Emerging Cultural Perspective
In the late 1990s two long books summarized the cultural turn in social-movement studies, Alberto Melucci’s Challenging Codes and James M. Jasper’s The Art of Moral Protest. Melucci focused on the creation of collective identities as the purpose of social movements, especially the “new social movements,” whereas Jasper argued that movements allow participants a chance to elaborate and articulate their moral intuitions and principles. Both recognized the importance of emotions in social movements, although Jasper developed this idea more systematically. Along with Jeff Goodwin and Francesca Polletta, Jasper organized a conference in New York in 1999 that helped put emotions on the intellectual agenda for many scholars of protest and movements. He has continued to write about the emotional dynamics of protest in the years since.
In 1999, Goodwin and Jasper published a critique of the then-dominant political opportunity paradigm, using Jasper’s cultural approach to show that political opportunity was too structural as a concept, leaving out meanings, emotions, and agency. Charles Tilly and a number of other scholars responded, often vituperatively.
In The Art of Moral Protest Jasper also argued that strategic interaction had an important logic that was independent of both culture and structure, and in 2006 he followed up on this claim with Getting Your Way, which developed a vocabulary for studying strategic engagement in a cultural, emotional, and agentic way. By then, his theory of action had moved closer to Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism. In the same period, Wisconsin social theorist Mustafa Emirbayer had begun writing in a similar fashion about emotions and social movements, but more explicitly deriving his ideas from the history of sociological thought. In France, Daniel Cefaï arrived at similar conclusions in Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on?, a sweeping history and synthesis of thought on collective action and social movements.
Read more about this topic: Social Movement Theory
Famous quotes containing the words emerging, cultural and/or perspective:
“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others’ reasons for action, or the basis of others’ emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)