Kursinformation

To date social scientists primarily analyze social life through the study of text and spoken words a. Yet, social life, including politics and political violence and their perception, are also shaped by visuals, sounds and bodily feelings. Cultural sociology is especially suited to analyze those aspects of social experience, because the subdiscipline assumes that myths, metaphors, (mental) images or musics have not only shaped politics and violent acts in premodern times, but still continue to do so. A good example is that of political protest, a situation which often involves both “musicking” and the threat of political violence. Certainly, how music and its perception shape politics and are politicized requires to be studied empirically. Comparing situations in which music and political violence come together and how various milieus interpret these situations helps to carve out some general characteristics of the relationship between music and political violence which do not fully dissolve in the specificity of a single case.