26 March 2013

Terms from Giddens' "Modernity and Self-Identity"


Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
Anthony Giddens, Stanford University Press, 1991

A handful of terms and concepts: 

Disembedding: the lifting out of social relationships from local contexts and their recombination across indefinite time/space distances.

Existential contradiction: the contradictory relation of human beings to nature, as finite creatures who are part of the organic world, yet set off against it.

Institutional reflexivity: the reflexivity of modernity, involving the routine incorporation of new knowledge or information into environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganized.

Narrative of the self: the story or stories by means of which self-identity is reflexively understood, both by the individual concerned and by others

Ontological security: a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual environment of the individual

Reflexive project of the self: the process whereby self-identity is constituted by the reflexive ordering of self-narratives

Risk culture: a fundamental cultural aspect of modernity, in which awareness of risk forms a medium of colonizing the future

Sequestration of experience: the separation of day-to-day life from contact with experiences which raise potentially disturbing existential questions – particularly experiences to do with sickness, madness, criminality, sexuality and death.

Trust: the vesting of confidence in persons or in abstract systems, made on the basis of a ‘leap into faith’ which brackets ignorance or lack of information

Umwelt (Goffman): a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely ‘in touch’ in respect of potential dangers and alarms.

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