Amine Amiri - Master of Social Sciences, Cultural Studies, Payam Noor University, Bushehr branch

Throughout the world, culture has been doggedly pushing its way onto the center stage of debates not only in sociological theory and research but also throughout the human sciences. As with any profound intellectual shift, this has been a process characterized by leads and lags. In the UK, for example, culture has been making headway since the early ۱۹۷۰s. In the USA, the tide began to turn unmistakably only in the mid-۱۹۸۰s. In continental Europe, it is possible to argue that culture never really went away. Despite this ongoing revival of interest, however, there is anything but consensus among sociologists specializing in the area about just what the concept means and how it relates to the discipline as traditionally understood. These differences of opinion can be usefully explained only partly as empirical reflections of geographical, sociopolitical, or national traditions. More importantly, they are manifestations of deeper contradictions relating to axiomatic and foundational logics in the theory of culture. Pivotal to all these disputes is the issue of ‘cultural autonomy’ (Alexander l۹۹۰, Smith ۱۹۹۸a). In this paper, we employ the concept of cultural autonomy to explore and evaluate the competing understandings of culture currently available to social theory. We suggest that fundamental flaws characterize most of these models, and we argue for an alternative approach that can be broadly understood as a kind of structural hermeneutics.

Sociologically, Cultural Studies, cultural autonomy