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

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 and experience, from that embedded in the physical making of the bell to all the symbolic and 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 and organizations, and the civil and women’s rights movements. But devastating economic and social changes seem to have fractured the everyday cultural forms of today, made them invisible, and unwound their links with political organization: the bell is cracked anew. But human labors, physical and cultural, continue even in “new times.” Ethnographic social science must recognize, record, and dignify their many forms, seeking, where possible, to make visibility a means to self-direction and repair.

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