"Kano Durbar, a Nigerian ritual that presents a social drama of and for Kano residents" now available on AJCS website

"Kano Durbar, a Nigerian ritual that presents a socialdrama of and for Kanoresidents" 

by Wendy Griswold and Muhammed Bhadmus

The authors make two important contributions:

They bring politics out of the “purely” political realm.

They emphasizes the symbolic nature of place.

The authors make an important contribution to the study of the nexus of culture and politics by understanding that which is political to be that which involves power instead of only those who currently have a monopoly on the use of violence in a given territory.  They define political aesthetics as, “…the process of putting beauty (of imagery, of language, of music, of the body) in the service of some power arrangement (p. 127).”  Thus, they avoid certain problems associated with the analysis of political rituals and performances.  For instance, they argue that most studies of political rituals and performances focus on authoritarian contexts because the massive pomp and power marshaled by these regimes and because they present an easier case—one where there is a central performer/audience binary—one unified center that performs for the undifferentiated periphery or one citizen audience.

Therefore, it is not surprising that it is more likely to be nondemocratic governmental forms that rely on more dramatic rituals – that rally more aesthetic supports to their legitimacy.  This is because it is their legitimacy that is the primary question.  That is, authoritarian regimes cannot rely on the legitimacy inherent in the governmental form itself, as is the case in most democracies or as most democracies are able to claim, but on the legitimacy of the particular ruling party or specific officials.  And this legitimacy must be constantly performed and narrated, particularly without reliance on actual popular support.  They must perform the existence of this popular support instead of pointing to actual instances of popular participation.  The performance is designed to make the claim that they represent the public in particular ways and always for their own good.

Instead, Griswold and Bhadmus make a more strongly cultural argument by saying that the meaning and function of public performances and rituals cannot be imposed on cases beforehand.  In fact, to the extent that it is legal to express so openly, there will always be audience contestation over interpretation of the meaning of any public event (whether orchestrated or not).  In fact, those “in” power are not the only ones “with” power.  This should be more apparent in countries where there is not a homogenous citizenry and where the government does not maintain a monopoly over definitions of that citizenry and public performances.  By allowing their data to talk to them instead of talking over the case-study, the authors are able to illustrate, compellingly, how power is clustered in different groups and mustered in different ways. 

The authors show that nowhere is this more important to understand than in studies of nation-building.  While the authors agree that nation-building, the creation of an “imagined community”, is achieved through collective identity narration and re-narration in performances and rituals.  But, past studies have often chosen, on the basis of an understanding of performances as having a primarily legitimating function, mostly those cases where there is little (in actuality or in ability) contestation over interpretation and where an imagined community had already been established.  This results in post hoc selection of cases with an undivided authority.  But if interpretations vary and most societies are not defined by an undifferentiated mass of bodies that naturally flock to participate in rituals whose aim is to legitimate the unquestioned authority, then other cases ought to be selected.  This is precisely what Griswold and Bhadmus do.

In fact, in countries where collective identity is divided and/or highly contentious and where power is either seen as shaky or provisional (often the same place), public performances are often successful not because of their claim to represent the imagined community or bolster the legitimacy of a popular leader, but because they are able to organize the performance around a unifying and highly potent aesthetic element.  In the case of Kano, the authors argue that this element is place.  In successful aesthetic politics it is not always the political element that creates solidarity, but the nature of the aesthetic elements that can create solidarity through affectation.  Hence, they argue not for an analysis of the aesthetics of politics; it is the politics of aesthetics – the inherently political nature of the aesthetic—that is important.

Place is an important symbolic container of performances because it has the potential to draw upon various identities and affective processes and is therefore capable of crossing the boundaries distinguishing groups from one another to create a more cohesive solidarity-making experience for participants and audience.

The article also includes a succinct summary of the historical context of Kano (tied to the Biafra conflict) which many readers will find useful to understanding the importance of Kano as a place of symbolic and political significance.  Kano is a large city in northern Nigeria which has been a hot center of conflict for many years between different ethnic-linguistic and religious groups.  Griswold and Bhadmus also provide a concise map of political, demographic, and economic tensions that plague the region and come to a point in the overpopulated and underemployed city.

The Durbar is a twice a year spectacle in Kano associated with Muslim holidays and revolve around a salute to the Emir.  The history of the Durbar is one of colonial legacy and the salutation to the Emir, the authors point out, is an odd one because he holds not legal or constitutional but only religious power.  Despite the fact that these are not obviously solidarity-rallying meaning-points for the events, it is extremely popular among all groups.  This is the conundrum that Griswold and Bhadmus attempt to solve—why is such a symbolically contaminated spectacle able to achieve such successful performance-audience fusion?

Many scholars studying ritual and performance in post-colonial nations focus on the authenticity of culture.  They make the argument that returning to local cultural roots is part of the answer to solving the crises of post-colonial nations.  But, these scholars merely become responsible for a politics of naming and division by saying that this and not that element is “pre-colonial”.  In fact, it does not matter whether or not a local cultural spectacle or ritual is pre- or post-colonial or in fact imperial in its origins.  It only matters that it resonates with the current local population in order to be successful and that, in cases of general identity formation based on local life, the symbolic meaning of festivals of space has the potential to muster more a more inclusive fusion.  All traditions are invented.

In this case, the political ritual spectacle of the Kano Durbar is able to resonate with its audience because it utilizes both cognitive and emotional elements, because those elements speak to an inclusive localness of Kano and not of Nigeria, Islam, African or otherwise, and because the performers (the bodies in motion) represent the not-undifferentiated masses of Kano and the local powers of Kano.  In fact, these local powers (the Emir) is seen, in the course of the ritual procession, to make local demands of national government thereby drawing lines of distinction between the local and the national and creating a more universal local identity that is not associated only with being Muslim.

Most importantly, as their interview data show, though the spectacle is highly scripted, it resonates with audience because it is perceived not as a drama, but as reality.  In fact, the performance is not understood in terms of its historical authenticity, but for the realness—the immediate authenticity—that is perceived by the audience.  It is understood as a pageant of real local culture and the reality of living local Kano lives.  This means that the performance is understood as largely apolitical and therefore not very divisive (though there are critiques).  The audience is able to consume politics through the entertaining aesthetics of that which is perceived to be local reality.

On a final note:

It is often difficult to write a significant qualitative journal article that discusses the politics and history of a place far from the common knowledge of the readership.  The authors do an impeccable job of sailing between the horns of multiple practical dilemmas.  Readers will particularly enjoy the tendency for the authors to clearly define the specificity of the concepts they are using and the terms of the theoretical and methodological dilemmas they are resolving.

Questions for comments:

Is it possible that the success of the spectacle in fusing with the audience and in creating a more inclusive local identity that crosses ethnic, religious, political, and economic lines is the product of the specific local charisma of the Emir?

Is it possible that local character can, that a definition of “us”, is only possible as the result of the generally condemned violence by the Boko Haram?  That is, does identity form more easily through ritual when faced with adversity?

"Notes on a cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation", now available on AJCS website

Andrea Voyer’s article, Notes on a Cultural Sociology of Immigrant Incorporation, is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on migration that utilizes an explicitly cultural lens. It covers important territory in two respects. In the face of increased levels of migration throughout the world and the multiracial, multiethnic and multireligious societies that emerge as a result, few topics are more important than the politics of belonging and inclusion. Thus, on the most concrete and immediate level, this article contributes to our knowledge of the processes of immigrant incorporation. Secondly, it enhances the growing but still needy area of methodology within cultural sociology.

The author provides a strong opening with a compelling analytical puzzle using the Swedish case. How can there be a “failure of belonging and integration” in a context where immigrants have full access to the material benefits of a comprehensive social welfare system? The missing piece concerns the nature of symbolic inclusion within the civil sphere, which requires a cultural sociological understanding of the boundaries drawn in relation to the foreign-born that delineate “us” and “them.” In contrast to the undue emphasis on ethnic group boundaries with regard to civil inclusion, Voyer provides strong theoretical grounding for a cultural sociological definition of the dynamics of immigrant incorporation as “civil solidarity encompassing immigrants and achieved through the application of widely shared meanings, categories of perception, moral distinctions and manners of speech pertaining to social membership” (28).

This article is extremely well structured, weaving together the theoretical and the empirical to build a cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation. The reader will appreciate how Voyer provides concrete examples of the three interrelated processes of immigrant incorporation: 1) symbolic boundaries; 2) epistemology and praxis; and 3) discipline. Stories from Sweden and the United States bring the processes of incorporation to life. The emergence of narratives in Lewiston Maine that “defined the city and its folks as a community populated by kind, caring, hardworking people” (32) reflect symbolic boundary construction that could allow for inclusion of Muslim Somali newcomers. At the level of epistemology and praxis, the Swedish case reflects a procedural conception of membership; there is a tight connection between what members actually do and the fundamental truth and values held by the mainstream. The discursive power of training sessions, community dialogues and job readiness programs in the American context helps (self-)discipline immigrants and non-immigrants alike by offering implicit and explicit instruction on the moral worth of an “upstanding person” and “modern locality” (35).

But, as Voyer herself points out, none of these processes occurs tidily and uniformly; “not all individuals are disciplined to hegemonic ideas and approaches” nor do they always fit “neatly and willingly into the categories created by the symbolic boundaries of belonging” (35-6). And this is where the issues of power and individual agency come into play. Cultural sociology has borne much criticism about the neglect of these aspects of social life. Voyer tackles these issues with the help of Bakhtin, showing the concurrent presence of centrifugal and centripetal forces in the process of immigrant incorporation. For example, an American mayor welcomes new immigrants as long as they “check their culture at the door” (36). However, even as there is contestation, the cultural structures within a given context of reception remain largely unshaken. Indeed, one of the most important take-away messages of this article is that “both agency and power are fundamentally shaped by the cultural landscape” (36).

That’s also why any theory of immigration incorporation must consider both structural and symbolic inclusion. Material considerations, while important, are simply not enough. So much previous work in migration studies has focused on the structural realm and now it’s time for the important corrective Voyer offers in this article. But cultural sociologists looking at any topic also benefit – this piece aptly leads us through the ways in which culture matters and operates within the landscape of the civil sphere.

"Pomp and Power, Performance and Politicians: The California Theatre State", now available on AJCS website

In Pomp and Power, Performers and Politicians: The California Theatre State, Elizabeth Helen Essary and Christian Ferney have produced a substantial contribution to the flourishing area of cultural and performative analyses of politics and power. The authors draw on Clifford Geertz’s work on myth and performance to analyse the relations between statecraft and the “animating centers of society,” and they use Jeffrey Alexander’s historical reconstruction of the rise of performance to acknowledge the increased complexity and contingency at play in the political arena of late-twentieth century California. It is a fruitful combination, and the article excels foremost in demonstrating the continuing analytical purchase of examining a collectivity’s animating myths in Geertzian fashion.

Borrowing and extending the phrase from Murray Edelman, Essary and Ferney craft a new space for ‘symbolic politics’ by identifying what one might call the codes of suspicion that have divided political analyses for decades, namely, style vs substance, entertainment vs rational discourse, professional journalism vs media circus, celebrity  vs politician, and audiences vs electorates. Over the course of the article the authors allay researchers’ concerns over being overly naïve or reductively suspicious by demonstrating that “because it is myth and performance that constitute politics, there can be no large material differences between successful candidates [for office].” While “wealth, status, communication savvy or prestige may offer explanatory leverage,” any account of the electoral process is “incomplete without the cultural structures.” Why? Because politicians “may be more or less successful in their struggles to become collective representations, but they are not free to rewrite the conventions of the story” (118). (Well, at a minimum the authors allay cultural sociologists’ concerns.)

And it is their careful empirical analysis of the gubernatorial campaigns of Ronald Reagan in 1966, Pete Wilson in 1990, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, that demonstrates the enduring conventions of the California story; the durability of a particular cultural structure, a Californian myth governing the character and motives of those who would hold Office, and of this person’s relations and obligations to Office and to the electorate. This mythical structure is activated with remarkable regularity, from within the campaigns of actors turned politicians such as Reagan and Schwarzenegger and within the campaign of Pete Wilson, a candidate who embodied the walking archetype of career politician.

To put it another way, myth transcends celebrity: Charting the frequency with which particular narrative elements are deployed within these three gubernatorial competitions, across a time frame spanning almost four decades, Essary and Ferney demonstrate that narrative elements of “crisis” and “hero” are deployed with impressive regularity. Crisis is reiterated foremost in narratives of the economy, and though less frequently, with regard to partisanship, the role of government, and social disorder (107). A hero is foremost interpreted vis-à-vis the category of having the right ideas, but also in terms of character, one’s affiliations, and one’s claims to outsider status (112). Inauguration days heighten and crystalize the political theatre, Essary and Ferney show, as incumbents strive to embody their heroic personas and demarcate social time by calling for the end of partisanship and the beginning of a new period.

The mythical elements the authors identify bring into stark relief how political discourse is organized around seemingly simple and obvious cultural structures. While obvious, though, the cultural structures are display a durability that is surprising and by no means obvious. Identifying these elements and showing their regularity and power over time is an achievement, one that helps reveal structures that are all too frequently taken for granted and assumed. While the authors go to lengths to demonstrate what is particularly “Californian” about this myth-structure,  and succeed in doing so, the reader is also led to consider how this analysis can inform investigations into a wide array of political phenomena up and down the scale from local to national to even the global political competitions and disputes. We at AJCS are confident that this article will inform future such sociological investigations, and these future works will be strengthened by the time researchers spend considering this illuminating, engaging, and well written piece. 

"What good are interviews for thinking about culture? Demystifying interpretive analysis" now available on AJCS website

"What good are interviews for thinking about culture? Demystifying interpretive analysis" is essential reading to understand what is at stake in the debates that swirl through cultural sociology today. Pugh is likely to both hear cries of approval and verbal slings and arrows from members of the culture section of the ASA, for she has launched a critique of the “cognitive culturalists” that takes the reader to the core of the issue. The article is simultaneously theoretical and methodological; indeed, she shows carefully the fundamental ways in which theoretical claims, methodological techniques, and epistemological orientations intertwine in the sociology of culture.

The article begins by reconstructing the fundamental arguments of the “cognitive culturalists,” and their vision for cultural sociology’s past and future. Having dispensed with Parsonian and Geertzian approaches to culture, the cognitive culturalists have moved through Swidler’s toolkit model and into the “dual-process” model of culture. In this model, there is a superficial discursive level of consciousness prone to rationalization, and second, underlying process wherein the “core moral beliefs held at the most primeval level…do indeed cause action” (4). On the surface level of rationalization, contradiction is common—people will reach for the cultural bits and pieces that they need. But, Pugh shows, for many proponents of the dual-process model, the idea is to “see past the contradictions on the surface to the clarity and coherence of the culture-action link in ‘internalized practical dispositions,’ in practical consciousness” (4).

Pugh notes the connections between this theory and forced choice surveys, and while recognizing that the “cognitive culturalists contribute mightily” (5) nonetheless brings them in for a significant critique. The dual-process view, and the cognitive turn in cultural sociology more generally, obscures the many different ways in which actors can be contradictory; it makes it difficult to theorize how underlying emotions can be molded simultaneously in contradictory ways; overall, it renders action bloodless and truncates its multiple meanings, and in doing so, undercuts its own professed explanatory power. Then the paper takes a methodological turn.

Pugh notes the strange fact that the cognitive culturalists have gone out of their way to dismiss in-depth interviewing as useful for constructing sociological explanations. Pushing on this point, she notes how—perhaps inflected by their theory of discursive rationalization—the cognitive turn in the sociology of culture has fundamentally misrecognized how in-depth interviews work. She then sets out a schema for understanding what in-depth interviews can access. That schema is, briefly, the following:

--“the honorable”: the “display work” actors do to present themselves in the best possible way to their interviewer

--“the schematic”: the frameworks which, by noting phrasing, metaphors, etc., investigators can infer actors’ are using to view the world

--“the visceral”: “an emotional landscape of desire, morality, and expectations” (9)

--“meta-feelings”: “how we feel about how we feel.”

In the body of her article, Pugh works out how these components “help us to see how culture, emotion, and action relate to each other” (11). Pugh develops these arguments via reference to an interview study of the “emotional cultures through which people interpret insecurity at work and at home” (12).

The key aspects of the analysis have to be read in full form in the article itself. In the meantime, however, it is worth noting how much Pugh’s article pushes debates in cultural sociology. Her article articulates the possibility of interpretive explanation, constructed with data retrieved by the best interviewing techniques. It is almost a manifesto, of sorts, but one that dispenses with the platitudes of qualitative vs. quantitative, and gets into the difficult and complex issues surround how one builds an explanation of social action. 

"Defilement and Disgust: Theorizing the Other", by Steven Seidman, now available on AJCS website

The journal's first article has been published, and is now available online on the AJCS website. Here is an extended description of the article:

"Defilement and Disgust: Theorizing the Other" is a very important and original manuscript. Steve Seidman distinguishes between a sociology of difference and a sociology of otherness, arguing that theory of the former is much more fully developed than the latter. The central purpose of the article is to develop a theory outlining the cultural organization of otherness, centering around notions of defilement and disgust.

There are a number of really significant contributions here. The only sociologist to even come close to a sociology of otherness is Zygmunt Bauman, with his theory of modernity's drive to eliminate conceptual ambiguity. But Bauman's theory is rather “thin”, when compared to this manuscript, because Bauman seems to suggest that all processes flow automatically from the existence of conceptual ambiguity. By contrast, Seidman develops a much more multidimensional theory of otherness, outlining its cultural, spatial, and psychological components.

Culturally, otherness is organized around a semiotic tension between deficiency and excess. On the one hand, the defiled self “is imagined as deficient in those key human traits that make a moral life possible”. On the other hand, the defiled figure is shown to have an excess of other ordinary (but typically polluted) traits. Possessing deficiencies as well as excesses in “normal” human characteristics, the defiled self “reminds us of the thin line separating order from disorder”. There is a similarity to Bauman's position, clearly, but it is much more full developed, in a cultural sense.

Seidman also makes a real contribution by identifying the spatial correlates to the culture of otherness. Because proximity to the other produces the danger of contamination as well as contagion, there are clear disciplinary practices that normalize and sequester the other, and those who are charged with policing the other engage in purification rituals that fend off contamination. At the same time, provocatively, Seidman suggests that the public borderland that separates the other from civil society has the capacity to produce new hybrid selves, which disturb the existing binaries while also producing categorical ambiguities that always have the capacity to generate new processes of defilement. These borderlands, then, are characterized by intense social anxiety and generativity.

Ultimately, the defiled self produces an embodied response of digust, “eliciting a sensation of revulsion”. Indeed, the manuscript contains a fascinating discussion of the psychology of defilement. In the first instance, there is an emotional disengagement that makes possible an attitude of de-cathexis-as-indifference. But this progresses into a different form of de-cathexis, based on dissociation, which leads to moral debasement, dehumanization, and hatred. This requires a cultural re-scripting, in which the putative ordinariness of the defiled other is re-narrated as a malicious disguise. And with this, all the cultural preparation for a social purging is put into place. But Seidman does not see these othering processes as inevitable or inevitably successful, in the way that is typical of most scholars who are interested in otherness and difference. In fact, he recognizes the importance of civil society, cultural trauma, and other macro-cultural processes that provide resources to the defiled, who have the ability to protest their defilement, to challenge their cultural pollution, to put forth counter-performances.

There is a very clear empirical research program that follows from this theoretical contribution, and it is easy to imagine readers of AJCS quickly scrambling to design research that identify the concrete processes by which otherness moves from the indifferent forms of de-cathexis to the dissociative and dehumanizing ones.

AJCS Editor Jeffrey Alexander featured in Huffington Post

Jeffrey Alexander has recently written The Performance of Politics Election 2012 for the Huffington Post. In this provocative article, Alexander explains the performative failures of Mitt Romney in the current US Presidential campaign. An excellent example of applied cultural sociology, Alexander mounts a convincing case that Romney lacks “symbolic soul”. Indeed, “Romney character” has an uncomfortable similarity with the fictional character Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. This makes Obama's task a lot easier. "At least for now, Obama can no longer be a hero," Alexander argues, but he can be represented as working heroically for our side."

Relying on the theory of politics and performance developed in his recent books  Performance and Power and Performance and Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power, Alexander's work provides a powerful demonstration of why politics is, at its core, a struggle for meaning.  

Congratulations to Editorial Board Members Claudio Benzecry and Isaac Reed

AJCS was well represented in this year's Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture, given annually by the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. Claudio Benzecry (University of Connecticut) received the award, for The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press). Isaac Reed (University of Colorado) was awarded Honorable Mention for Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press).

The awards committee (David Garland, Teresa Gowan, Allison Pugh, and Guobin Yang) has kindly granted us permission to share their descriptions of these award-winning books, which we have reprinted below, with congratulations to Claudio and Isaac.

Mary Douglas award winner for 2012: Claudio E. Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (Chicago 2011)

The Opera Fanatic is a beautiful book. A work of art as well as intellect, it conveys to its readers not just the fans’ passionate love for their opera but also the author’s love of his subject and his passion for understanding. The ethnography of a specific social world – the world of plebian opera devotees, waiting in line for discounted tickets, traveling together to far-flung theatres, gathered in the upper galleries of the legendary Colon Opera House in Buenos Aires – Benzecry’s account nevertheless provides glimpses of aspects of the human condition that we too often overlook: our capacity for love, for commitment, and for self-overcoming through devotion to an ideal. In the process, he develops a powerful set of arguments about the appropriation of culture and the relations between culture and class – arguments that challenge our dominant theories while opening up new lines of research on the formation of taste and its social uses.

Benzecry follows the daily routines, the social rituals, and the private ecstasies of his informants with deep sensitivity and understanding, providing us with an ethnography that is full of surprises, illuminations and a satisfying sense of insight into the lives of others. In the process, he gently but effectively pushes back against Bourdieu’s account of taste as a mode of distinction, showing us instead some unexpected relations between high art and low socio-economic status, and revealing how sophisticated tastes come to be acquired not as means of domination and hierarchy but as forms of self-transcendence and belonging.

A study of self-fashioning through devotion, discipline, and sacrifice – repaid in

enthrallment and epiphany – and a study of great music as a variety of religious

experience, this is also a profoundly sociological study, showing the role of music in relations between people, in their relation to their nation and its history, and above all in the relations of devotees to themselves and to their conditions of life. It is an account of how people work to make their lives meaningful and social. An account that shows how passions can be cultivated, embodied in practices, and made central to one’s life and identity.

Sociologists often study the passions of society, and yet in the studying, they

sometimes squeeze all the passion out of it. The Opera Fanatic addresses central theoretical issues in the sociology of culture but its treatment is transcendent because Benzecry never loses sight of his informants’ intense feeling for opera and its performance. The Opera Fanatic works powerfully as research and as narrative, not just because Benzecry manages to consider cultural content, cultural meaning, and culture- as-action all at once, but because he does so with a lyricism that inspires, and which exudes what Andrew Abbott called ‘humane sympathy.’ The Opera Fanatic is more than an in-depth ethnography of working class people who love opera in Argentina: it is sociology with heart.

Mary Douglas Prize 2012, Honorable Mention: Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago 2011)

Despite its brevity and accessibility, Interpretation and Social Knowledge is a work of sweeping ambition. It aims to change the self-understanding of the human sciences by offering a new account of the epistemological grounds on which social inquiry proceeds. Though the book is written for a wide audience, sociologists of culture will find it of particular interest since Reed places “meaning-centered inquiry” at the very heart of the project of social explanation and causal analysis. As far as Reed is concerned, “cultural analysis” is less a sociological specialty than an indispensable component of social research.

Writing in an era when most sociologists find it easier to say which epistemologies they reject than to affirm the positions they embrace, Reed sets out a positive account of the terms upon which social inquiry can effectively proceed. In doing so, he deconstructs the usual antinomies between interpretation and explanation, culture and cause, meaning and power, and insists that, in the social world, meaning operates as a cause of acts and events – albeit a “forming” or framing cause rather than a “forcing” one – and will necessarily be an element of any adequate social explanation.

Reed identifies the character and logic of three different epistemic modes – the

Realist, the Normative and the Interpretive – and shows us how each has a different way of employing theoretical abstractions to re-analyze and ultimately re-signify what we know about the world. Moving beyond these positions, he presents a new synthesis: a post-positivist epistemology for the human sciences that refuses to abandon realist causal claims and explanatory ambitions or to give up normative critique of the social world being studied.

In the process, he argues for a theoretical pluralism. Given that our social landscape is multi-dimensional and rendered meaningful in multiple ways, we should accept that it can be validly interpreted from more than one perspective. But he rejects the skepticism and relativism that often accompanies such pluralism, insisting that we can distinguish between better and worse interpretations, and between more and less valid causal accounts, and ought to do so on the basis of evidence and reasoning. Reed thereby extricates interpretivism from the defeatism of relativism while simultaneously showing why the critical realism underlining much historical-comparative work should not be confused with anti-theoretical or "positivist" empiricism.

In setting out these claims, Reed presents a series of engaged and engaging readings of exemplary sociological, anthropological and historical texts. Rather than philosophize about the terms on which social understanding might be attained, he examines the texts of leading interpreters of our social world – Geertz, Foucault, Marx, Habermas, Skocpol, among others – and traces how these writers shape the dialectic of evidence and theory, factual claims and interpretive claims, social description and social explanation. He roams across this terrain with extraordinary command, moving through a concise but resonant analysis of landmark works within each of the standard epistemic modes. The conclusions he draws, and the synthesis he presents, will be of interest to all sociologists, but especially to those of us who work in the sociology of culture.

Reed’s elegant writing mirrors his analysis in its clarity and precision, providing us with neat, insightful summaries of long-standing debates and accessible new paths through some difficult epistemological terrain. The result is a lively, sometimes brilliant, book that can be read with profit by anyone interested in the possibility – and the practice – of developing causal explanations of a meaningful social world.