Jeffrey C. Alexander’s Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004)

Description

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of “cultural trauma”–and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the “meaning making process” as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

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