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Culture and the end of slavery
Slavery in the United States officially ended with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 — a change in the law of the land. The end of slavery, though, was a sweeping social change associated with changes up and down the structure/culture continuum. All were important in bringing an end to slavery, but notice how change came most quickly (yet least decisively) at the culture end of the continuum.
Art: Editorial cartoonists and writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe created works of art that criticized slavery and helped convince Americans that change was necessary.
Religion: Many spiritual leaders took up emancipation as a religious issue, arguing that holding human beings as property was morally wrong and displeasing to God.
Politics: Slavery was a central issue in American politics of the 19th century, hotly debated among candidates for political office. Abraham Lincoln was elected president without the support of a single southern state.
Law: Even an executive order from President Lincoln couldn’t make slavery
unconditionally illegal in the United States; that required the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865.
Economy: Slavery was fundamental to the economy of the southern states, and it took decades for those states to adjust to emancipation. Economic arrangements like sharecropping, which became widespread after the Civil War, in some ways were not very different than slavery.
Language: One significant barrier to former slaves’ upward mobility was the fact that many slaves had not been taught to read or write, and had relatively little experience with the vocabulary and speech patterns of people of influence. Debates about race and education are with us to this day, and there is still a distinctive speaking style associated with African-Americans.
Technology: By the 1860s, the ongoing development of agricultural technology making unskilled labor less valuable to farmers certainly didn’t hurt in convincing northerners and southerners alike to accept the idea of a world without slavery.
Studying Culture: Makin’ It and Takin’ It
It’s slippery enough to figure out what culture is, but that doesn’t stop sociologists — the whole point of defining culture is to figure out how it works and how (or even whether) it’s important.
Cultural sociologists argue that it’s crucial to separate the production of culture from the reception of culture. Knowing how or why a cultural product is produced doesn’t necessarily mean knowing what happens when someone sits down and looks at it, reads it, watches it, or plays it.
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Both of these approaches have been used to study aspects of culture besides paintings, books, movies, and TV shows — but most studies have focused on cultural products such as those.
Other angles on culture
Sociologists don’t have a monopoly on the study of culture, but there are important differences between the sociological study of culture and the way other writers and thinkers approach the subject. It’s important to have some idea of these differences because as widely as the word “culture” is used in sociology, it’s used even more widely used in other disciplines. Understanding how other disciplines study culture will also help you understand what’s distinctive about the sociological approach generally.
Sociologists can be wrong (and how!), but they aim to make their arguments about culture with solid data — the more data, the better — and reasonably precise analyses. Rather than becoming deeply familiar with any one culture to the exclusion of others, sociologists want to see what the commonalities and differences are across a range of cultures. This means that you’re much more likely to find numbers and statistics in a sociological study of culture than in an anthropological study, but what defines the sociological approach to culture is an interest in making scientific observations to find patterns that may be common across a wide range of different societies.
Looking at how other academic disciplines in the following list study culture helps in understanding how sociologists study culture:
Anthropology
Anthropology is a discipline that is all about understanding culture. Anthropologists are deeply interested in culture — with an emphasis on deep. Anthropologists appreciate that social values and perspectives may vary widely from one society to another, and when they set out to study any society, from a rural Chinese village to a bustling neighborhood in central Berlin, they are careful to question their preconceptions about what is “right” and “wrong.”
Anthropologists document not only everyday practices (for example, methods of preparing food) but also the values that underlie those practices. The emphasis of most anthropologists is on precisely observing and really getting to know the groups they are studying. They do compare culture across places and times, but intercultural comparison is less important for anthropologists than it is for sociologists. Sociologists and anthropologists share a desire not to take anything for granted, but most sociologists would rather
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look for patterns across many cultures — or over a long period of time — rather than focusing so thoroughly on any one particular culture at any one particular time.
Cultural studies
In the field of “cultural studies,” scholars are similarly thorough and analytical in examining cultural practices and products. What does the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers say about American society in the 1950s, when it was produced? What does the portrayal of women’s bodies in music videos from the 1980s have to do with the way women were viewed at that time?
A scholar of cultural studies would likely be interested in those questions. They’re similar to the kind of questions that a sociologist might ask, but as with anthropology, the emphasis is more on achieving a deep understanding of a particular place and time than on making comparisons across places and times. Rather than writing an entire article or book about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, sociologists would be more likely to try to study a wide range of films produced in the 1950s and compare them with a similarly wide range of movies that came out in other decades.
Liberal arts
Of course, there may be no one more interested in culture than those people producing cultural products like books, movies, and music. Books like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and songs like Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” have a great deal to say about culture and society — but writers of
fictional stories and song lyrics are not scientists, and they don’t want to be! An artist’s goal is to say something with emotional impact and broad resonance, not to prove a point using systematic observations and analyses. It’s hard to prove a book or a song wrong, but sociologists support their arguments with hard data, systematically analyzed. As with any scientific study, a sociological study can be supported or challenged when new evidence comes to light.
The production of culture
Sociologists studying the production of culture concentrate on how and why cultural products are made. Sociologists working in this field have shown that structural changes behind the scenes can have a huge impact on the culture that we see. In the modern world, this means looking at the people, organizations, and technology important in the production of , for example:
Movies
Music
Books
Art
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One classic study of the production of culture was conducted by the husband- and-wife team of Harrison and Cynthia White, who studied the rise of Impressionism in French painting. There’s no doubt that Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh were artistic geniuses, but the Whites’ historical study showed that the sweeping transformation of art from precisely painted historical scenes to beautifully fuzzy water lilies could only have happened after changes in organizations (the French art market spread beyond a single, central market to a system of independent dealers), the economy (rising affluence meant that more people were able to buy art), and technology (paint became cheaper and easier to use). If Monet had come along 100 years earlier, he would have been out of luck.
This study is an example of how culture (art and music) is affected by structure (organizations, the economy, technology). As communications technology has developed, allowing culture created by a small group of people to quickly reach a very large group of people, understanding the production of culture has become increasingly important. Still, sociologists have shown that the same cultural product (say, a TV show) may have very different effects on different groups of people.
The reception of culture
Studying the reception of culture means looking at how people use and interpret culture — especially cultural products like books and TV shows. Sociologists working in this area have proven that people bring their own views and values to the culture they encounter; books, TV shows, movies, and music may affect everyone, but they affect different people in different ways. People seek them out for different reasons and make their own interpretations of what they see, hear, and read.
In a fascinating study, Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach showed episodes of the sitcom All in the Family to viewers with a range of different views on race. The show centers on a character named Archie Bunker, an intolerant bigot who often gets into fights with his more progressive family members. Vidmar and Rokeach found that viewers who didn’t share Archie Bunker’s views thought the show was very funny in the way it made fun of Archie’s absurd racism — in fact, this was the producers’ intention. On the other hand, though, viewers who were themselves bigots thought Archie Bunker was the hero of the show and that the producers meant to make fun of his foolish family!
This demonstrates why it’s a mistake to assume that a certain cultural product will have the same effect on everyone. This doesn’t mean that cultural products have no effect — other studies have shown, for example, that TV shows depicting the dangers of drunk driving can actually make people less likely to drink and drive — but it does mean that the interaction between culture and people’s actions is a little more complicated than it might seem.