The Liberty Bell: A Meditation on Labor, Liberty, and the Cultural Mediations That Connect or Disconnect Them

In: The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Band 595, S. 223-248

Abstract

A visit to the Liberty Bell has an unexpectedly penetrating effect on the author. He recasts a planned talk on the crisis of British working-class culture into a wider meditation, shaped by the metaphor of the bell, on the role of culture in popular struggles from below. The bell calls up the centrality of human labor in popular struggle & experience, from that embedded in the physical making of the bell to all time symbolic & communicative labors entailed in the grassroots cultural production of the historical meanings now condensed into it. In the past, these labors have helped to produce trade unions, abolitionist political forces & organizations, & the civil & women's rights movements. But devastating economic & social changes seem to have fractured the everyday cultural forms of today, made them invisible, & unwound their links with political organization: the bell is cracked anew. But human labors, physical & cultural, continue even in "newtimes." Ethnographic social science must recognize, record, & dignify their many forms, seeking, where possible, to make visibility a means to self-direction & repair. 33 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2004 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]