Cultural Approaches in the Sociology of Social Movements

Abstract

In the late twentieth century, the social sciences underwent a broad cultural turn, building on an earlier linguistic turn (Lafont 1993) but finding human meanings in a variety of activities and artifacts not previously interpreted as cultural. Cognitive psychology played the vanguard role in this shift, but practitioners in all disciplines were soon able to find indigenous traditions and tools that helped them craft their own repertories for understanding meaning (e.g., Crane 1994; Hunt 1989; Kuper 1999). Beginning in the 1970s, increasing numbers of social scientists began to pay attention to how humans understand the world, and not simply their (supposedly) objective behaviors and outcomes within it.