- The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
- Cultural Sociology as Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
- Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
- Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
- Culture and the Economy
- Culture and Economic Life
- From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
- Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
- Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
- Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
- Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
- Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere
- Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street
- Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
- Burning Schools/Building Bridges: Ethnographical Touchdowns in the Civil Sphere
- The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture, and Power
- Globalization and Religion
- Narrative and Social Movements
- The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization
- Rethinking Conflict and Collective Memory: The Case of Nanking
- Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration
- Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre,” and Chinese Identity
- Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
- Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
- Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity, and Navigating the Forest of Objects
- The Force of Embodiment: Violence and Altruism in Cultures of Practice
- Music Sociology in a New Key
- Narrating Global Warming
- Broadening Cultural Sociology's Scope: Meaning-Making in Mundane Organizational Life
- Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article focuses on the extraordinary space in between the opposites based on a paradigm in cultural sociology that conceives of ambivalence and inbetweenness as a fundamental and indissoluble given of classification and interpretation. More specifically, it considers something that transcends the sucessful ordering and splitting of the world into neat binaries, arguing that this inbetweenness is essential for the construction of culture. Reality does not provide any firm ground for neat classification. Therefore, in applying classifications to raw reality, there will always be an unclassifiable remainder. Furthermore, in specifying meaning, there is no way to achieve absolute clarity and to avoid a rest of fuzziness. This article first provides an overview of some theoretical concepts that point to the essence of inbetweenness before discussing various phenomena of inbetweenness such as garbage and monsters, heroes and victims, and seduction.
Keywords: cultural sociology, Opposites, ambivalence, inbetweenness, classification, interpretation, culture
Bernhard Giesen holds the Chair for Macro-sociology in the Department of History and Sociology at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and is a member of the executive board of the Center of Excellence 16 “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz. He has held visiting positions at the Department of Sociology at Yale University, the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Committee for Social Thought (Chicago), the Department of Sociology at New York University, and the Center for Advanced Studies at Stanford University. Bernhard Giesen works in the areas of cultural and historical sociology and sociological theory and has extensively published on collective memory, trauma, intergenerational conflict and collective rituals. Among his latest book publications are Social Performance. Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual (ed. with J.C. Alexander and J.L. Mast, Cambridge 2006); Religion and Politics. Cultural Perspectives (ed. With D. Suber, Leiden 2005); Cultural trauma and collective identity (ed. with J.C. Alexander et al., Berkeley 2004); Triumph and Trauma (Boulder 2004); Intellectuals and the Nation. Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Cambridge 1998).
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- The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
- Cultural Sociology as Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
- Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
- Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
- Culture and the Economy
- Culture and Economic Life
- From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
- Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
- Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
- Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
- Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
- Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere
- Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street
- Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
- Burning Schools/Building Bridges: Ethnographical Touchdowns in the Civil Sphere
- The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture, and Power
- Globalization and Religion
- Narrative and Social Movements
- The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization
- Rethinking Conflict and Collective Memory: The Case of Nanking
- Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration
- Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre,” and Chinese Identity
- Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
- Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
- Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity, and Navigating the Forest of Objects
- The Force of Embodiment: Violence and Altruism in Cultures of Practice
- Music Sociology in a New Key
- Narrating Global Warming
- Broadening Cultural Sociology's Scope: Meaning-Making in Mundane Organizational Life
- Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
- Index
