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During the last decade, the phrase ‘visual culture’ has come to identify a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the visual in everyday life. While analytic perspectives may come from gender, race or media theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and so forth, there is an apparent agreement about the critical relation the visual has to subjectivity and social organization. The travelling of critical and cultural theory across disciplinary boundaries has given ‘visual culture’ an institutional form through new degrees, programmes, cross-faculty appointments, courses, introductory textbooks, and research publications. This paper comments on the intellectual history of ‘visual culture’, identifies cultural aspects of visual performance that have been understated in recent formulations of visual culture and visual studies, and argues that the current institutional form of visual culture research has contributed to the disappearance of cultural and anthropological approaches within visual culture. The paper is developed in relation to a case study involving popular photography as a cultural performance of the Canadian north, and considers the contribution of performance to visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim'sThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912) as the basis for reconsidering the Tarde–Durkheim debate of 1903 and the distinctions between a theory of social force and a theory of social assemblage. Resisting traditional interpretations of Durkheim's scientism, this essay traces how concepts of force and energy are centrally developed inElementary Formsto draw new lines between epistemology to ontology for twentieth-century theory. I argue that Durkheim develops an ‘energetic epistemology’ that conceives of the human capacity for shared meaning as a product of invested energy in the form of continually enacted and evolving material practice, thought, and attention. According to Durkheim, when a member of a collective perceives a god or feels belief, he or she actually perceives the accumulated energy of on-going creation and maintenance of objects and ideas by members of a collective. Sacred objects, images, and ideas bear the trace of collective energy the more they are carefully crafted, maintained in spaces that are specially arranged, and written into behavioural codes. This reading of Durkheim allows us to consider him in a lineage of social constructivists and, particularly, in relation to Ludwik Fleck, who has been largely confined to different theoretical discussions when his contributions to sociology have been acknowledged at all. By reconsidering Durkheim, we have occasion to rethink his sociology and understand how he redrew the lines between thought and action, between epistemology and ontology, through the material framework of energy and force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay, introducing the collection of essays on cultural studies in mainland China and the Chinese-speaking societies, relates the emergence and development of Chinese cultural studies to changes in society. It documents the twin pulls in cultural studies between analyzing what is happening and intervening into society with idealistic possibilities for the future. It lays out how ‘the Chinese modern legacy’ and the Chinese Revolution provide resources for cultural studies and offers some analysis of the social changes that currently confront cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]