LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE/CHARLES UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE

type of traditionalization, centred on interpretations in conflict. Sacred texts are,

that guarantees the latter status (in India, canonization began with Buddhist

a canon. The Hellenistic – more precisely Alexandrian – canonization of the

Greek classics is the most obvious and seminal example.

This discussion of writing and its historical ramifications should have thrown

some light on the background mostly taken for granted when culture is compared

to a text. At the same time, it has touched upon a range of themes that come into focus when civilizational analysis extends the boundaries of cultural sociology. But there is one more part of the strong program to be considered.

The interpretation of the cultural text is to be succeeded and corroborated by an

ambitious explanatory strategy on the more properly sociological level. Alexander

and Smith (2003: 22) accept the ‘vision of culture as webs of significance that

guide action’, but not the general reluctance of cultural theorists to specify ‘precise

mechanisms through which webs of meaning influence action on the ground’

(p. 22). It is easy to agree with the general claim that both theories of culture and

theories of action would benefit from closer mutual contact, and that they have

kept each other at a distance through restrictive assumptions. But the strategy

proposed by Alexander and Smith calls for closer examination, and civilizational

analysis may have its own angle on that level too.

The third step of the strong program begins with arguments in favour of a

structuralist – or at least structuralism-friendly – version of hermeneutics. For

Alexander and Smith, the starting-point is ‘an effort to understand culture not

just as a text (à la Geertz), but rather as a text that is underpinned by signs and

symbols that are in patterned relationships’ (2003: 24). This general guideline is

linked to the insights of structural linguistics and to Lévi-Strauss’s extension of

linguistic models. Its relevance to the explanatory aims of the program is twofold:

it helps to conceive of culture as ‘a structure as objective as any more material

fact’ (Alexander and Smith, 2003: 24), and it paves the way for the construction

of general theories; the structural patterns can be translated into formal models

applicable across cultural boundaries. At this point, however, the strong program

does not take the line that might seem most tempting. To the extent that structuralist

trends gave rise to explanatory models of their own, the main emphasis

has been on abstract systemic logics. Alexander and Smith see such constructions

as a blind alley; their idea of cultural sociology is not a culturalist alternative to

the economy- or power-centred models inspired by Althusser and Foucault. Their

explanatory ideal is meant to satisfy ‘hardheaded and skeptical demands for causal

clarity’ and to ‘anchor causality in proximate actors and agencies’ (2003: 14). The

stress on ‘proximate actors’ leaves no doubt about the main aim: the involvement