“She thinks you’re kawaii”: Socializing affect, gender, and relationships in a Japanese preschool

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW BURDELSKI ◽  
KOJI MITSUHASHI
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Social World ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Participation Frameworks ◽  
Shed Light

ABSTRACTKawaii, an adjective meaning ‘cute’, ‘adorable’, and ‘lovable’, is an important aspect of Japanese material culture and a key affect word used to describe things that are small, delicate, and immature. While “cuteness” has been widely discussed in relation to Japanese society and psychology and the globalization of Japanese culture, there has been little analysis of the word kawaii in interaction. This article explores the use of kawaii in interaction in a Japanese preschool. In particular, it analyzes ways teachers use multimodal resources, including talk, embodied actions, material objects, and participation frameworks, in making assessments of things in the social world and in “glossing” children’s actions as thoughts and feelings, and it examines children’s emerging use of kawaii with teachers and peers. The findings shed light on ways everyday communicative practices shape children’s understandings and use of language in relation to affect, gender, and relationships in preschool.*

Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: A Couple's Narrative of Family History in Early Modern Florence

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Calvi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Concrete Material ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Relatives ◽  
Shed Light

Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.

Machina ex homine, homo ex machina

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio I. M. Poppi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Conceptual Representation ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Deviance ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social

Abstract In this article, I identify and describe multimodal hybrid metaphors—the conceptual representation of two elements represented as merged into a new single ‘gestalt’—represented by the machine and human body domains in “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (鉄男: Tetsuo), a Japanese avant-garde film. Since “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” portrays the genesis of a man whose body becomes a human-machine hybrid, I explore to what extent this film can act as an example of how hybrid metaphors are conveyed. In line with the ideological function of metaphors, where the use of alternative metaphors may produce different meanings and potentially have different effects on the recipient, I also try to interpret how these hybrid metaphors reveal information about the contemporary Japanese society. Specifically, the ideological analysis considers how the notion of ‘artificial’ and the social phenomena of misogyny, homophobia and social deviance are held to characterise the post-World War II Japanese culture.

Moving between frames: The basis of the stable and dialogical self

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore ◽  
Carol Jasper ◽  
Alex Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Dialogical Self ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Stability And Instability ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
The Stability

Research on the dialogical self has tended to emphasize instability over stability. Grossen and Salazar Orvig (2011) show how norms, values, material objects, and institutions feed into the stability of the self. We expand upon this contribution by introducing Goffman’s (1974) concept of “frames” to theorize both stability and instability. Social interactions do not begin with individuals but with socially given and pre-existing cultural-historical frames which people are called upon to inhabit. Frames comprise historical, institutional, material, and cultural aspects. The key point is that action within a frame tends to stabilize the self, while being caught between frames tends to destabilize the self. The concept of frames can thus provide a clear link between the structure of the social world and the structure of the dialogical self. We use the concept of frames to distinguish the stability produced by one set of expectations, within one frame, from the peculiar instability and dialogical tensions which result from being embedded in discrepant or contradictory frames.

Material Culture in the Social World

2002 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-66
Author(s):  
J. Attfield
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social

Bukhara Center

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-97
Author(s):  
James Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Human Impact ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Social World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Currency ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter assesses the human impact of Bukhara's efflorescence. To what extent did Bukhara's cosmological centrality manifest in actual networks of human exchange? How far did Bukhara's allure extend, and from what points of origin were people willing to travel there for education in its colossal madrasa establishment? The story of centering the cosmopolis for a regional constituency and of deploying the corresponding social currency within that context is one that could equally be told about any number of other Persianate nodes: Lahore, Isfahan, Istanbul, and beyond. Bukhara was not unique in this regard. However, this pivot between cosmopolitan high culture and social power dynamics at the subregional level remains terra incognita. Texts were resonant across vast swathes of territory, but the mechanics of the world undergirding them are left to the imagination in much of the extant scholarship. Yet these ideas were not merely floating in the ether, and the paths taken by the ulama of Bukhara can perhaps shed light on the social world producing, and produced by, cosmopolitan transculturation. Ultimately, the chapter traces the geographical trajectories of the Islamic scholars at the heart of this study, revealing a regional cultural–religious network that revolved around Bukhara the Noble, the Abode of Knowledge.

‘Gender’ Problems in Japanese Politics: A Dispute over a Socio-Cultural Change towards Increasing Equality

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-385
Author(s):  
MIKIKO ETO
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Family System ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Politics ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
The Government ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract‘Gender (jenda)’ is a troublesome loanword in Japan. While this term has been prevalent in feminist and scholarly circles, it has evoked confusion in the government and stimulated a backlash from the ultra-conservatives against gender equality. Japanese reactionaries have attacked the concept of gender because of their anxiety about cultural destruction – I thus call them the ‘old guard’. Focusing on a dispute over the term ‘gender’ between feminists and the old guard, this paper examines the changes in the term's usage and meanings in the Japanese political context. I first shed light on Japan's reaction to the newly arrived term ‘gender’, outlining different attitudes towards gender between the feminist/scholarly circles and the government. Secondly, I discuss the old guard's condemnation of the concept of gender, in which they distort its significance in order to diminish its positive impact on society. I then scrutinize the old guard's reasons behind their attack on the concept of gender. My findings reveal that the old guard, whose political cause is to protect traditional Japanese culture, asserts that gender equality damages this culture. Moreover, I refute their emphasis on Japan's uniqueness, demonstrating that Japanese women's traditional virtues under the patriarchal family system are not peculiar to Japan. To gauge how the concept of gender has been interpreted politically, I highlight legislative debates about the term ‘gender’. In doing so, I elucidate the extent to which the concept of gender has infiltrated Japanese society through the dispute.

‘We can’t live without beliefs’: Self and society in therapeutic engagements

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suvi Salmenniemi
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Emotional Wellbeing ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethical Work ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Shed Light

Therapeutic technologies of happiness, emotional wellbeing and self-improvement are a highly influential cultural phenomenon and a rapidly growing business worldwide; yet little is known of the motivations for engaging with these technologies. This article addresses this gap by investigating how therapeutic engagements are experienced and what participants hope to gain from them. Therapeutic technologies are conceived as psychologically informed regimes of knowledge and practice which aim to transform one’s relationship to oneself and shape the ways in which one makes sense of and acts upon oneself and the social world. Drawing on a set of interviews with consumers of therapeutic technologies in Russia, the article identifies three key motivations for engaging with such technologies: searching for new blueprints for ethical work on the self after a profound transformation of the ideological field; coming to terms with new mechanisms of inequality, particularly in the field of labour; and mobilizing therapeutic technologies as a response to inadequacies in the field of health. By unpacking these motivations and subjective experiences of therapeutic engagements, the article seeks to shed light on the growing popularity of therapeutic technologies under contemporary capitalism.

scholarly journals Law, Nation and Race: Exploring Law’s Cultural Power in Delimiting Belonging in English Courtrooms

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Aliverti
Keyword(s):  
Legal Culture ◽  
Social World ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The Law ◽  
Shed Light

This article explores the place of law and legality in the formation of British national identity and its reproduction (and contestation) inside the courtroom. It draws on sociolegal scholarship on legal culture, legal consciousness and ‘law and colonialism’ to shed light on the cultural power of the law to forge national subjectivities. The law does more than adjudicating justice and imposing sanctions. Its symbolic power lies in its capacity to construct legal subjectivities, of both individuals and nations. Through the law and its categories, people make sense of the social world and their position in it. The law can articulate national identities by expressing who we are and who we would like to be as a nation. By exploring the place of the law in discourses of British nationhood, this article contributes to our understanding of the ideological role of the law in reifying racial and global hierarchies. It also sheds light on how the boundaries of belonging can be unsettled through law’s power.

scholarly journals EMBEDDED CREATIVITY: STRUCTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN MATERIALITY, VISUALITY, AND AGENCY IN EVERYDAY PERCEPTUAL SETTINGS

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilya INISHEV
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Meaningful Material

Abstract The goal of the article is to examine how some material surfaces contribute to the social consequentiality of the everyday visual experience, generating, transmitting and disseminating nonverbal social meanings, making up bulk of contemporary world’s communicative practices, even its very social fabric. Unlike most of the current – otherwise enormously productive – theoretical initiatives making the social functions of material objects and surfaces the main focus of their social-theoretical inquiry, an approach proposed in this article lays emphasis on some formal structural correlations between the modes of materiality of visually perceived phenomena and the behavioural and emotional opportunities for perceiving subjects. I propose the notion of “generative surface” as the most semantically dense and socially consequential type of visual materiality – a sort of perceivable surfaces that, in contrast to mere physical ones, constitute meaningful material settings substantially influencing our creative capacities within everyday experiences.

scholarly journals Formations of Feeling, Constellation of Things

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Social World ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Ruth Benedict

This essay revisits Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘structures of feeling’ with the intention of clarifying what Williams meant by ‘feelings’, and of exploring the concept’s possible range and reach within the study of culture. It recovers the initial anthropological context for the phrase by reconnecting it to the work of Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson. It goes on to suggest that while the analysis of ‘structures of feeling’ has been deployed primarily in studies of literary and filmic culture it might be usefully extended towards the study of more ubiquitous forms of material culture such as clothing, housing, food, furnishings and other material practices of daily living. Indeed it might be one way of explaining how formations of feeling are disseminated, how they suture us to the social world and how feelings are embedded in the accoutrements of domestic, habitual life. The essay argues that by joining together a socially phenomenological interest in the world of things, accompanied by an attention to historically specific moods and atmospheres, ‘structures of feelings’ can direct analyses towards important mundane cultural phenomena.  

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