Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term “culture wars” came to prominence in the early 1990s, referring to conflicts in US society over abortion, religion in schools, acceptance of homosexuals, pornography, the judiciary, and the arts. Many of the flashpoints in the culture war derive from competing cultural assumptions about the body, particularly various aspects of sexuality. Activists in the culture war struggle to define what Americans believe a human to be and how human life is to be rightly ordered. The origin of the term traces to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who used kulturkampf in 1878 to launch a values campaign against Catholic and Jewish minorities in newly united Germany. Sociologist James Davison Hunter (1991, 1994) appropriated the concept as a tool for understanding the nature of contemporary cultural conflict in the US. In Hunter's work, culture wars concerns the activities of loosely clustered groups of elite knowledge workers who seek to impose their competing understandings of reality – both the way things are and the way things ought to be – on the rest of society. Hunter's theory reflects the confluence of several strands of classical sociological theory, particularly the synthesis of Weber and Durkheim forged by Peter Berger (1967) regarding the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion. Humans construct reality in their social relations and productions, and this ... log in or subscribe to read full text