Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T18:02:39.966Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The cultural pragmatics of event-ness: the Clinton / Lewinsky affair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2009

By
Jason L. Mast
Edited by
Jeffrey C. Alexander ,
Bernhard Giesen  and
Jason L. Mast
Jason L. Mast
Affiliation:
Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles; Visiting fellow, Yale University
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Bernhard Giesen
Affiliation:
Universität Konstanz, Germany
Jason L. Mast
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Imagined communities generate events that compel community-wide attention, regardless of size or degree of social and cultural differentiation. Early in the twentieth century Durkheim famously argued there “can be no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality” ([1912] 1995: 429). Rituals, he specified, represent the processes through which solidarity and collective identity are rejuvenated. While social and cultural differentiation has made ritual-like processes in twenty-first-century America more difficult to sustain, this imagined community (Anderson 1983) continues to produce events that draw issues of collective identity and solidarity to the fore of its individuals' consciences (cf. Larson and Wagner-Pacifici 2001).

Contemporary ritual-like events, however, differ markedly from the processes Durkheim described. They are subject to much higher degrees of conflict, disconsensus, and contingency. Victor Turner (1969, 1974, 1982) responded to this critical fact when he pushed his ritual framework towards the theory of social dramas. Social dramas represent events in the making that compel community-wide attention, generating narratives, oftentimes conflicting, that define and explain what has occurred and its seriousness. The Clinton/Lewinsky Affair, which dominated the national spotlight in 1998, was just such a drama. It appeared to erupt from an initial occurrence for which the vast majority of the country's citizens wanted, if not demanded, an explanation and some form of redressive action.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Performance
Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual
 , pp. 115 - 145
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Culture and Political Crisis: ‘Watergate’ and Durkheimian Sociology,” pp. 187–224 in Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Smith, Phillip. 1993. “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies.” Theory and Society 22: 151–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Smith, Phillip 1998. “Cultural Sociology or Sociology of Culture? Towards a Strong Program for Sociology's Second Wind.” Sociologie et Société 30, 1: 107–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. [1968] 1977a. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland 1977b. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill & Wang.Google Scholar
Christensen, Terry. 1987. Reel Politics: American Political Movies from “Birth of the Nation” to “Platoon.”New York: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dayan, Daniel and Katz, Elihu. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edles, Laura. 1998. Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy After Franco. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61: 420–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” pp. 73–93 in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gibson, James William. 1994. Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1951. “Symbols of Class Status.” British Journal of Sociology 2, 4: 294–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jameson, Frederic. 1982. “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” pp. 68–91 in Representing Kenneth Burke, ed. White, Hayden and Brose, Margaret. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Kane, Anne. 1991. “Cultural Analysis in Historical Sociology: The Analytic and Concrete Forms of the Autonomy of Culture.” Sociological Theory 9: 53–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Neal. 1999. Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S.Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Larson, Magali Sarfatti and Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. 2001. “The Dubious Place of Virtue: Reflections on the Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton and the Death of the Political Event in America.” Theory and Society 30: 735–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lukes, Steven. 1975. “Political Ritual and Social Integration.” Sociology 2: 289–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molotch, Harvey and Lester, Marilyn. 1974. “News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals.” American Sociological Review 39: 101–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukerji, Chandra and Schudson, Michael. 1991. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1985. “The Linguistic Sign,” pp. 28–46 in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert, E. Innis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Schechner, Richard. 1977. Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976. New York: Drama Book Specialists.Google Scholar
Saussure, Ferdinand 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schudson, Michael. 1992. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Barry and Holyfield, Lori. 1998. “Nixon Postmodern. (Richard Nixon).” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560: 96–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shils, Edward and Young, Michael. 1953. “The Meaning of the Coronation.” Sociological Review 1: 63–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smelser, Neil J. 1963. Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Philip. 1991. “Codes and Conflict: Toward a Theory of War as Ritual.” Theory and Society 20: 103–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sobchack, Thomas and Sobchack, Vivian. 1987. An Introduction to Film. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.Google Scholar
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51: 273–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.Google Scholar
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin E. 1986. The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, Robert. 1999. Shadow: Five Presidencies and the Legacy of Watergate. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Wuthnow, Robert. 1987. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×