Wallowing in Self-Pity

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Laura Otis

The United States and some other Western cultures discourage adults from crying and publicly expressing pain. Metaphors for self-pity show the cultural pressures brought to bear on people who try to make their suffering known. In recent novels and films, metaphors of enclosure, paralysis, and filth depict self-pity as so shameful that they may drive people to suffer in silence. The films G. I. Jane and Bridesmaids illustrate the social rewards offered to women who shun self-pity and the peer pressure directed toward women who “wallow.” Findings in the field of self psychology raise doubts about whether self-pity is as detrimental as popular metaphors indicate. Depictions of self-pity as filthy and entrapping probably have physiological roots but can serve political ends by making injured people feel too ashamed to speak out.

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Stuart Morris

‘The curriculum’, write Richard Hofstadter and C. de Witt Hardy, ‘is a barometer by which we may measure the cultural pressures that operate upon the school.’ These pressures are of many kinds, economic and intellectual, and they make schools and universities social, and even political institutions sensitive to external needs and demands. In the United States, where education has become one of the main secular goals of society, the history of schools and universities deserves to be an integral part of the social history of the country. Lawrence A. Cremin has shown how such an integration can be achieved. And now that ‘B schools’ in the vanguard of Le Défi American are spreading outwards from Manila to Manchester the time is ripe to study a phenomenon which most historians and sociologists, if they have not despised, have preferred to ignore.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8335
Author(s):  
Jasmina Nedevska

Climate change litigation has emerged as a powerful tool as societies steer towards sustainable development. Although the litigation mainly takes place in domestic courts, the implications can be seen as global as specific climate rulings influence courts across national borders. However, while the phenomenon of judicialization is well-known in the social sciences, relatively few have studied issues of legitimacy that arise as climate politics move into courts. A comparatively large part of climate cases have appeared in the United States. This article presents a research plan for a study of judges’ opinions and dissents in the United States, regarding the justiciability of strategic climate cases. The purpose is to empirically study how judges navigate a perceived normative conflict—between the litigation and an overarching ideal of separation of powers—in a system marked by checks and balances.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ayana Omilade Flewellen ◽  
Justin P. Dunnavant ◽  
Alicia Odewale ◽  
Alexandra Jones ◽  
Tsione Wolde-Michael ◽  
...  

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.


Author(s):  
Arati Maleku ◽  
Megan España ◽  
Shannon Jarrott ◽  
Sharvari Karandikar ◽  
Rupal Parekh

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 237802312098032
Author(s):  
Brandon G. Wagner ◽  
Kate H. Choi ◽  
Philip N. Cohen

In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records—marriage certificates and applications—gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.


2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.


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