Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
Jeffrey Alexander
Abstract
In this collaboratively authored work, five 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, the chapters 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 ... More
Keywords: social trauma, social responsibility, Nazi Holocaust, slavery, September 11th, social narratives, meaning making, social groups, constructivism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520235946 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: March 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520235946.001.0001 |
