Ann Swidler
Ann Swidler (PhD UC Berkeley; BA Harvard) studies the interplay of culture and institutions. She asks how culture works–both how people use it and how it shapes social life. She is best known for her books Talk of Love, and the co-authored works Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, as well as her classic article, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies” (American Sociological Review, 1986). Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, 2001), examines how actors select among elements of their cultural repertoires and how culture gets organized “from the outside in” by Codes, Contexts, and Institutions. Her newest book (with Susan Cotts Watkins) is A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa (Princeton, 2017), which explores the intersection of global and local responses to the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Her interest in institutions that can create collective goods has led to work on African chieftaincy, religious congregations, and NGOs, and to her current project on Social Ecologies of Religion in Malawi. She is studying religious congregations and the networks they form between villages and among pastors and sheikhs, village headmen, and local government officials in order to understand the cultural and religious sources of collective capacities for social action.
Professor Swidler teaches sociology of culture, sociology of religion, and sociological theory. Her interests increasingly touch on political sociology, development, and sociology of science and medicine as well.
Books
2024 Bellah and contributors, Challenging Modernity. Edited, introduction, and conclusion by Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton. (Columbia University Press).
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2017 A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa (Princeton University Press) (with Susan Watkins).
2001 Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (University of Chicago Press).
2001 (eds.), Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, Self (University of California Press). (with Madsen, Sullivan, Tipton)
1996 Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton University Press). (with Fischer, Hout, Jankowski, Lucas, and Voss)
1991 The Good Society (Alfred A. Knopf). (with Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, and Tipton)
1985 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press). (with Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, and Tipton)
1979 Organization Without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools (Harvard University Press).
Selected Articles and Chapters
- 2023 “Life’s Work: History, Biography, and Ideas.” Annual Review of Sociology 49:1-13.
- 2022 “Textures of Spirituality in Rural Malawi,” In Brian Steensland, Jaime Kucinskas, and Anna Sun, Eds. Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and
Power. Oxford University Press, pp. 208-224 - 2020 Marian Burchardt and Ann Swidler, “Transplanting Institutional Innovation: Comparing the Success of NGOs and Missionary Protestantism in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Theory & Society. Published online 7 Feb 2020: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09380-7
- 2015. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins, “Practices of Deliberation in Rural Malawi.” Pp. 133-166 in Patrick Heller and Vijayendra Rao (editors), Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies, The World Bank, Washington DC.
- 2013 "African Affirmations: The Religion of Modernity and the Modernity of Religion.” International Sociology 28(6) 680-696.
- 2013 “Cultural Sources of Institutional Resilience: Lessons from Chieftaincy in Rural Malawi,” in Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont (eds.), Social Resilience in the Neo-Liberal Era, Cambridge University Press.
- 2013 Susan Cotts Watkins and Ann Swidler, "Working Misunderstandings: Donors, Brokers, and Villagers in Africa's AIDS Industry." Population and Development Review 38 (suppl.): 197-218.
- 2012. “Where Do Axial Commitments Reside? Problems in Thinking about the African Case.” In Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Harvard University Press.
- 2012. Susan Cotts Watkins, Ann Swidler, and Thomas Hannan, “Outsourcing Social Transformation: Development NGOs as Organizations,” Annual Review of Sociology, 38: 285-315. http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/eprint/SaNuuI4GjMMqSvQ2ezKN/full/10.1146/annurev-soc-071811-145516
- 2010 "Return of the Sacred: What African Chiefs Teach Us about Secularization," Sociology of Religion 71(2).
- 2010 "Access to Pleasure: Aesthetics, Social Inequality, and the Structure of Culture Production," for Handbook of Culture, John Hall, et al, ed.
- 2009. Susan Cotts Watkins and Ann Swidler, “Hearsay Ethnography: Conversational Journals as a Method For Studying Culture in Action,” Poetics 37(2):162-184.
- 2009. “Responding to AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Peter Hall and Michele Lamont (eds.), Successful Societies: Institutions, Cultural Repertoires and Population Health. Cambridge University Press.
- 2009. “Dialectics of Patronage: Logics of Accountability at the African AIDS-NGO Interface,” in Philanthropic Projections: Sending Institutional Logics Abroad, edited by Steven Heydemann and David Hammack, Indiana University Press.
- 2009. “‘Teach a Man to Fish’: The Sustainability Doctrine and its Social Consequences.” World Development 36(4). (with Watkins)
- 2009 “Condom Semiotics: Meaning and Condom Use in Rural Malawi.”American Sociological Review 74(2). (with Iddo Tavory)
- 2007 “Ties of Dependence: AIDS and Transactional Sex in Rural Malawi,” Studies in Family Planning 38, 3 (September):147-162. (with Watkins)
- 1994 "The New Sociology of Knowledge," Annual Review of Sociology 20:305-29. (with Jorge Arditi)
- 1993/4 "What Properties of Culture Should We Measure?" Poetics 22 (4). (with Ronald L. Jepperson)
- 1986 "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review 51 (April): 273-286.