Cultural Theory

Philip Smith is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University and Deputy Director of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. His books include Cultural Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (with Jeffrey C. Alexander) (2005), and Punishment and Culture (2008).Alexander Riley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University. He is the author of Godless Intellectuals?: How Durkheimian Sociology and Poststructuralism Reinvented the Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred (2008).

"Highly recommended to anyone interested in acquiring a theoretical basis on which to systematize their knowledge of cultural theory. Indeed, the authors manage to make the complex simple enough to understand without oversimplifying." (Discourse Studies, 2010)"Presenting such a wide-ranging and multifarious set of ideas in a coherent manner constitutes a very considerable achievement. The book offers anyone interested in cultural theory a broad conspectus—provided of course it is read as a whole." (Metapsychology Online Reviews, February 2009)

• Preface to the First Edition: About this Book viPreface to the Second Edition ixAcknowledgments xIntroduction: What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory? 11 Culture in Classical Social Theory 62 Culture and Social Integration in the Work of Talcott Parsons 263 Culture as Ideology in Western Marxism 344 Culture as Action in Symbolic Interactionism, Phenomenology, and Ethnomethodology 545 The Durkheimians: Ritual, Classification, and the Sacred 696 Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture 927 The Poststructural Turn 1118 Culture, Structure, and Agency: Three Attempts at Synthesis 1289 British Cultural Studies 14410 The Production and Reception of Culture 15811 Culture as Text: Narrative and Hermeneutics 17612 Psychoanalytic Approaches to Culture and the Self 19513 The Cultural Analysis of Postmodernism and Postmodernity 20714 Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Theory 22815 Cultural Theories of Race and Gender 24116 The Body in Cultural Theory 262References 280Index 296