Not Just Any Body: Corporeally Mediated Experience, Meaning, and Perception

Over the past several decades, sociologists of culture influenced by Bourdieu and by work in related fields like cognitive science and psychology have begun to pay more attention to the embodied aspects of social life, as well as to the body's role in processes of meaning making. The articles in this dissertation examine the effects of experience on meaning and perception vis-à-vis the encultured body by exploring the ways that body, context, and biography interact. This dissertation is structured as follows: in the Introduction, "Back to Now," I lay out the approach to experience, meaning, and the body that undergirds the subsequent studies. Chapter 1, "Three Chords and [Somebody's] Truth: Trajectories of Experience and Taste Among Hard Country Fans," examines the body's role in the cultivation of a later-in-life, class-discrepant music taste. Chapter 2, "He Heard, She Heard: Toward a Cultural Sociology of the Senses," continues to explore music experience. Using a novel in-depth interview technique designed to facilitate sensory description of music experience, I measure qualities of music experience and explore gender differences in the description and experience of a particular subtype of sonic experience: "sexual" sound. In Chapter 3, "Dying to Get In: Corporatization, Feminization, and the (New) Meaning of Funeral Work," I trace the transformation of a classic "dirty work" occupation: funeral work. I show how presently unfolding, large-scale changes in the industry created the opportunity structure for a new type of social actor to enter the occupational field. This new director's orientation to funeral work is rapidly changing the meaning and nature of funeral work today.