Anthropological Quarterly

Over the past century, the field of social movement studies has moved several times toward the recognition and analysis of meaning-making by social movement participants. It may be time, now, to make a new leap in this direction. What would happen if we not only recognize meaning-making as an important facet of social movement mobilizations, but privilege it as the central feature of such phenomena? This special section explores several implications of this leap.

What do we mean by meaning-making? The concept is a broad one that draws on multiple traditions in sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences. At its root is the proposition that humans constantly seek to understand the world around them, and that the imposition of meaning on the world is a goal in itself, a spur to action, and a site of contestation. Meaning includes moral understandings of right and wrong, cognitive understandings of true and false, perceptual understandings of like and unlike, social understandings of identity and difference, aesthetic understandings of attractive and repulsive, and any other understandings that we may choose to identify through our own academic processes of meaning-making.

Meaning-making might be conceptualized in two distinct and complementary theoretical registers. For methodological individualists, it refers to [End Page 5] human perception and response. Humans may identify, valuate, and engage with identical perceptual "inputs" in quite different ways, depending on the meanings that we associate with these inputs. The approach of a person with a gun may cause us to run, to smile, to attack, and so on—depending on the meanings that the person and the gun (and other aspects of the context) have for us at that moment. Meaning-making, in this regard, is the mental processing that makes sense out of the senses. It is both idiosyncratic to each person and each moment, and at the same time patterned across ever-changing sets of populations and instances.

For culturalists, by contrast, meaning-making refers to collective contest over interpretation. Institutions, repertoires, and rituals offer a set of ready-made—though always contradictory—interpretations that allow people to assimilate information into established categories of understanding. The recognition of human suffering, for example, may be interpreted in terms of inequality or stratification, exploitation or ability, responsibility or inevitability, and so on. It may lead to collective action to reduce suffering, or not, and the actions to reduce suffering may take any number of forms, depending on the meanings associated with the phenomenon. Notwithstanding variation and contestation, the range of meanings available in any given context is finite. Most societies have ready-made categories for individuals and small groups who make meanings outside of the dominant cultural set: visionaries, prophets, persons with mental illness, and the like.

Meaning-making is not limited to social movements. All action involves meaning-making, just as all action involves contention. However, social movements may be a particularly conducive site to privilege meaning-making, because their activities foreground resistance to the dominant norms and institutions of society. They raise questions about the possibility of alternative world-views and alternative dispensations, and in so doing they challenge participants and observers to re-think meanings that are too often taken for granted. Social movements actively make meaning, challenging established meanings.

Social movement studies have not always stepped up to the challenge of meaning-making. The founding figures, according to the field's various genesis stories, generally ignored their subjects' meaning-making, in two ways. The first way held that the subjects were so different from the observer that their meaning-making was nonsensical, and therefore not worthy of analysis. This approach is evident in the "crowd psychology" of the late 19th century, [End Page 6] which is sometimes treated as the direct ancestor of social movement studies. For instance, Scipio Sighele, one of three major founders of this school of thought, based his analysis of "criminal crowds" on the "law" of hypnotic suggestibility, then extended the metaphor to all assemblies, including elected representatives, whose "intellectual level…, already quite humble, descends still further as a consequence of the law that we have enunciated" (Kurzman 2004b:129). Sighele's and...