The intellectual trajectories of social scientists Robert N. Bellah and Clifford Geertz are compared as a case study in the production of successful interdisciplinary work. Geertz and Bellah started from a similar position, in terms of scholarly habits, network centrality, and symbolic capital. However, while Geertz became an interdisciplinary star and left his mark in disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and cultural studies, Bellah’s interdisciplinary appeal was more limited, while his ability to speak to the general public as a (...) public intellectual was unmatched by Geertz. We thus review Bellah’s and Geertz’s parallel careers using a multidimensional analytical model intended to complete current field-based and performative-pragmatist models of intellectual success, arguing that interdisciplinary success can be accounted for by a combination of local ecological factors, images of intellectual work, and texts showing a high degree of cross-disciplinary fluency. (shrink)

The concept of social performance is a major theoretical innovation of the strong program in cultural sociology, championed by Jeffrey C. Alexander. This article offers a critical assessment of Alexander’s last four monographs on political performances with the explicit aim of contributing to the future development of the performance approach. After an outline of Alexander’s theory of performance, I continue to discuss his book-length empirical contributions, highlighting the innovations introduced by each study. Confronting Alexander’s research strategies with his theoretical framework, (...) I propose a recalibration of his ‘liberal’ sociology of performance, bringing ‘conservative’ aspects of political culture back in, first of all particularity and historicity. This entails a rethinking of performance effects in terms of ‘resonances’ attuned to particular audiences and a deeper hermeneutic engagement with specific historical backgrounds of collective representations in order to overcome the one-sidedness of Alexander’s constructivist approach. (shrink)

Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges (...) the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body. (shrink)