Looking Back on About 40 Years of “Sociology of Culture”

Abstract

In the 1980s, various restrictions applied to studying culture in sociology. As students had few opportunities to study in the university’s formal curriculum, they had no choice but to attend a study session beyond the faculty or an off-campus organization. This paper refers to the Society of Anthropology in Kyoto University （i.e., Konoe Rondo）and the private study group Gendai Hûzoku Kenkyûkai and shows that their activities supported studying culture at that time. Since the 1990s, “cultural studies” have spread in Japan. As the number of applicants to the Department of Sociology was decreasing, the university considered “cultural studies” an attractive option, and Japanese studies boomed overseas. Learning and researching culture became institutionalized within universities.

On the other hand, there was a tendency to standardize the contents of “cultural studies” or “sociology of culture” by incorporating them into the university’s formal curriculum. There was also the problem of the increasing number of people who could not get a full-time job while engaging in cultural studies as they wished. Today, those engaged in “cultural studies” can set research themes more freely than in the past and have more opportunities to publish papers and reports, benefiting from the changes that universities and sociology have welcomed and accepted.

This paper attempts to present the process of such academic changes in a form that overlaps with personal history.