Habermas and Occidental Rationalism: The Politics of Identity, Social Learning, and the Cultural Limits of Moral Universalism

While Habermas's theory of communicative action is deeply critical of all kinds of ethnocentrism, proposing a discursive concept of universal morality which transcends culture, a residual Eurocentrism still pervades it. Habermas's theory rests on a notion of modernity which is tied to Occidental rationalism, and when viewed in the global context or in the context of deeply divided societies it is problematic. The theory fails to grasp that universal morality can be articulated in more than one cultural form and in more than one logic of development. However, his theory can be defended against its Eurocentric bias if it shifts its emphasis from a de-contexualized and transcendental critique of communication rooted in Occidental rationalism to a cosmopolitan model of contemporary cultural transformation. Crucial to that task is a weaker notion of rationality which recognizes that the problem of universality is also a cognitive cultural problem and not just a normative one. Bringing culture and identity to the foreground will involve making room for a level of discourse focused less on consensual agreement than on cultural understanding .     

Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements

After a period of interdisciplinary openness, contemporary sociology has only recently rediscovered culture. This is especially true of political sociology, where institutional and network analyses, as well as rational choice models, have dominated. This article will offer another approach by focusing on the role of music and the visual arts in relation to the formation of collective identity, collective memory and collective action. Drawing on my own research on the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the memory of slavery in the formation of African-American identity, and its opposite, the place of white power music in contemporary neo-fascist movements, I will outline a model of culture as more than a mobilization resource and of the arts as political mediators.     

The Parable of Matthew: Identity Politics, Politics of Desire, and the Politics of Performance

Matthew Shepard's murder in October 1998 provides an opportunity to examine and reconsider identity politics as they play out around Matthew's body. After a sustained critique of identity politics, the author proposes, in their stead, a politics of performance, which offers a constructive alternative to current political agendas by allowing the simultaneous preservation and erasure of difference.     

Conceptualizing Cultural Politics in Subcultural and Social Movement Studies

In this article it is argued that combining theories of social movements and subcultures provides a way of 'conceptualizing cultural politics'. The focus is on debates that have taken place over the conceptualization of subcultures and social movements as well as the status and viability of cultural politics. Contemporary subcultural theorists are critical of the rigid concepts used by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) but, it is argued, they provide few feasible alternatives. They also have little to say about the supposed contemporary significance of cultural politics. New social movement (NSM) theorists, on the other hand, have generated conceptual frameworks that recognize the complexity of collective phenomena and have developed an approach which enables us to engage with the controversy over cultural politics. However, they concentrate too narrowly on struggles waged at the level of lifestyle, culture and civil society. The article shows how, like the CCCS, critics of NSM theory rightly question the potency of symbolic challenges and stress the persistent role of material issues and the continued part that conventional political actors, such as the state, play in contemporary social conflicts. Finally, the case of New Age Travellers is used to illuminate these debates in subcultural and social movement studies and to show how elements of each approach can be employed fruitfully in empirical research.     

Ritual, Resistance and Social Reproduction: A Cultural Economy of Iron-Smelting in Colonial Tanzania 1890–1975

Abstract The paper examines the historical relationships between ironworkers and peasants of Geita and other districts in colonial Tanzania. It explores their material. cultural and symbolic practices, as well as their interaction with merchants, native authorities and the colonial state. It is argued that these ironworkers and peasants. in providing for their social reproduction, confronted the daily challenges of existence through both material (economic) and ideological (cultural) means - at once resisting and accommodating the terms of domination and incorporation.     

Group Identity and Individuality in Times of Crisis: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Social Psychological Knowledge

This paper locates contemporary socialpsychological conceptions of group identity in thecontext of crises in forms of knowledge, and in the waysresearchers have responded to crises in disciplinaryidentity. Forms of group social psychology that emergedwithin the European tradition of research promised afully social account of human activity and experience,but recent trends of research in the discipline, even within group identity frameworks, havereturned to the individual as a focus of study. The workof Bion is used to draw attention to the ways in whichcrises in group identity often provoke particular varieties of response which serve to defend thegroup, varieties of response which look to theindividual as an escape from the threat or as a solutionto the problem.     

Cultural Identity,Social Capital,and Social Control of Young Korean Americans: Extending the Theory of Intercultural Public Relations

Through 10 in-depth interviews and 2 focus groups, this exploratory study examines how young Korean Americans perceive cultural identity, utilize social capital, and identify conflicts that arise between themselves and their significant others, particularly focusing on how they integrate Korean and American culture. The findings reveal that young Korean Americans have multifaceted, situational identities, which go beyond existing cultural stereotypes, maximize their religious-based social capital and human capital, and experience a varying range of cultural tensions and conflicts in social settings. Therefore, situational cultural identity, a new category of intercultural public relations is suggested, and implications for the practice of public relations are discussed.     

Morality Politics vs. Identity Politics: Framing Processes and Competition Among Christian Right and Gay Social Movement Organizations

This paper applies a social movement organization framing analysis to conflicts between gay-rights and Christian Right groups over issues of lesbian, gay, and bisexual inclusions in public education. As groups representing each side entered this new arena of debate over gay rights, they applied strategies they had used in other arenas. Both sides have pursued inflexible, polarizing strategies that target their constituencies and have relinquished the opportunity to offer new and creative understanding of their positions and to reach a potential new audience. This shows how opposing frames can become mutually reinforcing constraints.     

Reordering Public and Private in Iranian Cyberspace: Identity,Politics, and Mobilization

The capacity of cyberspace to bypass some of the spatial divisions that underpin social inequality endows it with political significance. This article examines some of the ways in which cyberspace has contributed to redrawing the boundaries between public and private and some of the consequences of this for people, things, and ideas in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. It shows how cyberspace influences a wide range of political phenomena including political mobilization and censorship, intergenerational communication, identity formation, sexuality, sense of belonging, and forms and location of symbolic capital. The relationship between net users in the diaspora and cyberspace involves a circuit of reorderings of one's understanding of the diaspora, one's contact with it in cyberspace, of one's own ideas on the basis of what one finds there, and of social relationships established and maintained in cyberspace. Paradoxically, the very richness and diversity of the ideas and opinions found in Iranian cyberspace may undermine the idea of there actually being a single Iranian diaspora.     

Identity in Crisis: Spirituality and Homosexuality in Adolescence

Adolescents experiencing same-sex attraction are increasingly comfortable identifying themselves as gay/lesbian/bisexual. For at least a minority of these youth, that identification conflicts with their spiritual values, and they or their families seek conversion therapy. The efficacy of conversion and ethics of conversion therapy for same-sex orientation stirs significant debate. The complexities of an approach to same-sex issues with adults multiply when the client is an adolescent. This article uses three adolescent case studies to examine issues of identity, ethics, confidentiality, social expectations, and therapist role.     

The Social Construction of the Midlife Crisis: A Case Study in the Temporalities of Identity

This paper examines the emergence, reification, and dissemination of the "midlife crisis" from a sociology of knowledge perspective. Two decades of articles on the subject from both professional and mass media sources (n = 233) are content analyzed. Upon elaborating the various biological, psychological, and social psychological theories of this biographical phenomenon, we address such questions as how different disciplines portray the event, what patterns of interdisciplinary citations there are, and how these professional depictions lead into the mass media. The results suggest longitudinal declines in the frequency of reductionist explanations from the biological and psychiatric paradigms and increasing attention given to the interplay between social dynamics and personality structures. From this, a new sociocultural theory is posited, one portraying this subjective experience deriving not simply from age, but from external social temporalities. Specifically, we consider the particular cohort that most midlife research is based upon as well as the particular historical period when it reached middle age.