Politics and Culture: A Less Fissured Terrain

In the past few years, the area of politics and culture has moved from the margins of cultural inquiry to its center as evidenced by the number of persons who identify themselves as working within the area and by its growing institutionalization within sociology. “Politics and culture” suggests that each term constitutes an autonomous social realm; whereas “political culture” suggests the boundaries of cultural action within which ordinary politics occurs. Bourdieu's emphasis on boundary making, Foucault's disciplinary mechanisms, and Habermas's conception of the public are setting the research agenda of scholars who focus on macro-level social change. Interdisciplinary dialogues are emerging, conducted on a landscape of historical and contemporary empirical research. Four sub-areas have crystallized: first, political culture, which focuses on problems of democratization and civil society; second, institutions, which includes law, religion, the state, and citizenship; third, political communication and meaning; and fourth, cultural approaches to collective action. Promising directions for future work are historical ethnographies, participant observation and interview studies of political communication, and studies of political mobilization that examine how emotion operates in politics. Paradigms are not yet firm within this area, suggesting that politics and culture is a disciplinary site of theoretical, methodological, and empirical innovation.