The Family as Project

1988 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaber F. Gubrium

Based on data gathered in settings where the family side of personal troubles is a regular concern, it is argued that the family enters into social relations as a collective representation. Adapting Durkheim's usage to everyday life, the family is analyzed as a ‘public’ project of those whose domestic affairs are challenged for consideration of family order. Three features of the family project are considered: (1) the awareness of the social form, (2) family conduct in the large, (3) family usage. As an object of experience, the family presents itself in a category separate and distinct from its members, while at the same time being a practical, discursive construct built out of, as well as reflecting concrete domestic affairs.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ciro Martínez

This article explores the importance and impact of a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed, the article looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 984-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo Costa de Oliveira ◽  
Jacó Fernando Schneider ◽  
Cíntia Nasi ◽  
Marcio Wagner Camatta ◽  
Agnes Olschowsky

ABSTRACT We aimed to understand the expectations of families about a Psychiatric Inpatient Unit in the perspective of Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology. This is a qualitative and phenomenological research, with families of patients at a psychiatric inpatient unit of a university hospital in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Data were collected through phenomenological interviews, and the analysis was constructed in the light of phenomenological sociology. The results show that the expectations of the family in the Psychiatric Inpatient Unit are related to the interpretation and experiences they have in the world of everyday life; that these expectations should be valued in patient and family care; and that they may integrate the family in care for the patient. We hope to contribute so that professionals and managers reflect about the importance of understanding the expectations of families on a Unit, aiming to implement more effective health actions, based on the social relations among the subjects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.


Author(s):  
Walter E.A. van Beek

There is not one African indigenous religion (AIR); rather, there are many, and they diverge widely. As a group, AIRs are quite different from the scriptural religions the world is more familiar with, since what is central to AIRs is neither belief nor faith, but ritual. Exemplifying an “imagistic” form of religiosity, these religions have no sacred books or writings and are learned by doing, by participation and experience, rather than by instruction and teaching. Belonging to specific local ethnic groups, they are deeply embedded in and informed by the various ecologies of foragers, pastoralists, and horticulturalists—as they are also by the social structures of these societies: they “dwell” in their cultures. These are religions of the living, not so much preparing for afterlife as geared toward meeting the challenges of everyday life, illness and misfortune, mourning and comforting—but also toward feasting, life, fertility, and togetherness, even in death. Quiet rituals of the family contrast with exuberant public celebrations when new adults re-enter the village after an arduous initiation; intricate ritual attention to the all-important crops may include tense rites to procure much needed rains. The range of rituals is wide and all-encompassing. In AIRs, the dead and the living are close, either as ancestors or as other representatives of the other world. Accompanied by spirits of all kinds, both good and bad, harmful and nurturing, existence is full of ambivalence. Various channels are open for communication with the invisible world, from prayer to trance, and from dreams to revelations, but throughout it is divination in its manifold forms that offers a window on the deeper layers of reality. Stories about the other world abound, and many myths and legends are never far removed from basic folktales. These stories do not so much explain the world as they entertainingly teach about the deep humanity that AIRs share and cherish.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Yayan Suryana

This paper presents an analysis of the death rituals carried out by Muslims in the Priangan region known as ngajahul. Ngajahul is done on the sixth or seventh day after death. Analysis of the ritual of death illustrates that the ritual of death is not only a spiritual-fiqhiyyah aspect, but also has a role in describing social relations. The graveyard that lay in the cemetery, not only shows the grave, but also describes the relationship between the deceased, the family and the social environment. This research in a sociological perspective produces the concept that the rituals of death and society, especially Muslim societies in various aspects are referred to as containing social cohesion. This concept illustrates that death rituals are not as depicted in recitation forums that see death rituals as a tradition laden with rituals that are spiritually nuanced. Ngajahul is a tradition that produces social interaction and involvement in social life that is produced simultaneously. Key Words : Ngajahul, Ritual, Social cohesion, fiqhiyyah


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Stas ◽  
Felix D. Schönbrodt ◽  
Tom Loeys

Family research aims to explore family processes, but is often limited to the examination of unidirectional processes. As the behavior of one person has consequences that go beyond that one individual, Family functioning should be investigated in its full complexity. The Social Relations Model (SRM; Kenny & La Voie, 1984) is a conceptual and analytical model which can disentangle family data from a round-robin design at three different levels: the individual level (actor and partner effects), the dyadic level (relationship effects) and the family level (family effect). Its statistical complexity may however be a hurdle for family researchers. The user-friendly R package fSRM performs almost automatically those rather complex SRM analyses and introduces new possibilities for assessing differences between SRM-means and between SRM-variances, both within and between groups of families. Using family data on negative processes, different type of research questions are formulated and corresponding analyses with fSRM are presented.


Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 004209802094787
Author(s):  
Max J Andrucki

In this paper I ask what is at stake when we move past static ontologies of the ‘gayborhood’ as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorise gay urban activism as a mode of queer social reproduction, through which queer caring labour ‘redeems’ the dislocations of the neoliberal city structured by oedipalised and capitalist social relations. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organised in response to health crises, exclusion and systemic threats of violence. Returning to socialist feminist imaginaries of care beyond the ‘social’, and to Guy Hocquenghem’s often-overlooked theory of the sociality of the anus, this paper draws on excerpts from the film Milk, the poetry of Thom Gunn and a discussion of gay men’s volunteering to examine San Francisco as a queer urban space constituted through a network of encounters, crossings, intimacies and labours enacted through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through non-monogamous sex practices that perform the messy marrying of public and private, and erotic and platonic.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasan Mahmud

Why do migrants send remittances? Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews among Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo, this article explores the social determinants of migrants’ remitting practices. It offers a realist analytical approach following Durkheim’s perspective on how society determines an individual’s action. It recognizes social relations between the migrants and their families and relatives as the essential foundation for remitting to occur, while migrants’ adherence to social norms, as well as legal and social exclusion in the destination, causes them to participate in various qualitatively distinct remitting practices. Therefore, it argues that migrants’ social relations to the family and community cause them to remit, and changes in these relations result in subsequent changes in their remitting. It complements the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) approach by incorporating the social (both relational and spatial) context of remitting. By bringing in migrants’ agency, it also overcomes the limitations in social-cultural approaches that prioritize structural determinants.


Africa ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ashforth ◽  
Susan Watkins

ABSTRACTThe key to understanding the experience of AIDS mortality lies in the stories that people tell each other about those they know who are suspected to have died from AIDS. We use a unique set of texts produced by rural Malawians reporting everyday conversations in their communities. These texts, drawn from the online archive of the Malawi Journals Project, consist of several thousand instances of ordinary people telling each other stories in the ordinary course of their lives. They are a form of insider ethnography, accounts of everyday life written by people immersed in the lives of their communities. Through analysis of these texts, we show that narratives of death are predicated upon the question ‘Who is to blame?’ We argue that a micropolitics of blame arises from practices of narrating death and shapes individual and collective responses to the epidemic. When we pay attention to the details of the production and exchange of these stories, we can see how the fact that narratives of death are predicated upon the question of blame both expresses and produces a desire for justice, both for the righting of wrongs through retributive punishment and for the restoration of harmonious social relations among the living. This desire for justice, we argue, is a central feature of the social impact of AIDS.


Author(s):  
Susan B. Boyd

AbstractIn this article I argue that an analysis of “the State” is necessary in order to understand legal developments related to “family” that are relevant to efforts to combat the oppression of heterosexual women, as well as of lesbians and gay men. Drawing on recent debates concerning postmodernism and feminist theory, I review efforts to reconceptualize the nature of the state not as a monolithic institution, but rather as a set of arenas, or the site of various discursive formations. Because laws are generated from within, but are only part of, concentrated forms of state power, feminists and progressive groups that are engaging with law must retain an explicit analysis of the state. This analysis must be more nuanced and displaced than it has been in instrumentalist and structuralist accounts, in order to explore the ways in which feminists have influenced legal change and whether this influence is positive or negative for different groups. The limits on law's ability to fundamentally transform the social relations of oppression must however be recognized. In particular, the relationship between overall state trends—for example privatization—and trends specific to certain state arenas such as courts and legislatures—for example enhanced women's rights to men's property and increased legal recognition of same sex couples—must be traced in order to determine the political impact of seemingly progressive movements in areas related to “the family”.


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