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Essay on Symbolic interaction of Religion
A leading American social psychological theory which focuses upon the ways in which meanings emerge through interaction. Its prime concern has been to analyse the meanings of everyday life, via close observational work and intimate familiarity, and from these to develop an understanding of the underlying forms of human interaction. Heavily influenced by pragmatism , the Chicago tradition of sociology and the philosophical writings of George Herbert Mead , the term itself was coined by Herbert Blumer in 1937.
The theory has four key foci. The first highlights the ways in which human beings are distinctly symbol-manipulating animals. It is through symbols that they, alone of all the animals, are capable of producing culture and transmitting a complex history. Interactionists are always concerned to study the ways in which people give meaning to their bodies, their feelings, their selves, their biographies, their situations, and indeed to the wider social worlds in which their lives exist.
Research strategies such as participant observation are employed, which enable the researcher to gain access to these symbols and meanings, as in Howard S. Becker's Art Worlds and Arlie Hochschild's The Managed Heart. There is a broad affinity here to semiology , but unlike at least some positions in semiology which seek the structures of language, interactionists are more concerned with the ways in which meaning is always emergent, fluid, ambiguous, and contextually bound. R. S. Perinbanayagam has provided an important account of meaning in interactionism in his book Signifying Acts......
