The revival of the sociology of culture
The case of collective memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5851944 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lewis A Coser (Boston College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 365-373 |
| Publication date | 1992-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Forum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0884-8971 • E-ISSN: 1573-7861 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1007/bf01125050 |
| OpenAlex | W2086448449 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 21 |
| References cited | 6 |
In the last decade or two, American sociology has witnessed a pronounced revival of cultural studies. After a long interval marked by the predominance of structural explanatory schemes, cultural types of explanation have again come to the fore. This is perhaps most salient in the reception of the work of Durkheim in the American sociology of the last 50 years or so. Those of us who went to graduate school in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were largely led to see in Durkheim the father of most structural explanation in sociology. Hence, The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim, 1893/1984), The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1895/1982), as well as Suicide (Durkheim, 1897/1951), were the works we were encouraged and required to study. We knew that around the turn of the century Durkheim concentrated his attention on the crucial importance of what he called collective representations, that is, socially generated sets of ideas that were not simply aggregates of individual ideas but belonged to a reality sui generis, which was the preeminent domain of sociological explanation. But most of us paid relatively little attention to this aspect of Durkheim's thought. His later approach in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim, 1912/1947), which explores the importance of religious ideas and practices and the emergence of the categories of his sociology of knowledge, was generally neglected. To put it into current sociological terminology, in the last phase of his thought, Durkheim redirected attention to the relevance of cultural elements in the analysis of social systems. Or as Jeffrey Alexander (1989:157) recently put it, Only in the studies of the later 1890s did Durkheim have an explicit theory of symbolic processes firmly in hand
Collective memory · Sociology of culture · Music History and Culture · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Social and Cultural Dynamics
Narrating changes, recalling memory
Vivências marcadas pela transfobia
Recovered Goods
Deep Memory and the Impossibility of Civil Resistance in Alfons Cervera’s Maquis
El Estudio De Los Lugares De Memoria Y La Historia Regional Y Local
Collective memories and social roles
Memory, power and resistance
Judging the past
Why memory's work on journalism does not reflect journalism's work on memory
What’s done is done”
Twilight of the Revolutionaries
The Persistence of the Past
Social–ecological memory in urban gardens—Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services
School History Textbooks and Historical Memories in Japan
Generations, Identities, and the Collective Memory of Che Guevara 1
It's more than just news
Collective Memory and Collective Fear
Réflexion sur l'institutionnalisation récente des memory studies
Life Stories, War, and Veterans
The Materiality of Memory
Halbwachs' studies in collective memory
| Citations per year | 0.95 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2025 (22) |
| Highly cited | No |