Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihwa Choi
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Death Rituals ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Question ◽  
Theoretical Question

This study inquires into the historical question of how the politics surrounding death rituals contributed to the revival of Confucianism. It examines major changes in ritual performance both at the imperial court and in society at large during the reigns from Zhenzong to Shenzong. It investigates how polarizing debates about death rituals introduced new terrain for political power dynamics between monarchy and officialdom, and between groups of politically and intellectually divided court officials. In order to answer why death rituals in particular became focal points of contention, it delineates the social imaginaries implied in the distinct death rituals preferred by three powerful and competing social groups—emperors, scholar-officials, and rich merchants. It also aims to engage the theoretical question of how diverse social groups’ contentions over ritual were enmeshed in the struggle over social imaginaries between groups as they envisioned different construction of social reality.

Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihwa Choi
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Death Rituals ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
Historical Question

This study inquires into a historical question of how politics surrounding death rituals and ensuing changes in ritual performance shaped a revival of Confucianism during eleventh-century China. It investigates how polarizing debates about death rituals introduced new terrain for political power dynamics between monarchy and officialdom, and between groups of court officials. During the reign of Renzong, in reaction to Emperor Zhenzong’s statewide Daoist ritual programs for venerating the royal ancestors, some court officials maneuvered in the imperial court to return Confucian canonical rituals to their place of primacy. Later, a faction of scholar-officials took a lead in reviving the Confucian rituals as a way of checking the power of both the emperors and the wealthy merchants. By perceiving Confucian rituals as the models for social reality as it ought to be, they wrote new ritual manuals, condemned non-Confucian rituals, took legal actions, and established public graveyards.

scholarly journals Devadasi System and its Caste Dynamics

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Jeevanandam S
Keyword(s):  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Religious Service ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Element ◽  
Hindu Temples ◽  
Historical Question ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Historical Past

Caste is an ‘integral component’ of Indian society.  Almost all the social groups in Indian subcontinent have their specific rites and rituals. It consolidated them within certain compartmentalized caste category. In this context, there was a custom where girl children were used to dedicate to the ‘Hindu’ temples for the religious service to the deity in the name of devadasi. The system became an important cultural element in the medieval Indian society. The system evolved with its unique functionality in the Indian tradition. The dedicated young girls came from different castes and assigned duties accordingly. However, it was not classified as a separate caste. It became an interesting historical question. This particular paper focused on the devadasi custom and its caste dynamics in the historical past.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihwa Choi
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Death Rituals ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Core Elements

Each of the competing social imaginaries held differing visions of how society ought to be constructed, and where a particular individual desired to be situated within that imagined world. In a world where ritual occupied one of the core elements constituting the social and political fabric of society, death rituals served, not only as a means of effectively displaying existing power relations, but also as a tool for practitioners to construct power and status through its performance. Through debates concerning imperial rituals, scholar-officials were able to limit the monarchical power to a certain extent during Renzong’s era. Amid ebbs and flows of shift in political power within factions among scholar-officials, continuing legal disputes on the performance of proper death rituals in turn fostered a revival of Confucianism.

The Ritual Animal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harvey Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
The Brain

The ritual animal longs to belong. Rituals are a way of defining the boundaries of social groups and binding their members together. The ritual modes theory set out in this book seeks to unravel the psychology behind these processes, and to explain how ritual behaviour evolved, including how different modes of ritual performance have shaped global history over many millennia. Testing the theory has meant designing experiments run with children in psychology labs and on remote Pacific islands, gathering survey data with armed insurgents in the Middle East and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia, monitoring heart rate and stress among football fans in Brazil, and measuring changes in the brain as people observe traditional Chinese rituals in Singapore. The results of all this research point to new ways of addressing cooperation problems: from preventing violent extremism to motivating action on the climate crisis. Although this book is about the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity, more broadly it models a new approach to the science of the social—an approach that is driven by real-world observation but grounded in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. More ambitiously still, it shows how cumulative theory building can be used to deliver practical benefits for society at large, perhaps even addressing problems on a global scale by harnessing the formidable cohesive and cooperative capacities of the ritual animal.

Doing Bodhisattva’s Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-32
Author(s):  
Le Hoang Anh Thu
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The State ◽  
Ho Chi Minh City ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
The Social

This paper explores the charitable work of Buddhist women who work as petty traders in Hồ Chí Minh City. By focusing on the social interaction between givers and recipients, it examines the traders’ class identity, their perception of social stratification, and their relationship with the state. Charitable work reveals the petty traders’ negotiations with the state and with other social groups to define their moral and social status in Vietnam’s society. These negotiations contribute to their self-identification as a moral social class and to their perception of trade as ethical labor.

Main Forms of Propagandistic Activities of the Right-Wing Parties (1904–1914)

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 656-676
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article examines the main forms and methods of agitation and propagandistic activities of monarchic parties in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Among them the author singles out such ones as periodical press, publication of books, brochures and flyers, organization of manifestations, religious processions, public prayers and funeral services, sending deputations to the monarch, organization of public lectures and readings for the people, as well as various philanthropic events. Using various forms of propagandistic activities the monarchists aspired to embrace all social groups and classes of the population in order to organize all-class and all-estate political movement in support of the autocracy. While they gained certain success in promoting their ideology, the Rights, nevertheless, lost to their adversaries from the radical opposition camp, as the monarchists constrained by their conservative ideology, could not promise immediate social and political changes to the population, and that fact was excessively used by their opponents. Moreover, the ideological paradigm of the Right camp expressed in the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” formula no longer agreed with the social and economic realities of Russia due to modernization processes that were underway in the country from the middle of the 19th century.

SOCIAL CONFLICT: ARCHETYPAL NATURE AND RESOLUTION MECHANISM

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (11) ◽  
pp. 294-305
Author(s):  
Ruslan Rafisovich Hasanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Constructive Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interdisciplinary Knowledge

On the basis of the archetypic analysis of development trends of a conflictological paradigm the author’s model of minimization of conflict potential in modern society is offered. Institutional construction is the basis for model that is harmonized with a factor of societal identity.It is noted that the problems of social conflicts, according to data from monitor- ing studies of the Ukrainian school of archetype, are increasingly shifted into the sphere of interpersonal relations. It is stimulated by the progression in society of so-called self-sufficient personalities, the “subjectification” of the social space, and at the same time narrowing down to the solution of entirely specific situations in which there is a collision of the interests of two or more parties.Instead, in order to find the optimal solution for resolving the conflict, it is necessary to have interdisciplinary knowledge, in particular understanding of the deep nature of such conflicts. Collision of points of view, thoughts, positions — a very frequent phenomenon of modern social life. In order to develop the correct line of behavior in various conflict situations, it is important to adequately under- stand the nature of the emergence of the modern conflict and the mechanisms for resolving them in substance. Knowledge of conflict nature enriches the culture of communication and makes human life and social groups not only more calm, but also creates conditions for constructive development. It is proved that in modern life one can not but agree with the statement that an individual carries first re- sponsibility for his own life and only then for the life of the social groups to which he belongs. And while making decisions within the framework of modern mecha- nisms (consensus), the properties of human psychology such as extroversion, emo- tionality, irrationality, intuition, externality, and executive ability will not at least contribute to such a task.That is why in the author’s research attracted attention to the archetypal na- ture of the conflict — the primitive images, ideas, feelings inherent in man as a bearer of the collective unconscious.

SOCIAL CONFLICT: ARCHETYPAL NATURE AND RESOLUTION MECHANISM

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (12) ◽  
pp. 294-305
Author(s):  
Ruslan Rafisovich Hasanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Constructive Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interdisciplinary Knowledge

On the basis of the archetypic analysis of development trends of a conflictological paradigm the author’s model of minimization of conflict potential in modern society is offered. Institutional construction is the basis for model that is harmonized with a factor of societal identity. It is noted that the problems of social conflicts, according to data from monitoring studies of the Ukrainian school of archetype, are increasingly shifted into the sphere of interpersonal relations. It is stimulated by the progression in society of so-called self-sufficient personalities, the “subjectification” of the social space, and at the same time narrowing down to the solution of entirely specific situations in which there is a collision of the interests of two or more parties. Instead, in order to find the optimal solution for resolving the conflict, it is necessary to have interdisciplinary knowledge, in particular understanding of the deep nature of such conflicts. Collision of points of view, thoughts, positions — a very frequent phenomenon of modern social life. In order to develop the correct line of behavior in various conflict situations, it is important to adequately understand the nature of the emergence of the modern conflict and the mechanisms for resolving them in substance. Knowledge of conflict nature enriches the culture of communication and makes human life and social groups not only more calm, but also creates conditions for constructive development. It is proved that in modern life one can not but agree with the statement that an individual carries first responsibility for his own life and only then for the life of the social groups to which he belongs. And while making decisions within the framework of modern mechanisms (consensus), the properties of human psychology such as extroversion, emotionality, irrationality, intuition, externality, and executive ability will not at least contribute to such a task. That is why in the author’s research attracted attention to the archetypal nature of the conflict — the primitive images, ideas, feelings inherent in man as a bearer of the collective unconscious.

STAGES IN SOCIAL POLICY DEVELOPMENT

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-272
Author(s):  
Venelin Terziev ◽  
Preslava Dimitrova
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
National Society ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The social policy of a country is a set of specific activities aimed at regulating the social relations between different in their social status subjects. This approach to clarifying social policy is also called functional and essentially addresses social policy as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality in society. It provides an opportunity to look for inequalities in the economic positions of individuals in relation to ownership, labor and working conditions, distribution of income and consumption, social security and health, to look for the sources of these inequalities and their social justification or undue application.The modern state takes on social functions that seek to regulate imbalances, to protect weak social positions and prevent the disintegration of the social system. It regulates the processes in society by harmonizing interests and opposing marginalization. Every modern country develops social activities that reflect the specifics of a particular society, correspond to its economic, political and cultural status. They are the result of political decisions aimed at directing and regulating the process of adaptation of the national society to the transformations of the market environment. Social policy is at the heart of the development and governance of each country. Despite the fact that too many factors and problems affect it, it largely determines the physical and mental state of the population as well as the relationships and interrelationships between people. On the other hand, social policy allows for a more global study and solving of vital social problems of civil society. On the basis of the programs and actions of political parties and state bodies, the guidelines for the development of society are outlined. Social policy should be seen as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality between different individuals and social groups in society. Its importance is determined by the possibility of establishing on the basis of the complex approach: the economic positions of the different social groups and individuals, by determining the differences between them in terms of income, consumption, working conditions, health, etc .; to explain the causes of inequality; to look for concrete and specific measures to overcome the emerging social disparities.

Ēdiens kā sociālā slāņa un nacionālās piederības robežzīme

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-43
Author(s):  
Sigita Kušnere
Keyword(s):  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hierarchic Structure ◽  
Semantic Pluralism

Taking into account the research conclusions in social and natural sciences, gastropoetics as a research method allows to examine a literary text in-depth revealing the causal relationships and nuances of the psychological portrayal of characters, as well as analyse semantic pluralism providing more diverse interpretation opportunities of a literary text. In Andrejs Upīts’s novel “Bread” (Maize, 1914) the portrayed passengers of the third class train wagon are a micromodel of Western society, where food, sharing the food or its denial precisely reveal the hierarchic structure of community and the differences in social stratification, as well as human behavioural principles, which are based on the tradition that has evolved over thousands of years and can also be cross-compared with the behavioural principles observable among animals. Other aspects include the social undermining of certain social groups, for instance, older people, children, foreigners, as well as the marginalisation of these groups denying them the freedom of choice or action, equal rights, etc. Upīts in his novel constructs a social situation of a small community, accurately revealing the hierarchic structure, as well as collaboration and relationship models of the community.

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