Culture and the State

Culture and the State
Author: David Lloyd
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135219923

From the end of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, a remarkable convergence takes place in Europe between theories of the modern state and theories of culture. Culture and the State explores that theoretical convergence in relation to the social functions of state and cultural institutions, showing how cultural education comes to play the role of forming citizens for the modern state. It critiques the way in which materialistic thinking has largely taken the concept of culture for granted and failed to grasp its relation to the idea of the state.

State/Culture

State/Culture
Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501717782

What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis.The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.

Culture, Power, and Authoritarianism in the Indonesian State

Culture, Power, and Authoritarianism in the Indonesian State
Author: Tod Jones
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004255109

Culture, Power, and Authoritarianism in the Indonesian State is a critical history of cultural policy in one of the world’s most diverse nations across the tumultuous twentieth century. It charts the influence of momentous political changes on the cultural policies of successive states, including colonial government, Japanese occupation, the killing and repression of the left and their affiliates, and the return of representative government, and examines broader social changes like nationalism and consumer culture. The book uses the concept of authoritarian cultural policy, or cultural policy that was premised on increased state control, tracing its presence from the colonial era until today. Tod Jones’ use of historical and case study chapters captures the central state’s changing cultural policies and its diverse outcomes across Indonesia.

State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa

State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa
Author: Tejumola Olaniyan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 025303017X

How has the state impacted culture and cultural production in Africa? How has culture challenged and transformed the state and our understandings of its nature, functions, and legitimacy? Compelled by complex realities on the ground as well as interdisciplinary scholarly debates on the state-culture dynamic, senior scholars and emerging voices examine the intersections of the state, culture, and politics in postcolonial Africa in this lively and wide-ranging volume. The coverage here is continental and topics include literature, politics, philosophy, music, religion, theatre, film, television, sports, child trafficking, journalism, city planning, and architecture. Together, the essays provide an energetic and nuanced portrait of the cultural forms of politics and the political forms of culture in contemporary Africa.

Culture, Power, and the State

Culture, Power, and the State
Author: Prasenjit Duara
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 688
Release: 1991-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804765588

In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era. The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and other structures of human interaction overlapped to form what he calls the cultural nexus of power in local society. The author's concept of the cultural nexus and his tracing of how it was altered enables us for the first time to grapple with change at the village level in all its complexity. The author asserts that the growth of the state transformed and delegitimized the traditional cultural nexus during the Republican era, particularly in the realm of village leadership and finances. Thus, the expansion of state power was ultimately and paradoxically responsible for the revolution in China as it eroded the foundations of village life, leaving nothing in its place. The problems of state-making in China were different from those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; the Chinese experience heralds the process that would become increasingly common in the emergent states of the developing world under the very different circumstances of the twentieth century.

Regulating the Social

Regulating the Social
Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 1993-08-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400820960

Why does the welfare state develop so unevenly across countries, regions, and localities? What accounts for the exclusions and disciplinary features of social programs? How are elite and popular conceptions of social reality related to welfare policies? George Steinmetz approaches these and other issues by exploring the complex origins and development of local and national social policies in nineteenth-century Germany. Generally regarded as the birthplace of the modern welfare state, Germany experimented with a wide variety of social programs before 1914, including the national social insurance legislation of the 1880s, the "Elberfeld" system of poor relief, protocorporatist policies, and modern forms of social work. Imperial Germany offers a particularly useful context in which to compare different programs at various levels of government. Looking at changes in welfare policy over the course of the nineteenth century, differences between state and municipal interventions, and intercity variations in policy, Steinmetz develops an account that focuses on the specific constraints on local and national policymakers and the different ways of imagining the "social question." Whereas certain aspects of the pre-1914 welfare state reinforced social divisions and even foreshadowed aspects of the Nazi regime, other dimensions actually helped to relieve sickness, poverty, and unemployment. Steinmetz explores the conditions that led to both the positive and the objectionable features of social policy. The explanation draws on statist, Marxist, and social democratic perspectives and on theories of gender and culture.

Culture and Tactics

Culture and Tactics
Author: Robert F. Carley
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438476442

While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics demonstrates how tactics impact the organizational structures of social movements and expand the affinities of political communities. Carley looks at how Gramsci used innovative tactics to bridge perceptions of racial differences between factory workers and subaltern groups, the latter having been denigrated to the point of subhumanity by a complex Italian national racial economy. Newly envisioning Gramsci as a theorist of race within a broader context of social struggle, Carley connects Gramsci's insights into the political mobilizations of racialized subaltern groups to contemporary critical race theory and cultural studies of racialization and racism. Speaking across disciplines and drawing on a number of empirical examples, Carley offers a battery of original concepts to assist scholars and activists in analyzing the tactical practices of protests in which race is a central factor.

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States
Author: Angela G. Ray
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2005
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Angela Ray provides a refreshing new look at the lyceum lecture system as it developed in the United States from the 1820s to the 1880s. She argues that the lyceum contributed to the creation of an American "public" at a time when the country experienced a rapid change in land area, increasing immigration, and a revolution in transportation, communication technology, and social roles. The history of the lyceum in the nineteenth century illustrates a process of expansion, diffusion, and eventual commercialization. In the late 1820s, a politically and economically dominant culture--the white Protestant northeastern middle class--institutionalized the practice of public debating and public lecturing for education and moral uplift. In the 1820s and 1830s, the lyceum was characterized by organized groups in cities and towns, particularly in the Northeast and the Old Northwest (now the Midwest). These groups were established to promote debate, to create a setting for study, and to provide a forum for members' lecturing. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, most lyceums concentrated on the sponsorship of public lectures, presented for institutional profit as well as public instruction and entertainment. Eventually, lyceum lectures became a commercial enterprise and desirable platform for celebrities who wished to expand their incomes from lecturing.