Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries.

• Jurisdiction: Derecho Internacional
• Author: Davis, Cindy L.
• Date: 01 April 2017

Bouchard, Gerard. Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries. University of Toronto Press, 2017. 176 pages. Paperback, $24.95.

Gerard Bouchard's Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries is a timely work for readers hoping to examine the contentious socio-cultural political environment of the twenty-first century. The interdisciplinary nature of the text is displayed in how it could be used to study topics in and across multiple disciplines. Bouchard takes a sociological perspective and analytical approach to the examination of myths in the collective imaginary (premodern and modern) to create a model to examine myths theoretically and empirically. The collective imaginary connects with the mental psyche and consists of the symbols and representations of society. Bouchard's focus is on how myths develop and become sacralized--how they become part of the subconscious of culture and society.

Bouchard explains that myth is a collective representation that is made up of six features which include an archetypal foundation; hybridity, where the myth can shift between dichotomies; driven by emotion, sacredness, instrumentality, and narrativity. "In light of these statements, the beginnings of a definition emerge: rooted in the psyche, strategically produced and used, social myth is a collective representation that is hybrid, beneficial, or harmful, imbued with the sacred, governed by emotion more than by reason, and a vehicle of meanings, values, and ideals shaped in a given social and historical environment" (p. 25). For Bouchard, sacredness is the most definitive of the foundations and is what distinguishes myth from other representations.

Bouchard provides a loose typology of myth with categories that are based on how the myths are constructed rather than on...