Norm and Transgression : Comments on the Notion of Provocation in Cultural History

Résumé 0

Provocation is an essential notion in cultural history. It is linked to that of transgression, also coming from the notion of norm. It leads to working on cultural norms and transgression, essential elements of societies’ metabolism and its collective representations. It is true that at the same time, such an approach must be recognized as being difficult to put into practice as the norm comes from what will be called, for lack of a better term, a period’s sensibility. Here are the representations and imaginations, and thus what marks, just as much as law or customs, individual and collective behaviors within a given human community at a given date. This is both an immense area since it touches private life and intimacy and impermeable to a historian’s research since it concerns notions as complex as the relation to the body or with the Other. The article aims to circumscribe this area by bringing up three cases from the same decade, the 1960s.