Michael Thompson et al.

Cultural Theory

The selections we are assigned for the prelim are really only snippets - Writing long summaries for this selection which you can read the original in maybe less than 30 minutes wouldn't help, so here are the very brief synopsis of main arguments the authors are trying to claim.

pp. 21 -23.

The dualisms constructed and used extensively in social sciences are merely arbitrary analytical devices - we need not think in terms of such dualisms, as they more often than not have effects of obscuring the social reality embedded in extensive interpenetrations. Accordingly, some of the dualisms the authors identify as unnecessary are as follows:

Culture vs. Structure: they are actually interdependent and cannot be dissociated from each other.

Methodological individualism vs. collectivism: What else could we say? They could both be analytically true.

Stability vs. change: Stability could merely be the phase of change, or vice versa...

Facts vs. Values: Again, are they so separate?

Rational vs. irrational: We have to look at the processes in which certain things come to be defined as "rational"....

Traditional vs. modern: More misleading than not, if for anything.

pp. 103 -8, & 207-9.

Bringing the functional explanation back in. There is nothing wrong with the functional logic that posits that behavior can be explained in terms of the contribution it makes to maintaining a way of life. What has been wrong with the past functionalism rested with its practices as done by figures as Malinowski or Parsons, not with the logic of functionalism itself. As such, our analysis of culture and politics must follow the functional logic of "explaining behavior in terms of its contribution to system maintenance".

So, specifically, what has been wrong with the past practices of functionalism? It is that they have been too preoccupied with discovering "functions" for the entire society as a whole. Instead, what we need is a "typology of different viable ways of life". In another word, we have to look for how certain behaviors are functional for what segments of the society, and how those different ways of life come to cohere. By carrying out this task, the authors claim that in the process we also solve the supposed problem that functionalism does not deal with conflict. For, this seeming problem of functionalism can also be attributed to the past practices of functionalists who looked for "functions" for the entire society - naturally leading to the logic that, how could certain behaviors be conflictual and functional for the entire society at the same time? By focusing on the functionality at the level of "different segments of life", we avoid the pitfall of this debilitating logic.

pp. 215-20.

This section extends the logic of the aforementioned section to the analysis of "political culture". For our purpose what we need to remember is the very simple crux of the argument: Different political cultures exist in any one single nation. There is no such thing as "national character" that could aptly describe the behavior of entire people in a nation. We must acknowledge that there are competing values and norms within any given society.

Critique and Relevance:

While the central arguments as I have summarized may appear rather common-sensical, in reading political sociology pieces too often we are likely to be reminded that Japanese conservative intellectuals are not the only ones guilty of postulating the supposed cultural uniformity of an entire national group. In fact, we'd see that some of the pieces in our prelim reading list comes remarkable close to the analysis of a political culture based on the assumption that such logic applies to the entire nation-state, and as such, we should take them with a grain of salt and try to figure out what sort of political processes, i.e., competition of values, norms and different ways of life, have been left out from the analysis.