A Distant Rainbow

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-38
Author(s):  
Debasish Roy Chowdhury ◽  
John Keane
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Western World ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Caste Status ◽  
Governing Institutions

This introductory chapter traces the origins and resilience of the idea of India as the world’s largest democracy. Democracy was neither a gift of the Western world nor uniquely suited to Indian conditions. India was in fact a laboratory featuring a first-ever experiment in creating national unity, economic growth, religious toleration, and social equality out of a vast and polychromatic reality, a social order whose inherited power relations, rooted in the hereditary Hindu caste status, language hierarchies, and accumulated wealth, were to be transformed by the constitutionally guaranteed counter-power of public debate, multiparty competition, and periodic elections. Efforts to build an Indian democracy are said to have done more than transform the lives of its people. India fundamentally altered the nature of representative democracy itself. India’s democratic credentials, however, face new scrutiny as a result of the executive excesses of a populist demagogue as governing institutions crumble. The chapter argues that India’s democratic decline actually goes back further. It looks at the destructive effects of the long-standing neglect of the social foundations of India’s democracy and considers the possible mutation of democracy into a strange new kind of government called despotism.

Contexts and structures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Economic Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Institutional Structures

This introductory chapter provides an outline of some of the ideological, political, and institutional structures and contexts within which the plays under discussion in this study were produced and consumed. Shakespeare's stagings of history were peculiarly intense in their concentration on the doings of kings and princes. In an emergently absolutist personal monarchy and during a period in which issues of succession and legitimacy were much on people's minds, plays that were so insistently about kings and queens were also quintessentially political plays. As a great deal of recent work has shown, such political concerns could well structure and, in their turn, be structured by, parallel sets of concerns and beliefs about the workings of the social order and the gender hierarchy. Political narratives then became useful ways to figure and interrogate the dynamics of economic exchange and value determined by the market or the workings of the gender hierarchy.

Introduction

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela T. Ragusa
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Sandra Harding ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Over Time

Epistemology is the concept used to describe ways of knowing. In other words, how you know what you know. Sociologists have been interested in how knowledge is produced since the discipline was founded in the 19th Century. How we come to know our world and make sense of it are influenced by social institutions, individual attitudes and behaviors, and our demographic position within the social order. The social order is an historical product which continues to change over time. To facilitate our learning from our socio-historical experiences, sociologists frequently turn to ideas expressed by social theorists. Social theory, whether classical or contemporary, may thus be employed to help us make sense of changes in our social and material world. Although technology is arguably as ancient as our first ancestors, as the chapters in this book reveal, the characteristics of and communications within our postindustrial society vary greatly from those which occurred in the age of modernity. This introductory chapter identifies a few well-known social theorists who have historically attempted to explain how and why social systems, at macro and micro levels, change over time. Next, it contextualizes communication as a cultural product, arguing the best way to examine the topic is from multiple, local perspectives. In the feminist tradition of postmodernist Sandra Harding, it implores us to consider the premise and source of the knowledge sources we use and espouse while communicating and interacting in specific ways and environments. Finally, grounded in the systemic backdrop of social inequality, this chapter encourages readers to begin the task of critical thinking and reflecting about how each of us, as individuals and members of local communities, nations and the world, assuage or reproduces the structurally-derived inequalities which the globalization of communication and technical systems and interacting in a global environment manifests.

scholarly journals Superhero of the Polish People’s Republic on the Example of Andrzej Kondratiuk’s Hydro-puzzle

2019 ◽  
Vol ENGLISH EDITION (1) ◽  
pp. 112-125
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kuźmicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Ideal

In my essay I try to depict the superheroes from Polish People’s Republic and how they served as embodiments of the ideal vision of a proper citizen, as advocated by the communist authorities. I also trace the differences between them and their Western counterparts, such as Superman or Batman, based on the example of Andrzej Kondratiuk’s Hydro-puzzle. First of all, the social order they upheld and tried to maintain was presented by propaganda as a total antithesis of the Western world – consumptionist, filled with depravation – the root of all imaginable evil. In spite of that, Hydro-puzzle was not only a grotesque parody of American superhero films but also a mocking critique of the communist reality.

On the Edge of Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosario Forlenza
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Order ◽  
World War ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Real People ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
Symbolic Formation

This book links the emergence of democracy in Italy after World War II to human experiences and the symbolic formation of meaning in a time of political and existential uncertainty. Between 1943 and 1948 Italians experienced the most intense period of the war, with its hardship and violence, and the most intense period of social, economic, and political reconstruction, with its hopes and vitality. Unlike conventional accounts that focus on institutions, ideologies, and political norms, On the Edge of Democracy examines the aspirations, expectations, and hopes of real people in real time—the social dramas the individuals engaged with. Adopting an anthropological approach, it sees the process of democratization in Italy as analogous to a ritual passage, in which social order was suspended and then reasserted following a liminal time during which ideas and beliefs were reformulated and new meanings, symbols, and identities emerged. The period of civil war 1943–5, especially, was a time of brutality and dramatic violence as well as a critical juncture of creative existential pluralism. The events during the period following the collapse of Fascism and the disintegration of national unity created a new popular consciousness and changed the relationships among individuals, and between individual and political power. Existential crisis and lived experiences during this period of uncertainty generated new meanings, interpretations, and hopes that shaped post-Fascist democracy. Democracy in Italy was the consequence of ordinary’s people reactions to, and symbolization of, the circumstances which they went through in those extraordinary times.

Squawk to Them like Roosters

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-88
Author(s):  
Mira Balberg ◽  
Haim Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Elderly Parents ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Behavioral Norm ◽  
Parent Child Relationships ◽  
Parent Child

Chapter 2 examines aging in the context of parent-child relationships. This chapter closely examines one lengthy Talmudic unit (BT Qiddushin 30b–32a) whose overt topic is the duty to respect one’s parents and in which appears a series of stories that are all concerned with the reversal of power relations between generations and with the breaking of taboos that this reversal threatens to entail. The chapter traces several key motifs in the unit, such as the effect of aging on gender hierarchies, the theological dimension of relations with aged parents, and the reorganization of public and private spaces when old age is involved. It argues that each story propagates a behavioral norm and subverts it at the very same time, thereby divulging the rabbis’ uncertainty and consternation when it comes to the difficulties inherent to elderly parents’ gradual exit from the social order.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
James Howard-Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literature And Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

The fundamental structures of Byzantium in the eleventh century have not been subjected to close and sustained scrutiny since the 1970s: it was during the eleventh century that Byzantium reached its apogee, in terms of power, prestige, and territorial extension, only to then plunge into steep political decline in the second half of the century. It is therefore well worth taking a thorough look at the social order in this age of change, to see how it was affected by economic growth and political expansion, and what were the consequences of the social changes which occurred. The Introduction sets out the origins of the volume in a workshop on the social order in eleventh-century Byzantium held in Oxford in May 2011, the third in a series of workshops funded by the British Academy on The Transformation of Byzantium: Law, Literature and Society in the Eleventh Century. It provides brief abstracts of the individual chapters, summarizing the approaches of their authors, in addition to a longer outline of the paper given by Mark Whittow on the Feudal Revolution at the workshop in 2011.

Property and Social Relations in Mughal India: Litigations and Disputes at the Qazi’s Court in Urban Localities, 17th-18th Centuries

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 851-877 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhat Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Caste Groups

AbstractCritiquing the commodity-centered frames of reference, this paper looks at property not within an economic logic, but as a set of practices that served to structure and reconfigure social relations. Based on a study of property documents and court papers, the essay argues that property was not simply an index of wealth, but a medium through which social relations were affirmed, reproduced and contested. Owing to the identification of property with the honor of families and caste groups, transactions in property were socially regulated activities that bore the imprint of local power relations. Property documents were imbued with a plethora of meanings, and this was because the scribal-literate tradition in Mughal India co-existed with an oral-performative culture. Writing was used by social actors in a wide variety of ways, and for different sets of objectives, sometimes to reinforce the social order, on other occasions to disrupt it.

scholarly journals Bourdieusian Reading of Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Pegah Marandi ◽  
Alireza Anushiravani
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Caryl Churchill ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Material Conditions

<p>Caryl Churchill is one of the most widely performed female dramatists in contemporary British theatre. She is arguably the most successful and best-known socialist-feminist playwright to have merged from Second Wave feminism. Her plays have been performed all over the world. In her materialist plays, she shows the matters of culture, education, power, politics, and myth. Her oeuvre hovers over the material conditions which testify to the power relations within society at a given time in history. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, and theorist in cultural studies points out the dynamics of power relations in social life throughout ideas such as capital, field, habitus, symbolic violence, theories concerned with class and culture. The overarching concern for the purpose of this essay is to analyse Churchill’s <em>Serious Money </em>(1987) in the light of Bourdieu’s sociological concepts. In accordance with Bourdieu, there exist various kinds of capital (cultural, economic, social, and symbolic) which distinguish every individual’s status both in society and in relation to other individuals. The present study attempts to show that in <em>Serious Money</em>, the capital especially economic capital forms the foundation of social life and dictates one’s position within the social order and respectively, determining the power discourse in the matrix of social life.</p>

scholarly journals Komparasi Munculnya Liberalisme Ekonomi di Indonesia dan Burma

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Hatib Abdul Kadir
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Class Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Growth System ◽  
Major Transformation

This paper explores the genealogy of the birth of the economic growth system in Indonesia and Burma. First, it is a major transformation that occurs in both countries in the form of commodification of land, labor and money. And the formation of pluralism in the colonial society. Second, the transformation of capitalism in Burma that enters through the system of bureaucratic governance, education and social order in rural communities. Third, the study of comparative application of economic liberalism in Indonesia and Burma and its social effects. And the emergence of middle class society who came from outside of original community. The author uses Karl Polanyi’s approach for looking at the social effects of economic liberalism, based on the transformation of three things: the privatization of the land, the commodification of labor and the emergence of the system of money and debt. This comparison primarily uses extensive data from J.S Furnivall in view of the application of an economic liberalism system which is then enriched with studies from other economic historians, such as Thomas Lindblad, Anne Booth and the study of political economics, Richard Robison.

scholarly journals Jin Worship, Founders’ Cults, and Social Relations in Tidore, Indonesia

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 788
Author(s):  
Seung-Won Song
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Stranger

This article examines perceptions of jin rituals in Tidore in order to explore how Austronesian perceptions of founders’ cults, arrival-order precedence, and stranger-kingship operate in determining social relations. Tidore origin narratives are significant historical texts that encode the social order and its power relations and so must be explored in greater depth. I analyzed rituals, origin narratives, and public discourse through interviews conducted with locals and particularly with four sowohi, the ritual specialists of jin worship. Additionally, I observed the public aspects of the jin ritual of inauguration of the sultan. The jin are the ancestral spirits and “true owners” of Tidore. Both the jin and sowohi are associated with the land and thus are the autochthonous leaders on the island. The sultan belongs to the stranger-king category, which was formed by later immigrant groups. During jin rituals of worship, the jin bless the sultan through the sowohi, who serve as mediums; this symbolizes the autochthonous flow of blessings to later immigrant groups. The rituals are also a recollection of a more primordial social order of heterogenous groups, which is based on the arrival-order precedence on Tidore.

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