附註:Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-284) and index.
Introduction: Context, Imagination, and Interpretation -- pt. 1. Reality Central. 1. Destination and Arrival. 2. Boredom and Ecstasy. 3. Difference and Possibility -- pt. 2. Performing Community. 4. Rapture and Ecstasy: Spirituality, Football, and the Accomplishment of Community. 5. Immanence and Angels: Experiencing Parallel Worlds. 6. Awareness and Imagination, or Altered States of Syntax as Communication Riddles -- pt. 3. Highways and Surrounds. 7. Vision and Reason, or The Strangeness of Instructions. 8. Insight and Complexity: The Future of Unities -- Afterword: Problematizing Spirit -- Appendix 1: Power, Other, and Spirit -- Appendix 2: Modern, Postmodern, and Spiritual Communication -- Appendix 3: Connecting Spirit to Community through Imagination and Communication.
摘要:Divine Signs is the concluding volume of the ethnographic trilogy about the communicative tensions in everyday American cultural life H.L. Goodall, Jr., began with Casing a Promised Land and continued with Living in the Rock n Roll Mystery. In this final work, the terms for understanding these tensions are found in a historical and mythological drama featuring Power (as the embodiment of the modern), Other (as the embodiment of the postmodern), and Spirit (as the unifying power capable of connecting disparate selves to dangerously fragmented communities). For this study, the localized site of interpretation is in and around Pickens and Oconee Counties, South Carolina, where everyday street signs, business advertisements on billboards, signs that announce church themes, Internet postings, and other forms of public communication that invite private meanings are read as rhetorical invitations to participate in these myths and mysteries. , Using themes discoverable in such public forms of communication, Goodall deconstructs a variety of communal experiences - from annual community celebrations to weekly therapy sessions in local beauty salons to the fall audience rituals of Clemson University football games - to gain a deeper appreciation of the unifying symbolic orders that enrich the interpretive possibilities of our lives and that serve as signs of our deeply spiritual connections to each other and to the planet.
