The micro-foundations of the American culture wars can be located by investigating informal accounts, narratives, and other forms of public discourse. We focus on the accounts of selfproclaimed Christian believers who are Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fans in order to uncover the nuanced ways they address the internal conflict between their religious beliefs and their leisure practices. Because American culture consists of multiple moral orders, individuals seek answers to questions about right and wrong in a great variety of social fields, including popular culture. By analyzing the accounts of Christian MMA fans who purposively use the Internet as a confessional device for claims making, we show that the culture wars are as much about conflicts within individuals as they are about conflicts between them. The culture wars are experienced by individuals offering and being offered confessional accounts of morality. We argue that these accounts and related boundary work are externalized products of an internalized culture war.

Cultural approaches to the study of urban life have enjoyed brief bursts of popularity within the social sciences over the past century. Although many urban sociologists acknowledge that meanings, symbols, narratives, and feelings, in other words local culture, help shape urban places, relatively few take this notion any further. In this article, I first lay out the foundations of cultural approaches to the study of urban life. Second, I argue for the continued significance of the distinction between space and place. Third, I describe a contemporary stream of urban sociology called the urban culturalist perspective. Fourth, I describe important insights gleaned from studies embracing cultural urbanist approaches to an area of urban research receiving increasing attention: gentrification. Fifth, and finally, I outline a few ways in which micro‐cultural investigations of urban phenomena provide useful opportunities for public sociology.

Disputes over historical representations often revolve around competing narratives about the past, but the processes through which these narratives are constructed are often neglected. In this paper, we extend the concept of collective memory using Brekhus’ notion of social marking to investigate the creation and maintenance of collective representations of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. We analyze the claims made in speeches and communiqués produced by two opposing groups—the Mexican government and the Zapatista movement—in a decades-long dispute over land and indigenous rights. Moreover, we argue that processes of social marking can further explain the selective nature of collective memory, that is, how certain parts of the past are remem­bered and emphasized while others are de-emphasized and forgotten. Also, in our analysis of social marking, we identify a naturalization process that is utilized by actors in mnemonic battles to recast their constructed representations of the past as natural, pure, and true. We close with a discussion of how understanding the naturalization process as outlined here can shed light on current political and historical disputes.

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Community is a concept infamous for its ambiguity. The entry examines the career of the concept, tracing the contours of major debates over its meaning and existence, and describes some areas of consensus. The emphasis in this entry is on face‐to‐face community in urban settings, but there is also a brief discussion of virtual communities.