You are on page 1of 9

Cultural Sociology

Copyright © The Author(s) 2010, Reprints and permissions:


http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 4(2): 257–265
[DOI: 10.1177/1749975510368475]

What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Notes


on a Few Trans-Cultural Misunderstandings
■ Nathalie Heinich
CNRS, Paris, France

A B S T R AC T
This article attempts to clarify some misunderstandings between English-speaking
and French-speaking scholars in the field of the sociology of arts and culture. In
addition to a number of ambiguities in the definition of what ‘culture’, ‘ar ts’ and
‘sociology’ mean within the French and the Anglo-American academic traditions,
the very words ‘culture’, ‘cultural sociology’ and ‘cultural studies’ exhibit important
differences between each other as they are understood within each linguistic con-
text. Seen from a French point of view, so-called ‘French theory’ appears as a typ-
ically Anglo-American category, along with ‘post-modernism’, while French debates
among sociologists of art seem to have few echoes abroad. The linguistic dissym-
metry between French and Anglo-American academic cultures should be taken into
account in order better to understand the nature of these misunderstandings.

K E Y WO R D S
cultural sociology / cultural studies / French theory / post-modernism / sociology
of art / sociology of arts / sociology of culture

Introduction

ast year, I decided to change the presentation of my English CV, turning

L ‘sociologie de la culture’ into ‘sociologie de l’art’. The reason is that, obvi-


ously, the first term is misleading for some Anglo-American scholars, who
seem to read into it another meaning. These differences between the French and
the Anglo-American academic worlds are what I would like to address in this
short note, considering what we term either ‘sociology of art’ or (but this ‘or’
is already a problem, as we shall see) ‘sociology of culture’.

257
Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016
258 Cultural Sociology Volume 4 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2010

Sociology of Art(s) or Sociology of Culture?

When I have to define my speciality as a researcher, I generally say ‘I study


sociology of art’ (sociologie de l’art), or ‘sociology of arts’ (sociologie des arts).
The plural version is used more and more in the Francophone world, in order
to indicate a more democratic interest in the whole spectrum of artistic activities,
and not only the traditionally more ‘legitimate’ ones (visual arts, literature,
music, etc.).1
I can also say that ‘I study the sociology of culture’, which means a more
extended spectrum of objects, including mostly what can be called ‘cultural
practices’: museums, concerts, opera, ballets, reading books, and also watching
TV or reading comics, if not (but this still remains very controversial) leisure
activities such as watching football or having picnics.2 Though slightly different
according to their actual boundaries, both ‘sociologie de l’art’ and ‘sociologie de
la culture’ are studied in the sociology departments of the French universities.
As far as I understand the rather mysterious world of my colleagues work-
ing in the UK or in the USA, they may also use the terms ‘sociology of art’ or
‘sociology of culture’ in quite similar ways as we do in France; and these disci-
plines are also grounded in the sociology departments of Anglophone universi-
ties. But behind this apparent similarity, an initial problem arises.

Sociology of Art or Aesthetic Sociology and/or


Cultural History?

The problem is that a great deal of what Anglophones mean by ‘sociology of art’
refers to what the French would rather call ‘cultural history’ (histoire culturelle),
‘aesthetic sociology’ (esthétique sociologique) or ‘social history of art’ (histoire
sociale de l’art). All three terms focus on art works and belong to the humani-
ties: they do not actually need the central concepts of sociology (e.g. ‘social strat-
ification’, ‘professionalization’, ‘interaction’, ‘frame’, ‘anomie’, ‘rationalization’,
‘civilizing process’, ‘configuration’, ‘field’, etc., etc.), or its methods (e.g. statistical
surveys, representative samples, in-depth interviews, observations, typologies,
and so on).3
Cultural history is a global description of the collective set of representations
governing relationships to art in a certain society (e.g. Burckhardt, Panofsky);
aesthetic sociology is a more or less theoretical reflection on the way ‘art’
reflects ‘society’ (e.g. Adorno, Hauser, Francastel); social history of art is a more
empirical inquiry into the actual contexts in which art works were produced
and appreciated (e.g. Antal, Baxandall, Haskell). For a presentation of these
trends, see Wolff (1981) and Zolberg (1990).
Rather than with reference to these three historical tendencies, present-day
French academia tends to associate the term ‘sociology of art’ with empirical
surveys – be they grounded in quantitative or qualitative methods – on the
reception of art (cultural practices, categories of aesthetic perception and taste,
modes of valuation, private collecting, etc.), on artistic production (the economic,

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Heinich 259

social and juridical status of creators, artists’ careers and curricula, role of age,
gender, training, social origins etc. in the relationship to creation, collective rep-
resentations of creators and creation, and suchlike), and on art mediation
(circles of recognition, the roles of gate-keepers such as publishers, gallery-owners,
curators, critics, agents, and so on).
These three main topics of the ‘sociology of art’ have been dramatically
developed by the most recent generation of French researchers, following the
paths opened up first by Pierre Bourdieu (1965, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975,
1979, 1992; Bourdieu and Darbel, 1966) and then after him by Raymonde
Moulin (1967, 1985, 1992).
However, in the USA and in the UK, the equivalent areas do not seem to
have produced very major pieces of research. Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (1982)
remains the most famous, the aforementioned ‘sociology of the arts’ being just
one section of the much wider field of ‘sociology of culture’. Here lies another risk
of mutual misunderstanding between Francophones and Anglophones.

Sociology of Culture or Cultural Sociology and/or


Cultural Studies?

Although ‘sociologie de l’art’ and ‘sociologie de la culture’ differ only slightly


in the French sociological world, I used to avoid the latter term in front of
Anglo-American colleagues, because I happened to realize that, when using the
word ‘culture’, one risks being understood as a specialist of ‘sociology of culture’,
or ‘cultural sociology’, or, more likely, of ‘cultural studies’. All three may be
misleading terms, especially the last.
As I understood through the interesting presentation offered by Janet Wolff
(2005), the Anglo-American versions of ‘sociology of culture’ and ‘cultural
sociology’ are mostly taught in departments of sociology and anthropology.
They mainly refer to the Anglo-American meaning of ‘culture’ (education, law,
habits, etc.), which is not spontaneously associated with ‘arts’ as it is in France.4
This does not mean that such issues are not present in French courses; but
rather they appear as histoire culturelle, or sometimes as histoire des mentalités,
existing at the crossroads of history, sociology and anthropology. Such thinking
has been a major trend among the last generation of French historians since the
famous Annales school, developed by such authors as Alain Corbin, Antoine De
Baecque, Arlette Farge, Pascal Ory, Jean-Pierre Rioux, Daniel Roche, Jean-François
Sirinelli, and others. But these intellectual dispositions are clearly grounded in
history departments, and not in sociology.
Actually, the greater risk would not involve confusing ‘sociology of
culture’5 with ‘cultural sociology’ 6 in present-day Anglo-American meanings of
these terms. Instead, the bigger problem involves mistaking ‘sociology of culture’
for ‘cultural studies’, especially given the dramatic increase of influence that this
latter field has enjoyed in certain sectors of Anglo-American academia. By
contrast, ‘cultural studies’ does not exist in France: at least, not yet. (‘Thank god,’
I would add.)

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


260 Cultural Sociology Volume 4 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2010

Three Anecdotes

I want to exemplify some of the issues I am discussing through some telling


anecdotes. Here is the first one. The last time I was in the USA (too long ago:
about 10 years), as well as the last time I was in the UK (two weeks ago), I vis-
ited a few bookstores, as we all usually do abroad. There I desperately searched
for the shelf entitled ‘sociology’. When I could not find it, I asked the salesper-
son. ‘You mean cultural studies?’, he said.
Here is a second story. A few months ago, I attended a conference orga-
nized by the sociology department in a French regional university. When driv-
ing me back to the station at the end of the day, the organizer told me that two
new members of the department had proposed a teaching course entitled études
culturelles. It had been accepted without any problem, since everyone in the
department thought it would consist in the study of ‘cultural practices’ (see
above). They eventually realized (too late) that études culturelles was the trans-
lation of ‘cultural studies’ (gender studies, queer studies, post-colonial studies
etc). They are now trying to stop the coming wave.
Here is a third tale. In 1999, when the Boekman Foundation in Amsterdam
offered me its chair of sociology of art at the University of Amsterdam for three
years, the staff wanted to know my teaching programme. After hearing my pre-
sentation, they gently asked ‘And don’t you plan to teach French theory?’ As
politely – I hope – as I could, I immediately answered “But I teach sociology,
not philosophy!’ And it was OK. But who was the most astonished: me, by their
question; or them, by my astonishment at their question?

‘French Theory’ as an American Export Commodity

As far as I can see, on American campuses ‘cultural studies’ belongs to the lit-
erature departments, together with what the French term ‘philosophy’ (but we
used to restrict it to recent continental philosophy – Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,
etc. – merely including analytical philosophy as a small component). Literature
departments in France teach the history of literature, and sometimes (more
marginally) sociologie de la littérature, which is mostly an application of Jauss’s
theory of reception or of Bourdieu’s field theory.
The items covered by the term ‘cultural studies’ seem to be finding a place
in French campuses today, but presented within and through a variety of top-
ics, in sociology, anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, and litera-
ture. They are closely akin to what some of us call Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’
(sociologie critique), since they share the same will to demonstrate that every-
thing is ‘socially constructed’, and that the sociologist’s task is mainly to dismiss
the actors’ ‘illusions’, their belief that the world is natural, universal and
unchangeable. However, it is difficult to assimilate sociologie critique and ‘cultural
studies’ – not only because Bourdieu’s fans use neither of these two terms, but

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Heinich 261

also because Bourdieu himself never considered himself either a ‘cultural studies’
or a ‘post-modern’ scholar (he even strongly refused such a categorization), no
more than he saw himself as a philosopher, always being very eager to demon-
strate the superiority of sociology over philosophy (see Heinich, 2007).
(As an aside, I should say that ‘post-modernism’ used to be a fashionable
trend in French philosophy a generation ago, after Lyotard’s interventions. But
today it seems quite outdated. While it may still be used in art theory, it is
almost absent in the human and social sciences. When one hears ‘post-modernism’
in France, one immediately thinks ‘American’, just as in the cases of ‘MacDo’
and ‘Coca-Cola’).
French scholars are always astonished when hearing that Bourdieu is
included in the pantheon of so-called ‘French theory’. A thing called ‘French
theory’ does not actually exist in France. We know the structuralist trend of the
1960s, developed by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Lacan,
the philosopher Foucault. We also know Derrida’s deconstruction and Deleuze’s
post-Bergsonism. We also know Bourdieu’s sociologie de la domination or soci-
ologie des champs. But we do not know something called ‘French theory’ – in
spite of some recent efforts to import it from the USA (see Cusset, 2003).
The authors included in this strange category are either dead or very old
(Lévi-Strauss has just died at the age of 100). Their major works appeared
more than 40 years ago. For French researchers in the present day, this is the
past. So many new things and innovative authors have appeared in the various
social science disciplines over the last four decades. Should we ignore these
new and exciting ideas, in order to confine ourselves to authors that we used
to read so long ago, when we were students? No – our debates are not in those
terrains any more.

Anglo-American versus French Debates

I will ask a final question: what are the present debates in both the Francophone
and Anglophone worlds, concerning the sociology of art(s) and/or culture?
Seen from France, the main debate on the Anglo-American scene appears
to be that between post-modernism and positivist science, dramatically illus-
trated by the so-called ‘Sokal case’ (affaire Sokal). It partly pertains to the oppo-
sition between ‘theory’ on one side, and empirical fact-finding (e.g. through
survey research) on the other.
In France, the latter issue is rather addressed as an opposition between
‘humanities’ and ‘social sciences’; within sociology, between qualitative and
quantitative methods; and even sometimes between (using very broad terms)
‘explicative’ and ‘comprehensive’ sociologies.
Another quite lively form of opposition among French sociologists is that
between those who practice and foster a politically involved social science
(following in the path of Bourdieu), and those who plead in favour of Max Weber’s

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


262 Cultural Sociology Volume 4 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2010

‘axiological neutrality’, that is, the avoidance of any normative assessment, in


order to limit the scientific discourse to a strictly descriptive and analytical level’
(see Heinich, 1998). The issue is all the more relevant in that the model of the
intellectuel engagé (the politically committed scholar) is very strong in modern
French academic culture. Needless to say, ‘cultural studies’ and ‘post-modernism’
are, in the eyes of their opponents, just some of the most common ways to foster
value-laden discourse, to confuse research with ideology, and to load social
sciences with political or ‘critical’ issues by repeatedly aiming at ‘deconstructing’
and thus dismissing traditional hierarchies and categories (but only on campuses,
which might somehow limit the efficiency of the programme).
This is why I disagree with Janet Wolff when she calls for ‘a growing dia-
logue between sociology and cultural studies’ (Wolff, 2005): as a fervent sup-
porter of the ‘scientific’, ‘neutral’, un-political, empirically-grounded (as well as
qualitative and comprehensive) conception of sociological research, I do hope
that ‘cultural studies’, ‘post-modernism’ and ‘French theory’ will mostly remain
an Anglo-American speciality.
French society of art also includes two other ongoing and rather acute
debates. The first one is related to the aforementioned opposition between
humanities and the social sciences. It involves, on one side, the ‘sociology of
art-works’ (mostly consisting in learned commentaries) and, on the other, the
‘sociology of artistic producers, consumers, and mediators’ (based on empirical
surveys, through either quantitative or qualitative methods).7 For the support-
ers of the former conception, the supreme goal of sociology should be to
enlighten us as to the social stakes of art-works, whatever they are. This is a
position which, in the eyes of their opponents (to which I belong), is but an old,
pre-sociological way of thinking. It desperately tries to re-assemble ‘art’ and
‘sociology’ after having treated them as if they were two entirely different enti-
ties. It also reproduces the academic privilege traditionally granted to art-
works, claims the hegemony of sociology over art history, and remains
entangled in unending debates on whether one should focus on art-works’
‘internal’ or ‘external’ determinants. In my eyes, the methodological and con-
ceptual resources of sociology as a scientific discipline are much more appro-
priate to the study of activities, representations and values related to arts than
to the works themselves, for which art historians and cultural historians have
provided quite interesting insights. This discussion is ongoing.
The final French debate in the sociology of art pertains to the opposition
between ‘legitimate culture’ and ‘popular culture’. Should the sociologist focus
on ‘major’ arts, because they are considered as such by the actors, and as a result
of such perceptions play important roles in society? Or should the sociologist try
to dismiss this hierarchy by privileging more ‘minor’ arts in the research agenda?
Although Bourdieu himself seems to have been somewhat ambivalent, he was
strongly accused of fostering the first option by some of his previous collabora-
tors, who referred to the Birmingham School version of cultural studies (in par-
ticular to Richard Hoggart’s work) in order to sustain their critiques (see
Grignon and Passeron, 1989). Here too the debate has not yet closed.

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Heinich 263

Translation Problems: The Handicap of Dominant Countries

As for the present state of the sociology of art, there appears to be a certain dis-
symmetry between France and the Anglo-Saxon world. The French seem to
know a little more about the Anglo-Americans than the latter know about us
(even if we may mistake or misunderstand a lot of things, as some readers of
the present article may be thinking). How could it be different, since we are
forced to read and write in English (as I am trying to do now – please forgive
me – so clumsily) whereas Anglo-Americans can rely on their native English
without having to practise our language?
But the problem is not so much a matter of dissymmetry as a matter of tem-
poral discrepancy, due to the delay in translations. Let us take a well-known
example: nowadays, no Anglo-American bibliography in our disciplines (be it
sociology of art, sociology of culture, cultural sociology, cultural studies, etc.)
ignores the name of Pierre Bourdieu. But he is quoted and discussed as if he
were a contemporary author, embodying the avant-garde of French intellectual
production, whereas his major contributions to the field occurred between
30 and 40 years ago. Among all the publications coming out of the younger
generation of French scholars, whether supportive or critical of Bourdieu, very
few have yet been translated into English. Bourdieu himself was translated into
English long after his work was translated into many other languages. Except
for one small book published at the beginning of the 1960s, major English
translations of his writings started during the 1980s and exploded in the 1990s,
one whole generation after he began to publish. Most of his books and articles
were translated into German, Spanish, Italian and other languages long before
they were published in English.
This last remark provides an interesting but somehow ironic contribution
to the sociology of domination: to be dominant may become a handicap in that
it can involve avoiding the effort to go and see what happens among the dom-
inated. Once such a process happens along the temporal dimension, it may gen-
erate a major problem in intellectual worlds, namely the problem of delayed
information. That problem above all may be at the root of some of our many
inter-cultural misunderstandings in the world of scholarly debate today.

Notes

1 The first noticeable occurrence of this use can be found in the title of the inter-
national conference organized in Marseilles: cf. Raymonde Moulin (1986).
2 For a discussion and commented results of the surveys on ‘cultural practices’,
see Olivier Donnat (1994).
3 I tried to define and present the traditions of ‘cultural history’, ‘aesthetic sociology,
‘social history’ and ‘survey sociology’ in La sociologie de l’art (Heinich, 2002).
4 On the difference between ‘implicit culture’ (the broader and mostly Anglo-
American sense) and ‘explicit culture’ (the restricted and mostly French sense),
see for instance Robert Wuthnow and Marsha Witten (1988).

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


264 Cultural Sociology Volume 4 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2010

5 On ‘sociology of culture’, see for instance Diana Crane (1992).


6 For a strong distinction between ‘sociology of culture’ ( ‘weak’ programme, ‘thin’
description, ‘culture’ as a dependent variable, as in the Birmingham School)
and ‘cultural sociology’ (‘strong’ programme, ‘thick’ description, ‘culture’ as an
independent variable, as in some recent trends in the anthropology of science), see
Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith (2001).
7 The debate appeared in Moulin (1986), and was re-opened in issue number 10
of the journal Sociologie de l’art, ‘Sociologie des oeuvres’, in 1997.

References

Alexander, J.C. and Smith, P. (2001) ‘The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology’, in
J. Turner (ed.) The Handbook of Sociological Theory, pp. 135–50. New York:
Kluwer.
Becker, H. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1965) Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie.
Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, P. (1968) ‘Eléments d’une théorie sociologique de la perception artistique’,
Revue Internationale des Sciences Sociales 20(4): 640–64.
Bourdieu, P. (1971) ‘Disposition esthétique et compétence artistique’, Les Temps
Modernes 26(295): 1344–78.
Bourdieu, P. (1973) ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, L’Année Sociologique 22:
49–126.
Bourdieu, P. (1974) ‘Les fractions de la classe dominante et les modes d’appropria-
tion de l’oeuvre d’art’, Information sur les Sciences Sociales 13(3): 7–31.
Bourdieu, P. (1975) ‘L’invention de la vie d’artiste’, Actes de la Recherche en
Sciences Sociales 2(March): 67–93.
Bourdieu, P. (1979) La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, P. (1992) Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris:
Seuil.
Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1966) L’amour de l’art. Les musées d’art européens et
leur public. Paris: Minuit.
Crane, D. (1992) The Production of Culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Cusset, F. (2003) French Theory. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations
de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La Découverte.
Donnat, O. (1994) Les Français face à la culture. De l’exclusion à l’éclectisme. Paris:
La Découverte.
Grignon, C. and Passeron, J.-C. (1989) Le savant et le populaire. Paris: Gallimard-
Le Seuil.
Heinich, N. (1998) Ce que l’art fait à la sociologie. Paris: Minuit.
Heinich, N. (2002) La Sociologie de l’art. Paris: La Découverte. [Collection Repères]
Heinich, N. (2007) Pourquoi Bourdieu. Paris: Gallimard.
Moulin, R. (1967) Le marché de la peinture en France. Paris: Minuit.
Moulin, R. (ed.) (1985) Les artistes. Essai de morphologie sociale. Paris: La
Documentation Française.
Moulin, R. (1986) (ed.) Sociologie des arts. Paris: La Documentation Française.
Moulin, R. (1992) L’artiste, l’institution et le marché. Paris: Flammarion.
Wolff, J. (1981) The Social Production of Art. London: Macmillan.

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016


What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Heinich 265

Wolff, J. (2005) ‘Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture’, in D. Inglis and
J. Hughson (eds) The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, pp. 87–97. Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Wuthnow, R. and Witten, M. (1988) ‘New Directions in the Study of Culture’, Annual
Review of Sociology 14: 49–67.
Zolberg, V. (1990) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Nathalie Heinich

Nathalie Heinich is research director in sociology at the Centre National de la


Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. She specializes in the sociology of arts (artistic
professions, aesthetic perception, conflicts about contemporary art), socio-anthropology
of identity crisis (in fiction, authorship and survivors’ testimonies), women’s identity
(the ‘states’ of women and mother-daughter relationships), and the epistemology of
the social sciences, with special reference to sociology of art, the writings of Norbert
Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, and others.
Address: Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage, CNRS Campus Gérard-
Mégie, 3 rue Michel-Ange – F-75794 Paris Cedex 16, France.
Email: heinich@ehess.fr

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at CIDADE UNIVERSITARIA on March 9, 2016

You might also like