Social Imaginary
The 2009-2010 working group will examine how memory and identity mediate the production of social imaginaries in past societies. Disciplines across the academy recognize how individual and collective imaginations are sources of new cultural forms and modes of being. Much research has concentrated on the social imaginaries of contemporary societies, that is, how they envision their social milieu and the relationships that structure them. Upon becoming broadly shared, these imaginaries have motivated new collective practices such as democracy, immigration, and religion. The works of Benedict Anderson, and more recently, Charles Taylor, have charted how new modes of cultural distribution, print media, and television, for example, disseminate imaginaries to groups not engaged in face-to-face relationships. While the modes and intensity through which these visions circulate are new, their production is not. Rather, social imaginaries appeared long before the advent of modernity.
Despite the antiquity of this practice, our knowledge of the production of modern iterations
cannot merely be applied to past societies, a point from which working group participants
disembark. The social imaginaries of past societies were disseminated through different modes
and varied in intensity and homogeneity. Oral communication and face-to-face relationships
dominated while the circulation of texts was often limited to literate elites. Participants will
therefore investigate discrete iterations of past social imaginaries in the Near Eastern and
Mediterranean worlds, paying particular attention to the ways that such visions were prescribed
overtly and covertly in the material record – text-artifacts, architecture, and objects. In these
regions, the most salient social imaginaries (e.g., Hellenism, Christianity, Islam) prescribed
social orders and dictated ideologies that often co-occurred with political and economic
expansion. The working group will focus its attention on less studied instances in these and other
regions. Additionally, social imaginaries in other past as well as contemporary societies will be
examined for comparative purposes.
Questions for further inquiry include:
- How were social imaginaries produced and disseminated?
- How were they challenged or resisted?
- What aspects of social imaginaries are accessible through its textual and material cultural productions and what aspects are not?
- How did the promotion of social imaginaries draw on as well as inform collective memories and presupposed identities?
- How did past societies practice social imaginaries?
- How is the study of past social imaginaries different from the study of their modern iterations?