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This paper seeks to contribute to the sociology of nations, a literature that is only starting to carve out its place in the social sciences. The paper offers a reconceptualization of 'nations' as 'national cultures', employing an evolutionary perspective and a systemic framework in which 'nations' are understood as cultural systems of a special kind. National cultures are intimately tied to natural languages, and the acquisition of a national culture occurs as part and parcel of the acquisition of a natural language. Acquiring a natural language is a prerequisite for learning other cultural systems (artefactual languages as well as other natural languages). National cultures function as metacultures. They are also the reference cultures for modern states and their citizens, a political dimension of nations that is of paramount importance, though it will only be touched on in this paper. National cultures should be considered as the most fundamental type of cultural system today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life story methods in Europe commonly belong to the field of biographical sociology. This paper points out that biographical sociology is missing from American sociology and describes in-depth two well-known methods in this field in Europe, the narrative interview and objective hermeneutics. The absence of biographical sociology from U.S. sociology should be remedied, it is argued, for the following reasons: First, an analysis of biographical patterns could counteract the heavy emphasis on social structure in American sociology and enrich certain subfields within it. For example, some of the concepts used in European biographical sociology, such as the concept of the 'trajectory' can be related to conceptions of agency set forth by American and British sociologists and thus enrich sociology overall. Second, biographical sociology can help counteract the heavy orientation towards quantitative research in American sociology without falling into the pitfalls of purely interpretive methodologies. And third, biographical sociology can significantly enrich the still missing link between culture and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]