What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Notes on a Few Trans-Cultural Misunderstandings

Abstract

This article attempts to clarify some misunderstandings between English-speaking and French-speaking scholars in the field of the sociology of arts and culture. In addition to a number of ambiguities in the definition of what ‘culture’, ‘ar ts’ and ‘sociology’ mean within the French and the Anglo-American academic traditions, the very words ‘culture’, ‘cultural sociology’ and ‘cultural studies’ exhibit important differences between each other as they are understood within each linguistic context. Seen from a French point of view, so-called ‘French theory’ appears as a typically Anglo-American category, along with ‘post-modernism’, while French debates among sociologists of art seem to have few echoes abroad. The linguistic dissymmetry between French and Anglo-American academic cultures should be taken into account in order better to understand the nature of these misunderstandings.