Taylor offers an interesting analysis of the ways in which societies conceive of themselves:
By social imaginery, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectuual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how thigs go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. 'Modern Social Imagineries' p. 23
To talk about a social 'theory' is not enough to capture this, because people don't think of their societies in terms of a theory so much as in terms of legends, myths, values and images. However, theories can infiltrate the social imagineries by a kind of trickle-down effect.
1 comment:
I can't help thinking, when reading taylor talk about the 'social imaginary', that he's simply coming up with a new name for a concept that's been around for a long time: 'tradition.' Am I missing something? When the passage is read with 'tradition' substituted for 'social imaginary', is anything lost? Might is just be that 'tradition' has a scary (religious!) sound, perhaps making it come off as un-academic?
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