The Situation: A Cultural-Interactionist Theory

Speaker

Iddo Tavory, New York University

Abstract

This talk argues that in order to construct a theory of cultural interactionism, we must revisit the way that we understand a key building block of interactionist theory: “the situation.” Despite its terminological centrality, interactionists have not thought enough about the situation, implicitly treating it as a scene where things take place, and where only the things that become explicitly relevant to the interaction are treated as “in” the situation. But thinking carefully about any situation, no matter how mundane, belies such a sharp delimitation. Following the notion of situation both in interactionism and in classical pragmatist thought, propels us to include not only actions and identities that interactants explicitly attend to, but also to a host of potential elements that lurk just under the surface of the interaction, but without which we can’t really understand it. In other words, we should think both about what actors make explicitly relevant and attend to in the interaction, but also on what I call, following Persian medieval philosopher Avicenna, “proximate potentials”—the meanings and identities that could become actualized in any given moment. These proximate potentials, I argue, require us to think carefully about culture. After all, what is “closer” or “farther away” is not something that can be defined by any form of logical entailment, nor even by paying careful attention to the ongoing interaction.

Chair

Katia Pilati, University of Trento

Presenter 

Andrea Cossu, University of Trento

Discussant

Andrea Brighenti, University of Trento