Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity - Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place - Vaia Touna
2. Response to Steven Ramey: The Constitutive Discourse of Description
Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity - Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place - Vaia Touna
Vaia Touna [+]
University of Alabama
Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill, 2017) and editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox, 2019). Her research focuses on the sociology of religion, acts of identification and social formation, methodological issues concerning the use of the category of “religion” in the study of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, as well as the study of the past in general.
Description
Descriptions, as Steven Ramey convincingly argued in his chapter, are never neutral, they are always selective, contingent, and invested with interests; yet, even in his attempt to demonstrate the constructive nature of discourses via the use of descriptions Ramey, unavoidably, engages in descriptions as well. So, in this chapter I want to press him further by asking: when are descriptions mere descriptions and when are they constitutive of a discourse themselves?