This study introduced and employed the political imagination as a viable analytic approach to the study of institutional cultural production after two disastersnamely, after the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995 and the World Trade Center Attacks of 2001. This approach asked questions about the public reconstitution of basic social assumptions after disasters vis--vis processes of institutional differentiation and de-differentiation. In such processes, repertoires of speech and action that are typically considered mutually exclusive in our contemporary context are actually enmeshed and presented as resources for postdisaster collective identity formation. With this in mind, three sociological hypotheses were engaged through a qualitative analysis of data from twenty-eight interview participants (including three focus groups), 227 print media sources, and numerous visual data sources. First, clergy and state personnel offered claims of the same scope, especially with regard to the aims of keynoting after a disaster, but clergy were dependent on contemporary statist narratives (including judgments about human beings, justice, and the future) to relay crucial theological views publicly. Second, the collectivity was bound together after the disasters in question through an integrative narrative that universalized the American nation and stressed the local (place and identity) only to the extent to which it can be nationalized. Third, the political imagination of the State sought to create post-disaster citizenship on the basis of cultural processes that promoted an already realized National unity, economic and technical competence, and assurance of victory. These social processes, most importantly, emanated from an implied public theology. The analysis revealed that churches in Oklahoma City acted with greater cultural and theological autonomy after the disaster than churches in New York City. In both cases, ministers were absorbed into an array of public performances (ritual and non-ritual) in which they would act to support or resist the statist political imagination and its narrative constructions. The analysis also showed that institutional de-differentiation between Church and State created a variety of ritual events, commodities, memorial efforts, public performances, and other cultural objects that emphasized different scales of social organization as bases for unity and identity. Finally, the State was shown to provide various cultural products as resources for a national identity that embraced both a particular theology and politics. It accomplished this by means of the co-optation of church spaces, appropriation of theological narratives, and public re-assertion of assumptions about the nature of human beings and their destiny.

Santos, Gabriel A.

Santos, Gabriel A.

940.S3.O3

2006 Summer

Terrorism ; Social Response ; Religion ;

DRC Dissertation #36

Newark, DE

University of Delaware

OH, WHEN THE STATE COMES MARCHING IN: THE THEOPOLITICS OF DISASTER IN SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

OH, WHEN THE STATE COMES MARCHING IN: THE THEOPOLITICS OF DISASTER IN SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Dissertation

9e10f31a-1760-4d4f-9443-598446760f75