Cultural sociology and civil society in a world of flows: Recapturing ambiguity, hybridity, and the political

This article “provincializes” cultural sociology and more specifically, the cultural sociology of politics and civil society. It first traces the origins of what is distinctive about the cultural sociology of civil society before discussing its three unspoken assumptions: the assumption of minimal stateness in the lives and worlds of social movements and civil society, the relation between civil and civilized, and the notion that the social location of the political in nonliberal societies might be different than in established liberal societies. It then explains how loosening these assumptions might make cultural sociology travel “better” and cites examples referring to civil society in places in the Global South. Finally, it examines some of the implications of these arguments for the Global North.