|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
|
Cultural Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 1,
31-47 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1749975507073918
© 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association
The Work of Culture
Tony Bennett
Open University, UK
The formulations of cultural sociology have a tendency to merge culture and the social so closely that they become indistinguishable from one another. Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality theory and actor network theory, this article argues that it is preferable to examine the processes through which culture is separated off from the social via the production of distinctive cultural assemblages.The kinds of issues that need to be taken into consideration to account for the work that goes into making culture as a publicly differentiated realm are identified. Attention then focuses on the kinds of work that culture does in being brought to act on the ‘working surfaces on the social’ that are organized in the relations between social and cultural knowledges. The argument is exemplified by considering how the assemblages of Aboriginal culture produced by Baldwin Spencer enabled the production of a new surface of social management through which the relations between white and Aboriginal Australia were organized in the context of the Aboriginal domain.
Key Words: Aboriginal domain • absolute racism • actor network theory • assemblage • governmentality • the social
References
- Ahearne, Jeremy (2004) Between Cultural Theory and Policy: The Cultural Policy Thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Régis Debray. Coventry: Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, Research Paper, no. 7.
- Albertsen, Niels and Diken, Bülent (2004) ‘"Artworks" Networks: Field, System or Mediators?’, Theory, Culture & Society 21(3): 35-58.[Abstract]
- Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2003) The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Bennett, Tony (1990) Outside Literature. London and New York: Routledge.
- Bennett, Tony (1995) ‘The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility’, Critical Inquiry 21(4): 859-889.
- Bennett, Tony (2000) ‘Acting on the Social: Art, Culture, and Government’, American Behavioural Science 43(9): 1412-1428.
- Bennett, Tony (2002) ‘Culture and Governmentality’, in J. Bratich, J. Packer and C. McCarthy (eds) Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality, pp. 47-66. New York: SUNY Press.
- Bennett, Tony (2004) Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge.
- Bennett, Tony (2005) ‘Civic Laboratories: Museums, Cultural Objecthood, and the Governance of the Social’, Cultural Studies 19(5): 521-547.
- Bennett, Tony (2007) ‘Making Culture, Changing Society: The Perspective of Culture Studies’, Cultural Studies 21(4/5): forthcoming.
- Blackburn, Kevin (2002) ‘Mapping Aboriginal Nations: The "Nation" Concept of Late Nineteenth Century Anthropologists in Australia’, Aboriginal History 26: 131-158.
- Bouquet, Mary (ed.) (2001) Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
- Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Bourdieu, Pierre (2004) Science of Science and Reflexivity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Clarke, Tom and Galligan, Brian (1995) ‘Aboriginal Native and the Institutional Construction of the Australian 1901-48’, Australian Historical Studies 26(105): 523-543.
- Dirks, Nicholas B. (2001) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972-1977 (Colin Gordon ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
- Foucault, Michel (1991) ‘Governmentaity’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
- Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Gomart, Emilie and Hennion, Antoine (1999) ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music, Amateurs, Drug Users’, in John Law and John Hazard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwells/The Sociological Review.
- Hemming, Emma (2006) ‘Into the Newsroom: Applying Actor Network Theory to an Investigation into the Way in Which Constellations of Humans and Technologies Construct News Facts’, conference disk, Media Change and Social Theory, CRESC (ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change).
- Hennion, Antione (1997) ‘Baroque and Rock: Music, Mediators and Musical Taste’, Poetics 24: 415-435.
- Hennion, Antione, Teil, Geneviève and Vergnaud, Frédéric (2005) ‘Questions of Taste’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, pp. 670-679. Germany and Cambridge, MA: ZKM and MIT Press.
- Hinsley, Curtis M. Jr. (1981) Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Hubble, N. (2001) ‘Charles Madge and Mass-Observation are at Home: From Anthropology to War, and After’, New Formations 44: 76-89.
- Jameson, Frederic (1981) The Political Unconscious. London: Methuen.
- Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2006) ‘World Heritage and Cultural Economics’, in Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (eds) Museum Frictions: Public Cultures, Global Transformations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Lahire, Bernard (2001) ‘De la théorie de l’habitus à une sociologie psychologique’, in Bernard Lahire (ed.) Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu: Dettes et critique, pp. 121-52. Paris: Éditions La Découverte.
- Lahire, Bernard (2003) ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions. Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics 31: 329-355.
- Lahire, Bernard (2004) La culture des individus: dissonances culturelles et distinctions de soi. Paris: Éditions la découverte.
- Latour, Bruno (1990) ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Latour, Bruno (1998) ‘How to be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?’, in Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (eds) Picturing Science, Producing Art. New York and London: Routledge.
- Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Law, John (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London and New York: Routledge.
- McGregor, Russell (2002) ‘"Breed Out the Colour", or the Importance of Being White’, Australian Historical Studies 120: 286-302.
- Martin, John Levi (2003) ‘What is Field Theory?’, American Journal of Sociology 109(1): 1-49.
- Mitchell, Timothy (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Morphy, Howard (1996) ‘More Than Mere Facts: Repositioning Spencer and Gillen in the History of Anthropology’, in S. R. Morton and D. J. Mulvaney (eds) Exploring Central Australia: Society, Environment and the 1894 Expedition. Chipping Nortin, NSW: Surrey Beatty.
- Mulvaney, D. J. and Calaby, J. H. (1985) ‘So Much That is New’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860-1929: A Biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
- Rowse, Tim (1992) Remote Possibilities: The Aboriginal Domain and the Administrative Imagination. Casuarina (Darwin): North Australian Research Unit, Australian National University.
- Rowse, Tim (1998) White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Spencer, Baldwin (1914) ‘The Aboriginals of Australia’, in G. H. Knibbs (ed.) Federal Handbook prepared in connection with the eighty-fourth meeting of The British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Australia, August 1914. Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia.
- Therborn, G. (1976) Science, Class and Society: On the Formation of Sociology and Historical Materialism. London: New Left Books.
- Turnbull, David (2000) Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. London: Harwood Academic Publishers.
- Wolfe, Patrick (1991) ‘On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 33(2): 197-224.[Medline]
[Order article via Infotrieve]
 CiteULike  Connotea  Del.icio.us  Digg  Reddit  Technorati What's this?
|
