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This book analyzes the culture wars as those struggles for the monopoly of the legitimate representation of the world in the normative elucidation of controversial issues linked to values. Public culture in this context would consist of a set of complex classificatory systems of symbols and meanings that constitute a semantic field in permanent dynamic tension. In this work we analyze a whole series of lines of cultural conflict such as the social and semantic genesis of the different forms of "culture war" from the thesis of "modern polytheism" pointed out by Max Weber at the beginning of the 20th century to the national culture wars and the current global culture wars; the social production of truth and the clash with the epistemological tribalisms; the struggles between the new warrior gods, daimons and demons that emerge in modern societies; the struggles of fusion and fission on the symbolic battlefield of "Europe"; the struggles between "pioneers" and "gatekeepers" to define the limits of human nature; the struggles between utopias and dystopias that colonize the present future. This book will be of great help to anybody looking for key interpretations on the nature and structure of modern conflicts in contemporary societies.
List of contents
1. Culture Wars in Comparative Perspective: Four patterns
2. Classificatory struggles and cognitive hegemonization
3. Epistemological clashes within the COVID crisis
4. Warrior gods, heroes and victims
5. "Europe" as a symbolic battlefield
6. The dynamic tension between the prefixes of the human: transhuman, posthuman and superhuman
7. Social acceleration and time wars out of the future
About the author
Maya Aguiluz-Ibargüen is Tenured Researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she also coordinates the Seminar for Advanced Research in Body Studies (ESCUE). Researcher level II of the National System of Researchers (CONACYT, Mexico) and the author of
The Distant Proximal (2009).
Josetxo Beriain is Professor of Sociology, I-Communitas-Institute for Advanced Social Research, Public University of Navarra (UPNA) (Spain) and Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University (USA). The author of
Clashing Modernities (2005) and
The Transgressing (and Transgressed) Subject: Modernity, Religion, Utopia and Terror (2011).
Summary
This book analyzes the culture wars as those struggles for the monopoly of the legitimate representation of the world in the normative elucidation of controversial issues linked to values.
