Fatwa, Discursivity, and the Art of Ethical Embedding

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 765-790
Author(s):  
Omer Awass
Keyword(s):  
Social Process ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Legal Opinions

Abstract This paper theorizes the role of iftāʾ, the process of producing fatwas (Islamic legal opinions), on the formation of Muslim societies. I argue in this paper that iftāʾ is an ethical embedding mechanism that historically carried out this function through a set of discursive and nondiscursive relations. “Ethical embedding” signifies the situating of the various spheres of the social world into an ethical domain. As for iftāʾs discursive relations, the historical manifestations of its procedures and the production of fatwas represented a discursive formation because they manifested a particular regularity in their discursive operations. As for their nondiscursive relations, fatwas position actions and practices within the Islamic moral field through a definite social process. Finally, these operations generate a social field of power that structures the relations between the individuals and institutions of iftāʾ and induces personal dispositions that facilitate the practice of the norms embedded in the fatwa.

scholarly journals Conceptualization of serious play in modern sociocultural reality

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 31-39
Author(s):  
Tatiana V. Fanenshtil ◽  
◽  
Irina V. Sadykova ◽  
Sofya Y. Sukhanova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Social World ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Theory Of Practice ◽  
The Social

In the conditions of transformation of sociocultural reality, its processes, levels, spheres, and new integrative social phenomena emerge, the meaning and role of which in the modern world have yet to be clarified. One of such phenomena is serious play. Traditionally, the playful and the serious, at the intersection of which serious play arises, are positioned as independent and mutually exclusive elements of the social world. We examine what changes in the social reality, in the relations of the playful and the serious, in the position of man in modern social processes make serious play possible and how serious play redetermines the conditions of its occurrence. For this, we used methods of philosophical analysis and hermeneutics: interpretation, conceptualization, comparative analysis. As a theoretical and methodological basis, we used the categorical apparatus of social philosophy, theory of practice, pragmatism, and social epistemology. As a result, we found that serious play is thought of as a social process in the range from an individual to global scale. In serious play, the subject, through the generation of meanings, performs both the production and reproduction of culture in predetermined ontoaxiological bases, and constructs these bases, while realizing the degree of his freedom, responsibility and immersion in the world he creates through his practices. The significance of the results of our research lies in the fact that the concept of serious play at the intersection of serious and game relations reveals the potential of serious play as an element of sociocultural reality. Serious play reflects the level of complexity of modern reality and ensures that a person adapts to the ever-increasing dynamics of this complexity. The trend of gamification registers this in the space of higher education, which causes a change in the role of the university in the modern social world. Serious play redefines the position of a person in the modern, dynamic and individualized social world. For the first time, serious play is conceptualized at the intersection of the playful and the serious as independent and mutually exclusive elements of sociocultural reality and is analyzed in the trend of the gamification of higher education.

Conforming Choices: Peer Influence, Adoption, and Interpretation of the Islamic Headscarf in Indonesia

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustav Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Peer Influence ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Islamic Headscarf ◽  
The Social

AbstractThis article examines the role of peer influence in structuring adoption and interpretation of the Islamic headscarf among young Muslim women in Indonesia. I argue that approaches to the jilbab fall into two broad-based categories of practice, each of whose practitioners play distinct roles in the social process driving both adoption and interpretation of the headscarf. Proactively pious Muslims act as “influencers” who encourage adoption by morality signaling (i.e., signaling “virtue” and “correct-ness” to others) in the immediate social environment. The reactively pious adopt the practice in response to the internalized urge to conform to new expectations within a pietized field, but then transform the practice by treating it as a commodified element in broader repertoires of fashion and femininity. The result is both a pietized social field and one in which piety has been informalized.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

Globalization, Citizenship, and Subjectivity in Self Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Namita Poudel
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Fields ◽  
Research Questions

One of the profound questions that troubled many philosophers is– “Who am I?” where do I come from? ‘Why am I, where I am? Or “How I see myself?” and maybe more technically -What is my subjectivity? How my subjectivity is formed and transformed? My attempt, in this paper, is to look at “I”, and see how it got shaped. To understand self, this paper tries to show, how subjectivity got transformed or persisted over five generations with changing social structure and institutions. In other words, I am trying to explore self-identity. I have analyzed changing subjectivity patterns of family, and its connection with globalization. Moreover, the research tries to show the role of the Meta field in search of subjectivity based on the following research questions; how my ancestor’s subjectivity changed with social fields? Which power forced them to change their citizenship? And how my identity is shaped within the metafield? The methodology of my study is qualitative. Faced to face interview is taken with the oldest member of family and relatives. The finding of my research is the subjectivity of Namita Poudel (Me) is shaped by the meta field, my position, and practices in the social field.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

Voorbij navelstaren en narcisme

KWALON ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Müller
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Auto Ethnography

Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography The labeling of auto-ethnography as navel-gazing does not do justice to the variety with which auto-ethnography is applied. A distinction should be made between emotional and analytical auto-ethnography. In the first form the central person of the researcher plays the central role, in the second auto-ethnography is applied to get a better understanding of the social world which is being studied. In this article the author discusses the second approach by using the work of Jeff Ferrell. Ferrell is a well-known cultural criminologist, who focuses critically on the cultural understanding of social life. By looking at how Ferrell applies auto-ethnography, insight is gained into the added value of this method for qualitative studies: (1) the integration of the personal experiences of researchers in texts in order to achieve a richer description of the social worlds they explore, (2) making explicit the role of the researcher in publications, and (3) developing new (more appealing) forms of representation.

scholarly journals Digital Survivance: Mediatization and the Sacred in the Tribal Digital Activism of the #NoDAPL Movement

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Schofield Clark ◽  
Angel Hinzo
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Communication Media ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Further Development

To explore the role of contestation in mediatization processes, this article utilizes digital and visual methods to analyze instances of Indigenous digital survivance. Focusing on recent examples at the heart of the #NoDAPL movement allows us to flesh out and argue for a decolonizing approach to the study of mediatization, which we define, following Clark (2011), as the process by which collective uses of communication media (1) extend the development of independent media industries and their circulation of narratives, (2) contribute to new forms of action and interaction in the social world, and (3) give shape to how we think of humanity and our place in the world. The article therefore concludes with suggestions regarding the further development of methodological approaches to studying processes of mediatization in relation to contestations over normative claims and pragmatic concerns regarding the role of media systems in our collective future.

scholarly journals Queer utopias and queer criminology

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 510-522
Author(s):  
Lynne Copson ◽  
Avi Boukli
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Forms

Drawing on the concept of utopia to reflect upon the emerging field of queer criminology and José Esteban Muñoz’s account of queer theory as essentially utopian, we draw two conclusions. First, we suggest that queer criminology is currently limited by tinkering at the edges with piecemeal reforms instead of focussing on radical, wholesale changes, and second, that queer theory contains within it the potential for a more holistic reimagining of the social world. In doing so, we question rigid cis/trans binaries and reject accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of structural harm. We draw on Ernst Bloch’s concepts of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopia to suggest that while queer criminology has succeeded in producing largely ‘abstract’ utopias, it struggles in translating these into ‘concrete’ ones. By introducing examples of trans literary utopias as potential transformative cultural forms, however, we consider the potential of queer theory for realising ‘concrete’ utopia through a more radical rethinking of the social world.

The function of metaphor framing, deliberate or otherwise, in a social world

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Thibodeau
Keyword(s):  
Framing Effects ◽  
Social World ◽  
Target Domain ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Metaphor Processing ◽  
Pragmatic Dimension

Abstract Metaphor frames highlight certain aspects of a target domain and deemphasize others, thereby encouraging specific patterns of inference. A recent series of studies (Reijnierse, Burgers, Krennmayr, & Steen, 2015; Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014), however, raises questions about the role of metaphor in communication and reasoning by (a) failing to find metaphor framing effects on a series of policy judgments, (b) critiquing the methods that have been used to test for metaphor framing effects, and (c) arguing that current theories of metaphor processing fail to consider the social-pragmatic dimension of metaphor in communication. Here, I reflect on these concerns and present novel analyses of data collected by Steen and colleagues, which reveal metaphor framing effects in these studies but fail to support a prediction of Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT): that extended metaphors are more likely to be remembered. DMT attempts to situate metaphor framing effects more intentionally along a social-pragmatic dimension; developing and testing the theory was a primary motivation of the studies conducted by Steen and colleagues. I discuss the implications of these findings and offer a perspective on how DMT can help grow our knowledge of the function of metaphor in a social world.

From paradise to brand

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Rainer Hülsse
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Considerable Body

Metaphors construct social reality, including the actors which populate the social world. A considerable body of research has explored this reality-constituting role of metaphors, yet little attention has been paid to the attempts of social actors to influence the metaphorical structure by which they are constituted. The present article conceptualises the relationship between actor and metaphorical structure as one of mutual constitution. Empirically, it analyses how until the late 1990s Liechtenstein was constructed as an attractive financial centre by metaphors such as haven and paradise, how then a metaphorical shift constituted the country more negatively, before Liechtenstein finally fought back: with the help of the new brand-metaphor and also a professional image campaign the country tried to repair its international image.

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