Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists - Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Each of these writers represents a distinct tradition which has become increasingly prominent in the study of culture: Berger's work represents an extension of the phenomenological perspective; Douglas draws on the Durkheimian tradition of cultural anthropology to investigate the structures of meaning and moral order; Foucault has adapted a variety of structural analysis which focuses on the ordering of discourse; and Habermas currently stands as the leading representative of critical theory.
This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. In particular, the book shows that Berger, Douglas, Foucault, and Habermas have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation.
About the Author
Robert Wuthnow is Associate professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His books include The Consciousness Reformation (University of California Press, 1976) and Experimentation in American Religion (University of California Press, 1978).
James Davison is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (Rutgers University Press, 1983).
Albert Bergesen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. His previous books, as editor, are Studies of the Modern World-Systems (Academic Press, 1980) and Crises in the World-System (Sage Publications, 1983).
Edith Kurzweil is Executive Editor of Partisan Review, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, Newark. Her books include The Age of Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss to Foucault (Columbia University Press, 1980) and Italian Entrepreneurs: Rearguard of Progress (Praeger, 1983), and, as co-editor, Writers and Politics: A Partisan Review Reader (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) and Literature and Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 1983).
