Scripting Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-264
Author(s):  
Laurens E. Tacoma
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
City Council ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Elite Identity ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

This chapter analyses the seventh characteristic of Roman political culture. The way that political institutions were functioning was based on the claim that they were central to society. Reality was different, and this produced ambiguities in the way elites positioned themselves. These can be analysed on the basis of the Ravenna papyri, which contain a number of reports of meetings of the city council of Ravenna and some other Italian cities. They show how a number of developments coalesced. First, the city council still formed a place to foster elite identity, but it did so in a society in which the traditional markers of elite identity were no longer adhered to by all, in which the church took over some of the social and economic roles, and in which some persons outside the council quite likely enjoyed a significantly higher level of wealth and status than the councillors themselves. Second, it shows what functions the remaining councils could perform, both at a practical and a symbolic level. By authenticating documents in accordance with the requirements of late-antique law, they performed an important practical notarial function. At a symbolic level, the elaborate procedures meant that social relations were enacted during the transactions. The council could assume—if only briefly—the central position in society that it still claimed. Third, it also shows the scripted quality of the proceedings. As the functions of the council and its role in society were reduced, role playing took over. Politics became literally scripted.

The Corpus Christi Procession in Medieval York: A Symbolic Struggle in Public Space

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Paul Weissengruber
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
City Council ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The Corpus Christi celebrations of medieval York provide a good opportunity for studying how symbolic power structures social relations, and how institutions reproduce their legitimacy at a time when the procession as well as the presentation of the pageant wagons were rigorously supervised by the city council. The elaborate procession of torches honoring the sacrament, a little discussed aspect of these celebrations, is particularly useful for such a study, because the records of the guilds provide surprising indications of the extent to which the supposedly solemn procession honoring the sacrament was characterized by disruption. These documents contradict those historians who normally treat both the procession and the pageants as representations staged in civic space that mirrored a united civic body. The negotiations surrounding the Skinner's participation in the Corpus Christi ceremonies of 1419 and the conflict of civic, religious, and royal authority in determining the position of the Cordwainers in the celebrations of 1490 provide traces of a different history—a history of a representation of social distinctions rather than a representation of undifferentiated community. This is a history of struggle between groups with different interests, engaging in symbolic struggle to maintain or alter the social distinctions embodied in the form of the procession.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Rural migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China: Multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 2245-2260 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Chung
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Rural Migrants ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper investigates rural Chinese migrants’ agency through their multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies. The idea of ‘multi-positionality’ conceptualises a migrant’s mobility between physical locations and shifting social positions. Through individual migrants’ multi-positionality, this study discusses their place-specific social relations and thereby the diverse way to negotiate a living in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. These strategies include simple approaches such as facilitating physical movements between different locations and more sophisticated ones which develop multiple roles with outsiders and native villagers in different localities. While the former allows individual migrants to use their local knowledge to make a living in the context of institutional exclusion and discrimination, the latter further cultivates changes and an upgrade in social relations. Rural migrants' everyday stories are used to unfold an individual’s particular people–place relationship and how he/she has tapped into a place-specific resource to make a living. It does not aim to generalise rural migrants’ experience; rather it seeks to show diversity and complexity. Migrants’ stories are collected through extensive research in a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. Through these stories, not only does this paper articulate the social relations which underlie individual migrants’ shifting positions, but also extends translocal studies on migrants beyond the narrative of physical locations.

scholarly journals Neighbourhood open spaces for social cohesion

2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 06019
Author(s):  
Rukhsana Badar ◽  
Sarika Bahadure
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Unitary Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Neighbourhood Level ◽  
The City

The global cities of the world are witnessing a visible disconnection of everyday life. In India the Smart City guidelines acknowledge the need to counter the growing social detachment and intolerance by encouraging interactions. They go further in identifying that preserving and creating of open spaces must be a key feature of comprehensive urban development. Most social relations are cemented within open spaces at the neighbourhood level. Previous studies examine the association between the attributes of neighbourhood open spaces and social activity but neglect to view the issue comprehensively. The present study turns to Lefebvre’s Unitary Theory which states that open space is a result of three forces; 1) perceived space which is the physical dimension and material quality identifiable by the senses; 2) conceived space created by planners and other agents as plans and documents; and 3) lived space which is shaped by the values attached and images generated through user experience. For open space conducive to social interactions these three aspects must work in tandem. With this consideration a framework of criteria and indicators is developed and used to measure and compare the open spaces in select neighbourhoods in Europe and India. The investigation thus reveals differences in all three aspects of neighbourhood spaces. It also reveals a discrepancy between the planning standards formulated and employed by the city authorities in providing the spaces and the actual needs of the community. The research aims to address this gap. The study of the Indian cases lays foundation for the use of the framework to measure open spaces in association with social cohesion and thereby contribute to the enhancement of the social infrastructure of the City.

scholarly journals Fragile Visions of the Social: Rethinking Solidarity with the Performance Piece Faust and the TV-series Skam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Schumann
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Venice Biennale ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today.

Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
African City ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The City ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

scholarly journals Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 642-642
Author(s):  
CARRIE RENTSCHLER
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
High Rise ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Street ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a body of films that represent and re-enact the infamous 1964 Catherine Genovese rape and murder, helping to define the crime as a problem of bystander non-intervention exacerbated by urban living conditions and the ‘high rise anxieties’ of apartment dwellers. The moving image culture around the Genovese case tells a story about male violence against women in the city through the perspective of urban apartment dwellers, who are portrayed as bystander witnesses to both the city and to the social relations of stranger sociability in the city. Films depict the killing of Kitty Genovese, sometimes through fictional analogues to her and the crime, as an outcome of failed witnessing, explicating those failures around changing ideas about urban social relations between strangers, and ways of surveilling the city street from apartment windows. By portraying urban bystanders as primarily non-interventionist spectators of the Genovese rape and murder, films locate the conditions of femicide and responsibility for it in detached modes of seeing and encountering strangers. By analysing film as forms of historic documentation and imagination, as artifacts of historically and contextually different ways of telling and revising the story of the Genovese murder as one of bystander non-intervention in gender violence in the city, the essay conceptualizes film and filmic re-enactments as a mode of paying witness to the past.

Citizenship Across the Life Course

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
International Borders ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
The Way

Analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant’s life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites.

Between dialect and standard

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-199
Author(s):  
Isabel Molina Martos
Keyword(s):  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Social Complexity ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Migrant Population ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Parameters ◽  
Castilian Spanish ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

Abstract This paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of the consonants (s) and (d) in the coda position in the city of Madrid, within the framework of the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and America (PRESEEA). The purpose is to illustrate how varieties of southern Castilian Spanish and those from the central and northern Peninsula converge and diverge, taking into consideration the social, political, and economic parameters that affect said processes. The diversity of patterns that coexist in the Madrid speech community reflects the city’s historic social complexity, the varied geographical origins of its migrant population, the interests that motivate each community of practice, as well as other circumstances that influence the direction of change. The analysis of (s) and (d) in coda illustrates the way in which the dynamics of variation and change in Madrid fluctuate between two poles: standardization and regionalization, the same two axes around which the community’s sociolinguistic patterns revolve.

How ‘Democratic’ Was the Pauline Ekklēsia? An Assessment with Special Reference to the Christ Groups of Roman Corinth

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. L. Welborn
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
First Century ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
House Churches ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
New Research ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence ◽  
The City

Several recent studies have argued for the importance of democratic practices and ideology for a proper understanding of the issues and debates reflected in Paul's Corinthian correspondence. This new perspective stands in tension with older scholarship which emphasised the role of patronage in the structure and dynamics of the house churches that made up the ekklēsia of Christ-believers at Corinth. This essay draws upon new research into the political sociology of Greek cities in the early Empire, which highlights evidence of the continuing vitality of democratic assemblies (ekklēsiai) in the first and second centuries, despite the limitations imposed upon local autonomy by Roman rule. Special attention is devoted to the epigraphic evidence of first-century Corinth, whose political institutions and social relations were those of a Roman colony. The essay seeks to ascertain whether the politics of the Christ groups mimicked those of the city in which they were located or represented an alternative.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document