Through analysis of the UK government’s management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture’s relative autonomy. It does so by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus. Ultimately, these impacts contributed to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens. Dividing the crisis into phases within a secular ritual passage or ‘social drama’, it shows how each phase was defined by struggles between the government and other actors to code the unfolding events in an appropriate moral way, to cast actors in their proper roles, and to plot them together in a storied fashion under a suitable narrative genre. Taken together, these processes constituted a conflictual effort to define the meaning of what was occurring. The paper also offers more specific contributions to cultural sociology by showing why social performance theory needs to consider the effects of casting non-human actors in social dramas, how metaphor forms a powerful tool of political action through simplifying and shaping complex realities, and how casting can shift responsibility and redefine the meaning of emotionally charged events such as human death.

中文翻译：

---

为什么意义创造很重要：英国政府的 COVID-19 响应案例

通过分析英国政府对 COVID-19 疫情的管理，本文对文化的相对自治原则进行了实证论证。它通过展示意义创造斗争的结果如何影响政治合法性、公共行为和对病毒传播的控制来做到这一点。最终，这些影响导致数以万计的英国公民本可避免的死亡。在世俗的仪式段落或“社会戏剧”中将危机划分为多个阶段，它显示了每个阶段是如何由政府和其他行为者之间的斗争来定义的，以便以适当的道德方式对正在发生的事件进行编码，让行为者扮演适当的角色，并在合适的叙事体裁下以故事的方式将它们组合在一起。综合起来，这些过程构成了定义正在发生的事情的含义的冲突努力。该论文还通过展示为什么社会表演理论需要考虑在社会剧中扮演非人类演员的影响，隐喻如何通过简化和塑造复杂的现实来形成政治行动的有力工具，以及演员如何可以转移责任并重新定义诸如人类死亡之类的情绪激动事件的含义。