Todd Nicholas Fuist is an associate professor of sociology at Illinois Wesleyan University who studies politics and culture. He is currently working on a manuscript about successful environmental social movements.
A post by Todd Nicholas Fuist
"I was a troubled kid when I was younger," Robert mused, looking out the window of the car at a group of homeless youth we had just been speaking to, milling around on the sidewalk. "There but for the grace of God could have gone I.”
I was getting a ride back to my apartment with members of Welcome and Shalom Synagogue (WSS), the progressive, LGBTQ-identified congregation I had been studying, after we had volunteered with a mobile soup kitchen that served late-night food on street corners. The members of WSS were explaining to me, as we packed up and got into the car, why they consistently volunteered with this particular soup kitchen, on this particular street. "We are serving our community," one congregant explained. The area we were in was widely understood as a gay neighborhood. Our serving location was, in fact, right down the street from the headquarters of a notable LGBTQ nonprofit and just off of the main route of the city's Pride Parade. From consistently volunteering with the soup kitchen, the members of WSS got to know a number of the regulars and learned that many of the homeless youth who line up to get a meal are, in fact, LGBTQ. Earlier in the evening, the volunteer coordinator for the synagogue noted that she was especially happy to volunteer in this neighborhood because she figured conservative churches—which meant most churches in her estimation—were less likely to serve an LGBTQ community and, therefore, WSS was helping a population that was uniquely in need.
I tell this story from my ethnographic research on progressive religious communities to highlight the role of collective imagination in social life. Cognitive sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) uses the term "thought communities" to refer to groups of people who share specific ways of thinking about the world. A congregation, such as WSS, is a useful example of such a group. My interview with Megan, a young, bisexual member of the Synagogue, demonstrated this kind of collective imagination within a thought community in action. She commented that part of what she loved about Judaism was "feeling connected to my grandparents who are dead, my great grandparents who passed away when I was five…. It feels like I am part of history, a larger sense of history as well as my family’s history…. We still say the prayers in Hebrew like we did a thousand years ago." Additionally, as a 20-something bisexual, she noted that she loved being part of WSS because of "this communal memory.... There is this huge percentage of WSS [who] are older gay people [and] they have this history with them. And to have been able to talk to them about what it was like to come out when they were my age.... It’s nice to have that grounding because I think a lot of young gay people don’t have that.... They do not appreciate that they are out and proud and crazy because there were these people before them." Commenting on how being part of this synagogue has merged these two parts of her identity in her head, she stated "it does tie into being Jewish in a way because, historically speaking, I think Jews had it the same way, where there were times when they could not be out and proud… There is a very clear connection between being gay and Jewish in how we adapt through history."
While talking with Megan, it struck me how much of her self-understanding was based on imaginings of history—the history of her family, of the Jewish people, of LGBTQ persons—and that all these histories weave together into the fabric of her identity, embedded in her congregation. Through the ritual practices of her faith, she imagines connections to ancestors she never knew, creatively placing herself in the long continuity of both her family and her ethnic community. Through conversations with members of her synagogue she is able to conceptualize their experiences as older LGBTQ persons, providing her with a sense of perspective she feels separates her from an archetypal image young gay people who are "out and proud and crazy." And all of this shapes her identity, ultimately helping her feel at home in her congregation, and leading her to participate in actions like the mobile soup kitchen, described above.
As a number of scholars have noted, including scholars who write for this blog (see here and here), imagination is often a collective phenomenon. This doesn't mean people think with some sort of supra-mind, of course. It simply means, in Jansen's (2017:248) apt words, groups share “common social and cultural conditions in which different acts of imagining are embedded.” This is what Zerubavel means by "thought communities." The groups we live in provide us with the raw material through which we are able to imagine. To envision a past or a future, to consider notable others in a social world, or to plan strategic actions vis-à-vis those notable others, one must draw on a stock of images and ideas, culled from group life, to imagine beyond one’s immediate senses.
As a sociologist, I felt my discipline lacked a thorough theorizing of imagination as I conducted my research. Yes, we do have a number of terms that fruitfully utilize an understanding of imagination—Mills's classic "sociological imagination," the "social imaginary" of Charles Taylor, or the "heterosexual imaginary" of Chrys Ingraham all spring to mind—yet these different ideas hadn't been collected into a coherent theoretical paradigm. In a recent paper in Theory and Society, titled "Towards a Sociology of Imagination," I attempted to begin to rectify this lacuna. Drawing on psychology and philosophy, two disciplines with robust literatures on imagination, as well as cognitive sociology, I note that sociology is uniquely positioned, by virtue of its methods and perspective, to examine the practice-oriented and collective nature of imagination. In particular, I highlight three components of this in the paper:
(a) imagination allows individuals and groups to coordinate identities, actions, and futures,
(b) imagination relies on widely shared cultural elements, and
(c) imagination is often undertaken collectively, in groups.
As a scholar whose main area of study is politics and social movements, I would argue that imagination underpins almost all socio-political action. Members of a social movement are part of a "thought community," and they must imaginatively conceptualize themselves as a unit, a group, a "we," so to speak, in order to picture what actions they may take and how those actions may shape an envisioned future. They often do this with reference to shared, cultural material pulled from the various, overlapping communities they exist in, as Megan did above. What's more, these imaginative processes often happen in group settings. One activist I spoke with during my research, for example, described sitting around with his anarchist collective and discussing what a better world, without a centralized government, could look like. A meeting to plan a protest, a group prayer, a conversation about one's allies or opponents—all of these activities build on a collectively undertaken effort to imagine towards the end of forging shared meaning and practice.
As I write these words, understanding the role of thought communities in shaping the collective political imaginations of groups seems of the utmost importance. My country has seen a dramatic spike in the prevalence of conspiracy theories, some of which have led to real world violence, and it has become commonplace to note that people occupying different parts of the political landscape live in divergent realities. To fully understand this, we must look at how the varied, and often quite distinct, thought communities that our fellow citizens think within provide them with incredibly different archetypal material—such as images of allies and opponents or visions of the past and future—with which to construct their identities, viewpoints, and actions. When thought communities provide narratives of a glorious past and vivid images of their corrupt opponents, for example, it allows their members to imaginatively cast themselves as part of the grand sweep of history, inheriting the greatness of the past by standing up to the monsters of the present. It is incorrect to say we live in different realities. There is, of course, only one reality that we all share, together. Rather, what is accurate to say is that our wildly dissimilar collective imaginations of that reality powerfully shape the sinking feeling that we are not experiencing the world in the same way as our neighbors.
References
Jansen, J. (2017). Shared imagining: Beyond extension, distribution and commitment. In M. Summa, T. Fuchs, & L. Vanzago (eds.), Imagination and social perspectives: Approaches from phenomenology and psychopathology (pp. 247-263). London, New York: Routledge.
Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.