Performativity has emerged as a critical new idea across the humanities and social sciences, from literary and cultural studies to the study of gender and the philosophy of action. In this volume, Jeffrey Alexander demonstrates how performance can reorient our study of politics and society. Alexander develops a cultural pragmatics that shifts cultural sociology from texts to gestural meanings. Positioning social performance between ritual and strategy, he lays out the elements of social...
In this book Jeffrey C. Alexander develops an original social theory of trauma and uses it to carry out a series of empirical investigations into social suffering around the globe. Alexander argues that traumas are not merely psychological but collective experiences, and that trauma work plays a key role in defining the origins and outcomes of critical social conflicts. He outlines a model of trauma work that relates interests of carrier groups, competing narrative identifications of victim and...
Pionero de la sociología cultural, Alexander ha creado un nuevo modelo sociológico para aproximarse al estudio del tradicional problema del binomio cultura-sociedad. Este volumen reúne una serie de influyentes ensayos de amplio alcance, donde el autor insiste en que, a pesar de la racionalización y de la diferenciación, el mundo moderno continúa «encantado» en aspectos fundamentalmente significativos; que el pensamiento mágico e irracional conserva su centralidad para el individuo y para la...
