It Was Like a Fever

Francesca Polletta's latest, It Was Like A Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, is essential reading for students of cultural trauma, social movements, and collective memory. Her basic thesis is that the ambiguity of narrative used in political speeches, public deliberation, and other discursive forums, is a powerful mechanism of social power. Her analysis successfully divorces narrative from the clutches of literary theory in order to show the causal and predictive power of storytelling for a variety of social outcomes. The following passage is a microcosm of the book's main message (p. viii):

"Take a story that, some say, won George Bush the 2004 election: a thirty-second television spot titled "Ashley's Story." The spot was produced by a conservative group, and it aired in nine contested states in the month before the election. It recounted sixteen-year-old Ashley Faulkner's meeting with the candidate at a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio. Ashley had lost her mother in the 2001 World Trade Center attack, and after that, the spot's narrator reported, she had "close up emotionally." The narrator continued, "But when President George W. Bush came to Lebanon, Ohio, she went to see him, as she had with her mother four years before." As Bush made his way through the crowed of well-wishers, a friend of the Faulkners told him that Ashley's mother had been killed in the 9/11 attack. Bush turned and spontaneously embraced the girl, saying that he knew it was hard and asking if she was all right. "And that was the moment," the family friend recounted, "that we saw Ashley's eyes fill up with tears." Ashley herself explained, "He's the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe, that I'm okay." The spot concluded with Ashley's father saying, "What I saw was what I want to see in the heart and soul of the man who sits in the highest elected office in our country"

This is only one of several powerful examples Polletta gives among others including analysis of the power of narrative in an on-line forum about the September 11th attacks, the use of the Civil Rights movement in Congressional speeches over the last sixty years, and the early sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement itself. In each of these examples, Polletta convincingly demonstrates how narrative can be strategically deployed by social movements and civil debate, developing a much more sophisticated vocabulary of "framing" than the wider literature on social movements in sociology as well as linguists such as Lakoff. Poletta's analysis of the context in which narratives are presented and the manner in which they are received allows her to predict when and where the use of narrative enables, transforms, or stifles, democratic debate. Coupled with Eviatar Zerubavel's similarly innovative analysis of the social structure of denail in The Elephant in the Room, Poletta's book provides young cultural sociologists with an impressive artillery of theory and methods with which to invade the dusty barracks of political sociology.

America Hates Atheists

Just came across a fascinating article by Penny Edgell and colleagues in Minnesota's Department of Sociology. Their recent survey of 2,000 plus households suggests Americans are more uncomfortable with allowing their children to marry an athiest than any other non-Christian group. Quite a fascinating finding in light of the dormant controversy about America's "culture wars." It raises fascinating questions, for example, about why we may be more comfortable with difference than undifferentiation. If this were the case, it opens fascinating new directions for the study of secularization-- one would want to know, for example, whether similar patterns are emerging in other secularized democracies (notably Western Europe). Somewhere Durkheim just rolled his eyes.

From Edgell et al.:

Table 1. Public and Private Acceptance, Ranked Groups

This Group Does Not At All Agree with My Vision of American Society
—Atheist 39.6
—Muslim 26.3
—Homosexual 22.6
—Conservative Christian 13.5
—Recent Immigrant 12.5
—Hispanic 7.6
—Jew 7.4
—Asian American 7.0
—African American 4.6
—White American 2.2

I Would Disapprove if My Child Wanted to Marry a Member of This Group
—Atheist 47.6
—Muslim 33.5
—African American 27.2
—Asian American 18.5
—Hispanic 18.5
—Jew 11.8
—Conservative Christian 6.9
—White 2.3

Source: American Mosaic Project Survey, 2003.

Foxy News

As if the we needed another reason to question the integrity of Fox news, I recently discovered an old article on their website describing the 2005 Paris riots. According to the article, the civil unrest was caused by "marauding bands of Muslim youth." Showed this to a few friends of mine from Paris, who promptly asked me whether FOX news was available internationally via satellite (strictly for entertainment purposes, needless to say). The "Islamization" of the riots does raise interesting questions about the globalization of media coverage about conflict, however, which would be an excellent direction for future research.