![[PDF]](/pb-assets/Icons/adobe-pdf-icon.png){kind=icon}
Abstract
It is common in anthropology now to speak of imaginaries instead of cultural beliefs. This article examines the way Cornelius Castoriadis, Jacques Lacan, Benedict Anderson, and Charles Taylor analyzed this concept. For Castoriadis, the imaginary is a culture's ethos, for Lacan, it is a fantasy, for Anderson and Taylor, it is a shared cognitive schema. Then Marilyn Ivy's application of these theories to Japanese ‘national-cultural imaginaries’ is examined. Finally, a more person-centered analysis is sketched, focusing on US Americans’ explanations of the Columbine school shootings. Current anthropological uses of the imaginary inherit from Castoriadis a tendency toward cultural abstraction, reification, and homogenization. Lacan's, Anderson's, and Taylor's applications of the imaginary are potentially valuable if we use person-centered methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects, if we insist on a deeper understanding of the psychological processes involved, and if we respect complexity at both the psychological and social levels.
Keywords Anderson, Castoriadis, cognitive psychology, imaginary, Ivy, Japan, Lacan, schema theory, Taylor, US
| Alba, Joseph W. and Lynn Hasher (1983) ‘Is Memory Schematic?’ , Psychological Bulletin 93: 203–231 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Althusser, Louis (1971 [1970]) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays by Louis Althusser (trans. B. Brewster), pp. 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press . Google Scholar | |
| Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso . Google Scholar | |
| Bellah, Robert N. , Richard Madsen , William M. Sullivan , Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row . Google Scholar | |
| Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge . Google Scholar | |
| Castoriadis, Cornelius (1987 [1975]) The Imaginary Institution of Society (trans. Kathleen Blamey). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press . Google Scholar | |
| Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997) World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis ). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press . Google Scholar | |
| D’Andrade, Roy G. (1984) ‘Cultural Meaning Systems’, in R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine (eds) Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, pp. 88–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar | |
| D’Andrade, Roy G. (1992) ‘Schemas and Motivation’, in R.G. D’Andrade and C. Strauss (eds) Human Motives and Cultural Models, pp. 23–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| D'Andrade, Roy G. (1995) The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| D'Andrade, Roy G. and Claudia Strauss , eds (1992) Human Motives and Cultural Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| Devine, Patricia G. (1989) ‘Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components’ , Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56: 5–18 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press . Google Scholar | |
| Durham, Deborah (2004) ‘Disappearing Youth: Youth as a Social Shifter in Botswana’ , American Ethnologist 31: 589–605 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Fenichel, Michael (2001–3) ‘Repression: Anxiety Filter for the Ego’, URL (accessed 15 January 2005): http://www.fenichel.com/repression.shtml Google Scholar | |
| FFSL – See Lacan (1977b [1953]). Google Scholar | |
| Freud, Sigmund (1957 [1920]) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in J. Rickman (ed.) A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Doubleday . Google Scholar | |
| Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (2002) ‘Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction’ , Public Culture 14: 1–19 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Garro, Linda (2001) ‘The Remembered Past in a Culturally Meaningful Life: Remembering as a Cultural, Social, and Cognitive Process’, in C.C. Moore and H.F. Mathews (eds) The Psychology of Cultural Experience, pp. 105–147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar | |
| Gellner, Ermest (1964) Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson . Google Scholar | |
| Handler, Richard (2004) ‘Afterword: Mysteries of Culture’ , American Anthropologist 106: 488–494 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Hollan, Douglas (2000) ‘Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Development of Culture Theory’ , American Anthropologist 102: 538–550 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Holland, Dorothy and Naomi Quinn (1987) Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| Ivy, Marilyn (1995) Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press . Google Scholar | |
| Jerry, Paul A. (1998) ‘Some of Lacan's Concepts’, URL (accessed January 2005): http://www3.memlane.com/pajerry/lacandef.htm Google Scholar | |
| Johnson, Marcia K. , Jung K. Kim and Gail Risse (1985) ‘Do Alcoholic Korsakoff's Syndrome Patients Acquire Affective Reactions?’ , Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 11: 22–36 . Google Scholar, Crossref, Medline, ISI | |
| Klages, Mary (2001) ‘Jacques Lacan’, URL (accessed 14 July 2006): http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/usflores/Klageslacan.html Google Scholar | |
| Lacan, Jacques (1977a [1949]) ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’ (MS), in Jacques Lacan Écrits: A Selection (trans. Alan Sheridan), pp. 1–7. New York: W.W. Norton . Google Scholar | |
| Lacan, Jacques (1977b [1953]) ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (FFSL), in Jacques Lacan Écrits: A Selection (trans. Alan Sheridan), pp. 30–113. New York: W.W. Norton . Google Scholar | |
| Lefort, Claude (1986) ‘Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’, in J.B. Thompson (ed. and trans.) The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, pp. 181–236. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press . Google Scholar | |
| Lin, Emilie L. and Gregory L. Murphy (1997) ‘Effects of Background Knowledge on Object Categorization and Part Detection’ , Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 23: 1153–1169 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Linde, Charlotte (1993) Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University Press . Google Scholar | |
| Linger, Daniel T. (1994) ‘Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?’ , Ethos 22: 284–315 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Marcus, George E. , ed. (1995) Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press . Google Scholar | |
| Markman, Arthur B. and Dedre Gentner (2001) ‘Thinking’ , Annual Review of Psychology 52: 223–247 . Google Scholar, Crossref, Medline, ISI | |
| McClelland, James L. , David E. Rumelhart , and the PDP Research Group , eds (1986) Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press . Google Scholar | |
| MS – See Lacan (1977a [1949]). Google Scholar | |
| Quinn, Naomi and Dorothy Holland (1987) ‘Culture and Cognition’, in D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds) Cultural Models in Language and Thought, pp. 3–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| Reddy, Michael J. (1979) ‘The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language about Language’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, pp. 284–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar | |
| Rosch, Eleanor (1978) ‘Principles of Categorization’, in E. Rosch and B. Lloyd (eds) Cognition and Categorization, pp. 27–48. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates . Google Scholar | |
| Rumelhart, David E. , James L. McClelland , and the PDP Research Group , eds (1986) Parallel Distributed Processing: Exploration in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press . Google Scholar | |
| Sahlins, Marshall (1976) Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press . Google Scholar | |
| Schacter, Daniel L. (1996) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books . Google Scholar | |
| Sheridan, Alan (1977) ‘Translator's Note’, in J. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan), pp. vii–xii. New York: W.W. Norton . Google Scholar | |
| Sperber, Dan (1996) Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell . Google Scholar | |
| Strauss, Claudia (1992) ‘What Makes Tony Run? Schemas as Motives Reconsidered’, in R. D’Andrade and C. Strauss (eds) Human Motives and Cultural Models, pp. 197–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| Strauss, Claudia (n.d.) ‘Blaming For Columbine: Conceptions in the Contemporary United States’, ms. in progress. Google Scholar | |
| Strauss, Claudia and Naomi Quinn (1992) ‘Preliminaries to a Theory of Culture Acquisition’, in H.L. Pick , P. Van Den Broek and D.C. Knill (eds) Cognition: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, pp. 267–294. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association . Google Scholar, Crossref | |
| Strauss, Claudia and Naomi Quinn (1997) A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar | |
| Taylor, Charles (2002) ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’ , Public Culture 14: 91–124 . Google Scholar, Crossref, ISI | |
| Taylor, Charles (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press . Google Scholar | |
| Wallace, Anthony F.C. (1970) Culture and Personality (2nd edn). New York: Random House . Google Scholar | |
| Weber, Max (1958 [1904–5]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. T. Parsons). New York: Scribner's . Google Scholar | |
| Westen, Drew (2001) ‘Beyond the Binary Opposition in Psychological Anthropology: Integrating Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science’, in C.C. Moore and H.F. Mathews (eds) The Psychology of Cultural Experience, pp. 21–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar | |
| Whiting, Beatrice Blyth and John W.M. Whiting (1975) Children of Six Cultures: A Psycho-Cultural Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press . Google Scholar, Crossref |
