Presentation

The ‘New American Cultural Sociology’
An Appraisal
By Gregor McLennan

• Gregor McLennan
  He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Marxism, Pluralism and Social Theory, he has recently published a range of articles on the contemporary status and nature of sociological discourse. He is currently investigating the way that ideas and intellectuals operate in ‘knowledge society’ contexts. He has also contributed to several collections in social and political theory and cultural studies.
  
• Jeffrey C. Alexander
  He is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology , Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim . In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (Oxford, 2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation.
  
• Cultural sociology
  Interprets social life through cultural analysis.
  Studies cultural impacts on societies and social interactions.
  
• Early theorists
  Karl Marx
  Marx's belief of culture is that the most powerful members of a society are those who live in the ruling class. These members set up the culture of a society in order to provide the best interests to that society. He has also talked about how a society's economic status determines their values and ideologies.
  
  Émile Durkheim
  Durkheim had the belief that culture has many relationships to society which include:
  • Functional- Certain rites and myths create build social order up more by having people create strong beliefs, the more people who believe in these myths will strengthen social order.
  • Historical- Culture had its origins in society, and from those experiences came evolution into things such as classification systems
  • Logical- Power over individuals belongs to certain cultural categories, and beliefs such as god.
  
  
  
• Alexander’s four levels of abstraction:
  1.Post-positivism: the necessary philosophical framing for all social enquiry
  2.The project of cultural sociology
  3.Its application in a series of substantive cultural exploration
  4.Political ideology of civil society and multiculturalism
  
• The project of cultural sociology
  1. Relative autonomy of culture: according to John Thompson it may result in ‘impasse’.
  2.Internal massive feelings rule the world
  3.Fantasy and reality are interwoven and difficult to separate
  
  
• Substantive applications
  “the line dividing the sacred from the profane must be drawn and re-drawn time and time again…through such phenomena as scandals, moral panics, public punishments, and wars, societies provide occasions to re-experience and recrystallize the enemies of the good.”
  
  1.Watergate
  2.Information technology
  3.Holocaust(as an example for the idea of ‘cultural trauma’)
  According to Alexander, attributions of good and evil are not static, they go through adaptations as societies face challenges called cultural trauma.
  
  
• The immanent utopia of civil society and multiculturalism

Utopia:
1.Only a social sphere separate from market and state
2.Democratic public opinion
3.In spite of ‘anti-civil’ forces, it keeps ‘equality, solidarity and respect', these forces push back destructive intrusions and carry out ‘civil repairs’.

• Multiculturalism
  
  1.Different from ‘assimilation’ that is culture blind and just qualities are purified.
  2.Different from ‘hyphenation’ that just persons are purified.
  3.But a society where both persons and qualities are purified.
  
• Conclusion:
  According to Terry Eagleton, Alexander in an anti-foundationalist going for a new foundationalism who privileges culture rather than God or nation (society) and elevated it to a near-sacred moral status.

American Studies

What is American Studies?

The first time I encountered this conception was in a book called “Americography: the Pictorial Notes of America” by Mehdi Arjmand. In fact I had received it as a gift. As I always do I took a look at the back of the book and then the introduction. In both parts the writer seemed so critical of the subject. I thought to myself, why most of such books have a negative point of view about America? Is that the whole reality? I decided to read the book any way. In fact it was just a brief history of America with lots of pictures that in my idea were used to make it more attractive especially for the young adults who usually find history boring. But while in general it was offering a negative opinion about the country, it didn’t contain any justifying reasons. So it left me with a question without answer. However there was one thing that remained in my mind and absorbed me most, a sentence in the introductory that the writer had quoted from one of his friends,

“America is the last empire of the world. It is like a huge dinosaur that is called to the kitchen!!!”

Now I am a MA student of North American studies, an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States that incorporates the study of economics, history, literature, art, the media, film, urban studies, women's studies, and culture of the United States, among other fields.
One of my professors once called it “world study” and another one defines it as “narrative of exceptionalism and empire.” And what has been my impression till now,

“American studies truly allows me to explore every facet of American culture in which I’ve ever had an interest, pushing me to draw connections and parallels that I may not have seen before.”

Social class in the U.S.

Also submitted in Ezine Articles:
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=919475

How Class Ascendancy is presented in American Novel?

Social stratification:
Social stratification can be described as the “layering of society” that has got different kinds and types of systems. Typically, there are three important systems.

1. Estate system
The central characteristic of the estate system of stratification is that it is based in land and in loyalty to an entity that controls, distributes the land -- usually the monarchy. In this kind of system of inequality there are three estates: the landed gentry/nobility, the serfs or peasantry, and the clergy.

2.Caste systems
The principal distinction between a cast and estate system has to do with the part played by religion in the separation of groups. Both caste and estate systems were based in agriculture and the ownership of property. However, the caste system made distinctions among groups of people in terms of their standing sanctioned by religion.

3.Class systems
Class systems seem to be more a product of the industrial revolution. Classes arise from the industrial productive system. Marx is in fact one of the first to describe such a system, but does not go a long way toward defining what the classes are except to note there are two principal classes: owners and workers.
So in class system stratification in according to social class which itself is based on occupation, education, income and wealth.
What makes class system different from the other ones is the fact that it is somewhat more open than either the estate or caste system. People can move up (or down) with some degree of ease.

Class Ascendancy:
Class ascendancy is defined as moving from a lower level to an upper level. That is what is so much developed in American dream that refers to the idea that one's prosperity depends upon one's own abilities and hard work, not on a rigid class structure. So American dream gives opportunity and freedom to all people to reach their goals without the pressures imposed by class.

Class Ascendancy in American novel:
This idea has always been considered as the essence of American dream and consequently has been a central theme in American literature.

For example in The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is a self-made, self-invented millionaire who has the ability to transform his dreams into reality. Fitzgerald has put his country’s most significant obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings in this character. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--". That is what makes it a tale about the American dream that an individual can achieve success regardless of family history, race, or religion simply by working hard enough.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) is another example in which George's and Lennie, migrant workers are constantly moving from one place to another in hoping to improve their life. They are in search of their dream, being able to own a home, have a job, and have a family to enjoy it with. So their dream matches American dream which is more obviously represented when George tries to calm Lennie down by reminding her of a story about the large farm they're going to buy one day and how they will live there and enjoy nature and work and live together forever, whenever they get into trouble. Throughout the story they never give up their dreams of improving their life to an upper level, exactly what is defined in class ascendancy.

In his next work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck focuses on one family, The Joads, former tenant farmers in Oklahoma who were forced out by the larger companies who wanted their land back during the Great Depression. So with dreams of luscious grapes and peaches in abundance waiting to be picked, they start their journey to California. Despite poverty, homelessness, death, and despair, the Joads refuse to give up their dignity, decency and spirit. They struggle to exist and do not give up their dream that their life can be better.

In spite of a lot of other works that symbolize the corruption of American dream, this theme continues to be represented in more modern novels such as The House on Mango Street (1991) by Sandra Cisneros. Esperanza Cordero is a girl from Hispanic quarter of Chicago who doesn’t like to belong to her neighborhood. She likes to have a better home, a better life, and greater opportunities. She uses poems and stories to escape reality and express her thoughts and feelings about her oppressive environment. So she is a girl refers to her own power and invents her dreams to change her life, the dreams that appropriately fall into American dream.

In addition to above mentioned novels, there are a lot more examples that develop the American idea of possibility of class ascendancy in the so-called land of opportunities, providing equal chances for everyone. However, there are novels that concentrate on social gap and inequality such as Dreiser’s American tragedy and Sister Carrie, Cran’s Maggie: A Girl of All Streets, etc.
For sure reading these novels and putting them together can give us a valuable understanding of the role of social class in the U.S.

Human Rights

Human Rights vs. National Security

Human rights refer to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. They include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law, and social, cultural and economic rights, such as the right to participate in culture, the right to work, and the right to education. [1]

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In the Case of National Security:
National loyalties have been described as a destructive influence on the human rights movement because they deny people's innately similar human qualities.
With the exception of the non-derogateable human rights (the four most important are the right to life, the right to be free from slavery, the right to be free from torture and the right to be free from retroactive application of penal laws, the UN recognizes that human rights can be limited or even pushed aside during times of national emergency – although

“the emergency must be actual, affect the whole population and the threat must be to the very existence of the nation. The declaration of emergency must also be a last resort and a temporary me
Resource: The United Nations

The Case of US:
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, and due to the subsequent War on terror and concerns about national security and terrorism in countries around the world, a number of national laws and measures have come into force limiting some domestic human rights in the name of national security. They include, amongst others, the Patriot Act in the United States and detention-without-trial. The United States has also used extraordinary rendition in order to allow suspects to be subjected to harsh interrogation that may constitute torture in third party states and has employed detention without trial at its controversial facility at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, contrary to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Torture Policy:
The Bush administration asserts that it does not use or condone torture. Its definition of torture, however, remains unclear. At the end of 2004, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memorandum repudiating earlier policies that had permitted a broad range of brutal interrogation tactics by, among other legal sleights-of-hand, redefining torture to exclude all techniques that did not inflict pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.. The Department has not, however, ever revealed what its definition currently is.
Authorized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation techniques apparently include a notorious method the administration has renamed “water boarding” (when practiced by Latin American dictatorships, it was called “the submarine”) forcefully submerging a suspects head in water or otherwise making him believe he is about to drown. The director of the CIA has stated that water boarding is a professional interrogation technique.
As noted above, the Bush Administration asserts that U.S. treaty obligations to refrain from cruel, inhuman and degrading (CID) treatment do not apply to the conduct of nonmilitary U.S. personnel interrogating non-U.S. citizens outside of the United States.
Led by Vice President Cheney, the Bush administration strongly resisted efforts by Congress to strengthen the legal ban against torture. A measure proposed by Republican Senator John McCain to prohibit torture and other ill-treatment of detainees anywhere by the U.S. military and the CIA passed 90-9 in the Senate but at this writing had not been approved by the full Congress at least in part because of administration objections.[2]

As you see Anti-human rights actions are done a lot in the US – in a country which has been established based on “Bill of Human Rights” and has always condemned other countries of not respecting human rights. You can find a lot more reports and news in suggested sites below and judge about it yourself.

1. http://www.ihrc.org/
2. http://hrw.org/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
4. http://www.icrc.org/

References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
2. http://hrw.org/