Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 052167462X ISBN 13: 9780521674621

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Taking a "cultural pragmatic" approach to meaning, the contributors suggest a new way of looking at the continuum that stretches between ritual and strategic action. They do so by developing, for the first time, a model of "social performance". This volume offers the first systematic and analytical framework that transforms the metaphor into a social theory and applies it to a series of facinating large-scale social and cultural processes--from September 11 and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair, to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Willy Brandt's famous "kneefall" before the Warsaw momument.

About this title

Book Description

This pathbreaking volume makes a powerful case for a new direction in cultural sociology and for social scientific analysis more generally. Taking a "cultural pragmatic" approach to meaning, the contributors suggest a new way of looking at the continuum that stretches between ritual and strategic action. They do so by developing, for the first time, a model of "social performance" that applies not only to micro but to macro sociology. Buildings on works by Austin, Derrida, Durkheim, Goffman and Turner, Social Performance offers a new and important perspective.

About the Author

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology and also Chair of the Sociology Department at Yale University. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, and Sztompka (2004), and the editor (with Philip Smith) of The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2005).

Bernhard Giesen holds the chair for macro-sociology in the Department of History and Sociology at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. Among the more than twenty books he has written and edited are The Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Cambridge 1998) and Triumph and Trauma (2004).

Jason L. Mast is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Visiting Fellow at Yale University's Department of Sociology and its Center for Cultural Sociology.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 052167462X
• ISBN 13: 9780521674621
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 392
• Editor: Alexander Jeffrey C., Giesen Bernhard, Mast Jason L.