Instructor: Paul DiMaggio
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This course is a mini-seminar -- a half-semester course aimed at exposing students to a broad array of perspectives in a manner that equips them for subsequent independent or group work. Graduate students in departments without the mini-seminar option are welcome to participate, either as auditors or, by arrangement with the instructor for further work, for full-semester credit. Advanced undergraduates with research interests in the field may participate on the same basis with the instructor's permission.
The purpose of this seminar is to explore the potential of recent work in the cognitive sciences (especially psychology and anthropology) to inform research and theory in the sociology of culture. The emphasis here is on culture as shared mental structures, rather than as symbol systems external to individuals (although language, practices, and institutionalized culture will naturally come into play). As such, this seminar is part of the Department's graduate "culture track" curriculum, one of a sequence of seminars that address different aspects of the sociology of culture. One might think of its topic as "Micro-Culture," in contrast to the more "macro" cultural emphasis of the standard Sociology of Culture seminar that Professor Lamont has taught. Thus this seminar should be seen not as endorsing a particular "approach" to the sociology of culture, but rather as contributing to a broader multidimensional perspective.
The seminar is experimental in two senses. First, it is new to Princeton and to me, as instructor. Second, there are not a lot of prototypes at other institutions. Students will participate in a shared adventure, in which we will explore the potential for cross-fertilization of exciting new work in several disciplines (with an emphasis, of course, on the kinds of questions that sociologists ask about culture). As we review several literatures in these disciplines, the question we will keep to the fore is: How can these ideas and methods help us understand and study culture? How can we integrate these into our own research projects? (Students will be encouraged to keep a particular research topic in mind throughout the semester as a concrete reference point.) By semester's end, we may conclude that as interesting as recent work in psychology and cognitive anthropology is, it has little to offer sociologists. Or we may conclude that, although the focal questions differ among the disciplines, cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology contain many treasures for sociologists who study culture.
My hunch going into this is that we will find many areas of overlap and relevance. After a couple decades of mutual neglect, psychology and sociology once again seem to share some important common ground. The last time the two disciplines got together, it was under the aegis of Harvard's social relations program, and the focal concepts were values, norms and attitudes. Sociologists never got very far with values and had a hard time studying norms, per se. The major effect of Parsons' emphasis on culture was probably to turn many of them into structuralists willing to leave culture to the humanities. And throughout much of the 1960s and early 1970s, social psychologists focussed on experimental studies of undergraduates which ignored most of the context with which sociologists concerned themselves, the few remaining behaviorists didn't believe in mental constructs at all, and the emerging cognitivists were mostly interested in universals. So for a decade or so, an interest in attitudes and socialization were just about the only thing that sociologists and psychologists had in common.
The 1970s and 1980s changed all that. Sociology witnessed a rebirth of interest in culture, but one that entailed new questions and new perspectives on the object of study. 1) Whereas the old sociology of culture was evaluative in focus (emphasizing values and norms as its object of study), the new sociology of culture was much more cognitive (emphasizing orientations, dispositions, and constitutive knowledge). 2) As Swidler has argued, whereas the old sociology of culture viewed culture as providing goals of action, the new sociology of culture conceived of culture as providing strategies or pre-strategic understandings. 3) Whereas the old sociology of culture viewed "culture" as a seamless web, a well-integrated system, the new sociology of culture portrays culture as loosely coupled parts, thus focalizing the relationship among those parts as a central topic. 4) Related to this, whereas early 1970s sociology was divided between structuralists who regarded culture as epiphenomenal or culturalists who saw it as very constraining (functionalist "value" theorists and Marxist hegemonists), sociologists of culture now agree that culture is interesting because of its relationship to structure, and that this relationship is contingent, bidirectional, and indeterminate.
I am too new to the psychology side to be able to provide a comparable synopsis. But from what I have read, it seems that psychology also developed in several relevant ways. 1) New experimental designs provided clear evidence for the existence of cognitive structures and demonstrated that such "mental models" could be studied far more directly (i.e., that one could make stronger inferences about underlying models from observables) than most people had thought. 2) As cognitive psychology matured and came to influence and overlap with social psychology, psychologists became interested in increasingly complex mental models, including models of social structure and social interaction. 3) For several reasons (the work of anthropologists and psychologists who study cognition and development cross-culturally; the influence of work on "pragmatics" in linguistics, anthropology, and ethnomethodology, etc.; the influence of European neo-Durkheimian "social representation" psychology; the emergence of questions about supra-individual processes or "distributed cognition"), psychologists have become much more interested in the contextual effects that are the staple of sociology.
In particular, I think we sociologists have at least three things to gain from acquainting ourselves with recent work in cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology:
There are two "texts" for the course. The first is Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Harvard Univ. Press, forthcoming) by Eviatar Zerubavel. Professor Zerubavel is the leading figure in cognitive sociology and this book, which is still in manuscript, will be the major text once he revises it for publication. I am very much indebted to Professor Zerubavel for his permission to use his manuscript before its publication. (By the way, Professor Zerubavel is at Rutgers -- His seminars are a great resource for students here at Princeton with an interest in these topics.) The other is The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (N.Y.: Cambridge, 1995) by Roy D'Andrade (available at the Princeton University Store). D'Andrade is a pivotal figure in cognitive anthropology, and his book nicely integrates two decades of work in this field. The two books are complementary in that Zerubavel's approach is strongly sociological, whereas D'Andrade draws much more on cognitive psychology.
There are also many other readings that represent work by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and people who are less classifiable. After the first week, the plan of attack is as follows. We start with problems that are relatively micro, entail analysis of relatively simple cultural units, and are relatively structural, and move towards problems that are larger-scale, entail analysis of relatively complex constructs, and are more narrative than structural. More concretely, we start with classification and taxonomy, move to perception and retrieval, go from there to relatively static schemata, then to narrative schemata, and, finally, to the sociological idea of "logics of action," with the hope of unpacking this fundamental but undertheorized concept in a way that makes it a more useful research tool.
Each week's readings range from fairly technical accounts of work in psychology to more conventional work in the sociology of culture with which the psychological and anthropological concepts or methods resonate. Throughout the mini-semester, we will continually bounce the two kinds of work and concepts off of one another. Wherever possible, cognate concepts or approaches from psychology and sociology are included in the readings for a given week. Readings for most weeks will also expose us to relevant methods of data-gathering and data-analysis as well.
In the course of this six-week mini-seminar, we will explore a dizzying array of topics -- classification, identities, boundaries, categorization, scripts and schemata, mental models, social representations, distributed cognition, collective memory, discourse, networks, metaphors, analogy, habitus, production systems, logics of action and others. My goal is not to make you experts -- a title that I myself cannot claim with respect to most of these topics -- but to give you the resources you need to decide which of these areas have the most potential for helping you formulate and address the research problems that are important to you, and the background to do more in-depth work on your own. Even so, this approach requires a division of labor, such that beyond a core of readings, different people read different things and report back to the group. (The specific division of labor will depend on how many students enroll.) Presentations will be assigned at the end of each seminar meeting and presenters will meet with me towards the end of the week to discuss their plans.