Trust has never been a topic of mainstream sociology. Neither classical authors nor modern sociologists use the term in a theoretical context. For this reason the elaboration of theoretical frameworks, one of the main sources of conceptual clarification, has been relatively neglected. Furthermore, empirical research for example, research about trust and distrust in politics has relied on rather general and unspecified ideas, confusing problems of trust with positive or negative attitudes toward political leadership or political institutions, with alienation (itself a multidimensional concept), with hopes and worries, or with confidence. In their monograph on patrons, clients, and friends, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger (1984) use the concept of trust as roughly equivalent to solidarity, meaning, and participation. This makes it possible to show that unconditional trust is generated in families and small-scale societies and cannot be automatically transferred to complex societies based on the division of labour. Trust, then, needs for its reconstruction special social institutions; friendship networks and patron-client relations are examples for this adaptation. But this is merely to reiterate well-known statements about the division of labour and the need to reconstruct solidarity, about Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. It does not give any new insight into the particularities of trusting relations. To gain such insights we need further conceptual clarification.

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Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives

Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to power- ful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were never- theless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance. The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second genera- tion is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth. It is also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living

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The Generation of Postmemory

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies...

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy*:

We start our chapter by introducing the notions of ‘critique’,‘ideology’ and ‘power’. These three concepts are constitutive for every approach in CDA, albeit frequently employed with different meanings.Therefore, it is important to clarify how they are conceptualized in the DHA.We then proceed with the delineation of other terms significant for our purposes, such as ‘discourse’, ‘genre’, ‘text’, ‘recontextualization’, ‘intertextuality’ and ‘interdiscursivity’. The second section summarizes some analytical tools and general principles of the DHA, while in the third section, we illustrate our methodology step by step by focusing on ‘discourses about climate change’. In the final section, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the DHA and point to future challenges for the field.

The discourse-historical approach (DHA)

Das ägyptische Zweibrüdermärchen (Papyrus d'Orbiney)

Echnaton und Zarathustra : zur Genese und Dynamik des Monotheismus

Die Frage nach der Entstehung der Welt gehort zu den Urfragen der Mensch­heit. Es gibt gewiss keine Mythologie auf Erden, in der diese Frage nicht einen zentralen Rang einnahme. Schopfungsmythen sind archaische Welt­modelle. Die heutige Wissenschaft produziert ebenfalls Weltmodelle, aber nicht mehr in der Form von Erzahlungen, sondern von Begriffen und For­meln. Die heutigen Weltmodelle erheben den Anspruch, eine wesentlich grosere Menge empirischer Daten zu integrieren als die mythischen Erzahlungen, aber das bedeutet nicht, dass nicht auch die Mythen empirische Daten integrieren und den Status von Weltmodellen beanspruchen. In Schopfungsmythen verstandigte sich der fruhe Mensch uber den Aufbau der Wirklichkeit und seinen eigenen Platz in ihr. Schopfungsmythen artikulie­ren daher das Welt- und Menschenbild fruher Gesellschaften. Sie haben einen explanatorischen Bezug zur Wirklichkeit.1

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Jan Assmann

Papers

Das ägyptische Zweibrüdermärchen (Papyrus d'Orbiney)

Echnaton und Zarathustra : zur Genese und Dynamik des Monotheismus

Schöpfungsmythen und Kreativitätskonzepte im Alten Ägypten

Ägypten und die Legitimierung des Tötens: ideologische Grundlagen politischer Gewalt im Alten Ägypten

Guilt and Remembrance: On the Theologization of History in the Ancient Near East