Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction: symbolic action in theory and practice: the cultural pragmatics of symbolic action
- 1 Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy
- 2 From the depths of despair: performance, counterperformance, and “September 11”
- 3 The cultural pragmatics of event-ness: the Clinton / Lewinsky affair
- 4 Social dramas, shipwrecks, and cockfights: conflict and complicity in social performance
- 5 Performing a “new” nation: the role of the TRC in South Africa
- 6 Performing opposition or, how social movements move
- 7 Politics as theatre: an alternative view of the rationalities of power
- 8 Symbols in action: Willy Brandt's kneefall at the Warsaw Memorial
- 9 The promise of performance and the problem of order
- 10 Performance art
- 11 Performing the sacred: a Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn in the social sciences
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
- References
4 - Social dramas, shipwrecks, and cockfights: conflict and complicity in social performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction: symbolic action in theory and practice: the cultural pragmatics of symbolic action
- 1 Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy
- 2 From the depths of despair: performance, counterperformance, and “September 11”
- 3 The cultural pragmatics of event-ness: the Clinton / Lewinsky affair
- 4 Social dramas, shipwrecks, and cockfights: conflict and complicity in social performance
- 5 Performing a “new” nation: the role of the TRC in South Africa
- 6 Performing opposition or, how social movements move
- 7 Politics as theatre: an alternative view of the rationalities of power
- 8 Symbols in action: Willy Brandt's kneefall at the Warsaw Memorial
- 9 The promise of performance and the problem of order
- 10 Performance art
- 11 Performing the sacred: a Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn in the social sciences
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
- References
Summary
Introduction
Since its post-positivist intersection with culture in the 1960s, sociological theory has taken myriad forms. Longstanding concerns have returned in new form, as a deeper and more detailed understanding of the symbolic has reorganized attempts to theorize social action and social structure. After the structuralist moment, sociological theorists have returned to praxis in its various forms: habitus, structuration, communicative action. The overarching narrative has been: “after the text, practices,” as if by returning to praxis we can return to the real, the political, and the individual.
This move to pragmatics has, often covertly, undercut the attempt to take culture seriously, to analyze the thickness and depth of symbolic structures. Against this tide, the strong program in cultural sociology has continued to emphasize the autonomy of culture and the usefulness of the textual metaphor for understanding it, and remained unwilling to commit to a crude version of the meaning-as-use theorem. Now, however, cultural sociology has turned to the questions of contingency, agency, and creativity; in other words, it has taken up “cultural pragmatics,” thus answering the call to theorize action without reducing meaning.
Part of this project has been the delineation of a general analytic schema of social performance, which, drawing upon theatre studies, analytic philosophy, and dramaturgical sociology, provides a framework for interpreting events in terms of what it takes to make meaning walk and talk.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social PerformanceSymbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, pp. 146 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
References
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