Complex Intersection of Social Relations and the Material World

2009 ◽  
pp. 123-165
Author(s):  
Deborah Rotman
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Material World

scholarly journals Autoanthropology, Modernity, and Automobiles

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Lemonnier
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Material World ◽  
Shared Representations ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S

The chapter deals both with the changing relations boys and men have had and have with ‘classic’ cars of the 1950s–1960s (notably British sports cars), and with the social relations classic cars aficionados have had and have between them apropos these machines that have survived and are still used, and therefore illustrate what has to be done so that artefacts do not become archaeological items. It raises an anthropological question having to do with what is at the core of the anthropology of objects, techniques, and material actions, namely: What do interactions with the material world do that words alone could not do? The answer the chapter proposes is that by doing and making things in relation to these cars, men build, in a partially non-verbal way, a core of shared representations. In turn, this shared mixture of thoughts and actions is central to diverse social groupings and manifestations.

scholarly journals Kitchenalia in Bronze Age Cyprus

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-90
Author(s):  
Louise Steel
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Material World ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Food And Drink

This article explores the materiality of food production and consumption within the household in Bronze Age Cyprus. The focus is on embodied encounters with the “stuff of food”—the pots, pans, and other kitchen implements that were used on a daily basis—and how these shaped people's lives. Throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, generations of families on Cyprus used Red Polished pottery to serve and consume food and drink: the round-bottomed pots were not designed to be laid on a table, indicative of the development of very specific customs of dining at home. The very limited range of pottery (wares and forms) available to the Early-Middle Cypriot householder suggests a monotone cultural experience. The introduction of vessels with flat bases or ring bases at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age might indicate a move to dining around a table—a radically different engagement with the physical, material world that undoubtedly affected social relations. This was accompanied by radical shifts in production practices—a move away from household production into the realm of craft specialists—alongside which there was an explosion in the range of tableware for consumption of food and drink and of utilitarian wares used within the kitchen. This article interrogates the implied transformations in the cultural knowledge embedded within people's engagement with their material world and the very different visual and tactile experiences involved in the daily use of pottery in the Late Bronze Age Cypriot household.

Animating by Association: Index Objects and Relational Taxonomies

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Nieves Zedeño
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Great Variability ◽  
Association Index ◽  
Material World ◽  
Different Ages ◽  
Contextual Associations ◽  
The Impact

Despite great variability in archaeological and ethnographic material culture across North America, a handful of objects are ubiquitous in assemblages of different ages and geographies. These index objects are clues to ontological principles, such as animacy, that guide the interactions between Native Americans and the material world. The impact of relational ontologies on the formation of heterogeneous archaeological assemblages may be evaluated through analyses of index objects and contextual associations. To this effect, this article presents the outline of an assemblage-based relational taxonomy, where spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions are combined with object biographies, interactive roles, and social relations.

scholarly journals Navigating stigma through everyday city-making: Gendered trajectories, politics and outcomes in the periphery of Lima

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110444
Author(s):  
Adriana Allen
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Access To Services ◽  
Tenure Security ◽  
Material World ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Multiple Material ◽  
The City

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholars from the fields of psychology, sociology, law and public health have devoted their attention to examining how and why stigma operates as a form of discrimination, paying particular attention to ethno-racially stigmatised groups. However, less attention has focused on how ordinary women and men engaged in peripheral urbanisation processes are stigmatised through multiple material, social and political mechanisms and with a myriad of outcomes. Building on this literature, and drawing on the trajectories of a man and a woman living in the periphery of metropolitan Lima, I explore how stigmatisation shapes the daily lives of poor and impoverished citizens as they try to find a place in the city, and how and why their everyday practices contribute, or not, to the transformation of stigma traps. I argue that the everyday city-making practices of the ‘unsheltered’ are inextricably linked to the politics of bare citizenship. As those stigmatised become individualised, isolated and undermined, they also are deprived of being part of a collective experience, and are deeply challenged to reclaim their agency as entitled citizens. The wider the range of stigmatisation mechanisms at work, the more difficult it is for those subjected to stigma to counteract them, as they become disadvantaged in a broad range of domains: from social relations, to tenure security, access to services and infrastructure, livelihood opportunities, and psychological and physical wellbeing. I further contend that a deep examination of the material world – the dwelling, the neighbourhood and the city – and of the practices and imaginaries that produce this material world, opens a window into the micro-politics of how stigma is negotiated, apportioned and resisted in the everyday lives of those who are politically and materially unsheltered.

Personhood

2019 ◽  
pp. 272-288
Author(s):  
John Frow
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Material World ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Natural Person ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Mode Of Being

Legal personhood is distinct from and dependent on ordinary understandings of what it means to be a human person. Yet not every human being is a person (slaves are not, for example), and there are some non-human entities (such as corporations) which are. The legal category of the person is thus at once continuous and discontinuous with that of the natural person, designating a subject of rights and duties along a spectrum from full to very partial personhood. Moreover, the mode of being of natural persons is by no means self-evident, because the status of the “natural” person is itself constituted by a juridical demarcation of the boundaries of embodied human being and by distinct institutional and practical conditions of constitution, and natural persons are not necessarily coextensive with their bodies. While Western models of personhood are based on the coherence and continuity of the self as rational or ethical substance, quite different ways of understanding personhood are found in other cultures, where persons may be taken to be the sum of their social relations or of the exchange of substances between their bodies and the rest of the social and material world. Similarly, in most cultures persons are constituted by their relation to the generations of the dead from whom they inherit, to the gods, and to the unborn descendants to whom property and some of the components of kinship (a name, a status, a genetic inheritance) are to be passed on.

Water and Materiality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Krause
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Material Properties ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Material World ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Single Thing ◽  
Two Sides

Water is key to human life, both biophysically and socioculturally. Having long been regarded in anthropology as a circumstantial backdrop to human society and culture, water—alongside other nonhuman substances and beings—has received growing attention as a material with specific potentials and histories in the 21st century. This research explores the fundamental connectivity and relationality of water, through which social relations and hydrological flows are often two sides of the same coin, shaping and transforming each other. Watery materiality is frequently characterized by movement and instability, defying control but also intersecting with other social and material processes to create ever new arrangements. Water practices, infrastructures, and experiences participate in the formation and transformation of spaces and landscapes, and may inspire novel theoretical insights on meaning-making, kinship, learning, and space, among other topics. Water’s valuation and the tensions that arise regarding how to govern it emerge in part from its material properties. Ongoing discussions explore the links between these properties, water infrastructures, unequal distribution, and political power. Watery materiality is not a single thing, but has multiple manifestations, including saltwater, ice, and humidity. Some scholars therefore propose studying water and materiality in terms of various forms of wetness or amphibious processes. Research into water and materiality suggests that the material world consists of open processes rather than of fixed objects, and that water’s multiple manifestations and flows actively participate in shaping human lives.

The Material World

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Cotterill
Keyword(s):  
Material World

The SRM Approach to Family Assessment

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 216-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Cook
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Risk Behaviors ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Dynamics ◽  
Family Assessment ◽  
High Risk Behaviors ◽  
Analysis Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
Direction Of Effects

Abstract. In family systems, it is possible for one to put oneself at risk by eliciting aversive, high-risk behaviors from others ( Cook, Kenny, & Goldstein, 1991 ). Consequently, it is desirable that family assessments should clarify the direction of effects when evaluating family dynamics. In this paper a new method of family assessment will be presented that identifies bidirectional influence processes in family relationships. Based on the Social Relations Model (SRM: Kenny & La Voie, 1984 ), the SRM Family Assessment provides information about the give and take of family dynamics at three levels of analysis: group, individual, and dyad. The method will be briefly illustrated by the assessment of a family from the PIER Program, a randomized clinical trial of an intervention to prevent the onset of psychosis in high-risk young people.

Meta-Accuracy and Perceived Reciprocity From the Perception-Meta-Perception Social Relations Model

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
Ben Porter ◽  
Camilla S. Øverup ◽  
Julie A. Brunson ◽  
Paras D. Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Structural Equation Modeling ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Social Relations Model ◽  
Flexible Framework ◽  
Multilevel Structural Equation

Abstract. Meta-accuracy and perceptions of reciprocity can be measured by covariances between latent variables in two social relations models examining perception and meta-perception. We propose a single unified model called the Perception-Meta-Perception Social Relations Model (PM-SRM). This model simultaneously estimates all possible parameters to provide a more complete understanding of the relationships between perception and meta-perception. We describe the components of the PM-SRM and present two pedagogical examples with code, openly available on https://osf.io/4ag5m . Using a new package in R (xxM), we estimated the model using multilevel structural equation modeling which provides an approachable and flexible framework for evaluating the PM-SRM. Further, we discuss possible expansions to the PM-SRM which can explore novel and exciting hypotheses.

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