Proceedings of the 52nd International Academic Conference, Barcelona

A FRAMEWORK FOR LINKING IMAGINARY TO CULTURE AND OTHER RELATED CONCEPTS

MĂDĂLINA DAN, ENIKÖ ELISABETA BODEA, EUGENIA CIOCOIU, ALIN MIHĂILĂ, EMIL CRIȘAN

Abstract:

Imaginary, also defined in the literature as imaginaire and imaginal, which are concepts developed by the French school of research on imagination (“recherches sur l’imaginaire”) and which have their roots in the Latin words ”imago” and ”imaginatio”, is the main focus of our paper. Imaginary refers to the products of imagination and the representations created by an individual or collective fantasy. Given the narrow use of these concepts by international researchers, one research opportunity we have observed is to clarify the boundaries and connections between imaginary and other related concepts, as culture, social imaginary, social representations and others. The question this paper answers is the following: is imaginary just culture or more? In order to answer it, we revise the literature concerning the concepts mentioned above, and also models which explain the emergence of culture and its component elements. Based on these conceptual analysis, we propose a representation for the imaginary with the aim of better understanding this concept.

Keywords: Imaginary, culture, social imaginary, social representations

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2019.052.014

PDF: Download