Seminar paper schedule for Sociology of Culture

These are the dates and topics that members of the seminar chose. As you can see, there are some topics for which people have not chosen to present: volunteers are welcome, especially for 6 April and 13 April. We have no papers scheduled for the last week of the semester -- let's keep it that way, and we can think of a nice way to celebrate our final meeting. Presenters: remember to have your paper by e-mail to me for distribution by noon on the day before the seminar.

26 January: Fundamental problems in sociology of culture
Reading: Griswold, Cultures and societies

• The “reflection” model of cultural meaning
• Changes in popular culture (Gross)
• Technological changes in communication (Tentor)

2 February: Popular culture and cultural division
Reading: Thornton, Club cultures

• “Mass culture” and “subculture” (Domash)
• “Authenticity” of cultural products (Lo Conte)
• Performed and recorded music (Sunkin)

9 February: Subculture and the maintenance of boundaries
Reading: Thornton, Club cultures

• The “mainstream” (Cedor)
• “Sharon and Tracy” (Patarkatsishvili)
• “Selling out” (Weiss)

16 February: Popular culture, identity and technology
Reading: Manuel, Cassette culture

• “New” and “old” media technologies (Cutroni)
• Centralization and decentralization of music industries (Sylvester)
• “Piracy” (Rabinovici)

23 February: Regional and local culture
Reading: Manuel, Cassette culture

• The ghazal and rasiya forms (Balila)
  
• Cassette production and diversity of music production (Block)
• Popular music and sectarian conflict

16 March: Cultures in contact and conflict
Reading: Paredes, Folklore and culture

• “México de adentro” and “México de afuera” (Harrison)
• Cultural contact in a border region (Hickey)
• Sources of misunderstanding (Cunningham)
  

23 March: The transformation of cultural form
Reading: Paredes, Folklore and culture

• Origin and development of folk cultural forms
• José Mosqueda, cultural hero (Link)
• Masculine identity and machismo (Berghegger)

30 March: High culture, popular culture, and cultural creativity
Film: The miners’ opera

• Poverty, economic and cultural creativity (Washington)
• Participating in the film and play (Dodge)
• Comparative cultural strategies (Ng)

6 April: Culture, politics and the avoidance of politics
Reading: Eliasoph, Avoiding politics

• “Close to home” and “for the children”
• The “volunteers” and “politics”
• The “buffaloes” and public life

13 April: Culture, engagement and disengagement
Reading: Eliasoph, Avoiding politics

• The production of “cynical solidarity”
• Maintaining and crossing boundaries around the “public sphere”
• The “cycle of political evaporation”

20 April: Culture, social change and the “underground”
Reading: Szemere, Up from the underground

• What factors made rock music “political” (Garrett)
• Hungarian musicians and “antipolitics” (Ventola)
• Attali: “Not the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future”

27 April: The “underground” surfaces
Reading: Szemere, Up from the underground

• The “pop machinery” in post-Communist Hungary
• Memorializing the “countercultural past”
• Gender and culture as “rebellion”