Product Description: A collection of original articles that explore social aspects of the phenomenon of icon. Having experienced the benefits and realized the limitations of so called 'linguistic turn', sociology has recently acknowledged a need to further expand its horizons.

Product Description: Taking a "cultural pragmatic" approach to meaning, the contributors suggest a new way of looking at the continuum that stretches between ritual and strategic action. They do so by developing, for the first time, a model of "social performance"...read more

Product Description: This volume brings together essays by such eminent scholars like Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Mary Douglas, Thomas Luckmann, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jan Assmann on the topic of politics and religion. The relationship between religious and cultural visions on the one hand and socio-political structures on the other becomes elaborated from a wide historical and culturalist perspective...read more

Product Description: This book deals with triumphant and tragic heroes, with victims and perpetrators as archetypes of the Western imagination. A major recent change in Western societies is that memories of triumphant heroism-for example, the revolutionary uprising of the people-are increasingly replaced by the public remembrance of collective trauma of genocide, slavery and expulsion...read more

Product 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This book proposes a theory of collective and national identity based on culture and language rather than power and politics. Applying this to what he calls Germany's "axial age," Bernhard Giesen shows how the codes of nineteenth-century German identity in turn became those of the divided Germany between 1945 and 1989...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Macro-Micro Link. Hardcover.