Chandra Mukerji
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 159462 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Chandra Mukerji |
| NOMBRES | Chandra |
| APELLIDO | Mukerji |
| FIRMA | MUKERJI C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California San Diego |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 73 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 179 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1976 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2020 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The Archives Made Me Do It
This paper is a reflection on the power of archives in driving research. Just as much as informants draw the attention of researchers to social patterns, archives do, too. Both archival and ethnographic research depends on the authority of written documents like field notes and official papers-even in the sociology of art. Archives consist mainly of papers about objects and property. I argue that the material turn in my work and the study of logi…
Culture, Nature and
Much recent work in the sociology of culture describes how cultural practices entail the participation of nature as well as of social actors. Some of the interest in nature and culture is inspired by the sociology of science and by writings on nonhuman agents in the production of culture. Other work addresses territoriality, looking at how landscapes are engineered for social and cultural effect. Still other studies look at material practices by …
Joe Gusfield at UCSD
Culture, the State and
In studies of nationalist movements in politics, national cultures of political practice, cultural institutions and the state, national media and popular culture in politics, collective memory and national identity, and cultural sources of state power, cultural sociologists help to explain how states work: what forces shift political allegiances, how states enroll citizens into the political process, when and how national identities are formed ar…
Social Cognition
Studies of social cognition attempt to explain how thought or cognitive problem‐solving takes places in groups. While scholars generally agree that learning can be a collective activity, many are reluctant to accept that thinking itself could have a social dimension. Psychologists and cognitive scientists tend to consider thought as an internal brain activity. Sociologists generally avoid the problem by focusing on social behavior. When sociologi…
The state of things
This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse …
Modernity Reimagined
Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award in 2012, Chandra Mukerji offers with this remarkable new book an explanation of the birth and subsequent proliferation of the many strands in the braid of modernity. The journey she takes us on is dedicated to teasing those strands apart, using forms of cultural analysis from the social sciences to approach history with fresh eyes. Faced with the problem of trying to under…
The Material Turn
There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power. It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under‐examined forms of social life—particularly the lives of nonliterate or suppres…
Entangled in questions of cultural analysis
The cultural power of tacit knowledge
Le mental et le social
Qu'est-ce au juste que le mental ? Les nouvelles « sciences de l'esprit » ne paraissent pas avoir de doute sur la réponse : c'est ce qu'il y a dans la boîte crânienne. L'idée que le mental puisse être autre chose que le côté « interne » d'une métaphore qui l'oppose à de l'externe, et qu'à ce titre il puisse s'avérer intrinsèquement social, leur paraît incongrue. C'est pourtant cette idée que le présent ouvrage s'applique à défendre. Il élabore u…
Analyzing Infrastructure
Analyzing Infrastructure Chandra Mukerji (bio) Sara B. Pritchard , Confluence In Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv+371. $49.95), Sara Pritchard attempts to bridge environmental history, science and technology studies, and the history of technology to analyze the Rhône River as an envirotechnical system. In connecting technology to the environment and polit…
Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles
This essay builds on theories of space and power, addressing the question of how spaces can exercise pedagogical power with political effects. It focuses empirically on the gardens of Versailles in seventeenth-century France, when the park was used to promote the view of France as descendent of Rome and heir to its imperial destiny. The gardens were made an immersive environment of classically inspired art, architecture, and engineering in which …
Author response
Jurisdiction, inscription, and state formation
In seventeenth-century France, Colbert built a more effective state administration not by rationalizing state offices but by using public documents to increase the government’s intellectual capacity to exercise logistical power and engage in territorial governance. This pattern calls into question Weber’s model of the genesis of “modern officialdom,” suggesting that its source was not social rationalization, but rather the identification and mana…
The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power
The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenth-century France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to stat…
Impossible Engineering
The New Rome
Before France was a nation, France was promoted as a New Rome and the French as descendents of ancient Gaul. Under Louis XIV, the idea of becoming French was not generally appealing because of opposition to monarchical power. But a campaign to make France a New Rome inadvertently provided a basis for French national identity. The Canal du Midi, one of the infrastructural projects for the New Rome, came to define France and stand for French native…
Culture, the State and
Studies of culture and the state focus on a range of relationships between modern political regimes and patterns of symbolic and material life. They reveal the diverse ways that power works through culture, and provide means for a better understanding of how power is accumulated, organized, and deployed in or around state systems
Controversy Studies
Controversy studies have been an important part of the sociology of science since the late 1970s when Merton's more institutional approach to the field began to be displaced by the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Inspired by Kuhn (1970), the new sociologists of science were determined to show empirically what Kuhn had suggested conceptually: that knowledge‐making was a social process. Controversy studies were important to this project be…
Culture, Nature and
There is a movement among sociologists and social critics to include the built environment and physical bodies in social analysis, and to think seriously about the ways that locations and creatures (including people) matter to group life. Part of this comes from anthropological leanings in sociology, and the tradition of thick description that includes discussions of chickens and back streets as well as group life. Part of it is motivated by femi…
Stewardship Politics and the Control of Wild Weather
The failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina not only ended the lives of many of the city's inhabitants, but also undermined the legitimacy of government officials, from the mayor to the president. The structures that crumbled were built by the Army Corps of Engineers, and represented the ability and will of the state to stabilize the land and make it safe for habitation. The fact that it was not safe reflected the lowered co…
The Great Forestry Survey of 1669-1671
A program of forestry surveys and reform conducted in France during the 17th century has been accused of rationalizing the landscape and suppressing peasant culture; tools of cartography were said to have made rural lands both more legible to the state and alien to locals. On closer inspection, it seems that the surveys did not produce abstract rationalizations of the forests that made them ‘readable’ at a distance or more orderly on the ground; …
Cultural Genealogy
This article looks at the value of genealogical analysis for doing historical research in cultural sociology, using Nietzsche's definition of genealogy.The point is to resuscitate a method that has often been rejected by sociologists, and demonstrate its value for analyzing forms of culture that have become tacit or unarticulated over time. To make the case for the method, the article follows a historical example: the use of indigenous hydraulics…
Printing, cartography and conceptions of place in Renaissance Europe
Eisenstein's account of the connection between scientific progress and printing does not apply well to map publication and knowledge of geography. Most of the celebrated figures in map design and publishing in the 16th century were fundamentally copyists and collectors of others' works. In Renaissance Europe, geographers did not strive to be original, but relied on others' measures, adding their own information to extant maps whenever this was po…
The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power
The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenth-century France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to stat…
The state of things
This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse …
Bullshitting
This paper explores how people create tall tales to make frustrating activities “engaging“–as Goffman uses that term. The data are the stories hitchhikers tell one another about their travels-what they call “bullshit.“ The analysis of these data suggests that bullshitting provides people with a way of managing their problems. By using difficult situations as bases for heroic autobiographical stories, people can use their problems to produce a pos…
Jurisdiction, inscription, and state formation
In seventeenth-century France, Colbert built a more effective state administration not by rationalizing state offices but by using public documents to increase the government’s intellectual capacity to exercise logistical power and engage in territorial governance. This pattern calls into question Weber’s model of the genesis of “modern officialdom,” suggesting that its source was not social rationalization, but rather the identification and mana…
Rethinking Popular Culture
Rethinking Popular Culture selects some of the best and most important recent work analyzing popular culture. Drawing upon recent developments in cultural theory and the exciting new techniques of critical analysis, the essays in this volume break down disciplinary boundaries in a fresh and innovative fashion. Eclectic and wide-ranging, Rethinking Popular Culture includes works by authors in the humanities and social sciences. The essays touch on…
Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles
This essay builds on theories of space and power, addressing the question of how spaces can exercise pedagogical power with political effects. It focuses empirically on the gardens of Versailles in seventeenth-century France, when the park was used to promote the view of France as descendent of Rome and heir to its imperial destiny. The gardens were made an immersive environment of classically inspired art, architecture, and engineering in which …
The political mobilization of nature in seventeenth-century French formal gardens
A Fragile Power
When the National Science Foundation funds research about the earth's crust and the Department of Energy supports studies on the disposal of nuclear wastes, what do they expect for their money? Most scientists believe that in such cases the government wants information for immediate use or directions for seeking future benefits from nature. Challenging this oversimplified view, Chandra Mukerji depicts a more complex interdependence between scienc…
The Great Forestry Survey of 1669-1671
A program of forestry surveys and reform conducted in France during the 17th century has been accused of rationalizing the landscape and suppressing peasant culture; tools of cartography were said to have made rural lands both more legible to the state and alien to locals. On closer inspection, it seems that the surveys did not produce abstract rationalizations of the forests that made them ‘readable’ at a distance or more orderly on the ground; …
Tacit Knowledge and Classical Technique in Seventeenth-Century France
Tacit Knowledge and Classical Techniquein Seventeenth-Century France Hydraulic Cement as a Living Practice among Masons and Military Engineers Chandra Mukerji Roman technical practices that went out of common use in northern Europe during the Middle Ages were long thought to be forgotten after the fall of Rome. But in limited areas some of these techniques remained part of living traditions. One of them is the subject of this paper: the formula f…
Material practices of domination
Intelligent Uses of Engineering and the Legitimacy of State Power
The destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 not only brought terrorism to the forefront of politics, but also made visible the political significance of engineering. The targeting of a skyscraper and use of commercial airplanes for the attack were frightening because they displayed not just political rage, but an unexpected intelligence. Osama Bin Laden raised the scary specter of a terrorist engineer. Scholars in Science and Technology Stu…
The Archives Made Me Do It
This paper is a reflection on the power of archives in driving research. Just as much as informants draw the attention of researchers to social patterns, archives do, too. Both archival and ethnographic research depends on the authority of written documents like field notes and official papers-even in the sociology of art. Archives consist mainly of papers about objects and property. I argue that the material turn in my work and the study of logi…
The cultural power of tacit knowledge
Cultural Genealogy
This article looks at the value of genealogical analysis for doing historical research in cultural sociology, using Nietzsche's definition of genealogy.The point is to resuscitate a method that has often been rejected by sociologists, and demonstrate its value for analyzing forms of culture that have become tacit or unarticulated over time. To make the case for the method, the article follows a historical example: the use of indigenous hydraulics…
Printing, cartography and conceptions of place in Renaissance Europe
Eisenstein's account of the connection between scientific progress and printing does not apply well to map publication and knowledge of geography. Most of the celebrated figures in map design and publishing in the 16th century were fundamentally copyists and collectors of others' works. In Renaissance Europe, geographers did not strive to be original, but relied on others' measures, adding their own information to extant maps whenever this was po…
Artwork
The definitional transformation of film from industrial commodity to art form that took place in the United States during the 1950s represents a more general change in the treatment of industrial commodities, as more outmoded goods have become "collectibles." This pattern has consequences which should be important to sociologists of culture since collection keeps pieces of material culture in the environment longer, perhaps to be used as design p…
Stewardship Politics and the Control of Wild Weather
The failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina not only ended the lives of many of the city's inhabitants, but also undermined the legitimacy of government officials, from the mayor to the president. The structures that crumbled were built by the Army Corps of Engineers, and represented the ability and will of the state to stabilize the land and make it safe for habitation. The fact that it was not safe reflected the lowered co…
The New Rome
Before France was a nation, France was promoted as a New Rome and the French as descendents of ancient Gaul. Under Louis XIV, the idea of becoming French was not generally appealing because of opposition to monarchical power. But a campaign to make France a New Rome inadvertently provided a basis for French national identity. The Canal du Midi, one of the infrastructural projects for the New Rome, came to define France and stand for French native…
Reading and writing with nature
Film Games
This paper presents data on how film students practice filmmaking skills by devising and playing games. In their games film students suggest images for films and correct one another's notions about the methods for or appropriateness of realizing these images on film. By using increasingly complex games as a series of exercises, students develop greater skill in anticipating programs in making films they imagine. The apparent effectiveness of thes…
Out of the Limelight
In this article we will suggest that print and related traditional media have been used more successfully in constituting a public sphere than in supporting more private and localized forms of community building (Habermas 1989; Stone 1991). The costs and control of print media, in addition to the stability of the content, have reduced the applicability of these media to the improvisatory and quotidian social processes that groups use to help keep…
Space Technology and Planetary Astronomy. Joseph N. Tatarewicz
Image Polemics
From Graven Images. Patterns of Modern Materialism
Having the Authority to Know
This paper examines how people gain authority over areas of expert knowledge and use this authority to claim the right to make decisions in small group situations. Students who enter film crews are ranked and typed as members both of a school and of a crew. They claim decision-making authority based on these ranks. Thus, depending on the social characteristics students bring to crews, the authority and decision-making patterns of these groups can…
Swept Away
Film Games
This paper presents data on how film students practice filmmaking skills by devising and playing games. In their games film students suggest images for films and correct one another's notions about the methods for or appropriateness of realizing these images on film. By using increasingly complex games as a series of exercises, students develop greater skill in anticipating programs in making films they imagine. The apparent effectiveness of thes…
Distinguishing Machines
The analyvsis in this paper suggests that when technology users define some kinds of machines as better than others for their work, they construct a scarcity of "good" equipment. This socialli' defined scarcity encourages users to struggle to get access to "good" equipment and to treat those with access to it as elites. To make this case the author uses participant observation data on film schools and student access to film-making equipment
Play
The Media are American
Bullshitting
This paper explores how people create tall tales to make frustrating activities “engaging“–as Goffman uses that term. The data are the stories hitchhikers tell one another about their travels-what they call “bullshit.“ The analysis of these data suggests that bullshitting provides people with a way of managing their problems. By using difficult situations as bases for heroic autobiographical stories, people can use their problems to produce a pos…
Artwork
The definitional transformation of film from industrial commodity to art form that took place in the United States during the 1950s represents a more general change in the treatment of industrial commodities, as more outmoded goods have become "collectibles." This pattern has consequences which should be important to sociologists of culture since collection keeps pieces of material culture in the environment longer, perhaps to be used as design p…
Broadcasting in the Third World
Mass culture and the modern world-system
Literacy
From Graven Images
Begins in the 15th century, during what historians call the commercial revolution or a time when expanding trade changed the European economy, and traces the patterns of materialism through the late 1990's.
Theory and Consumption
Visual Language in Science and the Exercise of Power
All That Money Can Buy--and More
The Language of Clothes
From Graven Images
From Graven Images
Languages of Class
Popular Culture
Popular culture studies have until recently been treated as more or less unworthy of serious scholarly attention. But developments in anthropology, history, communication, American studies, and literary criticism have given the study of popular culture new analytic tools and legitimacy. This article reviews some of the more noteworthy contributions to this body of scholarship. Interpretive anthropology by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and other…
Image Polemics
Art, Ideology, and Politics
From Graven Images
From Graven Images. Patterns of Modern Materialism
Patterns of Intention
Sociology (44 obras) · Political science (33 obras) · History (23 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Art (16 obras) · Epistemology (16 obras) · Aesthetics (14 obras)