Practicing Culture

By Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett

Why are some residents of the western Russian city of Kaliningrad, which was the former German city Königsberg, dedicated to recovering the area’s German artifacts while simultaneously denying Kalingrad’s German origins? How do nations brand themselves? What function do electric hair clippers serve—beyond the barber shop and the beauty salon?

Practicing Culture, edited by NYU sociologists Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett, addresses these and other questions. The work includes essays by doctoral candidates and recent graduates from the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

“Too often the sociology of culture takes on the static character of a sociology of cultural products,” the editors write in the book’s introduction. “It is a study of paintings not painting; of values not valuing—or even more, of the place of markets and patrons in the circulation of paintings with too little attention to the creative processes by which they are made and engaged by viewers.

“[In Practicing Culture], the authors take up the social field within which cultural practice is situated, the narrative accounts participants give of their work and lives, the way value is constructed, and the interplay of conscious and unconscious orientations to the production of knowledge.”