Page 12 - Cultural Theory

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Introduction
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Tim Edwards

Recent decades have witnessed an almost ever-increasing attention to questions of
culture, cultural theory and the cultural turn, yet what this means is still not entirely
clear. In this collection, a range of authors, both well established and new, address
these questions in a variety of ways. While literatures on cultural theory, including
large edited collections, are now profuse, if not perhaps even profligate, this collec-
tion is unique in two senses. First, rather than acting as a ‘round-up’ of previously
published readings, it brings together a series of original papers by authors, both
time-honoured and recent; and, second, instead of asking the question, what is the
significance of the impact of cultural analysis and theory for or upon sociology and
social science, it asks, what is the legacy of sociology and wider social scientific
inquiry in understanding the significance of culture, cultural practice, or cultural
theory? It is perhaps a rather odd sleight of hand that manages to reinvent history
so that cultural inquiry almost appears to precede the immense significance of over
a century and a half of sociological theory and social investigation of concepts, prac-
tices and phenomena that clearly had much to do with culture, however defined. In
this brief introduction, then, I have two intentions: first, to outline what constitutes
and defines ‘cultural theory’ in this particular instance and, second, to summarize
some of the findings of the authors in this particular collection at this particular
moment of time, space and culture.
The term cultural theory is something of a misnomer here for the original title of cul-
tural sociology, thus directly informing an understanding of the cultural significance of
sociology and the sociological significance of culture. Understandings of cultural the-
ory must necessarily reflect, and indeed depend upon, definitions of culture per se. As
is now well known across the social sciences, these tend to split into two: the first def-
inition centred on notions of art, style and more widely the visual, and the second
definition simply defined as ways of life (see, for example, Williams, 1988). Of course,
this is precisely where the perceived conflict between cultural studies and or more ‘cul-
turalist’ poststructural and postmodern theory and social science and sociology, par-
ticularly its nineteenth-century classical traditions, can perhaps be seen to originate.
Sociology and social science have always been concerned with culture as ways of life –
that is precisely what makes any of it ‘social’ – yet understandings of visual culture
have tended to reside under the auspices of the arts. The rise of studies of popular

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