symbolize and
communicate socially the universal and particular experiences of being
human throughout the world.
Despite the breadth of the problems encompassed by anthropol-
ogy, the discipline limited its frame of reference to discrete bounded
societies, often ignoring the colonial power structure within which
anthropologists and their subjects operate. The unifying concept of
culture was constricted in terms of biological evolutionary principles
affirming unilineal progression from primitive to advanced forms of
society. Although early anthropologists professed cultural relativism in
their comparative analyses, their vision of progress was predicated on
European models that validated colonial domination while ignoring the
scientific and humanistic advances in other societies.
Anthropologists have long since denounced unilineal descent from
primitive to civilized that haunted their interpretations of physical, cul-
tural, and social matters (Steward 1955).1 So, too, has the assumption
that any given culture is homogeneous and located in bounded groups –
in the tradition of Tyler – been exposed as our knowledge of their history

67
68 Reassessing the Culture Concept

and connections has proliferated. Yet the structural-functional mod-

els that framed the ethnographic field still allow euro-centric models,
for asserting modernization to remain intact generations after internal
rebellions began to change the people who were denied their history
(Escobar 1995; Nash 2001a, 2008; Wolf 1982).
With the increasing entry of formerly colonized subjects into the field
of social anthropology, distinct views of cultural processes proliferate
along with the contexts that relate to them. The coexistence of plural
cultures in every society requires a multifaceted notion of what con-
stitutes the cultural core, and even whether a core can be designated.
In Mexico, culture often relates to what is distinctively indigenous, with
public institutions such as hospitals or schools that serve predominantly
indigenous people named “El Hospital Cultural” or “La Universidad
Intercultural”. With the increasing number of settings in which dis-
tinct cultures now intermingle, the term “multicultural” is ubiquitous.
Although the goal of multicultural inclusion has been adopted by dis-
tinct political and social cohorts, the hegemonic patterns are dominated
by multicultural neoliberalism in the global spheres of interaction (Hale
2002, 2004). Clearly we are at a crossroad, with former “subjects” of
anthropology taking a leading role in defining the field of intercultural
interaction.
The emerging consensus regarding the definition of culture among
anthropologists is the characterization of culture as hybrid, fluid, and
constantly adapting to changes in a global system. Increasingly we
find that indigenous social movements base their claims to the right
of expression of their culture on United Nations Convention No. 169,
which guarantees the rights of “whole people” to self-determination.
At the same time indigenous social movements invoke patrimonial
rights as Pueblos Originarios, original populations, to lands of their prede-
cessors. In Mexico, they have applied this principle to settling national
territories, and even to gate receipts in archaeological sites.
Because of the multiple expressions of ethnic belonging, cultural
debates are sometimes cast in terms of repertoires, as cultural his-
torians, anthropologists, and sociologists seek to explain the flexible
and shifting strategies for analysing human behaviour. The work of
Carrithers (2005) and McDaniel (2011) illustrates the insights gained
from analysing repertoires that reveal the way in which familiar symbols
structure responses in public encounters or in the practice of religion.
Similarly, Ann Swidler’s vision of culture as a toolkit of symbols, stories,
and world views is a useful approach for analysing the institutional con-
text of cultural practice in assessing educational contexts (Swidler 1994).
 June Nash 69

However, neither a repertoire nor a toolkit can address systemic prob-

lems in economic and political structures that draw upon the sources
for oppositional discourse and action. Something more is needed for
the task of analysing the cultural context and social hierarchies that
generate social movements. This requires a theory of power and con-
flicts inherent in subaltern society in relation to deep-seated behavioural
responses to the state authority.
Here I shall discuss culture in the context of social movements in
which shared premises guiding the behaviours of dominant societies
are challenged. Among the most universal social movements unify-
ing and dividing people throughout the world are those related to
rejecting, resisting, or accommodating modernization. The concept of
modernity is derived from premises of secularity, rationality, and sci-
entific objectives that were central to the Age of Enlightenment in
18th-century European society. Exponents of modernization typically
measure progress based on material benefits that conduce to better
living. Although modernization once captured the imaginary of both
capitalist and communist countries in the 20th century, those who now
question the modernizing project relate their criticism to the dominance
of neoliberal capitalism defining the goals and strategies for attaining it.
For many countries of the Global South, modernization connotes cor-
ruption, greed, inflation, and insecurity on a global scale. The critique
of wasteful consumption unites conservationists from distinct popula-
tions, including elites and aboriginal populations, who perceive a threat
to the environment from unregulated extraction of natural resources.
Primordial communities, or Pueblos Originarios, are the most vigorous
exponents in protesting the dislocations in time and space caused by
the expansion of private capitalist enterprises in Latin America. These
communities are often found in the retreat zones to which indigenous
peoples of the Americas fled from the invasion of the conquerors. They
are now being invaded by timber and mining companies, commer-
cialized export agriculture, and tourism. Peasants and hunter-gatherers
are joined by environmental and cultural conservationists to expose
the drastic consequences of neoliberal economics and politics on the
destruction of biodiversity and the resource base for survival in its most
elemental forms. The confluence of these two streams of opposition to
neoliberal capitalism brings together culturally distinct trends in the
ongoing critique of capitalist accumulation (Bartra 2001; Bonfil Batalla
1989; Edelman 1999; Faust 2004). Whereas economic issues based on
class exploitation dominated the modernist critique of capital expan-
sion, the growing opposition of indigenous people to the invasion of
70 Reassessing the Culture Concept

mining and commercial crop enterprises is often cast in moral and spir-
itual terms. The growing alliance of conservationists and indigenous
peoples requires a culturally informed analysis that goes beyond eco-
nomic propositions to capture the traditional and customary appeals
of natives in the culture who are still grounded in the realities of
subsistence-based autonomy movements.
What is at stake is the subsistence sector that once allowed for
the survival of cultures as well as the environments they inhabited.
These retreat zones fostered alternative lifestyles that are gaining impor-
tance as the destructive consequences of modernization dominated by
neoliberal capitalism become recognized.2 The inclusion of women in
the wage work force along with subsistence workers of both genders is
now threatening the economic basis for political and social autonomy
that was based on the complementarity of a gendered division of labour
(Eber and Kovic 2003). With the invasion of indigenous lands by agro-
industrial enterprises, the subsistence economy of small plot cultivation
is disrupted. Men are forced to seek wage labour in urban areas and
across national borders, while women are often forced to take the ser-
vices and production they performed in the domestic economy into the
marketplace (Olivera and Vásquez 2004).
Anthropologists are responding to the global changes disrupting the
time and space horizons that once defined the boundaries of cultures
studied. In particular, we have begun to relate to the ongoing pro-
cesses of change occurring within and beyond the cultures we study. The
task anthropologists confront in the dislocations brought about by the
current globalization is that of clarifying the cultural processes that con-
duce to social movements that challenge the new hierarchies of power
and privilege: How do social movements reveal the disconnection in
time and space that generates social processes resulting from globaliza-
tion? How do we define the frame of analysis for our study of specific
cultures dominated by transnational forces? How can we analyse specific
cultural processes in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism? How are
popular responses to globalization attempting to overcome the widen-
ing gap in wealth and power emerging in the new social hierarchies?
Clearly we have a great deal to learn from protagonists in these
struggles to retain and elaborate their own designs for living. Our
definition of culture should encompass the cultural along with the struc-
tural processes that dominated the study of social movements. These
lessons derive from the demands for social justice of populations that
have been marginalized, specifically women and racial/ethnic groups,
as they seek a place in the widening orbits in time and space. The pro-
cesses generated in any social movement draw upon traditional cultural
 June Nash 71

expressions even as they project a vision of the changes needed to

realize them.
The generative forces deriving from latent conflict, accommodation,
and retention of the past contained in culture are revealed in social
movements. This requires methodological innovations to historicize our
subject in the absence of archival materials at the same time as we lib-
erate our conceptual tools from their colonial and imperial burdens.
Culture includes, but is not limited to, a repertoire of strategies for act-
ing in the world. It is also a dynamic context in which competing forces
attempt to change a given order to conform to new conditions of life.
Neither the approach to studying the cultural repertoires of a society
advanced by Carrithers’ (2005), and McDaniel’s (2011), nor Swidler’s
(1994) vision of culture as a toolkit of symbols, stories, and world views
can address systemic problems in economic and political structures that
draw upon the sources of oppositional discourse and action. The New
Social Movements’ assertion that the class struggle ends with the decline
of production in former industrial centres as it is replaced with the
“information societies” (see especially Melucci 1980, 1989) has failed
the test of history. What changes over time are the new contestants that
emerge with changing modes of production.
Rosa Luxemburg (1971) was among the first of her generation of
Marxists in the early decades of the 20th century to recognize the
change in the class struggle as it extended from factories to the sub-
sistence sector. She was attuned to the need on the part of capitalism
to draw peasants, fisherfolk, and hunters into the pool of wage-earning
consumers in order to extend the market for the goods produced, as the
following passage in “The Accumulation of Capital” (Luxemburg 1971)
shows:

The historic development of capitalism on the world stage in all of

its colorful and moving variety takes place in the exchange relations
of capital with the non-capitalist environment as it confronts the dif-
ficulties of a barter economy, secure social relations, and the limited
demand of patriarchal peasant society and artisan production.
(Luxemburg 1971:92)

Unlike her Marxist comrades, Luxemburg recognized the importance

of this unstated war waged by nascent capitalists in the early decades of
the 20th century in their attempt to break down the subsistence base of
self-sufficient producers.
Somehow this lesson was rediscovered – or possibly reinvented – by
the rebels who formed the ranks of the Zapatista Army of National
72 Reassessing the Culture Concept

Liberation. Ana Maria, a commander in the Ejercito Zapatista de

Liberación Nacional (EZLN), summed this up on the occasion of the Inter-
national Encounter of the EZLN in the Lacandon jungle on July 27,
1996:

As for the power known as neoliberalism, we do not count, we do

not produce, we do not sell and we do not buy. We are useless in the
accounts of big capital. And so we went to the mountains to seek for
relief from our pain of being forgotten stones and plants. Here in the
mountains of southeast Mexico our dead live. Our dead who live in
the mountains know many things. They speak to us of their death
and we listen. The talking boxes3 told us another history that comes
from yesterday and aims at tomorrow. The mountain spoke to us, the
Macehuales, who are common and ordinary people.
(my translation of a flyer released to the audience
on that occasion Nash 2001a:224)

Whether Ana Maria, who is an indigenous settler recruited in the early

stages of the formation of the EZLN rebellion, was tutored in commu-
nist literature by Subcomandante Marcos is not known. But coming
from that source it reveals the reasons for the growing revolts in the
Global South that took place as capitalism advanced during the 1970s
and 1980s. The New Social Movements theorists who announced the
“withering away” of the class struggle in the very days when it was being
rediscovered in the Global South by cultivators, hunters, and fisherfolk
might reconsider the course of history as it is taking place in the jungles
and other retreat zones.

Theory and methodology in comparing cultural imaginary

Among the paradigms for the anthropological analysis of change is the

concept of modernity. Inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Enlighten-
ment scholars, modernity is taken to be a complex of intellectual and
behavioural developments signifying progress in scientific, secular, and
rational modes of thinking and behaving. The social movements gener-
ated in the encounter of modernizing agents with distinctive cultures of
Europe are the early sites where expressions of resistance, protest, and
inspiration for change or withdrawal into retreat zones occurred. These
ongoing mobilizations in new sites of struggle in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America encompass the cultural repertoires and toolkits available in
each culture. But what is more important than the particular strategies
 June Nash 73

is the cultural patterning of these components in a coherent and gener-

ally accepted framework of ethical values. People mobilize in actions to
counter an assault on these premises for behaviour – premises that are
stimulated as often by past conditions as by future utopias. This frame-
work was once called the world view of a culture, but because of the
connotation that this was a bounded and homogeneous unit, I shall
use the term “imaginary” as the unifying concept of culture. It sug-
gests the spontaneous base for collective belief and behaviour in the
current expression of modernity. The conditions in which “modernity”
is realized are so changed that some have called it “postmodernity”.
Authority is no longer linked to age in ways that prevailed up to the
20th century. New discoveries and the rapid dissemination of new tech-
nologies upset the channels of cultural transmission that were once
considered enduring. As ethnographers working in the new frontiers
of state formation and alternative democratic processes show, age-
and gender-ordered hierarchies are challenged as women and indige-
nous groups take on leadership roles. The assumption that progress
was a one-way transfer of new technologies, institutions, and ways
of communicating drawn from European “civilizations” and applied
to undeveloped hinterlands is no longer valid in our concept of cul-
tural change. Added to this are the complications of globalization,
which multiply the challenges people in marginalized economies have
always faced when participation in global markets impinges on the local
economy.
The advent of modernity, wherever it has occurred in the expan-
sion of European civilization, brought with it some of the practices and
institutions that Charles Taylor (2004:1) associates with the term: These
include new technologies, urbanization, spatial as well as social mobil-
ity, and a secular orientation fostering scientific advance and progress.
Hundreds of years of conquest, colonization, and expropriation deny
the validity of the Europeans’ claims to promote progress as their unique
endeavour. The racist and class-divided societies that were propagated in
the colonies with European expansion brought indigenous people few
of the educational or social advances that are usually associated with the
term “modernity”.
In answer to Taylor’s question, as to whether we can envision “mul-
tiple modernities” in the world today, I shall argue that the project of
modernity cannot persist unless we recognize the ongoing adaptations
and transformations by those who are drawn into its orbits. Alterna-
tive modernities have found expression throughout the modern era, as
those who are marginalized challenge the premises of slavery, inequality,
74 Reassessing the Culture Concept

and injustice that prevailed long after the Enlightenment. The subaltern
voices of those who resist oppressive regimes draw upon these modern
concepts and institutions, as David Scott (2005) reminds us, in order to
express their own yearnings.
Globalization processes pose a challenge to our understanding of
culture that helps generate new methods and theory in anthropol-
ogy. As Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz and Gabriela Vargas-Cetina (2005:31 et
seq.) advise us, anthropological attention to local expressions of culture
allows us to imagine alternative modernities to offset global processes
of homogenization and cultural decline. Their preoccupation in iden-
tifying the local appropriation and resignification of global products,
knowledge, or systems is a key to understanding the cultural processes
at work in many sites. The generative force of these alternative cultures
constantly informs and revitalizes processes conducive to heterogeneous
expressions of modernity (Vargas Cetina 2005).
Our task then, as anthropologists, is to attend to the local expressions
of culture in which change and adaptation are ongoing processes of
accepting, modifying, or resisting new technologies, ideas, and institu-
tions. Globalization processes related to the expansion and integration
of capital investments, production systems, and markets generate social
movements of people mobilizing to protect their lands, their cultural
identities, and their autonomy. At the same time, the innovations
provided by modern technologies in improved communication sys-
tems and the development of global civil society provide local groups
with the means to transcend imposed trends and circulate their own
world view (Guidry, Kennedy and Zald 2000).
I shall draw upon my experience with social movements in my field-
work with Mayas of Guatemala and Chiapas to develop a theory and
method for analysing cultural processes related to globalization and
popular responses to dislocations in time and space. My guiding premise
is that the cultural commitments of indigenous populations, aroused
by the invasion of capitalist enterprises, promote social movements
related to the conservation of land, waters, mineral resources, and bio-
diversity. Cultural resources are mobilized in these social movements,
which are supported and often led by indigenous groups along with
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Their links with primordial
traditions provide adaptations based on collective social structures that
are alternatives to those of private capitalist expropriation. The link-
age of social movements to cultural processes revitalizes anthropology,
reaffirming our position in policy circles and public knowledge cen-
tres. At the same time, the structural issues of capital accumulation and
 June Nash 75

its distribution cannot be dismissed in the post-modernist rediscovery

of culture.

Alternatives to neoliberal modernity

In my focus on cultural processes I shall trace the alternatives to

neoliberal modernity as they develop in regions of the western hemi-
sphere which retain roots in ancient civilizations. Drawing on what
I learned in these settings, I shall try to show how cultural beliefs and
practices fare as people emerge from racist and class-divided societies
imposed by conquest, colonization, and neoliberal capitalist control.
Because Mayas have persisted as distinct subcultures in 500 years of
active resistance to assimilation, their world view, or imaginary, under-
stood as the logic that enables people to make sense of social practices in
rational, this-worldly terms is a necessary complement to Taylor’s (2004)
analysis of the Western, or European, imaginary. Whereas the Western
imaginary dissociates humans from the natural world, which they pre-
tend to dominate as they try to tame and bend it to their will, Mayan
logic seeks a balance in the universe with humanity accommodating to
a world of autonomous beings, including children, animals, and nature.
Rather than measuring progress in terms of technological control over
the world, Mayas view time as a burden borne by the collective group,
with people gaining prestige as they advance in age and responsibility
for the celebrations marking and ordering the passage of time in rela-
tion to cosmic changes of the solar and lunar cycles (Earle and Simonelli
2005; Kovic 2005; Speed 2004).
My task in describing the cultural imaginary of Mayas in these settings
is to define a theory of cultural retention in a time of rapid social change.
The cultural parameters that must be taken into account include (1) the
relationship of community to time and place; (2) the individual’s soul in
relation to nature and the cosmos; (3) the conceptual notion of cultural
and social autonomy retained from the past and adapted to new condi-
tions; and (4) the commitment to multicultural coexistence within and
beyond modern nations. The Mayan imaginary is rooted in the daily
interactions of people tied to ancestral lands that remind them of the
history of their ancestors as they forge a place in the global scheme.
Anthropologists are enhancing traditional methodologies of partici-
pation and observation to define these cultural parameters as well as
developing new digital media techniques to disseminate the informa-
tion. Cultural patterns emerge in the autobiographies in which members
of any given society express their experienced relationships to time
76 Reassessing the Culture Concept

and place. Crystallized in rituals and public events of the community

and the wider society, these events can also be observed and shared by
anthropologists.
The retention of distinctive cultural values reveals that Mayas never
accepted the premises of developed centres of the world as their own,
even while they tolerated these persuasions for others. I recall asking my
friend from Amatenango del Valle in Chiapas, Juliana Lopez Shunton,
as we travelled from Chiapas to New Haven, what she thought of the
marvels that she saw for the first time in the cities we passed through in
Mexico and beyond the border. Her response was always, “Yan shan.”
(That’s something else.) As a result of cultivated indifference to new
products and ways of doing things, there was a slow acceptance and
gradual accommodation of the new culture that allowed the Mayas to
develop their own paths to modernity.
I shall lay out the cultural parameters in which I perceived the values
of Mayan culture that will provide a context in which to compare dif-
ferences among Mayan societies and other culture complexes as well as
changes over time.

Relation of community to time and space

The relativity of time and space is acted out in the notion of cyclical
time within an ever-renewing world, or Balamilal, by Mayan communi-
ties. In ancient Mayan sites, the principle of relativity is contained in
the images of the turtle, which has inscribed naturally on its carapace
13 protuberances that signify the calendrical cycle of 260 days, with 20
times 13 days. Mayas believe that the turtle is among the aquatic crea-
tures that bore the earth as it moved from water to give passage to the
earth. Tedlock (2010:231) identifies the image of the turtle at Mayapan
as a diagram of space in time.4
Human beings ensure the ongoing cycle of the sun and moon in their
repetitive diurnal, monthly, and annual cycles in the ceremonial cal-
endar with which they celebrate the saints’ days and the preconquest
powers they mask. The burden of maintaining this cycle is borne by
religious officials who link the past with the present by carrying out
ceremonies that ensure the renewal of life (Gossen 1974,1986; Guiteras
Holmes 1961; Tedlock 1985; Villa Rojas 1990). These same concerns are
contained in the Popul Vuh, the Quiche bible of the Mayas (Tedlock
1985). The retention of these ties to temporal rhythms of the past is
impressive given the growing dependency of highland indigenous com-
munities on the migration of men as seasonal labourers in lowland
plantations. The notion of cyclical time in an ever-renewing world is
 June Nash 77

antithetical to the premise of progress in Western modernity, in which

the past is rejected, as well as the ties between generations along with it.
Yet this premise is probably the most important reason for the reten-
tion of a world view that has enabled Mayas to endure and remain
themselves in 500 years of colonization. It continues to reinforce a
vision of their place in the future as a collective group committed to
the conservation of life.

The individual’s soul in relation to nature and the cosmos

The Mayan imaginary draws upon a concept of soul (sch’ulel possessed
form), with which everyone relates to the collectivity and to the uni-
verse. The animal counterpart, or Wayohel (in Tzeltal) or Nahwal (in
nahuatl), accompanies many but not all people, enabling humans to
relate to nature and the wild (Nash 1970). When I was carrying out
fieldwork in Amatenango in the 1960s, shamans or curer diviners who
possessed two souls formed an age-ordered hierarchy called J’iloltik –
literally seers (Nash 1970:12–15, 138). Their power to cure, or to dam-
age through witchcraft, exercised through their Swayohel or animal
spirit, validated the guardian role of curer diviners in the service of the
Me’iltatil, or ancestors, protecting society from evil doers. They provided
the sanctioning for a system of justice that operated within the local
community. The sense of the need to conserve limited resources con-
tained in the Popol Vuh cultivates a cultural orientation that considers all
resources to be limited in quantity. It promotes a conservative approach
to production and consumption typical of peasant societies.

Cultural and social autonomy

The Mayan perception that human relations can affect, and in turn are
affected by, cosmic events is conducive to socializing practices giving
free expression to the autonomy of the individual and his/her soul.
Autonomy for the individual derives from the soul and is realized in the
community within which he/she is socialized. The demand for auton-
omy pervades political life as well as economic and social behaviour,
just as it is related to individual psyche and to the collectivity. The Popol
Vuh is replete with references to the autonomy of cosmic forces, the
sun and moon, the twin brothers as cultural heroes, of animals, and
even insects. Mayas are fully aware of the importance of the collective
ethos, and defend it zealously. They often name collective action groups,
such as Las Abejas (The Bees, a Catholic Base Community originating in
Chenalhó) or La Hormiga (The Ant), a neighbourhood of San Cristobal
de Las Casas to which Chamulans who were expelled from their pueblo
78 Reassessing the Culture Concept

migrated, in recognition of this collective ethos. Autonomy is the cen-

tral motivating force in the resistance movement that allowed Mayas to
retain their way of life.
In a story attributed to Don Antonio, who figured as Sub-commander
Marcos’ mentor for indigenous beliefs, the metaphor of the mirror, a
stone polished by the feet of multitudes that tramped over it as they
walked the good path, stood for collective opinion reflected in the pol-
ished surface. Justice means “not to punish, but to give back to each
what he or she deserves, and that is what the mirror gives back”; liberty
is “not that each one does what he or she wants, but to choose whatever
road the mirror wants in order to arrive at it, and to aid them in their
curing”. The “true word”, or democratic equality, requires “not that all
think the same, but that all thoughts, or the majority of the thoughts,
seek and arrive at this consensus”. This conversion of modernist ideals to
culturally and racially autonomous thinking marks the indigenous con-
tribution to an alternative imaginary that activates social movements to
this day (Nash 2001b).

Commitment to multicultural autonomy

The Balamilal (world) is frequently invoked in village speech and prayer.
The coexistence of multiple cultures in the Balamilal was cultivated by
Mayas in the formation of their civilization (Tedlock 2010). Autonomy
combined with multicultural coexistence remains a pivotal expression
in Mayan social movements. Commander David of the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation (EZLN) expressed the following multicultural
world view in his introductory remarks at the National Indigenous
Forum on January 3, 1996:

We are indigenous people, we have suffered centuries of rejection,

of persecution, of abandonment, of death. Many times the oppressor
has white skin, but other times death and treason has had dark skin
and our same language. The good path also takes on the world of
men and women of white skin and of different language. In the world
that the Zapatistas want, all skin colors fit, all the languages and all
the paths. The good world has many ways where there is respect and
dignity.
(EZLN 1997:269)

Commander David’s speech reveals the cultural conception that evil

does not come clothed in unique cultural or racial traits, and that the
world we must seek to embrace must contain room for all. This mimics
 June Nash 79

a value of modernity that the Euro-American West often fails to imagine

even as a possibility.

Cultural change in the contemporary Zapatista movement

What do these examples of an integrated cultural system tell us about

the culture concept itself and how is it changing in the contemporary
social movement? I learned to appreciate the commitment to the past
reiterated in the prayers of the Alfereces, Captains of the Fiesta, during
celebrations of what were ostensibly saints’ days. Since these celebra-
tions masked the powers of the sun and moon, and of the rain gods who
could also wreak havoc in the cornfields they cultivated, the community
seemed to feel that they were in league with nature. The rituals related
to these powers were also a defensive means of holding on to their
own identity as people of corn. Caught up in the “web of meanings” –
as Clifford Geertz called the elements spun in these culturally inte-
grated, cohesive systems – they could live with the dominant “other”
in their midst, as they appeared to have done with the Toltecs, or reject
it, as they did with the Spaniards. Chamulans, who are closest to San
Cristobal of all the indigenous groups in Chiapas, are dedicated to ritual
festivals that reinvigorate their cultural distinction from the dominant
culture (Gossen 1986)
Given this propensity to self-reinforcing stability, what causes cultures
to change? Ultimately, people abandon their cultural core when they
can no longer sustain life with given ways of production and exchange
with people in their world or an imagined after-world. There are many
changes along the way that modify the core of self-reinforcing mod-
ifications without destroying it. With the institutionalization of the
Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 in the 1930s, the national govern-
ment encroached on the defensive boundaries people had built up to
retain their own culture within indigenous communities of Chiapas
(Rus 1979). Elementary schools, government projects for roads, clean
water, and medical assistance that clashed with the curers’ pulsing and
divining systems gradually penetrated the local ways of being Mayas.
Patriarchal control within the family mimicked the Spanish system of
conducting family life, but is now yielding to the pre-Colombian ethic of
complementary gender order.
Indigenous communities were able to come to terms with innovations
in part because of a culturally condoned division of labour by gen-
der. Following the conquest, women became the repositories of those
features that marked them as “true people” (Batz’il Winik) while men
80 Reassessing the Culture Concept

learned Spanish, adopted non-indigenous clothing, and availed them-

selves of the little schooling there was. Men took on Ladino clothing as
they migrated to cities in search of employment, except for ceremonial
occasions when they wore the distinct, often hand-loomed attire that
marked them as members of a particular community. Girls were often
kept out of schools by their parents; they retained the cultural markers
of their Pueblos of origin, and conformed to the ways of the ancestors.
In Amatenango, where women made pottery that was sold in local mar-
kets, they restricted themselves to making only the standard household
ware they used in their own homes. Since they were the main socializ-
ing agents, they taught their children only “the true language” (Batz’il
K’op). The few who broke from this traditional way of life could not find
a man to marry, I was told (Nash 1993). And indeed this was the case
until the late 1960s, when the self-sustaining economy of Milpa agricul-
ture no longer had the land base to meet the needs of rising populations.
In the absence of men, women turned their pottery and weaving skills
to a variety of objects sold in the burgeoning tourist markets. Skills in
spoken and written Spanish were necessary for women as well as men
to navigate the tourist markets developing in nearby cities.
Each time I returned to Amatenango in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,
I could see the erosion of cultural boundaries marking them as a dis-
tinct ethnic group. Yet the core of folk Catholic religion combined
with indigenous festivals responding to cosmic cycles and the power
of nature lodged in the hills, caves, and the land itself was still in evi-
dence. Whenever disaster threatened, townspeople mobilized festivals
at home or peregrinations to neighbouring Pueblos which contained vil-
lage saints associated with cosmic powers of rainmaking or the ability
to counter disease.
This lesson of cultural viability constantly manifested itself. It was
never more evident than at the time of the uprising of 1 January
1994, which threatened the hegemonic control by a government run
by Ladinos, or non-Indians. Although the government has conceded a
degree of autonomy to the indigenous Pueblos, the rising population and
inability of the semi-subsistence economy to sustain new demands are
bringing about change.
What do we learn from the confrontation of the neoliberal assault
on subsistence-based communities that should be incorporated in our
redefinition of culture? Cultures are, as Ruth Benedict asserted, pat-
terned, so that each precept reinforces others in a self-perpetuating
syndrome. This is particularly noted in communities identified with a
 June Nash 81

long-term identification with place, as in the case of Mayas. The Mayan

symbol system woven in textiles worn as ethnic identifying markers is
a mnemonic strategy, reaffirming the belonging of people in an ever-
repeated world pattern. When a value system stressing autonomy is
integrated into a shared symbol system that endures out of repeti-
tion, cultures tend to be over-determined in their insistence on the
reinforcement of central values.

Cultural autonomy and the Zapatista uprising

The rebellion of New Year’s Eve 1994 marked a break from a world in
which the partial autonomy that had been regained with the 1910–
1917 Revolution was threatened by the neoliberal policies of President
Salinas. This happened, first, in the 1992 enactment of the reform of
Article 27 of the constitution that promised the reinstatement of land
taken from the original Pueblos and titles to national territories that they
settled, and, second, in the implementation of the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was to enter into effect on 1 January
1994. These two acts, and the daily encroachment of government poli-
cies in the autonomous spaces of the Pueblos Indigenas, threatened the
subsistence economy that had enabled them to resist control by the
outside world (Harvey 1998; Rus 1995).
In the Lacandon forest colonized by settlers from highland villages
during the last decades of the second millennium, “the Other Cam-
paign” (la Otra Campaña), formed from the ranks of the Zapatista
rebellion, is practicing traditional forms of self-governance as collective
entities. Threatened on all sides by the national armed forces sent in
by Ernesto Zedillo in 1997 and reinforced in subsequent presidencies
of Fox and Calderon, their objective of living as autonomous entities
reaffirms the importance of cultural prerogatives. Paradoxically, the will
to reaffirm their identity as distinct groups comes at a time when the
cultural traits that are associated with ethnicity are most at risk. Lan-
guage, attire, and habitation are disappearing even as the Mayas make
appeals for recognition of their claims based on ethnic roots.5 Clearly,
the grounds on which their identity as a people is based are shifting
from these external criteria to less visible but more powerful ways of
living in the world.
The multiple, distinct modernities exemplified in the Mayan rebellion
in Chiapas offer a critical alternative at a time when developed indus-
trial countries around the world are flouting the most vaunted values
82 Reassessing the Culture Concept

of modernity. The modernity espoused by dominant Euro-American

powers is disappearing as huge campaign expenditures and electoral
fraud are undermining democracy.
The most forceful opposition to the policies of privatization, exploita-
tion of forests and water sources, negation of workers’ rights, and
military intervention now emanates from the periphery rather than the
centres of power. Aymara and Quecha indigenous people of Bolivia who
constitute a majority of the Bolivian population are now in a posi-
tion of power won by the Movement to Socialismo (Movimiento al
Socialismo MAS) in that nation (Albo 1995). Along with other Andeans
(Van Cott 2012), Ecuadorean indigenous people have succeeded in
gaining constitutional changes recognizing their autonomy. Nicaraguan
Mesquitos have gained a large tract of national territories where they
exercise autonomy in the region. Mayas evoke a reinvigorated sense
of their identity as indigenous peoples and their commitment to sus-
taining the natural resources and order in the cosmos as they join
others who have until now been marginalized in the emerging global
sphere. It is there that an alternative imaginary of modernization, draw-
ing upon primordial cultural resources, is being forged in social action
(Nash 2004).
Whether indigenous people demand citizenship rights in a
multicultural nation in terms of indigenous rights, patrimonial rights as
Pueblos Originarias, women’s rights, or human rights, the degree of suc-
cess will depend on whether they can mobilize non-indigenous people
who are citizens of the same nation. With each day that they adhere
to Mayan cultural premises of honouring the past, governing while
obeying the people, and maintaining the cosmic balance in the envi-
ronment, they are proving their ability to overcome the resentment that
lingers from the centuries when they were treated as aliens in their own
territory. Their cause is advanced by human rights advocates who act as
their legal exponents in the absence of government action (Centro de
Derechos Humanos “Fray Bartolome de Las Casas” 2005).
The analysis of any social movement discloses the cultural com-
ponents of people’s identification with shared ideals, values, and
motivations that are the motivating forces behind that movement.
In southern Mexico, the resurgence of indigenous cultural autonomy
that has been latent in the 500 years of colonization and subordina-
tion in a European-dominated state reveals the cultural parameters of
their ethnic commitment. Through mnemonic strategies of rituals and
artisan production, they retain a sense of identity distinct from that of
the conquerors. This alternative memory enabled them to organize the
 June Nash 83

collective opposition to reject their subordinate roles in what they call

the “bad government” (Mal Gobierno) that tried to reinforce its rule by
military repression.
Over a century and a half ago, Edward B. Tyler’s (1871) emphasis
on the holistic bases of culture encouraged us to look beyond cultural
traits to consider ways of making a living within indigenous communi-
ties. Today we must look beyond specific communities and regions as
we consider how they are living in the world. Our analyses of culture
in social movements emphasize both the structural base for inequal-
ity and cultural characteristics in which this is manifested. Indigenous
people are now actively reaching out to establish international connec-
tions in order to revitalize their movements for cultural autonomy.6
Anthropologists who are focusing on alternatives to neoliberal capi-
talism are discovering new possibilities in communities in the South.
Accustomed to living with a variety of cultural and linguistic groups
that have survived in formerly marginalized areas, they accept coex-
istence without establishing hierarchy. The ethnic awakening of these
groups since the 1970s up to the present has begun to address com-
mon problems through united action (Stavenhagen 2002). Their ability
to imagine a pluricultural basis for a reconstituted polity can contribute
to programmes and policies that offer alternatives in a holistic context
of cultures in a global society.
This brings us back to the questions posed at the beginning of this
chapter. How do social movements reveal the disconnections in time
and place caused by globalization? How must anthropologists rethink
our central concept of culture to include these disjunctures? Our cen-
tral premise is that social movements in global society emerge with
the disjunctures from traditional coordinates in time and space as
people inhabit new places and accommodate to new time frames in
which to pursue their design for living. Anthropologists are, as a result,
redefining the frame of analysis for our study of cultures to include
multicultural interactions. We have learned from the people we study
that the neoliberal economic and political forces that pervade even the
most remote sites of human habitation make it imperative to include an
analysis of these forces in our accounts.

Notes
1. Steward’s (1955) essay refuted generalizations of evolutionary change, opting
for cultural adaptations to ecological conditions that influenced development.
His work marked an important divergence from universal laws of evolution
84 Reassessing the Culture Concept

relegating contemporary cultures to a linear process from the primitive to the

advanced.
2. I summarized the growing literature in anthropology on the threat to the sub-
sistence base with the encroachment of transnational capitalism at an earlier
stage of globalization (Nash 1994).
3. ‘Talking boxes’ is a figure of speech relating to the boxes from which spiri-
tual leaders of the 1869 liberation movement in the municipality of San Juan
Chamula claimed to hear the voices of the ancestors.
4. In north-eastern tribes of New England, the turtle is identified as the calendar
because of the repetition of 13 bumps found on the carapace. The recurrence
of this calendrical signification for distant tribes of aboriginal populations
suggests dissemination of a common origin story early in time.
5. See especially the study of an autonomous community in the Lacandon
rainforest by Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli (2005) that reveals the frus-
trations and occasional victories when seeking to revitalize the autonomy
threatened by neoliberal advances in Mexico. Shannon Speed, Ruben Moreno,
and Constantino Mendez (2008) note the poignant moment when the claims
of Tzeltal settlers of their autonomous community based on descent from
Pueblos Originarios were rejected by the government because they did not
speak the indigenous language.
6. See articles in the anthology edited by Sieder (2002).

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Part II
Culture as a Framework for
Movement Activity
5
Culture and Activism across
Borders
Britta Baumgarten

Introduction

Research into transnational activism and transnational social movements

has gained importance with the rise of the Global Justice Movement
(GJM). Moreover, the protests of the Occupy movement, the Arab
Spring, or Anonymous draw our attention to the transnational dimen-
sion of activism. But cooperation between activists at the transnational
level is not a new phenomenon (Keck and Sikkink 2000). The women’s
movement, for instance, had already built transnational networks in
the 19th century (Dadej and Leszczawski-Schwerk 2012). The vast liter-
ature on social movements stresses the transnational level of movement
activism. This has led to a neglect of processes that take place at the
national level. I will fill this gap by taking a closer look at the role of
national differences in social movement activism across borders – with
a focus on cultural differences. A broad debate has taken place about the
nation state as a concept and its loss of impact on various areas of peo-
ple’s lives. The contribution of this text will be to argue why the national
is still important for transnational activism and to outline some of the
forces of the nation state that are responsible for cultural differences
between movements based in different countries.
After a clarification of the concept of cultural difference, I outline
my concept of the nation state and show that the nation state is an
important factor that we have to take into account when analysing
transnational activism. Five reasons for persisting national differences
will be highlighted in this chapter: (1) national politicians as a target

The researcher is financed by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a

Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/74743/2010).

91
92 Culture and Activism across Borders

of social movement activism; (2) country-specific media systems and a

national focus of media attention; (3) legacies of prior policies and their
impact on civil society infrastructure; (4) prevalence of cultural models;
and (5) the state’s impact on collective identity.1
I have chosen the term “transnational activism” here to capture a
broad range of activities that go beyond cooperation between activists
from different countries, because there is great variety in activism that
in some way crosses borders. While the GJM, for example, is a quasi-
ideal type of transnational movement,2 the Indignados and Occupy
movements that emerged in 2011 and organized global protest events
together did not (yet) achieve such a high degree of transnationalism.
The transnational aspect of their activism, however, cannot be denied.
For example, they copy claims and action forms from movements in
other countries, launch solidarity events, and relate their struggles to or
seek punctual cooperation with social movement actors abroad. Some-
times movements from different countries do not have direct contact
at all but are inspired by mediated news and images from movements
abroad.

Culture and cultural difference in a globalized world

One aspect of culture is especially important for the understanding of

transnational activism: cultural difference. But to talk about cultural dif-
ference we need to know what to differentiate. Cultural differences are
not stable and they are situated at various levels: There are differences
across national boundaries and there are different subcultures within a
country, including the specific subculture social movements developed
over time. I will argue here that there are cultural differences that are
related to variation of the national framework in which the actors are
based and that these are structured in a certain way. These national dif-
ferences are (still) important to understand what distinguishes activism
across borders from cooperation between movements within the same
national framework.
For the purpose of this discussion I choose a broad and rather static
concept of culture. Culture develops through interaction within spe-
cific arenas. This also includes the selective import of ideas and practices
from other arenas. There will always be cultural differences. In this sense
culture is regarded here as a framework for action.3 I regard culture as a
set of shared meanings that have developed and often been institution-
alized in interaction over long periods of time. In contrast to Roose,
who also deals with national differences in this volume, I am interested
 Britta Baumgarten 93

in factors at the macro- and meso levels that shape culture within the
borders of the nation state in a distinctive way and so create nationally
specific differences. This includes, for example, language, law, the media,
or historical events.
In order to capture the cultural mechanisms that impact practical
action, I follow Polletta’s definition of schemas as “expectations about
how things do and should work” (Polletta 2008:89). Following this idea
she suggests two lines of research: to analyse how activists struggle
with the cultural framework and to analyse when and to what extent
they internalize schemas – and with what consequences. Research on
transnational cooperation needs to take differences in cultural schemas
into consideration in regard to both lines. Movement actors are strug-
gling with different schemas they observe, but they also internalize
different schemas which then affect their routines. As many of the chap-
ters in this volume show, culture is constantly built and rebuilt through
action. My chapter does not challenge these concepts of culture, but
we need to remember that there are also the more stable aspects of cul-
ture, like discourses, institutions, or outstanding past events and their
dominant interpretation. Approaches interested in culture as a frame-
work for social movement action need a focus on these more stable
factors: I argue later that the national framework that impacts cultural
differences across borders is quite stable. Meaning-making takes place
within this framework. If national frameworks are quite stable, then
their impact on meaning-making is quite stable, too.
Not every cultural difference in transnational activism is related to
national differences. The example of the 2004 international encounter
in Madrid that Cristina Flesher Fominaya presents in this volume shows
how understandings and routines can clash when different groups
come together. In her example, the practices involving the principle
of “consensus” diverged greatly between the actors. But, although we
are dealing with an international encounter, these differences are not
necessarily related to the national differences I deal with in my con-
tribution. Such clashes are common amongst different activist groups
from the same country. In Portugal, for example, the practice of “con-
sensus” was highly contested in the meetings of the activist platform
15O,4 which included various Portuguese activist groups – each with
its own organizational culture. While some groups insisted on talking
until total agreement was reached (like the Spanish activists in Flesher
Fominaya’s example), others opted for more pragmatic solutions and
successfully introduced a system of voting at the end of extensive debate
(Baumgarten 2013).
94 Culture and Activism across Borders

For the analysis of transnational activism, the notion that cultural

borders are socially constructed on the base of perceived differences
(Berger and Luckmann 1980) also becomes important. They are not con-
stant and the geographical and social location of differences cannot be
clearly distinguished. These social constructions are based on activists’
experiences and the communication of these experiences. Which are the
perceived cultural differences that make cooperation interesting on the
one hand or difficult on the other? In the current debates of Portuguese
activists about differences between Spanish and Portuguese protest, for
example, there is an established image that describes “the Spanish peo-
ple” as more politically active and more willing to protest protest-savvy,
while “the Portuguese” are constructed as rather apolitical, weakly orga-
nized, and tending not to participate in street protests. It is interesting
to note that in some Spanish activist groups before 15 May 2011 these
images were conceptualized the other way round: “The Portuguese”
were seen as people that in contrast to “the Spanish people” fight for
their rights, while the Spanish were depicted as rather apolitical, tending
not to participate in street protests. These different constructs are based
on different perceptions of aspects of the respective other. The con-
struction of the “apolitical Portuguese” is very dominant in Portuguese
society. Various newspaper articles refer to this idea and the activists use
it to explain low participation in demonstrations. The Spanish activists
constructing “the Portuguese” as politically active did not follow in this
dominant discourse. They constructed their image related to the big
demonstrations on 12 March 2012 and the memory of the revolutionary
period after 1974. Characterizing the Spanish as politically more active
is used as an explanation of the successful enlargement of the move-
ment 15M,5 in contrast to the Portuguese movement not gaining many
new activists.6
In the literature on transnational movements cultural differences are
often mentioned as obstacles: “Linguistic, educational and culture dif-
ferences are the most apparent obstacles. They make misunderstanding
between groups more likely, undermining the trust relationships essen-
tial to coalition building” (Johnston 2011:187–188; see also Flesher
Fominaya, this volume). But, like other differences between actors,
differences at the transnational level are also favourable for a move-
ment, as they are a source of inspiration. Movement actors cooperate in
joint campaigns and express their solidarity with movements in other
countries, which usually strengthens each movement; in some cases,
joining forces and sharing ideas lead to a more influential transnational
movement (Tarrow 2005:164). New action forms and world views of
 Britta Baumgarten 95

movements from other countries are often adopted and integrated in

the national context. Much has been written about these processes in
the literature on diffusion (Strang and Meyer 1993; Strang and Soule
1998; for an overview, see Malets and Zajak, this volume) and thus will
be set aside here.

The nation state as an arena and why national

differences (still) matter

A crucial difference between transnational activism and other forms

of activism is that the former has to deal with differences shaped by
national borders. In the following I outline specific impacts of national
frameworks on social movements and describe how they relate to cul-
ture. I do not call for a return to the old container model of culture,
where culture is conceptualized as static and homogeneous within the
borders of the nation state. Nor do I try to defend the often criti-
cized methodological nationalism.7 Cultural identities have always been
hybrid. There is a great influence of the national context that has to be
taken into account in the analysis of transnational activism. Cultural
differences at the national level matter not because the nation state
per se is a crucial category. However, the nation state delimits a certain
arena that impacts activists’ world views, including, for example, how
they perceive opportunities for action, identities, and the construction
of allies and enemies.
The concept of national differences needs a definition of the enti-
ties that should be distinguished: For our purpose we need a concept
of the nation state that includes cultural differences. The nation state
is regarded as a powerful social construct (Smith 1990:178). Hobsbawm
(1996:267) described the nation state as a “particular kind of political
entity which determines our lives”. He sees it as a specific form of polit-
ical organization that is characterized by a sovereign territory separated
from other states; the state has the monopoly of law and powers of
coercion to rule over its citizens; there is a certain degree of standard-
ization in the treatment of citizens and it is meant to represent “the
people” (Hobsbawm 1996:268–269). He further points out the impor-
tance of the past for a nation (Hobsbawm and Kerzyer 1992:3). I read
his concept of the state as a mixture between (1) an entity with certain
characteristics and (2) an actor with specific powers that is weakened
by globalization. I share Foucault’s (1979) reservations about locating
power in actors or institutions. For my purposes it is more important to
analyse the powers that come into play within the entity “nation state”.
96 Culture and Activism across Borders

It is the Foucauldian concept of power I am referring to that regards

power as established discourse that impacts what can be thought and
said in a certain arena (Baumgarten and Ullrich 2012).
So instead of regarding the state as an actor, I follow Johnston
(2011:16). For him the state is “an arena where conflicting interests
of political elites, economic elites [ . . . ] plus the additional element of
popular pressure play themselves out in undetermined ways to produce
particular configurations of state institutions”. This definition of the
state as an arena allows us to take a closer look at the mechanisms that
come into play in this arena, for example, a unity of law, a common his-
tory, a specific educational system, political governance, media coverage
of events, a certain degree of concordance in basic norms and values,
and a sense of belonging. This also includes discourses that are shaped
by nationally specific events and actor constellations that do not neces-
sarily have to be connected to state institutions but are mainly based in
this arena. For example, Ullrich (2008) explains differences between the
Left in Germany and in Great Britain in dealing with the Middle East
conflict by way of different discursive contexts shaped mainly by the
historical role of each country in said conflict.
This, however, does not mean that the state is the only important
arena. There are various other arenas important for social movement
actors. These arenas could be part of but also go beyond and just touch
some parts of the arena “state”. Activists refer to international events
of the past, call politicians in other countries, and use similar frames
and claims across borders. Furthermore, single campaigns may also take
place in a rather local arena. But in these cases too, the national context
has a great impact, as will be shown later.
Although my argument stresses that national borders are important
for cultural differences, I start with three types of voices of doubt against
the important role of national boundaries. First, there is broad liter-
ature on the erosion of the national state, with regard to not only
economic and political issues but also cultural issues (Hobsbawm 1996;
Marden 1997:45). These arguments refer to the state as an actor. Tarrow
aggregated a “strong thesis of transnational social movements” (Tarrow
1998:181) from various sources. It contains five claims: (1) due to tech-
nical developments national political opportunity structures lose weight
compared to transnational ones; (2) the national state loses its capacity
to constrain and structure collective action; (3) in addition, it loses the
power to control global economic forces, and social groups also get new
kinds of resources for cross-border action; (4) international norms are
created, gain influence, and there are processes of socialization of these
 Britta Baumgarten 97

norms in domestic understandings; and (5) a transnational network of

organizations and movements against inequality and abuses created by
economic globalization has been formed (Tarrow 1998:181–182).8
Further, there is a major line of literature that claims the diminish-
ing importance of the nation state as an entity. Processes of “cultural
homogenization” and “cultural heterogenization” (Appadurai 1990)
and the “formation of transnational cultures” (Smith 1990) have been
widely researched, especially since the 1990s. The flow of cultures is
strongly influenced by economic, financial, and media structures that
have become more global (Appadurai 1990).
Second, apart from these arguments of the nation state losing its
importance, there has been a lot of justified criticism of conceptualiz-
ing the nation state as a container. We cannot talk about a homogenized
cultural field. It should be self-evident that there can be no total homog-
enization of systems of meaning and expression (Hannerz 1990). Salman
and Assies (2007:211) claim that it is social movements that remind
us that culture is contested, plural, and fragmented in any society.
According to Sassen (2000:215), “Modern nation states themselves never
achieved spatiotemporal unity, and the global restructurings of today
threaten to erode the usefulness of this proposition for what is an
expanding arena of sociological reality”. Also, opinion polls show that
other criteria are often more significant for differences than belonging
to a nation state. One might think of variables like gender, class, age, for-
mal qualifications, and living in rural areas versus living in cities. These
variables are underestimated if we look only at national differences.
Third, thinking about a social movement as a subculture that is
affected by external influences (whether some kind of nationally spe-
cific cultures or influences from movements abroad), we have to ask how
these influences are interpreted and included in the movement culture.
Social movements are often more globalized than the mainstream cul-
tures of the countries in which they are based. For example, “activists
have long appealed to a global vision of common humanity, and com-
mon universalistic norms, to build an international constituency for
local movements” (Seidman 2000:343).
These doubts about the importance of the nation state have some
merit. For me they underestimate the impact of the nation state.
Melucci’s (1996) concept of “reference systems of collective action”
may be interpreted as pointing out the importance of national bor-
ders. He argues that collective action should be analysed within the
system of relationships in which it takes place and towards which it is
directed. Reference systems are not concrete sites of action but “analytic
98 Culture and Activism across Borders

structures, as specific forms of social relationships which can be dif-

ferentiated in terms of the social link binding individuals or groups
together” (Melucci 1996:25). Contrasting Melucci’s reference systems
with the underlying concepts of the nation state of those authors
who claim a loss of impact of the nation state, we see that the lat-
ter are based on limited assumptions: Tarrow’s thesis uses a model of
the state as an actor that possesses power in relation to other powers.
The concept of the state as an arena used in this chapter is broader,
also capturing influences of the nation state that are independent of
the state as a political actor. The idea of global culture is also criti-
cized: First, “it offers little in the way of explaining how supposedly
cosmopolitan cultural forms articulate with national, local or regional
identity formations” (Marden 1997:38). Furthermore, there is a “ten-
sion between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization”
(Appadurai 1990:295). Criticizing the homogenization thesis, Appadurai
refers to various studies that show that influences from abroad become
indigenized. We cannot think about cultural homogenization as a pro-
cess that affects all regions of the world in the same manner. He showed
that the popular example of Americanization that is often used in rela-
tion to cultural homogenization of European countries does not so
much apply to the people of Sri Lanka – who are much more affected by
Indianization than by Americanization. Thus developments of homog-
enization are also pre-structured according to areas, joint histories,
language similarities, and so on (Appadurai 1990), and cultural differ-
ences continue to exist and are, to a great extent, still structured by
national borders. I agree with the reservations about viewing the nation
state as a container. My arguments below nevertheless show that cul-
tural differences created in the context of the “nation state” arena do
differ from other kinds of differences and, furthermore, do have an
impact on some of them. Gender differences, for example, are shaped by
national law against discrimination, by social infrastructure, but also by
discourses shaped mainly at the national level. Movement subcultures
also develop within the national framework and, as will be shown later,
cultural differences between movements based in different countries are
still considerable. Popular culture is more closely tied to national bor-
ders than some authors on global culture cited above suggest: Just think
about all the national TV productions and the high percentage of book
bestsellers by national authors in many countries.
Based on ideas from institutionalism by Schneiberg and Lounsbury
(2008:658) and integrating other authors, I propose to distinguish the
following five aspects of the state as a framework for action in order
 Britta Baumgarten 99

to outline the importance of the nation state as such a reference sys-

tem: (1) national politicians as a target of social movement activism;
(2) country-specific media systems and a national focus of media atten-
tion; (3) legacies of prior policies and their impact on civil society
infrastructure; (4) prevalence of cultural models; and (5) the state’s
impact on collective identity. All these aspects are related to cultural dif-
ferences. They impact the activists’ notions about “how things usually
work” (Polletta 2008:89). These notions are constructed by the activists
based on their experiences. What is more, the meanings of imagery
(Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013; Ullrich and Keller, this volume) for a par-
ticular population derive to a considerable extent from the historical
experiences of that group (Smith 1990:179).

National politicians as a target of social movement activism

For most transnational movements, the nation state remains the main
target (Johnston 2011:197). Most issues that movements claim are still
decided on the national level; for example, they are dependent on
national laws and decisions about state expenses. Even at international
days of action, most claims are mainly directed towards national actors
and frames related to national politics: My research on the Portuguese
protests in 2011 and 2012, for example, shows that the majority of the
claims used here were directed towards the national level (Baumgarten
2013).
Social movements’ strategies and their success depend to a large
extent on the receptivity of institutional authorities towards chal-
lengers’ claims. This degree of receptivity may be different according to
the type of authority, but it is also influenced by a general national prac-
tice of dealing with challengers (Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2008:658).
Furthermore, different experiences with political decision-makers also
lead to national differences in demands: The Spanish protestors in 2011
mainly chanted “don’t vote for them” (Tejerina and Perrugoria 2012)
while the protestors in Tunisia protested for a parliamentary democracy
(Ryan 2011:12). Out of these experiences, in 2011 the social movements
in Egypt – a country which had experienced dictatorship for the last few
decades – set their hopes on democratic elections. Their main demands
are directly connected to this specific situation of suppression: “civilian
authority over the military, free speech and political activity, account-
ability for the former regime’s crimes, and full housecleaning of the
state’s violent internal security apparatus” (Cambanis 2011:35).
We find national differences in the way the target of protest is
constructed. Often experiences with state actors and political parties
100 Culture and Activism across Borders

are interpreted differently and lead to subcultural differences within

the movements of one country. Thus there is no direct translation
of experiences into specific practices, aims, or world views. Polletta’s
schemas come into play here (Polletta 2008:89): Out of experiences
with the politicians in Spain, the protestors drew the conclusion that
voting for one of the parties of the parliament was not a solution and
instead mainly searched for solutions outside representative democracy.
In Portugal, some of the activist groups actually have close connec-
tions to political parties from the opposition and from outside the
government, and apart from their negative experiences with the cur-
rent government, they share some good experiences with politicians.
Some activists are party members or even work for one of the parties;
some contact political parties and initiate petitions to change laws. The
appeal “don’t vote for them” is rare there.
These differences are often ignored at the level of transnational coop-
eration. “Democracy”, for example, was used all over the world in 2012
with dissimilar underlying concepts of democracy itself: These were
connected to elections by the movements in Tunisia and Egypt, to
assemblies working according to the principle of consensus largely apart
from the state in Spain, and to equality in economic terms and to some
extent party politics by some of the movements in Portugal. How these
different conceptions of the state as a possible target impact cooperation
and how they will be concealed depend on the further development
of the cooperation between these movements. My observations on
transnational activism of the Portuguese activist groups directed against
the austerity programmes show that they closely observe the events and
practices of movements in other countries suffering under austerity pro-
grammes. Although the main target remains the national politicians,
events are scheduled in various countries at the same time and the broad
similarities of the different governments’ policies are pointed out.

Country-specific media systems and a national

focus of media attention
The media system is a relevant factor explaining the continuing impor-
tance of national borders. The media are country-specific in terms of
the issues they cover and in the way they frame issues. They are based in
“nation-specific political discourse cultures” (Hepp et al. 2009:50). Hepp
et al. observe “nationalization as a journalistic practice” (51): Journalists
frame news content in such a way that it can be easily related to the
reader’s experiences. They choose issues and frame them according to
the criterion of familiarity. This means that in their decision whether
 Britta Baumgarten 101

to write about an issue, journalists take into consideration the extent to

which this issue affects their readers’ daily lives or how it can be related
to their own experiences.9 Frames are also used that resonate within the
media audience.
This observation is not only confirmed by our everyday media experi-
ence. A comparative long-term newspaper analysis of claims with regard
to unemployment showed that issues were discussed mainly within a
national framework. In the project UNEMPOL,10 data from daily news-
papers in France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Sweden
were gathered for the time frame 1995–2002. Of all, 77% of the themes
raised in the newspapers analysed in six European countries were placed
in a national framework, and a further 16.8% were placed in a local
framework (Lahusen 2009:159). The media concentrated mainly on
political decisions at the national level, on statements of national actors,
and only seldom reported on ideas and events from abroad. Thus, from
the media we do not learn much in detail about political realities beyond
our national borders. Due to the lack of articles on some countries, it
appears to the readers that these realities are not important for their
daily lives. For social movements it is therefore difficult to refer to
these realities without larger explanations. With the development of
new information technologies, this strong national link of the media
has weakened (Sundin 2009:158), but we should not forget that – for
example – the use of Internet-based discussion platforms is very often
related to issues and events at the national level. The national focus
of the media has several implications for transnational cooperation of
movements. Information about movements from abroad has to be taken
instead from alternative media. Moreover, activists are usually less well
informed about the context of events occurring in other countries than
of those in their own country. This makes an interpretation of events
from abroad more difficult. In the alternative media this problem is
sometimes tackled by activists trusted in their interpretation of events
writing locally.

Legacies of prior policies and their impact on civil

society infrastructure
It is important to note that events within the arena of the state and ref-
erences are always built upon a history of earlier encounters.11 It would
be too simplistic to reduce the context of the nation state to the current
influence of national politics. The legacies of prior policies condition
movement dynamics (Schneiberg and Lounsbury 2008:658). As a result
of the history of encounters at the national level, institutions, specific
102 Culture and Activism across Borders

practices of doing politics, common values, specific world views, and so

on were created that apply only in the respective national arena. In this
section I take a closer look at the infrastructural aspects created by for-
mer events, while the next section will be on the prevalence of cultural
models.
Segmentation, the existence of previous networks of affiliation, and
the openness or closure of the political system are factors that affect the
creation of a support base for a movement. The extent and the main
areas of state engagement in questions of social welfare and the way
the economy and society are regulated by the state provide different
conditions of action for social movements in different countries (see
Johnston 2011:69). Furthermore, the organizational structure of civil
society is very much affected by the nation state, for example state
spending, regulation (Johnston 2011:95). In Brazil, for example, the rela-
tionship between social movements and the state shifted considerably
after the worker’s party (PT) – which has always been closely tied to
various social movements – came into power. Various arenas of commu-
nication between state and civil society were created and many former
activists were given posts within state institutions.
The role of the trade unions for protest is a further example of these
legacies: It varies greatly between different countries. In Germany, for
a long time the trade unions maintained a close relationship with the
Social Democratic Party. This close relationship resulted in much greater
support for unemployment protest when the Social Democrats were the
opposition than in times of a Social Democratic government. The trade
unions are integrated in a system of collective bargaining and do not
easily risk this position through larger protest activity. By contrast, in
Italy and France the unions do not have such a close relationship with
one political party. There are also more divisions among the Italian and
French trade unions themselves, which has resulted in some parts of
the trade unions supporting the unemployment protests (Baglioni et al.
2008). Differences in the role of trade unions in the various countries
result from structural positions and internal organizational practices
that have grown over decades. Social movement actors have to take
these differences into consideration when they import ideas of protest or
cooperate with actors abroad. For example, cooperation abroad with an
actor considered too radical might negatively impact their relationship
with national actors.

Prevalence of cultural models

Johnston observed that “popular protest and the structure of the state
are in a dynamic and mutually influencing relationship, each pushing
 Britta Baumgarten 103

and constraining the other” (Johnston 2011:16). But there is not only
the relationship between movements and the state as an actor. Within
the arena of the state there is a prevalence of certain cultural models
that impact not only the power relationship between social movements
and the state but also nearly every aspect of the movement’s everyday
life, such as its aims, strategies, or world views. To understand this point
it is especially important to use a concept of power that is not tied to
specific actors (Foucault 1979). Culture is very closely related to power
in another, more subtle way: The legitimacy of power is based on a set of
cultural beliefs and values (Binder et al. 2008:9) that have been shaped
over time and that affect all actors.
The state as an arena is “the primary site for discourse and representa-
tion of democracy; of social and political responsibility, accountability
and obligation” (Marden 1997:52). Like political opportunity structures,
discursive opportunity structures are mostly conceptualized as being
located at the national level (Ullrich 2008; Johnston 2011:44; Ullrich
and Keller, this volume).12 The impact of national borders is partly
explained by the foregoing three aspects of the state that play an impor-
tant role for this fourth aspect of the prevalence of cultural models:
Cultural models are shaped by former events and certain actor constel-
lations, and the impact of the media should not be underestimated.
Moreover, new insights from governmentality studies argue that the
state (here conceptualized as an actor) uses “new techniques and tech-
nologies of surveillance and control [ . . . ] to colonize the social world
more intensely than it ever had in the past” (Marden 1997:58).
In practice, influences of the nation state become salient for a social
movement, for instance, to explain the success and failure of the use
of certain cultural symbols (Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013) and differ-
ent concepts (Ferree et al. 2002; McCammon 2009) such as authen-
ticity (Peterson 2005), justification regimes (Boltanski and Thévenot
2006), frame resonance, and cultural codes (Snow and Benford 1988).
Transnational frames have to be translated into the national con-
text in order to gain resonance within this new framework (Olesen
2005:431–434). Claims are always relative to existing practices and
institutions, and common frames are less likely in transnational net-
works because of cultural differences (McCarthy 1997:245). Therefore,
transnational cooperation has to reconcile different national contexts
by way of strategic framing (Snow and Benford 1999). The Portuguese
protests, for example, although sometimes organized as part of world-
wide days of protest, demonstrate a strong national dimension. Broad
claims against cuts in the welfare state, for example, are related to state-
ments by famous Portuguese writers and to older protest songs, like
104 Culture and Activism across Borders

those by the famous singer José Afonso (Baumgarten 2013). In general,

the revolutionary period of 1974/1975 is still a major reference point in
the mobilization of many activist groups (de Sousa Santos and Arriscado
Nunes 2004:12).
Shared values within a social movement exist only with reference to
some aspects of social life. In transnational movements there is mostly
agreement about broad basic values connected to the movement’s aims.
The influence of the different backgrounds is nicely illustrated by our
prior example of “democracy”. The Arab Spring and its appeal for
democracy became a key reference point for all large demonstrations
in 2011. It was not only strategically used in calls for protests and mani-
festos by social movement actors but also used widely by journalists. The
mainly positive description of these protests and their outcomes helped
mobilize people in other countries. The great differences in understand-
ings of democracy do not only refer to different experiences with the
political targets, as described above. There are also different concepts
of democracy underlying these claims. While the social movements in
Tunisia favoured a classical understanding of parliamentary democracy
(Ryan 2011), the Spanish demonstrators’ concept is a deliberative and
participative (Tejerina and Perrugorria 2012) one.

The state’s impact on collective identity

Collective identity is always also based on joint memories (Daphi 2011),
and these memories are rooted in space (as shown by Daphi and also
by Neveu, this volume). This is a point that speaks against global cul-
tures. According to Smith, “The central difficulty in any project to
construct a global identity, like imagery and culture, is that collective
identity is always historically specific because it is based on shared mem-
ories and a sense of continuity between generations” (1990:180). There
are some exceptional cases of memories shared globally, and these are
becoming more widespread due to the increased possibilities of shar-
ing information. But as depicted above, the media play an important
role “in shaping of cultural and national identities” (Sundin 2009:158),
so even these joint memories are perceived and remembered differ-
ently – while differences are also shaped by national borders. According
to Johnston (2011:199), “The identity basis of the nation state is strong
and enduring, partly because it is based on fundamental psychological
and social psychological traits such as identity, culture, and language
similarities”.
For a long time now, cooperation between social movements has
predominantly taken place at the local, regional, and national levels.
 Britta Baumgarten 105

Although in the digital age the costs of transnational cooperation

have become lower, joint international meetings account for just a
small proportion of face-to-face meetings. As a result of face-to-face
encounters, however, specific practices, common values, specific world
views, and so on are created over time. Online communication cannot
replace these meetings. Thus common identities are rather built between
movements at the local and the national level. Furthermore, individ-
ual identities are constructed in distinction to others and the national
state also plays an important role here. Within groups of the GJM, for
example, the perception of national differences by the activists is also
related to national stereotypes, like the well-organized Germans or the
fun-loving, creative Italians (Daphi 2012:11).
The nation state sets boundaries of belonging that impact the orga-
nizational structures of a social movement. The first national meeting
of the Portuguese public assemblies in Coimbra in January 2012, for
example, shows clearly how lines are drawn between countries. These
assemblies developed in Portugal beginning in May 2011 following the
example of the Spanish assemblies of the movement 15M (Baumgarten
2013). In this two-day meeting people from various assemblies in
Portugal met to exchange ideas, inform each other about activities, and
plan joint activities. Although some Spanish assemblies are situated rel-
atively close to Coimbra, the participation of Spanish groups was not
even discussed. The border in this case, however, was drawn between
countries and not nationalities. Spaniards living in Portugal and who
were part of the assemblies were also invited.13

Conclusion

National borders continue to have a great impact on transnational

activism and are still valid as points of orientation. The national arena,
however, is only one framework to be considered. If we agree to see
culture as a set of shared meanings, then it is not enough to take
country-specific cultural differences into consideration. This boundary
is very broad and country-specific differences impact upon subcultural
differences in various ways. Considering only national borders does
not allow us to capture movement-specific subcultures. Research on
transnational cooperation in relation to culture also has to define other
arenas, their boundaries with other arenas, and their specific impact
on social movements. In his work on different discourses among the
Left in Germany and Great Britain, Ullrich (2008) already distinguishes
national cultural contexts from movement-specific cultural contexts
106 Culture and Activism across Borders

(see also Ullrich and Keller, this volume). My contribution does not
primarily attempt to explain differences in movement discourses, but
instead forms of transnational activism, such as different ways of coop-
erating, importing ideas, or common identities. For this purpose other
factors from the national context, like civil society infrastructure or the
national focus of the mass media, become relevant. Movement-internal
cultures at the level of the social movement are not only influenced
by the national framework but also shaped by other factors, such as
ideas from abroad (see Malets and Zajak, this volume) or influences
from specific lifestyles and world views that are only marginally related
to the national culture. In many respects, social movements from dif-
ferent countries working on similar issues are more similar than social
movements from the same country working on different issues. The
relationship between national and local cultural factors remains an
empirical question.
As long as movements only refer to each other and do not cooper-
ate closely, they tend to ignore differences by using broad terms for
shared claims. The construction of the other movement as acting within
a dissimilar framework helps to accept this kind of diversity.
Furthermore, there are activists who can be classified as “global
cosmopolitans” (Brimm 2010): They speak more than one language,
have spent long periods in other countries, and thus have developed
a kind of hybrid identity. These actors function as interpreters between
movements. Like those activist writers mentioned above, personal trust
is a key for the other actors to accept the interpretations of these global
cosmopolitans.
Transnational movements like the GJM have developed their own
shared culture. Through long-term cooperation cultural differences
are negotiated, to some extent levelled, and replaced by a common
movement-internal culture. Furthermore, the movements develop inter-
nal practices for dealing with cultural differences. Thus we deal with
different levels of culture. If we are looking at transnational activism, all
of them are impacted by differences related to national borders.
Building upon Polletta’s (2008:89) cultural schemas, cultural differ-
ences are responsible for different “expectations about how things do
and should work”. Transnational cooperation faces a plurality of mean-
ings. Differences not only become obvious in internal discourses of
transnational social movements but are also reflected in different exter-
nal frameworks: “challengers’ claims are heard against the backdrop
not of a single canonical story but rather of many familiar stories
that navigate similarly between culturally privileged and denigrated
 Britta Baumgarten 107

poles of well-known symbolic oppositions” (Polletta 2008:91). National

borders impact these expectations due to the pre-selection of informa-
tion by the national media, experiences with policy-making processes,
or other civil society actors. Social movements are thus embedded
into their national context and have developed certain expectations
and practices. Expectations about how things do and should work are
an obstacle to cooperation between movements. They are often not
expressed and cause irritations if they differ between activists. But expec-
tations about differences can also help to avoid conflicts in terms of
only focusing on expected common ground. With regard to expecta-
tions, there is a big difference between transnational movements and
other kinds of transnational activism. On the one hand, transnational
movements have to face different expectations and cannot easily ignore
them because of the closer cooperation of activists. On the other hand,
these differences will likely be overcome through closer and long-term
exchange of ideas and the formation of common practices, provided
they are articulated.
I have argued here that cultural differences related to nation states are
structured in a certain way. The five aspects of the state as a framework
for social movement action showed why national borders are important
and what distinguishes national differences from differences structured
alongside other kinds of borders.

Notes
1. Although here I focus on difference, I would like to point out that culture
in transnational activism does not only come into play as a cause for dif-
ference. Due to shared problems such as austerity measures related to the
current economic crisis and, moreover, as a result of transnational coop-
eration, for example in the Global Social Forums, common discourses and
practices are created over time: processes of creation of a transnational inter-
nal movement culture. These processes have been analysed elsewhere (della
Porta 2004, 2009:181; Smith 2005; Djelic and Quack 2010; Teune 2010) and
will be left aside here.
2. Following Tarrow, transnational social movements are regarded as “sustained
contentious interaction with opponents – national and nonnational – by
connected networks of challengers organized across national boundaries
[ . . . ] the challengers themselves be both rooted in domestic social networks
and connected to one another more than episodically through common
ways of seeing the world, or through informal or organizational ties”
(Tarrow 1998:184). Long-term cooperation in transnational movements usu-
ally includes meetings at a regular base, internal debates on common aims
and frames, decisions about the most urgent issues at stake, and some kind
of a joint identity (for an overview, see Djelic and Quack 2010).
108 Culture and Activism across Borders

3. My concept does not deny the impact of social movements on culture.

However, this is not the focus of this chapter.
4. 15O stands for 15 de Outubro 2011 (15 October 2011), the date of the first
demonstration organized by this platform. The platform was founded in
May 2011 to organize this demonstration. It met in open assemblies and
was the main organizer of the street protest from summer 2011 until spring
2012.
5. The movement 15M started with the occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid
on 15 May 2011 by only a few people. After these people were removed by
the police, about 10,000 people returned there on 17 May. Later it success-
fully spread to various cities in Spain and around the world, “expanding it
and enabling a reconstruction of the first 15M action, the Sol occupation
camp site, in the outskirts and suburbs” (Nistal 2012:76). Further, there were
marches of people from various regions of Spain to Madrid.
6. Contrary to the intuition of the social movement researcher, this construct
does not serve as a utopia. In debates about differences between Spain and
Portugal as well as in the interview cited above, this construct has always
been used in the context of expression of frustration, and not of hope that
the same things could happen in Portugal one day too.
7. Chernilo (2008:2) defines methodological nationalism as follows:

At its simplest, methodological nationalism is found when the nation-

state is treated as the natural and necessary representation of the modern
society. A fuller definition would run as follows: the equation between
the idea of society as social theory’s key conceptual reference and the
process of historical formation of the nation-state in modernity. The idea
of society becomes the all-encompassing presupposition around which
all modern social trends are being explicated; the nation-state and the
modern society become conceptually undistinguishable.

8. Tarrow criticizes this strong thesis. Referring to historical events and net-
works, he states that global movements are nothing new.
9. Hepp et al. (2009) focus on Europe, but as Europe is a space with a long joint
history and intense political relations through the European Union, a public
sphere at the global level (if we think of such a concept) would be definitely
more fragmented than the European public sphere.
10. For more information on the UNEMPOL research project, see http://ec.
europa.eu/research/social-sciences/projects/145_en.html
11. To distinguish different types of states, Johnston proposes looking at four
variables: citizenship, equality, responsiveness, and protection (Johnston
2011:18). As they have developed over centuries, each of these variables is
also a sign of a specific national culture (Baumgarten, Gosewinkel, and Rucht
2011).
12. Recent approaches in social movement theory have elaborated on the clas-
sic model of opportunity structures, including the notion of discourse and
refrain from rational actor models (Ullrich 2008; Baumgarten and Ullrich
2012).
13. The following meeting in February 2012 included groups from Spain, among
them a working group on internationalization.
 Britta Baumgarten 109

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6
Comparing Discourse between
Cultures: A Discursive Approach
to Movement Knowledge
Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller

Introduction1

A discourse analysis of German left-wing media coverage of the Middle

East conflict brought to light a phenomenon also seen in other political
fields, but much stronger in quantity and quality: Much of the discourse
was related to Germany’s National Socialist past. Vocabulary from that
era was used and comparisons drawn. In one newspaper, Palestinian vio-
lence was reported on as the actions “of a mob”, aimed not at “taking
back illegally expropriated soil” but at “exterminating Jewish existence”
(Bartel and Ullrich 2008). Earlier statements by pro-Israeli autonomist
activists had described the Palestinians as the “biggest anti-Semitic col-
lective” and stated that the “Popular belief in Palestine” is “völkisch”
(literally “folkish”, extremely nationalistic, an essential part of German
Nazis’ self-description) and aims at a “pure-blood Palestine free of Jews”
(Ullrich 2008). In a similar fashion, the well-known and at times polit-
ically active German poet Günter Grass wrote a poem (“What has to
be said”) about his fears of an Israeli attack on Iran, which in his view
may “exterminate the Iranian people” – an allusion to the Nazi exter-
mination of Jews. Some pro-Palestinian activists hailed this political
statement as an act of bravery. The question arises as to why, despite
having different political aims, politically active Germans – especially
radical activists – debate the Middle East conflict in a discursive frame-
work so strongly shaped by terms and patterns from the discourse of or
about Germany’s National Socialist past. Or more generally, what shapes
the discursive patterns of these movements?
In this chapter, we intend to propose a research programme for
analysing such phenomena of social movements, with the aim of

113
114 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

literally solving the mystery of the introductory story. By focusing for

this purpose on knowledge and its discursive embeddedness, we thus
react to a deficit in line with the general assumptions that underpin
this book. This deficit is the predominance of an instrumentalist per-
spective or strategic self-restriction in current social movement theory,
especially in resource mobilization theory, framing, and the political
opportunity structures approach. Against the backdrop of these rational-
ist and instrumentalist restrictions of the potential scope of movement
research, we suggest a different perspective. Instead of analysing suc-
cessful and unsuccessful strategic framing efforts, we take on older
ideational approaches (such as Eyerman and Jamison 1991) and shift
our attention towards the conditions of the knowledge and the world
views of social movements (thus towards inherently cultural phenom-
ena), thereby largely drawing on the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to
Discourse (SKAD) (Keller 2011). This research approach combines the
questions of the social constructionist sociology of knowledge – How
is the objectivity and facticity of reality established through social pro-
cesses of institutionalization and legitimization? How does this become
the reality of the world for social actors? What can social actors know?
How is knowledge attained, stabilized, communicated, and changed? –
with the Foucauldian perspective on discourse and power-knowledge
regimes, providing us with insights into the enabling and restricting
social (discursive) structures of the sayable, thinkable, and legitimately
utterable, or the ideational and institutional context structures of social
movement ideas.
Firstly, we start with a brief overview of the shortcomings of gen-
eral and also cultural analysis in social movement research and propose
basic ideas about how to solve these problems. Secondly, we introduce
SKAD and its key heuristic concepts, including discourse, frames, phe-
nomenon structures, and narrative. Thirdly, this approach is applied to
social movement and protest research by highlighting the conceptual
links to key concepts of current social movement theory, which are man-
ifold – especially in the framing approach and the culturalist derivates
of the political opportunity structure approach [frames, cultural reso-
nance, and cultural or discursive opportunity structures (COS/DOS)].
Empirical examples, many of them from Ullrich’s research into histor-
ical reminiscences in German movements, shall illustrate the necessity
and fruition of our perspective. The fourth and last part outlines method-
ological implications of the SKAD research programme’s theoretical
framework. Most important therein is a non-deductive, hermeneutic
analysis of discourse, which draws on research methods established in
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 115

qualitative (interpretative) social research. Through cross-cultural com-

parison it reveals the relevant discursive contexts of a specific movement
discourse.
Our aim (for now) is not to present a new cultural theory of social
movements but to present a theoretical framework for analysing move-
ment specificities across cultures. Such cultures are considered here as
discursive fields – as social arenas where discourses unfold in a never-
ending struggle for meaning. Such discursive fields are largely produced
and reproduced by discursive practices and are constituted as internally
connected sets of statements and rules for their production.2

Bringing discourse and culture back

to protest research

Our starting point is what Johnston (2009:5) called the “instrumentalist-

structuralist lens” that characterizes huge parts of current social move-
ment theory.3 This dominant perspective, historically rooted in the
North American type of social movements as well as in the respec-
tive current of movement theorizing (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:27),
is explicitly or implicitly interested in questions of movement success
(Pettenkofer 2010). While this question is fruitful and absolutely central
in the analysis of actors, who aim to achieve social change (and there
is no doubt about this strategic aspect being a major quality of social
movements), it leaves certain questions unanswered (Teune 2008:541).
Among these questions, often neglected by movement researchers in the
last three decades under the truism “grievances are everywhere, move-
ments not” (Japp 1984), were those concerned with the reasons and
causes of mobilization. Much of the development of social movement
theory can be understood as a pendulum swinging between the poles
causes for protest (grievances, deprivation, modernization pressure) and
conditions of protest success (resources, political opportunities, successful
framing efforts). Yet, if we assume that there is no lack of grievances,
and that sometimes there are even (successful or unsuccessful) protest
movements, and if we analyse both aspects, there are still more issues
left unanswered. One would be what concerns people and why things
are perceived as a problem in the first place or not. The other would
be how problems or concerns are interpreted and understood. Why are
they constructed, viewed, interpreted, or de-constructed by social move-
ments in a specific way and not in another? And, how do movement
activities shape the construction of realities in social worlds, both in
cases of success and also when they seem to fail?
116 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

The following example illustrates this. The conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians is generally perceived as an enormous political problem.
And all over the world there are solidarity movements concerned with
the issue. Yet, we see that there are pro-Palestinian activists and pro-
Israeli activists. Even in established political camps like “the left” there
are huge differences in how the Middle East conflict is perceived. While
in many countries there is strong, dominant support among commu-
nists for the Palestinian cause, in some, such as Germany, communists
are strongly divided on the question of which side to support. And com-
paring different countries, such as Germany and Britain, it can be seen
that supporters of the Palestinians differ considerably in the way they
communicate about the problem, even if they belong to the same inter-
national organization. Regardless of their actual identification with the
Palestinians or Israel, the arguments used stem in part from and relate
to different, in this case mainly national, contexts (Ullrich 2008). Since
they represent what the world is like and what is considered normal,
it is above all these discursive contexts which are the cause for the dif-
ferent “implicit meanings” which “activists tend to take for granted”
(Lichtermann 1998) and which thus heavily shape social movements
and protest.
New Social Movement theory has partly addressed such ideational
questions. It was interested in the subjects’ concerns, which were anal-
ysed in a macro-sociological framework that considered the impact of
post-industrial capitalist society (Brand, Büsser, and Rucht 1986). But
this approach’s scope of attention does not cover all sorts of move-
ments that seem to react to a complex heterogeneity of problems.
And, as Jasper (2007:69) argued, Tourraine, the most prominent ana-
lyst of culture in “New Social Movements”, sometimes had to force the
macro-structural interpretation on data without convincing his research
objects of being understood properly in their wanting and thinking.
The framing approach set off from there, aiming to provide us with a
more detailed idea of the ideational processes in protest activity, and
an analysis of what concerns movements and activists (see, e.g., Snow
et al. 1986; Gamson and Modigliani 1989). Yet it stayed well within
the narrow instrumentalist perspective of mainstream US movement
research by viewing framing processes primarily as movement tasks that
can be fulfilled more or less successfully (Gerhards 1992; Klandermans
1988; Snow and Benford 1988). So framing an international trade agree-
ment as unjust would be belief amplification, that is the attempt to
legitimize one’s own position by appealing to common values. Surpris-
ingly, the obvious is not done: The injustice frame is not considered
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 117

as an expression of the movement’s world view. As scholars of social

movements (should) know, much that is said and done in the every-
day existence of movements does not follow any strategic imperative.
Things are sometimes done in a certain way because they have always
been done like that, so we find customs, routines, and habits. Some
protest is carried out with no strategic end (at least in this world), such
as some self-immolation. There may be a rationale behind it, but defi-
nitely not the one a professional US-American human rights campaigner
may follow when trying to formulate statements that would most likely
appeal to the American public. There are even activists who, in terms
of their own self-perception at least, despise politics and restrict them-
selves to uttering negative criticism, considering that they have hardly
anybody to appeal to. Other rather neglected aspects in the analysis of
movements are the knowledge stocks and argumentative claim-making
resources available to them (like external scientific expertise or own
knowledge production).
Taking the object of social movement studies seriously implies the
need to investigate their “ways of worldmaking” (Nelson Goodman),
their “vocabularies of motive” (Charles W. Mills), their world views,
beliefs, practices, and their communication as an expression of what
they are, and not to subsume all ideational aspects under strategic
efforts. Humankind is a narrating species, for which the use of sym-
bolic systems is elementary. So every time we tell other people about
something, we have to draw upon culturally organized prerequisites:
Whether consciously or not, we use frames, stories, and narrative ele-
ments of all kinds to make sense of something, to account for it. Such
symbolic expressions of movements are objectified in texts and images,
practices, identities, and organizational forms. It is a question of high
interest for the study of society where these ideas come from, what
shapes them, enables them, and sets their boundaries. Approaches to
that question have often stopped halfway. There has not been suffi-
cient elaboration on the concepts and research strategies necessary for
analysing where movement knowledge actually comes from. Johnston
(2009:21), for example, writes that by “examining the snapshots of texts
at different points in time, the analyst can plumb how the meaning sys-
tems of movement groups evolve”. While this is surely not incorrect,
it absolutely leaves open the question of where the ideas actually come
from and how this can be researched.
Scholars of movements can get helpful support in the endeavour to
overcome these theoretical weaknesses from approaches that have not
yet had much influence on current social movement theory, namely the
118 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

social constructionist sociology of knowledge (cf. Berger and Luckmann

1966) and Foucauldian discourse theory and analysis. The former offers
movement research the following new question: How is knowledge4 cre-
ated and sustained, contested and fixed in a movement which in itself
should be considered as a context of interaction, communication, and
agency? Yet, to this day this stream of sociology of knowledge has only
rarely considered the social meso- and macro-conditions of knowledge
production, circulation, and effects. In the wake of Michel Foucault and
others, discourse theory is perfectly qualified to fill this gap.5 Since his
early writings Foucault was concerned with what is considered “normal”
in society and, when developing the discourse approach, with the social
regulation of what can be legitimately stated in a specific (scientific)
arena at a certain point in time.
The SKAD has been developed since the late 1990s by Keller (2001) to
combine the analytical focus of sociology of knowledge on actors, inter-
action, everyday negotiation, and socialization with the Foucauldian
discourse perspective, which stands in a Durkheimian tradition, focus-
ing on emergent social facts as a reality of their own. It should be noted
at this point that SKAD resulted from empirical research performed
by Keller during the 1990s, which originally started with compara-
tive framing studies on ecological communication of waste issues and
policies in the German and French mass media and political spheres
(Keller 2009 [1998]). This research was, in the beginning, close to social
movement theory and studies carried out by Snow, Benford, Gamson,
Gerhards, and others. It used mass media texts as well as documents
from political actors and interviews. But the restricted vocabulary as
well as the strategic, cognitivist, and instrumentalist orientation of
frame research quickly proved too limited for addressing analytical
questions of broader cultural, institutional, and discursive contexts.
Like other social scientists – especially Maarten Hajer (1995) – Keller
decided that a more Foucauldian notion of discourse and a closer look
at social constructionism would be helpful to elaborate a more com-
prehensive approach to what he called later on in more general terms
the social politics of knowledge (in Foucauldian terms, “power-knowledge
regimes”).
The approach addresses five central points of concern: First, it takes
seriously the notion of discourse, which was of course used in the
social movement research tradition but in a rather narrow sense; sec-
ond, it looks for discursive battles, conflicts, and contexts, and not for
isolated movement actors and strategies; third, it accounts for the prac-
tices and materialities of discourse or statement production, including
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 119

the usage and production of knowledge of all kind; fourth, it considers

“problematizations” (Foucault 1984) as social actors’ attempts to estab-
lish a particular “definition of the situation” (Thomas and Thomas
1928), which means to fix the reality of the world in a particular way;
and fifth, it makes use, for purposes of concrete research, of the rich
traditions of qualitative research in sociology. The application of this
approach to social movement research (see also Ullrich 2012), which we
are proposing in the following, will not account for all of the theoretical
and methodological implications, but it does highlight certain aspects
of SKAD.
First, it is a cultural approach, in the sense that it brings to the fore
the importance (not exclusiveness!) of symbolic processes for the devel-
opment and existence of social movements. Where “social” usually
refers to a collective set of human actors, actions, constellations, and
(certain kinds of) structures, acknowledging “culture” accentuates the
role of meaning and symbolic systems. The production of symbols and
interaction in a symbolic form (thus referring to and relying on supra-
individual cultural patterns and rules) is not seen as a mere layer of
social reality next to structures. It does not support the idea of society
versus culture, but sees culture as a necessary perspective for looking at
society, because everything that is social is also cultural (and vice versa).
This means, to put it literally, not a disregard for factors such as hunger,
social inequality, or structural unemployment as reasons for protest,
but instead the insistence that even hunger and poverty first need to
be interpreted within the realm of the respective societies’ horizons
of meaning; only then can protest become a possible reaction. Addi-
tionally, this approach has been supplemented by additional insights
from a variety of other cultural approaches, such as political culture and
framing theory. The main focus of research is movements’ involvement
and embeddedness in discursive structurings, contexts, and practices.
If we consider movements as being embedded in social relationships
of knowledge and as actors in social politics of knowledge, then we can
address these discursive struggles in order to analyse what kind of knowl-
edge movements and their members produce, express, or (pre-)suppose
in their practical engagements and in all kinds of documents. Thus,
their symbolic expression and interaction are primarily analysed based
on their primarily textual, but also (secondarily) oral or visual practices.
Second, the conditions of this knowledge are primarily located in a
discursive context, which is a reality sui generis, a pre-existent condi-
tion from the actors’ point of view. This also implies the negation of
the cognitively or emotionally straitened concepts of culture (where
120 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

culture has the tendency to be viewed basically as a sharing of cognitions

and/or emotions6 ) and rather strengthening a perspective on cultural
“structurations” (Anthony Giddens), which are objectified in artefacts,
ways of saying, writing, and doing, that is in (discursive) rules for their
enactment in the concrete production of statements.
Third, this goes along with stressing the important influences on
movements of discursive contexts, which can be manifold (such as issue
fields, arenas, ideological currents/movement sectors, or local/regional/
border crossing cultures). In particular, we argue that besides the grow-
ing relevance of transnationalisation, national contexts still matter
immensely in the formation of movements and movement knowledge
(Buechler 2000:88 ff.), which underlines SKAD’s affinity with compar-
ative research designs. So, though being careful not to fall into the
trap of “the reproduction of holistic nationalist clichés” (Koopmans and
Statham 2000:31), we disagree with Jasper (2007:61), who sees cultural
approaches as basically micro-oriented in contrast to the big metaphors
like “states, structures, networks, even movements”. On the contrary,
the contribution of SKAD to movement research lies in the specifi-
cation of relevant discursive contexts of movement knowledge with
considerable formative power.
Yet, fourth, movements themselves are also of importance as a
discursive context, although this will not be elaborated thoroughly
here. Movements represent a lifeworld, too, an everyday communicative
and interactive practice, with sedimented norms, roles, and practices,
whose meanings cannot be reduced to their strategic relation to soci-
ety. Without this level – the agency of actors and the complexity of the
interactional contexts/situations – no change in the general discourse
could be imaginable.

Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse:

Foundations and key concepts7

As Stuart Hall and his Birmingham Cultural Studies colleagues argued,

we are living in “circuits of culture”, indicating that meaning-making
activities and social construction of realities have become effects of orga-
nized production, representation, marketing, regulation, and adaption
(Hall 1997). This was a concern of interpretative sociology from the out-
set: Max Weber’s work on “The Protestant Ethic” (Weber [1904/1905]
2002) is nothing less and nothing more than a discourse study avant
la lettre of a social movement’s religious discourse and its power effects
in capitalist societies. To make his claim about the connection between
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 121

“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Weber analysed sev-
eral kinds of texts: religious prayers, advisory books, and sermons. It was
from such textual data that he developed his ideas on “innerworldly
ascetics” and deeply structured ways of shaping everyday life, home,
and work. The “Protestant Ethic” delivered a deeply social vocabulary of
motives, an institutionally preconfigured “definition of the situation”
(William I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas 1928). Weber never used the
term “discourse”, but the Chicago pragmatists did. They argued that
social groups produce and live in “universes of discourse”, systems, or
horizons of meaning and processes of establishing and transforming
such systems (Mead 1963:89–90). Without being exhaustive, one could
mention Joseph Gusfield’s (1981) study on the “Culture of Public Prob-
lems”, Anselm Strauss’s attention to ongoing negotiated orderings in
social worlds/arenas (Strauss 1979, 1991, 1993), or the broad work on
social construction and careers of social problems as exemplars of such
a perspective. Social movement research in the symbolic-interactionist
and resource mobilization traditions was interested in public discourses,
but it did not elaborate a more comprehensive theory and method-
ology of discourse research. Neither did studies which used the term
“discursive opportunity structure” (see next section). In recent political
science, Vivien Schmidt (2010) elaborated “discursive institutionalism”
in order to give a richer account of the role of discourse in politi-
cal actions and decisions. But she reduced discourse to the rhetorical
power of individual actors, in trying to draw a line between constel-
lations when discourse matters and others when discourse does not
matter – that is, between a situation where an argument or a speech
makes a difference and others, where bargaining and established struc-
tures of interest and power determine the outcomes. Seen through a
Foucauldian lens, this is a rather narrow vision of discourse – for dis-
courses matter in both cases, as structured and structuring practices of
the discursive construction of reality.
As a philosopher turning to empirical and historical studies,
Foucault developed his approach to discourse and the complexities
of power/knowledge quite apart from sociological positions. Nev-
ertheless, he invented his own historical sociology of knowledge
and problematizations (Manning 1982:65, 76). Foucault’s fundamental
achievement was, first, to look at discourses as socio-historically situ-
ated practices manifest as textual data and not as the development of
ideas or lines of argumentation, and, second, to liberate discourse anal-
ysis from linguistic issues. In doing so, he laid important foundations
for a sociological analysis of discourses. When he argued that his main
122 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

concern was the analysis of “problematizations” (Foucault 1984), that is

the appearance of central “critical events” in the history of social con-
stitutions of subjectivities or particular orders of practice, he came quite
close to the interests of the symbolic interactionists or social movement
research.
According to Foucault, discourses are situated social practices, not rep-
resenting external objects, but constituting them. This implies a research
focus on concrete data – oral and written texts, articles, books, dis-
cussions, institutions, disciplines – in order to analyse bottom-up how
discourses are structured and how they structure knowledge domains
and claims. Foucault speaks of “discursive formations” (Foucault [1969]
2010:34–78), for example the “formation of concepts” (what concepts
are used and how they relate to each other) or the “formation of
enunciative modalities” (as the places for speakers and the established
criteria – for example, academic careers and titles – to access them, see
Baumgarten and Ullrich 2012). In the “Rivière case” Foucault (1982)
addresses discourses as battlefields, as power struggles over the legitimate
definition of phenomena.
Despite its enormous achievements in setting up a discourse research
agenda, there were some remaining deficits in the Foucauldian tool-
box which led to the elaboration of SKAD. First, Foucault’s theory
of discourse as established in the “Archaeology of Knowledge” largely
neglected the agency of social actors making discursive statements. Sec-
ond, he was not interested in a theory of human consciousness and
sign/symbol usage, which has to be assumed in order to allow discourses
to exist and to exert power effects on people. And third, he did not put
much effort into research methods.

SKAD’s Concepts
Social relationships of knowledge are complex socio-historical constella-
tions of the production, stabilization, structuration, and transformation
of knowledge within a variety of social arenas. Following Foucault,
SKAD identifies discourses as regulated, structured practices of sign usage
in social arenas which constitute smaller or larger realities, symbolic
universes. Discourses are at once both an expression and a constitu-
tional prerequisite of the (modern) social; they become real through
the actions of social actors, supply specific knowledge claims, and
contribute to the liquefaction and dissolution of the institutionalized
interpretations and apparent realities that are taken for granted. Dis-
courses crystallize and constitute themes in a particular form as social
interpretation and action issues. Discursive formations are assemblies
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 123

of statements which follow the same formation rules. For example, a

scientific discourse is manifest in texts, conferences, papers, talks, asso-
ciations, and so on, all of which can be studied as data. It emerged
historically out of actions and interactions that were committed in
order to tell the empirical truth about phenomena in the world. In dis-
courses, the use of language or symbols by social actors constitutes
the sociocultural facticity of physical and social realities. The mean-
ing of signs, symbols, images, gestures, actions, or things is more or
less fixed in socially, spatially, and temporally or historically situated
(and therefore transformable) orders of signs. It is affirmed, conserved,
or changed through the concrete usage of the signs. Discourses can be
understood as attempts to freeze meanings or, more generally speak-
ing, to freeze more or less broad symbolic orders, that is, fix them in
time and by doing so institutionalize a binding context of meaning,
values, and actions/agency within social collectives. SKAD is concerned
with this correlation between sign usage as a social practice and the
(re)-production/transformation of social orders of knowledge.
SKAD examines discourses as performative statement practices and
symbolic orderings which constitute reality orders and also produce
power effects in a conflict-ridden network of social actors, institutional
dispositifs, and knowledge stocks. It is emphasized that discourse is
concrete and material; it is not an abstract idea or free-floating line of argu-
ments. There are people on the streets, gestures of resistance, papers are
written, speeches held: The German anti-waste movement during the
early 1990s occupied territories, published books, organized knowledge
on the risks and hazardous effects of waste, and so on. This means that
discourse appears as speech, text, discussion, images, and use of symbols,
which have to be performed by actors following discursive instruc-
tions, and discourses are, therefore, a real social practice in which agency
and symbolic orders are bound together. SKAD research is concerned
with reconstructing the processes which occur in social construction,
communication, and the legitimization of meaning structures in insti-
tutional spheres and (public) issue arenas. Several heuristic concepts
from the sociology of knowledge tradition are useful for analysing
the discursive construction of reality: interpretative schemes, classifica-
tions, phenomenal structures (Phänomenstrukturen), and narrative structures.
Together, these elements create the interpretative repertoire (cf. Potter and
Wetherell 1998) of a discourse. We shall now consider these concepts
more closely.
The term interpretative scheme or frame (Deutungsmuster) covers mean-
ing and action-generating schemes, which are combined in and
124 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

circulated through discourses. Interpretative schemes are structuring

patterns of societies’ stocks of knowledge. They are used to assemble
signs and symbols and to create definitions of the situation (which hap-
pens all the time, not only in strategic action). Discourses differ in the
way they combine such frames in specific interpretative frameworks.
If complex technology is considered risky, nature seen as the endangered
mother earth, and society as the supreme instance of politics, then waste
appears as a quite different problem than in other possible or established
combinations of interpretative schemes. Discourses are able to generate
new interpretative schemes and ways of positioning them within the
social agenda – which is exactly what characterizes them. Differing from
social movement framing research, SKAD argues that such framings are
of interest far beyond the singular question of their strategic use, because
they – whether intentionally or not – always configure reality.
Classifications are a more or less elaborate, formalized, and institution-
ally fixed social typification or categorization process. They have specific
impacts for action. As an example, consider affirmative action or similar
politics which draws on classifications of populations. Movements often
classify opponents and their own we as well as those whose interests that
we is (striving to be) working for.
Alongside interpretative schemes and classifications, the concept of
phenomenal structure offers a complementary third form of access to
the levels of content-related structuring of discourse. Constructing an
issue as a problem on the public agenda, for instance, requires that
the protagonists deal with the issue in several dimensions, and refer to
argumentative, dramatizing, and evaluative statements; it requires the
determination of the kind of problem or theme of a statement unit,
the definition of characteristics, causal relations (cause-effect), and their
link to responsibilities, actors, and identities involved, and others. Social
actors are not pre-given or pre-fixed entities with clear interests, strate-
gies, and resources. SKAD research is very much about the discursive
processes in which actors emerge, engage themselves or are engaged by
others, claim or perform reciprocal positionings, and are involved in
multiple ways in discursive structurations. The comparative study on
waste politics in Germany and France (Keller 2009) showed that the cri-
tique of established waste treatment and waste production existed in
Germany well before the anti-waste movement came into being. One
could even regard it as a precondition of the movement’s existence.
A final element that is part of the content-related shaping of dis-
courses should be discussed here. The structuring moments of state-
ments and discourses, through which various interpretation schemes,
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 125

classifications, and dimensions of the phenomenal structure (e.g. actors,

problem definitions) are placed in relation to one another in a spe-
cific way, are narrative structures. Establishing narrative structures is not
simply a use of techniques to combine linguistic elements but a con-
figurative act which links disparate signs and statements to tell a story.
Narrative structures link the various elements of a discourse to render
them in a coherent, portrayable, and communicable form. They pro-
vide the acting scheme for the narration with which the discourse can
address an audience in the first place and with which it can construct its
own coherence over the course of time.
But SKAD is not only interested in the symbolic ordering of real-
ity. It is also concerned with the analysis of the material world and its
effects. This includes various dimensions of reconstruction: sense mak-
ing as well as subject formation, ways of acting, institutional/structural
contexts, and social as well as material consequences (e.g. installed
infrastructure designed to solve a problem, such as laws, staff, and
computers).
SKAD further describes discursive fields as social arenas, constituting
themselves around contested issues, controversies, problematizations,
and truth claims in which discourses compete with each other. In the
processing of discourses, specific discourse coalitions and statement bear-
ers can win out over others, by a wide range of means. Discursive
orders, accordingly, are the results of a continuous communicative produc-
tion within individual language and action events which are, however,
not understood as spontaneous or chaotic but rather as interwoven,
structured practices which refer back to one another. A pamphlet or
a speech within the context of a demonstration, for instance, actual-
izes an environmental policy discourse in differing concrete forms. The
materiality of discourses (as discursive or non-discursive practices, real
speakers, texts, speeches, discussions, things) simply means the way
discourses exist in societies.
Social actors are related to discourse in two ways: on the one hand,
as the holders of the speaker position, or statement producers, who speak
within a discourse; and on the other, as addressees of the statement prac-
tice. But actors generally appear on the discursive level too: subject
positions/identity offerings depict positioning processes and patterns of
subjectification which are generated in discourses and which refer to
(fields of) addressees.
The term practice(s) covers very generally conventionalized action pat-
terns which are made available in collective stocks of knowledge as a
repertoire for action, that is, in other words, a more or less explicitly
126 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

known, often incorporated recipe or knowledge script about the proper

way of acting. This knowledge can originate, establish, and develop itself
(further) in fields of social practice through experimenting and test-
ing actions in relation to specific issues. SKAD considers several forms
of practice: discursive practices are communication patterns which are
bound to a discourse context. Discursive practices are observable and
describable, typical ways of acting out statement production whose
implementation requires interpretative competence and active shap-
ing by social actors. SKAD differentiates between the latter and model
practices generated in discourses, that is, exemplary patterns (or tem-
plates) for action which are constituted in discourses, fixed to subject
positions, and addressed to the discourse’s public or to some oppo-
site counter-discourse. To continue with the above-mentioned example
of environmental discourse, this includes recommendations for eco-
friendly behaviour (such as turning the shower off while you shampoo
your hair, using your bike, preparing slow food).

SKAD and social movement research

Essentially, it should not be too controversial an approach to apply

SKAD to social movement research. It is quite compatible with current
social movement theory as it does not in the first place aim at explain-
ing the latter’s claims better, but at asking new questions and bringing
into focus new research interests. Yet, SKAD in social movement research
is linked to previous efforts in the field, albeit – to quote Marx – by
standing them from their head onto their feet.
A prominent role for connecting SKAD and current social movement
theory has to be reserved for the framing concept, as it has been out-
lined for social movement research and distinguished from ideology,
for example by Oliver and Johnston (2000:39) and Ferree et al. (2002).
The latter consider frames as a concept covering two structuring aspects
of signification, which are related to the meaning of the term “frame”.
First, a frame (like a picture frame) sets boundaries, explaining what is
being thematized and what is not (thematic relevance). Secondly, they
pick up on the meaning of structure, which leads our attention to the
inner structure of the phenomenon, to how something is thematized.
This conceptualization has some advantages over other ideational con-
cepts like ideology. One aspect is this concept’s economic connotation
or the implicit connection of the superstructure phenomenon of ideol-
ogy with its objective basis in social relations of production (which is
the power and a restriction of this concept) (Oliver and Johnston 2000).
The frame concept is – if not conceived of only as a “shallow conception
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 127

of the transmission of political ideas as marketing” (Oliver and Johnston

2000:37) – simply more open to cultural complexities and ties in with
basic insights of research into political culture. Karl Rohe (1990:335)
once wrote that political cultures (and political cultures are among the
central contextual discursive conditions of movement discourse) do not
differ so much in their problem solutions but in what would become a
problem for them at all and how (for Foucault, problematizations). If we
lay aside the classical view of movements as actors who are opposed to
society (or power or actors/institutions in it) and perceive them more
as a part and expression of society,8 we can grasp the embeddedness of
movement ideas. In the social repertoire of movement action the use of
frames is not chosen for exclusively strategic reasons, since they belong
to the basic ideational prerequisites which shape given movements in
culturally specific ways. As already mentioned, much of this is due to
national discursive contexts.
The most striking example of this is the influence of historical
memory and dealing with the national past in German movements,
including in political fields that are thematically not necessarily con-
nected to the past. Ferree et al. (2002) showed that in debates between
the women’s movement and the so-called pro-life camp, anti-abortion
positions differed between Germany and the United States. The moral
anti-abortion positions in Germany are, the authors argue, grounded
in the experiences of Nazi euthanasia. This eminent politico-cultural
issue for Germany gives the abortion debate a layer of meaning that
is unique for the respective discursive context (besides other mean-
ings with contexts greater than the German nation state). It is thus
an illuminating example of how a discursive context shapes modes of
sense-making by offering specific frames and not others. Other research
has shown these kinds of reminiscences in the visual production of
German protest movements against surveillance (Ullrich and Lê 2011;
Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013). The most commonplace depictions of
surveillance worked with allusions to Germany’s past. Very prominent
in the images was the Nazi regime, with many statements implicitly
or ironically equating today’s surveillance with that in Nazi Germany
or alluding to the latter as the ultimate threat if today’s development
of the surveillance state is not stopped or reversed. The most common
symbols of the protests worked with allusions to the German Demo-
cratic Republic (which in the decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain
replaced the Nazi period as the ultimate other of German national nar-
ratives, cf. Zuckermann 1999:8). Probably the most widely circulated
picture showed the then German minister of the interior, Wolfgang
Schäuble, who was responsible for many post-9/11 security laws, with
128 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

the slogan “Stasi 2.0” (“Stasi” being the colloquial abbreviation for the
political secret police of the GDR). While the anti-surveillance move-
ment is a wide coalition with a fundamentally liberal orientation, della
Porta (1999:76–78) showed similar historical references to the Nazi
regime for left-libertarian (or “autonomist”) movements in Germany
(as well as in Italy, with references to its fascist experiences) in the
1960s–1980s.
These examples also clearly illustrate how useful the concept of frame
resonance (Gamson and Modigliani 1989) is, and how strategic and
expressive aspects of movement discourse go hand in hand. Frame res-
onance refers to the public’s high or low response to a framing strategy.
While the historical allusion may be grounded in strategic thinking,
considering the Stasi link funny (and thus creating sympathy) and con-
sidering the Nazi allusion provocative and threatening (thus creating
a sense of the necessity to mobilize), they also inform the scholar of
the frames that were at hand or seemed plausible to the movements’
imagineers – and which were not. This is the concept of frame reso-
nance turned upside down: It is not only the movements’ frames that
gain resonance (more or less successfully) among bystanders, potential
adherents, or the public – it is also the available frames of a discursive
context that influence the movements’ possibilities to grasp things.
Foucault’s influence guides us in the attitude not to consider movements
as basically free actors who deliberately choose their frames, because he
encourages us towards the position that what can legitimately be stated,
or what makes sense, is structured by discourse. Whether the framing
choice is more strategic or more expressive, the pool from which to
choose is regulated and restricted. Still, discourses of movements remain
battlegrounds, too. While the German discursive context fosters the use
of the historical allusions described above, there are some actors who
criticize these. A current has developed within the German left that
centres on criticizing nationalism, the principle of nationality, and espe-
cially the unique character of German nationalism and anti-Semitism.
They see the Nazi allusions as a relativization of German guilt. The main-
stream and critics do not agree, yet in different ways relate to the same
discursive context. We see here that discourse does not determine posi-
tions, but by offering classifications and interpretative frames it defines
what makes sense at all. National socialism and its consequences are the
prime example of this in Germany.
Highly illustrative is the analysis of left-wing discourse on the con-
flict between Israel and the Palestinians (Ullrich 2008). As far as the
discursive field, “Jews/anti-Semitism/the Holocaust etc.”, is concerned
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 129

(which evokes a substantial connection), it is not surprising that in the

German variant of this discourse German history is omnipresent. Inter-
estingly, the Nazi allusion in this discourse has become a one-size-fits-all
allegation, with similarities being drawn between Israel and the Nazis
as well as between the Palestinians and the Nazis. A discourse anal-
ysis of movement media (Bartel and Ullrich 2008) revealed that parts
of the discourse indiscriminately transfer frames and terminology from
the Nazi era and the politics of remembering that era into the Mid-
dle Eastern context. Many position papers, programmatic statements,
or parliamentary motions about the conflict start with ritually acknowl-
edging “German responsibility” (Ullrich 2011). The interesting effect of
the discursive formation is that even people who adhere to the same
political ideology and fight for the same ends can differ considerably
in their framing of the conflict when from different countries. Ullrich
(2008:281 ff.) compared – among others – Trotskyists of the same inter-
national tendency in Great Britain and Germany and found immense
differences in their frames of the conflict, though not in their policy
positions or intended solutions. Anti-Semitism, Jewish/Israeli interests,
and the ethic imperatives of Germany’s National Socialist past occupy
a considerable proportion of German discourse compared to Britain,
where the frames “anti-Semitism” and “historical responsibility” are vir-
tually absent in movement discourse. The reason, of course, is the very
relevance of the respective sensitivities in the two national discursive
contexts. All other heuristic concepts of SKAD can be applied to that
discourse, too. One can identify certain – conflicting – narratives of
the conflict. There are fixed subject positions, for example the “Israel-
sympathetic lefty” or the “critic of Israel”. The German metadiscourse
binarily classifies camps (pro-Israeli “Antideutsche” vs pro-Palestinian
Anti-Zionists/Anti-imperialists – a common classification scheme that
ignores intermediary positions). Such sub-discourses also construct dif-
ferent phenomenal structures: One discourse sees the issue primarily as a
problem of anti-Semitism in the Muslim populations and their left-wing
supporters, which evokes the need for reconnaissance and awareness
measures. Others construct it as a problem of imperialism, which in turn
evokes the need for international solidarity campaigns or, for example,
boycotts against Israeli goods. Model practices and blueprints for acting
subjects are set up too, for instance when appropriate or politically cor-
rect behaviour is proclaimed. And this all is done through a whole set
of discursive practices, including the writing of pamphlets, books, the
organization of discourses and discussions, or the invitation of “real”
testimonies.
130 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

It should be noted that new interpretative schemes may always

emerge if social action encounters problems – this indeed is an old
pragmatist argument. SKAD considers such constellations as events.
Catastrophic events like the Fukushima disaster (catastrophic for the
environment) or wars in the Middle East (considered catastrophic for the
Palestinians) may evolve as generators of evidence for new interpretative
schemata. Discourses are therefore also open to new frames, which can
eventually become established as factual.
It is not new to social movement research to consider cultural or
discursive contexts’ relevance for movements. Eyerman and Jamison’s
(1991:36) “cognitive approach” was an early variant of this, considering
itself a sociology of knowledge approach, taking “long term traditions in
political culture” into consideration to analyse social movements. One
of the striking examples they give is Britain, where “the conflict between
capital and labour has continued to define the political culture, and
thus the way social movements are conceived” (Eyerman and Jamison
1991:37). This impression is still vivid for researchers with a knowledge
of the British movement landscape.
There have been a number of attempts to widen the scope of the polit-
ical opportunity structures approach by introducing cultural factors, and
several of these point in this direction. The terms cultural/discursive con-
text or cultural/discursive opportunity structures (COS/DOS) overlap heavily
and comprise a lot of different aspects and lookouts. Like the framing
approach, most of them were not intended to complete the cultural
turn, because they often restrict themselves to analysing the influence
of cultural or discursive structures on mobilizing success and policy
outcomes (McAdam 1994; Koopmans and Kriesi 1997; Koopmans and
Statham 2000). The term “opportunity” implies this strategic bias; this
is why we prefer the more open concept discursive context, which is
in fact the discourse of the wider society in which the movement is
embedded. Others have used the terms rather en passant without fur-
ther theoretical elaboration (for instance, Winkler 2001; Benthin 2004;
Laubenthal 2006; Linards 2009). Yet there have also been theoretical
advances – whether in the strategic corset or not. Goldberg (2001),
for example, subscribing to the Durkheimian tradition of culture-as-
structure as opposed to the cognitive concept of culture, explains the
perceived legitimacy to protest through deeply rooted cultural systems,
like basic binary codes. Ferree et al. (2002), in their seminal study on
discourses about abortion, and Ullrich (2008), in his book on left-wing
discourses on Israel/Palestine (both comparative research designs), have
not defined general layers or dimensions of the DOS (see Baumgarten
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 131

and Ullrich 2012:4 ff. instead), but make their interpretations plausi-
ble by referring to several specific cultural schemes, which they grasp
from historical analyses as well as from different types of political cul-
ture approaches. The possibility of leaving behind the strategic corset
is quite obvious when movement framing efforts are seen as a key to
the culture of a country in the study on abortion (Gerhards and Rucht
2000:181). Completing this cultural turn means considering discursive
contexts as relevant for the formation of world views and positions of
engagements well before strategic action starts. Discursive contexts in
this sense are the structures that enable and restrict the circuits of cul-
ture, of meaning making, and of social action. Research carried out by
Hajer (1995), Keller (2009), Lamont and Thévenot (2000), Ferree et al.
(2002), Ullrich (2008), and many others accounts for the continuing rel-
evance of national contexts – seen, at least in certain regards, as cultural
spheres with discursive fields of their own – distinguished by collective
memory, language, historical traditions, and so on (see e.g. Baumgarten,
this volume).

Using SKAD in movement research: Methodological

implications and challenges

The concepts introduced and the perspective taken do not make a

research project. To carve out the relevant discursive contexts for a given
movement or thematic discourse, one must start with the discursive
material. While other approaches remain quite silent on the criteria for
the selection of influential macro-phenomena (Pettenkofer 2010:71–74),
we suggest looking for it in the data. Especially helpful for this is
comparative analysis.
The approach, as we suggest it, has a very strong affinity with qual-
itative methodology, in general, and with certain aspects of Grounded
Theory in particular. One of the main tasks for the researcher is to
identify which relevant discursive contexts the analysed movement
knowledge relates to. This is hermeneutic and theoretical work in a circu-
lar process. Depending on the issues concerned, there will be knowledge
more or less readily available from existing research. This knowledge is a
source of hypotheses or questions put to the data that influence analysis
by offering foci of awareness. On the other hand, the in-depth anal-
ysis of the data will reveal different content and thus other relevant
discursive contexts. However, pure data means little to us. First, all data
need questions – and the same text may give different answers to dif-
ferent questions. Second, every interpretation and analysis of data are
132 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

influenced by pre-existing knowledge of the person doing the interpret-

ing. This means that any aspects that are unknown to the researcher
may stay hidden, and pieces of meaning that do not resonate with
the researcher may get lost despite thorough hermeneutic work. This is
where comparison comes into play. The constant comparison of cases –
similar ones and highly different ones – allows us to see the invisible,
since its non-existence is visible in the contrasting case.
Let us explain this using the example of left-wing Middle East
discourse in Germany and Britain. It was surely not surprising that
Germany’s past was the number one reference point (Hafez 2002:162
ff.), and thus the politics of remembrance, the prime discursive con-
text, for German perceptions of the Middle East. This insight could
be taken with some elaborations on aspects, dimensions, positions,
and causes from existing literature, but manifested itself richly in the
textual production of the movements and their members, yet in a spe-
cific way (which had similarities with and differences from the general
German discourse). So the theoretically already available knowledge
offered hypotheses that were confirmed by the data. Analysis of the
data revealed a particularity of the left-wing variant of this discourse,
in that people relate not only to the Middle East conflict itself and
Germany’s past but also to historical struggles and debates involving
left-wing political and workers’ movements, or specific left-wing ideo-
logical schemata of interpretation and many other factors. The interplay
of these contexts was at the centre of the interpretative work. It was
somewhat more surprising to discover that the historical British involve-
ment in the conflict (e.g. as the colonial power holding the League
of Nations mandate for Palestine before the foundation of Israel) and
other explicit historical references do not play an important role in the
British left-wing discourse on the conflict. Another aspect the compar-
ison revealed is that in the British interviews (the study was based on
interviews) Israel appears only as the oppressing nation, a military player,
and regional power. In the case of Germany, on the other hand, even
those who were very critical of or even hostile towards Israeli policy
spent more time and elaboration on other aspects of Israel (e.g. they
contemplated the rights and fears of the Israeli population) and stressed
the important role of anti-Semitism in the conflict or in Germany, which
is a relevant frame only in the German context. The incompatibility
of certain frames in the German discourse (the anti-Semitism frame
and the occupation frame sometimes suggest different identifications
from a left-wing point of view) and their constant clashes eventu-
ally also led to the start of learning processes towards more complex
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 133

positions than 100% identification with one of the conflict parties and
thus also to new narratives with changed phenomenal structures, for
example to combinations of the Palestinian and the Zionist master
narratives.
The basic research design was the comparison of two sets of discursive
contexts – the movement-specific or political camp context and the
national context. The former was kept constant (both cases are left
wingers), while the latter was modified through cross-national case
selection and comparison. This allowed for a deep insight into the
respective national characteristics of discourse on Israel, Palestine,
(Anti-)Zionism, and anti-Semitism. Philo-Semitic and militant pro-
Israeli positions that constrain themselves to the politics of memory
frames (historic responsibility and anti-Semitism) are virtually non-
existent in Britain (neither the discursive context “the left” nor the
national discursive context pointed in that direction), while they are
prominent in Germany. The discursive context “the left” and the
national discursive context in Germany were partly contradictory,
which led to the arguments, extremely antagonistic positions, and much
metatalk. But left-wing and pro-Israeli positions could only be estab-
lished there. In the British left-wing discourse they would not make
any sense.
Although we consider the national context as relevant for many
issues, there is no rule for this. The symbolic production of movements
has to be analysed in a comparative perspective. Depending on the inter-
est of research and the actual character of the movements analysed, the
dimensions of comparison can be different. It seems especially fruitful to
compare diachronically9 or across movement sectors. There is no gen-
eral rule governing which discursive context is relevant, but one may
speculate about hierarchies. General political contexts (like nations)
will be important for more issues, especially those that are articulated
and debated nationwide. In many countries with national media, for a
national public this is of the highest importance. Other issues may relate
more to transnational or local publics. Yet they, too, will be structured
historically, or based on place and time.

Conclusion

The SKAD offers social movement and protest research as a powerful tool
for the analysis of movement knowledge. Movement knowledge is anal-
ysed in its concrete socio-historical circumstances, which we construe as
the discursive context. SKAD offers a conceptual framework for combining
134 Comparing Discourse between Cultures

the interactional processes of reiterating and shaping knowledge on the

micro-level with the level of emergent social structures of knowledge.
In this chapter we concentrated our efforts on highlighting the signifi-
cance of the latter for giving movements time-spatial specificity.
So, what is the benefit of using SKAD in comparative social movement
research? First, considering movement activities as part of discursive
struggles in social arenas leads us to the discursive structuration of
such processes. This means that there are established (and changing)
ways of saying and interacting, role positions and resources for speak-
ers, taboos, stocks of knowledge, symbols, values, norms at hand (or
not), accepted expertise, scientific, and other knowledge production –
all of this enters into the movements’ discursive accounts of how the
world really is, and how it should be. To approach movements via dis-
course means to analyse them as being embedded in whole discursive
fields, where their action resonates with that of other collective actors
and vice versa – we can account for what they do and say only if we
try to get the whole picture. Second, it allows for comparative studies
of movements simply because the toolbox of discourse research is able
to account for the different discursive contexts which shape movement
activities and are shaped by them in an empirically sound way. There
is no need to refer to mysterious national mentalities or cultural prefer-
ences as ideational forces. As Keller shows in his comparative research,
a discourse-orientated perspective can clarify how such cultural differ-
ences are to be understood as permanent and performative productions,
processed in and through discourses as well as through the instutional-
izations which already exist, and how they are transformed or brought
into being by discursive engagements of social actors. The interplay of
the relevant discursive contexts (e.g. the national and the issue-specific
ones, see Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013) is decisive for giving movements
their shape.
Is it necessary to say that this is all about power/knowledge?
Discursive structuration is both enabling and limiting discursive activ-
ities. The power to speak and make discursive statements as well as
the power to find resonance, create, stabilize, transform, or abandon all
kinds of worldly effects – this all is not just the result of some determin-
ing force (like well-established and known capitalist or class interests)10
which could be identified by theorization ad hoc, but which has to
be analysed in its empirical appearance – it might differ rather widely
according to the issues and time periods considered. As for other social
sciences research, SKAD’s approach to social movements has to reflect on
and account for its objects’ boundaries for the relevant elements, dimen-
sions, discursive fields, and data to be included. This is a question of
 Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 135

convincing arguments as well as of (wo)manpower, time, and financial

resources.

Notes
1. We are indebted to the participants of the “Protest | Culture” workshops
and Sebastian Scheele for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the
chapter.
2. See, for example, Keller (2009, 2013), Lamont and Thévenot (2000), and Eder
(2000).
3. We borrow this term from Marion Hamm to gather what we perceive as
dominant trends in theorizing movements.
4. The term “knowledge”, according to this sociological tradition, refers not
only to factual assets of history, mathematics, hard sciences, and so on but
to all kinds of competences for interpretation and action. Indeed, it even
considers religion, ideologies, and institutions as knowledge. Every society
or culture establishes its own realities, its stocks of knowledge. The given
reality is a socio-historical a priori, mediated by such stocks of knowledge.
5. Interestingly, a search in relevant journals and handbooks revealed that
Foucauldian thinking has had almost no impact on current social movement
theory, even in works dealing with discourse. For some of the exceptions,
see Sandberg (2006); Ullrich (2008, 2010, 2012); Baumgarten (2010); Death
(2010); Heßdörfer, Pabst, and Ullrich (2010); and Baumgarten and Ullrich
(2012).
6. This seems to be connected with a strong influence of psychology and social
cognition (Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Eyerman and Jamison 1991; Jasper
2007 and his contribution in this volume), which gives the concept of
culture a cognitive (and hence individualistic) bias (Goldberg 2001:190 f.).
7. For a condensed presentation of SKAD, see Keller (2011); theoretical founda-
tions and the whole case for SKAD are elaborated in Keller ([2005] 2010) and
will be available in English soon (Keller forthcoming). The methodological
toolbox of SKAD is elaborated in Keller (2013). Keller and Truschkat (2012)
present a whole range of SKAD studies.
8. This view is also fundamentally supported by Foucault-inspired government
ality approaches to social movements (see contributions in Heßdörfer et al.
2010; Death 2010; Baumgarten and Ullrich 2012).
9. Jasper (1997:152 ff., 322 f.) gives us a striking temporal example. He argues
that it was unimaginable to campaign for animal rights as long as animals
were ubiquitous as working livestock. Animal rights campaigns reflect a sit-
uation in which we usually only ever come into contact with animals as
pets.
10. An old idea of symbolic interactionist Edward Hughes says that interests
should rather be considered as the outcomes of situations and negotiations
between actors than as pre-established forces.

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7
Culture and Movement Strength
from a Quantitative Perspective:
A Partial Theory
Jochen Roose

Introduction

At times, in social sciences we find an established combination of a

research object, a theoretical approach, a methodological approach,
and applied methods. In some cases these combinations are logi-
cally founded in obvious or particularly interesting research questions
or practical restrictions. On other occasions these combinations are
less well justified but rather mirror a path dependency in discourse.
Of course, there are good reasons for choosing one approach over others.
Nevertheless, other approaches might add valuable insights.
For research on culture in general and – more specifically – on cul-
ture and social movements, this observation applies to a considerable
extent. Not only did the cultural turn imply a research focus on culture,
discourses, and practices, but it also led to a dominant use of qualitative
or ethnographic approaches (Berezin 1997). The complex phenomenon
of culture seems to call for a research method which is able to cover
this complexity in detail and broadly. The consequences of this are,
however, far-reaching. Qualitative approaches not only collect data in
a specific way but also usually follow a specific methodological orienta-
tion, that is a deep description, or an abductive approach with a closely
interwoven combination of inductive hypothesis generation and deduc-
tive validation (Strauss 1990). The cognitive interest and the status of
theory usually differ fundamentally between quantitative and qualita-
tive approaches (Chalmers 1990). Therefore, applying only qualitative
research methods to research questions on culture and social move-
ments has more implications than just a way of collecting data (cf. e.g.

140
 Jochen Roose 141

Creswell 1998). With this narrowing to one method of data collection

and one methodological approach, a price is paid; I want to question
whether this price really does have to be paid. Is a quantitative method
in combination with a deductive methodological approach necessarily
inadequate for questions on culture in relation to social movements?
It is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss all the
implications of qualitative versus quantitative methods and inductive
versus deductive methodology in relation to all possible questions in
social movement research. My focus will therefore be on the strength
of social movements. By movement strength I refer to the ability of a
movement to attract resources and active support in actual activity. The
resources of a social movement, but also the intensity of protest activity
as one of the core activities of social movements, are indicators of move-
ment strength. Movement activities can also be internal (e.g. meetings
to discuss further strategies or practice a movement-specific lifestyle),
or active participation could be understood as the support for action
by specialists, such as financing lobbying activities. Movement strength
is used as a general denominator to summarize various aspects which
contribute to a visible, active, and resourceful movement. This focus is
in line with the traditional core question of social movement research,
that is explaining the existence of strong movement mobilization.
As the method of data collection, that is quantitative versus qual-
itative, is closely interwoven with the methodological approach (i.e.
mainly inductive versus mainly deductive starting points of research),
I want to focus in this chapter on the position that is the most different
to the current mainstream among cultural approaches to social move-
ment research. Instead of the dominant approach, whereby qualitative
methods apply a dominantly inductive methodology, here I discuss the
possibility of quantitative data collection applying a dominantly deduc-
tive methodology.1 In contrasting these most different approaches, a
number of advantages and problems come to the fore.
In the following, I intend to suggest an explanation of social move-
ment strength through culture. This is only a partial theory since other
factors are of course also important, and possibly even much more
influential. However, structural influences have received considerable
attention through quantitative social movement research in the past,
whereas cultural aspects have been introduced only half-heartedly (see
section “Defining Culture”). Therefore, culture deserves more attention,
while for other factors I would like to redirect the reader to the existing
literature (see, e.g., della Porta and Diani 1999; Snow et al. 2007).2 To
be clear from the outset, my point is not to suggest a superiority of the
142 Culture and Movement Strength

quantitative, theory-driven approach. Rather it is a different yet equally

possible approach leading to valuable results.
In the next section I will trace how cultural aspects have been
included in quantitative studies of social movements (section “Rudi-
ments of Culture in Quantitative Approaches to Social Movements”).
As it turns out, culture remained marginal in much of this literature.
To show that this neglect is neither necessary nor useful, I discuss the
prerequisites and potentials of a quantitative analysis of culture’s impact
on movement emergence. First, I specify my object of interest, that is
social movement strength, and I look at definitions of culture to carve
out a precise understanding which is conducive to quantitative analy-
sis (section “Defining Culture”). Then I specify theoretical assumptions
about culture’s influence on movement emergence (section “Theoreti-
cal Specification of Culture as an Influence”), and finally I suggest some
ways and resources for measurement (section “Possible Measurements”).
As this is a conceptual rather than empirical chapter, this last section can
only point to possibilities and illustrate potentials that might be utilized
on other occasions.

Rudiments of culture in quantitative approaches

to social movements

Quantitative research is well established in social movement

research. The aim of this research has either been to describe the
prevalence of social movements and their internal structure, to ground
general diagnoses in empirical research, or to test hypotheses by com-
paring cases in a quasi-experimental design. Cultural aspects, however,
remain marginal or are included only implicitly.
Research on social movement organizations, as inspired by
the resource mobilization approach, has widely used standardized
approaches (e.g. Rucht et al. 1997; Rootes 2007). The analyses not only
present what is basically an assessment of the movement’s strength and
vitality but also refer to assumptions of institutionalization (Rucht 1999;
Clemens and Minkoff 2007). Although probably all of these authors
would readily admit that organizational structures carry a strong cultural
imprint, no explicit discussion of cultural influences can be found.
Protest event analysis and claim analysis have introduced a quantita-
tive approach in the study of social movements in action (Rucht et al.
1998). It described the landscape of protest, documenting the contin-
uous prevalence of protest and strength of movements (Rucht 2001;
Rootes 2003) or the emergence of specific kinds of protest (Imig and
 Jochen Roose 143

Tarrow 2001; della Porta 2008). Again the cultural imprint is marginal
and implicit, while explanations for cross-national differences refer pri-
marily to political institutional structures. Kriesi et al. (1995) are an
exception to some extent. They elaborate a set of hypotheses about the
magnitude and degree of radicalism of protest in different countries,
relying on a modified political opportunity structure approach. This
includes aspects referring to culture such as prevalent strategies, cleavage
structures, and alliance structures. However, the labels already indicate
that structures are the dominant reference point.
Content analysis of newspapers has also been used to analyse debates
and the role of social movements (Koopmans and Statham 1999).
The political opportunity structure approach was extended to include
discursive opportunities (McAdam 1994; Koopmans and Statham 2000).
This argument bridges political opportunity structure and the framing
approach (Snow 2007). Ferree et al. (2002) analysed the public discourse
on abortion in Germany and the United States, while Koopmans et al.
(2005) analysed the debate on citizenship and respective mobilizations.
These studies come closest to ascribing culture a systematic role. Empir-
ically, cultural aspects are primarily introduced as broad assessments of
the background. Ideas of this research will be taken up later (see section
“Theoretical Specification of Culture as an Influence”).
Recently, surveys among protesters have been conducted while they
protest, in order to take a closer look at the people who actually
form the movement (Aelst and Walgrave 2001; Rucht and Yang 2004;
Walgrave and Rucht 2010; Baumgarten and Rucht 2013). Again, cultural
aspects remain a subdimension that has yet to be systematically fol-
lowed up. Walgrave and Rucht (2010) refer in their comparative study to
the prevalent attitudes in the wider population, though their dependent
variable is the social composition of protesters rather than the activ-
ity of the social movement. In the project by Klandermans et al. on
protesters in eight countries (see www.protestsurvey.eu), protest culture
is regarded as part of the mobilizing context, although since the project
is currently in its field phase it is difficult to say how the influence of
“protest cultures” will be tested.
Beyond social movement research, political participation is a major
issue in political sociology. Time and again, general surveys have
included forms of participation, including various forms of protest.
Pioneered by Barnes and Kaase (1979), political participation beyond
the formally institutionalized paths is a well-established research area
(Kaase 2007; Rucht 2007). The approach to culture is quite different,
because culture is not regarded as an explanatory factor but the political
144 Culture and Movement Strength

attitudes measured are considered to be culture as such (Fuchs 2007).

Also, descriptive approaches prevail here as the research refers to a
normative reference point, that is stability of democracies.
Looking at the consideration of cultural influences, three particulari-
ties are striking: First, the prominence of culture as found in qualitative
studies is by no means paralleled in quantitative approaches. Culture
is partly mentioned as important and aspects of culture are consid-
ered in part, but this is hardly at the core of studies. Second, culture
or cultural aspects are seldom measured systematically. Though the
studies considered are quantitative studies and therefore rely on system-
atic standardized measurement, this only rarely applies to the cultural
aspects. These are rather introduced by a global assessment referring to
plausibility or a few unsystematic indicators. Third, culture or aspects
of culture are not systematically integrated into a statistical analysis.
Obviously, all three aspects imply each other. The inclusion of cultural
aspects in quantitative analysis presupposes systematic quantitative
measurement, and if quantitative measures had been at hand, cultural
aspects would probably have gained more prominence in quantitative
approaches. However, the problem is much more fundamental than
being simply an issue of measurement. As culture is a highly disputed
concept, the question is what should be measured. The theoretical prepa-
ration – the systematic explication of theories and hypotheses including
cultural aspects – is also lagging behind. There is no adequate starting
point for a deductive approach.
There are good reasons why this is about to change. First, obviously
the qualitative studies offer valuable insights which can be fed into
quantitative studies. Second, some attempts at systematically dealing
with (parts of) culture have been made and could be integrated into
social movement research, adding value. And finally, with the spread of
multilevel analysis as a statistical procedure (Snijders and Bosker 1999),
a method is available to include macro-characteristics in quantitative
comparative designs. This is happening currently, albeit often only with
ad hoc considerations. And culture is only rarely among those influences
considered ad hoc.
As we have very good reason to assume that culture has a funda-
mental imprint on the strength of social movements, it is time to
integrate culture systematically into quantitative approaches. For this
aim, three problems have to be tackled: First, culture has to be defined
in a way which allows and supports quantitative assessment. Second, the
impact of culture has to be specified theoretically. Third, the problem of
measurement has to be dealt with.
 Jochen Roose 145

Defining culture

Not only is culture as such a complex phenomenon, but it has also

led to a complex discussion in social sciences. Competing arguments
have been summarized elsewhere (Swidler 1986, 1995). But what are
adequate criteria for choosing a definition of culture for a deductive
approach using quantitative measurement? Three criteria are crucial: a
clear definition, specificity, and a chance to measure the concept.
A deductive approach needs a clear definition, as does quantitative
measurement. The deductive approach is based on theory and requires
clear guidelines on how to test it. Furthermore, standardized data col-
lection needs clearly fixed concepts right from the start. Thus, clarity of
the definition is the first criterion.
The second criterion is specificity. Contrary to what is often suggested
in qualitative approaches, an encompassing concept of culture would be
fatal for quantitative research. To be able to identify factors that make an
outcome more likely, it is crucial to identify specific and detailed poten-
tial influences, which can be isolated against other potential influences.
For example, the fact that something is shaped by the “social circum-
stances” is not very informative, since social circumstances can be more
or less everything. In order to make general yet informative statements,
the phenomenon that is proposed as a potential influence has to be
specified precisely.
The third criterion is the chance to measure the concept in a standard-
ized way. The chance to measure a potentially relevant phenomenon
has become known as the demarcation criterion (Popper 1969:17).
As Popper was interested in methodological questions, he referred to
a principal opportunity to measure, although a practical opportunity
is also relevant. Accordingly, experience with methods of measurement
could document this practical opportunity.
A definition for culture has to meet these three criteria of clarity, speci-
ficity, and the chance to measure the concept. Marion Hamm gave a
thorough review of suggestions on how to conceptualize culture in an
unpublished paper, on which I build here (see also Hamm 2014). With
reference to Swidler (1986, 1995), she distinguishes four understandings:
(a) culture as values and beliefs, (b) culture as a toolkit, (c) culture as a
cognitive process, and (d) culture as a web of meaning.
The latter two do not form conceptual options for my purposes. Cul-
ture as a cognitive process argues that cultural change as a change in
the perception of the world should be the core of social movement
research. This, however, is a change in the research object rather than
146 Culture and Movement Strength

a different understanding of culture. Modifications of the understand-

ing of culture, proposed by this approach, refer to a broader definition
of what is subsumed under this term. Beyond the Weberian values and
beliefs, culture is said to also encompass artefacts (Johnston 2009) as
well as emotions (Jasper, this volume). I will take this up later.
The concept of culture as a web of meaning explicitly rejects a causal
approach. Salman and Assies (2007:209 f.) argue that culture should
not be introduced as a cause for something. Instead, an interpretative
approach is proposed, which aims at a description but refrains from
causal analysis. This proposition refers to a fundamental methodologi-
cal debate about causal inferences and interpretative and reconstructive
paradigms (Chalmers 1990). Though a whole range of methodological
questions are involved, at least a possible approach to this paradigmatic
dualism is to consider them as compatible and mutually complementary
(see e.g. Creswell and Clark 2007; Kelle 2008; Small 2011). Therefore,
I want to argue that both approaches have their validity in general and
with respect to culture. I deliberately leave aside the arguments of cul-
ture as a web of meaning without causal status and proceed here to
outline a concept of culture in a tradition of causal analysis.
The concept of culture as values and beliefs bases the macro-
phenomenon of culture on prevalent individual values and beliefs.
Similar to the political culture approach (Almond and Verba 1963:14),
culture is defined as the pattern of values and beliefs which dominate
in a collectivity. The concept is based on values and thereby refers to
a long tradition of research. Parsons (1961, 1965) championed values
as the cultural core of societies guaranteeing social integration. This
concept was widely criticized (Wrong 1961; Sciulli and Gerstein 1985;
Swidler 1986). In the following decades, research on values was left aside
on the basis that values are regarded as a “dormant concept” (Hitlin
and Piliavin 2004). Values are classically defined as “conceptions of
the desirable which are ( . . . ) relevant to the formulation of attitudes”
(Deth and Scarbrough 1995:46). Systematic research on what people
regard as true is much less established. Beliefs as to the nature of sub-
jects and causal relations can only be identified with respect to specific
issues. The literature on framing, also going beyond social movement
research, has referred to this question on a general level (Entman 1993;
Scheufele 1999).
This classical concept of culture as values and beliefs has the advan-
tage of being closely related to empirical quantitative research. Prevalent
values and beliefs in a social collective can be measured in survey
research and then aggregated to macro-patterns of prevalent values and
 Jochen Roose 147

beliefs, that is culture. In the course of value research, experiences have

accumulated, which are helpful with respect to the criteria of speci-
ficity and the chance to measure the concept. Research on value surveys
are established and it is possible to build on available data (see also
section “Possible Measurements”). However, two questions remain, that
is whether this specification can still be regarded as adequate and how
the individually measured perspectives have to be aggregated to the
macro-phenomenon of culture. The crucial question is how to define
and operationalize prevalence.
The first question takes us back to arguments made by the concept
of culture as a cognitive process. This approach pointed to the lim-
ited understanding of culture as only beliefs and values, arguing that
artefacts and emotions should also be included. For artefacts, this sug-
gestion is not convincing, as they are only cultural in respect to the
meaning which is ascribed to them. Therefore, I would insist on relat-
ing culture to the meaning side, which is part of the prevalent beliefs
and values that might be symbolized by or attached to objects. Things
look quite different as regards emotions. Emotions are an important
extension of the Weberian concept of culture as values and beliefs.
While the rationalistic approach concentrated on unemotional cogni-
tions, this is a specific reduction of what beliefs are. Jasper (2011, this
volume) argues convincingly that cognitive, evaluative, and emotional
aspects are closely interwoven. Understanding culture as prevalent val-
ues and beliefs should therefore be extended by also including prevalent
emotions.
The second question refers to the relationship between individual
beliefs, values, and emotions on the one hand and culture as a macro-
phenomenon on the other. To specify culture with respect to prevalent
values, beliefs, and emotions one requires a rule of aggregation or a def-
inition of how individual beliefs, values, and attitudes form culture on
the macro-level. Three general possibilities of aggregation can be found.
(1) One obvious way of aggregation would be a majority principle. A cul-
ture would then be adequately described by those values, attitudes, and
beliefs in combination with prevalent emotional reactions which are
most frequently held in a social entity (Schwartz 1999:25 f.; Inglehart
and Welzel 2005). (2) Another suggestion for the aggregation problem
was made in the classical study by Almond and Verba (1963) on “civic
culture”. They defined (political) culture as “the particular distribution
of patterns of orientation toward political objects among the members
of the nation” (Almond and Verba 1963:14). Similarly, culture could
be defined as the distribution of patterns of orientation towards a set
148 Culture and Movement Strength

of relevant objects beyond politics. In this definition, it is not just the

most often held beliefs or values but also their particular distribution
pattern in a social entity which forms culture as a macro-phenomenon.
(3) An alternative interpretation would refer to dominance or hege-
mony. The assumption would be that not all people are identically
influential in a social entity. It may be that a minority dominates what
is commonly regarded as true, normal, and good. Elites and mass media
will play a crucial role in the respective definition processes (Baumgarten
2010:45 ff.; Baumgarten and Ullrich 2014).
Instead of choosing one of these options and rejecting the others, I
regard a combination of the perspectives as most appropriate. Basically
I want to suggest the majority principle as the core way of aggregation.
Other things being equal, those ideas and concepts which are held most
often in a social entity should be most influential in defining what peo-
ple regard as “normal”, “self-evident”, expectable, and so on. However,
other things are not equal. The argument that some are more influen-
tial than others is more than convincing. Theorizing should reflect this
idea by specifying relevant subgroups within a social entity. Hypothe-
ses can and should make clear which subgroups of society are relevant
for imprinting culture with their respective values, ideas, or emotions.
Culture is not simply defined by ideas, emotions, and values found
among the majority of all; it is the pattern of all these as distributed
among relevant subgroups, elites, social milieus, and so on. Accord-
ingly, I suggest an understanding of culture as the pattern of prevalent
values, beliefs, and emotions by subgroups of a society. The task for the the-
orist/theorizer/theoretician is to specify which pattern of values, beliefs,
and emotions held by a majority in which subgroup of society has an
influence on the expectable strength of a social movement.
One concept of culture has not yet been discussed, that is culture as a
toolkit. Culture as a toolkit regards it as intimately connected to action.
Culture is “a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals and world-views, which
people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of
problems” (Swidler 1986:273). This includes not only explicit beliefs
and normative ideas but also implicit knowledge and assumptions that
are taken for granted. Swidler calls it “a continuum from ideology to
tradition to Common Sense” (Swidler 1986:279, original emphasis). The
ideology pole of the continuum is close to values though they are
assigned a different theoretical role. The latter part relates to the prac-
tice concept in sociology (Giddens 1986; Bourdieu 1992; Schatzki et al.
2006). Practices are ways of doing something which is established and
based on knowledge that is taken for granted. The choice of practices
 Jochen Roose 149

and the rejection of others can also be regarded as based on implicit

beliefs in facts and normative ideas on appropriateness (values) as well
as assumptions about adequate emotional reactions. Therefore, though
the concept of practices distances itself from rationalistic accounts, it is
fair to say that practices are grounded in beliefs, values, and emotions
which are part of a practical consciousness (Giddens 1986).
The two approaches – culture as beliefs and values, and culture as a
toolkit – refer to different theoretical backgrounds. Culture as beliefs and
values regards culture as the motivational cause of action and therefore
easily absorbs emotions. Culture as a toolkit regards culture as the set
of options for doing things. However, these options are also related to
normative restrictions and self-evident assumptions. The voluntaristic
aspect gains more emphasis and implicit, practical knowledge finds its
place in the theory. However, the argument follows again the basic logic
that concepts of rightness and justice, ideas of emotional appropriate-
ness, and “obvious” facts result in motivational guidance and normative
restrictions.3 Accordingly, I think it is appropriate to base an under-
standing of culture for a quantitative conceptualization on the common
aspects of both concepts, that is culture as a toolkit and culture as beliefs
and values. My suggested understanding of culture as the pattern of
prevalent values, beliefs, and emotions in (subgroups of) a society is
based on these understandings. Also, it is a definition of culture that
has an appropriate clarity, specificity, and chance of measurement to
comply with the criteria introduced above.
Theoretical reasoning could and should specify how beliefs, values,
and emotions which prevail in a specified part of society influence the
strength of social movements. It is important to note that this con-
cept of culture does not simply refer to values, beliefs, and emotions
people as individuals have. Rather it refers to the beliefs, values, and
emotions that prevail – those one might regard as “normal” in a soci-
ety and expect to be shared by others because they are so widespread.
This prevalence of specific beliefs, values, and emotions will have an
effect on people’s actions, regardless of whether they themselves share
them. Instead, these prevalent and dominant beliefs, values, and emo-
tions form a relevant background for individual action and are as such
influential for social movement strength.

Theoretical specification of culture as an influence

Culture is only one factor explaining the strength of social movements.

Other aspects have been dealt with in social movement theorizing from
150 Culture and Movement Strength

a deductive, quantitative perspective; therefore, this focus is a helpful

limitation. Discussing only one dimension for a causal explanation is in
line with the idea of quantitative analysis, which assumes a broad range
of factors influencing a dependent variable. Each explanatory factor is
assumed to contribute to some extent to the explanation having a strong
or weak influence. Thinking about culture adds one more factor to a
broader explanation.
A theory on how beliefs, values, attitudes, or emotions work is by and
large missing. It seems to be too obvious that values and attitudes moti-
vate action (or the refusal thereof), beliefs guide the choice of action
measures, and practices are carried out when they are regarded as appro-
priate. This goes without saying – and has been shown to be wrong or,
at least, much more complicated (e.g. Eagly and Chaiken 1993:155 ff.).
The relationship between culture and social movements is quite dif-
ferent. Culture is a macro-phenomenon. Theoretical reasoning on the
influence of culture and the strength of social movements has to refer
to the influence of prevalent, dominant cultural elements. These domi-
nant perceptions should add further insights beyond the knowledge of
values, beliefs, and emotions by crucial actors themselves.
For specifying theoretically which shape of culture is likely to enhance
movement strength, we have to know which issues (a) in which con-
stellation of prevalent or marginal beliefs, values, and emotions (b) held
by which subgroup of a society (c) will increase movement strength.
The first aspect (a) concerns the question of which objects of values,
beliefs, and emotions are relevant for our hypotheses. A crucial distinc-
tion is the difference between movement issues and social movements
as a form of political participation. The movement issue encompasses
the belief in factual arguments, the valuation of concerned claims, and
the emotional reactions proposed as appropriate by the movement. The
view on the form of participation encompasses beliefs about the factual
effectiveness and normative appropriateness, as well as emotional posi-
tion towards types of political participation.4 The second point (b) refers
to the question of how widespread support for beliefs, values, and emo-
tions relevant for the social movement should be to enhance movement
strength. The last aspect (c) looks at the specification of societal sub-
groups and their respective pattern of dominant beliefs, values, and
emotions. Three groups will be of primary importance: the general pub-
lic; a social entity in which active participants of the movements can
be found; and elites, usually in the political system. While the impor-
tance of the general public as the addressee of claims is straightforward,
the social entity in which active participants can be recruited needs
 Jochen Roose 151

some explication. It has been argued that social movements recruit not
individuals but groups and networks. This has been described as bloc
recruitment (Oberschall 1973:125) or mobilization from CATNETs, from
a category of people defined by society or the people themselves who
are connected in social networks (Tilly 1978:68). It is these pre-existing
networks which often form the breeding ground for social movements.
Elites, particularly political elites, are of crucial importance as part of the
political opportunity structure (see e.g. Tarrow 1998). The importance
of elites that are split when it comes to the movement issue has been
highlighted time and again (Kriesi 2007:74 f.). As this aspect is already
covered in the literature, I will not follow it up here.
Until now, social movement theory has primarily dealt with the per-
spectives on the issues of social movements held in the wider public.
The framing approach discusses how problems have to be interpreted
by social movements to achieve mobilization. The crucial concept is
“resonance”. According to Gamson (1992:135), “resonances increase the
appeal of a frame by making it appear natural and familiar”. For him, res-
onance is dependent on how a frame is related to general themes which
are anchored in a culture. These general themes are “safe, conventional,
and normative” (Gamson 1992:135). It helps to make sense of some-
thing one does not really know and is unable to assess adequately. While
Gamson refers to very general cultural topics, Koopmans and Statham
(2000) introduce the concept of discursive opportunities, which points
at short-time developments in the political discourse. “Political dis-
course dynamics for a contested issue-field may be seen as constituting
a set of discursive opportunities that determines which of the strategic
political demands that are made by movements are more likely to suc-
ceed in the public sphere” (Koopmans and Statham 2000:37). According
to the authors, three aspects are crucial for success in the public sphere:
(1) visibility, that is appearing in the public sphere; (2) resonance, that
is provoking reactions from others and carrying the contention to a
wider public; and (3) legitimacy, that is the challenging actors have to
legitimate themselves and their claims to a wider public (ibid.).
Taking visibility, resonance, and legitimacy we can derive more pre-
cise assumptions about the relationship between culture, movement
claim, and strength of a social movement.5 The need for legitimacy
could lead to the assumption that widespread acceptance of statements
made by the movement (belief) and high valuation of the related nor-
mative claims would enhance mobilization and, therefore, movement
strength. However, this assumption conflicts with the former two con-
ditions: visibility and resonance. Trying to get a message across if it is
152 Culture and Movement Strength

already taken for granted is not only pointless; it will also be ignored.
Only ideas and arguments that are not already widely shared and
regarded as consensual have a chance of garnering attention. On the
other hand, arguments and ideas which are regarded as totally absurd
will also be ignored. We will have to look at a middle range of the not-
too-consensual and the not-too-absurd – always in relation to what is
accepted, taken for granted, and valued in a given social entity – to
find those claims which increase mobilization chances. In general, a
inverted U-shaped relationship can be expected between the prevalence
of values and beliefs relevant for mobilization and the likeliness of mobi-
lization. If they are very widely shared in a society, mobilization should
be unlikely, and if they are barely shared at all, mobilization should be
unlikely as well. It is in the middle range where a claim would be more
likely.6

Hypothesis 1: The relationship between support for movement issues and

strength of a social movement is inverted U-shaped: If movement issues
are highly accepted or not at all accepted in the public, mobilization is
unlikely, while mobilization is more likely when the issues find a medium
level of acceptance.

Looking at the CATNET, the categorized people in a network, things

look slightly different. If the ideas and arguments are widely shared
within the CATNET and emotional reactions are shared, this would
enhance mobilization within the respective networks and thus move-
ment strength. Conversely, controversy about the issue within the
CATNET would decrease the probability of mobilization and thus also
movement strength. While a considerable share of indifferent attitudes
would not necessarily be an obstacle, outright rejection and polar-
ized attitudes would imply network-internal conflicts that decrease the
likeliness of mobilization. In respect to the culture in the CATNET,
hypotheses 2 and 3 will apply:

Hypothesis 2: The more widespread support for the movement issue is

found in the CATNET, the stronger a movement will be.
Hypothesis 3: The more polarized attitudes towards the movement issue
are in the CATNET, the weaker a movement will be.

In respect to the practices of a movement, using protest and public

action to make a claim, a culture conducive to the emergence of a social
movement would again imply different things for the wider public and
 Jochen Roose 153

the CATNET. Movement participation needs to be part of the cultural

toolkit of those to be mobilized. Therefore, experience with or at least
preparedness for movement practices, like becoming part of a social
movement organization, participating in protest, or otherwise support-
ing movement activity, should prevail in the CATNET. The availability
of movement practices and also a specific and at least partly consensual
set of movement practices should coincide with the beliefs, values, and
emotions concerning the movement issues.

Hypothesis 4: The more widespread experiences with potential movement

practices (such as becoming part of a social movement organization,
participating in protest, or otherwise supporting movement activity) are
and/or the higher the share of people who could imagine acting in this
way, the stronger a movement will be.

Among the wider public, two variants can be conducive to social move-
ment strength. Firstly, if the movement practices to be expected by the
movement due to widespread practices in the respective CATNET are
regarded as legitimate in the wider public, this might enhance the legiti-
macy of the movement and, therefore, its acceptance. This might further
strengthen the influx of support for the movement. Secondly, if those
movement practices that are accepted and shared in the CATNET are
rejected by a considerable minority of the wider public, then this will
fuel the conflict and, therefore, increase visibility. The effect will be even
stronger if the minority rejecting the movement practices is influential
or holds elite positions.

Hypothesis 5: The more widespread the acceptance of those movement

practices which are likely (according to hypothesis 4), the stronger a
movement will be.
Hypothesis 6: The larger and the more influential the minority (without
becoming a majority) which rejects the movement practices, the stronger
a movement will be.

With these six hypotheses I do not claim to present a comprehen-

sive theory on culture’s effects on social movement strength. My point
is rather to present some core ideas on this relationship and thereby
illustrate what a theory on culture’s influence on social movement
strength will look like. Further specifications will of course likely emerge
as soon as empirical research commences, but the general direction
154 Culture and Movement Strength

of theoretical reasoning for culture’s influence on social movement

strength should have become evident.

Possible measurements

Theoretical preparation is only helpful if it can be transposed into

empirical research. Obviously, the general hypotheses stated above need
further specification for the respective (potential) movement at hand,
as it has to be argued which values relate to the relevant claims of the
(potential) movement and which activity repertoire would be relevant.
Accordingly, remarks on measurement can only be quite general.
Measurements for movement strength have been already mentioned
above (section “Defining Culture”), for example, protest event analysis
or membership and resources of movement organizations. More inter-
esting is the measurement of culture. Measuring culture in the version
defined above refers to values, beliefs, emotions, and practices on the
individual level. There are established research traditions which have
employed measures in cross-cultural comparison, such as the World Val-
ues Survey (WVS), the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP),
and the European Social Survey (ESS).7 Partly, these studies cover not
only values but also beliefs about facts and causal links. Furthermore,
there have been a range of other studies on specific issues or in relation
to specific polities, like the Eurobarometer studies.8 In these cases beliefs
are covered more widely, but attitudes and values are often included as
well. Data from these studies are easily accessible.9 These sources cover
at least in part the required information referring to various (potential)
movement issues and to (potential) movement practices alike.
The situation for emotions is much more problematic. Only seldom
have emotions been included in standardized surveys, and their mea-
surement is less established.10 Recently, interest in emotions in social
sciences has increased (see e.g. Stets and Turner 2007; Turner and Stets
2005); this may improve their coverage in survey research, although this
remains to be seen.
Empirical research on practices is closely connected to qualitative
methods, particularly observation. Though not the most intuitively
plausible method, standardized measurements can also produce valid
data on practices. Especially on more complex action, consciousness is
clearly given and self-reporting is a possibility. For example, participa-
tion in protest forms in the past is something that is known to people
and could be self-reported. More problematic is knowing whether a prac-
tice has not been carried out but is part of the cultural toolkit. Surveys
 Jochen Roose 155

have approached this problem by asking whether one could imagine or

would be prepared to do something (e.g. in the ESS). It is likely that
results for these questions tend to be less reliable but are nevertheless
useful as alternatives are absent.
It is slightly more complex to apply an aggregation procedure that
takes dominance of specific subgroups in a social entity into account.
Obviously, this approach requires a careful definition of which group or
category of people has to be regarded as dominant. In research on social
movements and the public sphere, the mass media have been used as
a source to assess the dominant culture (e.g. Ferree et al. 2002). The
opinion published in the mass media is the result of this domination –
and, therefore, also an adequate measurement of it. Expert interviews
are also an option (Ullrich 2008). Another approach would be to identify
opinion leaders or other kinds of elites in survey research and refer to
this subgroup only in the analysis of general surveys.
These short remarks on possible measurements can only illustrate
opportunities. Only when a specific movement related to a specific issue
is focused will it be possible to specify the measurement. These illustra-
tions basically aim to show the plausibility of potentially applying such
a measurement for some, maybe many movements.

Conclusion

Culture has a crucial influence on the strength of social movements.

In the course of a cultural turn this assumption has gained consider-
able attention. However, the cultural turn is not limited to a focus on
culture as an important aspect. It also concentrates on qualitative meth-
ods, discourses, and non-causal analysis. In this chapter, I challenge this
connection in the sense that this is not compulsory. A causal analysis
employing quantitative measurement and statistical analysis can also
consider culture – indeed it should. This kind of analysis has to solve
three problems: a definition of culture which is conducive to this kind
of analysis; specification of the assumed influence of culture on move-
ment strength; and ways of measuring culture. Suggestions for all these
points have been outlined.
Defining culture as a pattern of prevalent values, beliefs, and emotions
held by individuals in a social entity is obviously not a consensual def-
inition and it is not intended to be. It is rather a variant which has
close connections to prominent positions in the debate and is com-
patible with the envisaged quantitative analysis. The six hypotheses
outlined here make assumptions about the influence of the culture
156 Culture and Movement Strength

found among the wider public and the categorized people connected
by networks (CATNET), respectively. The hypotheses do not intend to
fully cover the relationship between culture and movement strength but
rather illustrate some of the complexity involved. All abstract theoretical
reasoning remains insufficient if empirical testing is impossible or unre-
alistic. In the case of the arguments outlined here, empirical approaches,
and sometimes even useful data, are available. A quantitative analysis of
culture’s influence on movement emergence is not only theoretically
interesting but is also possible.
Social sciences are diverse in their methodological paradigms, theo-
retical approaches, and empirical methods. While there have been, and
sometimes still are, bitter fights between positions, perhaps this variety
merely mirrors the complexity of society as an object of analysis and is
therefore an asset of the discipline. Still, due to characteristics of specific
research questions and path dependency, time and again methodolo-
gies, methods, and research objects have become closely amalgamated.
Here I argued that this is the case for culture, interpretative method-
ology, and qualitative methods. Though there are good arguments for
each aspect of this combination, it is not as compulsive as it might seem.
In many cases, a crossover of research issues, methods, and methodology
provides new and valuable insights. It is this aim which guided my dis-
cussion of a quantitative approach to culture’s influence on movement
strength. Adding quantitative research to the study of culture and social
movements can further enrich our understanding of the phenomenon.
Social sciences should not refrain from seizing this opportunity.

Notes
1. In the methodological debate, the contrast between inductive and deduc-
tive methodologies is often overstated. Research practice is always and
necessarily a combination of the two.
2. This distinction refers to a classical but of course hotly debated distinction
between ideas (or culture) on the one hand, and interests and institutions
on the other (e.g. Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997). The distinction can be
traced back to Marx and Weber (see e.g. Hahn 1979; Lepsius 1986). In this
distinction, structure refers to patterns which are based in legal rules or dis-
tribution of resources while culture refers to (prevalent) ideas and cognitive
concepts. Neo-institutional approaches use a similar distinction between reg-
ulative institutions (i.e. structure) versus normative and cognitive-cultural
institutions (i.e. culture) with reference to the work of Weber (Scott 2008).
That both aspects are closely interwoven and refer to each other is obvious.
A quite different concept of culture and its relation to structure is proposed,
for example in the contribution of Ullrich and Keller (this volume).
 Jochen Roose 157

3. A similar approach is suggested by Ullrich (2008) and also Baumgarten

(2010; Baumgarten and Ullrich 2014). They look at discourses and there-
fore focus more on what can be said and how arguments are chosen and
taken up. However, referring to Foucault (1994) they also suggest a frame-
work of what is regarded as appropriate and is used or could be used in public
debate. Furthermore, Ullrich (2008) chooses the political culture approach,
political opportunity structure, and the wider discourse theory as reference
points. However, the empirical translation is qualitative and the concepts are
specified in close relation to the empirical objects.
4. Here, I do not discuss the internal life of social movements. To the extent
that a specific lifestyle, as practiced in a social movement, is part of its claim
(Melucci 1988), it is covered by the arguments referring to movement issues.
To the extent that the internal life is unrelated to the specific claim, instead
we have social settings, group processes, and so on, which can also be found
in other contexts. Therefore I do not cover this.
5. Contrary to Koopmans and Statham I do not refer to momentous oppor-
tunities due to specific situations in a discourse but rather to facilitating
characteristics of the more enduring culture.
6. This relationship resembles not by chance the inverted U-shape relationship
between openness of the political system and probability of mobilization as
proposed in the classical political opportunity structure approach (Eisinger
1973).
7. Cf. www.worldvaluessurvey.org, www.issp.org, and www.europeansocial
survey.org.
8. For the Eurobarometer, see, for example, ec.europa.eu/public_opinion.
9. See, for example, www.gesis.org.
10. For a rare occasion, see Eurobarometer 64.2.

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Part III
Internal Movement Culture
8
Movement Space: A Cultural
Approach
Priska Daphi

Introduction

The most recent wave of anti-austerity mobilizations – in particular

the Occupy and Indignados movements, as well as the Arab Spring –
once again draws attention to the interrelation of social movements
and space: With the occupation of public places these movements direct
much interest towards the way in which social movements shape and
are affected by space. The spatial properties of the town square facili-
tate continued encounters, which in turn transform such a place from
one of transition into one of political debate and contestation. This
chapter aims to contribute to the conceptualization of the term “space”
within the literature on social movements. The term has become espe-
cially prominent within this literature since the turn of the century –
however, its conceptual merit and boundaries remain blurry. In partic-
ular, a broad use of the term diminishes its explanatory value as it fails
to distinguish it from other social properties, such as opportunity struc-
tures and social networks. Avoiding this, the chapter defines space as a
part of movement culture.
From the late 1980s onwards social movement studies have been
influenced by two paradigm shifts within the social sciences: the cul-
tural turn, on the one hand, and the spatial turn, on the other. So far,
these changes in perspective have not gone together well. Under the
auspices of the cultural turn, social movement scholars stressed the role
of meaning-making in social movements and began examining how
activists make sense of their world, grievances, and actions (cf. Melucci
1996). Conversely, in the context of the spatial turn, scholars empha-
sized the significance of movements’ spatial context and focused on

165
166 Movement Space

exploring the impact of activists’ physical surroundings on movement

dynamics (cf. Tilly 2000).
These two perspectives are not necessarily contradictory. Instead, as
I will argue below, their connection is highly fruitful for analysing social
movements. More specifically, I show that space can be considered as a
part of culture without losing sight of its material base. Defining space
in terms of temporally fixed meaning-making allows it to be consid-
ered as a dual structure, overcoming two problematic tendencies within
the research on space and social movements: Frequently, space is either
equated with particular social structures or assumed to be a given phys-
ical structure. As space is both a product of social processes and an
influence on them, the two restricted uses of the term are inadequate.
In order to account for the interrelation of materiality and social pro-
cesses, this contribution develops a three-dimensional model of spatial
meaning-making.
The following will first provide a critical review of the social move-
ment literature’s use of the concept of space. A second part elaborates
the approach to space as part of culture. Based on the conceptualiza-
tion of space as a dual structure and a broad definition of culture, this
part distinguishes between three processes of spatial meaning-making:
orientation, categorization, and synthesis. These will be illustrated with
respect to the way in which activists of the Global Justice Movement
(GJM) make sense of the spatial setting of major protest events.

Space in social movement studies

Influenced by the spatial turn in the social sciences of the late 1980s
(e.g. Giddens 1984), space entered the literature on social movements
in the 1990s (e.g. Routledge 1993; Pile and Keith 1997). However, it
was not until the beginning of the new millennium that the issue
found broader attention (e.g. Miller 2000; Routledge 2000; Tilly 2000;
Sewell 2001). The growing interest is linked, on the one hand, to the
transnationalisation of protest as it calls into question social move-
ments’ spatial delimitations (Smith 2001; Koopmans and Rucht 2002;
Tilly 2003; Miller 2004; Beaumont and Nicholls 2007a). On the other
hand, the intensified attention is due to the growing interest in social
movements among geographers as well as increased cooperation across
disciplines. Geographers provided studies on protests and social move-
ments as early as in the 1970s (e.g. Sharp 1973), although it was not
until the 1990s that studies on social movements began to diversify
(cf. Miller 2000).
 Priska Daphi 167

Today, a considerable body of research both in the social and political

sciences, as well as in geography, deals with space and social move-
ments. Spatial vocabulary – place, space, territory, scale, borders, and
so on – has infused large parts of the literature. Special issues in Mobi-
lization in 2003 (e.g. Tilly 2003) and in Environment and Planning in 2007
(e.g. Barnett and Scott 2007) illustrate this development. Several of these
studies address the transnational dimension of social movements (e.g.
Beaumont and Nicholls 2007b; Cumbers et al. 2008).
In addition to the use of the term as an emphasis of the significance
of movements’ physical surroundings, space also entered the social
movement literature in another, more abstract and almost metaphori-
cal sense, which will not be considered in this chapter. For example the
recent approach, “social movements as spaces” emphasises that social
movements are (heterogeneous) contexts for actions and interactions
rather than homogeneous actors (Routledge 2000; Haug 2013). This per-
spective is linked to debates about new forms of movement organization
in so-called open spaces – platforms of encounter and exchange rather
than decision-making bodies such as the World Social Forums (Patomäki
and Teivainen 2004).
Charles Tilly (2000) convincingly identified four dimensions1 of the
role space plays in contentious politics – a distinction the following
literature review will draw upon.

Four dimensions of space

First, following Tilly (2000), space is a (built) structure that pro-
vides social movements with certain constraints and opportunities.
This includes physical barriers during protests as well as time-distance
costs (e.g. the time it takes to access allies and targets of contentious
claims). Several studies address this issue. Stillerman (2002), for exam-
ple, shows in an analysis of a metal workers’ strike in 1960 in Chile
how the built environment influences movement repertoires. He reveals
how the proximity and layout of housing, the union hall, the fac-
tories, and local transportation routes shaped the tactical repertoires
activists adopted. However, often this dimension of space is applied
more broadly, employing the term “space” to denote an area’s specific
characteristics such as socio-demographic composition, opportunity
structures, and cultural features (e.g. Bandy and Mendez 2003; Carter
2003; Barnett and Scott 2007).
The widely used concept of scale-shift introduced by Doug McAdam,
Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly (2001) can be situated in this broad per-
spective as well. Scale-shift is a process that diffuses contention across
168 Movement Space

space (both physical and social) and creates instances for new coordina-
tion at another level with different opportunities (McAdam et al. 2001).
Such shift in scale can either take a downward direction, when coordi-
nation of action takes place at a more local level than its initiation, or an
upward one, when coordination happens at a higher level than before
(ibid:94–95).
Second, space affects social movements through the impact every-
day spatial practices, proximities, and routines have on the degree and
form of mobilization. Activists often draw on specific daily activities
and meeting points to develop mobilization tactics. Several studies con-
sider this dimension of space, though less than in the case of the first
dimension. William H. Sewell (2001), for example, shows how the spa-
tial proximity of the university campus and the shared “spatial routines”
were crucial for the mobilization of students during the Beijing student
uprising in 1989. Similarly, Wendy Wolford (2003) reveals how in the
case of the Brazilian land reform movement, the spatial constitution of
agricultural production intensified practices of high mobility and close
exchange that crucially affected individuals’ decisions to participate in
the movement.
Similarly to the first dimension, this dimension of space is often
applied broadly, using space to denote an area’s particular type of social
relations and economic practices (e.g. Beaumont and Nicholls 2007a).
Third, space’s role in social movement dynamics draws on the territo-
rial organization of power. Governments are crucial points of reference
for social movements and they manifest their power spatially. Accord-
ingly, opposition groups address and counteract this spatial organization
of power, for example by subverting governmentally set borders (e.g. the
red zone during summit protests) or by building so-called free spaces –
independent from and countering governmental control. Fewer studies
address this third dimension of space. John Noakes and his colleagues
(2005), for example, show how protestors and police struggled over
space during anti-war protests in 2001 in Washington, DC.
Also, with respect to this third dimension, several studies apply space
broadly – many of these employ the concept of “free spaces” (e.g.
Gamson 1996; Featherstone 2008). Free spaces are defined as “small-
scale settings within a community or movement that are removed
from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily partici-
pated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accom-
panies political mobilization” (Polletta 1999:1). Originally developed
by Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte (1986), the concept has found
wide resonance among movement scholars (e.g. Melucci 1989; Taylor
1995; Polletta 1999; Routledge 2000). Despite Evans and Boyte’s (1986)
 Priska Daphi 169

emphasis on the physical characteristics of free spaces, social movement

scholars mainly examine them as social spaces. In this vein, Francesca
Polletta observes that “it is the character of the ties that are established
or reinforced in those settings, rather than the physical space itself, that
the free space concept has sometimes successfully captured” (1999:25).
Lastly, mobilization addresses the existing meaning and political rel-
evance of spaces as well as spatial routines (in some cases endowed
through routine political life) – intentionally as well as unintentionally.
Protesters often choose places with politically salient meaning in order
to underline their claim of the importance of their cause (Routledge
1993; Tilly 2000; Sewell 2001). This may transform the meaning of this
location (Sewell 2001). Often the normative meanings and uses of places
themselves are the focus of social movement activity, such as the Les-
bian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans gender (LGBT) movement’s struggle in
US cities to take part in St. Patrick’s Day parades (Marston 2003). Few
studies address this dimension of space. Puneet Dhaliwal (2012), for
example, shows how in the case of the Indignados movement in Spain
the meaning of space, public squares in particular, was changed through
mobilization into places of contestation and solidarity.

What is missing?
This review shows that the social movement literature considers the
concept of space from various angles. It is considered in terms of exter-
nally set constraints and opportunities, spatially bound social relations
and practices, as well as (though less) with respect to redefinitions of
space. The way in which the majority of research employs the concept,
however, is problematic in two ways: first, a broad use of the term over-
stretches the concept and diminishes its explanatory value; second, a
narrow notion reduces space to a given physical environment and fails
to take space’s social construction into account.
First, since every social action takes place in space, the term “space”
can be used to refer to a large array of social processes and struc-
tures. However, when space designates all kinds of social interactions,
resources, and practices, this obscures what particular aspect of or
influence on social movements the concept of space actually captures.
There is a problem, in particular in those studies that have been iden-
tified above, in applying the term “space” broadly with respect to the
first and second dimension. These studies employ the term “space” in
order to describe an area’s specific characteristics such as political oppor-
tunity structures (e.g. Bandy and Mendez 2003), language policies (e.g.
Carter 2003), and types of networks (e.g. Beaumont and Nicholls 2007a).
This use of space fails to identify the effects of spatial factors on social
170 Movement Space

movements as it equates space with certain social structures and rela-

tions such as opportunity structures, resources, and networks. Employed
in this way, the explanatory contribution of the concept is obscured.
Space does not seem to add much to existing concepts in social move-
ment studies such as networks and political opportunity structures. It
simply seems to replace them.
The second problem is that many of the studies which do not apply
the term “space” broadly use it too narrowly in the sense of a given
physical environment. This ignores widely acknowledged theoretical
insights about space. That space is a social construction has become “an
academic self-evidence” (Löw 2008) at least since the 1990s. This view
contrasts with an absolute notion which describes space as an objec-
tive physical structure that constitutes a container for social processes
(cf. Sewell 2001; Löw 2008; Schroer 2008). This absolute notion has
been increasingly criticized – within both the social sciences and human
geography – for its neglect of social agency. As there is no natural space,
space is a product of social processes rather than a container – it only
attains relevance for social actions due to the properties ascribed to it
(cf. Massey 1984, 2007; Lefebvre 1994; Soja 1996).
While this social constructivist understanding of space is reflected
in theoretical contributions on movements and space (e.g. Tilly 2000;
Martin and Miller 2003), it only very slowly seems to find its way into
empirical research. Several studies treat space as a given and unprob-
lematic background rather than a product of social processes. Stillerman
(2002) and Wolford (2003), for example, analyse the impact of the spa-
tial infrastructure of industrial and agricultural production but fail to
examine how this infrastructure is made sense of. How space is inter-
preted by activists is largely neglected in movement studies (exceptions
include Miller 2000; Boudreau 2007). This is also the case with the lit-
erature on free spaces despite its generally strong attention to processes
of meaning-making (cf. Polletta 1999).2 Exploring how activists make
sense of their physical surroundings – the streets they protest in, the
places and buildings they meet in – however, is crucial for analysing the
role of space in social movements.
This review shows that space, on the one hand, needs to be con-
sidered more with respect to its particular, materially based impact on
social movements. Equating the term with social structures and rela-
tions within a particular area considerably reduces its explanatory value.
In order to avoid this, space’s materiality needs to be taken into con-
sideration. On the other hand, more attention needs to be paid to the
social construction of space. Examining how activists make sense of
 Priska Daphi 171

space is key to understanding space’s impact on social movements. The

following part will show how both is possible based on, first, a defini-
tion of space as a dual structure, second, its consideration as part of
culture, and third, a distinction between three dimensions of spatial
meaning-making.

Conceptualizing space as spatial meaning-making

Space as a dual structure

The first part showed that neither is space identical with the social rela-
tions it encloses nor is it a given physical structure external to social
relations. This underlines that space is, in fact, a dual structure (Giddens
1984): Space, on the one hand, is constituted by social actions – as actors
arrange physical objects and interpret built environments. On the other
hand, it influences social action in its own right (cf. Pries 2005; Löw
2008; Schroer 2008). Hence, the insight that space is a social prod-
uct is just one side of the coin. Doreen Massey writes in this vein
that “spatial distribution and geographical differentiation may be the
result of social processes but they also affect how these processes work”
(1984:4). More recently, Martina Löw (2008) argued that the “academic
self-evidence” of space being a social construction risks failing to con-
sider the materiality of space and its power to induce action. Social
actions are influenced by the spatial arrangements of the physical envi-
ronment – they channel communication and pre-structure interaction
processes (cf. Schroer 2007).
While space may have direct effects on action – the blockage of a road,
for example, steers demonstrators into a particular direction – this effect
is crucially channelled through the meanings attributed to physical
arrangements. These meanings attain certain permanence – they aren’t
rearticulated in each situation. In this way, they provide frameworks for
defining situations and guide social action (Massey 1984; Schroer 2007).
This definition of space brings the term close to that of culture, as dis-
cussed in section “Space and Culture”. It allows space to be explored as
a product of social processes as well as an influence on them – avoiding
both the equation of space with particular sets of social relations and
assuming a space as given.

Space and culture

For a long time, space and culture were assumed to overlap, since
national culture was understood to be limited to a certain territory.
172 Movement Space

Scholars from diaspora and post-colonial studies – among others – have

long refuted this assumption. Nonetheless, there are conceptual over-
laps between culture and space. Drawing on a broad definition of
culture, the following will show how space can be understood as part
of meaning-making.
Culture is temporarily fixed, collective meaning-making resulting
in “webs of meanings” (Geertz 1973). Meanings encompass various
aspects: moral understandings of right and wrong, cognitive under-
standings of true and false, perceptual understandings of like and
unlike, social understandings of identity and difference, as well as aes-
thetic understandings of attractive and repulsive (Kurzman 2008:5).
Meanings are collective and embodied and shaped in performances as
well as in the interpretation of (natural) physical objects and the cre-
ation of artefacts. Accordingly, the present definition differs from other
conceptions in three respects.
First, it locates culture primarily at the collective level. In contrast to
value-based notions of culture that locate culture inside the individual’s
mind, the present conception stresses that culture is not simply the sum
of individuals’ actions but a result of interaction. Second, it puts empha-
sis on the role of social agency. This contrasts with other collective
approaches to culture that focus on the role of a body of “ready-made”
interpretations that people simply use, above all Ann Swindler’s (1995)
toolkit model. Instead, culture is actively shaped by social actions – it is
temporally fixed meaning-making that in turn influences actions. Third,
the present definition goes beyond a mere cognitive understanding of
culture by including moral, social, and aesthetic meanings. Emotional
processes are important in this respect, as the social movement literature
on emotions has shown.3
Movement culture has many facets. A crucial part of it is mak-
ing sense of the surrounding physical environment. Space is “one of
the axes along which we experience and conceptualise the world”
(Massey 1984:251). Accordingly, space can be understood as a part
of culture: It concerns particular, temporally fixed patterns of col-
lective meaning-making. As other elements of culture, patterns of
spatial meaning-making are not primarily the result of individual pro-
cesses but created in interaction. In contrast to other patterns of
meaning-making, however, spatial patterns refer to the proximity of
material objects to each other and the observer – though to vary-
ing degrees. The following will clarify this issue of material reference
with a distinction between three dimensions of spatial meaning-
making.
 Priska Daphi 173

Dimensions of spatial meaning-making

Several influential writings on space make a distinction between a con-
crete, that is material, and a more abstract, that is socially, conceived
dimension of space – often in the form of a distinction between place
and space (e.g. Martin and Miller 2003). Henri Lefebvre (1994), for
example, does this in his seminal work on the social production of
space. He distinguishes between space as experienced in everyday life
(concrete “spatial practices”) and the commoditized or bureaucratized
space in maps, models, and plans (abstract “representations of space”).
Drawing on this distinction, the sociologist Martina Löw (2001, 2008)
distinguishes between two processes of space construction, which will
serve as a point of departure for this contribution’s model: spacing and
synthesis.
First, in a process of spacing, social goods and people are situated
and/or symbolic markings (e.g. entry sign to locality) are placed in order
to render ensembles of goods and people recognizable as such (Löw
2001). This includes constructing buildings, erecting signs, and position-
ing oneself in relation to objects and other people. The process of spac-
ing produces specific places – sites which can be specifically named and
geographically marked. This first process of space construction addresses
the more concrete, material dimension of space – in accordance with
what several scholars have called “place”. Second, these places are con-
nected together in a process of synthesis. Synthesis produces spaces
through processes of perception, ideation, and recall (2008), for exam-
ple by connecting different locations into a city. These two processes are
concurrent; they both shape and are based on each other.4
Löw’s model provides a useful approach for examining the degree to
which spatial meaning-making refers to materiality. Spacing is more con-
crete as it emerges in direct interaction with the material: It concerns
the perceived position of objects in relation to each other and oneself.
Synthesis is more abstract as it draws on the places produced in the pro-
cess of spacing rather than on direct interactions with the material (see
Figure 8.1). In order to assess these interactions more clearly, I distin-
guish between two aspects of spacing and hence propose a model with
three dimensions of spatial meaning-making.
Spacing entails two different processes of spatial meaning-making:
First, it encompasses the situation of social goods and people – the way
in which people orient themselves in their immediate physical surround-
ings. Second, it comprises the creation and use of signs (including names
and images) to cluster certain social goods and people – a process of
174 Movement Space

+ Material reference −

Orientation Categorization Synthesis

Determination of proximity Clustering of objects and Symbolic association of
to and distance from actors clusters
objects and/or actors

Spacing

Figure 8.1 Different degrees of material reference in spatial meaning-making

categorization.5 Orientation and categorization of physical arrangements

are not necessarily the same thing. Actors may determine their distance
from or closeness to physical objects and other actors as well as between
physical objects without necessarily categorizing these units into cer-
tain entities – though, of course, both processes strongly draw on each
other and are difficult to distinguish empirically (see section “Illustrat-
ing Orientation, Categorization, and Synthesis”). This extends Löw’s
model of space production from two dimensions to three: Orientation,
categorization, and synthesis (see Figure 8.1).
The distinction between these three processes allows different degrees
of material reference to be addressed in detail in spatial meaning-
making: While orientation takes place in direct interaction with the
material; categorization refers to materiality more indirectly by draw-
ing on the product of orientation; and synthesis, finally, building on
categorization is the most abstract as it does not rely on direct reference
to physical arrangements (see Figure 8.1). These three dimensions will
be elaborated in the following and illustrated with examples from the
GJM’s protests in Genoa in 2001.

Illustrating orientation, categorization, and synthesis

The GJM and its counter-summit in Genoa

The GJM comprises a network of groups engaged in various collective
actions, which share the goal of advancing economic, social, political,
and environmental justice in opposition to neoliberal globalization (cf.
della Porta 2007). Large transnational protest events play an important
role in this movement, in particular the protests against summits of
international organizations such as the Group of Eight (G8), the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade
 Priska Daphi 175

Organisation (WTO). These so-called counter-summits were particularly

formative in the movement’s early years.6 They constitute culmina-
tions of coordinative efforts that attract much public attention and
have crucially shaped the movement’s development. Important counter-
summits include the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, against
the IMF and World Bank in 2000 in Prague, and against the G8 in
2001 in Genoa.7 The following examples will be based on the latter. The
counter-summit in Genoa8 in 2001 had particularly strong repercussions
for politics in Italy and elsewhere due to its size, the high level of media
attention, as well as violence.9 During urban counter-summits such as
the one in Genoa, the infrastructure of the hosting city is temporarily
converted. Large numbers of activists from other regions and countries
pour into the city and need to be accommodated: Public buildings such
as schools become information centres or sleeping places, stadiums are
turned into convention halls, and streets and squares are used as (public)
areas of celebration and claim-making. During urban counter-summits,
the local police designate a restricted “red zone” around the summit’s
venue, which only the summit’s delegates and residents are allowed
to enter.
Spatial meaning-making in this context – as in other situations – takes
place in all three dimensions described above. Examining these different
dimensions separately is difficult as they overlap in discourse. In addi-
tion, spatial meaning-making mostly concerns a tacit kind of knowledge
that is difficult to assess immediately. As, for example, Löw (2010) has
shown, actors are hardly able to speak about spatial perceptions when
asked directly. However, spatial meaning-making can be found in other
utterances. The examples below draw on activists’ accounts of the GJM’s
emergence and development based on 20 interviews conducted with
Italian activists in spring 2011.10 All interviewees have been involved in
the GJM ever since its inception in the 1990s. These retrospective recon-
structions provide crucial insights into the meaning and importance
activists attach to the place of protest events. While the dimensions
of orientation, categorization, and synthesis intertwine in such recol-
lections, the following discusses each in turn to illustrate all three as
clearly as possible.

Orientation
This first process of spatial meaning-making concerns the way in which
activists orient themselves in their immediate physical surroundings.
For the case of the counter-summit this means activists’ determination
of distance from or proximity to physical arrangement such as streets,
buildings, places, or sidewalks, as well as actors such as other activist
176 Movement Space

groups, bystanders, and police. This orientation often underlies catego-

rization and synthesis – as well as other interpretations – rather than
being stated as such (especially in retrospect) and, hence, is particularly
difficult to access directly. The following quotation contains an excep-
tionally detailed account of streets’ proximity and distance, that is how
distant or close objects are defined to be. And it also reveals how inti-
mately orientation is linked to categorization and synthesis – in this
case clustering objects and actors into the description of a trap that is
associated with danger.

[ . . . ] in Genoa, the small streets, try to imagine the structure of the

smaller and bigger streets. Here is the main street where the protest
was taking place and the people were marching: the protest was sup-
posed to walk in this direction but then these small streets were
completely blocked . . . with some big and heavy iron bars so . . . if
some problems happened here, the protest had no [ . . . ] escape
points.
(Lorenzo,11 activist from a student association, §24)

Categorization
Categorization concerns the clustering of objects and actors into entities
drawing on orientation. The case of the counter-summit in Genoa offers
several good examples of categorization.
First, activists cluster the streets of the city into different zones.
Activists frequently refer to the red zone in their accounts of the events.
The streets and places of the historic centre are clustered and labelled
as the place of the “others” – the political elites and the police. Con-
versely, the streets outside the red zone are identified as the activists’
place (without differentiation between the yellow zone and the rest
of the city) – despite the fact that opinions on how exactly to fight
the red zone diverged.12 Accordingly, activists from different groups
describe the challenge of – and the exclusion from – the red zone as
a common feature of the movement. More radical activists, such as
from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and left political parties
divide up the city of Genoa in this way, as do more radical activists,
such as from the social centres.13 In this regard, the latter in particu-
lar describe the red zone as a physical representation of the common
enemy:

The red zone [ . . . ] worked as an engine for the movement, in the

sense that the red zone made the idea [clear] that there was a physical
 Priska Daphi 177

and territorial oligarchy that we were dealing with, [ . . . ]. And so

to violate the red zone actually represented really well in physical
and plastic terms the idea of a conflict which violated this space
which had been stolen also from the city itself and with the aim of
re-gaining the freedom of speech.
(Emiliano, activist from social centre, §11)

Second, in addition to identifying places common to the movement at

large, some areas of the city are categorized as places of particular sec-
tors of the movement. Here, the various “thematic” squares in which
activists met during the second day of protests are linked to particular
clusters of activist groups: one square of the religiously based (pacifist)
activists, one square of the autonomist activists of the social centres,
and so on.

[ . . . ] the squares of the cities represent different modalities to protest.

So, for example we were a square with nuns, with religious people and
determined forces while the social centre was in a different square.
(Tommaso, activist from a Catholic NGO, §8)

Not only the “thematic squares” of the second day are linked to par-
ticular groups of activists, but also certain clusters of convention and
sleeping places are identified with particular movement groups. In par-
ticular, radical leftist and autonomous activists associate a stadium in
the east of the city (“Campo Sportivo Carlini” outside the yellow zone)
with groups similar to them in ideology and tactics. In fact, this place
later becomes a way in which to refer to the mixture of activist groups
representing the more radical part of the movement (including small
radical unions and youth groups from left political parties).

Synthesis
Synthesis differs from categorization as it concerns a more abstract clus-
tering: While categorization draws together entities on the basis of
orientation, that is material arrangements that are identified as phys-
ically close, synthesis links different places on the basis of symbolic
associations. It brings together places that are described to share some
characteristics independent of (perceived) physical proximity. In this
vein, the different places of the counter-summit in Genoa are linked
together symbolically and associated with certain general developments
of the movement at large. For example, Genoa is associated with over-
coming previous divisions – in one line with the events in Seattle
178 Movement Space

(protest against a WTO meeting 1999) and in Porto Alegre (first World
Social Forum 2001). In this way, Genoa becomes a place of success – the
success of forming a broad leftist coalition worldwide.

And what Porto Alegre – because Genova in reality comes from this
spirit of the World Social Forum – what this spirit of the era produced
was the feeling that we could overcome these divisions, so we could
create a sort of common front between the more moderate and the
moderate.
(Daniela, activist from a leftist NGO, §4)

This unifying characteristic of the event is often explicitly linked to the

counter-summits’ places – to the different “thematic” squares and places
of convention forming a united protest against neoliberal globalization.
With this in mind, several activists refer to walking different roads to the
same goals when describing how the broad coalition came into being –
corresponding with the different marches moving towards the red zone
in Genoa.

It was as if from different observation points everyone started walking

on its own, without knowing that the others were walking as well and
once arrived started discovering that it was possible to arrive to the
same place but walking through different paths.
(Fabio, activist from leftist NGO, §14)

Also, on a more negative note, Genoa is associated with police repres-

sion and defeat – connected to similar experiences of repression in other
places, such as in Gothenburg and Naples (where counter-summits also
took place in 2001). These places of defeat together stand for a new era
of police repression. In the interviews, such loss of power as a movement
vis-à-vis governmental institutions is often explicitly linked to the spa-
tial infrastructure of the Genoa counter-summit, especially with regard
to being excluded from the red zone as well as the description of Genoa’s
streets and squares as traps (see above).

[ . . . ] the police mind-set was not to guarantee public security but it

was to make carnage in that square, a square which had been closed
from all sides to realize a sort of trap. [ . . . ] I think it [Genoa] is the
closing event of this experimental cycle of transnational repression
towards a movement.
(Emiliano, activist from social centre, §14)
 Priska Daphi 179

These examples illustrate how spatial meaning-making works in the

different dimensions of orientation, categorization, and synthesis.
The case chosen for illustrating the distinction between the three
dimensions is, of course, only one among a huge variety. Also with
respect to the counter-summit in Genoa, many other spatial interpre-
tations could be identified. Nonetheless, the examples in this section
revealed the different degrees of material reference in spatial meaning-
making.
Orientation refers directly to the distance and proximity of streets,
town squares and convention places. In categorisation the different –
closer and distant – places identified through orientation are linked
together and labelled, for example as zones of the movement and
those of “the others”. Synthesis is the furthest removed from concrete
materiality. It links places clustered in categorisation largely based on
symbolic association rather than physical proximity. In the examples
above, this in particular concerns the association of Genoa with certain
developments of the movement and politics in general. This associa-
tion is based on an abstract connection drawn between different places
such as Genoa and Gothenburg (based on a sense of defeat) as well as
between Genoa, Seattle, and Porto Alegre (based on a sense of success).
While the most abstracted, this association also entails some material
reference drawing on orientation and categorisation and its identifi-
cation of places of the movement within the infrastructure of streets
and squares. In this way, this part also shows that spatial meaning-
making may draw more or less directly on physical arrangements but
is hardly completely independent from them as the three dimensions
are interdependent.
Furthermore, this section illustrated the broad definition of cul-
ture developed in the second part as it explored the process of
meaning-making in interaction during protest and its spatial infras-
tructure. The examples also point to the fact that this meaning-
making not only entails cognitions but also draws on emotions –
activists connect places with feelings of solidarity, joy, defeat, and
anger.

Conclusion

This contribution developed a cultural approach to space in social

movements. In order to overcome shortcomings of the use of the
term in existing studies on space and social movements, I introduced
the concept of spatial meaning-making. The review of research on
180 Movement Space

movement space in the first part revealed that most of the litera-
ture takes the term to two extremes: It either equates space with
certain social structures neglecting its special materiality, or assumes
it to be a given physical structure and thereby ignores space’s social
construction. In both cases, attention to how activists make sense
of space – how materiality and social relations are connected – is
lacking.
The concept of spatial meaning-making and the distinction between
its different dimensions proposed made it possible to move beyond
these shortcomings by exploring space both as a product of social pro-
cesses and as an influence on them (in terms of temporally fixed webs
of meaning). Crucially, this conceptualization entailed defining space –
or rather constructions thereof – as a part of movement culture: it con-
stitutes one of the ways in which activists collectively make sense of
their surroundings. Such collectively created and temporally fixed pat-
terns of meaning-making are both a result of and an influence on social
processes – in the sense of a dual structure.
This particular – spatial – aspect of meaning-making draws on
the materiality of physical surroundings to different degrees, as was
highlighted by the distinction between three dimensions of spatial
meaning-making (orientation, categorization, and synthesis). Spatial
meaning-making may refer more explicitly to the arrangement of phys-
ical objects as in orientation, or draw on more abstract associations as in
synthesis. In this way, this chapter’s conceptualization of space showed
that defining space as a social product does not necessarily mean equat-
ing it with certain social structures and relations, but allows space’s
materiality to be taken into account.
The illustration of these three processes with respect to the counter-
summit in Genoa in 2001 highlighted the different degrees of mate-
rial reference in spatial meaning-making as well as their interplay.
It showed in particular how the collective experience of the city’s spa-
tial infrastructure – the distance and proximity of its streets and places
(orientation) – is linked to a distinction of the city into certain “zones”
(categorization), which demarcate the movement from its opponents, as
well as how this in turn is connected to the more symbolic association
of the city with success and defeat (synthesis).
On a more general level, this contribution showed that research on
movement space needs to take into account how activists make sense of
that space. This is crucial in order to assess space’s impact and activists’
strategic as well as habitual use of space. In this vein, the examples in
this contribution, for instance, point to the role of space in constructing
 Priska Daphi 181

movement identity: Drawing boundaries between a movement and its

opponent is closely related to notions of place.
Finally, this contribution emphasized considering the different
degrees of material reference in exploring movement space. This distinc-
tion could be especially fruitful in analysing transnational movements.
This is due to the fact that these movements consist of a complex
interplay of local, national, and transnational dynamics of activism
that entail different degrees of concrete material reference in spa-
tial meaning-making. Exploring how these different ways of spatial
meaning-making are compatible may crucially advance our understand-
ing of how transnational movements cohere.

Notes
1. Tilly (2000) initially identifies five dimensions, but merges them into four in
his analysis.
2. An exception is, for example, Golova (2011).
3. Authors such as Taylor (1995), Jasper (1997), Aminzade and McAdam (2001),
and Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta (2001) criticize that the “cultural turn” in
social movement studies led to a neglect of emotions in favour of cognitive
dimensions of culture.
4. However, Löw (2008) argues that while spacing both requires and provokes
synthesis, synthesis does not necessarily require spacing, for example in arts
or architecture.
5. In addition, a third aspect may be distinguished in spacing: the active
contribution of social actors in constructing the physical environment, for
example building streets, putting up signs. While this certainly is influenced
by cultural meaning-making, it will not be considered here due to the focus
of space as meaning-making.
6. In later years counter-summits lost some of their momentum, partly because
the international organizations preferred to meet in remote and difficult-to-
reach places instead of cities.
7. The events have varying degrees of importance for activists in different
countries; for an overview, see Daphi (2013).
8. Launched at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2001,
more than 800 groups came together to organize the protests against the
G8 in Genoa. The main protest events took place between July 19 and
July 21. The counter-summit started off with a large demonstration with
between 10,000 and 20,000 participants on July 19. On July 20 different
(direct) actions were organized: Activists met in different squares (so-called
thematic squares) and in different marches. On the last day, July 21, the
largest march with around 300,000 participants took place, concluding the
official programme of the counter-summit.
9. For detailed accounts of the repercussions see, for example, Ullrich (2004)
and della Porta and Mosca (2008).
182 Movement Space

10. These interviews were conducted in the context of a larger research

project about the Global Justice Movements in Italy, Germany, and Poland
funded by the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des
deutschen Volkes).
11. All names are pseudonyms.
12. See http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj92/behan.htm.
13. “Social centres” refer to groups of autonomous and anarchist activists that
are organized in self-managed, cultural, and political centres, often located
in squatted buildings (cf. Membretti 2007). These centres played a crucial
role in the Global Justice Movement in Italy (Mudu 2004).

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9
Movement Culture as Habit(us):
Resistance to Change in the
Routinized Practices of Resistance
Cristina Flesher Fominaya

Introduction

In this chapter I want to draw on the theoretical understanding of

culture as implicit, routinized, taken-for-granted symbolic systems of
meanings that individuals from shared locations (e.g. local, national,
class, and social) have in common and that shape their interactions.
This understanding of culture has a rich and diverse theoretical trajec-
tory that is under-utilized in analysis of social movements,1 yet yields
significant insight into the internal dynamics of social movement inter-
action. As such it provides a very fruitful conceptual tool for research
into culture and movement, as I hope to illustrate. My aim here is not
prescriptive – other understandings of culture capture important aspects
of social movement dynamics. Rather, I want to show how this con-
ception of culture, broadly defined, can illuminate internal movement
dynamics, using the specific example of how it can hinder a sense of
collective belonging or cohesion in movement groups, within the con-
text of deliberative and coordinating practices. This forms part of a
larger agenda to show how social theory, broadly defined, rather than
social movement theory, narrowly conceived as a self-contained and self-
referential subfield, can serve as a rich source of insights into social
movement dynamics (Flesher Fominaya 2014). At the same time, I hope
to show that the study of collective action provides fertile terrain for the
advancement of social theory.

I would like to thank the editors and the participants in the Protest | Culture
workshops at WZB in Berlin 2012, in particular Andreas Pettenkofer, for their
very helpful feedback and criticism.

186
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 187

I came to my theoretical preoccupation with the role of culture as

habit(us)2 from a desire to resolve some puzzles that arose in my field-
work on the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Spain in the early
2000s.3 Over the course of my fieldwork I began to notice two things.
First I noticed that activists in a specific national context (Spain) per-
sisted in practices that were counter to their explicitly articulated
ideology and goals. The second observation was that the global imag-
inary of collective belonging to a shared movement (the “Global Justice
Movement”) was a very real aspect of participants’ sense of movement
belonging and collective identification in the abstract sense, but actual
attempts at transnational coordination met with significant barriers that
could not be explained by the lack of a shared set of strategic objectives
nor by the lack of a shared (autonomous) ideology, broadly conceived.
Invitations to transnational networking events among “like-minded”
and sympathetic activists committed to anti-capitalist global justice
agendas did not lead to a Habermasian-style debate, nor was these
activists’ engagement reflective of the cosmopolitanism that theorists like
Beck (2006) and indeed many observers’ and scholars’ narratives of the
GJM would lead us to expect. What I found was that, in fact, “global-
ization” always happens somewhere and national cultural differences
between activists had important implications for collective identity for-
mation grounded in actual practices of coordination, rather than merely
in a shared imagined belonging. While the insight that globalization
is always rooted geographically in its effects is not of course unique,
what is largely absent from the literature is an exploration of the role
of implicit taken-for-granted aspects of cultural practice as opposed to
explicitly articulated differences at the discursive level (expressed in
the form of ideologies, narratives, myths, stories, frames, etc., whether
within or across national boundaries). I will return to the specific empir-
ical cases later to explore the theoretical and analytical ramifications of
paying attention to how routinized, internalized culture shapes practices
of deliberation and coordination in both national and transnational
movement settings.
Attempts at transnational coordination form a key part of social
movement aspirations in “global” movements, and while success-
ful results of these attempts are self-evident in the existence of
transnational social forums and networks, the failures are very rarely
analysed. To the extent that internal processes of cohesion and conflict
are studied, the role of culture in analysing internal social movement
conflict is often seen in relation to explicitly articulated differences between
groups or collective actors, and its role in cohesion likewise is linked to
188 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

explicitly articulated shared narratives, identities, frames, ideologies, issues,

tactics, and so on. There is of course a theoretical tension between cul-
tural practices that are seen as routinized, internalized, and habitual,
and therefore largely unreflective, and strategic action and agency which
is most often seen as conscious and deliberate. The theorists I discuss
below all allow for strategy and agency (if they didn’t there would be
little hope for culture playing a role in social transformation), while
pointing our attention to ingrained or habitual patterns of interaction
that shape much of cultural practice.
In a similar way that much work on culture in social movements
defines it as something deployed strategically, consciously and explicitly
(e.g. framing theory, symbolic protest, movement cultural production,
use/subversion of cultural products and messages, etc.), much work on
collective identity (often subsumed into a “cultural” approach in social
movement scholarship typologies) focuses on shared, explicitly articu-
lated grievances and differentiation from other reference groups, either
within or outside the movement. Melucci’s work was crucial in drawing
attention to the internal or latent movement interactions that foster the
development of collective identity or cohesion over time. This chapter
moves this work forward by focusing specifically on the role of culture
as I define it here in fostering or, in the cases I will discuss, hindering
shared identification with a group or movement, thereby generating
conflict instead of cohesion. I first define collective identity and then
move to an overview of the particular theoretical conception of cul-
ture I would like to call attention to in this chapter, as conceived by
a number of central social theorists. I deliberately draw on the notion
of habit(us) in a range of social theory from often opposing traditions
to highlight its importance in theories of social action. This aspect
of culture is often overlooked in favour of more agentic and strategic
understandings in social theory, even within many of the theories I will
be discussing.
I then turn to some specific examples from my research on the GJM to
illustrate the usefulness of these conceptual tools in understanding how
culture can shape internal movement dynamics and constrain collec-
tive identity processes. In so doing, I hope to advance thinking about
the role of culture in collective learning processes and transnational
cooperation more broadly, to highlight the crucial nexus between cul-
ture as habit(us) and emotions, and to call into question some of the
claims made for cosmopolitanism and the effects of globalization in
transnational collective spheres.
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 189

What is collective identity?

As I have argued elsewhere (2010a) collective identity is a notoriously

slippery concept to define succinctly,4 but I will draw on the work of
the theorist most closely associated with the concept in social move-
ment studies, Alberto Melucci, to highlight its key features. Instead of
analysing social movements as an already constituted collective actor,
Melucci’s fundamental concern was in illuminating the dynamic pro-
cesses through which that collective actor was itself constituted, how the
“we” became a “we”. For Melucci (1995:45–49),5 “contemporary move-
ments are solidarity networks with potent cultural meanings” which is
what distinguishes them from political and formal organizations. Move-
ments are systems of action that do not have a unified set of goals,
and the actors themselves are a social composite, which is why the
explanation for involvement in action cannot be reduced to linking
involvement to social condition (i.e. class). Melucci sought to bridge the
gap between individual beliefs and meanings and collective action by
exploring the dynamic process through which actors negotiate, under-
stand, and construct their action through shared repeated interaction.
According to Melucci, collective identity as a process involves cognitive
definitions about ends, means, and the field of action; this process is
given a voice through a common language and enacted through a set
of rituals, practices, and cultural artefacts. This cognitive framework is
not necessarily unified or coherent but is shaped through interaction
and encompasses different and even contradictory definitions. Collec-
tive identity refers to a network of active relationships and collective
action always mobilizes an emotional involvement on the part of the
actors. Collective identity involves the ability to distinguish the (collec-
tive) self from others, and to be recognized by those others, so social
movements’ collective identity is always formed in relation to a field
of opportunities and constraints. Conflict provides the basis for the
consolidation of group identity and for solidarity (rather than shared
interests). Collective identity establishes the limits of the actor in rela-
tion to the field: It regulates membership of individuals and defines the
requisites for joining the movement. Collective identity is crucial in
generating collective action and in sustaining groups and movements
over time.
Having seen how interaction is crucial to shaping collective identity,
I now turn to how culture as habit(us) is seen to shape interaction in a
range of social theories.
190 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

Culture as internalized systems of meanings

that shape interaction

The conception of culture as a shared system of embedded mean-

ings that shapes and is shaped through interaction has taken differ-
ent forms, yet is present in a wide range of theories. The notion of
“common sense”, or naturalized internalized systems of meanings that
serve to shape and reproduce inequality, is associated most commonly
with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony”6 or cultural hegemony.7
Gramsci, drawing on Marx and Lenin, developed a theory to explain
how the ruling class eventually comes to dominate the masses more
effectively through consent than through force (albeit using a combi-
nation of the two). While a full treatment of Gramsci’s understanding
of hegemony lies outside the scope of this chapter, and also involves
explicit concessions, alliances, and agreements between various col-
lective actors and power holders, one moment of hegemony involves
the way in which the ruling class presents its own interests as the
shared interests of all. These interests are then eventually adopted by
the dominated class and over time become a combination of ideas
that are pervasive throughout a given society as a form of embed-
ded, spontaneous assumptions and beliefs that form a common sense.
This naturalized culture as an acceptance of the social order as “the
way things are” forms a crucial component of the maintenance of eco-
nomic and political hegemony. Class domination is a dynamic historical
process in which political, intellectual, and moral leadership play key
roles, which means that the content of these pervasive shared sets of
ideas changes through time and is not static or fixed. Gramsci therefore
affords a great importance not only to meaning, or culture, and to its
relation to power, leadership, and strategy but also to (working-class)
consciousness, and the possibility of the development of “good sense”
from common sense. Cultural hegemony is not totalizing; if it were
there would be no possibility of social transformation and working-class
consciousness developing. Gramsci offers collective agency and the pos-
sibility for change, but crucially points to the difficulties in overcoming
the passivity generated by inherited consciousness. Of the embryonic
working-class consciousness, he writes that it is in reality

two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness):

one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him
with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real
world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 191

from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is
not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it
influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying effi-
cacy but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the
contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action,
any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral and
political passivity.
(1971:333; my emphasis)

Although Gramsci places great importance on the role of the State in get-
ting the active (and therefore explicit and knowing) consent of “those
over whom it rules” (1971:244), he still holds onto this element of
uncritically absorbed consciousness that serves to hold together specific
social groups and can produce inactivity and conformity, preventing
change.
From a radically different point of departure, Émile Durkheim also
offers the idea of a common, shared set of beliefs that constrain indi-
vidual action through his notion of collective consciousness, which he
defined as “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the aver-
age members of the society that forms a determinate system with a life
of its own” ([1893] 1997:38–39). Durkheim, however, downplays the
connection between collective consciousness and inequality, domina-
tion, or conflict, and his mechanism for how collective consciousness
changes over time is much more nebulous than Gramsci’s. Durkheim
indicates that individual innovators are able to break with the collective
conscience (and are likely punished for it), but their ideas eventually
may become adopted by wider society. However, unlike Gramsci, he
does not link this explicitly to the deliberate organization of ideas by
intellectuals on behalf of particular class interests. Instead, Durkheim
points us to the importance of symbols and rituals in fostering a sense
of common belonging and social cohesion and a reaffirmation of the
collective conscience. As society becomes increasingly complex through
the division of labour, the connection between individuals is based
less on shared values and beliefs and more on a mutual recognition
of interdependence. Ritual acts are therefore crucial mechanisms that
bind individuals together despite differences in beliefs and values and
creating a common identity or unity from diversity. Durkheim’s work is
also important in showing symbols as representations of shared mean-
ing in a particular social setting – a candle in itself is not a sacred
object but becomes so when imbued with sacredness through the col-
lective meanings attributed to it, which are reaffirmed through ritual
192 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

practices. Symbolization and ritualization are key mechanisms through

which a sense of collective belonging is maintained. Durkheim also
offers another key component that is relevant for my purposes here –
that is, highlighting the important links between symbolization and
ritualization and the emotions these processes call forth. Symbols in par-
ticular serve to call forth those emotions even when individuals are not
engaged in “sacred”8 ritualized practice.
Although rarely highlighted in discussions of his theory, Durkheim
“viewed habit . . . as a chief determinant of human action in a great
variety of areas . . . ” (Camic 1986:1039). He discussed a link between
consciousness, habits, and the possibility for change:

Durkheim . . . held that the “ideas and reasons which develop in our
consciousness [arise, inter alia, from] ingrained habits of which we
are unaware” (1887a:35; 1897a:168) and his speculation on social and
cultural change repeatedly harked back to habit, which he viewed as
one of the greatest impediments to progress of any sort . . . operating
outside the “sphere of the clear consciousness, . . . habits . . . resist any
change [since] what cannot be seen is not easily modified” (1898–
1900:84).
(Camic 1986:1051)

For Durkheim, people only stop to examine and reflect on their “habits”
when they are at a crossroads, when habit is disrupted or when a pro-
cess of non-adaptation occurs (Camic 1986:1052). Hence, crucially, it is
not enough to focus our attention on the ideas or sentiments of super-
ficial consciousness, because these are not the ones that have the most
influence on our behaviour, but rather our habits are the real forces that
govern our actions (Durkheim in Camic 1986:1052).
Camic (1986) also points out how crucial the notion of Eingestelltheit
or disposition was to Max Weber (whose work does not share many sim-
ilarities with that of Durkheim), which “was employed by him to desig-
nate the phenomenon he had in view when speaking of habit, namely
an unreflective, set disposition to engage in actions that have long been
practiced” (Camic 1986:1057). For both Weber and Durkheim, then, the
concept of habit or habitus is crucial in understanding social action
because it is a “generalized disposition whose very shape may differ
with variations in the socialization practices of different groups and
may undergo major reorganization as social formations change histor-
ically” (Camic 1986:1075). Habitual action is crucial for both Weber
and Durkheim “in economic, political, religious, and moral life”, but its
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 193

consequences will be overlooked “when one assumes that action always

takes the form of a reflective weighing, by various normative standards,
of means to ends” (Camic 1986:1075).
There is a tension between the notion of habitus as being contained
in the person and being enacted and reproduced in social interaction.
The symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead, for his part, understood
meaning itself to be constituted in social interaction when a gesture
from one actor called forth a response from another. This definition of
meaning, however, does not suppose shared meaning. Mead used the
term “significant symbol” to denote those gestures whose meaning is
shared by all in a social interaction, a crucial point for my purposes
here. He highlighted the ability of the individual to take the attitude
of the other (to interact symbolically with ourselves and others) and
linked that ability to the possibility of social progress. Taking the atti-
tude of the other (imagining the other’s reaction) leads to self-conscious
control of our own actions. Unlike Gramsci, Mead saw language as neu-
tral, not as reflecting relations of domination, with the development of
a “universal discourse” as the formal ideal of communication.9 Interest-
ingly, Mead was concerned with the implication of theory as a means to
improve mutual comprehension between people from different cultures
in the political sphere (specifically the League of Nations), an aspiration
with many parallels to activists involved in the construction of world or
regional social forums and similar deliberative decision-making arenas
that seek to transcend national or local boundaries.
Despite his emphasis on performativity (and hence conscious or
strategic action), Erving Goffman’s work also draws on a notion of shared
internalized assumptions that shape social interaction (1959, 1967).
Over the course of their lives, individuals learn to recognize and assume
a wide range of “roles” that are enacted in a series of performances that
performers strive to make believable to their audiences. Crucially, they
work to maintain common definitions of the situation and draw on cul-
tural resources to do so. Goffman introduces an element of strategy and
agency in his dramaturgical analysis of social interaction (much less
developed in Mead), as individuals are seeking particular outcomes as
a result of their performances. In the tension between internalized roles
and reflexive conscious performance, Goffman falls on the latter, and
indeed he has been criticized for overlooking or underplaying the idea
of culture as a deeply internalized motivator for social action (Smith and
Riley 2009:58). Stryker (1980 in Camic 1986:1041) observes in symbolic
interactionism an emphasis on “reflexivity as the essence of the human
condition, [at the expense of] a serious consideration of habit”. Yet,
194 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

the idea in Goffman’s work of social action as a series of performances

that have been learned over time through socialization processes nev-
ertheless ultimately relies on a sense of habitus. Goffman’s approach is
important in drawing attention to rituals and face-to-face interaction,
as well as to the links between the self, meaning, and action in social
settings, all useful conceptual tools for the analysis of internal social
movement dynamics.
Semiotics, like symbolic interactionism, is concerned with symbols,
signs, and codes, although the roots of semiotics come from linguistics,
notably the work of Swiss linguist de Saussure. In A Theory of Semiotics
(1976), Umberto Eco argues that semiotics studies all cultural processes
as processes of communication. Cultural systems are like linguistic sys-
tems, in that they are based on widely shared meanings and underlying
structures that are largely unconscious or prediscursive but that shape
our interactions and are reproduced in practice. They are not closed,
static, or fixed systems, but are open series, in which individuals choose
from a range of options, and can alter and introduce new messages
which then shift the range of available choices. His purpose therefore
is not to try to determine an established typology of signs, but rather
a method and theory that investigates how signs are produced and
interpreted.
What can be taken from Eco for my purposes here is the idea that the
meaning of every sign is culturally defined. The meaning of a sign is
a “cultural unit”, and cultural units are elements of systems of other
cultural units which can limit or change their meaning. Some cul-
tural units may be ambiguous or open to different readings because
they have different meanings in different settings or when they com-
bine with other cultural units. Meaning is not just transmitted but is
actively created according to a complex interplay of codes of which we
are largely unaware. Therefore, we rely on cultural codes to make sense
of meanings, but not all meanings are consensual across all groups.
Perhaps the most useful set of conceptual tools for an analysis of cul-
ture and internal social movement dynamics is that offered by Pierre
Bourdieu, partly because his work draws on elements of all the above-
mentioned theories (albeit not necessarily explicitly). His notion of
“habitus” can be very usefully applied to the (sub)cultural field of social
movements in a given network or domain. Like many of his concepts,
Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” takes on different emphases throughout
his work. In one very important sense, “habitus” refers specifically to
class habitus, a durable and transposable disposition that is acquired
through primary socialization processes in a specific class location and
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 195

which shapes strategies and likelihood of success (or failure), therefore

playing a key role in the reproduction of social inequality. But Bourdieu
also uses the notion of habitus in a much broader sense, as cultural prac-
tices and habits or dispositions that are acquired over time in certain
contexts become internalized and shape social interaction in particular
fields. As Swartz (1997:115) points out, although he stresses agency and
strategy, his approach is much less voluntaristic than Swidler’s (1995)
oft-cited culture as toolkit simile, in that Bourdieu “stresses the group
embeddedness of individual action”. Bourdieu’s habitus draws on Weber
and Durkheim’s understanding of habit as something with a genera-
tive capacity rather than simply a mechanical reproduction of a learned
performance. In a given field, actors draw on different forms of capi-
tal to compete with others strategically seeking outcomes, yet many of
their strategic choices are not conscious, but a product of habitus. Prac-
tices are the result of the interaction between cultural field, habitus, and
different forms of capital.
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus picks up on the stress Durkheim and
Weber place on the fact that individuals are not fully conscious of their
deeply held internalized assumptions. Because habitus is durable and
transposable to other contexts, there is an echo of Goffman in the idea
that those individuals without the “appropriate” habitus can fail to per-
form successfully in certain social settings, which will decrease their
strategic effectiveness in a given field of social interaction. Bourdieu’s
understanding of habitus and its role in the reproduction of social
inequality, and in particular his use of the term “natural ideology”, also
shares important elements of the specific cultural element of Gramsci’s
hegemony outlined above. As with habitus, this aspect of hegemony
works to constrain individual action precisely because dominant under-
standings are accepted as common sense and are therefore naturalized
and not subjected to scrutiny and critical reflection.
Bourdieu’s conception of habitus highlights a crucial emotional dimen-
sion which becomes most marked when actors enter into social milieux
for which their habitus has not equipped them (e.g. an exclusive restau-
rant with elaborate dining codes). In this case they will experience a
sense of discomfort and being out of place; they will feel that particular
space is “not for them”. Therefore, most people auto-exclude themselves
from those environments where they feel they do not understand the
rules of the game, where they are unable to enact a role successfully
or observe the proper rituals, and where the meanings, symbols, and
codes are unclear to them; in short, where they do not share significant
symbols with other actors in the interaction (to use Mead’s language).
196 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

In such an environment, actors will not feel a shared sense of belonging,

or to put it another way, will not share a sense of collective identity.
Conversely:

Habitus being the social embodied, it is “at home” in the field it

inhabits, it perceives it immediately as endowed with meaning and
interest . . . the agent does what he or she “has to do” without pos-
ing it explicitly as a goal, below the level of calculation and even
consciousness, beneath discourse and representation.
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:128)

In other words, when actors are in spaces or fields that are in synch with
their habitus, they will feel that things make sense and feel “natural”,
and will not subject their routine choices or behaviour to scrutiny or
critical reflection.
Although not seeing actors as cultural dopes or slaves to traditional
or inherited modes of thought, nor denying actors strategy and agency,
as we have seen, theorists from a range of traditions point our attention
to the importance of implicit, routinized, taken-for-granted symbolic
systems of meanings that individuals from shared locations10 (e.g. local,
national, class, and social) have in common and that shape their interac-
tions. This aspect of culture is crucial in explaining conflict and cohesion
in social groups. I will now turn to an illustration of how this under-
standing of culture can be used to analyse internal social movement
dynamics and collective identity formation processes, drawing on some
examples from autonomous movement groups in the GJM in Spain.

Culture and collective identity processes: Autonomous

groups in the GJM

The Global Justice Movement can be broadly defined as a loosely con-

nected constellation of movements (encompassing a broad range of
issues, ideologies, and strategies) who work to expose the destructive
effects of global capitalism, hold those responsible to account, and try
to seek more just alternatives to it. Two broad currents within the move-
ment (or lines of demarcation) in Europe are between institutional left
organizations and autonomous groups (Flesher Fominaya 2007a). This
difference is often shorthanded as a tension between “horizontals and
verticals”, although the actual differences are more complex than any
neat typology suggests (Flesher Fominaya 2007a, 2005). Autonomous
movement groups can be broadly defined as groups organized in hor-
izontal networks and underlain by the principles of self-organization,
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 197

direct/participatory democracy, autonomy, diversity, and direct action

(Flesher Fominaya 2007a).11
We can conceive of the global justice social movement network in
a given city as a (sub)cultural field, where actors or members share
sets of meanings and rituals across movement groups (with greater or
lesser degrees of congruence), which are embedded in a wider cultural
political framework that itself shapes interaction rituals and movement
group practice. In the case of Madrid, at the “heteronymous pole” (to
use Bourdieu’s term), or the pole most influenced by outside dominant
groups, lies the influence of institutional left groups who were more
established, powerful and resource-rich and who continued to exert a
latent influence on the autonomous groups, despite these groups’ desire
to break with institutional left practice and define themselves as distinct
from them.12

The persistence of counterproductive assembly rituals

One key area of social movement interaction in autonomous groups

is the assembly – the central internal decision-making forum. In order
to create a new autonomous movement project in Spain, a group
of activists invites people to participate in an assembly. Projects are
defined as “spaces” designed to pursue a particular goal, which can
be narrowly or loosely defined: that is, squatting and setting up a
new social centre or generating protest against neoliberal capitalist
globalization (in general) or an ecological disaster such as the Pres-
tige oil spill (in particular). The term “assembly” or asamblea, refers
to asamblearismo, a political tradition based on participatory deliber-
ative practice. Understanding what happens in an assembly is crucial
to understanding collective identity formation in autonomous groups
because, in the absence of a more formal organizational framework,
the continued existence of a given project initially depends on the suc-
cess or failure of the dynamic generated there. Autonomous assemblies
aim to be open, horizontal, participatory and, usually, to generate direct
action. Initially these assemblies are often a heterogeneous collection of
individuals with multiple and sometimes conflicting ideologies, prior-
ities, and strategic orientations. Whether and how a particular group
of activists coheres into a movement group, depends in large mea-
sure on the dynamic generated between them in assembly (Flesher
Fominaya 2010b).
One of the most striking findings from my three years of fieldwork
in Spain13 was that autonomous activists, who were explicitly trying
198 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

to define their activist practice in contradistinction to traditional insti-

tutional left politics (i.e. be horizontal instead of vertical, inclusive
instead of exclusionary), would nevertheless unreflexively reproduce
institutional left practices and rituals that themselves served to repro-
duce hierarchical structures. Again and again, in group after group, they
would begin the assembly meetings following a standard (for Spanish
leftist politics) formula of setting an agenda and then a strict turno de
palabra. Turno de palabra is a highly routinized practice of establish-
ing a strict order of intervention based on participants requesting their
names be placed on a list controlled by a moderator. No one within
the (sub)cultural field, in my entire fieldwork experience, ever sponta-
neously questioned this ritual practice, despite the fact that it clearly
favoured those who would repeatedly put their names down to speak
and did not provide mechanisms for including the voices and opin-
ions of those who did not, for whatever reason. In some cases, activists
who did not feel included would then exit the groups, whereas strate-
gies to make the assembly more inclusive would likely have prevented
their exit. The three points that are important here are that (a) activists
were unconsciously reproducing a role and ritual they had learnt and
that was resistant to change and (b) the existing practice was not actu-
ally in keeping with their professed values and ideology, but (c) was so
taken for granted as to be unreflexively adopted time and again, rather
than altered to provide an ostensibly more favourable outcome for the
groups.
Does this mean cultural fields cannot change and activists are doomed
to repeat the same mistakes forever?14 While such an assertion flies in
the face of the evidence (clearly movement cultures do change over
time), my fieldwork findings suggest that (sub)cultural movement fields
are much more resistant to change or more durable than activists or
some scholars would like to believe. In fact, one of the key findings in
my research was that the main barrier to the fulfilment of autonomous
principles (or ideology) in practice was this unreflexive reproduction of
inherited assembly methodologies: methodologies that had served the
institutional left very well for many years but which had very damaging
consequences for autonomous movement groups trying to break away
from their influence and create an alternative political movement.
So far, this analysis has drawn on a single cultural field, in a single
city. But do things change when activists are exposed to new influ-
ences? From reading many accounts of the Global Justice Movement,
one might get the impression that it is an extremely transnational move-
ment, with activists “summit-hopping”, and travelling great distances
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 199

to participate in social forums and other movement activities. The fact

is, most activists, and certainly most autonomous activists who lack
financial support from parties and unions, cannot afford to engage in
“summit-hopping”. Theirs is largely an imagined global identity that
remains rooted in nationally bound fields and practices.15 Yet, in all the
groups in the network, there were key activists with significant cultural
and social capital within the groups and network, who had travelled
to transnational meetings and forums (e.g. PGA, ESF, WSF), and yet,
this exposure did not alter the rituals and practices of activists in any
significant or fundamental way – at least over the three-year period of
fieldwork.16

Habitus clashes in a transnational encounter

The cosmopolitan vision put forward by theorists such as Beck (2006)

would lead us to believe that activists involved in the construction
of transnational networks would be likely to display the cosmopolitan
effects produced by global flows of culture, images, technology, goods,
and media. Social movements seeking to establish a transnational or
global movement are an excellent arena in which to examine this ques-
tion, and to see how these global macro processes actually play out in
a micro-context. After all, activists who see themselves as belonging
to a global movement, who are aware and influenced by that move-
ment’s activities beyond the borders of their own countries, cities, and
active networks, would be the people we would expect to be most dis-
posed to adopting new practices, meanings, and identities. Drawing on
my fieldwork, I would suggest that for most activists, the influence of
these “global flows” is much less penetrating than strong globalization
theories would lead us to expect (or, perhaps I should say, hope), pre-
cisely because they are not embedded in the day-to-day rituals that
shape interactions. I will illustrate this with an example from an interna-
tional encounter that took place in Spain in 2004 between activists from
a number of different countries who had come together to establish
a transnational network dedicated to expanding participatory democ-
racy. All of the activists were deeply committed to this principle, and
very excited about the project. They had travelled very far to be at
this important meeting. The activists hosting the meeting had prepared
it meticulously, right down to the very detailed agenda. In the first
assembly, the hosts kicked off the meeting with the typical Spanish left-
ist political ritual of agenda setting and establishing turno de palabra.
There was an immediate problem however: The other activists did not
200 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

interpret this as a “shared symbol”. They did not see this as the right way
to go about a participatory assembly. In short, they rebelled. The hosts
were baffled, and insisted on continuing with the programme they had
carefully planned with the best intentions. The disgruntlement grew, as
did the frustration on both sides. There was no question everyone was
deeply committed to the principle of “participatory democracy”. The
problem was that the term meant different things to different people
depending on the established ritual practices in their “native” (for lack
of a better word) cultural field. Their habitus were durable and trans-
posable (in Bourdieu’s terms), and the result of attempting to engage in
social interaction where the rules of the interaction and the meaning of
supposedly shared symbols had changed, where the cultural field was
in fact different, led to feelings of extreme discomfort, frustration, and
even anger.
One of the key areas of misunderstanding lay around the term “con-
sensus”. The sign was clear enough and translation was not a problem;
everyone shared the use of the word in the several languages spoken
(consensus, Consenso, Konsens). The problem lay in the meaning the
word had for the different activists. The meaning itself was only able
to be understood in relation to the practice of achieving it, so the two
aspects, consensus discourse and consensus practice (or rituals) were
deeply intertwined and difficult for them to disentangle. For the Spanish
hosts, consensus meant reaching total agreement, and going around and
around until it was reached. They thought this should apply to all lev-
els of decision-making. For most other groups, consensus and the desire
for it only made sense when linked to a specific objective and not as an
end in itself. These activists kept asking “Why consensus? What for?”
or “Yes, consensus, but why start with the methodology? What are the
objectives?” Others thought consensus was useful, but only for certain
issues: “One thing is to strive for consensus, but for technical points it
is a monumental waste of time. We need to put practice over theory,
and voting under certain circumstances is practical. It’s like we need to
use consensus to become friends. You don’t become friends by reaching
consensus!” Another said, “There shouldn’t be monism in decision-
making – there are different levels. Consensus is designed to slow down
action. There should be a level for consensus; there should be another
level for majority vote”. The organizing culture clashes were not limited
to the reasons for consensus but also extended to the technical way it
should be reached.
The result of this encounter was that, despite clear agreement on the
desire to create a transnational network around this particular project as
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 201

well as the goals and principles the project should have (insofar as these
were able to be determined), the activists’ emotional experience, their
sense of discomfort at their organizing habit(us) culture clash left them
unable to share a sense of collective belonging or cohesion. The attempt
to create a collective identity around this particular project failed; it was
a costly failure because many resources (both social and economic) had
been used putting the encounter together and it was not possible to
try again.
But what of the learning process? Durkheim and indeed many of the
theorists discussed above would argue that when faced with a situation
where “habits” are clearly not working, actors will reflect on and “see”
what remained before at the level of the unconscious. Did the activists
involved learn from this experience and attempt to adapt their strate-
gies? Did the hosts, for example, reflect on what went wrong or how
things should be changed in the future? The short answer is no. The
internal post-meeting evaluation chalked the problems up to the pres-
ence of new people who just “didn’t get” the project or the process.
The activists who had travelled out of their comfort zones and entered a
new cultural field had a slightly different reaction. They were prompted
to reflect on their own practices (i.e. for reaching consensus or running
an assembly) and contrast them with what they had experienced during
the meeting, but they did not come to the conclusion that intercultural
reflection on practices was the way forward. Instead, they came away
deeply convinced and reaffirmed in their belief that their own practices
were in fact superior and should be more widely adopted. Their language
in the interviews I had with them was full of the words “should”, “need
to”, “have to”, and so on in relation to how the encounter was organized
and carried out. One activist said of the hosts, with great sympathy and
pity, “They just don’t know how to do it, it’s not their fault”.
How can we understand this outcome? In Goffman’s terms what
I witnessed was a series of failed performances, where the actors
were attempting to enact a believable and strategically successful role.
In Mead’s terms, the gestures that were called forth in the social inter-
actions during the assemblies produced meanings for all involved – but
not shared meanings. In particular, the term “consensus” called forth
different meanings and was not a shared symbol. The hosts, who were
at home in their own cultural field, were convinced that their role was
being enacted successfully, according to the accepted rules of the game.
Precisely because habitus is unconscious, internalized, and taken for
granted, even in a setting explicitly created to promote participatory democ-
racy, they were unable to reflect on how their rituals might be altered to
202 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

encompass alternative renderings or understandings. The activists who

entered into the cultural field were unprepared for a different “consen-
sus” and assembly ritual, and were also hard-pressed to articulate what
was “wrong” with it in a systematic way. Instead, they put it down to
“reason”, not “culture”: The other activists simply did not understand
what they were trying to do.
While this is a particularly striking example of failed organization due
to culture clashes, it is not markedly different from other transnational
encounters I studied during my fieldwork, where activists were by and
large deeply shaped by their organizing habitus and experienced strong
discomfort when outside their own cultural field. To what extent this is
true across movements and groups would be a very interesting area of
analysis.
Does this mean transnational activism is doomed due to the persis-
tence of habitus across different cultural fields? Again, the answer is
clearly no, or there would not be successful transnational networks,
and of course the fact is that there are many. What is interesting and
revealing about this analysis is that it presents a picture of what hap-
pens before this cultural adaptation takes place; as Melucci argued, this
allows us to see movements not as an already constituted entity, but to
try to explain how they become movements in the first place, how the
“we” becomes, or doesn’t become a “we”. It shows the crucial role of
habit(us) in shaping interaction.
My purpose here has not been to argue against a notion of culture
that sees actors as strategic actors who make conscious choices. Actors
and activists clearly do engage in conscious, strategic action in inter-
nal social movement settings. But they also engage in a lot of action
that is internalized, routinized, and not operating at the level of con-
scious reflection. The notion of habit(us), broadly understood, points
out the ways in which cultural practices are resistant to change despite
the best intentions of the actors involved. As scholars of social move-
ments we ignore this understanding of culture and social action at our
peril. Many activists and scholars share with Mead (1967) and Habermas
(1984) a vision of a universal form of communication that will enable
social transformation into a more just society, or with Beck (2006) a
“cosmopolitan vision”, but an emphasis on reflexivity at the expense of
habitual action or habitus actually works against this ideal.
Culture is not just about meaning but also about the emotional
responses those meanings call forth, and those meanings are not only
conscious and explicit but are also enacted through (implicit, habit-
ual) cultural practices. Emotions are closely linked to culture and are
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 203

also crucial in collective identity, as I have argued elsewhere (Flesher

Fominaya 2007b, 2010a). As Melucci (1996:71) argued:

“[A] certain degree of emotional investment is required in the def-

inition of a collective identity, which enables individuals to feel
themselves part of a common unity . . . Passions and feelings, love and
hate, faith and fear are all part of a body acting collectively, particu-
larly in those areas of social life that are less institutionalized, such as
the social movements.

In the analysis above, shared meanings provoked very similar emotional

responses, highlighting the fact that emotions are not just individual
responses but are also cultural, generated in interaction and have an
important collective dimension.17 Ultimately, it was the affective reper-
cussions of habitus clashes that impeded the development of collective
identity rooted in a shared commitment to a common endeavour,
despite a shared imaginary “global” collective identity and a commit-
ment to common objectives.
As Gramsci argued, we should engage in pessimism of the intellect and
optimism of the spirit. Rather than presuppose reflexivity (and think,
e.g., that because an ideal of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, or
participatory democracy exists it will necessarily be realized), we should
pay careful attention to the role of culture, and particularly its routinized
and non-reflective aspects, the internal practices of coordination, and
how this affects processes of conflict and cohesion in social movements.

Notes
1. A notable exception is Lichterman (1996).
2. I am shorthanding this broad approach to culture as habit(us), which
includes but extends beyond Bourdieu’s use of the term “habitus”.
3. See Flesher Fominaya (2005) for a full account of that research.
4. See Flesher Fominaya (2010a) for a comprehensive overview of its definitions
and use in social movement studies.
5. While the quotations cited here come from his 1995 article “The Process of
Collective Identity”, he develops this concept throughout his work, notably
in his books Challenging Codes (1996) and Nomads of the Present (1989).
6. Gramsci uses the term “hegemony” in many different ways in his writings,
this is only one of the ways he uses it, and perhaps the meaning with the
widest use (or some would argue misuse) in sociology.
7. For a comprehensive treatment of the relation between cultural hegemony,
cultural resistance and social movements, see Flesher Fominaya (2014).
8. By sacred, Durkheim is not referring to religiosity in the sense of religious
doctrine/deities, but rather to that which is set above and apart from the
204 Movement Culture as Habit(us)

mundane, or profane. Again, what is defined as sacred or profane is not fixed

but determined by the shared meanings a society invests the symbols with;
indeed, a sacred object in one society may be profane in another (e.g. a cow
revered by a Hindu society but routinely slaughtered and consumed in a
non-Hindu society).
9. An ideal close to Habermas’ dream of communicative action.
10. For a discussion of the relation between space, location and collective
identity, see Daphi (this volume).
11. They are autonomous because (by and large) they want to remain indepen-
dent of parties and unions.
12. For a detailed analysis of this network and distinctions between institutional
left and autonomous groups, see Flesher Fominaya (2007a).
13. From 2002–2005 I undertook ethnographic fieldwork on the Global Justice
Movement in Madrid. I traced the emergence and decline of three move-
ment groups, participating in all the assemblies and in the activities of the
movement network more broadly (Flesher Fominaya 2005).
14. For other discussions of barriers to collective learning processes, see Doerr
(this volume).
15. See Baumgarten (this volume) for a discussion of the impact of nationally
rooted cultures on social movements.
16. Earlier fieldwork conducted in the early 1990s on the Spanish Greens in
Madrid showed very similar patterns of interaction.
17. For a discussion of the relation between emotions and culture, see Jasper
(this volume).

References
Beck, Ulrich. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press
Camic, Charles. 1986. “The Matter of Habit.” American Journal of Sociology
91(5):1039–1087.
Durkheim, Émile. [1893] 1997. On the Division of Labor in Society. New York, NY:
Free Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University
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Flesher Fominaya, Cristina. 2014. Social Movements and Globalization: How
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Macmillan.
——-. 2010a. “Collective Identity in Social Movements: Central Concepts and
Debates.” Sociology Compass 6(4):393–404.
——. 2010b. “Creating Cohesion from Diversity: The Challenge of Collec-
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3(80):377–404.
——. 2007a. “Autonomous Movement and the Institutional Left: Two
Approaches in Tension in Madrid’s Anti-globalization Network.” South European
Society and Politics 12(3):335–358.
 Cristina Flesher Fominaya 205

——. 2007b. “The Role of Humour in the Process of Collective Identity Formation
in Autonomous Social Movement Groups in Contemporary Madrid.” Humour
and Social Protest, International Review of Social History 52:243–258.
——. 2005. The Logic of Autonomy: Principles, Praxis and Challenges of Autonomous
Anti-Capitalist Movement. University of California, Berkeley, CA, PhD Disserta-
tion (as Cristina Flesher Eguiarte).
Goffman, Erving. [1956] 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York,
NY: Doubleday.
——. 1967. Interaction Ritual. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
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International Publishers.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Lichterman, Paul. 1996. The Search for Political Community. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Melucci, Alberto. 1995. “The Process of Collective Identity.” Pp.41–63 in
Social Movements and Culture, edited by H. Johnston and B. Klandermans.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
——. 1996. Challenging Codes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Phillip and Alexander Riley. 2009. Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Oxford:
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Stryker, Sheldon. 1980. Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version. Menlo
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Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Swidler, Ann. 1995. “Cultural Power and Social Movements.” Pp.41–63 in
Social Movements and Culture, edited by H. Johnston and B. Klandermans.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
10
Memory and Culture in Social
Movements
Nicole Doerr

When telling alternative stories on the Internet and in street protest,

activists publicize memories excluded from national history books and
mainstream media audiences. At the same time, officials also publicize
claims for apology and repair in official public commemorations created
for reconciliation. How do social movements construct and use memory,
and how does the politics of memory shape cultural meaning-making in
movements? To begin answering this question, my contribution brings
together a cultural sociology of social movements with an interdisci-
plinary analysis of memory drawing on psychoanalytical, visual, and
historical approaches. Movement scholars who focused on narrative,
discourse, framing, and performance show how activists actively con-
struct and mobilize collective memory. We know much less, however,
about interactions between multiple layers and forms of remembering
stored in images, stories, or performances, or discursive forms. How do
conflicting or contradictory memories about the past inside movement
groups condition activists’ ability to speak, write, and even think about
the future? While previous work conceived of memory in movements
as a subcategory of narrative, discourse, and framing, my central point
is to understand how memory itself structures these forms of meaning-
making – as an independent and multidimensional category of cultural
analysis. Students of memory outside the field of social movements have
critically evaluated the conflicting making of memories and silences by
different actors. Based on this work I develop a multidimensional con-
ceptualization of memory in movements which helps us to understand
why and when memories, even if transmitted informally or implicitly
as “hidden” stories, images, or frames, have a powerful impact for a
movement’s ability to change the future.

206
 Nicole Doerr 207

Introduction

Like religious groups, ethnic minorities, or nations, social movements

have tried to commemorate their shared past in order to imagine future
collective action and relationships with other groups. However, we lack
systematic research on how memory itself conditions or constrains col-
lective action in present-day social movements. Only recently, scholars
have addressed the gap in research on the political impact of commem-
orative events in movements, asking for comparative studies on the
global diffusion of mnemonic practices (Armstrong and Crage 2006:746;
see also Daphi 2013; Zamponi and Daphi forthcoming). While numer-
ous movement scholars mention memory’s impact in relation to other
aspects of culture, such as narrative and discourse, performance or
framing, few have studied how memory shapes these various cultural
practices themselves. Indeed, much work has conceived of memory as
a subcategory of narrative, discourse, and framing as the more cen-
tral category of analysis. In order to address this gap, I will propose a
multidimensional understanding of memory that explores how various
mnemonic practices such as story, image, discourse, and performance
interact with each other, conditioning social movements’ future. My
argument follows two main lines: By addressing memory as a central
category of cultural analysis, my motivation is to discuss how scholars
in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies have problematized the
multidimensional, conflicting, constraining, and enabling dynamics of
memory, which have not systematically been considered by students of
social movements. Based on this discussion, I will propose ways of see-
ing memory as an independent variable that influences activists’ politics
of framing, narrative, discourse, and performance, and through this also
influences what movements actually are.
Movement theorists in the wake of the “cultural turn” have con-
ceptualized and explored culture as stored in stories, narrative, and
discursive forms (Polletta 2006:187), and they have examined its emo-
tional (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001), performative (Alexander
2006), and ritualized dynamics (Collins 2005). The cultural turn also
inspired a parallel “boom” in memory studies (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi,
and Levy 2011). However, the huge and growing field of cultural mem-
ory studies remained somewhat insulated – too big to address other
related fields (Olick and Robbins 1997). Social movement scholars for
their part have not yet, in my view, conceived of memory in a systematic
way in its various forms and formats of transmission or actors, such as
career groups, which make and unmake cultural history (Zemon-Davis
208 Memory and Culture

1983). True, numerous empirical studies that present social movement

groups are influenced by past ones. However, few have thought about
memory as an “independent variable” which structures, infiltrates, and
influences other forms of cultural expression. As an exception, Elisabeth
Armstrong and Suzanna Crage (2006) demonstrate how the narrative
construction of the “Stonewall Myth” enabled future gay rights mobi-
lizations and commemorations – but again, they felt compelled to
orient their analysis alongside the literature of narrative and political
event analysis rather than focusing on memory as a central category of
analysis.
Moreover, few scholars mention the active construction or problem-
atic and constraining role of memory, which has increasingly gained
attention among students of memory outside movements. “Collec-
tive memory vibrates—it is essentially committed to being provisional”
writes Robin Wagner-Pacifici (Wagner-Pacifici 1996:301), urging schol-
ars to pay attention to the provisional making of the content of
memory depending on the diversity of its form, coded and trans-
lated within and across events. Other authors debate activists’ impact
on the contested construction of a global memory of the Holo-
caust (Levy and Sznaider 2006), or on the narrative construction of
European memory (Eder 2009). In a recent move, cultural theorist
Aleida Assmann and her colleagues have just done cross-national com-
parative work highlighting the role of transnational discursive pub-
lic spaces created by social movements and civic groups in order to
make visible silenced stories and memories of violent exclusion of
women, migrants, and minorities (Assmann and Conrad 2010). At the
same time, postcolonial and feminist scholars and historical sociol-
ogists have criticized universal ideas of European and cosmopolitan
memory as essentialist (Zolberg 1998:583), and have discussed the
marginalization of non-white and non-western movements’ perspec-
tives (Mohanty 2003).
Some theorists of memory, such as Assmann, therefore choose a
critical approach, that is, an approach that distinguishes among the
different types and functions of contested collective memory a cul-
tural (i.e. an official, consciously transmitted), and a communicative
function (Assmann 2005; Olick and Robbins 1997). I perceive of the dis-
tinction between cultural and communicative memory as an interesting
point of connection with existing concepts of cultural analysis in social
movement studies. Moreover, cultural theorists of memory conceptu-
alize communicative memory as composed of “residues of the past in
language or communication” (Olick and Robbins 1997:111–112). This
 Nicole Doerr 209

suggests that the communicative function of memory itself constrains

ways of imagining the future through “the very ability to communi-
cate in language” (ibid.). Transposed to social movement studies, this
suggests that all practices of meaning-making – for example, fram-
ing, discourse, narrative, and performance – are conditioned by the
contingent making of communicative and cultural memory. Memories
are transmitted or silenced in various ways and by various mnemonic
practices that are accessible to activists in different generations who
operate in different, sometimes extremely repressive, contexts of “cul-
turalized ignorance” (Einwohner 2009:1). The understanding of culture
that I will propose intends to connect these studies in the separate
fields of memory and culture in movements. With this project, my own
perspective is distinct from existing definitions of memory in at least
two ways.
First, there is a tendency in cultural history and literary studies of
memory to focus on specific cases of commemoration in movements
or ritualized performances of remembrance as if they were a text –
which one can “read” independent from the existence of a broader
movement and collective action behind its construction (see, critically,
Zemon-Davis 1983). This risks neglecting the active construction of
memory by actual groups and individuals in movements (Armstrong
and Crage 2006), something which has been highlighted by movement
scholars working on the strategic use of and symbolic fights about mem-
ory among elites in movements and institutionalized politics (Polletta
2006:148). James Jasper, for example, shows the time-consuming work
of characterization that activists need to do in order to create a political
hero figure which commemorates the past in glorious, caricaturist, or
other ways (Jasper et al. forthcoming).
Secondly, my approach also differs from the aforementioned studies
of culture in movements. Indeed, when studying culture through social
movements’ stories or frames, analysts conceived of memory as a subcat-
egory of certain other independent variables – narrative and discourse,
performance, framing, or emotion. Instead, I will explore how mem-
ory is a multidimensional category connecting different concepts and
fields of analysis. Here I conceive of memory as a “multidimensional”
category of culture in order to highlight and problematize mnemonic
practices of transmission which we may study in different, interrelated
forms such as image, text, story, and performance. My idea about multi-
dimensionality is inspired by the work on memory by Michael Schudson
(1992) and the focus on the actors behind various (multiple) layers of
memory-making by Natalie Zemon Davis (Zemon Davis 1983). As will
210 Memory and Culture

be shown, these authors problematize the contradictory and contested

construction of memory and its multiple ways of interpretation that
structure present-day politics and interaction between activists and offi-
cials, ordinary people and elites. For example, Schudson reveals how
political activists combine multiple mnemonic forms such as image,
narrative, and performance and use their ambivalent open-ended char-
acter in public to subvert monolithic memories transmitted through
official discursive media.
In the following, I will apply the multidimensional understanding of
memory as developed in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies
to the field of social movements. First, I discuss how social movement
theories in the fields of narrative, framing and discourse, and perfor-
mance debate the politics of memory. I problematize the contingent
and contradictory dynamics of memory that have been neglected but
which are, nevertheless, particularly relevant for understanding conflicts
about democracy, or particular frames or identities in present, inter-
generational movement groups. I address these gaps through the work
by cultural historians (Assmann 2005) and psychoanalysts (Olick and
Levy 1997; Schwab 2011) who studied stories’ and images’ potential
to mediate and transmit silenced experiences of trauma. Third, I dis-
cuss how memory scholars have conceived of the visual dimension of
memory, which has relevant insights for a multidimensional analysis
for the emerging fields of visual analysis and character work in social
movements. After having discussed the theoretical relevance of cultural
approaches to memory, I will give examples that illustrate how to apply
their interdisciplinary conceptual toolkit to the empirical field of culture
in social movements. Although this is beyond the scope of this chapter,
it would be particularly interesting to include the perspectives of con-
tentious politics and contentious performances (Tilly 2003), and ritual
(Collins 2005), on memory in social movements.

Movement scholars: How movements construct

and use memory

Social movement scholars have approached memory through the per-

spectives of framing, discourse, narrative, and performance. While each
of these traditions was interested in particular aspects of memory and
commemoration, all highlight the contingent patterns of active for-
getting and selective transmission – the active making of memory by
activists or by their opponents. Focusing on framing and on the remem-
bering and forgetting of social movements, some scholars were able
to explain the success or failure of future protest. For example, Rachel
 Nicole Doerr 211

Einwohner’s (2009) comparative study on the mobilization of Jewish

resistance against the Nazis in three Eastern European cities explores
how selective memory or “cultured ignorance” may constrain politi-
cal resistance in situations of extreme threat: In three attempted ghetto
uprisings in Vilnius, Warsaw, and Lodz, Einwohner demonstrates, young
Jewish resistance groups tried to convince elder community members
to mobilize collective resistance against the Nazis. The two attempts
in Vilnius and Lodz failed, where a prevailing positive memory frame
of the German occupiers as rational, modern, culturalized army elites
subverted existing evidence of planned genocide. Only in the specific
context of Warsaw where resistance groups were able to change the
dominant positive memory of German army elites did mobilization and
resistance succeed (ibid.). In discussing the discursive construction of
memory in relation to the Holocaust in the German national context
of parliamentary debates, Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy’s study shows
that “(t)he relationship between remembered pasts and constructed
presents is one of perpetual but differentiated constraint and renego-
tiation over time, rather than pure strategic invention in the present or
fidelity to (or inability to escape from) a monolithic legacy” (Olick and
Levy 1997:937). Historical sociological studies have thus used (critical)
discursive approaches to explore the role of taboo as a powerful means of
political contention that makes memory matter for present movement
groups (ibid:922).
Scholars interested in narrative and storytelling in social movements
explore how memory is constructed through narrative forms. Gay rights
activists strategically constructed events for memorization that allow
them to sustain their movements across time and space (Armstrong and
Crage 2006). Such memories also leave a political impact in present
mainstream politics. In It was like a Fever, Francesca Polletta (2006)
accounts for how African American legislators in the Senate and in
Congress invoked Dr Martin Luther King in order to promote policy
change or legitimate their own position within congressional debates.
In understanding memory as narrative “stored in stories”, Francesca
Polletta argues that stories contingently connect present social move-
ments with past ones. In documenting how Democrats and Republicans
interpreted Dr King’s famous statement “I have a dream” most differ-
ently, Polletta demonstrates how an American dream of individualism
at times came to replace the more disruptive, activist character of King,
his dreaming of social rights, and his radical critique of capitalism in his
last speeches delivered before his death. Polletta illustrates the political
impact of memory stored in competing stories about the civil rights
movement which served as “a crucial terrain to fight out continuous
212 Memory and Culture

leadership claims between protest elites and electoral ones” (Polletta

2002:165).
If we read Polletta’s analysis carefully and through a multidimen-
sional perspective on memory, then narrative and storytelling are not
the only analytical perspectives that come into play: Polletta rightly
directs attention to the institutional context and familiar plot lines of
unitary collective memory shaped by official settings within public com-
memoration impeding the telling of politically impactful stories by
activists. Beyond these insights into the constraints of narrative forms,
however, Polletta’s data illustrate the impact of Dr King as a character
figure (Jasper et al. forthcoming), an object of memory, a hero, and
a martyr (Schudson 1992). Polletta is clear about the fact that King’s
presence as a central hero enabled and yet constrained commemora-
tion, while neglected by narrative theorists interested foremost in plot
(Polletta et al. 2011). However, character figures are more than stories.
They stick out as visual, gendered hero figures or villains used as perfor-
mative carriers of memory, images, and role models that have an impact
(Jasper forthcoming). This means that beyond what narrative theorists
have done thus far, movement scholars may want to study narrative ele-
ments (such as plot) in interaction with other mnemonic forms (such
as image) using multidimensional comparison, as students of collective
memory have done.
Indeed, media sociologist Michael Schudson’s work on the making
of Watergate in American official cultural and collective memory has
focused on character figures and on symbols, including non-verbal
commemoration, to demonstrate that there is no shared memory but
rather contesting narratives in different political factions of media and
society (Schudson 1992:207). In understanding Watergate through his-
torical comparison, Schudson discusses how the character figure of a
Polish army general who supported Hungarian nationalists in the 19th-
century war against Russia became transformed from an official symbol
for communism into a counter-communist symbol of protest in 1956.
Michael Schudson thus concludes that the ambiguous character of col-
lective memory stored in officially silenced stories resists hegemonic
interpretations of conflicting past events, when he writes:

All stories can be read in more than one way. Although societies,
by remembering some stories, may successfully repress others, every
story contains its own alternative readings. Narratives are ambiguous,
or, to use a fancier term, polysemic.
(Schudson 1992:217)
 Nicole Doerr 213

By bringing together narrative and images, Schudson’s multidimen-

sional perspective highlights that political characters such as the Pol-
ish army general reveal the complicated and polyvalent relationships
between different oral, discursive, and visual mnemonic forms (Olick
and Robbins 1997). I suspect that a multidimensional perspective on
memory stored in different mnemonic forms and layers has implica-
tions for understanding how activists construct the future. For example,
in connecting Schudson’s and Polletta’s points, we may expect that not
only the ambiguous plots of stories but also visual characters’ “openness
for interpretation” (Polletta 2006:43) provide a condensed mnemonic
energy, which may help activists to re-imagine future struggles, while
also constraining them in doing so through its “resistant” character
(ibid:148; Schudson 1992:216).

Memory studies: How conflicting memories condition

future mobilization

Interestingly, in the same vein as media scholars, historians and lit-

erary theorists have problematized the contentious power of officially
repressed or “silenced” memories of conflict in families, organizations,
and divided societies. Silenced memories, they argue, become conflicting
memories, that is, memories that predict future conflict (Assmann 2005).
Influenced by psychoanalytical and postmodern approaches to time and
trauma, memory scholars assume there is a kind of story that resists new
interpretations. Such “silenced stories”, I argue in this section, may in
fact constrain dialogue,1 and the imagining of future collective action
in movements. I will elaborate and apply the concept of silenced stories
to social movement studies to focus on memories condensed in stories,
images, and/or discourses that did not get publicized officially to the out-
side public because their very existence involved a conflict among the
group itself (Schudson 1992; Olick and Levy 1997; Polletta 2002, 2005).
One of the first sociologists to address conflicting memories and
their silencing, Maurice Halbwachs, assumed that group-specific prac-
tices of oral remembering mark cultural boundaries and define who is
included or excluded politically in local settings for remembering and
forgetting (Halbwachs [1925] 1992:72; Olick 1999). Focusing on the
nation state, comparative historians and sociologists have revealed the
contentious and contested construction of collective memory at the
level of the nation state (Olick and Levy 1997; Steinberg 1999; Tilly
2003; Straughn 2009), and social movements’ powerful symbolic role in
revealing silenced stories of violent exclusion (Zolberg 1998:565; Olick,
214 Memory and Culture

Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011:430). For example, Aristide Zolberg

notes (1972), for the case of the French ‘68 movement, that officially
silenced memories of long past conflicts are informally transmitted and
enable young protesters to recall into the present the power of revolu-
tion to transform the routines of public discourse and enact symbolic
change. Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy, in focusing on official practices
of silencing, have shown that collective memory determines what can
be said and what remains silent in mainstream arenas of national politi-
cal deliberation (Olick and Levy 1997). However, activists who publicize
“silenced” stories on the internet and in transnational protest sum-
mits risk being punished severely (Assmann and Conrad 2010:2; see
also Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011:430). Moreover, resistant
memories also fail to make an impact within mainstream public dis-
course in national political institutions where they get silenced through
institutional arrangements (Polletta 2006:147).
If all these channels fail, how then are “silenced” memories of
excluded ethnic and social groups transmitted, and how does this affect
social movements? To answer the former question, historians and liter-
ary scholars have specifically focused on long cycles of violent conflict
and repression (Assmann and Conrad 2010). They have developed a
toolbar of critical analysis for official public “modes of remembering” in
order to understand how once “silenced memories” reenter contentious
public debates (Schwab 2010). I assume that the interdisciplinary con-
ceptual toolbar that memory studies apply also has lessons for the study
of conflict inside social movements. Let me briefly discuss how memory
studies, drawing on literature, psychoanalysis, and historical approaches
help us to explore the trans-generational making and transformation of
conflicting memories and their impact on constraining/enabling future
movements.
For example, following Gaby Schwab’s psychoanalytical approach to
collective memory we can define silenced memories as consequences
of violent conflict whose victims find no arena in which to tell their
stories – outside or possibly also inside diverse movement groups
(Schwab 2010:102–103). Following Abraham and Torok’s (1994) psy-
choanalytical theory of “cryptonomy”, Schwab understands memories
as powerful carriers of conflict between different groups and inside
them which is transmitted implicitly and often unnoticed across gen-
erations through the narrative form of “crypts” (Schwab 2010:103).
“Cryptonymy”, the art of tracing such remains of stories, refers to oper-
ations in language that emerge as manifestations of a psychic crypt,
often in the form of fragmentations, distortions, gaps, or ellipses. Once
 Nicole Doerr 215

“unintegrated and unassimilated”, such silenced stories however get

passed on in “indirect and implicit ways” and become fragmented
(Straughn 2009), potentially conflicting memories (Assmann 2005).
Abraham and Torok write about the crypt as an effect of failed mourn-
ing: “It is a burial place inside the self for a love object that is
lost but kept inside the self like a living dead” (Schwab 2010:103).
Psychoanalysts and literary scholars trace such narrative crypts within
literary texts, but we may also trace them in oral narratives – the kind of
incomplete stories that are typical of everyday language we find in the
study of interviews with activists or resistant groups (cf. Polletta et al.
2011). In her work on trans-generational trauma, Gaby Schwab suggests
that narrative crypts can be traced as they are transmitted in writing
and speech in which “buried ghosts of the past come to haunt language
from within” as a deathly atmosphere “threatening to destroy its com-
municated and expressive function” (Schwab 2010:102–3). Transposed
to the field of culture in movements, this implies that cultural forms of
expression – the official stories and frames activists use – may in fact
themselves be encrypted forms, which opens up a whole new field of
analysis. A multidimensional analysis of memory in movements thus
invites narrative theorists (and those working on discourse and framing)
to explore the contradictions between different stories and frames, the
silences, incompletions, and absences, in relation to conflict in the past.
How may encrypted stories shape movements’ success, failure, and
interrelationships between different movement groups? Below, I will
present examples to explore this question. Because of their intergen-
erational dimension (della Porta 2005b), current waves of transnational
social movements provide an exciting field to explore the conflicting
transmission of memory. Before, I want to note how psychoanalytical,
historical, and literary approaches empirically assess conflicting mem-
ories being transmitted across time. While scholars have explored the
silent transmission of memories of trauma (Hirsch 1997) and of violent
political exclusion (Assmann 2005), less is known about how ways of
storytelling that help to mediate memories of exclusion get processed
and included in such a way as to encourage social repair (Alexander
2006). Therefore, Aleida Assmann has recently proposed looking at pro-
cesses of remediation as a communicative practice that facilitates the
processing of conflicting events and violent histories in which group
members were involved (Assmann 2008:55).2
Students of conflicting memories within social movements may use
this approach that also proposes ways to understand the failure of such
remediation processes, using the concept of “premediation” (Assmann
216 Memory and Culture

2005:3). Premediation describes the (negative) impact of violent and

traumatic events which can neither be remembered and remediated
nor forgotten, and which are stored in stories foreclosing the future:
“the future, which until recently, was considered a resource for inno-
vation, change, hope and regeneration, has become a source of deep
collective anxiety and impending trauma” (Assmann 2005:3). In other
words, premediation means that narratives about violent exclusion
tend to “prefigure” the future in constructing “cultural schemata or
templates” for condensed remembering blocking dialogical interaction
across conflicting group identities (Assmann 2005:4).
I assume that this interdisciplinary work has further implications for
understanding memory’s conflicting trans-generational impact on social
movements. For narrative scholars, for example, who have focused on
narratives and stories in interaction between movement groups and a
wider public, the new conceptual focus on encryptment, remediation,
and premediation will enable a novel focus on dominant and conflict-
ing stories inside movements. Also in other fields, for example, when it
comes to explaining the frequent and repetitive internal crises of democ-
racy within different generations of social movements, the conflicting
potential of memory may be an explanatory category that offers itself
for further analysis. While numerous activists and scholars have tried
to explain the frequent internal crisis3 of democracy, they have not
problematized memory as a potentially conflicting dimension of culture
that triggered conflicts within and between different movement groups
trying to cooperate with each other. However, Donatella della Porta
urges us to study movements as public spaces and internally conflict-
ing arenas (della Porta 2005), which means that different groups may
compete about the one legitimate story that represents the movement
(see also Polletta 2006). In this respect Francesca Polletta’s work, while
not explicitly focusing on memory, reveals the connection between con-
flicting stories of the past and democratic crises in present generations of
activists: First, Polletta argues that radical democracy in American social
movements meant very different things in different periods depend-
ing on who (was seen to) use it, whether religious or non-religious
groups, male or female organizers, black or white, Southern or North-
ern, working-class or middle-class people (Polletta 2002, 2005). Second,
because of the exclusion of some groups, the future of new movements
was always going to be shaped by prevailing negative memories of failed
movement-democracies in preceding ones. For example, women’s liber-
ation groups built their radical, consensus-based model for democracy
in a way to overcome the perceived male-dominated, exclusive model
 Nicole Doerr 217

of democracy within the New Left (Polletta 2002:150). Or, also, young
American activists today may want to ensure that their democracies do
not look white-dominated, avoiding the exclusionary image of past ones
(Polletta 2005). This means that memory is an independent category of
culture that influences the stories activists tell within meetings and the
resulting conflicts present movement-democracies experience. By work-
ing with a multidimensional perspective of memory, we can empirically
get at those images, stories, identity constructions or symbols that
powerfully recreate conflicts inside present movements.

An example: Studying encrypted stories in trans-generational

movement groups
Let me briefly provide an example drawing on my own research on
memory and conflict in the European Social Forum. Created in 2002,
the European Social Forum was Europe’s largest transnational discursive
public space for debating alternatives to neoliberal globalization in the
global justice movement (della Porta 2005). While the students’ and
‘68 movements had a negative relation to the past (Polletta 2002:80),
today’s global justice groups in the European Social Forum positively
stress their trans-generational lineage including leftist parties, unions
as well as feminist, anarchist, and autonomous groups who had been
fighting each other since the sixties (della Porta 2005). However, ethnog-
raphers and anthropologists have shown the repeated democratic crises
in the transnational and European Social Forum process, interpreting
them as a consequence of different organizing cultures (Juris 2005) and
of power asymmetries (Maeckelbergh 2009). My specific focus on the
conflicting role of memory made me interested in whether and how
encrypted stories (a concept I discuss above) and old conflicts structured
such democratic crises. My cross-national comparison of the Italian and
British Social Forums illustrates that depending on the context, mem-
ories of violent symbolic exclusion in past movements account for the
intensity, and timing of democratic crises in the national Social Forums
I studied. In using Schwab’s approach for my analysis of discourse and
public storytelling, I found that the attempt to build dialogue and rad-
ical democracy in the Social Forums “clashed” at the very moment in
which carrier groups publicized their “encrypted stories” of long-past
symbolic exclusion (Doerr 2012).
Carrier groups were experienced activists who remembered violent
symbolic exclusion in previous decades’ movements. If, for example, as
it happened in one place, anarchists participating in past social move-
ments had felt excluded by socialists, then exactly this memory of
218 Memory and Culture

conflict would come up again. “Encrypted” stories were informal sto-

ries that predicted the conflict with other ideological groups, before the
beginning of meetings that aimed at potential dialogue. For example,
a participant said in an email: “The problem with consensus in the UK
is not that it means endless decisions, but that it allows people like the
Socialist Workers Party since 25 years to appropriate the process in the
UK, in the way that they stand in the centre and take the process over
and manipulate.”4 Interestingly, young participants who had never been
part of these old conflicts perceived a “poisoned” or “deathly” atmo-
sphere once such a story was told or transmitted via email. However,
in the end, even these newcomers also themselves became entangled in
the logic of conflict, which led to new conflict, frustration, and the death
of national social forums. By extending the perspective to memory, we
start to understand the far-reaching but nuanced impact of stories about
conflicts long past. If I had not considered the conflicting power of
encrypted stories and traumatized storytellers, I would have had diffi-
culties in understanding why some people’s stories told before meetings
had such a tremendous impact.
How then do activists succeed in mobilizing the past as a resource
in order to mobilize support for social change and against dominant
opinions? An open question that needs further exploration is whether
and how heterogeneously composed social movement groups can digest
and remediate memories of exclusion so as to facilitate cooperation in
the future. Interestingly, memories of exclusion can have stimulating
impacts in fostering the construction of new identities. For example,
feminist theorists, critical discourse analysts, and historical sociolo-
gists outside the field of social movement studies have made it their
task to study how memory enables collective action. Taking a critical,
discursive perspective interested in assessing practices of the “silencing”
of women’s and/or workers’ stories (Wodak 2004), feminists docu-
mented the exclusionary dynamics of mainstream participatory democ-
racy inside social movements, feminist groups, and in the New Left
(Phillips 1993; Mohanty 2003). A point that is particularly important
for a multidimensional perspective of memory is the role of those resist-
ing memories that make for newly emerging movements within broader
streams of social movements. In problematizing the internal reproduc-
tion of racial injustice as well as claims for change within the civil rights
movement, memory scholar Kathleen McElroy (2011) explores how
memories resist dominant narratives on the movements by officials.
In focusing on written discourse rather than on oral narrative, for exam-
ple, she shows how obituaries in the New York Times remember the civil
rights movement. However, as the case of the remembering of Rosa Parks
 Nicole Doerr 219

illustrates, in the process of constructing memory, collective stories of

resistance risk being mainstreamed by benevolent movement supporters
or strategists into individualist hero-narratives (Schudson 2012).

Visual memory: Comparative historical approaches

and performance

Another interdisciplinary field of analysis that illustrates the poten-

tial of a multidimensional perspective on memory is visual memory.
Defining collective memories as “images of the past”, memory scholars
have made images and visual symbols a key object of their analysis,
assuming that discourse and images are fluid, interrelated categories
(Olick and Robbins 1997:106). In other fields, such as historical com-
parative sociology, scholars like Eiko Ikegami have also shown for
the case of Japan that non-verbal and visual forms of memory in
objects served movements as an alternative public space where the
spoken word was strictly prohibited (Ikegami 2000). To assure con-
tinuous mobilization in periods of repression and extremely violent
“silencing” of movements’ discourse by officials, activists could exclu-
sively use tacit and visual forms, which determined the future shape of
modern “Japanese” political culture (Ikegami 2000). In addressing the
incomplete notion of movement publics as merely discursive publics
in Habermas’ sense, she suggests that visual culture, condensed in
visual and tacit forms of memory, in fact enabled mutual understand-
ing and political communication and collective action in non-Western
contexts.
This suggests that a multidimensional perspective on memory should
compare how different mnemonic forms such as visual and verbal forms
of memory empirically interact, as complementary, contradicting, and
potentially conflicting factors. Let me give a first example for what this
can contribute to theories of culture and memory in movements. I have
shown that movement scholars who focused on narrative and fram-
ing were able to demonstrate how selective strategies of storytelling or
traumatic events made for a rupture with past movements. In compari-
son, movement scholars who traced memory in visual and performative
forms came to different results – showing sources of resistance under
very hard circumstances. For example, performance theorists such as
Ron Eyerman (2004) find continuity in the transmission of the shared
experiences of collective resistance by African American slaves who were
unable to frame, debate or tell their stories in political or discursive
arenas (Eyerman 2004:159). Eyerman combined psychoanalytical and
literary approaches with the analysis of visual art and music in order
220 Memory and Culture

to understand the transmission of memory across huge ruptures. This

multidimensional approach allows him to demonstrate how members
of marginalized groups transmit common knowledge across time, losing
their language but not their memory.
Inspired by the visual turn in performance and cultural studies, an
increasing number of social movement students have started to perform
visual analysis – combining it with various theoretical traditions such as
framing (Mattoni 2007), cultural studies and semiotics (Daphi, Ullrich,
and Lê 2013) or discourse analysis (Doerr 2010). Let me give another
example of how a multidimensional analysis of visual memory helps
to deepen and complement conventional discursive and text-based
approaches and methods.
My colleague Alice Mattoni and I tried to compare and interpret the
posters by young “EuroMayday” protesters in different European coun-
tries including Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and the UK (Mattoni and
Doerr 2007). Across the cases we studied, protesters were inspired by
anarchist and autonomous movements, and they also mobilized on the
same issues such as precarious labor conditions and migrants’ rights.
However, despite these similarities, we were puzzled that we did not find
shared national poster frames among protesters in individual countries,
but instead similarities among local groups across different countries.
Contrary to what we had expected, a few local posters – one created
by a small, provincial group in a north eastern Italian city – spread
across Western Europe, and, surprisingly, even to Japan and Canada.
One particularly widespread visual protest character was San Precario,
an invented “saint” of precarious workers, also invented in Italy. Other
“successful” visual characters invented by activists drew heavily on glob-
ally popular cultural icons such as precarious “Super heroic” figures that
imitated flashy manga and comic styles (Mattoni and Doerr 2007). How
could we prove that the broad cross-national diffusion of these distinct
few visual figures came from their ironic play with collective memory?
Since the transmission of memory was implicit and visual rather than
discursive, activists themselves had been surprised that some of their
images “worked well” in different places, some which they had never
expected to do so, such as the local San Precario figure. Our conven-
tional text-based methods of discourse and media analysis, interviews,
and framing were insufficient.
In reading the literature on visual memory I started to understand that
activists’ mimesis of religious saints was probably politically efficient
because it tapped into a stock of well-known images (Assmann 2005),
addressing a particular age group (Doerr 2010). But for what reasons
 Nicole Doerr 221

did protesters’ superhero characters attract a transnational audience of

sympathizers in many countries? Interestingly, we noted that while
the “SuperHeroic” images that were being created in different coun-
tries looked similar, each super Heroic/Heroine’s slogan, story, and also
gender characteristics changed, sometimes reversing previous meanings.
With respect to transnational publics, the tricky thing is to understand
why an image creates contention or “works” in a particular national
context, or, why the meaning associated with it changes in a different
context of visual memory. Students of visual memory in media studies
have been able to explain how single political images without a clear
textual message trigger contention or understanding among different
cultural or political groups by recalling the condensed energy of pre-
ceding works of art and religious iconography (Olick and Robbins 1997;
Müller and Öczan 2007). By including these insights into a multidimen-
sional analysis of superhero symbols, stories and slogans, we started to
understand how active forgetting happened, as the most “cutting edge”
hero figures “lost” their radical slogans, or got entirely lost as symbols
of resistance if filtered through group ideologies in specific local settings
(see also Doerr and Milman 2014).
Indeed, students of visual memory, trying to understand how memory
is “lost in translation”, have worked with Freud’s concept of the screen
and the images behind it, which also provides some relevant insights
for visual analysts of social movements. For example, where political
posters seem to reveal an immediate “déjà vu” effect of well-known his-
torical political contexts, sociologists of memory have instead pointed
to hidden images behind the screen of official collective memory (Olick
and Robbins 1997). Moreover, visual images and photographs used by
officials (or by activists) may be the surviving of memories of violence
and conflict that no can longer be seen, or, in other words, a kind of
“encrypted” set of images behind the screen. For a multidimensional
analysis of visual memory this suggests that it would be interesting to
compare how activists construct and use encrypted images as well as
encrypted stories, and how stories may hide other stories or images
behind them, images that can no longer be seen and that have been
“lost” in the process of conflictual translation (Schwab 2010).
Take again the example of the EuroMayday protests against social
precarity. Another puzzle that popped up in comparing representations
of migrants in activists’ posters was the following: Unlike activists in
other European countries, German EuroMayday activists combined por-
traits of undocumented migrants with border fortifications and barbed
wire fences. In comparison, protesters in other countries such as Italy
222 Memory and Culture

and Spain used photo collage portraits of migrants in everyday life

showing them as a totally integrated part of society, and not in the
position of marginalized outsiders (Doerr 2010). Visual memory scholars
have developed cross-national and cross-historical comparison in order
to understand such differences in political imagination. For example,
the historian Gerhard Paul compared the stock of images constitut-
ing the European Union’s contemporary official visual memory with
that of media images and activist groups. He finds that “the images
of barbed wire fences, border fortifications and watchtowers” are part
of “image clusters” reflecting experiences of a “century of violence”
in the German and European context (Paul 2011:46). Paul problema-
tizes that the experiential visual memory of Europe cannot be found
in pictures constructed or used by pro-European movements or offi-
cials but in the virtual images in people’s minds. His cross-national
comparison of Europe’s visual political history documents that these
unofficial “image clusters” popularized through art, literature and pop-
ular culture constitute a virtual type of “visual sites of memory” of
Europe’s – and Germany’s – violent past, a term derived from Pierre
Nora’s notion of Lieu De Mémoire (ibid.). In the empirical example of
the EuroMayday, however, only in Germany did activists’ posters con-
nect the theme of migration referring to symbols of the national history
of violence (Doerr 2010), a result that finds parallels in a discourse
analysis of German parliamentary debates (Olick and Levy 1997) and
in a most recently conducted study on the anti-surveillance move-
ments (Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013). Beyond the official discourse of
a shared European memory, this suggests the prevailing impact of dif-
ferentiated, localized and place specific national memory cultures. These
examples illustrate how the conflicting making of memory in multiple
visual, discursive, and narrative forms, helps to deepen our comparative
analysis and understanding of movements mobilizing in place-specific
historical contexts.

Discussion: Towards a multidimensional perspective

of memory in movements

In this contribution I have developed a multidimensional understand-

ing of memory; that is, a conceptual approach that helps us explore
memory in multiple, connected, and conflicting mnemonic practices
such as narrative and discourse, framing, visual, and performance. Soci-
ologists of culture disagree on whether movements necessarily require
a shared collective memory or not (Polletta et al. 2011). Based on my
 Nicole Doerr 223

discussion above, I propose to think of movements as a result of mul-

tiple, conflicting processes of remembering and forgetting. Movement
scholars have done important work on particular aspects of memory
such as narrative, discourse, and performance, but they have not yet
seen these forms together as multiple forms and media transmitting
conflicting memories. To fill this gap, I have read theories and empir-
ical studies of memory in sociology, history, literature, psychoanalysis,
media, and feminism to show how we can understand memory system-
atically as an independent category of culture that underlies all other
practices of cultural expression in movements, also including “silences”
or “silencing” practices. While movement scholars addressed memory
with a focus on its strategic mobilization in interactions between move-
ments and their opponents or target groups, I have proposed a focus on
the complicated making of memory inside movements as well. For exam-
ple, one interesting empirical insight from memory studies regards the
role of violence and conflict, and of traumatic experiences: I have shown
that conflicts within present movements become silenced memories
which will predictably pop up within future storytelling practices, limit-
ing potential interaction, and/or foster images or identities. This means
that activists construct memory and try to change it, but my point is
that they are constrained by context-specific mnemonic repertoires.
The proposed multidimensional approach is distinct from previous
work on narrative or on framing that has focused on how movements
mobilize memory without taking into consideration conflicts about
memory inside movements. By extending the focus from narrative to
memory I introduced the concept of “encrypted” stories and asked
whether the images activists use also result from “encrypted” images
filtering a conflicting past. While previous work focused on strategies of
storytelling from movements towards other groups, I argued that a focus
on “encrypted stories” and conflicting memories inside movements
helps to better understand major internal democratic crises. Similarly,
in focusing on visual memory, I have shown that “conflicting” mem-
ories in the form of political characters or of unofficial “visual sites of
memory” in popular memory are an important resource and point of
inspiration for social movements, but they are also a source of internal
conflict or contentious mobilization. This ambiguous role of “conflict-
ing memories” and conflicts about memory may inspire future research
on the multiple methods of cross-generational transmission. The two
dimensions of analysis (the focus on conflict and the focus on multiple
forms of memory), beyond the field of memory as such, helps move-
ment scholars to explore and compare interactions between different
224 Memory and Culture

dimensions of cultural analysis such as narrative and visual analysis,

discourse, and performance.

Notes
1. I define the notion of dialogue broadly: Beyond the notion of dialogue as
deliberative democracy, I mean dialogue across historical lines of conflict.
2. Following Grusin’s media theory, Assmann conceives of memory as a “medi-
ated memory” (Assmann 2005:4).
3. By the notion of crisis, I mean a breakdown, frequently the end of participa-
tion by grassroots activists (Polletta 2002).
4. My fieldnotes.

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11
Embodying Protest: Culture
and Performance within
Social Movements
Jeffrey S. Juris

Cultural approaches to the study of social movements are by now well

ensconced in the pantheon of social movement theory as the field
has moved beyond the overly rationalist, materialist, and institutional
biases of resource mobilization and early political process traditions.
Responding to the challenge of new social movement theorists and the
general trend towards cultural approaches across a range of fields over
the past two decades, social movement scholars have produced numer-
ous accounts of the relationship between culture and political protest
(see e.g. Fantasia 1988; McAdam 1988; Melucci 1989; Laraña, Johnston,
and Gusfield 1994; Darnovsky, Epstein, and Flacks 1995; Johnston and
Klandermans 1995; Jasper 1997; Rochon 1998). Despite critiques of the
overly strategic and static notions of culture in many of these accounts,
as well as a recognition of the productive, contested, and dialogical
nature of culture (Fantasia and Hirsch 1995; Polletta 1997; Steinberg
1999), there has been little attention paid to the role of performance in
forging alternative emotions, meanings, and identities among activists
(but see Fine 1995; Eyerman 2006; Tilly 2008; Hohle 2009).
This chapter explores the links between culture and performance in
social movements. Based on my observations of recent movements,
including Occupy and the movements for global justice (see Juris 2005,
2008a, 2008b, 2012), and other relevant writing on protest and perfor-
mance, I argue that it is through cultural performance that alternative
meanings, values, and identities are produced, embodied, and publicly
communicated within social movements. A focus on cultural perfor-
mance also helps to bridge the mind/body divide that, with the excep-
tion of the literature on social movements and emotion (see Goodwin,

227
228 Embodying Protest

Jasper, and Polletta 2001), continues to plague accounts of move-

ment cultures. In particular, emphasizing how protest performances are
embodied allows us to explore the way meanings and identities are
expressed through the body (Scheper-Hughes and Locke 1987), as well as
the body as a lived subject and agent (Lyon and Barbalet 1994). After an
opening section that lays out the theoretical framework, I examine the
links between culture and performance through an analysis of different
modes of protest performance and then conclude with some reflections
on the political limitations of performative protest.
First, however, an important proviso is in order regarding the dan-
ger of over-extending the concept of performance. As Goodwin and
Jasper (1999) have suggested in relation to the idea of political oppor-
tunity, the notion of performance can be used in so many ways and
to cover so many things that it becomes meaningless. As Burke (2005)
writes, “It is surely necessary to ask what in social life does not count
as a scenario or a performance?” (43). In some sense, this is the point.
To the extent that culture is performative, any practice that involves
the production of alternative meanings, ideas, or identities has to be
understood as performance. Nonetheless, there are certainly activities
less directed at public audiences. In the realm of social movements, these
include letter writing, phone calling, and other direct forms of lobbying;
recruiting members of a community to attend a meeting; or the ongo-
ing work of maintaining radical bookstores, squatted social centres, and
urban gardens. Such practices have a performative dimension, but they
are not performances in the same sense as a mass direct action, street
march, protest song, or guerrilla theatre presentation. It may thus help
to think about social movement practices as arrayed along a continuum
from more to less performative. It is also important to point out that
performance is not unique to social movements, but given activists’
need to communicate with a larger public and to produce opposi-
tional discourses, social movements often make use of performance as
an important strategic and tactical tool. In this chapter I explore the
more performative dimensions of social movement practice with a par-
ticular focus on the most highly visible performances that are meant
for wider audiences, including other activists, policy-makers, and the
general public.

Culture, performance, and social movements

According to Ann Swidler (1995), the sociology of culture has been char-
acterized by two basic theoretical traditions, each of which has been
 Jeffrey S. Juris 229

applied to greater or lesser degrees in the cultural sociology of social

movements. On the one hand, the Weberian tradition has focused on
meaningful action at the individual level. The goal of such analysis
is to grasp how particular ideas or world views – such as the Protes-
tant ethic – shape individual behaviour. The Weberian influence can
be seen, for example, in social-psychological accounts of social move-
ment culture, such as the literature on framing (see Snow et al. 1986)
or studies of how movements shape individual values and beliefs (see
Rochon 1998).
On the other hand, the Durkheimian tradition understands culture
in terms of publicly shared symbols and collective representations,
which constitute rather than merely reflect group life (Swidler 1995).
Although he was greatly influenced by the Weberian problematic of
culture, Clifford Geertz (1973), whose work ushered in a cultural turn
across the humanities and social sciences, is perhaps more indebted to
Durkheim in his view of culture as a system of meanings embedded
in public symbols as opposed to ideas that exist inside people’s heads.
On this view, the role of the analyst is to interpret cultural meanings as
texts, not to explain how ideas motivate action. As a cultural anthro-
pologist, my own view of culture is more Geertzian, although Geertz’s
hermeneutic approach requires some adaptation. As William Roseberry
(1989) forcefully argued, viewing culture as a text removes it from the
material process of its creation and implies greater uniformity than war-
ranted. In this sense, attention should focus on the process through
which cultural meanings are produced and the struggles over meaning
waged by differently situated actors within complex fields of power (see
Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Burdick 1998).
Many social movement scholars have also criticized the tendency
towards reductive, static views of culture, particularly in relation to the-
ories of framing, viewing movements as sites of cultural contestation
and meaning production in the context of ongoing political struggle
and dialogical interaction (see e.g. Tarrow 1992; Fantasia and Hirsch
1995; Polletta 1997; Steinberg 1999). The important point for our pur-
poses, which has been neglected in the social movements literature, is
that alternative cultural meanings and identities are largely produced
via embodied cultural performance.1 As Jeffrey Alexander (2004:531)
has suggested, “cultural texts are performed so that meanings can be
displayed to others”. A focus on performance allows us not only to
appreciate the dynamics of cultural production and communication but
also to move beyond the mind/body dualism that underlies so many
accounts of social movement culture.
230 Embodying Protest

The theme of performance has not been entirely absent from main-
stream work on social movements. Indeed, Charles Tilly has long
written about the importance of protest repertoires – public meet-
ings, demonstrations, rallies, petition drives, and so on – to the
sustained, organized forms of claims-making that characterize social
movements. A given repertoire involves a particular “ensemble of per-
formances” (2004:3). This theatrical metaphor signals the “clustered,
learned, yet improvisational” nature of claims-making routines between
the aggrieved and the object of their claims (Tilly 2008:14). Repertoires
may vary, yet, “on the whole, when people make collective claims,
they innovate within limits set by the repertoire already established for
their place, time, and pair” (ibid:14–15). Nonetheless, as he has himself
admitted, Tilly (2008:xv) did not engage the wider literature on perfor-
mance, and thus never explored the finer details of performance in a
way that might shed theoretical light on the relationship between per-
formance, specific bodily movements, and the production of particular
cultural meanings and identities.
Social movement theorists influenced by the dramaturgical tradition
have explored how ritualized symbolic performances express conflict
and communicate power (Taylor and Whittier 1995:176). Specifically,
social movement dramas demonstrate how antagonists have violated
cultural norms regarding the proper use and distribution of authority
(Benford and Hunt 1992:38). Performing in the context of movement
dramas also has an emotional impact, generating feelings of agency
and experiences of self-transformation (see also Jasper, this volume).
Such dramaturgical models begin to get at the intersections of culture,
emotions, and performance, but the links between them remain under-
theorized. Recent approaches to performance involve a more fluid view
of culture than the fixed cultural scripts of the dramaturgical model
(Burke 2005). Writing on ritual and social movements has done a better
job of specifying the links between emotions and protest (Jasper 1997;
Collins 2001), but the performative dimension is often obscured. It is
only in recent work on social movements that engages the wider lit-
erature on performance (e.g. Reed 2005; Eyerman 2006; Juris 2008a,
2008b; Hohle 2009; Bogad 2010; Haugerud 2010; Shepard 2010), where
the links between protest performance, bodies, and cultural creativity is
coming more fully into view.
It is in the domain of cultural performance that the production of
alternative meanings and identities is brought together with image
and emotion through the enactment of embodied tactical repertoires.
Hymes (1975) defines performance as “cultural behavior for which a
 Jeffrey S. Juris 231

person assumes responsibility to an audience” (Burke 2005:38). Per-

formances are composed of “strips” of “restored behavior”, learned
repertoires that are both symbolic and meaningful and can be cre-
atively arranged and rearranged to express particular ideas and identities
through rehearsal, adaptation, and experiment (Schechner 1985). Per-
formances thus communicate verbal and non-verbal messages to an
audience (Bauman 1975; Beeman 1993), while allowing participants
to experience symbolic meanings in the context of ritual interaction
(Schieffelin 1985).
At the same time, performances are constitutive: of meanings, iden-
tities, images, feelings, and even bodies (see Butler 1997). As Debra
Kapchan (1995) maintains, “To perform is to carry something into
effect” (479). Moreover, the enhancement of experience and heightened
intensity of communicative interaction associated with performance
make it a powerful vehicle for social change efforts. Richard Bauman
(1975) put it thusly, “Through his performance, the performer elicits
the participative attention and energy of his audience . . . When the per-
former gains control in this way, the potential for transformation of
the social structure may become available to him as well” (305). Mov-
ing beyond overly cognitive approaches to social movement culture
and identity, Eyerman (2006) contends that performance “adds drama
and activates emotion . . . [It] focuses on corporality and presence; per-
formance is what makes a movement move and helps it move others.
The performance of opposition dramatizes and forcefully expresses a
movement through designed and stylized acts, communicating protest
beyond the movement itself” (198).
Although many activists are highly aware of the performative dimen-
sions of protest and, in my experience, social movements are often
extremely self-reflexive about the strategic pros and cons of different
types of protest performance, it is true that not all of the practices
I examine here are interpreted by all activists as performances. For
example, a mass counter-summit blockade may have clear performative
dimensions from the point of view of the analyst, but for many activists
the blockade may be viewed in practical terms as an effort to shut a
meeting down, to disrupt the functioning of an institution viewed as
illegitimate, or to prevent a particular policy from taking effect. Such
interpretations will vary according to the performative tactic (guerrilla
theatre is more likely to be perceived by activists in performative terms
than, say, a sit-in to disrupt the operation of a nuclear weapons fac-
tory) or to the particular activist group involved. For example, some
groups may be more open to mass media-oriented strategies that rely
232 Embodying Protest

on performance for achieving visibility, while more militant collectives

may reject media strategies in favour of producing more direct effects
such as those highlighted above. Here I am using performance from an
analytic rather than an emic perspective, although many activists I have
worked with recognize the performative and “practical” dimensions of
their protest tactics.
Social movement performances vary in relation to the identity and
goals of participants, the specific practices and forms, the degree of
formality and improvization, the level of danger and intensity, and
the context and scale. Different modalities of protest performance use
bodies and space in particular ways to produce alternative cultural
meanings, identities, and forms of emotional experience. In what fol-
lows I explore the dynamics of performance in relation to four types of
performative protest: macro-level protest events, micro-level embodied
performances, protest theatre, and musical performances. These cate-
gories have been distinguished for heuristic purposes, and in practice
they overlap. However, separating them this way allows me to analyze
particular features associated with each type. The first two categories
refer to scale and level of abstraction. On the one hand, focusing on
macro-level protests allows me to examine the wider logics and cultural
dynamics of mass actions as strategic social movement performances.
On the other hand, exploring micro-level embodied performances,
which often (but not always) take place in the context of mass actions,
allows for a consideration of the particular mechanisms and effects of
specific embodied tactics. The final two categories are actually subsets of
the latter, but their particular features – the higher degree of planning
and formality in the case of theatre; the rhythmic and vocal qualities in
the case of music – make it appropriate to treat them separately.

Macro-level protest events

The largest-scale social movement performances are the macro-level

protest events that activists use to make their struggles visible to a wider
audience and to generate powerful emotions and identities. These are
the marches, rallies, public meetings, direct actions, and riots that com-
prise Tilly’s protest repertoires. These large-scale cultural performances
constitute social processes “by which actors, individually or in con-
cert, display for others the meaning of their social situation” (Alexander
2004:529). The two most significant strategic innovations in recent
decades have been the rise of the mass-counter summit action within
the global justice movements and the emergence of extended physical
 Jeffrey S. Juris 233

occupations of urban space that ushered in the recent Occupy move-

ments. Although using different mechanisms – one relying on direct
confrontation within a delimited time-space, the other on simultaneous
extended non-violent occupations of multiple spaces – each of these tac-
tics uses performance to communicate dissent via media spectacle and
to produce and embody an alternative set of cultural ideas, identities,
practices, and forms.
Compared to institutionalized protests, relatively free-form mass
actions and occupations are more visually and emotively potent. This
is so because activists use their bodies to physically enact confronta-
tion and occupy space through ritual performance, and because they
introduce elements of danger, uncertainty, and play, generating a “limi-
noid” space (Turner 1982) where alternative worlds can be imagined and
political utopias prefigured through lived experience.2 The difference
between scripted demonstrations and unpredictable actions is captured
by Don Handelman’s (1990) distinction between events that “present
the lived-in world” and events that “re-present the lived in world”.
The former, including marches and rallies, directly display, declare,
and reflect the world as constituted. The latter, including open-ended
performances such as carnival, entail comparison, contrast, and cri-
tique. Events of re-presentation have a distinct liminal quality involving
a lack of hierarchy and strong egalitarian sentiments, or “commu-
nitas” (Turner 1969). As events of re-presentation, large-scale public
occupations and mass actions shine a critical light on the existing socio-
political order and make visible alternative forms of organization and
sociality. The novel cultural and political forms produced within Occupy
and other recent movements, including the consensus-based decision-
making processes, the General Assemblies, and the “horizontal” camp
and affinity group structures (horizontal in theory, if not always in prac-
tice), have a clear egalitarian and communitarian thrust. At the same
time, mass actions and more confrontational moments during pub-
lic occupations, such as evictions of Occupy encampments, are shot
through with liminoid moments of terror, panic, and play, eliciting high
levels of “affective solidarity” (Juris 2008a, 2008b).
Counter-summit protests and public occupations are complex ritual
performances that involve “imagineered resistance”: struggles that are
at once embodied and mediated (Routledge 1997). In this sense, the
kinds of protest performance examined in this chapter have a sym-
biotic relationship with the mass media (see Gitlin 1980). Externally,
large-scale direct actions are performative terrains that allow protesters
to produce and communicate alternative cultural meanings and ideas
234 Embodying Protest

to an audience comprised of other activists, policy makers, and the

general public. Such “critique through spectacle” (DeLuca 1999) con-
forms to prevailing media logics, a way of seeing and interpreting the
world via the production formats and modes of transmission of mass
media as entertainment (Altheide and Snow 1991). In an era of “info-
tainment” unusual, spontaneous, dramatic, and emotionally satisfying
events often garner significant media attention while less visually and
emotionally compelling incidents go unnoticed (Ibid; Castells 1996).
By staging spectacular “image events” (DeLuca 1999), protesters make
unequal power relations visible and challenge dominant symbolic codes
(Melucci 1989).
Internally, mass actions and public occupations provide multiple
“theatrical spaces” (Hetherington 1998) where alternative identities
are performed and emotions are generated via ritual conflict and the
lived experience of prefigured utopias (see also Flesher Fominaya this
volume). Image is specifically linked to emotion through embodied per-
formances that generate powerful feelings and prepare activist bodies
for action. As Randall Collins (2001) suggests, mass protests are charac-
terized by “high ritual density”, resulting from the bodily awareness of
co-presence among ritual participants who are physically assembled and
share a mutual focus of attention. As performative rituals, mass actions
and occupations operate by transforming affect: amplifying an initiating
emotion, such as anger or rage, and transferring it into a sense of collec-
tive solidarity involving feelings of exhilaration, passion, and euphoria.
Throughout a protest action, activists often experience periodic inter-
vals of fear, panic, and even boredom as confrontations with the police
give way to long hours of waiting and anticipation, contributing to the
emotional diversity and complexity of performative protest rituals.
Mass global justice actions such as the 1999 blockade of the WTO
Summit in Seattle, which prevented delegates from meeting during the
first day of the proceedings, or the 2000 protest against the World
Bank and IMF in Prague, which blocked delegates inside the congress
centre, involved multiple embodied confrontations that generated spec-
tacular images and communicated powerful cultural critiques of the
socio-political order (Juris 2008a, 2008b). At the same time, the shift-
ing feelings of excitement, uncertainty, danger, and play, together with
the sense of co-presence and common purpose among so many indi-
viduals and groups engaged in radical dissent and egalitarian forms of
organization, generated a great deal of affective solidarity.
Although less confrontational, the mass performances of the recent
Occupy movements achieved similar, if less intense, media and
 Jeffrey S. Juris 235

emotional effects by extending public occupations across space and over

time, producing the sense of a powerful, rapidly growing movement
that elicited comparatively positive media coverage while generating
emotional attachments and the rise of a new subjectivity (the 99%)
across, but not erasing, important differences of race, class, and gen-
eration. The occupations were a performative terrain constituted by a
massing of bodies in space that allowed protesters to communicate alter-
native cultural meanings and ideals with respect to the distribution of
political and economic power and to experiment with new forms of
horizontal democracy and directly democratic decision-making (Juris
2012). In this sense, large-scale protest events such as mass global jus-
tice actions and occupations generate alternative meanings, identities,
and emotions while bringing together cultural and embodied practices.
In relation to the other types of protest performance examined here,
macro-level protest events are uniquely suited to producing feelings of
belonging to a larger movement and eliciting images that convey the
existence of a mass-based collective actor.

Micro-level embodied performances

The protest actions described above are large-scale cultural perfor-

mances, but they also provide terrains for myriad micro-level perfor-
mances and struggles. The difference here is primarily one of analytic
abstraction. In Tilly’s terms (2008), “ensembles” of small-scale per-
formances bundle together to constitute larger repertoires of dissent.
Whereas in the last section I was concerned with broader cultural log-
ics and mechanisms, here I am more interested in the specific dynamics
of embodied spatial tactics. At Occupy Boston, for example, protesters
frequently engaged in performative struggles with the police and city
authorities over the placement of their tents, the boundaries of their
camps, and the kinds of materials that could be used. Sometimes groups
of protesters would use unadorned, non-violent bodies to peacefully
resist attempts to move them or prevent them from circulating, while on
other occasions protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks and black hoodies
would assume more defiant postures.3 Such performative militancy was
more pronounced at Occupy Oakland, given the aggressive stance of the
police there and the widely circulating images of black-clad “anarchists”
tangling with riot cops, but similar performances were also apparent to
varying degrees at other camps.
More common at Occupy Boston were the creative, festive, and ironic
performances of colourfully dressed protesters communicating their
236 Embodying Protest

messages to drivers and pedestrians through the diverse signs carried

by individual protesters (“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!”; “End
the Wars and Tax the Rich!”; “Make too much money for government
assistance, but enough to support myself: I AM THE 99%!”) and visually
arresting scenes like a group of young men at the camp’s permanent vigil
decked out in red Speedos holding placards conveying messages such as
“Speedos Now!” or “1% of this SPEEDO is covering 99% of my?*@ [this
symbol is referring here to ‘ass’]!” The use of Speedos was meant to create
a visual spectacle while the associated slogans were largely nonsensi-
cal, using humour and absurdity to capture the attention of onlookers,
although the creative adaptation of movement imagery might also be
read as a whimsical metaphor suggesting the disproportionate influence
of the 1%. At the same time, struggles over the legitimacy of tactical per-
formances (militant vs. non-violent, ludic vs. serious, mobile vs. rooted
in place, etc.) reflect internal cultural-political differences within move-
ments that may result in the generation of competing ideas, meanings,
and identities.
Mass global justice actions made particularly evident the links
between distinct modes of embodied performance, alternative mean-
ings, and space. At the mobilization against the World Bank and IMF
in Prague in September 2000, for example, protesters divided the urban
terrain into colour-coded zones to accommodate diverse modes of per-
formative protest (see Juris 2005, 2008b and Daphi in this volume
regarding similar terrains of protest in Genoa). The Blue March involved
high-risk militant action featuring masked black-clad protesters enact-
ing scenes of violent confrontation with the police; the Yellow March an
innovative mode of confrontational yet non-violent protest led by the
Italian White Overalls wearing absurdly decorated helmets and foam
padding and advancing behind large plastic shields; the Pink March a
space for traditional non-violent sit-ins; and the Pink and Silver Bloc
a mobile terrain for playful theatrics, drag, and burlesque dancing in
the spirit of Reclaim the Streets and queer protest, from the gay lib-
eration movements of the 1960s to Act Up and the struggle against
HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s (Reed 2005; Shepard 2010). Compet-
ing cultural meanings were embodied via diverse protest performances,
inscribing distinct messages on the urban and media landscapes (Juris
2008a, 2008b).
During such actions the activist body is transformed into a site of
political agency, as protesters produce and disseminate diverse ideas,
meanings, and identities through “incarnate sign practices” (Halton
1995), resist disciplinary control through struggles over urban space,
 Jeffrey S. Juris 237

and express divergent political messages through alternative forms,

styles, and spatial configurations of protest. Diverse tactics involving
contrasting activist “techniques of the body” (Mauss 1973) reflect more
than instrumental choices; they also help produce and embody alterna-
tive political visions, discourses, and identities. At the same time, myriad
micro-political battles are waged around the distribution of bodies in
space (Feldman 1991) in the context of struggles over the production
and control of physical territory. During counter-summit actions young
activists also enact alternative “subcultural styles” (Hall and Jefferson
1976), appropriating, recombining, and assembling diverse commodity
signs to express distinct identities and political messages.
The use of activist bodies in political protest has a long history,
particularly in the context of the non-violent civil disobedience pop-
ularized by Gandhi and southern Blacks during the US civil rights
movement. Randolph Hohle (2009) has written about the role-playing
trainings that taught Black civil rights activists how to control their
emotions and use their bodies to maintain a neat, orderly appearance
of “good citizenship” and to most effectively absorb the physical blows
meted out by the police. Physical performances such as “covering up”
were meant not only to shield the body but also “to minimize affect
outbursts, thus, ensuring idealized citizenship was embodied in all per-
formances” (295). Albeit in a different setting and with a distinctive
set of meanings attached, I have participated in similar trainings that
prepared activist bodies for performative action leading up to global
justice mobilizations. As with the larger protest events they are often
a part of, micro-level protest performances thus bring together mean-
ings and embodied practices in ways that generate alternative cultural
forms, values, and identities. However, whereas macro-level protest
events produce larger collective affects, subjectivities, and representa-
tions, micro-level protest performances generate particular embodied
images, meanings, and emotions that are specific to and often serve to
differentiate between different kinds of activist groups.

Protest theatre

The embodied performances I have been considering thus far are theatri-
cal, but they lack the higher degree of formalized staging that character-
izes theatre as an art form. In this sense, they are relatively spontaneous
and tactical and tend to make sense only within larger protest events.
Other kinds of social movement performance are more explicit in their
adoption of the structure and format of theatre, including a clearer
238 Embodying Protest

(but not complete) separation between the performer and the audience,
greater levels of previous rehearsing, and a more significant likelihood
of repetition. These relatively formalized theatrical routines are just as
likely to stand on their own as they are to form part of macro-level
protests and marches. Moreover, they may be tactical in the sense of
being designed to accomplish an objective (interrupt a meeting, hijack
a press conference, etc.) but they are less likely to be coordinated with
other tactics to achieve a specific strategic goal (blockade a summit, resist
an eviction, etc.). However, the line dividing theatrical protest from
“protest theatre” is a fine one, and the division is relative and porous
rather than absolute. Again, these distinctions are meant to be heuristic
and they are frequently violated in practice.
Protest theatre encompasses diverse kinds of more or less highly for-
malized performative political interventions, ranging from agitprop,
street and puppet theatre, to elaborate media stunts and culture jams.
Since the late 1960s protest movements in the West have regularly
employed highly visible forms of “guerrilla theatre”, a term coined
by Ronnie Davis of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1966 to refer
to a mobile, simplified form of theatre enacted by small bands of
activist performers to shock, surprise, and raise awareness about an issue
(Schechner 1970). The goal is “to make a swift action or image that
gets to the heart of an issue or a feeling – to make people realize where
they are living, and under what situation” (Ibid:163). Guerrilla theatre
can take place on a pedestrian thoroughfare, during a protest march or
action, or at a site targeted to maximize political and/or media impact
such as when the Yippies dropped hundreds of dollar bills on the floor
of the New York Stock Exchange or when Jerry Rubin attended a House
Un-American Activities Committee Hearing dressed in Revolutionary
garb. Guerilla theatre has been used over the years to bring visibility to
US-perpetrated or supported war atrocities in Vietnam, El Salvador, and
Iraq; to raise awareness about the indignities and violence of apartheid;
and to dramatize the harm wrought by neoliberal globalization and
corporate greed.
Activist groups such as the Black Panthers were particularly known
for their use of guerrilla and other forms of protest theatre. As T.V.
Reed (2005) has argued, the Black Panther Party and the wider black
power movement of the late 1960s largely operated through theatrical
performance, building on Black Nationalist art and theatre. The party’s
theatrics, which included sensational speeches, press conferences, and
protest arrivals, involved “highly dramatic, stylized confrontations,
often involving guns and the police” (42). Guns were meant to convey
 Jeffrey S. Juris 239

a symbolic rejection of the state’s monopoly on the use of force and

a public affirmation of the right to self-defence in the face of violent
acts of white supremacy by citizens and agents of the state. Among
the most famous acts of Black Panther guerrilla theatre was the tele-
vised entry (and subsequent press conference on the capitol steps) of
30 young Black men and women, armed with loaded handguns and
dressed in black berets and leather jackets, into the assembly chamber
of the California Legislature while lawmakers were considering gun con-
trol legislation targeting the right of the Panthers to carry weapons. Such
mass-mediated performances used strategically assembled, adorned, and
decorated bodies to convey particular cultural meanings and identities.
In contrast to the serious and militant images displayed by the Pan-
thers, playful and ironic street theatre troupes such as Billionaires for
Bush have used humour and satire to protest corporate globalization
and growing economic inequality during elections and anti-corporate
protests. At the 2008 National Republican Convention, for example,
Billionaires performed as “Lobbyists for McCain”, wearing suits and
top hats and displaying signs such as “No, you can’t!” and “Loyal to
Big Oil”. During the financial crisis that same year activists attended
protests against Wall Street as “Billionaires for Bush Bailouts”, posing
as wealthy bankers and declaring, in reference to President George W.
Bush’s bailout of the US banking industry and his neglect of ordi-
nary workers, “Thanks for the $700bn check!” (Haugerud 2010:114).
Such performative guerrilla tactics break down the divide between per-
former and spectator, as spirited exchanges often ensue between actors
and audience. Participants can always interpret the meaning of such
exchanges differently, but such interactive performances open up a
space for questioning received assumptions and, at least potentially,
developing alternative cultural-political understandings.4 Like other
modes of activist performance, protest theatre attests to the generative
nature of social movement culture and its capacity to move beyond the
divide between mind and body, the cultural and the physical. In con-
trast to other forms of performative protest, however, formally theatrical
types of protest are capable of producing more targeted messages, of
more directly engaging an audience, and of being deployed in more
diverse and everyday settings.

Musical performances

Perhaps no artistic form has been more central to contemporary social

movements than music. Whether consumed during live performances,
240 Embodying Protest

enjoyed within more intimate movement settings, or performed by

activists during public meetings and protests, music works on a visceral
level, providing an emotionally vibrant site for condensing, reflecting
on, and generating alternative cultural ideas, values, and identities.
Moreover, the shared, deeply embodied nature of musical production
and consumption makes it an ideal mechanism for eliciting power-
ful emotions and strong feelings of affective solidarity. From the folk
music of the Popular Front in the 1930s, the great civil rights songs of
the 1960s, the folk revival and burgeoning rock scene in the anti-war
movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the emergence of anar-
chist punk in the 1970s and 1980s, to the popularity of Musica Mestiza
in many global justice networks in the 1990s and 2000s,5 particular
musical traditions have long been closely linked to specific movements.
Musical performance helps to disseminate movement ideas and val-
ues into wider socio-cultural contexts and forms. In this sense, music
is a mode of cognitive praxis, “contributing to the ideas that move-
ments offer and create in opposition to the existing social and cultural
order” (Eyerman and Jamison 1998:24). Music provides a way for social
movements to mobilize past traditions and generate new ones by
depositing alternative meanings, feelings, and identities as sedimented
cultural memories. In this sense, the traditions encoded in music con-
stitute “a river of embodied ideas and images between generations of
activists” (Ibid:2). Music was a particularly important dimension of the
US civil rights movement, but also helped to link that movement to
past and subsequent traditions and struggles. For example, as Eyerman
and Jamison (1998) point out, the song “We Shall Overcome” was orig-
inally a spiritual first put to overtly political use in the labor movement
and transmitted to civil rights activists via their contact with labor orga-
nizers at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. After becoming a civil
rights movement “anthem”, the song found its way into the musi-
cal repertoires of movements globally, often reproduced as embodied
ritual performances where participants sing together with their arms
linked (2–4).
Music is thus not only a site for the production of alternative ideas,
values, and identities; it is “deeply physical”, generating and conveying
particular feelings and serving as a “rehearsal for, and in demonstrations
as an act of, putting your body on the line” (Reed 2005:29). Musical per-
formance within social movements is at once cognitive and affective,
generating powerful feelings of solidarity while preparing activist bod-
ies for action. One of my most deeply ingrained memories from global
justice mobilizations was the time I sat with dozens of protesters from
 Jeffrey S. Juris 241

around the world in a mobile eatery at the Piazza Kennedy convergence

centre in Genoa during the mobilization against the G8. It was 18 July
2001, two nights before the “siege of the red zone”, and we were both
exhilarated and terrified given the climate of repression and fear (Juris
2008b). Huddled together and drinking beer under a tin roof to avoid
the rain, we began to sing “Bella Ciao”, the song of the anti-fascist
resistance in Italy. I still recall the sense of togetherness, determined
commitment, and even love for my fellow “combatants” as we sang, O
partigiano, portami via, o bella, ciao! Bella, ciao! Bella ciao, ciao, ciao! O
partigiano, portami via, ché mi sento di morir (Oh partisan, carry me away,
oh goodbye beautiful, goodbye beautiful, goodbye beautiful! Bye! Bye!
Oh partisan, carry me away, because I feel death approaching).
Like guerrilla theatre, embodied musical performances can also be
deployed as protest tactics. For example, in the civil rights movement,
singing was often used to portray an image of organized, non-violent
resistance as opposed to disorderly mob action (Reed 2005:29). Musi-
cal performances frequently become the focal point of actions, helping
to guide protesters through the streets while generating passion and
energy. In this sense, activist marching bands such as the Infernal Noise
Brigade from Seattle and Pink and Silver samba troupes including the
UK-based Rhythms of Resistance played important roles in guiding
protest actions during the height of the global justice movements (Juris
2008a, 2008b; see also Bogad 2010).6 Their musical, drumming, and
dance performances embodied a stark contrast to the aggressive style
of militant protesters and the violent demeanour of the forces of law
and order while convening a “rhythmic crowd” capable of generating
intense passion and excitement. In sum, musical performances bring
together the physical-emotional and cognitive-ideational dimensions
of protest, eliciting powerful feelings even as they generate alternative
ideas, meanings, and identities. With respect to other kinds of protest
performance, music operates on a unique corporeal-sensory register,
producing deeply felt and ingrained rhythmic and harmonic effects that
link activists and movements together across spatial, generational, and
oppositional-popular culture divides.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the dynamics of cultural performance

within contemporary social movements. A focus on protest perfor-
mance allows us to move beyond overly static and reified conceptions
of social movement culture. I have specifically argued that it is through
242 Embodying Protest

cultural performance that alternative meanings, values, and identities

are produced, embodied, and publicly communicated within social
movements. I have also suggested that an emphasis on cultural perfor-
mance can help bridge the mind/body dualism that characterizes much
of the literature on social movements and culture. In this sense, as the
examples considered here demonstrate, cultural meanings are not only
cognitive; they are embodied and experienced emotionally in the con-
text of social movement performances. Moreover, as we saw in the case
of contrasting micro-level performances during mass occupations and
global justice mobilizations, alternative embodied tactics generate com-
peting ideas, values, and identities, reflecting internal cultural diversity,
tension, and struggle within particular movements.
What about the impact of performative protest? As I have suggested,
large-scale protest events produce both internal and external effects,
and the same is true for other modes of activist performance. With
respect to their external dimension, social movement performances gen-
erate new ideas, images, and cultural practices that may call attention
to an issue, shape public debate, introduce new frameworks, motivate
further action, and potentially help transform wider cultural patterns.
As Angelique Haugerud (2010) writes, cultural resistance more generally
“can be a vital step in helping to destabilize political categories, reframe
debates, introduce new ideas and norms, rewrite discourse, and build
new political communities” (126). In terms of their internal dimen-
sion, activist performances can produce more or less powerful emotions
and help forge new identities, playing a key role in the emergence of
new subjectivities and the creation of the affective solidarity needed
for ongoing organizing. To the extent protest performances contribute
to new meanings, discourses, and identities they may contribute to
longer-term cultural change, while the feelings of collective agency they
produce can help to sustain movements.
At the same time, performative protest also has several major lim-
itations. First, the ever-growing influence of infotainment means ever-
more spectacular performances are often required to break through busy
news cycles, while protesters and observers may lose interest over time
as once-compelling performances lose their visual and emotional nov-
elty. Arguably, this is what happened with global justice counter-summit
protests (Juris 2008a, 2008b) and may have occurred with the public
occupations of the Occupy movements in the absence of the evictions
in the late fall of 2011. Activists are thus under pressure to constantly
innovate in order to develop protest performances that maintain public
interest and remain emotionally compelling for participants, a dynamic
 Jeffrey S. Juris 243

that can often detract from the underlying socio-political, economic, or

cultural issues that motivate protest in the first place. The reliance on
emotion and spectacle is thus a double-edged sword: not only can it
help movements develop and expand, but it can also detract from their
ability to develop more sustainable structures that allow movements to
survive over the long haul.
Second, there is also the question of how protest performances are
understood by a target audience. Audience interpretation is an interac-
tive process (Alexander 2004:564), involving not only the production of
new meanings, values, and identities, but also their reception by mem-
bers of an audience. With respect to social movements, Eyerman (2006)
has suggested that “the gap between performance, the messages which
movements wish to convey, and its reception is a problematic which
both activists and sociologists must ponder” (199). In this sense, despite
their best efforts, even the most playful and non-threatening activist
performers such as Pink and Silver samba dancers or Billionaires for Bush
may leave their observers as confused as they are delighted. More prob-
lematically, as Bauman and Briggs (1990) point out, performances can
be extracted as texts, removed from their initial setting, and reinserted
into new discursive contexts. In relation to social movements, for exam-
ple, journalists, police, government officials, local business elites, and
other power holders can create or influence media packages (Gamson
and Modigliani 1989) that manipulate images of protest, decontextual-
izing and reinserting them into alternative narratives that may trivialize,
marginalize, or disparage protesters. Indeed, activists who rely on perfor-
mative violence such as Black Bloc or Black Panther members are often
constructed in public discourse as dangerous criminals or even terrorists
(Juris 2005, 2008a, 2008b; Reed 2005). Social movements thus have to
negotiate the strategic tension posed by the need to generate spectacu-
lar images and the potential loss of control over the meaning of their
performances.
Even when activist performances achieve their intended cultural
effects, making conflicts visible, framing political debates, and help-
ing to shape public opinion, the question remains as to whether and
how this might lead to tangible gains. As Bogad (2010) reminds us,
in and of itself, carnivalesque protest, for example, “does not change
the fundamental relations of production or distribution in the greater
society” (555). The gap between discursive and material change thus
represents a third limitation of performative protest. Indeed, as Reed
(2005) points out, to the extent the Black Panthers succeeded in help-
ing to empower black communities, this depended as much on their
244 Embodying Protest

grassroots organizing and social programmes as their protest theatrics.

In this sense, protest performances may be necessary, but they are
not sufficient to bring about social change. Similarly, social movement
performances may create the conditions for policy change by raising
awareness about particular issues and influencing public debate, as well
as by generating the identities and emotions needed for sustainable
mobilization, but it is up to elected officials to translate that poten-
tial into actual legislation. For example, the public occupations of the
Occupy movements may have shined a critical light on the negative
impact of inequality, but bringing about material change will require
either more institutionalized political action (though not necessarily by
movement actors) and/or long-term organizing efforts to build support
for and generate the directly democratic institutions capable of effecting
more radical transformation. In this sense, performative protest should
be understood as an important strategy and tactic of mobilization that
is best employed in the context of a range of other tactics and strategies,
but performance itself should never be seen as the raison d’être of social
movements.

Notes
1. Somewhat confusingly, Johnston and Klandermans (1995) refer to more
Weberian approaches to culture as “performative” in that individuals can
use particular cultural “tools” (Swidler 1986), be they symbols, worldviews,
stories, or rituals, to develop specific strategies of action. Rather than per-
formance, however, it seems to me that such a view involves the enactment
of culture. Although I agree with their critique of “systemic” approaches to
culture as articulated by Geertz for overlooking differentiation and meaning
construction, I do not believe the culture as tool-kit metaphor (see Swidler
1986) is a convincing alternative. Instead, a more adequate conception of cul-
ture as performance, as argued here, would focus precisely on the construction
of meaning embedded in public symbols and discourses, as well as struggles
over such meanings.
2. For Turner (1982), the “liminal” is a functional requirement of premodern
societies, which compensates for the rigidity of social structure. The “limi-
noid” corresponds to dynamic industrial societies and is often associated with
social, even revolutionary, critique (52–54).
3. The Guy Fawkes mask, an image of resistance appropriated from the film
and novel “V for Vendetta” by members of the Anonymous hacker collective,
became an early symbol of Occupy Wall Street.
4. The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army is another recent example
of innovative and playful guerrilla street theatre that challenges the divide
between performer and audience by inserting its “targets” into the structure
and flow of the performance itself (see Klepto and Evil 2006; Bogad 2010). For
more on the use of campy humour, wit, and ridicule in the context of creative
 Jeffrey S. Juris 245

direct action protest see Shepard’s (2010) analysis of Act Up and the group’s
use of performance to combat the AIDS/HIV epidemic.
5. Musica mestiza is a fusion style of music popularized by musicians such as
Manu Chao that features politically charged lyrics and mixes traditional
rhythms and sounds from regions such as North Africa, Latin America, and
Europe with contemporary rock, punk, ska, reggae, rap, and raï, among other
genres (Juris 2008b).
6. The Infernal Noise Brigade played a fusion-oriented, musica mestiza-like mix
“including elements of drumline, taiko, Mughal and North African rhythms,
elements of Balkan fanfares, breakbeats, and just about anything else” (cited
in Bogad 2010:545).

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Part IV
Impact of Social Movements
on Culture
12
Moving Culture: Transnational
Social Movement Organizations as
Translators in a Diffusion Cycle
Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak

Introduction

The central question of this chapter is how social movement actors pro-
duce and promote cultural change across national and local settings.
We define culture as a set of practices that have shared meanings. Cul-
tural change is thus a change in practices and/or in meanings attached
to them. In an increasingly interconnected world, one way for social
movements to induce cultural change is to borrow ideas and practices
from other settings and install them in their own cultural environment,
or to modify existing practices by incorporating borrowed cultural ele-
ments or new meanings into them. Social movements can also borrow
cultural elements from international law and global discourses, such as
environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and human
rights, and localize them in a specific cultural setting. In the social
movement literature, this process of ideas and practices travelling across
borders is referred to as diffusion.
There are two approaches in existing literature on social movements
and transnational activism that have tackled the issue of the flow of
ideas, repertoires, and practices within and across borders: (1) research
on the diffusion of protest repertoires across movements and coun-
tries and diffusion mechanisms and outcomes (e.g. Soule 2004; Givan,
Soule, and Roberts 2010); and (2) research on transnational advocacy
networks and coalitions promoting international norms, rules, and ideas
(Keck and Sikkink 1999; Price 2003). While these lines of research study
the diffusion of cultural items, the diffusion process itself is not seen
as a cultural one. In this chapter, we attempt to conceptualize diffusion

251
252 Moving Culture

as a cultural process by emphasizing the process of the translation of

practices and ideas borrowed from elsewhere into a specific cultural
and political setting. Translation is a process of transformation and
adaptation of culturally “alien” ideas and practices into locally spe-
cific on-the-ground practices. In the literature, this process is also called
vernacularization (Levitt and Merry 2009; Levitt et al. 2009). In contrast
to a more common usage of the term “diffusion”, translation empha-
sizes conscious efforts and creativity that social movement actors –
individual activists and organizations – employ for changing existing
cultural practices.
The process of translation is central to our concept of the diffusion
of cultural practices, but we view it only as one step within what we
refer to as the diffusion cycle. We modify the common concept of
diffusion by presenting it as a sequence of three steps characterized
by recursive interactions, learning, ruptures, backlash, resistance, and
feedback effects. First, it starts with a reception and appropriation of
practices by social movement actors in settings beyond their own con-
text. They learn about innovations through pre-established direct and
indirect lines of cross-national communication and exchange (e.g. per-
sonal networks or media) and compare them to their own problems and
experience in order to understand whether innovations can be applied
to their own context (Roggeband 2007). Second, they translate prac-
tices by framing them in their own language, or vernacular, adapting
them to the structural conditions in their home countries, and, in some
cases, redefining target groups for innovations (Merry 2006; Levitt et al.
2009). Translation triggers learning, as social movement actors accumu-
late experience and new knowledge about diffusing practices (Malets
2011). Third, learning, as well as emerging conflicts and power struggles
(Zajak 2014), induces feedback effects that may lead to a modification of
original practices or global ideas in initial settings. The diffusion cycle
begins again.
Social movement actors are critical to this process, since they
often occupy the position of intermediaries between national and
transnational settings and possess the knowledge of both diffusing
ideas and local cultural, legal, institutional, and political contexts. They
adapt, modify, and legitimize travelling ideas and practices in a local
setting and construct new practices by using both global ideas and local
culture. They recombine external and vernacular cultural elements in
order to implement global norms in local settings in locally appropriate
(e.g. culturally acceptable) ways. They use their networks as channels
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 253

for spreading ideas, organizational forms, and practices that challenge

existing practices.
More generally, we adopt a perspective that organizations and orga-
nizing are critical not only for resource mobilization and protest but
also for the realization of social movement objectives, that is challeng-
ing authority and introducing alternative worldviews and behaviour
(McCarthy and Zald 1977; Snow, Soule, and Kriesi 2004:9–10). In this
sense, we do not focus on protest and social movements in general but
instead focus on the role of social movement actors – leaders, activists,
and organizations – in challenging and changing cultural practices
in domestic settings inspired by transnational social movements and
their campaigns. We do not claim that social movement activists and
organizations are social movements. Rather, we see social movement
activists and organizations as one part of social movements concep-
tualized as “collectivities acting with some degree of organization and
continuity outside of institutional or organizational channels for the
purpose of challenging and defining extant authority [ . . . ]” (Snow,
Soule, and Kriesi 2004:11) that identify with a movement, share some
of its broad objectives, and attempt to implement these (McCarthy and
Zald 1977:1217–1218).
After the introduction, we address the concept of culture we use in
our analysis. We understand culture to be a flexible and changing sys-
tem of ideas and practices – a system always in the (re-)making, shaped
by contentious interactions between various actors embedded in power
relations. In the third section, we review the social movement literature
dealing with diffusion and draw key insights for the development of the
concept of a diffusion cycle as an approach to explaining the impact of
social movements on culture. In the fourth section, we draw insights
from sociology and political science literature on diffusion and transla-
tion beyond social movement research. In the fifth section, we present
our concept of a diffusion cycle, with particular attention paid to trans-
lation as its critical step. In the conclusion, we provide a brief chapter
summary and outline several avenues for future research.

Defining culture

In social movement research and beyond it, the concept of culture has
long been a subject of extensive debate, about what culture is and what
it does (Johnston and Klandermans 1995). The interpretations of culture
range from a relatively focused understanding of it as sets of frames,
254 Moving Culture

or mental models that help its carriers to name, make sense of, and
interpret their environment (Benford and Snow 2000), to more encom-
passing conceptions of culture as a system of beliefs, cognitive models,
meanings and practices, or a “ubiquitous and constitutive dimension
of all social relations, structures, networks and practices” (Goodwin and
Jasper 1999:46). Whereas the former interpretations have been criticized
for being too narrow (Goodwin and Jasper 1999), the latter have been
condemned as “all-out theoretical eclecticism” (Koopmans 1999:94).
In this chapter, we do not attempt to resolve this debate. Our pur-
pose is a different one: We seek to provide an account of how social
movements transform dominant cultural practices. We define culture as
“constituted by a web of signs and the signified meaning of those signs”
(Earl 2004:510) that can be observed in “linguistic practices, institu-
tional rules and social rituals” (Polletta 1999:67, cited in Earl 2004:510).
From this perspective, it also includes practices, or routines, that have
a shared meaning for people. In this sense, cultural change refers to
changes in practices and meanings attached to them (Hart 1996, cited
in Earl 2004:510). This conception of culture enables us to provide
one explanation – by no means the only one – of how social move-
ments transform culture by “replanting” alien cultural elements into
different local socio-cultural soil, attaching a meaning to them and legit-
imizing emerging practices using “indigenous” culture. Following Merry
(2006:14–16), we point out two important features of culture as a con-
tentious system of signs, meanings, and practices that are particularly
helpful for explaining the impact of social movements on culture.
The first feature is the flexibility of culture. In contrast to the concep-
tions of culture as a rigid and consensual system of values and beliefs, we
consider culture to be contradictory and flexible. Culture is not a fixed,
unchanging system, but rather a product of historical processes that con-
tinues to change over time under various influences, both internal and
external (Merry 2006:15). Moreover, culture is not homogenous but may
contain contradictory elements, for example norms or practices, which
certain groups, for example social movement actors seeking to challenge
dominant cultural practices, may activate to introduce and legitimize
new practices. The understanding of culture as a flexible and chang-
ing system of signs and meaningful practices, or as a system always
in the (re-)making, is crucial for explaining cultural change. Clearly,
whereas many cultural norms stabilize expectations and provide mod-
els for action, some can facilitate change in favourable circumstances.
In Merry’s words (2006:15), “[L]ocal norms can be paths to change as
well as barriers” (see also Chabot 2000).
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 255

The second important feature for our analysis is that culture is con-
tentious and connected to and shaped by power relations. It is not
neutral, but reflects, depends upon, and is used to reproduce dominant
institutional and legal arrangements, or in other words dominant struc-
tures of power (Merry 2006:15). It is common to think of culture as
something that fixes the distribution of rights, duties, and responsibili-
ties in a society or a group, but it may also be interpreted as cementing
a specific distribution of power, such as men’s control over women. Cul-
ture can be consciously used to lend legitimacy to practices that would
be considered discriminatory or incorrect in other societies. Yet these
practices can be challenged by social movement actors who introduce
new cultural practices and promote them despite potential resistance,
thus triggering cultural and social change (Merry 2006).
In the following sections, we draw on this discussion in order to
deconstruct how social movement actors – for example, activists and
organizations inspired by successes in other countries and cultural
settings – change cultural practices by introducing new practices or
modifying existing ones and attaching new meaning to them.

Social movements and diffusion as a cultural process

One of the answers to the question of how social movements facilitate

cultural change is provided by the vast literature on diffusion. Gener-
ally speaking, diffusion refers to the “flow of social practices among
actors within some larger system” (Strang and Meyer 1993:488). In the
simplest terms, innovative “cultural elements”, or innovations, travel
from a transmitter to an adopter along specific channels across many
kinds of borders, for example between countries, groups, or movements
(McAdam and Rucht 1993:56, 59; Soule 2004:295). In existing literature
on diffusion and social movements, innovations refer to tactics, strate-
gies, repertoires, organizational forms, frames, slogans, practices, skills,
information, and forms of protest to name a few.
Following the classical theory of diffusion (Strang and Meyer 1993),
early studies of social movements and diffusion emphasize that diffu-
sion is conditioned by cultural and/or structural similarities between
transmitters and adopters of innovations – the homophily principle
(Snow and Benford 1999:23–24) – and the availability of direct (rela-
tional) or indirect (non-relational) channels along which social practices
are transmitted, and/or the availability of “brokers” capable of build-
ing a bridge between unconnected movements (McAdam and Rucht
1993; Soule 1997). Furthermore, Soule (1997) finds that a number of
256 Moving Culture

structural similarities, such as university type, endowment size, and

ranking, explain the diffusion of the anti-apartheid movement and
shantytown protests across US universities. Tarrow (1994) and McAdam
(1995) unpack diffusion as a process in time, that is as a historically sit-
uated, temporal sequence of events when an initiator movement starts
a protest cycle that in turn sets spin-off movements in motion. Rising
spin-off movements find inspiration in specifically framed ideas of the
initiator movement and imitate their tactics, but this imitation is far
from a mere copying of the initiator movement: It involves reflexivity
and reveals “normal learning and influence processes as mediated by the
network structures of everyday social life” (McAdam 1995:231).
In sum, these studies have significantly advanced the understand-
ing of cross-national, cross-temporal, and cross-movement diffusion as
being conditioned by the availability of direct and indirect diffusion
channels, by various types of similarities between adopters and trans-
mitters, as well as by time (particularly compared to early contributions
focusing on diffusion rates, rather than its causes and conditions of dif-
fusion). At the same time, Snow and Benford (1999:25) have criticized
this literature for the lack of an explicit account of agency. They suggest
that this has resulted in a failure to recognize that diffusion can have
many different faces and dynamics depending on whether the transmit-
ter and adopter take an active role in the process. They also note that
without an explicit account of agency, it is easy to assume that struc-
tural and cultural similarities are “given”, whereas they may need to be
constructed – at least in cases when they are problematic.
Snow and Benford (1999:26–27) distinguish between four types of dif-
fusion processes depending on whether a transmitter and an adopter are
active or passive: (1) reciprocation (both active); (2) adaptation (trans-
mitter passive, adopter active); (3) accommodation (transmitter active,
adopter passive); and (4) contagion (both passive), although they find
it difficult to imagine that contagion can occur in the social move-
ment arena. They suggest that most of the previous studies have focused
on reciprocation (e.g. McAdam and Rucht 1993), whereas adaptation
and accommodation have received far less attention. Adaptation occurs
when adopters borrow elements of another culture and adapt them to
fit their own culture. Accommodation occurs when transmitters seeking
to induce the spread of their ideas and tactics in a new culture modify
the elements of their culture in order to adapt them to the target social
and cultural context. Explicitly linking their theory of diffusion with
the concept of strategic framing, they argue that accommodation and
adaptation are two ideal types of diffusion processes “in which objects
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 257

of diffusion . . . are framed so as to enhance the prospect of their reso-

nance with the host or target culture” (Benford and Snow 2000:628;
see also Strang and Soule 1998:276). For them, when adapting and
accommodating, social movements act strategically.
Although Benford and Snow are probably mistaken in believing that
social movements always seek to make diffusing ideas fit the host or
target culture (see Ferree 2003), this is a crucial point for our argu-
ment: It suggests that interpretative interaction and framing are key to
a comprehensive understanding of diffusion and, ultimately, of cultural
change brought about by social movements. Moreover, these ideal types
are clearly useful analytically, but it may be difficult to separate them
empirically. In other words, reciprocation also requires some degree of
adaptation and accommodation, whereas adaptation and accommoda-
tion are in many cases a mixture of adapting and accommodating efforts
of transmitters and adopters that influence each other as they trans-
mit or adopt ideas and practices. In addition, while we agree on the
importance of strategic recombining, re-interpreting, and re-framing of
domestic ideas and norms, we go beyond this perspective on cultural
change as strategic framing. We see social movement actors as being
embedded in both the transnational and domestic contexts and shaped
by and interacting with pre-existing cultural traditions.
To sum up, the literature reviewed above helps conceptualize dif-
fusion as a process far more complex than an autonomous flow of
innovations from a transmitter to an adopter along specific channels.
It turns out to be a cultural process through which transmitters and
adopters – active agents of change – do not simply transmit or adopt
cultural elements, but they interpret, translate, and adapt them, that
is they reflect upon elements of target and host cultures, modify inno-
vations, recombine social practices, and learn from the experience of
others and of their own (Roggeband 2004; see also Flesher Fominaya,
this volume). However, this literature has only begun to address the
black box of diffusion explicitly and systematically: It fails to represent
diffusion not as one process but as a set of intersecting social-cultural
processes that constitute a diffusion cycle with potential backlash, con-
flicts, unintended consequences, and spill-over, feedback and learning
effects. It also pays no attention to the problems and complexity of
cross-border, cross-cultural exchange (Roggeband 2007). For example,
transmitters and adopters speak different languages and have different
cultural backgrounds and may therefore see diffusing practices through
different cultural lenses. States’ responses may be more or less repressive
in the face of social movements and diffusing practices.
258 Moving Culture

In order to address this gap we develop a concept of a diffusion cycle

and provide an overview of factors that shape the specific dynamics and
outcomes of diffusion. The central element of the concept of a diffu-
sion cycle is represented by the conscious efforts of actors to frame,
adapt, accommodate, and recombine both diffusing elements and host
culture. This requires reflexivity, creativity, and learning. We call these
efforts “translation” and argue that it considerably shapes diffusion out-
comes. Other elements of the diffusion cycle include (1) reception and
appropriation of innovations that precede translation; and (2) feedback
and modification of innovations that follow translation. For the con-
cept of a diffusion cycle, we also draw insights from the sociological
literature on transnational legal norm-making and implementation in
order to capture feedback effects and the role of domestic factors, such
as pre-existing cultural practices and meanings and power structures.

Social movements and transnational norm

implementation

The literature on political consequences of social movements and on

transnational advocacy and norm-making provides further insights for
explaining how social movements condition and facilitate change in an
increasingly interconnected world. A considerable body of research on
social movements focuses on identifying the effects of social movements
on policy outcomes. Despite methodological challenges (Amenta and
Caren 2004:461–462), scholars were able to show how social movements
influence political agenda-setting and shape policy – for example, for-
mulation, adoption, revision, or abandonment of laws and regulations
(Gamson 1975; Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly 1999; Tilly 1999; Giugni
2005; Kolb 2007). Research on transnational advocacy coalitions shows
how such coalitions claim normative power and exert pressure on inter-
national organizations and national governments in order to make them
adopt or abandon certain policies (Keck and Sikkink 1999; Price 2003).
These bodies of research have started to pay attention to the impact of
social movements on what happens after a policy has been adopted.
This helps to enrich our concept of a diffusion cycle, since the literature
on diffusion summarized in the previous section does not pay atten-
tion to recursive cycles and feedback effects prominent in the analysis
of translation of codified norms.
We argue that implementation of national and transnational legal
norms is another important source, or channel, of on-the-ground cul-
tural change that intersects with the diffusion channels described above,
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 259

since social movement organizations and advocacy networks play a crit-

ical role in turning codified norms into actual practices. They may do it
through monitoring enforcement and drawing attention to compliance
failures (Amenta and Caren 2004:463; Esbenshade 2004; Armbruster-
Sandoval 2005), but they also engage directly in introducing new
practices that conform to international and domestic laws, standards,
and regulations (Merry 2006). These practices may be invented locally
or borrowed from other settings, that is, they may flow across borders
and movements through direct and indirect diffusion channels (Merry
2006; Malets 2011).
In line with the arguments from the literature on diffusion and social
movements reviewed in the previous section, the sociological literature
on the implementation of transnational legal norms also emphasizes the
importance of transnational and local actors who possess the knowledge
of both transnational norms and local context and act as translators and
intermediaries between global norms and grass-roots groups.1 However,
with some exceptions this literature mainly focuses on technical experts,
lawyers, service organizations, or international specialized agencies who
act as translators (Quack 2007; Halliday and Carruthers 2009). Follow-
ing Merry (2006), Benhabib (2009), and Dobusch and Quack (2012),
we suggest that social movements and social movement organizations
also play a role as intermediaries and translators. We believe that “[T]he
neglect of social movements as actors of social transformation and
jurisgenerative politics in recent theorizing has led to a naïve faith in
legal experts, international lawyers, and judges as agents of democratic
change” (Benhabib 2009:692).
From this perspective, social movements are not only campaigning
agents pushing governments and international organizations for pol-
icy change but also implementing agents translating legal norms into
on-the-ground practices in a specific cultural context and thus chang-
ing local culture, that is, installing new cultural practices in people’s
everyday lives. These conscious and creative translation efforts on the
part of social movement actors (e.g. activists and social movement orga-
nizations) are necessary, since rules are always ambiguous and require
interpretation, as suggested by the institutionalist literature (Streeck and
Thelen 2005). This creates opportunities for actors to interpret, shape,
and transform the meanings of rules in order to make them applicable to
a specific domestic social, cultural, and political context and contribute
to the implementation and enforcement of rules. Here, the literature
on transnational norm implementation, transnational advocacy coali-
tions, and cross-national diffusion shares the idea of creative agency
260 Moving Culture

and strategic framing as conditions for effective diffusion of practices

or implementation of transnational norms.
However, the literature on transnational norm-making and imple-
mentation goes beyond the perspective on cultural change as a result
of successful and strategic framing, emphasizing the conditioning role
of a domestic culture and transnational and domestic power constella-
tions. Halliday and Carruthers (2009) show in their study of diffusion
of transnational insolvency standards in Indonesia, South Korea, and
China that the proximity of national insolvency law to a transnational
standard depends on the balance of power between global actors (e.g.
the World Bank and powerful nation states) and national actors (e.g.
national governments) and on the normative distance between global
norms and national legal traditions (and more broadly culture). In the
interplay with translation and framing efforts, these factors shape
change in both national law and practice. Taking the case of attempts
to diffuse international labour rights standards to China, Zajak (2011)
shows that the ability to act as a translator is shaped by the political
regime type and the repressive capacities of political and business elites.
The second contribution of the transnational implementation liter-
ature to a diffusion cycle concept developed here is the identification
of mechanisms that explain the cyclical nature of diffusion and feed-
back effects. Whereas social movement research on diffusion focuses on
how transmitters or adopters change cross-national or cross-movement
innovations (one-way flow), Halliday and Carruthers (2007) develop
a concept of recursivity of global norm-making that connects global
norm-making, national lawmaking, and national implementation in a
recursive norm-making cycle (two-way flow). During implementation,
implementation gaps emerge due to deficiencies and contradictions in
formulations, conflicts, and implementing actors’ ability to delay and
undermine implementation. They trigger legal reforms at the national
and global levels. These feedbacks set in motion recursivity cycles and
help explain why and how innovations change over time as they travel
between settings and between levels in a multi-level, patchy, global nor-
mative system. As we will show in the next section, applied to the
diffusion cycles driven by social movements, this framework helps high-
light the dynamic interplay between social movements, norms, and
practices. Although ideas of recursivity have been developed to con-
ceptualize the interplay between actors, law, and practice, we argue
that recursivity is an important aspect of diffusion cycles, even if
non-codified norms, ideas, and action repertoires travel.
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 261

Translation as a part of a diffusion cycle

In this section, we introduce the concept of a diffusion cycle and

represent transnational diffusion as a cultural process occurring in a
specific social, political, and cultural context. Understanding diffusion
as a cultural process means that we conceptualize diffusion as cultural
change or changes in existing cultural practices. Understanding diffu-
sion as a cycle means that we think of diffusion as a set of recursive
processes which feed back into each other and influence diffusing inno-
vations, transmitters, translators, and target groups (e.g. policy-makers
or grass-roots groups). Cultural change is by no means automatic or
straightforward. It requires conscious and strategic efforts on the part
of mediating actors active in a complex domestic environment who
seek to challenge and change existing cultural practices and/or intro-
duce new ones. Translators play a crucial role during the diffusion cycle.
They first receive and appropriate certain practices; second, they trans-
plant and translate certain practices; and finally they may contribute to
a modification of the original ideas.
In this section, we discuss the different elements of the diffusion cycle
and provide examples from several studies to illustrate the applicability
of our concept. Although using the word cycle, we are aware that these
processes never run smoothly. Ruptures, or “frictions” (Tsing 2005), can
occur at any step along the way. This is why we also pay attention to
challenges translators face; we describe how a national or local social,
political, and cultural context shapes the diffusion outcomes and trans-
lation process by enabling and constraining transmitters and translators
(see Figure 12.1).

Reception and appropriation

Understanding how translation occurs and what factors shape it
helps understand why the diffusion of ideas, practices, strategies, and
organizational forms occurs differently in various settings. It can be
defined as one of several steps within a diffusion process. It is pre-
ceded by two other steps: One is reception (Roggeband 2007:246); the
other one is appropriation (Merry 2006:135). According to Roggeband
(2007:247), reception refers to the perception and interpretation of
transnational ideas and represents “a first central step in the diffusion
process”, since the way an actor perceives and interprets a new practice
influences considerably his/her willingness to consider adopting and
implementing it.
262 Moving Culture

Cultural and political context

Modification

Norms, ideas, repertoires

Reception and
appropriation
Feedback

Social move actors as intermediaries

Translation

Reformulation Recombination Invention

New practices
Cultural and political context

Figure 12.1 Cycle of diffusion

Following McAdam and Rucht (1993), she argues that the percep-
tion of innovations depends on channels of communication and the
similarity between transmitters and translators. Whereas the argument
that when pre-established links exist and/or non-relational channels are
available (e.g. networks or access to the media) diffusion is likely to
occur faster and more easily is relatively straightforward; the argument
concerning the similarity appears more complicated. Similarities are not
always external or “given” (e.g. as structural similarities described by
Soule (1997) in her study of shantytown protests in US universities) but
have to be actively constructed and attributed by activists (McAdam and
Rucht 1993:60; Snow and Benford 1999:25).
Roggenband (2007:247) argues that the reception of innovations and
the construction of the similarity are closely related to the temporal
dimension of the diffusion process, since actors may construct a simi-
larity and receive one and the same innovation differently, depending
on whether they are early or late adopters. Since innovations are mod-
ified as they travel, later adopters observe more varying examples of an
innovation. They learn not only from an original source but also from a
variety of later examples. Moreover, the attribution of similarity is more
important for early observers: They have to be convinced that they are
dealing with a similar problem or that the tactic they want to borrow
is successful. When more successful examples are available, legitimation
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 263

is less of a problem. Moreover, late observers tend to emphasize differ-

ences in problems and contexts. This makes reception by early and late
observers different and shapes the diffusion outcomes.
Merry (2006:135) describes a similar process as “appropriation”,
meaning “taking the programs, interventions, and ideas developed by
other activists in one setting and replicating them in another set-
ting”. She suggests that appropriation requires not only knowledge
of approaches in other places communicated through relational and
non-relational channels but also the ability of activists to attract fund-
ing and political support, the availability of donors, and the perceived
capacity of an innovation to trigger change rapidly. Contingent events
and the political context in adopters’ countries also influence the
reception and appropriation of innovations that emerged elsewhere.
Zajak (2012) shows that domestic Chinese labour support organi-
zations (in contrast to their European or American allies) are not
always willing to adopt confrontational tactics and tend to abstain
from framing labour rights violations as a breach of international law.
Instead, they choose to interpret and make sense of labour rights
violations in the light of national law and more politically accepted
avenues of redress, for example courts. This again can cause con-
flicts with European and American activists, who take a much more
confrontational position towards the political regime, as well as with
transnational companies.

Translation
After an innovation has been perceived and appropriated by movement
activists, it is transplanted into new cultural soil. This requires transla-
tion, that is adapting the rhetoric and structure of innovations to local
circumstances (Merry 2006:135; see also Czarniawska and Sevon 1996;
Halliday and Carruthers 2009). Levitt and Merry (2009; Levitt et al.
2009) put forward the term “vernacularization”, meaning translation
into a vernacular, and emphasize the discursive nature of this process:
“Vernacularization is a process of creating meanings by connecting, in
a variety of ways, the discourse of the global with local . . . ideologies”
(Levitt et al. 2009:3). Roggeband (2007:247–248) uses the term “recon-
textualization”, that is adapting to a new context. Following Chabot
and Duyvendak (2002:707), she argues Roggeband (2007:248) that
recontextualization requires “a process of ‘dislocation’ – recognition
that a foreign innovation may also work outside of its original con-
text – and ‘relocation’ – experimenting with the innovation in a new
setting”. We consider Merry’s approach particularly helpful, since she
264 Moving Culture

differentiates between three different dimensions of the translation

process (see also Levitt et al. 2009).

Framing
The first of the three dimensions of translation according to Merry
(2006:136–137) is closely related to the concept of “framing” as devel-
oped in the social movement literature (Snow et al. 1986; Benford and
Snow 2000). Frames are not ideas per se, but the ways ideas are pre-
sented, justified, and contextualized (see Ullrich and Keller this volume),
that is interpretative packages around a core idea (Ferree 2003:308) or
costumes in which activists dress innovations (Merry 2006:138). So,
when innovations are appropriated and introduced into a new con-
text, activists present innovations using images, symbols, and stories
from specific local cultural narratives and conceptions. In other words,
whereas the reception and appropriation of ideas require sense-making
efforts from activists (making sense of practices elsewhere and accessing
their applicability to their own problems and experiences), translating
requires meaning-making (attaching culturally resonant meanings to
alien concepts and practices).
Dressing ideas in familiar costumes (Merry 2006) makes new ideas
more resonant, which increases the likelihood that innovations will be
accepted and become popular. At the same time, cultural resonance has
its costs (Ferree 2003). Resonant ideas are less radical and risk triggering
less cultural change compared to radical ideas, provided, of course, they
are successful. In contrast to some authors who emphasize that social
movements are likely to choose resonant frames in order to increase
the chances of an innovation being adopted, Ferree (2003) argues that
the relationship between resonance and movement activists’ strategic
choices is not straightforward or deterministic. Activists may choose rad-
ical frames and avoid resonance, hoping to induce more social change
and avoid devaluating the ideals and losing some of their supporters.
Alternatively, it is also possible that certain radical tactics and ideas
are little accepted in a certain political and social context, or they may
trigger broader political and societal resistance. Domestic organizations
may refrain from adopting them, since they may undermine their stand-
ing and efficacy (Stachursky 2007), or they may modify them to be in
keeping with what is considered “rightful resistance” (O’Brien 1996).

Structural adaptation
The second dimension of translation distinguished by Merry
(2006:136–137) deals with the adaptation of appropriated innovations
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 265

to local structural conditions. In her study of the translation of interna-

tional law on gender violence, Merry (2006) shows that activists used
different tactics and repertoires in order to protect battered women
depending on the local cultural and legal context and the opportuni-
ties this context offered. In Hong Kong, activists working in shelters for
battered women worked with social welfare department officials in order
to move victims of domestic violence higher up on the public housing
priority lists. In contrast, in India, where there is basically no public
housing, activists running shelters struggle for battered women’s rights
to return to their parental home. In other words, domestic laws, govern-
ment services, cultural norms and traditions, and political institutions
differ from location to location and influence how specific ideas and
practices are translated.
It would be a mistake to view translation, and particularly structural
adaption, as an uncontested process. The introduction of practices chal-
lenges existing relations of power in a community or society (Evans
2004:34). New cultural practices can therefore cause resistance. Even
within diffusion networks themselves, the appropriation and adaption
of innovations may trigger conflicts and struggles over the control of
innovations (Roggeband 2007:256). Local institutions, power relations,
and meaning structures are, therefore, not only resources for translators
but also constraints. Zajak (2012) shows that attempts to translate the
right of freedom of association and collective bargaining in China – an
international law which China has not ratified – by explaining this right
and practicing it with workers has indeed contributed to some empow-
erment of workers; this is seen in basic forms of collective organizing
and negotiations with management at individual factory sites. How-
ever, Zajak (2012) also highlights the limitations of translation when
it comes to bringing about change. Pre-existing institutionalized power
imbalances between capital and labour within the Chinese system of
“state capitalism” (ten Brink 2010) exclude certain issues that workers
may want to negotiate with management (e.g. wage levels). She con-
cludes that whether continuous cycles of diffusion can contribute to
the spread of new labour practices beyond individual factories over time
also depends on broader structural factors (e.g. the employment rate)
and the restrictions states place on the competition along supply chains
(Zajak 2012).

Redefinition of target population

The third dimension of translation, according to Merry (2006:138), is
the redefinition of the target population. She shows that in the United
266 Moving Culture

States violence is typical in marriage whereas in China it is common

that violence is used on women and relatives in larger households, for
example elderly parents and children. This motivated activists in China
to modify their definition of violence and expand the target groups
for their activities. This dimension is also relevant to the innovations
that travel between movements. It is likely that when social movements
borrow tactics from other movements, the adopters not only construct
the similarity – whether structural or related to a problem or identity –
between themselves and transmitters but also redefine the groups their
protest targets.

Modes of translation
As the previous discussion suggests, in particular with regard to Merry’s
second dimension of diffusion, translation does not occur in a uni-
form manner. Instead, it is shaped by many factors and contingent
events. Several studies have demonstrated that the adjustment to local
structural conditions depends not only on the availability of structural
opportunities for cultural change but also on the distance between dif-
fusing innovations and local conditions (Halliday and Carruthers 2007;
Malets 2011). Malets (2011:10–11) elaborates four modes of translation
based on the availability of legal and cultural elements in the ver-
nacular policy language that can be used for dressing global concepts
in familiar costumes (Merry 2006): direct implementation, reformu-
lation, recombination, and invention. When transnational norms or
standards appear clear and unproblematic to translators – that is, when
actors understand how their practices need to be changed in order to
comply with transnational standards and when comparable practices
and conceptions are available locally – the requirements are directly
implemented.
In most cases, however, global norms appear at least to some
extent obscure and alien to local actors, or concepts proposed by
the transnational actors do not have any equivalents in local cultural
repertoires or policy language. When local actors do not understand
what is required, they seek local categories and conceptions that overlap
at least partially with global categories and concepts. When categories
(or even individual practices) fully overlap with global requirements, it
is enough to reformulate local concepts in terms that are consistent with
the language of transnational standards. When the overlap is partial,
they are then combined with categories that are either borrowed or trans-
planted from other settings or invented specifically for a local setting. The
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 267

practices used to implement transnational norms adopted for local use

may also be borrowed or invented (Malets 2011).
In her study of the translation of transnational forest certifica-
tion standards by Russian forest companies, Malets (2011) provides
several examples illustrating these modes of translation. Forest man-
agement standards are provided by an international, non-profit, non-
governmental organization, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),
which was founded by environmental movement organizations and
other actors in 1993 and seeks to improve the environmental condition
of managed forests worldwide. The standards include requirements con-
cerning forest management’s operational and economic aspects, envi-
ronmental impact, and social consequences for local communities and
indigenous peoples. Environmental activists help private companies
implement transnational standards and monitor standard enforcement.
In doing so, they appear as implementing and monitoring actors at the
local level and contribute to changes in the operational, environmental,
and social practices of Russian forest enterprises.
The requirements related to occupational safety appeared familiar
and unproblematic to both environmentalists and forest managers,
since they were largely compatible with the national legal norms (e.g.
regular occupational safety training or provision of individual safety
equipment). Managers were able to directly implement them because
“establishing which practices were ‘correct’ and how deviating practices
could be improved” was not difficult (Malets 2011:29). Requirements
related to maintaining the social and economic well-being of forest
workers and local communities provide a good example of reformulat-
ing. In Russia, forest companies traditionally support local populations
and rural infrastructure. In order to comply with community-related
requirements, activists and managers re-frame and present companies’
activities as the provision of services that contribute to the social and
economic well-being of local communities.
The translation of FSC requirements related to high conservation
value forests and biodiversity protection describes well the recombination
of locally available, externally given global, and newly invented cultural
elements. “High conservation value forests” is a term used to describe
different types of forests and forest ecosystems that require special pro-
tection. There is no equivalent to it in Russian forest and environmental
law, but there are concepts and norms prescribing protection of forests
that correspond to several types and subtypes of high conservation value
forests. This offered an opportunity for activists to reactivate national
268 Moving Culture

environmental and forest norms as a resource for protecting high con-

servation value forests and to frame transnational standards as resonant
with the national law. In countries where legal norms are not enforced,
this may mean a significant improvement of existing practices.
At the same time, activists were able to introduce new practices that
went beyond national legal requirements or contradicted them. Old-
growth forests are not recognized as protected under Russian national
law but are covered by the term “high conservation value forests” as
defined by the FSC. After lengthy negotiations, activists introduced
a zoning system, an internationally recognized approach for manag-
ing large protected areas: “Zoning allows forest companies to continue
logging in old-growth forests but at the same time conserve large
old-growth areas.” Old-growth forests were

divided into three zones marked red, yellow and green. Red zones are
relatively large tracts of forests where logging is prohibited. Yellow
zones are the buffer zones where companies can log using only soft
logging techniques, and no clear-cutting is allowed. In green zones,
companies can continue logging using standard logging techniques.
(Malets 2011:20)

This combination of global ideas (e.g. zoning), national law and practice
(standard logging techniques), and new practices (protecting old-growth
forests) enabled better protection of the world’s last large tracts of boreal
forests.

Indirect effects of translation

As the previous discussion shows, translation – although not always
required – helps install and embed new cultural practices in specific
national and local contexts, thus making the acceptance and popular-
ity of the innovative practices more likely. At the same time, translation
also results in greater impact that goes beyond adoption, adaptation,
and functioning of innovations in a new context. The adaptation and
implementation of new practices requires and mobilizes activists to
learn about the context they want to change and about the innovations
they seek to install. Moreover, the installation of new practices is often
accompanied by capacity-building when activists educate their followers
on how to make use of new practices and opportunities associated with
them. As a result, new knowledge concerning old and new practices is
constructed. Based on the new knowledge, activists may modify their
behaviour and new practices in order to render them more effective.
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 269

In her study of forest certification in Russia, Malets (2011) shows

that one of the indirect effects of social movement activists’ pro-
motion and implementation of transnational standards of sustainable
forest management is the accumulation of practical knowledge of forest
ecosystems and sustainable forest management practices. On the basis
of the knowledge and experience accumulated during the translation
of transnational standards, social movement activists publish compli-
ance guidelines and case studies of successful implementation. These
reflect new knowledge on sustainable forest management in Russia and
are used extensively by managers in certified forest companies to make
their practices comply with the standards. In a similar vein, Zajak (2011)
identified an increased understanding of national labour law and how
to use domestic redress mechanisms in China (e.g. legal procedures) as
an outcome of translation processes.

Feedback effects and modification of innovations

So far, we have described what happens to the innovations when they
are borrowed from other settings or designed in transnational forums,
such as international organizations or non-governmental associations,
and then translated into a local social, political, and cultural context.
Since the lines of interaction, particularly direct ties, do not break,
it is likely that feedback effects occur within a diffusion cycle: Along
the established channels, such as networks connecting activists across
national settings and transnational forums, accumulated knowledge
feeds back into those initial settings or transnational forums and trig-
gers new cycles of adaptation and reformulation of ideas. Not only
accumulated knowledge and practical experience but also the prob-
lems that emerge during translation have the potential to induce new
cycles of idea reformulation. Diagnostic struggles concerning the causes
of problems, learning, new actors, and the resistance triggered by the
introduction of new practices all represent the drivers of rethinking and
modification of innovations in initial national settings or transnational
forums (Halliday and Carruthers 2007). Again, if and how such a mod-
ification takes place very much depends on the actual translation, the
cognitive and strategic capacities of actors, and pre-existing norms and
power structures.

Conclusion

In this chapter we discussed diffusion as a cultural process. We per-

ceived culture as consisting of contradictory, contentious, and flexible
270 Moving Culture

elements, as well as being determined, shaped, and structured by pre-

existing institutions and power structures. Studying diffusion as a cul-
tural process means gaining a deeper understanding of these at first-sight
seemingly contradictory elements of culture: Social movement organiza-
tions operate as intermediaries and translators, actively carrying, making
sense of, and modifying ideas and meanings; but if and how they are
able to produce cultural consequences in the form of changes in prac-
tices also depends on the specific environment, the political and social
context, power relations, and the normative distance (which has also
been labelled as “similarity” by some) between the original norm, idea,
or repertoire and existing domestic practices.
Building upon various insights from the literature on diffusion, imple-
mentation, and translation, we developed the concept of a cycle of
diffusion. We argue that it can be understood as a process of recep-
tion and appropriation of norms and ideas, the actual translation into
new contexts and feedback and modification processes which might
contribute to a re-translation of the original sources of the innovation.
We paid particular attention to the process of translation as such and
argued that it can be perceived as consisting of different dimensions
or modes of translation (re-framing, adoption, or redefinition). Taking
a closer look at these modes of translation helps to conceptualize the
creativity of the agents, the translator who has to adopt, re-frame, and
recombine different cultural elements, as well as the barriers and limits
to bringing about a change in local norms and practices, for example
due to political and social resistance, which is based on pre-existing and
stable cultural structures. This again captures the dual facet of culture –
on the one hand, the more fluid, and, on the other, the more struc-
tural and stable elements of culture. Processes of translation can face
unintended consequences and produce resistance or backlashes, which
can lead to feedback processes, which may in turn lead to the modifica-
tion and re-translation of the original norms and ideas. It is conceivable
that the cycles of diffusion will continue until the ultimate goal of the
movement organization is reached. However, there are many barriers
along the way, such as those resulting from the embeddedness of every
norm or idea in certain cultural, social, and political force fields, which
can result in all manner of friction or disruptions to the cycle – leaving
certain aspects of the original idea behind to get lost on the way and
without any local consequences.
We claim that this framework contributes to the discussion of diffu-
sion processes, as it opens up the black box of diffusion as a cultural
process, taking into account the active role of agency and the complex-
ities and problems of cross-border, cross-cultural exchange.
 Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 271

We believe our framework of cycles of translation can be fruitful for

a range of specific diffusion processes across countries, movements, and
time. For example, studies of the current waves of democratic and inde-
pendence protest in Arab countries could benefit from paying attention
to how general norms of democracy travel through the region, become
issues of struggles concerning their meaning – which also reflect existing
traditions and power relations – and are then redefined in the process,
between countries and over time. Similarly, we do not know how the
recent Occupy movement, its diffusion across countries, and the events
and pictures it creates will contribute to changes in our understanding
of social justice in the light of recurrent global, regional, and national
economic and financial crisis.
Other aspects or elements of our diffusion cycle might need further
elaboration, extension, or specification. For example, what kind of dif-
ference does it make if codified standards, general norms, and ideas or
specific repertoires become diffused? How is the translation of various
elements interconnected and related? Several relationships are conceiv-
able. For example, certain ideas and norms can be linked to the diffusion
of confrontational protest repertoires, but they can also be linked to
discursive repertoires and less confrontational strategies. This again
could affect the degree and type of cultural change, depending on the
context. Future studies could try to further explore such relationships
and thereby contribute to elaborating on cycles of diffusion.

Note
1. Grass-roots groups are groups of a local population targeted by innovative
legal norms that may have an interest in them, but may also be interested
in circumventing them or be simply indifferent to or unaware of them, for
example women in the case of women’s rights (Merry 2006) or businesses in
the case of insolvency or environmental standards (Halliday and Carruthers
2009; Malets 2011).

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13
Memory Battles over Mai 68:
Interpretative Struggles as a
Cultural Re-Play of Social
Movements
Erik Neveu

He who controls the present, controls the past.

He who controls the past, controls the future.
George Orwell (1984)

Memory as a sociological object has claimed the attention of social sci-

entists since the groundbreaking research of Halbwachs (1994, 2008).
The contribution of historians is central here (Connerton 1989; Gillis
1994), especially Les Lieux de mémoire, the 5,000-page work in French
edited by Nora (1997). Let’s borrow a definition from him:

[M]emory is life, always carried by living groups, it is thus con-

stantly changing, open to the dialectics of remembrance and amne-
sia, unconscious of its successive distortions, vulnerable to all uses
and manipulations, capable of long sleeps and sudden regenerations.
History is the reconstruction of what no longer exists, always incom-
plete and questionable [ . . . ] Memory embeds remembrance into the
sacred, history flushes it out. History always makes things mundane.
Memory rises from the group that it fuses together, which means,
as Halbwachs has highlighted, that there are as many memories as
groups . . . .
(Nora 1997, I:24–25)

Rather than reviewing the available literature, inevitably a long task

given its richness, perhaps a more profitable approach is to consider
three landmarks concerning the sociological approach to memory. I will

275
276 Memory Battles over Mai 68

then explain why Mai 68 is an event which perfectly illustrates an

understanding of memory construction processes.
A theoretical framing of social memory should first highlight its nar-
rative dimension. By a combined process of selection, hierarchization,
and evaluation, memory transforms the chaos of events into a coherent
story, with its heroes and villains. An intellectualist vision of mem-
ory would suggest something made of highbrow cultural productions,
the remembrance of battles, and the organization of state rituals. But
memory is also made of and by the most ordinary productions of mass
culture, the stream of adverts, or the transformation of landscapes,
buildings, and public places into equivalents of memory checklists.
As John Urry (1990) emphasized, and as Priska Daphi reminds us in
this volume, memory is rooted in space. One of the strong contribu-
tions of Les Lieux de Mémoire is its mapping of the diversity of places and
cultural products, of rituals and institutions through which a memory
criss-crosses social life, oozing from everyday objects. I would secondly
question – along with Gary Alan Fine (2001) – the activity of mem-
ory entrepreneurs. There is no framing or reframing of memory without
conscious effort in which new interpretations are produced and circu-
lated. Identifying the memory entrepreneurs is crucial in order to make
sense of the changing content of the narratives produced by historical
winners at different stages of the memory work. Thirdly, memory must
be combined with an exploration of identity work (Handler in Gillis
1994). Memory defines “us” and “them”; it produces infamous charac-
ters and folk-devils; and it establishes the list of the veterans – heroic
or ridiculous. Memory solidifies narratives and legacies, in relation to
which we must adopt a position. The moments of commemoration
(Gillis 1994) are often those when memories and identities are estab-
lished or changed, as the historian Jean-Pierre Rioux (1989, 2008) shows
us for the “decennial celebrations” of Mai 68. And memory work is not
just the fact of remembering. It is also based on organized amnesia, selec-
tive narratives of the past, often much subtler than the erasure of Trotsky
from official Soviet photographs.
The simple use of notions such as narratives, identity, or rituals sug-
gests how memory is a structuring element of any culture. If one focuses
on the Geertzian vision of culture as a web of meaning, memory is one
of the major threads in this web. The small cast of characters and images
may change between generations and social groups, but Mai 68 would
suggest to any French person its snapshots of barricades and demon-
strations, the faces of Cohn Bendit, of the Libération’s editor July and
of Prefect Grimaud, the clichés of the Maoist activist from Godard’s
La Chinoise, the slogan “il est interdit d’interdire” tagged on a city wall.
 Erik Neveu 277

If one finds more explanatory power in Swidler’s metaphor of culture

as a toolkit, there is no doubt that Mai’s memory is also a toolkit, a
compass for today’s activists (one gains more from mobilizations than
from elections); and to those satisfied with the current social (dis)order,
the reassuring certainty that mock revolutions would end in business as
usual. Memory constitutes that part of culture which, in making sense
of the past, solidifies shared interpretations of the present.
A cultural analysis of a social movement faces a first theoretical chal-
lenge, which would be one of the two major questions structuring this
contribution. What are the peculiarities of the memory management
of social movements? Is it possible to think of the memory of Mai 68
as we think of, say, those of the battle of Agincourt or of Fukushima’s
tsunami? The answer is no, for at least three reasons. The first is the exis-
tence of a peculiar activist “memory of struggles”, with its autonomy,
its specific symbolic places, and its backstage organization so usefully
described by James Scott in Hidden Transcripts (1990). In France, one
might refer to the Renault car plant at Billancourt, considered for 50
years as the trigger of working-class struggles,1 or to the highlands of
Larzac where the extension of a military training camp was successfully
challenged. Secondly, memory here goes beyond questions of interpre-
tation and identity: It produces mobilizing and/or inhibiting effects.
Memory works as a bank of tactical recipes, motivations, and tools to
make sense of political opportunities. The memory and mythology of
past events are often invoked to decipher the signs of a promised success,
to find reasons to keep on struggling, sometimes to fear an impending
defeat. Memory maintenance suggests a third kind of specific prob-
lem. When mobilizations emanate from dominated groups, with few
resources or weak connections to the media and cultural institutions,
how can memory, which is sometimes limited to oral transmission,
operate? How can memory be institutionalized for movements whose
participants are poorly organized, whose social movement organizations
(SMOs) disappear, and whose enemies are much richer in resources for
managing the remembrance of the past or triggering oblivion?
Mai 68 offers a fascinating case study for such an investigation of
memory management of a social movement. Starting with a student
mobilization in Paris and Nanterre and soon spreading to all the coun-
try’s universities and many secondary schools, Mai 68 became the
greatest working-class strike in French history, with hundreds of facto-
ries occupied by the workers. Among the peculiarities of this insurgency,
which lasted almost a full month, one must mention the importance
of the “Prise de parole”: Mai was an incredible flow of speeches and
mottos, a whirlwind of face-to-face communication between people
278 Memory Battles over Mai 68

from different backgrounds or generations. Mai was also striking in

terms of the spread, variety, and sometimes unpredictability of its
actors: professional football players occupying the building of their
Fédération, farmers bringing food to the occupied factories or public
service journalists picketing around the Maison de la radio. Lacking
a unified political direction, a surprise to its own actors and finally
challenged by the Gaullist counter-mobilization of fear, the movement
crumbled at the beginning of June – Right wingers won by a landslide
the elections at the end of the month: “May-June 68” heralded the
start of a cycle of high-intensity mobilizations lasting more than five
years. Mai 68 was synchronized across many European countries and
beyond, creating a moment of contention comparable only to 1848.
Beyond its objective importance, it triggered, and still triggers 40 years
later, interpretive battles. Nora even claims in the conclusion of Les
Lieux de mémoire (III, 4689–4690) that Mai was just a “phantasmago-
ria”, trapped in a maze of commemorative mirrors. “Purely symbolic”,
Mai 68 celebrates and re-plays 1848, Petrograd of 1917, the French
strikes of 1936, and the Résistance – but as a farce, as Marx would
have said. Before it was over, Mai was the object of endless explana-
tions and commemorations. “The Soixante-huitards wanted to act, all
they have done is celebrate [ . . . ] the end of the revolution. The event
only makes sense as a commemoration”, its actors “self-auscultating
periodically, at the rhythm of their own biographies”. And France,
being a paradise for memorial activism,2 is an excellent place for such
investigations.
To study the memory of 68,3 three major data sources will be used.
The first are books and special issues of intellectual reviews (Esprit,
Le Débat . . . ), mostly produced by actors or politicians, interpreters or
essayists, but rarely by social scientists. Such texts often receive signif-
icant coverage in news magazines or TV talk shows. I shall also enlist
the representations of 68 in fiction. Finally, I will pay attention to
the contribution of ‘minor’ or illegitimate cultural products such as
detective novels, movies, or songs. The production of books, narratives,
and interpretations of 68 has reached the size of a cottage industry in
France. The number of books of all kinds already published is prob-
ably close to 1,000: Needless to say, no one has ever read them all.
But the commemorative frenzy (especially in 1988, 1998, 2008) has
been documented by historians (Prost 1988; Rioux 1989, 2008; Artiéres
and Zancarini-Fournel 2008) who have developed in-depth overviews of
what has been published, and it is thus unlikely that a significant book
or interpretation could remain invisible.
 Erik Neveu 279

Aside from the question of the peculiarities of social movement mem-

ory, this chapter will question its actors and its tools. The memory of
Mai challenges the researcher with a puzzle. The dominant memory
of Mai 68, the doxa, is both terribly selective and rather critical. The
working-class contribution of millions of strikers is brushed into the
background of the event, and often completely obscured by the focus
on the student movement. The student and leftist leaders are depicted
very ambiguously. At best they appear as sympathetic but dangerously
un-reflexive challengers of a “Societé bloquée”. More often they appear
as dogmatic ideologues or social chameleons, able to make ideological
U-turns to keep on climbing the social ladder. And the real result of
Mai is described by those who control its memory as the ruse of cap-
italist reason: The most visible effect of Mai was a modernization of
capitalism, the triumph of an individualist hedonism preventing any
return of the idea of revolution. In the press and media, this interpre-
tation has acquired a taken-for-granted status. The balance of power
among memory entrepreneurs has been hugely unequal and the offi-
cial narrative has received no significant challenge in the most central
spaces of the public sphere. And yet, opinion polls published in 2008
at the time of Mai’s 40th anniversary identify alternative interpretations
which challenge this status. Although a great majority of French peo-
ple (72%) regard Mai first and foremost as a students’ movement (while
37% describe it as a “great strike”),4 and while the vision of Mai as
having mainly practical results for lifestyles and morals also fits with
the liberal-libertarian memory, other data are worth attention too. The
global appreciation of Mai is very positive. The vision of 68 as a great
moment of “social progress” for workers’ rights is also striking. Last
but not least, the expression – mostly among the working classes – of
a dream of remaking 68 is a surprise. Since it probably does not target
changes in private relations – which probably appear as an unchallenge-
able legacy – this desire for another 68 expresses the strength of the
criticism of economic and power inequalities. The nature of the mem-
ory puzzle would appear clear now. Where is the resistance to official
memory coming from? Where could it be possible to identify the loca-
tion and expressions of an alternative, critical, and unofficial memory?
(See Table 13.1.)
To make sense of our research questions on memory and social move-
ment, official memory and its dissents, the first section of this chapter
will explain the stages in the process of memory-building. The second
section will focus on the profile and strategies of the leading memory
entrepreneurs. The chapter will finally suggest a partial explanation
280 Memory Battles over Mai 68

Table 13.1 Opinon poll results

1. 74% of French people have a positive view of Mai 68.

2. 62% of French people think that such a movement could happen again
today, but 57% do not wish it to. However, 58% of the working class and
53% of employees are in favour of it.
3. 78% of French people (and up to 90% of those less than 30 years old)
associate Mai with the idea of “social progress”. 80% think that Mai had a
positive influence on “the distribution of tasks between men and women”;
73% think that Mai had a positive influence on “professional relations and
trade union laws”; 72% have the same opinion concerning “sexuality”, and
64% concerning “parent–child relations”.
4. Finally, 61% consider that Mai had a positive influence on “morals”, and 74%
agree with the statement “The criticisms that could be made concerning the
mood and spirit of society are not linked to Mai 68” (An opinion to be
deciphered in the context of 68-bashing by President Sarkozy)

CSA Institute Polls (March 27, 2008; August 13, 2008).

of the puzzle by identifying the survival and revivals of a “Hidden

Transcript”, carrying a more critical, more subversive memory of 68.

The evolution of interpretative frameworks

The process of transformation of Mai 68 into a solidified memory

has already been studied in illuminating contributions (Rioux 1989;
Sommier 1994) that I will revisit here, before extending the analysis
towards the threshold of the present decade.

Competing and fluid interpretations of a still “Hot”

event (1968–1975)
One had only to wait a few months to observe intense interpretative
activity around Mai 68. A herald of liberal political thought, Raymond
Aron (1968) was one of the first to take a stand in a book whose title
is itself an interpretation. “La révolution introuvable” suggests the vacu-
ity of an event which is nothing more than a teenage disturbance. For
those on the extreme left, conversely, the initial diagnosis brooks no
doubts. Mai 68 is “Une répetition générale” (a last rehearsal) before the
Revolution (Bensaïd and Weber 1969). For the leaders of the Maoist
Gauche Prolétarienne (GP) it even opens the way “Vers la guerre civile”
(July, Morane, and Geismar 1969) and to the struggle against a “Nouveau
fascisme” (Glucksmann). Cohn Bendit would later suggest a less political
interpretative framework. In Le Grand Bazar (1975) Mai becomes an
anarchic and festive explosion of claims and creativity. On the side
 Erik Neveu 281

of more academic interpretations, Morin, alone or with Castoriadis

and Lefort (1968), questioned the generational dimension of the Mai
upsurge, the strength of the frustrations generated by an authoritar-
ian, archaic, and change-resistant society. Inaugurating an interpretative
framework which would become central among sociologists, Boudon
(1969) diagnosed a revolt fuelled by the anticipation of fall in status
by young students and academics, conscious of the devaluation of their
degrees.
During this first stage, no interpretation “won” and most of the
explanatory frames appeared as political or normative positions more
than as distanced analysis. Ten years after Mai 68, if the events still
focused passions and comments, no interpretative framework appeared
as dominant or consensual.

Crystallization of a memory doxa (1976–1988)

Mai’s twentieth anniversary made visible the strength gained by
an interpretative master frame. It mobilized a doxa; a structured
articulation of values; and interpretation of events, roles, and char-
acters transformed into common sense and soon unchallenged,
perceived as giving an accurate vision of facts, or more precisely
as being the facts. A combined process of selection (among events,
actors, places), interpretation (political, moral) and of storytelling
weaves historical events and experiences into this memory doxa. One
could describe its initial making by highlighting three convergent
processes.
The first is a re-visited vision of their leftist commitments by intel-
lectuals, who highlighted the anti-democratic potential of these move-
ments and the intoxicating power of Marxist ideologies. This intellec-
tual revision – soon labeled as made by the Nouveaux philosophes –
is too well-known to need much discussion. Its expression is con-
densed in a collection of best-selling books, the most famous being La
cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (Glucksmann 1975), La barbarie à vis-
age humain (Levy 1976), and Les Maîtres-Penseurs (Glucksmann 1977).
All describe the damaging effects of totalitarian ideologies of Marxist
and “anti-humanist” philosophies. All highlight the dangers of their
“barbarian” contempt of human rights, their oppressive effects on the
people – often identified as “plebs”. These ideologies are also described
as the end of any freedom of intellectual activity. Coming later and
more “academic” in style, La Pensée 68 (Ferry and Renaud 1985) does
not belong to the “Nouvelle Philosophie” bubble. Connections do exist
however. Here again, the trick is to explain the hubris of activists in
terms of the influence of ideologues and theories. This time the villains
282 Memory Battles over Mai 68

are the “anti-humanistic” four (Bourdieu, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida5 ),

fascinated by powerful determinisms and thus challenging the idea of
the free subject.
Another explanatory schema, which rapidly became taken for
granted, is the “ruse of liberal reason”. It was first expressed by Regis
Debray (1978) who suggested ironically that the most visible impact
of 68 was not to shake the foundations of capitalism but to modern-
ize it. Sexual liberation, celebration of consumption, and less formal
social relations: These were the results of 68, the main effect of which
was to reduce the cultural contradictions of capitalism identified by
Daniel Bell. This interpretation was to receive more systematic expres-
sion in Lipovetski’s L’ère du Vide (1983), which highlights the central
importance gained by a hedonist individualism, a disenchanted vision
of citizenship which found its inspiration in 68. National media pundit
of the eighties, Alain Minc even identifies a “Soixante-Huitard capitalism”
(1984), to suggest the importance of this modernist momentum. These
texts are not without their differences, but they share the retrospective
fallacy “Post Ergo . . . Hoc Propter”: the knowledge of what happened 20
years after 68 explains both its real meaning and the intentions of its
actors.
A third process of memory-building is the spectacular shrinking of
the space-time locations and actors worthy of being considered. 68
shrinks to the dimension of a Parisian–student–leftist event. Its actors
worthy of portraits and interviews are less than 40 personalities, often
self-celebrants of their adventures. The two big volumes of Hamon and
Rotman’s Génération (1987, 1988) were to become the official narrative
of 68. The books are serious work of investigative journalism. The nar-
rative structure – a kind of generational Bildungsroman – is based on
the trajectories and adventures of well-drawn characters. Génération is
the book of memory, both by virtue of its enormous success and by
defining Ex-Post a kind of official cast of Mai, drawing a line under
the list of veterans with sufficient medals to be allowed to speak.
The millions of working-class strikers and demonstrators, the farm-
ers, the activists struggling in dozens of French cities6 are pushed off
the top of the bill. The very structure of the book opposes the cre-
ative illusions of the “dream years”, to the following “gunpowder
years” where the potential for violence and the intellectual blindness
of leftists becomes more and more visible. Firmly established in 1988,
this dominant memory was to rule without facing major challenges
for 20 years. It offers a frame which can be summarized in six ideas
(Table 13.2).
 Erik Neveu 283

Table 13.2 The doxa memory of 68 in 1988

1. 68 is an event whose nexus is Parisian–student–leftist (not working-class

provincial or trade-unionist)
2. Many of the key actors are drawn from two loci: the former activists of the
communist UEC, the Maoist nebula around the Normale-Sup School
3. Almost all the leaders are fascinated by Marxist ideologies in their modernist
variant (Althusser), hybrid variant (Marx + Freud) or exotic variants (Mao,
Castro . . . )
4. 68 is basically a mobilization with a strong festive dimension, without
dramatic violence. It is a libertarian claim against all institutional
constraints.
5. 68 could however have finished tragically if the combination of the weight
of the real (Soljenitzyn revealing the Gulag, the Vietnamese boat people)
and the belated clear-sightedness of some Maoist leaders had not revealed
the totalitarian potential of many commitments.
6. By a trick of reason and history, a mock revolution will give birth to a
modernization of archaic social structures and the revolutionaries will
become the most ardent supporters (and winners) of the dynamics of
individualism.

This master frame has a double polarization (Sommier 1994). It allows

on the one hand a smiling, liberal-libertarian vision of 68 as a healthy
revolt against backward institutions and a quest for individual freedom
and, on the other hand, the exorcism of a sinister flirtation with the fas-
cination of totalitarianism. But these differences of interpretation rely
on the same hermeneutic game. Speaking of 68 is to mobilize one’s own
remembrance of the events, selecting ad hoc examples, making com-
ments on books and ideologies, almost never investigating or producing
original data. The paradoxical strength of the Hamon and Rotman book
is that it is based on a real investigation, something impossible to find
elsewhere in the surge of books and speeches on 68. It is worth high-
lighting how this master frame recalls Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction
(1991) with its perversity (fake revolution as real capitalist moderniza-
tion) and jeopardy (radical social change threatening to bring terrorism
and dictatorship).

The double criticism of a “Generation” (1990–2007)

The nineties could be described as a moment of interpretative tor-
por. It would indeed be difficult to find during the nineties a social
science book or a work of fiction suggesting an alternative frame of
interpretation of 68. Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) showed how the
management of many companies and organizations seized upon what
284 Memory Battles over Mai 68

they term the “artist criticism” of society developed in Mai 68, but their
aim is not to analyse Mai 68 or its actors. Although 80 books about
68 were published in 1998, only one remains significantly quoted 20
years later: Mai 68, L’héritage impossible by the sociologist and ex-activist
Jean-Pierre Le Goff. The author questions a double legacy of 68. Its
political leftism cannot be “reclaimed”: It appears as a combination
of a simplistic radicalism and totalitarian threat. The cultural leftism
of utopias and libertarian lifestyles aged better. But, asks Le Goff, was
it ever able to combine with its individualist and hedonist values a
vision of a new social organization which would mean norms, coordi-
nating institutions? Le Goff criticized the doxa produced by Génération,
its retrospective reading, its fascination for those well known for being
well-known. He is nevertheless trapped in the frame of the official mem-
ory: Here too 68 remains Parisian–student–leftist. When Le Goff writes
a chapter on the working-class he really deals with the relationship
between leftist students and workers.
If the master frame remains weakly challenged, changes are however
obvious. A first shift is visible in the typification of the “Soixante-
Huitard”. It is not always easy to understand who the “Soixante-Huitards”
are – members of a generation, activists of Mai, media-savvy leaders?
Whatever they are, they are negative characters. In the less malicious fic-
tions (J. Rolin 1995), leftism is described as naïve populism. The novel
ends in the – metaphorical – space of a rehab clinic for drug addicts.
Often depicted as coming from the upper crust of society, the “Soixante-
Huitards” are frantic social climbers, collecting status symbols. As years
pass they are also those who cling to power positions, closing the door to
younger generations. The “Soixante-Huitards” are always lecturing, they
have rallied the capitalist order and shamelessly abandoned the dreams
of their youth. Variations on these clichés became an almost compul-
sory ingredient of the novels exploring 68 (Enard 1986; Tillinac 1988;
Sportes 2006).
Another change in the 2000s is the conservative re-politicization of
68. Here, even the “cultural”, the liberal-libertarian side of the legacy,
is a catastrophe. The impact of individualistic hedonism is devastating.
This culture of selfishness develops anomie, cynicism, and the absence
of discipline. In politics, Sarkozy has been the most vocal. In 2007 he
promised no less than the complete “eradication” of the evil influence
of Mai 68,7 visible in the lack of respect for teachers, the poor education
of children and teenagers, the loss of the love of effort and even the
super-profits of greedy traders whose behaviour is merely the enactment
of the 68 motto “Jouissez sans entraves!”8
 Erik Neveu 285

How is memory institutionalized?

The process of memory-building described above combines a “Jacobin”

reduction (France = Paris), a sociological reduction (10 million protesters
reduced to the Parisian students), a selective view of leaders, and finally
the cultural reduction to a vision focusing on lifestyles and the challenge
to all authority of a movement which had political goals and “materi-
alist” claims. Let’s quote again that amazing statement by Nora. The
greatest strike of European history is just “a phantasmagoria”, “not even
anything tangible or practical”. The core of the official memory is here.
One can reasonably claim the cultural legacy of 68 as the inspiration of
more relaxed, maybe more efficient, ways of working, entertaining one-
self or constructing intimacy. But politically speaking 68 was – by way
of logic worthy of the Mad Hatter – both completely vain and deeply
threatening for democracy or the simple ability to think freely.
mEMORY belongs to this cultural dimension of social movements
that Polletta invites us to think of “less as people’s formal worldviews
and values [ . . . ] than as their ideas about how the organizations and
institutions should work” [ . . . ] “The focus is on the how in interac-
tion: the models, schemas, recipes and rules of thumb that people
rely on to do . . . ” (2008, p. 84). The vision of politics behind the
memory of 68 suggests precisely that dreaming of collectively chang-
ing the rules of the political game or the distribution of wealth can
only bring evil and disillusionment. The only reasonable action open
to individuals is empowerment: get rid of your inhibitions, dare to
undertake/do, behave as entrepreneurs of micro-changes! Memory is
also a machine to make and un-make identities. The young Generation
is modern, Class is ancient. Industrial workers are reduced to back-
ground shadows, to “object-class” (Bourdieu 1977), lacking autonomy,
destined to disappear, only able to speak through the ventriloquism of
better educated spokespersons. The effect of these narratives is also to
define characters allowed to speak of Mai as its authentic representa-
tives. Closing the hermeneutic circle, they will develop variations on
the official Memory of 68: an orthodox discourse which thus confirms
their legitimacy to be the heralds and undertakers of the movement.
Gary-Alan Fine (2001) highlights the importance of such “reputational
entrepreneurs”: “The effective reputational entrepreneur will be in a
structural position in which the claims gain credence and are spread
by virtue of the placement of their maker. Thus, self-interest, narra-
tive clarity and social position affect which reputations ‘stick’ ” (Fine
2001:63).
286 Memory Battles over Mai 68

Changin’ in the winds . . .

Which memory entrepreneurs made the 68 memory “stick”? The
importance of former activists and fellow travellers from the Gauche
Prolétarienne has already been highlighted by Isabelle Sommier (1994;
see also Nora 1997, II:2976; Terray 1988:55). The GP was, between 1969
and 1973, the most visible and mediatized of the Maoist organizations.
Its journal La cause du peuple, with the editorship of Sartre to protect
it from repression, developed an inflammatory rhetoric. It combined
a populism celebrating working-class wisdom and fighting spirit with
a strange ideological hollowness, visible in the absence of a political
project. A significant number of students from the GP would leave
the university to work in factories, becoming Établis. It is also the
only organization which initiated real “military” actions, albeit prevent-
ing anybody from actually being killed. The GP also had sociological
peculiarities. Many among its leaders came from Normale Sup, the
holy temple of French academia. It is also the only organization in
which activists from very wealthy families or from the intelligentsia
were visible. The journalist Serge July, the Nouveaux Philosophe André
Glucksmann, the novelists Olivier Rolin and Jean Rolin, Daniel Rondeau
and Michel Le Bris, and Alain Geismar, one of the three main leaders of
the students’ Mai were all members of the GP. Compared to other left-
ist organizations, the GP brought together more activists with strong
cultural and/or social capital, and in some cases economic resources,
and thus had more of what Bourdieu calls “Culot social” (having a brass
neck). This combination of individual resources and family connexions,
the shared feeling of belonging to an elite, worked for the organization
core like a mutual insurance system, fostering careers and initiatives.
Another feature of many among yesterday’s GP figureheads is their
ability to change their minds. Such ideological flexibility is counter-
balanced by an enduring disposition of their Habitus: the ability to
lecture and produce theories. The shift from inflammatory Maoism to
Nouvelle Philosophie in two or three years is a pertinent example.
Former GP activists were to succeed as the most active memory
entrepreneurs. Weren’t they major actors, maybe heroes of 68? Weren’t
they the only ones to have dared to take violent actions which could
be transformed into Shakespearian dilemmas about violence or into
picaresque narratives (Rolin 2002)? Didn’t they have, through the best
Parisian Khâgnes, Normale Sup, and Althusserism, a philosophical cul-
ture, skills to theorize? As Bourdieu (1998) showed with regard to
another character of trendy Maoism – writer Philippe Sollers – another
 Erik Neveu 287

dimension of the Habitus of these ex-activists is their skill at sublimating

into a vanguardist perspicacity their quick understanding of ideological
changes. And what was at stake in the memory games over 68 is also the
conversion of resources linked to activism into other kinds of capitals.
Painted with the flashy colours of a Grand Bazar (Cohn-Bendit 1975) or
with the dark threat of totalitarian “man-eaters” (Glucksmann 1976),
the revisited memories of 68 also disqualify those who do not learn and
teach the right lessons, those who persist in disastrous commitments.
Conversely, admitting that one was wrong does not condemn one to
silence. It creates a duty to lecture one’s fellow citizens on such blunders.
Weberian sociology of religions might suggest a polarity in the man-
agement of social movements’ memories. It may be in the hands of a
clergy of apparatchiks, party historians and activists, selected as wit-
nesses in proportion to their orthodoxy. Rioux (1989) complained thus
of the boring presence of the “civil servants of memory” from the
French Communist Party (PCF) and trade unions during a conference
on 68 which brought together researchers and actors. Conversely, the
making of 68 memory suggests more the character of the prophet. Mem-
ory entrepreneurs do not speak for 68 as servants of an institution,
but against its possible confiscation by parties and institutions. They
claim to speak with the legitimacy of their militant feats of arms and
charisma, not as the priests of an established creed. Their vision of 68
mobilizes “emotional preaching”, and the style of “the demagogue or of
the political publicist” (Weber 1995:190–197). But how does prophetic
power work? Supplying political and ethical “goods of salvation” with-
out the support of an institution, prophets need devices to amplify their
message.

Media as loudspeakers
But how could a small group of former GP activists – even strength-
ened by the convergent narratives of journalists (Hamon and Rotman,
Joffrin), leaders of 68 (Cohn-Bendit), and some ex-activists from the
Trotskyite LCR (R. Goupil; H. Weber) – produce something like a
national memory? The importance of the social capital and networks
of many of these entrepreneurs in the media and institutions of cultural
diffusion has been emphasized. Aubral and Delcourt (1977) have pro-
duced an illuminating investigation of the early P.R. campaign which
catapulted the “Nouveaux Philosophes” in front of movie cameras, micro-
phones, and interviewers. The media firepower of the group is amazing:
They launched the daily Libération in 1973, several book collections
288 Memory Battles over Mai 68

published by Grasset, garnered support from other publishers (Seuil)

and friendly coverage from the first news magazine on the left (Le
Nouvel Obs), but also from “Les Nouvelles Littéraires”. They produced
documentary movies (Goupil), received invitations from media cultural
programmes (Apostrophes, France-Culture). The strength of the network
also comes from the mobilization of intellectual godfathers (Althusser,
Sartre, Foucault) to seduce journalists, to put in motion the social capital
which they inherited and built in elite academic institutions.
The impact of memory entrepreneurs goes far beyond an explanation
of networking or cronyism. Following Louis Pinto (1994), we should
pay attention to the rise of a new model of Intellectual in the seventies
and eighties. Higher levels of education mean that there is an increas-
ing audience for books and journals on social issues, though not at the
same level of intellectual complexity as those publications aimed at the
academic publishing market. A second variable is the parallel increase
in educated journalists, more open to intellectual debates, conscious of
the existence of this new audience and of the need to offer them reader-
friendly texts. It is precisely to these social demands that a new breed
of intellectuals would answer. Who? Young intellectuals for whom the
world of academia – with its slow career progression and greyish seri-
ousness, the peer control and the burden of growing student numbers –
was not attractive; others who were unable to match its prerequisites.
But also ex-leftists seeking a quick conversion of resources accumulated
in activism. They would invent a new breed of “media intellectuals”.
Some of the former activists who gained media fame revisiting 68 (BHL,
Glucksmann, July) would become what the Italian call Tuttologo, media
guests able to discuss any kind of topic in the Zeitgeist.

Streamlined narratives
The success of the official memory also comes from its themes. The
merry vision of 68 as the great cleansing of archaisms brings into
focus issues such as sexual liberation, individual autonomy and self-
expression, ecology and openness to other cultures. As a re-reading of
Distinction (1979, esp. Chapter 6:409–431) or of the Whole Earth Catalog
(1972) would show, this reconstruction of 68 places the intellectual mid-
dle classes and their lifestyles at the heart of society. In these narratives
working classes are either groups destined to disappear, or powerless
plebs condemned to suffer domination stoically. The re-framing of 68
as the inspiration of France’s cultural modernization fits perfectly with
the rise of the new intellectual middle classes and their values. Echo-
ing the growing scepticism about the idea of revolution, it suggests that
 Erik Neveu 289

innovation in lifestyles and softening the institutional norms could be

the most reasonable way towards social change. Such a vision of 68 faces
less resistance than emphasizing its revolutionary potential. Conversely,
here is a limit to the reception of this memory of 68 among working
classes: It has no message for them but the suggestion of their back-
wardness. But do industrial workers and employees read Bernard-Henry
Lévy or subscribe to the Nouvel Obs?
It is also the form of these narratives that contributes to the reception
of their messages. The most “intellectual” hub of memory production
(Glucksman, BHL) combines the appearance of depth suggested by the
mobilization of intimidating (for beginners) concepts with capital letters
(the Master, State, Plebs) and names of philosophers, with an emotional
pathos and the almost aesthetic pleasure of stylish writing (Grignon
1976). In a more “documentary” hub of memory literature, the strength
of “Génération” comes from its combination of serious investigation and
good storytelling. The book is doubly reader-friendly. Dialogues and
exciting moments of tension are frequent. And as the story adopts the
meaning given Ex-Post to their lives by the actors selected as central,
the narrative sounds coherent, and delivers its morality without a cum-
bersome theoretical vocabulary. Many of the texts which convey this
memory are also mobilizing a culture as a shared web of meanings.
One finds biblical images (the David protesters vs. the Goliath Gaullist
state, the return of the prodigal-revolutionary sons). Common sense
statements are in evidence as well (one should stop before provoking
a catastrophe). Binary cultural schemes are at work too: the pragmatism
of common sense versus hazy ideologies, the pleasure of individual self-
expression and consumption versus the sad barrack life and shortages of
collectivism.
Such memory institutionalization would support Halbwachs and
Durkheim: Social memory, in its dominant version, must fit with the
changing power and ideological balances structuring a society. Framing
68 as liberal-libertarian echoes the reforms of the “advanced liberalism”
of Giscard d’Estaing. It fits with the cultural rise of the new mid-
dle classes and with the drift of a left which is beginning to theorize
its Farewell to the Proletariat (Gorz 1980). 68 also suggests a growing
difficulty for social movements in the self-management and institu-
tionalization of their memory. The more a movement and its members
escape the control of a strong organization, the more its constituency
is made up of members with high levels of cultural and social capital,
and in turn the more these capitals can be used to shape the memory
of any movement lacking organizational control, even to gain memory
290 Memory Battles over Mai 68

ownership. Comparing the memory of the strikes of 1936 – mostly

defined, codified and managed by the PCF and CGT – and of those
of 1968 is illuminating. It suggests two possible analyses. Is it possible
to argue that organizations which can exert strong control over their
membership – for instance because the organization is members’ only
chance to act and express themselves – are becoming rarer, and if so
why? Is there a shift towards a loss of movements’ media autonomy
(Neveu 1999)? The hypothesis here would be that SMOs have fewer
media and communication tools (press, leaflets, posters) under their
complete control than in the past. Such a situation creates a novel
media-dependency, forcing activists to anticipate what is newsworthy,
which media channels to use to spread the right messages and to build
the right memory. This brings us back to our original puzzle: Why the
triumph of the official memory without very visible resistance or alter-
native narratives? And what is the real strength of an official memory
which could not prevent something like the desire for a new Mai of
social change?

Where can we find memory’s Hidden transcripts?

Scott calls “hidden transcripts” the combination of narratives, ideas, and

remembrances which are the silent, often secret, cognitive and emo-
tional expressions of resistance, the shared understanding among the
weak that although the social order is here to last, this does not make
it just. Scott’s concept makes sense in our case study too: Far from the
media, disconnected from intellectual fashions, visible but unseen or
despised by columnists and media intellectuals, alternative visions of 68
survived. That is what the polls are showing. The hammering of the offi-
cial narrative of 68 could not prevent the survival and even the revival
of a positive vision of 68 as a victorious and happy moment of social
conquests and upheaval against economic exploitation. That’s what the
2008 polls were showing. How did this surprising resistance happen?
Precisely with the help of what would probably better be called “unseen”
than “hidden” transcripts. A more political, more class-sensitive and
anti-capitalist vision of 68 survived in a cultural space of narratives,
clichés and remembrances. This web of meaning was not strictly speak-
ing “hidden” as something secret or punished when expressed; more
often it was “unseen” because it was expressed in private spaces, carried
by cultural forms not legitimate enough to trigger public discussion in
the core of the press-media system. But before exploring the nature of
 Erik Neveu 291

such “unseen transcripts”, one needs to pay attention to the problems

of promoting alternative master frames of memory.

An orphan social movement?

If the hegemonic memory of Mai is powerful, it is also because it has
not had to face an alternative master frame. Politically speaking, 68 is an
orphan social movement, with an ambiguous relation to parties on the
left and trade unions. The strikes of 68 developed in an industrial world
with a very low rate of unionization. The simultaneous mobilization of
industrial workers, journalists, peasants and students was propelled by
many different organizations, all of them weakly connected, sometimes
short-lived, not always able or willing to produce a discourse on the
meaning of Mai. The PCF – and its satellite union CGT – has always been
suspicious of a movement which challenged its leadership. The new
Parti Socialiste had no reason to praise a mobilization in which it had no
role and which ended in two electoral catastrophes (1968, 1969). The
trade union CFDT is the only organization which was in tune with the
movement. But the “second left” to which the CFDT is connected devel-
oped a political vision (limitation of state intervention, contract vs. law,
activists as “social entrepreneurs”) closer to the liberal-libertarian vision
of 68 than to a vision structured by ideas of class struggle or radical
change.
The role of researchers and the social sciences in the interpretations
and memory-building of 68 is also worthy of a few comments. The weak-
ness of a sociological dimension in the official memory has already been
mentioned. Did sociologists and historians never study 68? They did it
in the phase immediately following Mai. But they faced two difficul-
ties. Writing too soon, without the time for proper investigation, they
either suggested weak interpretations (Morin 1968) or proposed analy-
sis limited to the mobilization of the universities (Boudon 1969). It was
necessary to wait until the eighties to read the first empirical research
on 68 (Lacroix 1986; Bourdieu 1984). But this research, deciphering 68
among student youth as a revolt anticipating the devaluation of aca-
demic degrees on the job market, had a disenchanting message; it did
not really supply an attractive narrative of the events. Explaining the
reluctance of French academia for social movement studies would be
a worthy subject for another paper. Let us just say here that mobiliza-
tions have long been perceived by political science as a “dirty” object,
threatening a democracy confined to the vote. Among sociologists, the
only ones strongly committed to the study of social movements were
292 Memory Battles over Mai 68

Alain Touraine and his colleagues. Their interpretation of the “sixties”

combined the vision of an end of the central role of the working class
(Touraine 1980) and a desperate quest for a new central actor of social
change, a line of reasoning which paralleled or converged with the doxa
rather than challenging it.

Thinking “Banal Culture”

Our initial puzzle still remains unsolved. How can one explain that
Mai 68 continues to inspire a deep sympathy and is still perceived as
having a social and political dimension, when the interpretative frame
hammered by most of the media and witnesses is so different? We will
seek alternative interpretive frames in two directions. Firstly, intellectu-
als habitually overrate the impact of their own productions, or reduce
the complexity of political and social debates to what can be objecti-
fied in books, talk shows, or press clippings. Conversely, one should
pay more attention to “banal culture”. Billig (1995) speaks of banal
nationalism as the presence of nationalism before and beneath state
rituals and formalized discourse on national identities. Banal nation-
alism can be seen in the most ordinary activations of we-ness: the
sticker with a national flag at the rear of a car, the celebration or “our”
qualities in the style of the national football team. Such is the idea of
“banal culture”. Interpretations of the social world, and memory main-
tenance, do not only flow from visible, legitimate, and public cultural
channels.
A few remarks suffice to make sense of the idea of an overrating of
the impact of the most elaborate production of the memory doxa. By its
very style the Nouvelle Philosophie is simply out of reach of the working-
class readership. The idea that the narrative of the struggles inside the
Union des Etudiants Communistes or of the exploits or blunders of leftist
groups could impassion large audiences reveals a good level of intellec-
tual ethnocentrism. And the impact of novels, fiction, and even of news
magazines – rarely reaching one million copies sold a week in France –
should not be inflated. The French working class cannot be described as
a cultural archipelago, barricaded in a culture of resistance and immune
from any influence of media culture. But the most systematic expression
of the official memory reaches the educated groups far more than the
masses. The question remains as to evaluating how and to what degree
television, the local press, or cultural products specifically consumed by
the working classes could have diffused the official memory. To give a
single illustration (Neveu 1985), until the mid-seventies French spy nov-
els were a genre selling millions of copies a year to a male, working-class
 Erik Neveu 293

readership. This literature developed a very negative image of the 68

activists.
Concerning the sites and expressions of a “banal culture”, three at
least should be mentioned. Let’s firstly rehabilitate the centrality of oral
communication. The number of French people going on strike in 68
can be debated: seven million, ten million? Whatever the right figure,
it means that for at least a third of French families 68 has been a lived
commitment which had a strong emotional dimension, and was linked
to “cognitive liberation”, to the feeling of regaining personal dignity.
If the passage of time and the death of many participants have pushed
68 into the attics of memory, one might also suggest that ordinary con-
versations, moments of political discussion, and familial or professional
micro-rituals (union meetings, speeches during social events such as
retirement parties . . . ) produced millions of opportunities to speak of
68, outside the official memory frame. The decennial commemorations
also triggered unorthodox memories of 68, as is very visible in the emo-
tions of interviews with rank-and-file activists – when they find a media
slot to speak.
A second site of resistance can be identified in schools. Curricula at
French secondary schools dedicate no more than a few pages and a
handful of minutes to 68. A look at the textbooks of three major educa-
tional publishers (Belin, Hachette, Hatier) shows that in all of them the
strikes and the working-class presence in Mai are highlighted, and that
the youth revolt is depicted as something at least understandable, even
justified. Beyond what textbooks may suggest, we should not forget that
many of the students studying in the university of 68 found a job in the
education system, and that French education has the highest national
rate of unionization, often in unions with critical views inside the left.
It is thus highly probable that, beyond the history or civic instruction
courses, French teenagers have been exposed to messages concerning
Mai which were strongly dissonant with the doxa.
A third space of expression of “banal culture” can be identified in
a variety of cultural goods (novels, movies, comics), which – without
hitting the headlines of the cultural pages or airtime of the press and
media – brought hundreds of micro-contributions to an alternative
memory of 68. One of the most visible and important of these cul-
tural productions has been the sub-genre of detective novels known as
“Néo-Polar” or “Noir”. Indeed, detective novels in France represent one
in four books sold. Prolific and popular in the eighties and nineties,
this literature contributed to the ongoing critical 68 “Mauvais Esprit”.
These novels often locate their stories among working-class or marginal
294 Memory Battles over Mai 68

groups that French literature tends to ignore. They develop strong social
criticism “à la 68” of professional politicians, of ordinary life and work
relations, as well as of economic inequalities. Many authors of these
novels have been activists or close to 68 leftism (Collovald and Neveu
2001). The list of cultural products which conveyed an oppositional
memory of 68 would need further research; here let’s mention singers
(Renaud), rock bands (Trust, Mano Negra), and comedians (Font et Val,
Coluche, Bedos) who have maintained a contentious mood. The weekly
Charlie Hebdo, which between 1969 and 1982 had been a most irrever-
ent expression of the cultural effervescence of 68, was to have a second
life after 1992, bridging a subversive memory of 68 between the older
and younger generations. We should also pay attention to film, from
Guedigian’s socially concerned movies to lighter comedies (Klapisch’s
Péril Jeune).
To understand the resistance of public opinion, the lasting vision of
68 as a class conflict requires two further explanatory dimensions. Alter-
native readings of 68 re-emerged in the first decade of the 21st century.
This was visible in a blooming of memoirs and narratives, often com-
bining a self-ironic nostalgia, the reminder of the harshness of social
inequalities and the idea that if the words used might have been fool-
ish, the cause of the fighting was just (Le Menn 1999; Rémond 2002;
Morvan 2009). But the shift happened in academia too. The translation
of the book by the US historian Karen Ross – May 68 and its Afterlives
(2005) – was a first shock. Ross highlighted how much Mai had been a
political event, sometimes violent, which had mobilized factory work-
ers. The 2008 celebrations allowed the publication of two edited books
(Artieres and Zancarini-Fournel 2008; Dammame et al. 2008) bringing
original research into play. A growing stream of research has offered
empirical investigations of 68 among the working class (Dressen 2000;
Vigna 2007; Porhel 2008). This research has shaken the pillars of the
official memory. It reminds how 68 made strong claims for political
change, for a different distribution of wealth and power. It highlights
a new style of worker insubordination. This research also shows that the
narrative of a leftism which brought together only the children of the
upper classes, and stories of ex-activists skyrocketing to power positions
in the media and culture, politics, and academia after a few months
or years of ideological exaltation do not stand up to even the smallest
empirical investigation. The practical impact of this research should not
be overrated. It appeared a long time after the struggles of 68 and their
interpretative follow-up. Most of the books quoted here are academic
in their style and circulation; few have received wide press coverage.
 Erik Neveu 295

But these re-interpretations have been relayed by a dense network of

associations and local unions, of bookshops and debating societies. One
should also remember that although their membership among work-
ing classes is weak, the French leftist organizations which have kept
alive the memory of a bright red 68 of class struggle are not minor
political sects: They have mobilized between 5% and 10% of voters at
presidential elections since 1988, and maintain a real influence among
the intellectual Petite Bourgeoisie. And here is probably another lesson.
The lasting strength of heterodox/hidden transcripts of 68 is indebted to
the combined influence of teachers, of the battalions of “little” cultural
producers, to the networks of activists dedicated to the organization
of public debates. The low clergy of the intellectual worlds may not
be powerless when challenging the media firepower and intellectual
arrogance of the bishops and cardinals of the high clergy of media
intellectuals and Tutologos.

Some lessons of 68 and its memories

Transformed into memory, events become incredibly plastic. Memory
works to re-play mobilizations: It redefines their geography, their sociol-
ogy, their actors and meaning. The metaphor of the rehearsal takes on
a new meaning here: The events of May–June appear as a draft of the
“real” story which memory has constructed. At stake crucially in the 68
memory-building is the fact that it is obviously told, managed and insti-
tutionalized by a limited number of entrepreneurs. Their success comes
from a combination of reasons which suggest as many analytical vari-
ables: (a) they possess strong social and cultural capital, with specific
“media” capital; (b) beyond the question of its “truth”, their framing is
in tune with changes in social morphology and culture; (c) the success
of this small group of memory entrepreneurs cannot be separated from
a broader process of change, namely the invention of the “media intel-
lectual”, able to speak on any and all topics with emotion and brevity,
to transform platitudes and Zeitgeist into apparent expertise or moral
depth; and (d) they face very weak competition from other memorial
narratives with powerful sponsors.
The role of these entrepreneurs invites us to question the “owner-
ship of memory”. For most French journalists, the right guest for a talk
show on 68 is Cohn-Bendit, July, or Glucksmann. How can the legacy
of some social movements be overtaken by individuals? In what cir-
cumstances, with what resources, and within what limits? Conversely,
which social movements have their memory monitored by institutions
(the state, the PCF, Gaullism for the French Résistance) and why? Why
296 Memory Battles over Mai 68

do some movements seem to carry impossible legacies, like the Italian

May with the blot of terrorism?
Another lesson concerns the weaving of memory. Memories are made
of many different threads: theoretical and academic analysis, first-
person narratives, individual remembrances, but also fiction, advertis-
ing, and songs. They select characters and mottos, events, and places to
produce morality plays. There is no possible understanding of the social
construction of memory without paying attention to this diversity,
without challenging the intellectualist vision of memory as something
produced by serious books and solemn rituals.
The growing weight of media and the press in the management of
social movements’ memory must also be considered. As media cover-
age is strategic enough to shape the very style of protests (Champagne
1990) and as many SMOs no longer have a kind of “disciplinary” control
of movements, or their own network of communication tools, media
matters more and more in memory management. This trend imposes
new investments and requires new skills from memory managers. But
oppositional memories can survive, even with few supporting voices
in the press and media. Lived memories linked to personal experience,
remembrance of mobilizations circulating in work communities and in
networks of family and friends matter. The micro-actions and speeches
of thousands of “small” intellectuals (teachers and activists, artists, and
“paperback writers”) matter too.

Notes
1. A good example of memory cleansing, which cannot be accounted for by the
demands of urbanism alone, is the complete destruction of the car factory at
Boulogne-Billancourt, leaving no remnants of what was coined “the working-
class fortress”.
2. Cf. Mark Twain’s Notes on Paris with its mock speech by a French politician,
crammed with references to historical events (the 14th of July, the 10th of
August, the 2nd of December . . . ) which could only make sense to a local
audience (Contes choisis, Le livre de Poche, Paris 1969:58–59).
3. From now on I will use the phrase 68 more than “May” or “May–June 68”.
In fact 68 goes far beyond the two months of mobilization and should be
extended at least to the early seventies. Artiéres and Zancarini-Fournel (2008)
even suggest the term “années 68” for the historical moment which begins
with the end of the Algerian war and ends with Mitterrand’s election (1962–
1981).
4. The opinion poll allowed multiple answers.
5. Defining as the godfathers of the “Pensée 68” authors who have never been
read – or very selectively: maybe Bourdieu and Passeron’s Les Héritiers (1964) –
by most of the participants and leaders of the movement is both a strange
 Erik Neveu 297

choice and a test of the relationship of the interpreters of 68 with “real-world

indicators”.
6. Lip (a watch factory occupied and self-managed by workers) and the Larzac
(farmers resisting the extension of an army training camp for eight years)
being the only provincial exceptions, in almost all books.
7. See his speech at Perpignan, February 23, 2007.
8. Have unfettered pleasure! The French verb Jouir means both to rejoice and to
come.

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Index
Note: The letter ‘n’ followed by locators refer to notes.
Abraham, Nicolas, 214–15
The Accumulation of Capital (1951), 71
activism, transnational, 91–107
barriers to, 186–7
diffusion, 261–71
diminishing importance of the
nation state, 96–7
and space, 166–7
state’s impact on collectiveidentity,
104–5
advanced liberalism, 289
Aelst, Peter van, 143
Afonso, José, 104
Africa, African, 72, 211, 219, 245
agency, 13, 14–15, 37, 46, 47, 58, 118,
120, 122, 123, 170, 172, 188, 190,
193, 195, 196, 230, 236, 242, 256,
259–60, 270
Albo, Xavier, 82
Alexander, Jeffrey, 23, 207, 215, 229,
232, 243
Alford, C. Fred, 40
Almond, Gabriel A., 146–7
Al-Qaeda, 31
Altheide, David, 234
Alvarez, Sonia, 229
Amatenango, 76, 77, 80
Amenta, Edwin, 258–9
Aminzade, Ron, 3, 181 n3
Anderson, Benedict, 31
Anonymous, 91
anthropology, 3, 7, 8, 67–8, 74
anti-abortion movement, 127,
130–1, 143
anti-apartheid movement, 256
anti-austerity movement, 59, 100, 165
anti-nuclear movement, US, 38
anti-Semitism, 31, 128–9, 132–3
anti-surveillance movement, 127–8
anti-war movement, 47, 168
300
anti-waste movement, Germany,
123, 124
anti-Zionism, 129, 133
Appadurai, Arjun, 97–8
appropriation, 263
Arab Spring, 91, 104, 165
Archer, Margaret S., 25–6
archaeology (of knowledge), 122
Argentina, 34, 38
Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph, 259
Armstrong, Elizabeth A., 207–9, 211
Aron, Raymond, 280
Arriscado Nunes, João, 104
art, emotional impact of, 33
Artiéres, Philippe, 278, 294, 296 n3
assembly, 29, 100, 105, 197–9
Assies, Willem, 3, 97, 146
Assmann, Aleida, 208, 210, 213–16,
220, 224 n2
Aubral, François, 287
austerity programmes, 59, 100, 165
autonomists, 47, 113, 177, 199
movement, 10, 70, 74, 77–83, 128,
196–9, 220
Auyero, Javier, 38
Avrich, Paul, 51
Ayora-Diaz, Stefan Igor, 74
Babb, Sarah, 4
Baglioni, Simone, 102
Balamilal, 76
Ballymun Community Action
Programme, 59
banal culture, 292–5
Band-of-Brothers Dilemma, 33
Bandy, Joe Jennifer, 167, 169
Barbalet, J. M., 228
Barker, Colin, 48, 58, 61, 62 n2
Barnes, Samuel H., 143
Barnett, Clive, 167

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 27
Barrow, Logie, 55
Bartel, Daniel, 113, 129
Bartra, Roger, 69
Bauman, Richard, 231, 243
Baumgarten, Britta, 1–16, 51, 58,
91–108, 122, 130–1, 135 n5, 135
n8, 143, 148, 157 n3, 204 n13
Beaumont, Justin, 166–9
Beck, Ulrich, 187, 199, 202
Beeman, William O., 231
belief amplification, 116
Benford, Robert D., 2–4, 37, 103, 116,
118, 230, 254–7, 262, 264
Benhabib, Seyla, 259
Bensaïd, Daniel, 280
Benthin, Rainer, 130
Berezin, Mabel, 38, 140
Berger, Peter, 5, 14, 94, 118
Bernstein, Mary, 39
Bevington, Douglas, 61
Billig, Michael, 292
Billionaires for Bush, 239, 243
Binder, Amy, 103
Black Panthers, 238–9, 243
blame work, 40–1
Blee, Kathleen M., 38
Bob, Clifford, 35
Bogad, L. M., 230, 241, 243, 244 n4,
245 n6
Boltanski, Luc, 103, 283
Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 69
Bosi, Lorenzo, 11
Bosker, Roel J., 144
Boudon, Raymond, 281, 291
Boudreau, Julie-Anne, 170
Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 14–15, 148,
194–7, 200, 203 n2, 282, 285–6,
291, 296 n5
Boyte, Harry C., 168
Brand, Karl-Werner, 116
Brazil, 102
Briggs, Charles L., 243
Brimm, Linda, 106
Brockett, Charles D., 34
Bröckling, Ulrich, 15
Browning, Christopher R., 40
Buckner, Hugh, 56
Buechler, Steven M., 5, 120
Index 301
Burdick, John, 229
Burke, Peter, 228, 230–1
Bürklin, Wilhelm, 2
Büsser, Detlef, 116
Butler, Judith, 231
Canada, 220
Calhoun, Craig, 2
Cambanis, Thanassis, 99
Camic, Charles, 192–3
capitalism, 55, 69–71, 116, 121, 211,
265, 279, 282
and modernization of, 281
Caren, Neal, 258–9
Carrithers, Matthew, 68, 71
Carruthers, Bruce, 259–60, 263, 266,
269, 271 n1
Carter, Neal Alan, 167, 169
Castells, Manuel, 237
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 281
Chabot, Sean, 254, 263
Chaiken, Shelly, 150
Chalmers, Alan F., 140, 146
Champagne, Patrick, 296
Chaney, David, 2
character work, 40–1
Chernilo, Daniel, 108 n7
Chess, Caron, 26
Chiapello, Eve, 283
Chile, 167
China, 260, 263, 265–6, 269
civil rights movement, US, 32, 35,
211–12, 237, 240
Clarke, Lee, 26
classifications, 123, 124
class consciousness, working class, 48,
55, 190
cleavage structures, 2, 143
Clemens, Elisabeth S., 142
Cocco, Giuseppe, 52
cognition, 23, 25, 27, 34, 37, 120, 147
cognitive bias, 4
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 287, 295
collective effervescence, 29
collective identity, 2, 9, 30–1, 38
definition, 189, 191
importance of symbols and rituals,
191–2
and interaction, 189
302 Index
collective identity – continued
and memory, 217
and space, 181
state’s impact on, 92, 99, 104–5
Collier, Andrew, 54
Collins, Randall, 29–30, 48, 207, 210,
230, 234
colonialism (legacy of), 67, 71, 132
postcolonialism, 172, 208
common sense, 190
comparative (research) designs, 120,
124, 130–1, 134
conflict, 58–60, 96, 113, 116, 128–32,
188–9
conflicting memories
and democratic crises, 216, 223
and future mobilization, 213–19
Connerton, Paul, 275
Conrad, Sebastian, 208, 214
conscious and unconscious agency,
14–15
consensus, of transnational activism,
39, 68, 93, 100, 200–2, 218
Conway, Janet, 52
counter-summit, see Genoa
counter-summit
counterproductive assembly rituals,
197–8
Cox, Laurence, 3, 8, 14, 45–62, 186
Crage, Suzanne, 207–9, 211
Creswell, John W., 141, 146
cryptonomy, 214–16
Culot Social, 286
cults, 32–3
cultural comparison, 154
cultural differences, 92–5, 98, 113–14,
127–31
culture
actor of, 14–15
banal culture, 292–5
cultural/discursive context or
cultural/discursive opportunity
structures(COS/DOS), 113–34
cultural opportunity structures,
2, 130
cultural outcomes, 11
cultural paradigm, 6, 23
definition, 3, 12, 67, 145–9, 172,
251, 253–5
flexibility of, 254
indigenous culture 68, 76, 82
as meanings, 24
objective reality of, 24
popular culture, 8, 45ff, 222, 241
and power relations, 255
and structure, 25
structuring character of culture, 5, 7
as webs of meanings, 172
Cumbers, Andy, 167
cycles of translation, 271
Czarniawska, Barbara, 263
Dadej, Iwona, 91
Dagnino, Evelina, 229
Dale, Gareth, 57
Dalton, Russell J., 2
Damasio, Antonio, 28
Daphi, Priska, 1–15, 99, 103–5, 127,
134, 165–81, 204 n10, 207, 220,
222, 236, 276
Darnovsky, Marcy, 5–6, 227
data collection, method of, 141
Death, Carl, 135 n5
Debray, Régis, 282
Delcourt, Xavier, 287
della Porta, Donatella, 10, 107 n1,
128, 141, 143, 174, 181 n9,
215–17
DeLuca, Kevin Michael, 234
democracy, 26, 58–9
crises of, 216–17, 223
dissimilar concepts of, 99–100, 104
participatory, 199–203, 218
Democratic Workers Party, 32
d’Estaing, Giscard, 289
Deth, Jan van, 146
Dhaliwal, Puneet, 169
dialogue of terror, 58
Diani, Mario, 141
diffusion, 251
adopters of innovations, 255–7
as cultural process, 255–8
reception and appropriation, 261–3
translation, see main heading
transmitters of innovations, 255–7
and transnational norm
implementation, 258–60
types of diffusion processes, 256–7

digital age, 75, 101, 105
discourse, 122–3
counter discourse, 126
discourse analysis, 121, 129,
220, 222
discourse regimes, 9, 114, 118
environmental discourses, 69–71,
82, 125–6, 267–8
Foucauldian discourse theory, 9, 14,
96, 114, 118, 121, 122
global discourses, 251
materiality of discourse, 125
media discourse, 3
meta-discourse, 129
movement (internal) discourse, 106,
115, 127–9
neoliberal discourse, 59
oppositional discourses, 69, 71, 228
political discourse, 100, 151
public discourse, 121, 143, 214, 243
Sociology of Knowledge Approach
to Discourse, see main heading
sub-discourses, 129
discursive context, 9, 13, 96, 115ff,
127–34
discursive field, 115, 125, 128,
131, 134
discursive formations, 122
discursive institutionalism, 121
discursive patterns, 113
discursive practices, 115, 125–6, 129
dispositif, 123
disposition, notion of, 192, 194–5
Dixon, Chris, 61
Djelic, Marie-Laure, 107 n1, 107 n2
Dobusch, Leonhard, 259
Doerr, Nicole, 10, 12–13, 206–24
Dressen, Marnix, 294
Durkheim, Émile, 10, 12–13, 29, 118,
130, 191–2, 195, 201, 203 n8,
229, 289
Duyvendak, Jan Willem, 263
Eagly, Alice, 150
Earle, Duncan, 75, 84 n5
Earl, Jennifer, 11, 254
Eber, Christine, 70
Eco, Umberto, 194
Edelman, Marc, 69
Index 303
Eder, Klaus, 2, 135 n2, 208
Egypt, activism, 99, 100
Eingestelltheit, notion of, 192
Einwohner, Rachel, 209, 211
Eisinger, Peter K., 157 n6
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN), 72, 78
Ekman, Paul, 28
Ellsworth, Phoebe, 28
Elster, Jon, 14, 28
embeddedness, 114, 119, 127, 130
embody/embodiment, 24, 227ff,
233, 237
emotional energy, 29
emotions, 3, 7–8
cognitive approach, 27
external, 34–6
internal, 28–33
and meaning, 25–6
and morality, 38–41
negative, 32
and protest, 230–2, 234–5, 241–4
and rationality, 27
reciprocal, 30–3
recruitment, 36–8
role of, 24, 147–50, 153–4, 189, 192,
202–3
shared, 30, 36–7, 119–20
types of, 28–9
working of, 26–7
Enard, Jean-Louis, 284
encryptment, 215–16
Engels, Friedrich, 1, 56
Entman, Robert M., 146
environmentalism, 51, 69, 70, 82,
125, 126, 130, 167, 169, 170, 171,
172, 174, 181, 251, 267–8, 271
Epstein, Barbara, 5–6, 227
Esbenshade, Jill, 259
Escobar, Arturo, 68, 229
Établis, 286
Eurobarometer, 154
EuroMayday protests, 220–2
Europe, European, 46, 59, 62, 67, 69,
72, 73, 75, 82, 98, 101, 108, 154,
196, 208, 211, 217, 220, 221–2,
245, 263, 278, 285
European Social Forum, 217–19
European Social Survey (ESS), 154–5
304 Index

Evans, Peter, 265 interpretative, 124, 128, 280–4, 292

Evans, Sara M., 168 organizational, 197
events political, 197
critical events, 122 France, French, 11, 24, 25, 26, 31, 47,
protest events, 10–11, 92, 142, 154, 60, 101, 102, 118, 124, 214, 220,
166, 174–5, 232–5, 237, 242 275, 276, 277–8, 279, 280, 282,
Eyerman, Ron, 2, 4, 23, 30, 33, 56, 285, 286, 287, 291, 292–5, 296
114–15, 130, 135 n6, 219, 227, Frankfurt School, 47
230–1, 240, 243 Fraser, Ronald, 57
Freeman, Jo, 37
Fantasia, Rick, 55, 227, 229 free spaces, concept of, 168–70
Faust, Betty B., 69 Freisen, Wallace C., 28
Featherstone, David, 168 French ‘68 movement, 11, 214–23
feeling, 25 see also Soixante-Huitards
of belonging, 30–1 Freud, Sigmund, 221
as thinking, 26–9 Fuchs, Dieter, 144
types of, 28–9
Feldman, Allen, 237 Gamson, William A., 2, 37, 40, 116,
Ferree, Myra Marx, 2, 8, 103, 126–7, 118, 128, 135 n6, 151, 168,
130–1, 143, 155, 257, 264 243, 258
Ferry, Luc, 281 Gandhi, 237
Fetner, Tina, 5, 23 Gauche Prolétarienne, 286
15M movement, 94, 105 gay rights activism, 169, 211
see also Indignados GDR/German Democratic Republic,
15O movement, 93 100–1, 113, 127–31
Fine, Gary Alan, 227, 276, 285 Geertz, Clifford, 5, 79, 172, 229,
Flacks, Richard, 5–6, 227 244 n1
Flesher Fominaya, Cristina, 2, 10, 13, Geismar, Alain, 280, 286
15, 52, 57, 93–4, 186–204, Génération (1987, 1988), 282–3
234, 257 Genoa, counter-summit 2001, 174–9,
fMRI scans, 27 240–1
forest companies, in Russia, 267–8 Gerhards, Jürgen, 2, 4, 8, 116,
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), 267 118, 131
formation of concepts, 122 Germany, German, 3, 96, 101, 102,
Foucauldian discourse theory, 9, 14, 105, 113, 114, 116, 123, 124, 127,
96, 114, 118, 121–2 128–9, 132, 133, 211, 220, 221–2
Foucault, Michel, 13–14, 95, 103, Gerstein, Dean, 146
118–19, 121–2, 127, 135 n8, 157 Giddens, Anthony, 120, 148–9,
n3, 282, 288 166, 171
frame Gillis, John, 275–6
alignment, 37 Gitlin, Todd, 233
approach, 2, 114, 151, 229 Giugni, Marco, 11, 258
concept, 126–7 Givan, Rebecca Kolins, 251
resonance, 128, 151 global cosmopolitans, 106
theory, 59 global identity, imagined, 198–9
framework Global Justice Movement (GJM), 91,
cognitive, 189 92, 105, 106
conceptual, 48, 133 autonomous groups in, 196–7
discursive, 113 in Italy, 174–9

mass-counter summit actions, 232–5
and space, 166, 174–5
in Spain, 187
Glucksmann, André, 280–1,
286–8, 295
Goffman, Erving, 10, 193–5, 201
Goldberg, Chad Allan, 2, 130, 135 n6
Golova, Tatiana, 181 n2
good sense, 54–5
Goodwin, Jeff, 3, 23, 32, 181 n3, 207,
227–8, 254
Gorz, André, 289
Gosewinkel, Dieter, 108 n11
Gossen, Gary H., 76, 79
Gottlieb, Roger, 46, 62 n5
Gould, Deborah, 35
Gramsci, Antonio, 1, 45–8, 52–5,
59–61, 62 n1, 190–1, 193, 195,
203 n6
common sense and good sense,
54–5
Grass, Günter, 113
Great Britain, British, 47, 48, 51, 54,
59, 60, 96, 101, 105, 116, 129,
130, 132–3, 217, 218, 220
grievances, 38, 115
Grignon, Claude, 289
Grounded Theory, 131
Group of Eight (G8), 174–5, 241
guerilla theatre, 238–9
Guiteras-Holmes, Calixta, 76
Gusfield, Joseph R., 6, 121, 227
Habermas, Jürgen, 47, 52, 202, 219
habit(us), 193-4
habitus clashes, 199–203
habit(us), culture as, 191–203
Hafez, Kai, 132
Hahn, Alois, 156 n2
Hajer, Maarten A., 118, 131
Halbwachs, Maurice, 213, 275, 289
Hall, Stuart, 51, 55, 60, 120, 237
Halliday, Terence, 259–60, 263, 266,
269, 271 n1
Halton, Eugene, 236
Hamm, Marion, 2, 135 n3, 145
Hamon, Hervé, 282–3, 287
Hampton, Henry, 57
Handelman, Don, 233
Index 305
Hannerz, Ulf, 97
Hart, Stephen, 254
Haug, Christoph, 167, 230, 239, 242
Haugerud, Angelique, 230, 239, 242
Haunss, Sebastian, 2, 5
Havel, Václav, 57
Heaven’s Gate, 32
Heßdörfer, Florian, 135n5, 135n8
hegemony, 46, 148, 190, 195
Heise, David R., 30
Hepp, Andreas, 100, 108 n9
hermeneutic analysis/hermeneutics,
114–15, 131–2, 229, 283, 285
heterogenization thesis, 97–8
Hetherington, Kevin, 51, 234
Hewitt, Lyndi, 52
hidden transcripts, 54, 290–6
Hill, Christopher, 48, 51, 58, 60
Hirsch, Eric L., 227, 229
Hirschman, Albert, 283
Hirsch, Marianne, 215
Hitlin, Steven, 146
Hobsbawm, Eric, 48, 95–6
Hohle, Randolphe, 227, 230, 237
Holloway, John, 57
Holocaust, 40, 128, 208, 211
Holston, James, 48, 58
homogenization thesis, 97–8
homophily principle, 255
Honneth, Axel, 35
hooks, bell, 52
‘hot cognition’, 37
human agency, 14–15, 46
human rights movements, 35, 82, 117
humiliation, 31
Hunt, Scott A., 230
Hutter, Swen, 2
Hymes, Dell, 230
ideology, 33, 37, 39, 126, 129, 148
identity/identification, 5, 35, 37–8, 40,
79, 81, 82, 98, 104, 106, 107, 125,
172, 199, 217, 231, 232, 266,
276, 277
see also collective identity
Ikegami, Eiko, 219
imaginary, 69, 72–5, 77–8, 82,
187, 203
Imig, Doug, 142
306 Index
indigenous culture, 68
and capitalism, 69–75
conservation, 74, 77
see also Mayas
Indignados, 92, 165, 169
see also 15 M Movement
Inglehart, Ronald, 147
institutionalism, 98–9, 121
instrumentalist structuralist lens,
4, 115
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
174–5
performative protests against,
234, 236
International Social Survey
Programme (ISSP), 154
interpretative schemes, 123–4, 130
Islam, 31
Israel, 113, 116
Israel-Solidarity Movement, 116, 129
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 113, 116,
128–33
Italy, Italian, 59, 101, 102, 105, 128,
175, 217, 220, 221–2, 236, 241,
288, 296
trade unions, 102
It was like a Fever, 211
Iverson, Erika, 38
Jacoby, Russell, 46
Jamison, Andrew, 2, 4, 33, 56, 114–15,
130, 135 n6, 240
Japan, Japanese, 219, 220
Japp, Klaus P., 115
Jasper, James M., 3, 6–7, 10, 12–15,
23–41, 116, 120, 135 n6, 135 n9,
146–7, 181 n3, 207, 209, 212,
227–8, 230, 254
Jefferson, Tony, 51, 60, 237
Jews, 31, 113, 128–9, 211
Johnston, Hank, 2, 4, 6, 23, 31, 94, 96,
99, 102–4, 108 n11, 115, 117,
126–7, 146, 227, 244 n1, 253
July, Serge, 280, 286, 288, 295
Juris, Jeffrey S., 10, 12–13, 52, 217,
227–45
Kaase, Max, 143
Kahneman, Daniel, 27, 36
Kant, 39
Kapchan, Deborah A., 231
Kaye, Harvey, 47
Keck, Margaret, 91, 251, 258
Keith, Michael, 166
Kelle, Udo, 146
Keller, Reiner, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 51, 99,
103, 106 113–35, 156 n2, 264
Kenney, Padraic, 57
Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 31
King, Martin Luther (Dr.), 211–12
Kitschelt, Herbert, 25
Klandermans, Bert, 4, 6, 143, 227,
244 n1, 253
Klepto, Kolonel, 244 n4
knowledge, 29, 53–7, 114, 117–18,
125–34, 252
implicit, 148
-power regimes, 9, 114, 118
Kolakowski, Leszek, 46
Kolb, Felix, 11, 258
Koopmans, Ruud, 2, 120, 130, 143,
151, 157 n5, 166, 254
Kovic, Christine, 70, 75
Krasmann, Susanne, 15
Kriesi, Hanspeter, 2, 25, 130, 143,
151, 253
Krinsky, John, 48
Kuechler, Manfred, 2
Kurzman, Charles, 23, 172
Laclau, Ernesto, 53
Lacroix, Bernard, 291
Lahusen, Christian, 101
Lalich, Janja, 32
Lamont, Michèle, 131, 135 n2
la Nouvelle Philosophie, 281
La Pensée, 68, 281
land reform movement, 168
Laraña, Enrique, 6, 227
La Révolution Introuvable, 280
Las Abejas, 77
Latin America, 57, 69, 72, 245
Latour, Bruno, 24
Laubenthal, Barbara, 130
Lê, Anja, 99, 103, 127, 134, 136,
220, 222
Lebowitz, Michael, 52–3, 55
Lefebvre, Henri, 170, 173

Lefort, Claude, 281
Le Goff, Jean-Pierre, 284
Le Menn, Yvon, 294
Lemke, Thomas, 15
Lenin, 190
Lepsius, M. Rainer, 156 n2
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans
(LGBT) movement, 169, 211
Llieux de Mémoire, 222, 278
definition of memory, 275
Les Maîtres-Penseurs, 281
Leszczawski-Schwerk, Angelique, 91
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 24
Levitt, Peggy, 252, 263–4
Levy, Bernard-Henri, 281, 289
Levy, Daniel, 207–8, 210–11,
213–14, 222
liberalism, advanced, 289
Lichbach, Mark, 156 n2
Lichterman, Paul, 51, 116, 203 n1
limbic system, 27
Linards, Udris, 130
Linebaugh, Peter, 45, 47–8, 50
Lipovetski, Gilles, 282
Lock, Margaret M., 228
Lofland, John, 29
Lounsbury, Michael, 98–9, 101
Löw, Martina, 170–1, 173–5, 181 n4
Luckmann, Thomas, 5, 94, 118
Luhmann, Niklas, 15
Lukács, Györgi, 1, 45, 47–8, 55
class consciousness, 55
Luxemburg, Rosa, 71
Lyon, M. L., 228
Macintyre, Stuart, 55
Maeckelbergh, Marianne, 217
Maffesoli, Michel, 51
Mai 68, memory of, 276–90
conservative re-politicization of, 284
crystallization of memory doxa,
281–3
double criticism of, 283–4
interpretations of, 280–1
lessons of, 295–6
L’héritage Impossible, 284
streamlined narratives, 288–90
Malets, Olga, 11–12, 14–15, 95, 106,
251–71
Index 307
Mann, Michael, 36
Manning, Philipp K., 121
Maoism, 286
Marden, Peter, 96, 98, 103
Maria, Ana, 72
Marston, Sallie A., 169
Martin, Deborah, 170, 173
Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 56, 62 n1, 78, 126,
156 n2
Marxism, 1, 190, 281
role of culture, 1–2
Western, see Western Marxism
Massey, Doreen, 170–2
Mattoni, Alice, 220
Mauss, Marcel, 237
Mayas, 74–5
autonomy, 77–8
cultural change, 79–81
cultural imaginary of, 75
individual soul in relation to nature
and the cosmos, 77
multiculturalism, 78–9
relation of community to time and
space, 76–7
see also indigenous culture
Mayer, John D., 27
Mayo, Peter, 47
McAdam, Doug, 2–3, 8, 11, 37, 71,
130, 143, 167–8, 181 n3, 227,
255–6, 258, 262
McCammon, Holly J., 103
McCarthy, John, 37, 103, 253
McDaniel, Justin T., 68, 71
McElroy, Kathleen, 218
McKay, George, 51
McNally, David, 57
McNeill, William H., 33
Mead, George Herbert, 10, 121, 193,
195, 201, 202
habit(us), 193
meaning making, 10ff, 93, 120, 131
webs of, 166, 171–5, 179–81, 264
meanings
culture as, 24, 172
and emotions, 25–6
implicit meaning, 116
internalized systems of, 190–6
308 Index
media
German left-wing coverage of
Middle East conflict, 113
as loudspeakers, 287–8
national focus of, 100–1
media intellectuals, 288, 290, 295
Melucci, Alberto, 2, 5, 59, 71, 97–8,
157 n4, 165, 168, 188–9, 202–3,
227, 234
Membretti, Andrea, 182 n13
memory entrepreneurs, 276, 279–80,
286–8, 295
memory, 275–96
active construction and use of, 209,
210–13
collective memory, 11, 131, 206,
208, 212–14, 220–2
communicative, 208–9
conflicting, 213–19
cultural, 208–9
encryptment, 215–19
Holocaust, 211
memory entrepreneurs, 276,
279–80, 286–8, 295
memory studies, 207, 213–19
as multidimensional, 209
narrative dimension, 276
politics of memory, 133,
206, 210
selective, 211
silenced memory, 206, 208–15, 223
visual, 219–22
Watergate, 212
Mendez, Constantino, 84 n5
Mendez, Jennifer B., 167, 169
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 14
Merry, Sally Engle, 252, 254–5, 259,
263–6, 271 n1
Messner, Michael, 52
methods
comparison, 72–5, 101, 120, 124,
130–4, 143–4, 219–22
data collection, 141, 145, 147,
154, 156
interpretation, 122, 124, 131–2, 213
interpretative methodology, 156
interviews, 132, 175, 178, 201,
215, 220
qualitative, 131, 141, 154–6
quantitative, 9, 141
surveys, 143, 146–7, 154–5
Mexico, 68, 76, 82
Meyer, David S., 6
Meyer, John W., 95, 255
Middle East, 96, 113, 116, 129–32
Miller, Byron, 166, 170, 173
Milman, Noa, 221
Minc, Alain, 282
Minkoff, Debra C., 142
mnemonic repertoires, 81–2, 207,
209–13, 219, 223
modernization, 68–70, 82, 279,
283, 288
Modigliani, Andre, 2, 116, 128, 135
n6, 243
Mohanty, Chandra T., 208, 218
Monroe, Kristin Renwick, 40
moods, 28, 29, 33, 38
moral emotions, 28, 38–41
morality, 8, 25, 29–30
and emotions, 38–41
moral shocks, 38
Morane, Erlyn, 280
Moreno, Ruben, 84 n5
Morin, Edgar, 281, 291
Morvan, Daniel, 294
Mosca, Lorenzo, 181 n9
Mouffe, Chantal, 53
movement-relevant theory, 56, 61
movement space, see space
Movement to Socialismo (MAS), 82
Mudu, Pierpaolo, 182 n13
Mullan, Caitríona, 46
Müller, Marion G., 221
Munson, Ziad W., 37, 40
music, 53, 219–20, 239–41
emotional impact of, 33
Muslim(s), 31, 129
Nairn, Tom, 54
Naples, Nancy, 51
narrative structures, 123, 124–5
narratives, 26, 34, 123, 125, 208
master narratives, 132–3
national narratives, 127–8
shared narratives, 187, 211–19,
277–82
streamlined narratives, 288–90

Nash, June, 3, 8, 13–14, 67–84
National Socialism, 113, 129
Naughty-or-Nice Dilemma, 35
Nazi allusions, 113, 127–9
Negri, Antonio, 52
neoliberal modernity
alternatives to, 75–9
criticism of, 69–72
Neveu, Erik, 11–13, 15, 104, 275–97
New Social Movement Theory, 2, 5,
71–2, 114–18, 126, 136, 151, 186
Nicholls, Walter, 166–9
ní Dhorchaigh, Ealáir, 58
Nilsen, Alf, 53–4, 56, 62 n3
Nistal, Tomás A., 108 n5
Noakes, John A., 168
non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), 35, 74, 176–8, 269
Nora, Pierre, 222, 275, 278, 285–6
North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), 81
Nussbaum, Martha C., 27
Oberschall, Anthony, 37, 151
O’Brien, Kevin J., 264
Occupy movement, 91, 92, 165,
233–5, 243–4, 271
O’Connor, Alan, 47
Offe, Claus, 2
Ogoni, 35–6
Olesen, Thomas, 58, 103
Olick, Jeffrey K., 207–11, 213–14, 219,
221–2
Oliver, Pamela E., 2, 31, 126–7
opportunity structures, discursive
cultural, 2, 130
discursive, 2, 103, 114, 121, 130
political, 2, 4, 6, 8, 96, 103, 114,
130, 143, 151, 169, 170
orphan social movement, 291–2
Outcomes of protest/social movement
activity, 56, 104, 150, 153, 171,
195, 231–2, 242–4, 258
Owens, Lynn, 30
Pabst, Andrea, 135n5
Palestine Solidarity Movements, 113,
128–9, 130–1, 132–3
panic model, 26
Index 309
Paris, Rainer, 5
Parks, Rosa, 218–19
Parsons, Talcott, 146
participation, 58–9, 75, 141, 143, 150,
153–4
participatory democracy,
199–203, 218
Patomäki, Heikki, 167
Paul, Gerhard, 222
perfomances, 10, 193–5, 201, 206,
209–10, 219–22, 227–41
performative protest
defined, 230–1
dramaturgical models, 230
impact of, 232, 235, 242
limitations, 242–4
macro-level events, 232–5
micro-level performances, 235–7
musical performances, 239–41
protest theatre, 237–9
target audience, 221, 228, 231, 232,
234, 238–9, 243
Peterson, Richard, 103
Petite Bourgeoisie, 295
Pettenkofer, Andreas, 4, 115, 131, 186
Pfaff, Steven, 3, 32
Phänomenstrukturen, see phenomenal
structures
phenomenal structures, 123, 124, 125,
129, 133
philo-Semitism, 133
Pile, Steve, 166
Piliavin, Allyn, 146
Pinto, Louis, 288
Piven, Frances Fox, 52
policy-shaping, and diffusion, 258–60
political agenda–setting, and
diffusion, 258–60
political culture approach, 131, 146
political opportunity structure
approach, 2, 4, 23, 25, 35, 96,
103, 114, 143
Polletta, Francesca, 5, 9–10, 23, 31, 93,
99–100, 106–7, 168–70, 181 n3,
207, 209, 211–17, 222, 227–9,
254, 285
Popper, Karl, 24, 145
popular culture, 8, 45ff, 222, 241
Popul Vuh, 76, 77
310 Index
Porhel, Vincent, 294
Portugal, 93–4, 99, 100, 103–4, 105
Potter, Jonathan, 123
Poulsen, Jane, 35
power, 36, 49–50, 53–4, 95–8, 103,
214, 234, 255
speaking to, 57–60
practice(s), 13, 52, 75, 77, 99–107,
125–6, 129, 148–9, 153–4, 255
see also discursive practices
precarity & anti-precarious
movements, 220, 221
premediation, concept of, 215–16
Price, Richard, 251, 258
Pries, Ludger, 171
primordial communities, 68–73
Prise De Parole, 278
problematization(s), 119, 121–2
Prost, Antoine, 278
protest event analysis, 142, 143
causes for, 39–41, 115, 119, 127
differences, 94, 99
success, 115
Pueblos Originarios, 68–9, 82
Quack, Sigrid, 107 n1, 107 n2, 259
rational choice theory, 14–15
reciprocal emotions, 30–3
Reckwitz, Andreas, 2–4, 16 n1
Reclaim the State, 58
recontextualization, 263
recruitment, 36–8
recursivity of global
norm-making, 260
Rediker, Marcus, 47–8, 50, 58, 60
Reed, T. V., 230, 236, 238, 240–1, 243
reflex emotions, 28
remediation, 215–16
Rémond, Alain, 294
Renaud, Alain, 281, 294
rescuers, 39–40
research design, 120, 130, 133
resonance, 24, 37, 103, 114, 128, 134,
151–2, 168, 264
resource mobilization theory, 23, 25,
74, 114, 121, 142
Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), 283
Riley, Alexander, 193
Rioux, Jean Pierre, 276, 278, 280, 287
Risley, Amy, 34, 38
rituals, 29–30, 41, 79, 82, 191–2, 197,
200–202
counterproductive, 197–9
Rivière case, 122
Roberts, Kenneth M., 251
Robnett, Belinda, 6
Rochon, Thomas R., 227, 229
Roggeband, Conny, 252, 257, 261,
263, 265
Rohe, Karl, 127
Rolin, Jean, 284, 286
Rolin, Olivier, 286
Roose, Jochen, 9, 12-14, 140
Rootes, Christopher, 142
Rose, Nikolas, 14
Roseberry, William, 229
Routledge, Paul, 166–9, 233
Rowbotham, Sheila, 48, 52
Roy, William G., 33
Rubin, Jerry, 238
Rucht, Dieter, 2, 4, 8, 108 n11, 116,
131, 142–3, 166, 255–6, 262
Russia, 46, 212, 267–9
Ryan, Yasemin, 99, 104
Salinas, President, 81
Salman, Ton, 3, 97, 146
Salovey, Peter, 27
Sandberg, Sveinung, 135 n5
Sarkozy, 284
Sassen, Saskia, 97
scale-shift, concept of, 167–8
Scarbrough, Elinor, 146
Schatzki, Theodore R., 148
Schechner, Richard, 231, 238
schemas, definition of, 93
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 228
Scheufele, Dietram A., 146
Schieffelin, Edward L., 231
Schmidt, Vivien A., 121
Schneiberg, Marc, 98–9, 101
Schroer, Markus, 170–1
Schudson, Michael, 209–10,
212–13, 219
Schütz, Alfred, 14
Schwab, Gabriele, 210, 214–15,
217, 221

Schwartz, Shalom H., 147
Sciulli, David, 146
Scott, Anne, 56
Scott, David, 74
Scott, Dianne, 167
Scott, James, 52, 54, 277, 290
Scott, W. Richard, 156 n2
screen, concept of, 221
Sebestyen, Amanda, 57
Seidman, Gay, 97
semiotics, 194, 220
Sevon, Guje, 263
Sewell, William, JR., 166, 168–70
shame, 31, 35, 39
shantytown protests, 256
shared emotions, 30–1
internal management of, 31–2
Sharp, V., 166
Shepard, Benjamin, 230, 236, 245 n4
Shihade, Magid, 57
Sieder, Rachel, 84 n6
signs, 26–7, 122–5, 173, 254
Sikkink, Kathryn, 91, 251, 258
silenced memories, 213–19
silenced stories, publicization of,
208, 214
Simonelli, Jeanne, 75, 84 n5
Small, Mario Luis, 146
Smelser, Neil, 39
Smith, Anthony D., 95, 97, 99
Smith, Jackie, 5, 23, 107 n1, 166
Smith, Phillip, 193
Snijders, Tom A. B., 144
Snow, David A., 2, 4, 37, 103, 116,
118, 141, 143, 229, 253–7,
262, 264
Snow, Robert, 234
social action, 14, 82, 130–1, 169–72,
188, 193–4
social constructionism, 114, 118
social movement strength, 141
CATNETs, 151–4
emotions, 154
hypotheses for partial theory, 152–4
measurements, 154–5
mobilization, 151–3
quantitative approaches to, 141–4
theoretical specification of culture
asinfluence, 149–54
Index 311
social movement theory, conceptual
shortcomings of
culture vs structure, 5
narrow definition of culture, 4–5
one-dimensionality of culture, 3–4
social politics of knowledge, 118
social structure(s), 74, 133, 166, 170,
180, 231
Societé Bloquée, 279
sociology of knowledge, 118, 123,
121, 130
sociology of knowledge approach to
discourse (SKAD), 9, 114
concepts, 123–6
and discourses, 122–3
foundations, 119–22
methodological implications and
challenges, 131–3
and social movement research,
126–31
Soixante-Huitards, 282, 284
see also French ‘68 movement
Soja, Edward, 170
Sollers, Philippe, 286
Sommier, Isabelle, 280, 283, 286
Soule, Sarah A., 95, 251, 253, 255,
257, 262
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 104
space
and culture, 171–2
defined, 165–6
dimensions of, 167–9
as dual structure, 171
failures of approach, 169–71
free spaces, 168–9
materiality of, 170
social construction of, 170–1
in social movement studies, 53, 69,
166–74, 180
spatial meaning-making, 171–4
categorization, 174, 176–7
orientation, 173–4, 175–6
spacing, 173
synthesis, 173, 177–9
Spain, 93–4, 99, 100, 104, 105, 169,
197–203
Speed, Shannon, 75, 84 n5
Sportes, Morgan, 284
squatters’ movement, 30
312 Index
Stachursky, Benjamin, 264
state
defined, 95
diminishing importance of, 96–7
state as framework for action, 98–9
legacies of prior policies, 101–2
national differences, 91–2, 98
national focus of media attention,
100–1
national politicians as target of,
99–100
norm implementation, 258–60
prevalence of cultural models,
102–4, 133ff
Statham, Paul, 2, 18, 120, 130, 138,
143, 151, 157 n5
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, 83
Steinberg, Marc W., 213, 227, 229
Stets, Jan E., 154
Steward, Julian H., 67, 83 n1
Stigmatized Identity Dilemma, 35
Stillerman, Joel, 167, 170
Stonewall Myth, 208
Strang, David, 95, 255, 257
strategy, 61–2, 115, 128, 193, 195
Straughn, Jeffrey B., 213, 215
Strauss, Anselm L., 121, 140
Streeck, Wolfgang, 259
structurations, cultural, 120, 124, 134
structure, and culture, 25
Stryker, Sheldon, 193
student uprising, 168
Sundin, Ebba, 101, 104
Swartz, David, 195
Sweden, 101
Swidler, Ann, 2, 4, 68, 71, 145–6, 148,
172, 195, 228–9, 244 n1, 277
Swistun, Débora Alejandra, 38
Switzerland, 101, 194
symbolic interactionism, 193–4
symbols, 4, 29, 34, 68, 71, 123–5,
191–5
routinized symbolic systems, 10,
117, 119
Sznaider, Natan, 208
tacit knowledge, 49
Tarrow, Sidney, 60, 94, 96–8, 107 n2,
108 n8, 143, 151, 167, 229, 256
Taylor, Charles, 73, 75
Taylor, Verta, 2, 168, 181 n3, 230
Tedlock, Dennis, 76, 78
Teivainen, Teivo, 167
Tejerina, Benjamin, 99, 104
ten Brink, Tobias, 265
Terray, Emmanuel, 286
Teune, Simon, 107 n1, 109, 112, 115,
136, 139, 160
Thelen, Kathleen, 259
A Theory of Semiotics (1976), 194
Thévenot, Laurent, 103, 131, 135 n2
thinking, 7–8, 12, 23–9, 36, 37, 41
Thomas, Dorothy S., 119, 121
Thomas, William I., 119, 121
Thompson, E. P., 39, 45, 47–8, 51–2,
55, 57, 60–1
Thompson, Paul, 55
Thörn, Håkan, 41 n1
Tillinac, Denis, 284
Tilly, Charles, 11, 23, 60, 151, 166–7,
169–70, 181 n1, 210, 213, 227,
230, 232, 235, 258
toolkit, culture as, 2, 23, 68, 69, 71,
72, 145, 148–9, 153–4, 172
Torok, Maria, 214–15
Touraine, Alain, 2, 292
Tourraine, 116
Tovey, Hilary, 59
trade unions, 55, 102, 167, 177, 199,
217, 287, 291–5
Traïni, Christophe, 28, 33, 38
translation, 252, 258, 263–6
framing, 264
indirect effects of, 268–9
modes of, 266–8
redefinition of target population,
265–6
structural adaptation, 264–5
transnational encounters, 199–203
Tressell, Robert, 52
Truschkat, Inga, 135n7
Tsing, Anna, 261
Tunisia, activism, 99, 100, 104
Turner, Jonathan H., 154
Turner, Victor, 233
Turno De Palabra, 198, 199–200
Tuttologo, 288
Tyler, Edward B., 67, 83

Uba, Katrin, 11, 16
Ullrich, Peter, 1–16, 51, 58, 96, 99,
103, 105–6, 108 n12, 113–35, 155,
156 n2, 157 n3, 181 n9, 220,
222, 264
UNEMPOL, 101
unions, see trade unions
United Nations, Convention
No. 169, 68
urges, 28, 29
Urry, John, 276
USA, 4, 34, 38, 48, 51, 59, 60, 79, 81,
82, 98, 115, 116, 117, 127, 143,
169, 211, 212, 216, 217, 237, 238,
239, 240, 256, 262, 263, 294
Vargas-Cetina, Gabriela, 74
Verba, Sidney, 146–7
vernacularization, 263
Vester, Michael, 55
Vigna, Xavier, 294
Villa Rojas, Alfonso, 76
Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered, 207, 213–14
visual memory, 219–22
Wacquant, Loïc J. D., 196
Wagner-Pacifici, R., 208
Wainwright, Hilary, 45, 48,
53–4, 58
Walgrave, Stefaan, 143
Walsh, Edward J., 38
Warren, Mark R., 38
Watergate, 212
Weber, Henri, 280
Weber, Max, 5, 12–14, 120–1, 229, 287
distinction between social action
and behavior, 14
habit(us), 192–3, 195
Welzel, Christian, 147
Western Marxism
culture as conflict, 57–60
defined, 46–8
developmental perspective on social
movement culture, 53–7
literature, 48
Index 313
socialmovement cultures and
everyday lifeworlds, 50–3
Wetherell, Margaret, 123
whistleblowers, 39–40
Whittier, Nancy E., 2, 6, 61, 230
Williams, Raymond, 45, 47–8, 52–3,
55, 60–1
Winkler, Jürgen R., 130
Wodak, Ruth, 218
Wolf, Eric, 68
Wolfgang Schäuble, 127–8
Wolford, Wendy, 168, 170
women’s movement, 91
working-class consciousness, 46, 52,
55, 58, 190–1, 277–86, 293
World Bank, 174
performative protests against, 236
World Trade Organisation (WTO), 174
blockade of summit, 234
World Values Survey (WVS), 154
Wrong, Dennis H., 146
Yang, Mundo, 143
Ytterstad, Andreas, 55
Zajak, Sabrina, 11–12, 14–15, 95, 106,
251–71
Zald, Mayer N., 37, 253
Zamponi, Lorenzo, 207
Zancarini-Fournel, Michèle, 278, 294,
296 n3
Zapatista Army of National Liberation,
72, 78
Zapatista movement, 35–6, 58–9,
72, 78
cultural autonomy and, 81–3
cultural change in, 79–81
Zedillo, Ernesto, 81
Zemon Davis, Natalie, 207, 209
Zibechi, Raúl, 52, 57
Zolberg, Aristide R., 208, 213
Zolberg, Vera L., 208, 213
Zuckerman, Alan S., 156 n2
Zuckermann, Moshe, 127