Ombre. Riflessioni sulla sociologia dell’immaginario

This article aims to elaborate, according to the analytical perspective of the sociology of the imaginary, a reflection on the “shadows of the social”, a category that includes a heterogeneous set of phenomena - such as traumas, taboos, forgetfulness, ghosts, abandoned places, secrets - connected to the dimension of otherness, invisibility and silence. The sociological study of shadows offers a privileged observatory to deal with one of the sources of construction of the contemporary imaginary. The shadowy imaginary is the device through which today's culture elaborates, experiments and communicates the hidden dimension, the backstage, that constitutes it. Starting from an epistemological reflection on the sociology of the imaginary and on the conceptual categories that found it, the article focuses in the second part on the relationship between shadows and society and on the declinations that this theme finds in the contributions selected for this Special Issue.