Editorial
Charles Taylor and Jeffrey C. Alexander on secularity and the sacred by Samuel Nelson

The following is a conversation between Charles Taylor and Jeffrey Alexander which developed from a panel convened for the tenth anniversary of Taylor’s A Secular Age, held at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in Montreal in November 2017. Taylor was present to hear and address the reflections of four scholars, including Alexander, who were invited to discuss the book’s legacy a decade on.  READ FULL EDITORIAL

Original Article
Cultural sociology in a secular age by Jeffrey C. Alexander

I approach Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (SA) not directly, as a sociologist of religion, but obliquely, as a theorist who sees theological religion, not as the sine qua non of deep culture but rather as one among its powerful forms. I deeply appreciate the manner in which Taylor’s rich re-interpretation of belief and unbelief provides a more nuanced understanding of how both may thrive in a secular age. What I question is Taylor’s understanding of the “modern” society within which fragile belief and unbelief suffer and thrive. I want to tell a different story about modernity, from a cultural sociological point of view. READ FULL ARTICLE

 Original Article
Response to Jeffrey C. Alexander by Charles Taylor

[…] my reaction to Alexander’s main thesis is more complex. Our difference is constituted for one part by a misunderstanding of my position, for another, by my terminological failure.  First, the misunderstanding. The word “disenchantment” is used in more than one sense. Weber was guilty of this, and the confusion was handed down by him. In one sense it applies to the condemnation, and subsequent (partly consequent) withering of certain practices which are often described as “magic”. This, of course, is built into the etymology of Weber’s term, Entzauberung. The relation is complex, because our Western understanding of “magic”, and its difference from “religion” (cf. Frazer 1959) is constructed out of this condemnation/withering. READ FULL ARTICLE

Original Article
The Israel BBQ as national ritual: performing unofficial nationalism, or finding meaning in triviality by Hizky Shoham

Concerned with how nationalist cultural codes are embedded in everyday life, studies of “nationalism-from-below” mistake nationalist meanings for the contents of official messages. Rather than studying the reception of spectacles and symbols produced from above, the article suggests looking at unofficial nationalism and focusing on the nationalist meanings of traditions and customs—especially those related to ritual and food—that are common to broad strata of the population but have almost no state involvement. Using the anthropological history of Israeli Independence Day as an exemplary case, and focusing on how people spend their country’s national day, the article examines the failure of official nationalism to design the holiday’s popular traditions. Next it surveys the development of what has become the popular mode of celebrating the day—the picnic and cookout. In due course, this practice was ritualized and iconized as representing “Israeliness,” an identity that is more ambivalent than the seamless images circulated from above. I argue that the meanings of unofficial practices, because of their triviality, lie not in the symbolic codes they enact, but rather in the synchronicity that ritualizes and iconizes a “way of life,” forms national solidarity, and imbues the performance with nationalist meanings. READ FULL ARTICLE

Original Article
Career gatekeeping in cultural fields by Julian Hamann and Stefan Beljean

This paper presents a comparative analysis of career gatekeeping processes in two cultural fields. Drawing on data on appointment procedures in German academia and booking processes in North American stand-up comedy, we compare how gatekeepers in two widely different contexts evaluate and select candidates for established positions in their respective field and validate their decisions. Focusing on three types of gatekeeping practices that have been documented in prior research—typecasting, comparison, and legitimization—our analysis reveals major differences in how gatekeepers perform these practices across our two cases: (1) typecasting based on ascriptive categories versus professional criteria, (2) comparisons that are ad-hoc and holistic versus systematic and guided by performance criteria, and (3) legitimation by means of ritualization versus transparency. We argue that these differences are related to the social and organizational context in which gatekeepers make selection decisions, including differences in the structure of academic and creative careers and the organization of the respective labor markets in which these careers unfold. These findings contribute to scholarship on gatekeeping in cultural fields by providing comparative insights into the work of career gatekeepers and the social organization of career gatekeeping processes. READ FULL ARTICLE

Original Article
Stand-up comedy and the comedic cult of the individual: or, the humor of James Acaster by Daniel R. Smith

Stand-up comedy prioritises the individual performer. Yet its success relies upon awakening collective sentiments through laughter. For this article, the aesthetic form of stand-up becomes a site to explore the legacy of Durkheim’s ‘cult of the individual’. Durkheim recognised the significance of the ‘cult of the individual’ in modernity but was unable to locate its place within collective sentiments. The article advances the claim that sociology can locate individuality’s cult within the aesthetic affordances individuals have at their disposal in institutional settings. It is demonstrated that stand-up comedy becomes a way to achieve individuality in a society of advanced role differentiation, a plurality of lifeworld’s and beliefs and its associated tensions. Humor does not reconcile tensions; through humor these social conditions become ‘known’ to the modern subject at an intra-personal level. The article substantiates and illustrates these claims through a case-study of British comedian James Acaster. Methodologically the article makes use of literary and aesthetic theories to advance an alternative theory of modernity, one which highlights how stand-up comedy is valued for its ability to register—at a sensuous level—the meaningful organisation of social relations modern social actors live within. READ FULL ARTICLE

Book Review
Socializing the aesthetic by Alexander C. Sutton

In Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw have curated a collection of essays that boldly reimagines accounts of aesthetic judgment and experience as part and parcel of the social. While dominant discourses on aesthetics have been largely preoccupied with Immanuel Kant’s disinterested universalisms or David Hume’s normative claims of taste making as the rhetorical province of expert critics, here, contributors propose and develop a “social aesthetics” that advocates the centrality of subjects’ social location as the critical point of departure linking social and aesthetic experience. The analysis of art and performance, in this framework, is not limited to questions of what constitutes “good” versus “bad” taste according to some generalizable scheme of form and technique. Rather, social aesthetics, it is argued, investigates how our experiences of art objects are constructed and mediated through interactions with individuals, groups, and institutions. Centering the practice of improvisation as its topical focus, the book sets forth an agenda that intimately entwines relations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality with a variety of possibilities for understanding sociality and aesthetics as mutually constitutive. READ FULL REVIEW

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