The social and personal functions of music in cross-cultural perspective

Author(s):  
Martin Clayton

Music's uses and contexts are so many and so various that the task of cataloguing its functions is daunting: how can we make sense of this diversity? These functions appear to range from the individual (music can affect the way we feel and the way we manage our lives) to the social (it can facilitate the coordination of large numbers of people and help to forge a sense of group identity). This article argues that musical behaviour covers a vast middle ground in which relationships between self and other or between the individual and the collective are played out. It surveys some of the extant literature on music's functions – referring to literature from ethnomusicology, anthropology, musicology, psychology, and sociology, and discussing a wide variety of musical contexts from around the world – and develops an argument emphasizing music's role in the management of relationships between self and other.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 598-611
Author(s):  
Kengo Nawata

Previous research has shown that honor culture and honor ideology enhance interpersonal and intergroup aggressiveness at the individual level. This study aimed to examine collective-level relationships among honor culture, social rewards for warriors, and intergroup conflict. To demonstrate these relationships, I used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, which contains data on 186 mainly preindustrial societies from all over the world. The analysis demonstrated that honor culture, which values males’ toughness and aggression, has a positive relationship with frequency of intergroup conflicts. In addition, social rewards (praise, prestige, and status) for warriors mediated the relationship between honor culture and frequency of intergroup conflict. These results imply that the collective-level processes of honor culture enhance intergroup conflicts through the social reputations of warriors who participate in war.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedemann J. Weidauer

Coming-of-Age films have in common that they must address the social contradictions an adolescent experiences as he or she joins the world of adults. At the same time they have to come to a resolution of these contradictions that is acceptable to the audiences as well as the direct or indirect mechanisms of censorship of the movie industry. In the aftermath of World War II,  a number of social paradigms had been upset (as for example gender roles, intergenerational relations, representations of state and paternal authority).The 1950s were thus a time when the contradictions experienced by all generations of adolescents were even more acutely brought to the foreground and thus represent a particularly fertile ground for this genre. The Coming-of Age films of this period played a crucial role in reintroducing established social paradigms by way of offering “false closures” that temporarily offered resolutions to the contradictions experienced by this particular generation of young adults.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.


Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho

Chapter 12, “Commentary: Personalization,” discusses the process of personalization, based on the portraits presented in Chapters 8–11. Personalization is not just a matter of individual variation; it is a form of active engagement through which individuals endow imaginaries with personal meanings and refract the imaginary through their own experiences. The portraits illustrate how the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem entered into dialogue with the complex realities of people’s lives. Parents’ ability to implement their childrearing goals was constrained and enabled by their past experiences and by socioeconomic conditions. The individual children were developing different strategies of self-evaluation, different expectations about how affirming the world would be, and different self-defining interests, and their self-making varied, depending on the situation. Some children received diagnoses of low self-esteem as early as preschool.


2003 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE HALL

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.


2005 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Klofft

[In the writings of Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970), Western theology can find new resources regarding the relationship between gender and moral development. The author presents Evdokimov's unique theological anthropology in the context of both the complicated question of gender, as well as the effects that gender has on the way women and men act. While the goal of the Christian life for both is the transformation of the individual through asceticism, the role each plays in the salvation of the world differs markedly.]


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Mike Askew

<p>I cringe at the fashion of reducing everything to a set of discrete points – ‘the five keys to eternal happiness’, ‘twenty-seven ways to beat procrastination’ – yet find myself attracted to the 4 E’s model of cognition: that cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Far yet from being a coherent model in the sense of general agreement over what each of these terms means, and despite sounding reductionist, the model seems to have traction through bringing together differing theoretical positions and suggesting that cognition cannot be accounted for by just one of them.<br />For example, Lakoff &amp; Núñez (2000) argue for embodied origins of mathematics, but the power of mathematics also resides in the way that it extends our ‘natural’ understandings. And while the Vygotskian position of cognition arising from the move from the interpersonal – the embedded and enactive – to the intrapersonal is popular, it seems to lack explanatory power about how it is that what originates between people comes to be located within the individual. The proprioceptor emphasis of embodied theories (that cognition originates through our literal, common senses of position and the movement of our bodies in space) has, I think, potential to unlock this connection between the social and individual.</p>


Author(s):  
Carlos Belvedere

En este trabajo paso revista a las diferentes acepciones del concepto de realidad en la obra de Alfred Schutz y las tensiones que lo surcan. Así es que describo una dimensión pragmatista de la realidad, y muestro cómo ella entra en contradicción con una idea marcadamente realista y objetivista. En este contexto, la obra de Schutz se presenta como atravesada por una tensión irresuelta en tres frentes problemáticos: realismo –constructivismo; egología– intersubjetividad; relativismo– fundacionalismo. La intrepretación schutziana del Quijote ilustra magníficamente de qué modo operan estas contradicciones. Al respecto, si bien Schutz se siente cercano a la exégesis de Ortega y Gasset, argumentamos que su Quijote es más afín al de Unamuno. Otra diferencia sustancial que lo distancia de Ortega, a pesar del profundo respeto que sentía por él, es el modo en que ambos cuestionan concepciones colectivistas de lo social como la de Durkheim: Schutz considera que lo social es abstracto y, por ende, irreal, mientras que Ortega lo concibe como una realidad sustituta. Además, Schutz piensa que lo social se enfrenta al individuo, mientras que Ortega muestra que se contrapone a la interacción.In my paper I review the different meanings of the concept of reality in the work of Alfred Schutz and the tensions that cross it. I describe a pragmatic dimension of reality and then I show how it clashes with an idea re-markably realistic and objectivist. In this con-text, Schutz's work is presented as crossed by an unresolved tension on three fronts: realism – constructivism; egology - intersubjectivity; relativism - foundationalism. The Schutzian intrepretación of Don Quixote superbly illustrates how these contradictions operate. In this regard, although Schutz felt close to the exegesis of Ortega y Gasset, I argue that his Quixote is more akin to that of Unamuno. Another substantial difference with Ortega, despite the deep respect Schutz had for him, is the way in which both challenge collectivist social concepts like Durkheim’s: Schutz considered that the social is abstract and therefore unreal, while Ortega conceived it as a substitute reality. Also, Schutz thinks that the social is opposed to the individual while Ortega shows that it opposes interaction.


لارك ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (20) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Sanaa Lazim Hassan

Sam Shepard is one of the controversial modern American playwrights who wrote about issues that are concerned with the individual in America rather than the institution In his theatre, the audience expects to see everything that concerns itself with the western culture and ignores that which is global. He is very much interested in the inner landscape of America rather than its position as the leader of the world. Thus, in his drama he preaches such ideology urging the US Administration to focus the attention on the American welfare. The research attempts an analysis on his play The States of Shock using the New Historicism approach through studying the writer’s point of view concerning the craft of war. Modern politics has been very influential on both the social as well as the literary scene. Wars, whether launched or were only loomed at, has been considered the most controversial subject about which plays, poems, and books were written. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, writers


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