Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

DUSTIN KIDD

For Sociology really to be a science of things, the generality of phenomena must be taken as the criterion of their normality. (Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method 104) OUR children and rap is touted as a threat to our society (Binder). Music videos provide a framework that justies rape and other forms of sexual violence ( Jhally). The reproduction of artwork in mass-produced books has destroyed the special aura of art (Benjamin), and television has made cultural consumers passive (Horkheimer and Adorno). Sociological analyses have produced a lengthy list of critiques of popular culture such that we must wonder why we bother with popular culture at all. What could be more pathological than a social element that threatens a society and its members while also reducing the good life to a commodity and reducing persons to consumers? Utopian visionaries have long hoped to one day eradicate crime. Should popular culture be an additional target? To address this question, I turn to Emile Durkheims The Rules of Sociological Method, which argues that crime is actually normal and necessary for a healthy society. Durkheims principles for the necessity of crime are applicable to the study of popular culture and raise to the surface the often-overlooked functions that popular culture serves in contemporary society. The evidence for this claim comes from the existing literature on the relationship between cultural consumption and social structure,

EAVY METAL MUSIC HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS A THREAT TO

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2007 r 2007, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation r 2007, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

69

70

Dustin Kidd

particularly the literature of cultural sociology and of cultural studies. I also offer a brief study of one specific example, that of the hugely successful Harry Potter novels, as an illustration. The Rules of Sociological Method includes a chapter on Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological, in which Durkheim uses a functionalist approach to identify those elements of social structure that are conducive to social health and to distinguish them from those that are pathological and destructive. Healthy elements are those whose functions actually benet social cohesion, and generally they are elements that are found in all societies. Durkheim takes crime as his key example because, given the obvious negative associations with crime, it is surprising that crime persists and is so widespread. Why has it not been eradicated if we all agree that it is bad? Durkheim argues that the sociological approach to crime needs to look past the detrimental effects upon the victim in order to identify the benets that crime offers to the society in which it occurs. Durkheim begins from the premise that crime is normal because it is found in all societies, in all time periods. He goes on to formulate a list of reasons why crime is necessary. First, he claims that crime denes the norms of a society. By this, he means that the negative sanctions that are associated with crime serve to isolate a particular set of behaviors within a larger range of possible behaviors and label them as normal or acceptable. The remaining possible behaviors are labeled as deviant. Second, Durkheim nds that crime establishes social boundaries. Those who are at the fringes of society, by virtue of economic disadvantages, cultural differences, or moral displacement, are least likely to follow the norms of the society. Their behaviors are sanctioned against when they diverge from the social mainstreamthey are at or beyond the boundaries of the social group. Moreover, a range of behaviors is possible even within the narrow set of acceptable norms, and crime reveals which of these behaviors are at the boundaries, in contrast to those at the center. Third, for those within the acceptable boundaries, crime provides a set of rituals that helps to build solidarity. These rituals come in the form of trials, executions, and other forms of public punishment that unite observers in their position of not being tried or punished, reminding them of their collective right to social legitimacy, in contrast to the illegitimacy of the criminal. Fourth, Durkheim argues that crime produces innovation. This can occur when a criminal action is revealed to be helpful to society, as in the case of Napster, an

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

71

online music trading service that was at rst sued by the large music corporations, and then subsumed into one of them once its uses were discovered. Or, innovation may result in response to criminal behavior. For instance, after the 1996 kidnapping and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman in Arlington Texas, local residents developed an early warning system that became known as Amber Alert and has since spread to many other states. Fifth and nally, crime can provide the necessary impetus for social change, particularly when it comes in the form of actions that call into question the social mainstream or social authority. Consider, for instance, the various criminal offenses that resulted in hate crime legislation. So, crime produces norms, establishes boundaries, provides rituals, produces innovation, and leads the way for social change. This list will guide my argument that popular culture, like crime, is a necessary and healthy element of modern society. But rst, we must consider that popular culture is a normal component of all advanced capitalist societies. Within these societies, popular culture has become necessary, in that it establishes norms, social boundaries, rituals, and innovations, while also paving the way for social change. And so, the critique of popular culture must always be tempered by a discussion of the important role that this culture plays in social cohesion.

A Note on the Concept of Popular Culture

The term Popular Culture is broadly used to identify several forms of culture, some of which are overlapping. The word popular has three meanings that cause, for some, confusion about the sorts of categories that count as popular culture. It can mean the people, in which case popular culture is the peoples culture. In this case, we would largely consider folk culture, as folk can invoke the people as well. Folk culture is generally seen as hand-made, locally produced goods that are often distributed at the local levelthe quilt sold at the farmers market rather than the CD sold on the Internet. This is, of course, changing as cultural boundaries are increasingly blurred and as folk objects are gaining in popularity and value. The peoples culture can also invoke civic cultureshared symbols of (generally national) identity such as ags, folklore, anthems, and the like.

72

Dustin Kidd

But popular can also invoke the idea of fame or widespread enjoyment. Quilts, as folk culture, do not experience this sort of popularity. Under this definition, we would have to look specifically at commercial culturethose cultural products which are produced by industries that, at least in part, seek to generate profit, and which are often produced or distributed through nonhuman technology such as the printing press, the CD manufacturing plant, or television airwaves. Finally, the term popular culture can also invoke the idea of common culture, which might include any or all of the above forms of culture but also goes beyond tangible cultural products to include widely shared values and beliefs. These values and beliefs may be embodied in tangible cultural objects, but they are not reducible to those objects. Given such broad use of the term popular culture, the researcher of popular culture needs to be precise about which of these areas are subject to analysis. In this article, I examine commercial culture and it is this form of culture that I mean to invoke when I use the term popular culture. My chief examplethe Harry Potter novelsis popular precisely for its fame and the breadth of its audience, rather than for any civic ideals or folk qualities. Although the ideals located in the novels are considered here, the focus is on the books themselves and their function within a capitalist society.

The Normalcy of Popular Culture in Advanced Capitalism

To begin, we cannot make the claim of popular culture that Durkheim makes of crime, that it is common in all societies in all time periods. Popular culture is absent from many societies, and it is historically isolated to those periods in which mechanical production and distribution were technologically affordable and widely practiced. However, popular culture is found in all societies in which capitalism has advanced far enough to include the commodication of culture. I know of no long-standing capitalist system that has not reached such a point. To that end, we can say that popular culture is a normal element of all advanced capitalist societies. According to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos work in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the production and distribution of culture through mechanical processes constitutes a culture industry in which culture is reduced from art to business.

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

73

Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its articial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. (Horkheimer and Adorno 121)

Horkheimer and Adorno indicate by their language that they assume art, apart from popular culture, to be an element of the sacred, and business to be an element of the profane. It is clear from their selection of lm and radio as examples that Horkheimer and Adorno are referring to popular or commercial culture in their discussion of the culture industry. The notion that popular culture furthers a selflegitimating ideology leads Horkheimer and Adorno to claim that the culture industry becomes a lter for all forms of culture. Eventually, popular culture becomes indistinguishable from other forms of cultureall culture becomes popular culture. We see this today in the popularity of Shakespeare movies, the commercialization of classical music, and the mainstream character of alternative rock music. Horkheimer and Adorno were both founding members of the Frankfurt School, a group of German/Jewish intellectuals operating in the 1920s out of Germany and later from the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University during the 1930s and 1940s. Other scholars who were part of, or associated with, the Frankfurt School include Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Gershom Scholem, and Georg Lukacs. The Frankfurt School, particularly Horkheimer and Adornos discussion of the culture industry, offered one of the rst critical analyses of commercial culture. Adorno and Horkheimers theories are less accepted in scholarly circles now, largely because audience and reception studies have demonstrated that individual participants in mass culture have much more agency than Horkheimer and Adorno assumed; i.e., they are not just passive consumers. But their critique of the production side of culture still resonates and is useful for understanding contemporary concerns such as media ownership, copyright laws, and record industry battles against music piracy online. Contemporary scholarship on popular culture generally begins with this understanding of cultural production and then infuses an

74

Dustin Kidd

understanding of audience agency to produce a more holistic understanding of how culture works in contemporary society.1 Many members of the Frankfurt School argued that the commercialization of culture changed cultural items from art objects into commodities. As the argument goes, the basis of our judgment of these products shifts from aesthetic principles of beauty to capitalist principles of worth and the cost/benet ratio. The negative effects of popular culture were very clear to Walter Benjamin, whose article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argues that mechanical reproduction of art in the form of prints, books, photographs, etc., removes the aura from that work. The work need no longer be experienced within the particular context of its creation and exhibition. Even if I do travel to Paris to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, I go with the image of the painting already in my head from seeing it in art books; I go knowing that I can know all about the painting without seeing it in person; and I go with the notion that if I like it, I can have itas a print, or on a coffee mug, or as a photograph from my disposable camera. The special character of seeing a work of art only in its particular contextwhat Benjamin called the aurais forever gone from the world of art. To put this in modern terms, we may consider the example of music. Music is rarely experienced in the presence of the performers. Most musical experiences happen at home or in the car; the music being played through the radio or on a stereo. The song is a commodity that can be purchased as a tape or CD, or downloaded over the Internet. Even the live experience of music, where the song is heard in the presence of its performers, is a sort of commodity. The music fan who wishes to hear a Britney Spears concert usually has a choice of dates and locations for which concert to attend. But all of the performances are largely the same, because performance itself is mass-produced. Popular performers, selling their commodied concerts, compete as business adversaries for a profitable share of ticket sales. In this schema for cultural production, there is no original, no special moment in which Benjamin might say an aura can be perceived. So, popular culture is an element of capitalism that, at times, has negative consequences. The key issue for my argument is Horkheimer and Adornos sense that commercial culture is a common component of advanced capitalist societies.2 As such, popular culture must be understood by the sociologist as a normal element of these societies,

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

75

regardless of any identiable consequences that seem deplorable. I turn now from the normalcy of popular culture, to its necessity.

Popular Culture as a Space of Norm Production

Social norms, as guides to social behavior, are important mechanisms in social cohesion. Durkheims study of suicide and Robert Mertons study of crime reveal that anomic communities experience higher suicide and crime rates,3 suggesting that adherence to social norms increases ones sense of social importance and responsibility. Popular culture is not the only source of norm production in advanced capitalist societies, but it is perhaps the most important because of its wide distribution. To compare popular culture and crime as sources of social norms, it is important to recognize that many Americans are not aware of all of the laws of their country, state, or community, but they are enormously aware of popular culture. Most crimes never become truly public events; only the major crimes make the news, and few Americans attend trials. So, crime has a very limited role as a means by which norms are produced and distributed. The role of popular culture, in contrast, is quite large. Although no American consumes all of American popular culture, most Americans consume quite a lot of it. In their book The Dominant Ideology Thesis, Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner identify popular culture, in the form of mass media, as the key means by which the ideas of the dominant classes might be transmitted to the whole of society in the era of late capitalism. Although the authors ultimately argue that no dominant ideology is in place in late capitalismbecause the dominant class is too fragmentedthe study nevertheless highlights the fact that popular culture is the most centralized and effective means for dening and distributing the norms of society. Fashion is an excellent example of popular culture serving as the clearinghouse of norms. In the realm of fashion, anything is possible as long as the cheapest cloths can be dyed to any color and cut to any style. So what do I wear and how do I decide? The fashion industry lifts this anxiety from me. I know what to wear when I see it advertised on television and in magazines where these norms of fashion are presented. The norms are reinforced by lm and television actors, and musicians, who embrace the advertised fashions. They are reinforced again when

76

Dustin Kidd

the department store only offers those fashions that have been advertised. Admittedly, the contemporary fashion industry does offer some options, but the realm of possibilities has been signicantly reduced as the many fashion questions that I might have faced have been answered by a narrow group of fashion executives. The norms that popular culture produces are not limited to the realm of expression. Magazines tell us what kinds of sexual practices are now acceptable. Audiences tune in to nance-oriented shows on cable television to learn about the norms of investing. Kindergarteners learn the basic norms of behavior from Barney and Sesame Street. Michael Schudsons work on the efcacy of culture argues that this informal institutionalization of culture leads to such informal social sanctions as social exclusion or a loss of social power for those who have failed to consume enough of the right culture. The matrix of popular culture, with its complexly self-referential character, has become perhaps the chief space in which social norms are negotiated and transmitted throughout society.

Popular Culture and Social Boundaries

The exact norms that any particular culture consumer will internalize will depend on the consumers social location and social roles, which is why popular culture is an important dynamic in the creation and maintenance of social boundaries. The clothing we wear, the music we listen to, and the television we watch not only constitute our identities, but also help to separate our identity categories from others. My love of Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris helps me to nd others who are like me. People who listen to Billy Ray Cyrus or Eminem are not like me, at least not musically. Popular culture offers a complex system of identity creation and separation. Maybe there is an Eminem fan who really should be my friend; fashion, television, lm, and literature may yet bring us together. Bethany Brysons Anything But Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes uses musical dislikes to illustrate class and education-based identity patterns. She nds that cultural univores those who have very narrow cultural toleranceare more likely to be consumers of lowbrow culture. Further, she speculates that elites use broad cultural tolerance as a kind of multicultural capital that protects

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

77

their elite position within an anti-elitist value structure. This multicultural capital still produces exclusion, rst by using a broad knowledge of middle- and low-brow culture as a barrier to low-status univores, and second by rejecting the popular culture that is most associated with the least educated, such as heavy metal and rap music. Bryson demonstrates that distaste is a key element in social stratication. Similarly, Paul Willis nds that popular culture in the form of fashion is an important tool for boundary maintenance among working-class adolescent males. In Learning to Labor, Willis takes as his subject population a group called the lads who actively resist the authority of the school system. The lads dene their identities in contrast to the earoles who embrace school culture, and in contrast to the school itself. As the most visible, personalised and instantly understood element of resistance to staff and ascendancy over earoles clothes have great importance to the lads. The rst signs of a lad coming out is a fairly rapid change in his clothes and hairstyle. The particular form of this alternative dress is determined by outside inuences, especially fashions current in the wider symbolic system of youth culture. At the moment the lads look includes longish well-groomed hair, platform-type shoes, wide collared shirt turned over waisted coat or denim jerkin, plus the still obligatory ared trousers. Whatever the particular form of dress, it is most certainly not school uniform, rarely includes a tie (the second best for many heads if uniform cannot be enforced), and exploits colours calculated to give the maximum distinction from institutional drabness and conformity. There is a clear stereotypical notion of what constitutes institutional clothesSpike, for instance, trying to describe the shape of a collar: You know, like a teachers! (Willis 17) Fashion constitutes and negotiates the boundaries between the lads and the earoles and between the lads and the teachers. It is a shorthand for a distinctive set of values, goals, and practices. To cross the boundary and become a lad, as Willis indicates, requires an embrace of one kind of fashion and a rejection of another. Willis goes on to argue that culture is then a key component of class reproduction.4 The very concept of popular culture implies a kind of cultural stratication. Although it is important to recognize that popular culture generally serves as common culture, in that it is commonly available to all within a given society, it is equally important to recognize the implication of power that is behind the concept. To

78

Dustin Kidd

designate certain culture as popular is often a way of distinguishing that culture which is not high. Paul DiMaggio has written about the complex process that Bostonian elites in the late nineteenth century undertook to designate certain art as high culture. As DiMaggio demonstrates, the goal of this process was to make distinctions between elites and nonelites, and to legitimate the position of the elites. This is a symbolic process, as is made clear by studies that compare the content of high and popular cultures such as those by Herbert Gans or Lawrence Levine. The consequence of this symbolic work is the maintenance of social stratication. In other words, culture is a mechanism of social reproduction, as demonstrated by Bourdieus studies of cultural consumption (1977 and 1984). Bourdieu argues that elites use culture as capitalexchanging cultural knowledge for social or economic capital. The cultural knowledge that is most valuable is precisely that knowledge that is dominated by elites, and for which access by nonelites is often denied. Consumption patterns of popular culture determine who is included and who is excluded from our social groups. They provide an easy reference system for identifying our allies and adversaries. Further, they constitute the meaning of our identities. The ideas that underlie identity categories vary signicantly, due in part to differences in the popular culture that people in these categories consume.

The Rituals of Popular Culture

People who share identity categories have solidarity with one another, thanks to the rituals of popular culture. Teenagers are united by rhythms at the rave and the club; college students come together to watch Must See TV on NBC; rural whites meet on Friday nights for hoe downs and line dancing; Harry Potter fans become friends at book release parties or while standing in line for the movie. These rituals produce feelings of shared sentimentthe excitement and love for Harry Potter and his friends, for instanceand these feelings produce social cohesion by bonding members of society together in relationships of trust and shared purpose. John Fiske explores the audience rituals of television using the concept of audiencing, which is a research method that explores how groups produce meaning through shared cultural consumption, and

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

79

how the meaning that is produced varies by audience. Fiske compares the perceived meaning of the television show Married . . . With Children as it is understood by executives at the Fox television network, by a housewife on a campaign against the shows lack of decency, and by a group of college students who watch the show together on a weekly basis. Fiske only offers direct audience observations from the students, but extrapolates about the Fox executives and about the housewife through analyses of media sources and the show itself. Fiskes descriptions of the college students is important for understanding how popular culture produces rituals that, in turn, produce solidarity. The theme music of the show, Love and Marriage, a Frank Sinatra number from their parents generation, provoked the group into singing along in a vacuous parody of both its older style and older sentiments. A similar parody of their parents taste (as they saw it) hung on the walla somewhat motheaten painting of Elvis on black velvet. The bad taste of the picture was different from the bad taste of the program, for it was their view of teenage culture then as opposed to now. (Fiske 349) The audience sings along together to the theme song, and shares physical space during the period of cultural consumption. The time they spend together watching the show makes them more closely bonded socially, and leaves them with a shared sense of meaning. Specifically, according to Fiske, they share a sense of the meaning of their age-group identity, and its distinction from the identity of their parents. This shared sense of meaning is the basis of group solidarity. Why does solidarity matter? Based on the work of Durkheim, it is clear that solidarity is the basis of social cohesion; the sense of trust that solidarity engenders is a necessary precondition before members of society will take the risky step of investing their resources, time, and selves into their societies. Without solidarity, humans are purely biologicaland not socialentities. In contemporary capitalist societies, popular culture is one of the most important sources of the rituals that produce solidarity because of its widespread and frequent consumption.

Popular Culture and Innovation

In addition to producing solidarity, popular culture also produces innovation. In fact, popular culture is an outcome of technical

80

Dustin Kidd

innovations, such as the printing press and photography. But the market value of popular culture has produced a race for new technologies, whose benets extend beyond the realms of the popular and the cultural. In the area of lm, new technologies such as DVD have not only changed the ways that we view movies, but also have changed the ways that movies are produced. The conceptualization stage of movie production now takes the possibilities of DVD into account, such that the special features on new DVDs are actually part of the initial concept. DVD technology is used for many purposes other than cinema. For instance, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland now offers visitors the opportunity to purchase a digitized copy of The Book of Kells, an ancient religious text, available on DVD. Arguably, the most important area of technological progress as a consequence of popular culture is the Internet. The World Wide Web is largely driven by one of the most nancially successful areas of popular culturepornography. We can thank the porn industry for such important technological advancements as e-commerce and streaming videos (Kriz). These technologies are now widely used for nonpornographic purposes of business and leisure. The innovations of popular culture are not just technical. Presidential politics happened differently after the invention of television than it did previously. Television and other forms of mass media have also innovated the ways that we think about the world. The nightly news, National Geographic, and the Internet have made the international world less foreign. These innovations of popular culture, technical and otherwise, have been key mechanisms of social change.

Popular Culture as the Road to Change

Popular culture goes further than providing the tools for social change; in many cases, it is actually the driving force behind social change. Books in particular have been very important. Upton Sinclairs book The Jungle (1906) led to significant reforms in the American food industry. Harriet Beecher Stowes publication of Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) prepared America for massive reorganization of its racial structure, and is credited as at least a partial cause of the Civil War. More recently, Mary Bray Piphers Reviving Ophelia (1995) caused parents,

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

81

educators, and policymakers to re-evaluate how they understand and inuence the lives of adolescent women. The eld of cultural studies has revealed some surprising social changes that came about as a result of popular culture. For instance, Jennifer Prices Flight Maps includes a chapter that reveals the role that fashion played in the ecology movement. When Women were Women, Men were Men, and Birds were Hats explains how debates about bird hatsa popular womens fashion of the mid-nineteenth centuryactually led to the foundation of The National Audubon Society. As Price explains, the debates reveal a complex dialectic between gender roles, ecology, and fashion. The state-level Audubon societies, which later became The National Audubon Society, had many successes in reducing the popularity of bird hats, but the terms of the debate were the issues of womanhood and morality, with tacit arguments about economics and class. Contemporary spaces of popular culture that lead, or may lead, to social change are numerous and varied. On television, news-based ex poses consistently challenge public policy, while Oprah leads a revolution of the spirit that certainly marks a change in television programming, if not in the lives of its viewers. Magazines such as Ms. challenge the norms of Americas gendered power structure and rap music continues to offer critiques of race-based power. The weighty role that popular culture performs in social change makes it an important element in the dynamics of contemporary social life.

By Way of Example
We have ve reasons why popular culture is necessary for America. How does this list of claims work when applied to one specific piece of popular culture? I take, as my example, one of the most phenomenally successful pieces of recent popular cultureHarry Potter. J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter and the Sorcerors Stone, and its sequels and spin-offs are a product and export of England, which is certainly an advanced capitalist society. The most documented reception of Rowlings novels is in America where the role of the books as a commodity is clear. There are now six Harry Potter novels and two spinoffs. In order of release, the novels are Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner

82

Dustin Kidd

of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Two additional novels are expected in the next few years. The two spin-offs, released in 2001 as charity fundraisers, are Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages. The novels tell of the adventures of Harry Potter, an orphaned boy with magical powers who is raised by his nonmagical aunt and uncle. At the start of the rst book, Harry discovers his magical abilities and learns of his parents death at the hands of an evil wizard. He leaves his aunt and uncles house to attend Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Each book tells of one of Harrys years at Hogwarts and the many escapades he has in avoiding his nemesis Draco Malfoy, ghting the wizard who killed his parents, battling through difcult courses on magic, and having fun with his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. These books are expensive items, particularly at rst release, yet their early hardback sales far exceed that of any other book on the market. They are heavily promoted by stores like Barnes & Noble, and on Web sites like Amazon.com. As a marketing technique, the publishers have used different cover illustrations to attract different audiences, including versions that are more appealing to adults. They have even adjusted the language of the books to suit the audience. Awkwardly British terms are replaced by American equivalents. In the rst novel, this includes the changing of spellingslike the shift from moustache to mustacheas well as the changing of termslike the transformation of Sellotape into Scotch tape, and trainers into sneakers. Even the title is changed. The rst book was released in England as Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, but in the United States, philosopher has a more academic and less mystical connotation; thus, the shift to sorcerer.5 The books stand as a powerful example of the commodication of culture that is prevalent in late capitalism. Owing to their massive audience and broad appeal, the Potter novels are an extremely important source of social norms. This happens rst with the content of the novels. The books take place within a magical realm that co-exists with the known nonmagical world. In the magical world, otherwise inanimate objects become very much alive and are given subjectivity, such as the talking portraits that guard several doors at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Readers of the novels recognize the violation of their taken-for-granted beliefs, and become more aware of the norms by which they structure their lives. But the

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

83

magical world is not anomic. Thanks to the Ministry of Magic, all wizards and witches live by certain rules. For instance, school-aged children are not allowed to perform magic during their summer vacations. So while the specific norms of the nonmagical social world are violated, the importance of norms is not violated. Second, there is the reception of the novels in the context of contemporary America. The dominant role that these novels played at the top of the bestseller lists attests to their institutionalization in American culture. There is a sense in which you just have to read them, or so you would think from listening to Potter devotees, children and adults alike. Literary critic Harold Bloom, perhaps the most vocal Potter antagonist, has commented in many of his writings on the Western canon that the literary critic is most concerned with the question of which literature deserves to be read again (The Western Canon, How to Read and Why). In an editorial titled Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes, he says of the Potter novels, One can reasonably doubt that Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone is going to prove a classic of childrens literature, and How to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, perhaps also to make an end (A26). Despite Blooms nose-thumbing at Harry Potter it is Rowlings novels that receive the most reads and rereads in contemporary America. Harry Potter has become the norm. As a norm maker, how does Harry Potter dene social boundaries? Two specific boundaries seem important: the boundary between legitimate culture and illegitimate extra-curricular culture,6 and the boundary between religious conservatism and spiritual liberalism. The rst boundary has been negotiated by the school system, the second by the institutions of faith. Harry Potter represents Bourdieus concept of illegitimate extra-curricular culture in that it is not generally assigned by schools, although there is some indication that this is beginning to change; largely, it is leisure and not assigned reading. Yet it is credited with increasing American adolescent literacy because so many young people have actively pursued the chance to read the Potter novels. This is a boundary violation that is disconcerting to the schools. Many school systems have actually banned the books from school property. In doing so, they have afrmed Harry Potters position as illegitimate culture, in contrast to the legitimacy of the novels that are assigned by schools. But the publishing industry has continued to challenge the boundary by arguing that Rowlings novels should be

84

Dustin Kidd

legitimate culture. Beachams Sourcebooks has published Exploring Harry Potter (Schafer), a book that demonstrates for teachers how the Potter novels can be used to teach children such basics of literacy as irony and character development. So the boundary is still under negotiation. The second boundary that Harry Potter helps to dene is within the realm of faith. Many faith groups have reacted negatively to the Potter novels because of the significant role that magic plays in the premise of the books. For religious conservatives, magic is generally associated with evil, but in Harry Potter, the hero-protagonist is portrayed as a powerful wizard. This framing of magic as good is troubling to these conservatives who have reacted by discouraging the reading of Harry Potter in their communities. Although the books afrm a distinction between good and evilrarely seen in postmodern literature but viewed with favor by religious conservativesthey also suggest a spiritual liberalism. This liberalism embraces magic as a constitutive element of the good. Not every reader of Harry Potter believes in magicprobably, most do notbut every reader must be comfortable with the possibility of magic. Magic is also bound up in many of the rituals that surround the novels. The most basic ritual is the actual reading of the novel, which is not a particularly social event. Most readers will consume the novels in privacy, although some may read together. But private reading becomes a social experience when it becomes an important feature of conversations. Formal conversations, organized by bookstores and libraries, and informal conversations at the cafeteria table are likely to be lled with Potter-mania. In these conversations, readers work together to produce the meaning of the novels. They become an interpretive community, just as the readers of romance novels form an interpretive community in Janice Radways study Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies. As an interpretive community, they have their own distinct ways of making sense of the novelswhat Radway calls a literacy. For Radway, literacy is a qualitative variable that recognizes that different readers have different styles of reading. In their discussions of Harry Potter, these readers bond and develop a strong sense of solidarity with one another. The rituals of Harry Potter occasionally become more intense, particularly when new novels are released, or at the release of the lm versions. When the fourth novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released in 2000, my local Barnes & Noble held a release party the

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

85

night before the book was to be sold, so that book sales could begin promptly at midnight. I arrived at 10:00 p.m. to observe the festivities, and found a crowd of over one thousand people crammed into the store. Most of these partygoers were in full Potter regalia, dressed in the garb of wizards and witches. Less than half of them were children. At one point, I spotted a middle-aged woman in the philosophy section dressed as Moaning Myrtle, a ghost who haunts the girls restroom of Hogwarts. She was cloaked in white, with a toilet seat hanging around her neck. At the back of the store, a clerk was leading a game of Harry Potter trivia. According to this same clerk, the store sold 740 copies of the novel in that single evening, from exactly 12:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. This kind of hysteria over popular culture produces emotional energy that unites the group. As Randall Collins explains in a sociological primer, from the excitement of mass gatherings, crusades are born and revolutions are made (40). The release of the latest Harry Potter novel may not spark a revolution (provided the stores do not sell out too quickly) but is an important element of social cohesion. It unites the community in the pursuit of a common goalPotter. If Harry Potter does not produce a revolution, does it produce any sort of innovation? I know of no technical innovation that has occurred as a result of Rowlings novels, but the books have changed the publishing industry in important ways. For instance, as a result of the Potter novels, a new list of childrens bestsellers was formed. This allowed the Potter novels to take their appropriate place as bestsellers while freeing up the primary bestseller list for more adult novelsof course, that is despite the fact of a large adult readership for Rowlings books. This is an innovation in literature; the invention of a mechanism that measures bestsellers within audience categories. The novels may also be seen as a new kind of book, as a consequence of the massive size of the Potter phenomenon. New novels may soon follow that try to capture the same scope of readership and attention, such as Eoin Colfers Artemis Fowl series and Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials trilogy. And of course, for readers of Harry Potter, the actual writing of the novels is, in some ineffable way, an innovation in literature. For many fans, there simply has never been anything like Potter. If Harry Potter paves the road for social change, it will be as a consequence of the issue of literacy, in the quantitative sense of measured reading ability. The novels can be credited for forging many new readerspeople who may not have become readers were it not for

86

Dustin Kidd

these particular novels. Perhaps this change will effect the removal of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate culture, such that novels like Harry Potter will be appreciated within the institutions of legitimate culture without losing their popular status. Based on this example, the list of societys needs for popular culture does hold up when applied to a specific piece of popular culture. However, the list is also a useful way of making sense of popular culture as a whole industry. Some social needs that are not fullled by some pieces of popular culture will be fullled by others. Deliberately or not, the industry that produces popular culture regulates the fulllment of these needs.

Conclusion
We must not forget that the advantage of distinguishing the normal from the abnormal is principally to throw light upon practice. (Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method 94) To some, popular culture is bizarre; to others, it is evil. For most of us, popular culture is everyday, taken-for-granted. But it has particular functions and it exists for a reason. The primary reason that I have isolated here is capitalism. Popular culture is a means by which culture generates profit. But once in place, popular culture then co-opts many other important social functions. Norm generation, boundary maintenance, ritual development, innovation, and social change are the key social functions to which popular culture contributes. To claim that popular culture serves important functions in society is not to claim that it must do so in a particular way. While recognizing the value of popular culture as a social institution, it is still necessary to critique the content of this culture as well as the particular mechanisms by which it is produced, distributed, valorized, and interpreted. To that end, the criticisms of popular culture that were described at the start of this article are still open for debate. Although many critiques have been leveled against the Frankfurt School approachparticularly for its totalizing approach to the audience members of a mass culture, which fails to account for audience agency newer research still nds much cause for concern in the production and reception of commercial culture. The world of market research, reality television, and professional wrestling may really be the cause of some

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

87

social ills at the start of the twenty-rst century, but the way that we respond to these concerns must account for the important role that popular culture performs in generating social cohesion and individual identity.
NOTES
The author wishes to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for research support, and Anne Wallin, John Worozbyt, Shannon Anderson, and the JPC reviewers for their comments. Janice Radways Reading the Romance is a particularly effective model of this form of scholarship because it demonstrates how adult female romance readers actually participate in the formation of their own subordinate positions within patriarchy through their engagement with romance novels. Radways analysis includes both the production of the novels by the publishing houses, and the consumption of the novels (or the production of the meaning of the novels) by the readers. To claim that popular culture is a common element in society is not to say that it constitutes a monolithic common culture. Popular culture is fragmented and contentious, as many studies of audience reception indicate. At this point, the reader may respond that an increase in crime rates should not be problematic because of the important functions of crime. However, although Durkheims work identies crime as normal and necessary, that does not mean there is not a level at which crime becomes pathological, such that its prevalence in society ceases to be conducive to social health. For an analysis of the use of culture in boundary maintenance for the upper classes, see Lamonts Money, Morals, and Manners and DiMaggios Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America, Parts I and II. I thank Sulove Bothra, a student in my course on American popular culture, for systematically comparing the American and British versions of the novel. My terminology here is from Bourdieus Distinction.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

Works Cited
Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner. The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1980. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Binder, Amy. Constructing Racial Rhetoric: Media Depictions of Harm in Rap and Heavy Metal. American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 753 67. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. . Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes. Wall Street Journal 11 July 2000. A26.

88

Dustin Kidd

. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. Power and Ideology in Education. Eds. Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. 487 511. . Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Bryson, Bethany. Anything but Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes. American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 884 99. Colfer, Eoin. Artemis Fowl. New York: Hyperion, 2001. . Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. New York: Hyperion, 2002. Collins, Randall. Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. DiMaggio, Paul. Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America, Parts I and II. Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33 50, 303 22. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Ed. George Simpson, Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: Free Press, 1951. . The Rules of Sociological Method. Ed. Steven Lukes, Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1982. Fiske, John. Audiencing: A Cultural Studies Approach to Watching Television. Poetics 21 (1992): 345 59. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture & High Culture; An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. Revised and updated edition. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder, 1992. Jhally, Sut. Dreamworlds 2 [video-recording]. Media Education Foundation, 1995. Kriz, Heidi.Porn Industry Knows Its Worth. Wired 13 Apr. 1999. ` Lamont, Michele. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Merton, Robert K. Social Structure and Anomie. American Sociological Review 3 (1938): 672 82. Pipher, Mary Bray. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Price, Jennifer. Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture

89

Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass. New York: Random House, 1995. . The Subtle Knife. New York: Random House, 1997. . The Amber Spyglass. New York: Random House, 2000. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. . Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Eds. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. 465 86. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1997. . Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1999. . Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1999. . Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2000. . Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. London: Scholastic Trade, 2001. . Quidditch Through the Ages. London: Scholastic Trade, 2001. . Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2003. . Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2005. Schafer, Elizabeth D. Exploring Harry Potter. Osprey, FL: Beacham Publishing Corp., 2000. Schudson, Michael. How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efcacy of Symbols. Theory and Society 18 (1989): 153 80. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Penguin Books, [1906] 1936. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Toms Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly. New York: Modern Library, [1852] 2001. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UPress, 1977.
Dustin Kidd is a sociologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he teaches social theory and the sociology of popular culture. His current research focuses on the intersections of art and politics in the context of government funding for the arts.