History
Koni Weber
Umstrittene Repräsentation der Schweiz
Soziologie, Politik und Kunst bei der Landesausstellung 1964
[The Controversial Representation of Switzerland. Sociology, Politics and Art at the 1964 National Exhibition.]
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Published in German.
What happens when in the middle of the Cold War a theater director who has been inspired by the commedia dell'arte and popular customs of western Switzerland teams up with IBM Switzerland in order to carry out a live interview with the visitors to the 1964 national exhibition based on a sociological survey written by researchers from Paris? The result was a full-blown political scandal and a sociological study whose raw material was ultimately used by the famous sociologist Luc Boltanski as a basis for his first monograph. Koni Weber reconstructs the genesis, development and rejection of a sociological analysis. He breaks down the heterogeneity of sociological methods in the 60s and examines a piece of contemporary Swiss history between 1955 and 1964 from the perspective of the history of knowledge.