Symbolic Mediation and Political Autonomy: A Reinterpretation of Geertz's Concept of Expression
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Politics can maintain its autonomy despite economic and technological forces only if it acknowledges that rational action is influenced by cultural meanings deeply intertwined with the social life of specific historical communities. Clifford Geertz’s work on ideology illuminated how symbolic systems mediate and integrate human actions in their public forms. Human actions, even in their elementary forms, are already mediated and articulated by symbolic systems. Therefore, Geertz develops an interpretive strategy to reveal the entanglement between the surface of social phenomena and the depth of symbolic systems. While symbolic anthropology emphasises the significance of rhetoric and figurative language, cultural pragmatics adds a power dynamic to this focus on structural codes. This sensitivity to the active strategic utilisation of meanings in specific situations can bring back a historical sense of collective agency into sociology. In this context, if social action is considered to be inherently symbolic and historical, the current sociological emphasis on the conflict between the reality of social life and its distorted representations cannot be justified without integrating this force of distortion into processes of symbolization and legitimization. |
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