Wendy Griswold Quotes

Power holders as well as seekers of power work to legitimate their chosen frames through rituals and symbols. We saw earlier that this is in part a matter of efficiency: It is cheaper to organize a parade that whips up enthusiasm for the regime than it is to operate a police state.

Two intellectual consequences of literacy were the separation of history from myth and the increased individualism based on highly specialized knowledge. In literate cultures, people are stratified on the basis of what they have read; academic disciplines and college majors are an obvious example of this kind of specialization.

He (Zerubavel) draws attention to the social influences on perception (what people notice), attention and concern (what people care about), classification (how people categorize things, meanings, memories - what to remember, what to forget, how to feel about it), and time (how people place things in the past or future). For example, many African Americans regard slavery as a relatively recent "cultural trauma" having pressing contemporary meaning, while many white Americans see it as a long past institution having little relevance (Eyerman 2002).

A more general statement of Davies's point would be that when institutions and meaning systems are threatened or disrupted, it may not be the case that entirely new ones will be created; one response may simply be a greater emphasis on preexisting cultural traits and distinctions...Thus, Wuthnow's (1987) "breakdowns of the moral order" may not produce new ideologies; it may reinvigorate old ones, including old hatreds that were assumed to have vanished from the modern world. The increasing fragmentation and resurgent ethnicity of the former Eastern bloc gives evidence of this. The concept of "ethnic cleansing" represents community with a vengeance.

Paul DiMaggio (1997) has looked at the interaction between cognition and social life. He notes that under everyday circumstances, people organize information via automatic cognition, using "culturally available schemata - knowledge structures that represent objects of events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information".

...printing and the proliferation of written materials allowed ordinary people to be members of any number of relational communities.

Power gets legitimated through schemas; if there is an underlying schema that says that men are more decisive than women, this schema will structure new situations in which men get to make the decisions, often accumulating resources by doing so, and thus will reproduce male power.

Charles Cooley (1956) wrote that primary groups, those groups such as the family and neighborhood where we have our earliest and most intimate interactions, form people's sense of who they are and with whom they are identified. Extending Cooley's reasoning, if electronic communications make intimate interactions possible for more and more people regardless of where they are physically located, it may lead to a greater communion among them, a greater sense of what they have in common as people.

We known the past - and shape our schemas about it - through memory, history, and relics but also through imagination. With such aids, memory organizes consciousness, transforming welter of actual experience into desirable or meaningful events, and these become institutionalized as history. 'Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective self-awareness'.