What are Social Imaginaries?: A Pathway Through the Labyrinth

Abstract This essay charts a pathway through the labyrinth of social imaginaries. It enters into hermeneutic engagement with Castoriadis, Ricoeur, Taylor, and Arnason to outline a framework that elucidates social imaginaries in relation to social creativity, meaning, action, institutions, and the world horizon. It first situates “imaginaries” within a theory of culture. This section addresses the world as a background horizon of implicit meanings; imaginary significations as world creating; the interpretative aspect of creation; and the symbolic as a bridge between culture and society. The second section addresses the ‘social’ of social imaginaries. It highlights the social-historical as the impersonal dimension of society, and institutions and modes of social doing in which social imaginaries are incarnated. It identifies three varieties of doing: movement, social practices, and social praxis. It draws on the metaphor of the hermeneutic spiral to grasp social imaginaries in their dynamic movement of interpretation and creation.