Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Gwynne Mapes
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Food Consumption ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Culture And Language

This chapter introduces the main topics addressed in the book, beginning with a consideration of “eliteness” in contemporary society and how this relates to food consumption, to language, and to authenticity. Here Mapes also lays out the theoretical cornerstones of her research: social class, neoliberalism, and elite discourse; contemporary eating and food rhetorics; material culture and language materiality; and terroir and authenticity. After addressing each of these bodies of literature in turn, Mapes proceeds to explain her methodological approach, which includes a critical/multimodal/autoethnographic orientation to discourse. The chapter concludes with an overview of the rest of the book, and an introduction to “elite authenticity.”

The Organization of Expert Activism: Shadow Mobilization in Two Social Movements*

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Frickel ◽  
Rebekah Torcasso ◽  
Annika Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Cumulative Risk ◽  
Alternative Agriculture ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Systematic Data ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Knowledge Based

The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of “shadow mobilization” to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk and intensifying knowledge-based conflict. Second, we introduce a new methodological approach for collecting systematic data on members of this difficult-to-reach population. Findings from comparative analysis of expert activists in the environmental justice movement in Louisiana and the alternative agriculture movement in Washington reveal both important commonalities and fine-grained differences, suggesting that shadow mobilizations are strategic collective responses to cumulative risk in contemporary society.

Self and Body

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Sassatelli
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Specific Configuration ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Late Modern

This article investigates the historical formation and specific configuration of a threefold relation crucial to contemporary society, that between the body, the self, and material culture, which, in contemporary, late modern (or post-industrial) societies, has become largely defined through consumer culture. Drawing on historiography, sociology, and anthropology, it explores how, from the early modern period, the consolidation of new consumption patterns and values has given way to particular visions of the human being as a consumer, and how, in turn, the consumer has become a cultural battlefield for the management of body and self. The article also discusses tastes, habitus, and individualization.

scholarly journals Ethnisierung als Ressource und Praxis

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (120) ◽  
pp. 399-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Scherr
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Collective Identities

Forms of doing ethnicity question an understanding of modern society as a society of free and equal individuals as well as the idea, that membership of social class determines social identities. What kind of a challenge the obversation of processes of ethnicitation represents in regard of the theories of contemporary society should discuss more precisely. In front of this background it is supposed to see ethnicitation as an indeterminate collective name for intern heterogene social practices of social construction of collective identities. It is argued, that even so processes of ethnicitation often indicate conflicts between majorities and minorities and the structural and manifested discrimination of the latter, it can not be sufficiently and exclusively explained in this way.

scholarly journals Makna Material Culture dalam “Sarung” sebagai Identitas Santri

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Toto Sugiarto
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Character Building ◽  
Culture Concept

In material culture as a concept of local culture and nation heritage, “sarong” also has non-material value,  likes as a symbol of santri, heroism, social class, kindness and honor. Sarong with variuos size, color, motifs, and pattern shapes the person and society, even the identity of a nation, especially Indonesia. Sarong even became part of the symbol of religiosity and diversity of Indonesia. By borrowing Bung Karno's message that the task of future generations is nation character building, caring for and developing a sarong culture, it can be seen as an effort to care for and develop the nation's character. Therefore, this paper use approachs or perspectives : material culture concept, social class perspective, and nation characer building concept. Method of writing is literary studies and analysis content method by various in resorches  that support this article. The result of exprloration indicate that sarong can be the symbol  for nation building character and identity with meaning and history contents powerly.

Eat What’s Good for You

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy L. Best
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Food Consumption ◽  
Food Provisioning ◽  
Parental Pressure ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Good For ◽  
Washington High School ◽  
Role Of Parents

This chapter focuses on Washington High School and its cafeteria, examining the different types of food found there and the role of parents in shaping the cafeteria and students, with specific attention to social class and its consequence for a public food provisioning system. The first part of the chapter sketches the changing set of arrangements in food consumption toward a focus on health that Dan, the food director, labored to bring into being and the role of parental pressure in driving such change. The second part of the chapter shifts attention toward youth, highlighting the way class dispositions shape what kids consume and how they consume, and examining how this same ambivalence finds expression in the types of play students engage in this space.

Zapisnaia kniga (Donation Records) of Volokolamsk Monastery, for 1550-1607

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 106-147
Author(s):  
Tom Dykstra
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Broad Cross Section ◽  
Parish Priests

Early modern Russian monasteries kept detailed records of donations by laity and by the monks themselves from before and after their tonsure. Gifts large enough to endow annual celebrations were generally recorded in the vkladnaia kniga (endowment donation book) and the kormovaia kniga (book of feasts), while smaller donations were recorded in the zapisnaia kniga (note book). The zapisnaia kniga translated here includes donations made over more than half a century to the Iosifo-Volokolamsk monastery, one of the largest in Russia in the sixteenth century. The donors form a broad cross-section of Russian society -- peasants and princes, men and women, parish priests and archbishops. The records provide detailed evidence of the material culture of their time, since donations were mostly in-kind. And the information they provide calls into question preconceived notions about how closely social class and wealth were tied together in Russia in this period.

scholarly journals Robo-Revolution: A Marxist Approach to Social Uprising in the High-Tech Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 224-244
Author(s):  
Lika Rodin
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The Future ◽  
Marxist Approach

With the increasing role of technological agents in contemporary society, questions surrounding the future of socio-economic organization are intensely debated. A variety of predictions have been made, ranging from conservative views that emphasize the gradual integration of techno-actors into human social collectives to radical outlooks that assume the inevitability of a dramatic historic break. This study employs the method of simulation, exploring the on-going path towards automation with the help of classical Marxism. It seeks to understand whether robots and artificial intelligence (AI) might become new value producers and a revolutionary social class. As demonstrated, the continuity of capitalist relationships may facilitate the formation of new social groups and recast class-based political agendas.

scholarly journals Bridging the Gap: Image, Discourse, and Beyond – Towards a Critical Theory of Visual Representation

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Antonia Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Visual Artifacts ◽  
Linguistic Material

Pictures and images play a central role in contemporary society. Not only do they mediate meaning in a seemingly universal language (Fromm 1981), but their relevance for the construction of perception and beliefs cannot be underestimated. In global, political and religious discourses, controversies often revolve around images. The influence visuality has on the forming of ideas has already been discussed in the 1930s (Freud 1932). Today, even neurobiologists acknowledge the influential power of mental images (Hüther 2004).  But, despite the well acknowledged impact the Pictorial Turn has had up to date, discourse analyses are typically carried out solely on linguistic material. Nevertheless, even in the Foucauldian sense the term “discourse” relates to epistemes and power not only conveyed by language, but also by pictures and images, in “a mushy mixture of the articulable and the visible” (Deleuze 2006).  Nonetheless, the specific characteristics of pictures and images render analysis ever more difficult. Visual representations are a case sui generis. They cannot be transcribed into language completely. Research on visual artifacts can be put to work as a disclosure of how symbolic orders and the accordant identities are constructed. Something present, a picture or an image, is analyzed with regard to its ideological implications, as studies related to Cultural Studies usually do. Yet, beyond the visible picture, if representation is the making-present of something that’s absent (Pitkin 1967), what respectively who is being made absent by the presence of the visible? The ambiguity of representation as “standing for” versus “depiction of” might at the same time enable a critical approach in the analysis of visual discourse. In this article, I attempt to conceptualize a methodological approach for conducting discourse analyses on visual material. For this purpose, I will introduce a dialectical notion of representativeness as imagery that draws on Gayatri C. Spivak’s critique and Hannah Fenichel Pitkin’s Political Theory of representation, as well as on Siegfried Kracauer’s deliberations on film. Finally, I am going to give an example for putting this approach into research practice.

scholarly journals Ethics in an individualized field of practice – Social pedagogy in the context of the neoliberal organization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Cleary
Keyword(s):  
Reflective Practice ◽  
General Public ◽  
Ethical Code ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
Social Pedagogy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
General Concern ◽  
Culture And Language

Writing from a Danish social pedagogical perspective, the author raises concerns about the difficulty of developing and integrating ethical reflection within the organization in the context of neoliberalism. While ethical reflection in social pedagogy tends to focus on the relationship between practitioner and client, or the relationship between the profession and the general public, this article wishes to focus on how ethical reflection develops in the workplace on an everyday basis. The reason for this focus is that the culture and language of the workplace can have major consequences for how practitioners interpret their roles and how they interpret the official ethical code. Although this article addresses the problem from a Danish context, the author argues that the struggle to develop ethical reflection within the organization is a general concern in most professions in contemporary society. What makes this problem controversial within the Danish social pedagogical context is that the profession has a long tradition of working qualitatively with relationship-based-practices. In the neoliberal organization, mercantile logic undermines the ethical logic of relationship-based practices. This is due to the former’s emphasis on effectivity and the latter’s emphasis on responsibility. This article is a critique of what the author sees as the neoliberal organization’s inability to tackle this conflict of values. Furthermore, this article problematizes the ‘abstract individuality’ that neoliberal organizations produce, highlighting the fact that such individuality is inconsistent with responsibility. Finally, the author argues that, by reinterpreting the concept of reflective practice, the organization may develop a more concrete individuality that is more consistent with responsibility.

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