Abstract

HERRERA, Martha Cecilia  and  TORRES-CARRILLO, Alfonso. The Cultural Imaginary in the Work of Gilbert Durand. Folios [online]. 2023, n.58, pp.205-216.  Epub Jan 27, 2024. ISSN 0123-4870.  https://doi.org/10.17227/folios.58-14682.

The concept of imaginary, also known as social or cultural imaginary, did not have much prestige in modern thought and classical social sciences due to the hegemony of rationalism -which gave preeminence to the rational and to clear and indistinct ideas- and positivism -which privileged only those factual and observable phenomena-. Gilbert Durand is responsible for the most complete development of this concept as well as its establishment in the field of social and humanities as a tool to address contemporary problems in which the symbolic occupies a central place. In the regard, this article addresses the recent revaluation of the imaginary dimension in contemporary thought, then focuses on Durand's elaborate conceptualization to then address the conceptualization developed by Durand about the imaginary by understanding it as a set of mental and visual images, by which an individual, a society, organize and symbolically express their existential values and their interpretation of the world; as well as on the features that are attributed to the imaginary: its trans-historical and magmatic flow, operating from a logic of a-causal synchronicity and recovering the principle of a-causal synchronicity. Finally, some opportunities for the use of imaginaries in social studies are presented.

Keywords : imaginary; symbol; imagination; Gilbert Durand.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )