Studying culture through imaginaries

摘要: Even though social imaginaries’ philosophical relevance is ever more widely acknowledged, it remains a rather strange intruder for cultural sociologists and anthropologists. How individuals make sense of the world they live in through the structures underlying their thoughts, actions and experiences, how they evaluate each other’s and their own behaviour, or how they use widely available narratives to understand an ever more complex stream of events: all these descriptions given by Charles Taylor (2004, 23) are exactly what the social-scientific study of culture is about. And yet some scholars working from within these social sciences have argued precisely that social imaginaries might help provide a way out of some of the impasses in which their disciplines have been caught (Appadurai 1996; Strauss 2006).In this chapter, we therefore explore the conceptual and heuristic relevance of social imaginaries for …