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In dialogue with recent developments in cultural sociology, this chapter looks at the forms of discourse generated by movement activists in response to the multiple relations in which they are involved. Networks are reinterpreted as multiple, cross‐cutting sets of social relations sustained by conversational dynamics within social settings. They are at the same time the location for the development of movement solidarities and for the transmission of messages, identity, etc. across movements. The chapter identifies several conversational mechanisms that characterize the process of network construction and reproduction. It also introduces a technique, Galois lattices, to map the complexity of conjunctures of actors and events in a dynamic way.

In comparative research — whether it is cross-cultural, cross-national, or multigroup comparison — the assumption of measurement equivalence is crucially important. If nonequivalent measures were used, the outcomes would be seriously biased. Equivalence is the fundamental issue in cross-cultural research and evaluation. A cross-cultural comparison can be misleading for two reasons: (1) comparison is made using different attributes and (2) comparison is made using different scale units. But even when the problems of equivalence in attributes and scale units are resolved, it does not warrant a valid cross-cultural comparison. In every step of the research process, the researcher must ensure that equivalence in concept, operationalization, methods, analysis, and interpretation receive the same attention.

Assesses the limitations of the structural paradigm for the investigation of the network‐participation link, and invokes a greater role for cultural analysis in the identification of recruitment and mobilization mechanisms. This general point is illustrated with reference to three specific ‘facts’ regarding the origins of protest and contention, conventionally associated with the standard structuralist argument: prior social ties as a basis for movement recruitment; established social settings as the locus of movement emergence; the spread of movements along existing lines of interaction. For each of these cases, the author identifies social mechanisms, which combine structural and cultural elements. Rather than rejecting the formalization and the quest for systematic patterns, to which network concepts and methods have so much contributed in recent years, the author calls for a more dynamic integration of cultural analysis and structuralist research strategies.

This introductory chapter outlines the strategy of the book as a whole. This book is an investigation of the different conceptions that have been entertained in eight major areas of human experience: philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, religion, and science. One recurrent theme is the different ways in which those intellectual disciplines have developed in different ancient and modern societies and the roles of elites in such processes, both positive ones, in encouraging the professionalization of the investigation, and negative, when elites lay down restrictive definitions of the subject-matter concerned. A second is the need to challenge modern Western assumptions on the nature of each discipline. A third is the struggle between different disciplines for hegemonic status.

This chapter analyses a shift in contemporary American sociology to the study of culture and cultural analysis. This shift or return of culture in sociology represents something of an intellectual pendulum swing. Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism dominated the middle decades of the 20th century. It taught that human societies are regulated and coordinated from the top down by their cultural systems and that, from the bottom up, individual actors are oriented and guided by cultural values that they internalize through socialization. In the mid-1960s and 1970s, however, Parsons's structural functionalism was attacked and displaced as the dominant framework in the discipline. Various developments within and outside of sociology had helped prepare the intellectual ground for new and creative sociological scholarship that began to employ culture in ways more sophisticated than structural functionalism.

This is the fourth of five chapters on the Old Testament and the reader, and reviews feminist study of the Old Testament. It describes feminist criticism as one of the most significant intellectual developments of the twentieth century, and notes that biblical interpretation of this kind is not likely to be disinterested although feminist critics are more likely than most to admit their ideological presuppositions. These presuppositions, like those of other postmodern approaches, provide a compelling challenge to the dominant paradigms of ‘objective’ biblical scholarship through their recognition of the constructedness of history, gender, and self. Many and various examples of the vast and growing biblical feminist criticism are discussed through the chapter, looking, among other things, at the different methodological approaches taken, the strategies employed for getting at women's perspectives in androcentric texts, the search for traces of women's discourses in biblical texts, intertextual and cross‐cultural analysis, and gender studies.

This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.

Chapter 1 furnishes an overview of cultural analysis and the study of halakhah and the Jewish tradition through a cultural analysis framework. It opens with a discussion of the emerging focus on law and cultural analysis in the academic world generally and identifies the salient themes of a cultural analysis approach to law. These themes stress the importance of power relationships, environment, cultural dissent, and multiple values in the development of law. Cultural analysis also relies on the narrative model because the lawmaking process is best served with stories representing a broad range of perspectives. This discussion emphasizes that law and culture should not be viewed as two distinct entities but rather as embodiments of one another. This chapter also introduces the book’s central theme: how a cultural analysis paradigm provides an ideal way of understanding the historical development and ongoing evolution of halakhah and the mesorah.

This chapter studies suffering and how it can be included in an ethnography of interpersonal experience. It first studies an effective strategy used in medical anthropology, which demonstrates how a patient's illness convictions and complaints reproduce a certain moral domain. The chapter introduces the anthropologists' interpretive dilemma and enumerates the categories for the ethnography of experience. Next, it examines the suffering that is associated with illness and its social sources, and presents a case study of a person who has experienced great suffering. From there the chapter looks at suffering in Chinese culture and the limitations of a cultural analysis on suffering.

This chapter describes how data fusion enhances the analytical capability of cultural analysts by using the visual analyst theory in conjunction with ongoing technological software advances in data fusion. The field of cultural analyses is significantly contributing to COIN doctrine. However, software advances must also be accompanied by two caveats. The first is, no matter how powerful or versatile the technology is a thorough understanding of the social system depends on expert analyst’s opinion that is deeply familiar with a culture’s fundamentals. Second, we must refrain from reinventing the wheel by utilizing existing sources of social data ranging from deployed company intelligence officers to civil affairs teams. In conclusion, by harnessing technology to fuse geospatial, relational, and temporal data, we can enhance the field of cultural analysis to further empower the war fighter’s mission of defeating contemporary and future insurgency.

This chapter uses the dual roles of participant and outsider to contextualize the production of a particular market research practice, consumer segmentation, in real time. The goal is to show that while consumer segments exist as abstractions (and thus come to have a life of their own within marketing discourse and practice), their constitution and persistence occurs within a messy matrix of social relationships, with attendant obligations, attachments, and desires. This is an examination of ways consumer segmentation practices enmesh and sometimes ensnare those closest to their production and whose persistence is grounded by embedded cultural assumptions about consumption. By focusing on the microcosm of interactions — the phone calls, e-mails, conversations, report texts — it hopes to illuminate the fodder with which practice and ideology are co-constituted in real time.

Chapter 10 illustrates how the lessons of cultural analysis can be applied to inform and shape Jewish identity and to enhance the discussion concerning the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people. These lessons focus on the importance of the intersection between law and culture. The discussion illuminates how the mesorah negotiates issues involving authenticity and particularity of the tradition on the one hand, and cultural fluidity and pluralism on the other. Drawing from the theory and insights of cultural analysis, this chapter demonstrates how the explicit synergy between Jewish law and culture can facilitate important conversations for Jews in the United States and elsewhere. It emphasizes the importance of creating a strong middle ground among Jews and the role of both halakhah and Jewish narrative (known as aggadah) in effective Jewish education.

The vital terms of modernist cultural analysis and debate remain so because they constantly need to be reestablished. Cultural studies as it is defined and practiced at the beginning of the twenty-first century (at its best) takes “the new” as a task rather than a marvel, exploring the contemporaneity of culture as it is challenged and propelled by history and paying attention to the current, the ephemeral, and the marginal but always in relation to the equally modernist concept of a common culture. In combining this attention to how we live today with the modernist imperatives to, on the one hand, evaluate culture and, on the other, exhaustively document it, cultural studies is a perspective singularly attentive to the modernism that continues to define us. This chapter returns to what has so often been used as the exemplar, if not the definition, of modernism — namely, avant-garde art — and to the trouble with distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism.

Class analysis is concerned with how patterns of advantage (and disadvantage) are transmitted and reproduced over time. However, the passage of time (such as the life-course transitions associated with ageing, cohort changes from one generation to the next, and longer-term socio-economic changes) makes the question of how class inequalities endure a complicated one. This chapter examines how change over time requires us to rethink the nature of class inequalities, by taking a closer look at the relationship between ‘class’ and culture, lifestyle and taste. It considers how social change in post-industrial societies has created a challenge for how we think about ‘class’, and led some to claim that ‘class is dead’. It then explores the counter-reaction by theorists who argue that ‘class’ today has a changed and increasingly cultural dynamic, with class inequalities reproduced through affluence and consumption practices and existing within processes of individualisation.

The introductory section lays the groundwork for the argument that cultural Judaism is a myth. It argues that Jewish law, known as halakhah, is similar to all law in that it is best understood in cultural terms through a paradigm known as cultural analysis. This paradigm rejects the view that law is objectively neutral and coherent and thus lacking a relationship to its surrounding cultural environment. This interrelationship between law and culture is clearly evidenced in the formation and application of the Jewish tradition, known as the mesorah, which includes both legal precepts and cultural elements. This section introduces the cultural analysis paradigm developed throughout the book and details the advantages of situating the mesorah within a cultural analysis framework. It also provides an overview of the book’s chapters.