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. Preface to the Second Edition.Acknowledgments.Introduction: What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory?1 Culture in Classical Social Theory.2 Culture and Social Integration in the Work of Talcott Parsons.3 Culture as Ideology in Western Marxism.4 Culture as Action in Symbolic Interactionism, Phenomenology, and Ethnomethodology.5 The Durkheimians: Ritual, Classification, and the Sacred.6 Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture.7 The Poststructural Turn.8 Culture, Structure, and Agency: Three Attempts at Synthesis.9 British Cultural Studies.10 The Production and Reception of Culture.11 Culture as Text: Narrative and Hermeneutics.12 Psychoanalytic Approaches to Culture and the Self.13 The Cultural Analysis of Postmodernism and Postmodernity.14 Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Theory.15 Cultural Theories of Race and Gender.16 The Body in Cultural Theory.References.Index.