Interpreting culture : rethinking method and truth in social theory
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Bibliographic Information
Interpreting culture : rethinking method and truth in social theory
（Modern German culture and literature）
University of Nebraska Press, c2001
- : cloth
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Scholars have conducted the study of culture in two general ways: as an observer science, where behavior and world-views are measurable, rational, and subject to impartial examination; and as an interpretive art, where a scholar actually participates in the understanding of cultures. In view of increasingly manifest problems with both stances, Joseph D. Lewandowski proposes an alternative, one that capitalizes on the strengths of both schools of interpretation and in fact underpins the work of major social theorists of the modern era, including Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu. Gathering insights from a wide array of anthropologists, archaeologists, and philosophers and applying them to case studies in the United States, Lewandowski develops a practical model of culture and method of interpretation that are built around the concept of "constructing constellations." According to this concept-drawn from the work of Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno-cultures are made up of social fields, embedded social practices that are continually created and patterned in certain ways, akin to constellations. The constellations of embedded actions and beliefs in different settings, such as ghetto life in New York or the world of boxing in Chicago, are, Lewandowski argues, observable, measurable, and ultimately comparable.
Table of Contents
- Contents - List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1. The Contemporary Logics of Social Theory
- 1. Textuality and Deconstruction
- 2. Rationality and Reconstruction
- 3. Constructing Constellations
- Chapter 2. Method and Truth amid the Ruins of the Social
- 1. Image-Construction and the Problem of Truth
- 2. Adorno's Critique and Appropriation of Benjamin
- 3. Interpretive Philosophy as Constructing Constellations
- Chapter 3. Affect and Evidence in the Logic of Constructing Constellations
- 1. Adorno's Kierkegaard Study
- 2. Truth as Truth Bearers
- 3. Sociological Interpretation and Disenchantment
- Chapter 4. Method and Truth in French Social Theory
- 1. Archaeology and Genealogy
- 2. Reflexive Sociology
- Chapter 5. Constructing Urban Constellations
- 1. Ghetto Life in America
- 2. Social Struggle in Chicago
- Afterword - Constructing Constellations, or Thematizing Embeddedness
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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