XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

638

Cultural Performance: Reconceptualizing Social Change in Modern Societies

RC35 Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (host committee)

Language: Spanish and English

May cultural sociology provide new insights for the understanding of social change in contemporary societies? The concept of cultural or social performance has been proposed by Jeffrey Alexander as a key one for the renovation of cultural sociology. In complex and differentiated contemporary societies, rituals are unable to maintainsocial cohesion, but social performance may achieve the re-fusion of those social elements that are no longer cohesive. Therefore, performance can be seen as a result of social change. But, furthermore, performance is able to foster social change, as it happens in social mobilizations that generate great charismatic power. This session deals with the ways in which cultural performance may encourage social change, with the relationship between performance and processes such as differentiation and de-differentation, and with the role of performance beyond Western modernity or in a variety of modernities.