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Kultura mezi materialitou a diskursem: případ Higgsova bosonu a „božské částice
Ist Teil von
Socialni Studia, 2017-06, Vol.14 (2), p.123-140
Ort / Verlag
Brno: Masarykova University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2017
Quelle
Sociological Abstracts
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The article discusses the neglect that cultural sociology pays to the sciences and technology.Even though the “strong program” in cultural sociology claims that cultural meanings exist in every socialfact, its research focuses mainly on culture in a narrow sense, e.g. ethics, aesthetics, politics, memory, religionetc. I overcome this shortcoming by development of two approaches: 1) ethnography of a scientific facilitybased on science and technology studies (STS); and 2) cultural-sociological analysis of symbols, discoursesand narratives related to the research of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. Re-interpretingethnographic studies conducted at CERN and sociological research focused on quantum physics, the articledemonstrates that media and popular-cultural discourses on the Higgs boson are tightly related to its materialaspects. While the strong program traditionally presumes the arbitrariness of symbolic structures, the“iconic turn” in cultural sociology stresses the importance of the aesthetic material surface in the resultingmeaning. Conceiving the Higgs boson as a “secular icon”, we can see that the practically oriented actions ofresearchers at CERN relate to cultural meanings that reach far beyond the “laboratory” of quantum physics.