Abstract
In hundred-years time, Angela Doyle will be dead and mostly forgotten. She will be a name among all the other names in the graveyard in Greyrock. To die is to enter into meaninglessness. For the moment, however, her life is full of meaning. We can imagine her busy in and around her home, on the phone, organizing meetings, driving down to the village, and meeting with neighbors. We can imagine her actions when she meets and greets those she knows, the smiles, the expression of delight, the inquiring look, the attentive look, the gasps of “ah no,” the nod of agreement, the graceful touch, the laughter. We can imagine Angela as a skillful social actor who has played this role many times, a role that she learnt first from her mother. All the time, she weaves in and out of encounters, greetings and conversations, she is creating and sustaining webs of meaning. People know and understand her actions: whatever she says and does is appropriate to the context and to the people involved. As in her interview, she constantly checks to make sure that the meaning is being maintained. She regularly interjects phrases such as “you know like,” or “you know what I mean” at the end of sentences. If she says or does something inappropriate, or if people don’t understand what she has said, they may often seek clarification: “you don’t say,” “what,” “honestly,” “go on,” and so forth.
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Notes
The notion of other people being the mirrors through which we come to know and understand ourselves and develop a sense of self comes from Cooley’s concept of the looking-glass self. See Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1992 [1902]), 150–151.
“Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.” Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 3.
“The story or stories of myself that I tell, that I hear others tell of me, that I am unable or unwilling to tell, are not independent of the self that I am: they are constitutive of me. This is a central claim of the cultural psychology of selfhood.” Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London: Routledge, 2001), 45 (emphasis in original).
The blowing of a kiss has, then, concrete specific meaning for Angela, Martin, and the children, but can also be understood as an ideal type of action, belonging to a range of gestures of love and affection. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Claus Wittich and Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 4.
This is what Weber meant by social action, Weber, Economy and Society, 22–23. As Schutz points out, what made Weber unique was his interpretive method (Verstehen), which placed the search for meaning at the center of sociological understanding and reduced all kinds of social relationships and structures to the most elementary forms of individual behavior. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (London: Heinemann, 1972), 8.
Sayer points out that modernist thinkers, including Weber, tend to divorce reason from emotion. This leads to emotion being seen as a threat to reason. He argues, however, that emotions are a key part of practical reason. He argues that instead of looking for rational explanations and motives for action, practical reason derives from a concern for others and a moral concern for what we should do and how we should live our lives. Andrew Sayer, Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36–41, 61–63.
Schutz argues that much of what happens in the common sense world of everyday life revolves around distinguishing what is individual or different from what is typical or similar. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality 1, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1967), 8–9.
One of the key struggles in sociology is to find a way of balancing subjectivism, that is, how Angela sees, reads, and understands her world, with objectivism, that is, the external, preexisting world into which she has been born. A phenomenologist like Schutz recognizes the objective side, but emphasizes the subjective. (Note: while he uses “man,” we could easily substitute “Angela.”) Man finds himself at any moment in his daily life in a biographically determined situation, that is, in a physical and socio-cultural environment as defined by him, within which he has his position, not merely his position in terms of physical space and outer time or his status and role within the social system but his moral and ideological position. To say that this definition of the situation is biographically determined is to say that it has its history; it is the sedimentation of all man’s previous experiences, organized in the habitual possessions of his stock of knowledge at hand, and as such his unique possession, given to him and him alone. (Schutz, Collected Papers, 9). The problem is how can other people, particularly sociologists, ever access the way the individual views the world? This is the major difficulty that Talcott Parsons had with Schutz’s phenomenological methodology. Parsons argued that there was no point in trying to get at subjective experience and meaning. It could not be achieved and therefore it could not be the starting point for developing an analytical realist explanation of social life. In a long correspondence with Schutz, Parsons concluded that there were irrevocable differences in their epistemology: We may now come to the question of the objective and subjective points of view. I really think that I have finally succeeded in straightening out the differences between us on this question. I think what you mean essentially is an ontological reality, what a concrete real actor “really” experiences. I think I have legitimate reasons to be sceptical that by your analysis or by any others available it is possible to arrive at anything approaching a definitive description of such a reality. I am afraid I must confess to being sceptical of phenomenological analysis. (Richard Grathoff (ed.), The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 89–90)
Weber defined culture as “a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.” Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. E. Shills and H. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 49.
This is an adaptation of Geertz’s famous definition of culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” See Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” in Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89. The notion of culture being “taken for granted” comes from Bourdieu and his concept of habitus.
See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 165–167.
See Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2001);
Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review, 51.2 (1986), 273–286.
As mentioned earlier, the ability to see, understand, and relate to other people, generally, as holders of positions and roles, rather than as specific individuals becomes the basis not just of participating in wider social networks but of social scientific thought as well. The notion of “generalized other” comes from Mead. He argued that in the beginning children play games of specific others as when they play nurses and doctors, mummies and daddies, and so forth. They then move on to play board games in which they learn to play with or against other general players. The role becomes generalized. This is what happens in organizational and social life. We learn to deal with people in terms of their roles and positions rather than as specific people. See George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1967 [1934]), 155.
Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
Roger M. Keesing “Theories of Culture,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 3 (1974), 73–97.
This is an adaptation of Weber’s famous description of ideas operating as “switchmen” that send the way human beings fulfill basic interests down different tracks. Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 280.
There has been a tendency in the structure/agency debate in sociology, to move away from an analytical perspective that sees structures and institutions having a real independent, constraining influence on behavior and seeing institutions, such as the Catholic Church, simply in terms of what people do within them. Collins argues that since culture, the economy, states, organizations, and classes do not act, any causal explanation in sociology has to start with the empirical world and the real live actions of individuals. “The structures never do anything: it is only persons in real situations who act. It is on the micro level that we must show the emerging processes, both those that cause structural change and those that are responsible for maintaining and reproducing the structures from one occasion to another (that is to say, the “glue” that holds structures together),” Randall Collins, “Interaction Ritual Chains, Power and Property,” in The Micro-Macro Link, ed. J. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Münch, and N. Smelser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 195 (emphasis in the original). However, it is not just that concepts such as church, state, media, market, capitalism, and so forth are an essential part of developing a sociological explanation of life, that they are deemed to have an external reality that shapes and constrains what people do and say, but insofar as people use these concepts in their everyday communication, sociology imitates life. Individual actors, like Angela Doyle, see and explain social life in terms of “the state,” “the Church,” and the “the media,” that is, as “obdurate structures with their own reality” and other areas as organized more by the independent actions of individuals. See Swidler, Talk of Love, 130.
Swidler links the difference in the extent to which people use culture to Basil Bernstein’s concepts of “restricted” and “elaborated” codes. Bernstein found that working-class children tend to speak in concrete terms because they take for granted that other people see and read the world the same way as them. However, he found that middle-class children tended to be more explicit and abstract in their language that enabled them to relate to wider audiences who might not share their assumptions and opinions. See Swidler, Talk of Love, 52; Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). As Swidler suggests, people like Angela “use culture primarily to defend a stable orientation to the world rather than interrogating experience in light of cultural aspirations or searching for new cultural possibilities to interpret their experience.” Swidler, Talk of Love, 55–56.
This resembles Levi-Strauss’s concept of “bricoleur.” As opposed to the scientist who develops consistent theories, the “bricoleur” creates meaning more like an artist by bringing together cultural elements into a mosaic that is constantly being added to and subtracted from. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 20–22.
Joas has developed an alternative understanding of action that gives as much primacy to the body as to the mind: According to this alternative view, goal-setting does not take place by an act of the intellect prior to the actual action, but is instead the result of reflection on aspirations and tendencies that are prereflective and have already always been operative. In this act of reflection, we thematize aspirations which are normally at work without our being actively aware of them. But where are these aspirations located? They are located in our bodies. It is the body’s capabilities, habits, and ways of relating to the environment which form the background to all conscious goal-setting, in other words, our intentionality. (Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 158)
For a rich, thick description of the strategies of attaining honor and avoiding shame in gift-giving relations, see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 4–8. See also, Theodore Caplow, “Rule Enforcement without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown,” American Journal of Sociology, 89.6 (1984), 1306–1323.
Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 111–133.
In this sense, social life is about means and ends. We can see values as ultimate ends, ideals to which people strive, often set within religious and ethical discourses. In any situation, individuals are constrained in fulfilling these values by the means that are available to them. However, in between means and values, individuals’ actions are guided by specific norms, protocols, codes, and the specific context in which they find themselves. See Talcott Parsons, Societies, Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (London: Prentice-Hall, 1966);
Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1949), 44, 732.
Erving Goffman’s great achievement was the meticulous, detailed descriptions and analyses of the way meaning is negotiated and maintained in social interactions. The way people create and sustain meaning in different contexts was a constant theme in his work. See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 1–16.
See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin 1990);
Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).
The reason why social interaction is orderly is because it is based on “shared cognitive presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self-sustained restraints.” Gofffman, “The Interaction Order,” American Sociological Review 48.1 (1983), 5.
However, as Goffman points out, people may go along with the social conventions that enable interaction to take place even though they may not believe in them and may try to resist or subvert them, Goffman “Interaction Order,” 5. Swidler analyzes the importance of codes in everyday cultural life and, similarly, argues that there are many codes in everyday life, such as celebrating Mother’s Day, which we are constrained to follow even if we disagree with them. Swidler, Talk of Love, 162–169. And what makes interaction all the more complicated is that the codes of being mannerly and polite vary across contexts and are subject to long-term processes of change. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Revised ed.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000);
Cas Wouters, Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (London: Sage, 2007).
Berger and Luckmann point out, “All social reality is precarious. All societies are constructions in the face of chaos. The constant possibility of anomic terror is actualized whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse.” Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 103 (emphasis in original).
The problem with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is, first, that it generally pertains to power and to social fields—thereby denying any whole culture —and, second, that it does not capture how culture is used in specific contexts. For a more detailed analysis of Bourdieu’s concept of culture and, in particular, of how habitus works, see Jeffrey Alexander, “The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu,” in Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, 1995), 128–217.
Bourdieu argues that it is this continual critical self-reflection that attempts to respond to the perceived needs and interests of the participant that makes a mockery of the “the positivist dream of an epistemological state of pure innocence” that is often taken for granted in social survey research. However, it may well be that positivist approaches are more useful and appropriate in gathering facts and information and less appropriate in attempts to understand meaning. Pierre Bourdieu, “Understanding,” Theory, Culture & Society, 13.2 (1996), 18.
This raises issues of “pre-understanding” and how my unannounced assumptions and prejudices about Angela Doyle’s “natural attitude” (her dispositions, orientations, and prejudices) necessarily distort and undermine the interview process. The only way to overcome “pre-understanding” is through rigorous critical self-reflection before, during, and after the interview. See Lawrence C. Watson, “Understanding a Life History as a Subjective Document: Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Perspectives,” Ethos 4.1 (1976), 103.
Bourdieu considers this problem many times in his different studies. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Pascallian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 49–92;
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 30–51.
“Narratives, like memoirs, are constructed ways of making sense of a life. People tell stories and/or write memoirs to say something about who they are as individuals and the combination of personal experiences and social/ cultural contexts that shaped their identities. Our stories root us, give us identity and grounding, and a guideline for action.” Lynn Davidman, “The Personal, the Sociological, and the Intersection of the Two,” Qualitative Sociology 20.4 (1997), 512. For my own narrative, see Tom Inglis, Making Love: A Memoir (Dublin: New Island, 2012). As Benson points out, all autobiographies are constructions, made with the tools and ingredients that culture provides. The stories that are told depend on the skills and motivations of the storyteller. “Personal narratives depend on the person’s skill in using these tools and their abilities to innovate and invent new narrative tools thereby enabling new experiences of hearing and reading. These expressions of self also depend on the reasons why the person feels they want their story told and on the particular circumstances giving rise to those reasons.” Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, 48. We tell stories about ourselves every day, but often the main stories that emerge are when we are more critically reflective about ourselves, as happens in turbulent times or, as I would argue, when being asked by an interviewer. As much as there are some stories of the self that are more important than others, there are some stories in a cultural history that become more important than others. This brings us back to Geertz’s story of the sheep raid in Morocco and why it was still being told over fifty years later. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 8–9.
For a discussion of what stories have been told about modern Ireland, see Tom Inglis, Truth, Power and Lies: Irish Society and the Case of the Kerry Babies (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), 1–16.
Elias writes about this in a journal article: The way in which individual members of a group experience whatever affects their senses, the meaning it has for them, depends on the standard forms of dealing with, and of thinking and speaking about, these phenomena which have gradually evolved in their society. Thus, although the degree of attachment shown in one’s encounter with natural forces may vary from individual to individual and from situation to situation, the concepts themselves, which, in societies like ours, all individuals use in thinking, speaking and acting, concepts like “lightning,” “tree,” or “wolf” not less than “electricity,” “organism,” “cause-and-effect,” or “nature,” in the sense in which they are used today, represent a relatively high degree of detachment; so does the socially induced experience of nature as ‘landscape’ or as “beautiful.” (Norbert Elias, “Problems of Involvement and Detachment,” The British Journal of Sociology 7.3 (1956), 227–228)
As Alexander notes, description is rich when it is “analytically informed and culturally contextualised.” To achieve this rich description it is necessary to capture the “convictions, feelings, ethics, dramas, and patterned texts of meaning that give life to society.” The interpretation of these convictions, feelings, and meanings is “central for the human sciences because the inner life is pivotal for social action and collective subjectivity alike.” Jeffrey Alexander, “Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program: The Human Sciences and Cultural Sociology,” Cultural Sociology 2.2 (2008), 159–160.
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Inglis, T. (2014). Culture as Meaning. In: Meanings of Life in Contemporary Ireland. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413727_2
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