TY  - JOUR
TI  - Cathectic Mechanisms of Culture. Part 2
T2  - The Russian Sociological Review
IS  - The Russian Sociological Review
KW  - cathexis
KW  - emotions
KW  - affect
KW  - culture
KW  - sacred
KW  - cultural sociology
KW  - sociology of culture and cognition
KW  - cognitive processes
AB  - The article introduces a new research program that focuses on the constitutive role of emotions, affect, and their intensity in meaning-making. It opposes the existing broad tradition that effectively posits culture as information, sees cultural processes as coding, transferring, and processing information, and treats emotions as a ‘fuel’ feeding these processes in social life. I build this program around the re-interpretation of the concept of ‘cathexis,’ defined as a basic feature of meaning-making that consists in attaching emotions produced in social interactions to various kinds of objects of that meaning-making: things, ideas, representations, symbols, bodies, and their parts; spatial (e.g., pieces of land) and temporal (e.g., events) phenomena. Drawing on the analysis presented in the first part of this article, in this part, I introduce two basic modes of cathectic mechanisms of culture (piety and transgression) and outline five general features of cathexis (persistence, the pharmacy principle, boundary-making, situational spontaneity, and emergence). Based on this program, I review existing research dealing with the emotional dimension of culture. I organize this material into three sub-sections: perception, identity and social change, and ‘energetics’ of social action. I show that using the theory of cathexis as a common denominator empowers existing approaches, puts them on the same board, and moves us to a better understanding of the emotional dimension of culture.
AU  - Dmitry Kurakin
UR  - https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2024-23-1/910284176.html
PY  - 2024
SP  - 9-39
VL  - 23