september 13: kieran healy
september 15: robert bellah
selections from habits of the heart (co-authored with: richard madsen, william sullivan, ann swidler and steven tipton)
september 20: jeffrey alexander
“discourse of civil society” from the meanings of social life (2005)
“imagining heroes” and “working the binaries” from the performance of politics (2010) [apologies for having a line sort of cut off on a few of the early pages. i hope it won’t affect your comprehension (why not make copiers book sized?). also, i have included the first page of the chapter that follows (“working the boundaries”), which i did not include because this already a lot, but if you want to get a feel for it (and i might fill in the blanks in class…)]
[[[yes, this is kind of a lot of reading, but the first reading nicely builds on our discussion from monday on the culture of politics, and the second bit is a (fairly) readable analysis of the 2008 presidential elections, so it’s not too bad. i hope… if you find yourself pressed for time, focus on the 2008 election readings, and just scan at the main points in the civil society chapter. that should suffice in a pinch.]]]
think about what makes this “theory” and what makes this “durkheimian” (or not!)
september 22: jeffrey alexander
“on the social construction of moral universals: the holocaust from war crime to trauma drama”
we explore the deepest edges of evil, and how it is both a social construction and denies its social constructedness
september 27: benedict anderson
selections from imagined communities — the beginning and near the end.
consider the shared interest in both imagination and the media (and also think about how anderson is not durkheimian, but actually, gasp, a marxist!)
HOMEWORK! TBA
september 29: erving goffman
although he also probably isn’t a perfect fit for post-durkheim, he does build on the ideas of performance and normative codes that alexander explored, taking them in a quite different direction
selections from the presentation of self: