
Inimitable Examples? Gesture and Tradition in Western Political Reform
As a folklorist I've studied traditional festival in Europe as a vehicle for difficult processes of social accommodation and compromise. Now I'm working on a larger scale, trying to understand how the symbolic gestures of political representatives attempt to connect with the public, what conditions their success or (more often) failure, and how this might articulate with processes of political reform. This will be a report on a book project in its early stages.