Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Truely a groundbreaking work, and is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in the understanding of modern social and political action."
Marvin Carlson, TDR:The Drama Review
Synopsis
Edited volume that uniquely attempts to synthesize sociological and performance studies theories with conceptual frameworks.
Synopsis
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: symbolic action in theory and practice: the cultural pragmatics of symbolic action Jeffrey C. Alexander and Jason L. Mast; 1. Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy Jeffrey C. Alexander; 2. From the depths of despair: performance, counterperformance, and 'September 11' Jeffrey C. Alexander; 3. The cultural pragmatics of event-ness: the Clinton/Lewinsky affair Jason L. Mast; 4. Social dramas, shipwrecks and cockfights: conflict and complicity in social performance Isaac Reed; 5. Performing a 'new' nation: the role of the TRC in South Africa Tanya Goodman; 6. Performing opposition or, how social movements move Ron Eyerman; 7. Politics as theater: an alternative view of the rationalities of power David E. Apter; 8. Symbols in action: Willy Brandt's kneefall at the Warsaw monument Valentin Rauer; 9. The promise of performance and the problem of order Kay Junge; 10. Performance art Bernhard Giesen; 11. Performing the sacred: a Durkheimian perspective on the performance turn in the social sciences Bernhard Giesen.