Symbolic Crusades
2021-07-31 07:04:17.03795+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
I have two books on my nightstand right now: Joseph R. Gusfield's "Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement", and Byung-Chul Han's "The disappearance of rituals".
The former is a fascinating look at how group identity drove the Temperance movement. How lay-led organizations took moral leadership and group identity from churches, and in so doing made morality more binary. It's also fascinating for language, it was written in 1963 and revised in 1986, and I have a couple of times had to look for footnotes for a little more context so that I could understand better what the author meant by "Indian", for instance.
The latter is a more recent lament about how social media is fragmenting culture, and how spontaneous culture is destroying rituals. I'm reading it slowly, the way it (and the translation) use language is sometimes hard to suss out.
But I suspect they're actually writing about the same thing, and Han is too caught up in his privilege to understand that.