By Giovanni Zampieri

Giovanni Zampieri (G): Thank you for accepting the interview! I’d like you to introduce yourself and your work to kick things off.

Matthew Norton (M): Hi! I’m Matt Norton, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. I think of my work as being a mixture of cultural sociology and historical sociology. The throughline that helps me focus on specific topics and ideas is a commitment to theoretical questions concerning the relationship between signs, semiotics, and the creation of systems of power, often—but not exclusively—political power. I’m interested in theorizing about the intersection between culture and forms of power, including beliefs and values, but also things like material power, bureaucratic power, and different kinds of power that are often seen as being independent of culture and beliefs but are actually deeply entangled with aspects of signs and semiotics through a connection that isn’t always evident.

G: How did you become interested in cultural sociology?

M: I was recently at a conference at Yale University that was a celebration of the career and the thinking of Jeffrey Alexander as he’s retiring from teaching—although I hope, and we all do, he’ll be continuing to do lots of wonderful work—and there I told this anecdote. I did not study sociology as an undergraduate: I studied philosophy at Villanova University and had no idea what sociology was.My biography between graduating from Villanova and starting as a graduate student at Yale is probably not super interesting. Through a series of events, I found myself teaching at a university in Costa Rica called the University for Peace. This institution focused on postgraduate education for people involved in different UN programs and non-governmental organizations. It was focused on international peace, international law, conflict resolution, program design, and management… those kinds of things. I was there teaching, and it was a very exciting place to be, but I wasn’t sure what my next step would be. I found out, without expecting it, that I enjoyed teaching and wanted to continue doing that.Going to graduate school seemed like the next step. I didn’t want to keep studying philosophy. I wanted something more connected with empirical research. And getting academic books at the time and in that place wasn’t easy. We had to order them long in advance, and they would go through Miami, but we could get them. It took a long time, and I had to be very selective because they were expensive. I ended up getting a range of different books that sounded interesting, but I wasn’t sure about them: one of them was Jeff’s edited volume about cultural trauma. I got it, and I was like, “What is this? This is terrific.” I found it challenging and fascinating. I ordered another book, and a month later, I got The Meanings of Social Life, which, for those unfamiliar with it, is a great read and has this programmatic essay co-authored by Jeff Alexander and Phil Smith about what they call the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology. . . . I didn’t understand everything: probably, I understood even less than I thought then, but I found it engaging and intriguing. At that point, I was hooked on that as being a really valuable way to pursue the kinds of interests I had.I had different questions then than I do now, but the value of cultural sociology is that it is a way to think about the semiotic dimensions of social life, which is approximately how Sewell defines culture, the semiotic side of social life and that’s generally how I think about it. It’s been really valuable for that purpose.

G: Your recent book, The Punishment of Pirates (University of Chicago Press, 2023), is about… pirates! A fascinating topic. I’m sure many people have already asked you this, but I would like to know how you became interested in this subject and the vantage points for doing cultural sociology starting from this case.

M: So, the pirates’ book started as my dissertation, and then I wrote a lot of different things about a lot of other topics between starting the dissertation and the publication of the book, but as a dissertation, the way I ended up with pirates was first of all by continuing to come back to this question in cultural sociology and the strong program in cultural sociology. One of the critical claims of cultural sociology is, at least for me, that we need to be able to think about culture as being involved in a wide range of different aspects of human social life, including the production of power. One of the easiest ways to think about the connection between symbols, semiotics, signs, and power is to go through the lens of beliefs, of ideas—and I think that’s valuable—but I was hooked on, as others were, a kind of idea that I got from combining the work of Julia Adams, who was one of my mentors, with some of the approaches that Jeff Alexander and others in the Strong Program adopted. Julia’s The Familial State shows in this compelling way how familial ties are implicated in power, not simply through what people think and believe, but by constituting the potential for state power in a very, very clear way—and that’s what I wanted to follow. The basic pitch of The Punishment of Pirates is: do we need to think about culture when thinking about state power in its most utterly blunt, bloody, and physical manifestations? You know, if you’re talking about hanging someone by the neck, is there any semiotic necessity there to account for the rope or the cannons or ships in a fight? My argument is that there is. So that’s how I ended up there. I thought about a range of different topics that got at some of those questions. Initially, I thought of considering pirates and outlaws. At one point, I was thinking about the English Empire and its confrontation with the Ashanti Empire in Ghana. I also thought of writing about how the English constituted power in Ireland. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the pirates. This case allowed me to speak to the theoretical interests that I had, and the pirate stuff was just so exciting and interesting to me that I loved reading it, and I was energized and excited by the empirical material. I love reading adventure novels, science fiction, and fantasy; those are my genres, and engaging with that part of history is really exciting. That was a part of it as well. I once got a review that said something along the lines of “This is a good example of theoretically driven empirical social science,” and that was a perfect encapsulation of how I like to think about what I’m doing. I pick empirical materials because I feel like they do something particular that really helps to shine a light on the theory in an interesting way. With pirates, if we’re thinking about state power and the ways that semiotic, cultural, and symbolic elements play a role in constituting state power, including in its very physical manifestations, then following this group of pirates who are operating on the high seas, right at the limits of the capacity for early modern states to even think about trying to exert pressures of social control, the way that piracy operated presented challenges to state agents, merchant capitalists, and others that were quite unique. Because it was an unusual case, it helped reveal how they were trying to innovate and extend the limits and the capacity of early modern states to exert pressure on these groups.

G: This leads me to the following question. For this project, you’ve worked with archival sources, published primary sources, historiographical literature, and sociological theory. How did you manage to balance between these different strands of literature? And how did you balance historical narrative with sociological generalization?

M: So, going back to that idea of theoretically driven empirical social science, I find this idea resonant because it captures what I try to approximate. This is a common idea for people approaching sociology in similar ways, where the ideal situation is one where theory and empirical work speak and inform each other, but they also help to discipline each other. When it came to working in the British National Archives, dealing with issues of maritime violence and piracy, the problem was not “can I find anything?”: the problem was that there was just such an abundance of material. The issue is: how do you decide what’s important from this vast archive? When you run into problems like that in one part of the research, that’s where the other part can help. You can move back to the theory to help organize and think about criteria or heuristics for figuring out what is important from this material to speak to the concepts you’re using and the arguments that you’re making, and then vice versa. I think many people who like and enjoy theory, reading it, and thinking about things from a theoretical perspective have all experienced this problem. It’s easy to get swept away with the theory part of the work, to keep adding new things, and to read new papers and books. It’s easy for the theoretical part of the work to become overburdened. The empirical commitments and materials help rein in the theory, keeping it focused on the actual empirical goal. Having a joint empirical and theoretical project is valuable because you can play them off against each other to keep the project organized and moving and help you make decisions when necessary.

Regarding narrative, my general approach when I’m worried about relying too much on one method or narrative strategy is switching to another and seeing how those relate. So, for example, one of the things I wanted to do in The Punishment of Pirates was to include this large narrative sweep that takes us from the chaos that English elites, governmental actors, and merchant capitalists were comfortable with during the 17^th century, to the beginning of the 18^th century, when they had a very different vision for what their empire was going to be. That’s a story that has been told by a lot of historians, but it’s an important kind of big narrative sweep. On the other hand, I didn’t want to get so caught up with that ending up being a big narrative looming over everything. For me, the way to do that was to oscillate back to the details. One of the theoretical arguments I’ve made in published work is about the importance for cultural sociologists to focus on the situational level of analysis. It’s great to talk about a cultural code that develops over a decade or is enshrined in a legal system over 40 or 50 years. It’s also really important to zoom into the level of actual interactions to see the play of signs and symbols and see how, to use Austin’s idea, people are doing things with their words, performatively creating realities directly tied to power. For me, that’s the kind of juxtaposition I value. That’s just one example. I don’t think situations and narratives are necessarily always the thing. But it’s just finding ways to contrast different approaches and finding ways to bounce back and forth.

G: Speaking of theory, in some of your recent work, you’ve argued for a distributed approach to cognition to create a trading zone between cognitively and systemically oriented approaches to cultural sociology. Could you tell us a bit about that?

M: In that work, I was nettled by an argument coming out of the interesting, fascinating, engaging, and important work done by people who are thinking about the connections between cognition and culture. The argument is that approaches to culture that rely on highly complex systems have a significant problem because of the limits of human cognition. And because humans are cognitively limited, that should raise doubts about the extent to which we should expect people to apply things like elaborate semiotic codes. I was nettled by this because I thought that it was a good point, but at the same time, I felt like it revealed an important way to advance our understanding of what is involved in structural, systemic approaches to culture. So, I don’t actually think that it ends up being that strong of an argument to say, “How can we think about complex cultural codes when people are cognitively limited?” My basic answer is that we shouldn’t think about cultural systems as being in people’s heads. They are in people’s heads, but they’re not only there. They also exist in other parts of the world. We can take inspiration from things like distributed cognition from Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory to think about how signs and semiotic relations are embedded in social environments. I also think that works like Terrence Deacon’s on the semiotic aspects of human evolution and the evolution of the brain are really important. If his arguments are correct, we shouldn’t underestimate the capacity of the human brain to deal with symbolic information. His arguments entail that a very powerful evolutionary pressure on human brains, neurology, and ultimately cognition was the ability to deal with symbols. And so, we can deal with pretty complex symbolic systems. But there are indeed limits to cognition, to what we can keep in mind at any time. And this gets to your question about what that trading zone looks like. I wanted to think about it from both sides: thinking about the cognitive side, it’s important to relax the assumption that because we’re talking about cognition and because we’re drawing on research in cognitive psychology—which is great, and we should—we shouldn’t become overly fixated on the individual and the interiority of their head as our main unit of analysis. We must think about cognition in a much more sociologically informed, distributed way. Consider a legal system: we don’t ask, “How can we have a complex legal system since people are cognitively limited?” We know the answer to that: we involve lots of people. It’s not one person’s cognitive limits; it’s a lot of people focusing on different parts of it who have different memories, knowledge, specialties, and roles. We have books, computer systems, Hein Online, and Westlaw. We have this entire apparatus that allows us to access different parts of that semiotic system and to bring it to bear in situationally cued ways that make those codified systems realities in their complexity—even though any one individual doesn’t keep the entirety of the law in their head at any one time. I think that’s a valuable thing to remember from the cognitive perspective: to be ready to think about cognition in a more distributed way. But then, from the cultural system side, it’s really important to remember that when we’re talking about codes, there are important individual-level limits to the extent to which people have any aspect of that in their heads at any moment. I was recently reading Umberto Eco discussing Charles Sanders Pierce and the idea of code. At one point, he talks about a code as simply being the trace of the semiotic activity in a particular community. And that struck me as one valuable way to think about code—not as this sort of highly structured ontologically unclear thing that somehow exists and shapes action, but instead as the trace of semiosis, the trace of sign-related activity. When we talk about code from that perspective, code becomes more of an analytical tool—a way that we, as researchers, can try to capture the systematicity that emerges from symbolic human action. From that perspective, we don’t need to think about a code existing in people’s heads. These days, I also tend to frame this from a more probabilistic point of view, where it’s not that human symbolic interactions are so tightly scripted that they lead in an uninterruptible way from one thing to the other, but it’s more than what we’re observing is the traces of what happens given certain kinds of interpretive tendencies, patterns, and probabilities. I think that from the perspective of systems-oriented cultural sociologists, the cognitive approach is useful to keep in mind as we always want to be able to tie however complex, however abstract—and I think that complex and abstract representations of cultural systems have their place and can be important for developing analytical insight—we always want to be able to think about how those can be translated into situations where people are using them. Cognition isn’t something we should dismiss. That’s how I think about that trading zone.

G: Coming toward the end of our interview, I’d like to ask: what advice would you give to early career scholars interested in cultural sociology? And how do you see the future of cultural sociology?

M: Great questions. I’m afraid I don’t know what the future looks like—it’s not a mode of thinking that comes very easily to me. I know the projects that I’m excited about. Isaac Reed and I have had similar interests for a long time, and we approach them in somewhat different ways, but ways that are often aligned with each other. He described this kind of approach, as he calls it, the “lawyers, guns and money” approach to thinking about culture, which encourages us to think about how semiotic relations, materiality, and power are tied together. I often think about it through the lens of coordination. When we think about things like state power, like having a navy ship in a position where it can fire a broadside and sink a pirate ship, a very romantic image, and an actual site of physical material power, what are the things that make that possible? One of the things that makes it possible is coordinated and collective social action. For me, that is a key point where the semiotic dimension comes in because signs and symbols, words and meanings are so fundamental to getting people to operate together to be on the same page, to be able to do complicated things like have a naval ship, perhaps months or weeks out at sea, chasing down and successfully sinking a pirate ship. That is a real feat of coordinated human social power. I hope this approach to thinking about power and its wide array of manifestations will be part of cultural sociology in the future. One thing I would say is, you know, there’s an instructive tale told by Gary Alan Fine in his essay on what happened to symbolic interactionism (“The Sad Demise, Mysterious Disappearance, and Glorious Triumph of Symbolic Interactionism”). It’s a great essay where he talks about symbolic interactionism and how it goes from being this outsider approach to being an approach that sociologists start to recognize and adopt, and then it becomes part of a sort of sociological common sense. People start saying, “We don’t even bother with symbolic interactionism because it’s become so incorporated.” In some ways, symbolic interactionism loses its way partly because it has become so accepted. And I think that’s probably a risk for cultural sociologists to consider when there’s been a lot of success in incorporating our ideas into mainstream sociology. To what extent does it remain a distinctive approach? To what extent do we, as a community, want it to remain a distinctive approach? How can we keep it alive as a distinct intellectual tradition rather than being absorbed into sociological common sense (if that’s a goal, which it would be for me)?

For starting cultural sociologists, I think there’s a real wealth of material, and I would encourage people to read it widely. I believe that one aspect of cultural sociology, as I came to learn and become familiar with it, was that it was characterized and structured by different schools of thought. And I think it’s helpful not to approach those in a very doctrinaire way but to read widely amongst those. That said, John Levi Martin, in his classic essay, “What Is Field Theory?,” has this polemic—I don’t know if he would agree that it’s a polemic—at the beginning, which I love, where he talks about how we’re in an age where all theory is just so agreeable, everyone finds ways to synthesize all theories, and you can end up agreeing to everything and therefore not having anything distinctive. I would say to read widely and not be too shy to take positions. I mean, saying things like, “Systems are great, and cognition is great, and Bourdieusian-inspired approaches are great, and so are approaches derived from Jeff Alexander’s work,” is fine: there’s a tremendous amount of creative intellectual activity in all these different areas. However, I believe it is helpful to develop a critical perspective within that and to find ways to argumentatively approach the field and juxtapose things in ways that allow us to develop our arguments in clear ways without necessarily being combative. We shouldn’t shy away from those confrontations. We should approach these generously and in a friendly way and remember that they’re valuable in clarifying our thinking. Read widely, and don’t be afraid to adopt respectfully opinionated argumentative stances within the cultural sociological debate.