ABSTRACT
The Western establishes symbolic forms that have had a performative effect on our contemporary world and in shaping American culture. Without offering a complete study of the symbolic forms of the Western, this chapter argues that the genre is paradigmatic for (popular) American culture where the actual performance of the culture is not in what the culture says, its semantics, but in what it does: Westerns bear witness from the past to our future and tell us where and when we live; they tell us also what imagined communities—national, transnational, cultural, religious, ethnic—we belong to.
