The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the Dramaturgy of Power in a Modern African Society

The article explores the development of cultural mystique in elite organizations, focusing on Sierra Leone as a case study. It analyzes culture in terms of symbolic forms, functions, and dramaturgical techniques, exploring how it operates in chains of dramatic performances on different levels of social organization. The author argues that culture serves to reconcile contradictions between universalistic functions and particularistic interests, and to promote sectional power.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 29 April 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

The development of cultural mystique in the articulation of elite organizations is a complex and intriguing process that involves a range of symbolic beliefs and practices. These elements serve to reconcile, camouflage, or mystify a fundamental contradiction that exists within elite groups. This contradiction revolves around their universalistic functions and particularistic interests, as well as their duties to serve wider publics and their simultaneous endeavor to promote their own sectional power.

To explore this phenomenon in depth, Cohen conducts a detailed, experimental study of one power elite within a modern small-scale nation-state, Sierra Leone. However, his findings are not limited to this specific context; rather, they are systematically worked out within a broader, cross-cultural comparative perspective. This allows him to further develop his earlier formulations about the instrumental functions of culture in political organization.

Culture is analyzed in terms of symbolic forms, symbolic functions, and dramaturgical techniques. Cohen examines how culture operates as a mechanism of politico-cultural causation, shaping and influencing the dynamics of social organization through chains of dramatic performances on different levels. He takes familiar, everyday symbolic events out of their ordinary ideological sequences and shows how they are intricately involved in major power struggles.

This title is part of UC Press' Voices Revived program, which commemorates the University of California Press' mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology, drawing on a backlist dating to 1893. This title was originally published in 1981.

Weight: 363g
Dimension: 216 x 140 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520307193