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Social Performance
This pathbreaking volume makes a powerful case for a new
direction in cultural sociology and for social scientific anal-
ysis 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. This new model is relevant not only to con-
temporary analysis but parative and historical issues,
and it is as sensitive to power as it is to cultural structures.
The metaphor of performance has long been used by sociol-
ogists and humanists to explore not only the social world
but literary texts, but this volume offers the first system-
atic and analytical framework that transforms the metaphor
into a social theory and applies it to a series of fascinating
large-scale social and cultural processes – from September 11
and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair, to the South African Truth
and mission and Willy Brandt’s famous
“kneefall” before the Warsaw Memorial. Building on works
by Austin and Derrida on the one side, and Durkheim, Goff-
man and Turner on the other, Social Performance offers a
new perspective that will be of great interest to scholars and
students alike in the social sciences, humanities, and theatre
arts.
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), Cul-
tural Trauma and Collective Identity (with Eyerman, Giesen,
Smelser, and Sztompka) (2004), and the editor (with Philip
Smith) of The panion to Durkheim (2005).
bernhard giesen holds the chair for macro-sociology
in the Department of History and Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Konstanz (Germany) and is a Visiting Professo