Autonomies of Art and Culture

Abstract

This dossier aims to explore the way social sciences study relations between spaces of symbolic production and the political or economic fields. It focuses on uses in the sociology of culture, art, and ideas of the concept of autonomy, and on the various forms that the relative autonomy of art and culture can take depending on the configurations studied. The contributions and different case studies presented highlight the polysemy of the concept of autonomy on a theoretical level, and the multiplicity of its variations on an empirical level. Through a comparative presentation of the different cases studied in the dossier, the introduction specifically addresses three issues: the links between scholarly and vernacular uses of the concept of autonomy ; the empirical measure of the latter ; and the social conditions that enable it.