Bricolage: A tool for race‐related, historically situated complex research

Peter Bowker and Laurie Borg's three-part television drama Occupation (2009) chronicles the experiences of three British soldiers involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By means of an historically situated textual analysis, this article assesses how far the drama succeeds in presenting a progressive critique of the British military involvement in Iraq. It is argued that although Occupation devotes some narrative space to subaltern perspectives on Britain's military involvement in Iraq, the production – in contrast to some other British television dramas about the Iraq war – tends to privilege pro-war perspectives, elide Iraqi experiences of suffering, and, through the discursive strategy of ‘de-agentification’, obfuscate the extent of Western responsibility for the damage the war inflicted on Iraq and its population. Appearing six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, Occupation's political silences perhaps illustrate the BBC's difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting.

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The Emergence of Statistical Objectivity: Changing Ideas of Epistemic Vice and Virtue in Science

Sociological Theory ◽

10.1177/0735275118794987 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 289-313 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Jeremy Freese ◽

David Peterson

Keyword(s):

Social Movement ◽

Sociological Theory ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Statistical Techniques ◽

Scientific Communities ◽

Specific Setting ◽

Historically Situated ◽

New Formulation ◽

Economic Understanding ◽

Scientific Fields

The meaning of objectivity in any specific setting reflects historically situated understandings of both science and self. Recently, various scientific fields have confronted growing mistrust about the replicability of findings, and statistical techniques have been deployed to articulate a “crisis of false positives.” In response, epistemic activists have invoked a decidedly economic understanding of scientists’ selves. This has prompted a scientific social movement of proposed reforms, including regulating disclosure of “backstage” research details and enhancing incentives for replication. We theorize that together, these events represent the emergence of a new formulation of objectivity. Statistical objectivity assesses the integrity of research literatures in the results observed in collections of studies rather than the methodological details of individual studies and thus positions meta-analysis as the ultimate arbiter of scientific objectivity. Statistical objectivity presents a challenge to scientific communities and raises new questions for sociological theory about tensions between quantification and expertise.

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What is Communicable? Unaccounted Injuries and “Catching” Diabetes in an Illegible Epidemic

Cultural Anthropology ◽

10.14506/ca34.4.01 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Amy Moran-Thomas

Keyword(s):

Public Health ◽

Infectious Disease ◽

Disease Transmission ◽

Communicable Disease ◽

Treatment Access ◽

Infectious Disease Transmission ◽

The World ◽

Historically Situated ◽

Over Time ◽

Non Communicable Disease

Long-accepted models of causality cast diseases into the binary of either “contagious” or “non-communicable,” typically with institutional resources focused primarily on interrupting infectious disease transmission. But in southern Belize, as in much of the world today, epidemic diabetes has become a leading cause of death and a notorious contributor to organ failure and amputated limbs. This ethnographic essay follows caregivers’ and families’ work to survive in-between public health categories, and asks what responses a bifurcated model of infectious versus non-communicable disease structures or incapacitates in practice. It proposes an alternative focus on diabetes as a “para-communicable” condition—materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people. The article closes by querying how communicability relates to community, and why it matters to reframe narratives about contributing causalities in relation to struggles for treatment access.

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The paradoxes of gerotranscendence: The theory of gerotranscendence in a cultural gerontological and post-modernist perspective

Norsk Epidemiologi ◽

10.5324/nje.v8i2.464 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Kirsten Thorsen

Keyword(s):

Cultural Values ◽

Cultural Change ◽

Individual Development ◽

Font Size ◽

Theoretical Position ◽

Ageing Processes ◽

Historically Situated ◽

Definition Of ◽

Theory Of Gerotranscendence ◽

Different Cultures

ABSTRACTThis article presents a theoretical analysis and discussion of the theory of gerotranscendence, formulatedby Lars Tornstam (University of Uppsala, Sweden). The theory is presented as a meta-theory ofageing, as a theory of universal and general ageing processes. Ageing is seen as an urge (a drive)towards a less engaged posititon in the wordly life, moving towards a higher degree of transcendence,with a more cosmic outlook and another definition of reality. In this article the theory is discussed fromanother theoretical position; Ageing seen in a cultural gerontological perspective, as a varied culturallyand historically situated phenomenon – differing in different times and different cultures. The theoreticalperspective underlines that ageing is complex dialectical processes, an intertwined interplay betweenindividual development and cultural change. The varied individual ageing processes are not seenas the result of «drives». In Western post-modern cultures the ageing processes are becoming manifold,often contradictory. Elderly present versions of the selves that are becoming complex, multiplied (multipleselves), acting at different scenes, stamped by varied cultural values, presenting mixed versions ofactivity and passivity, engagement and retractment, wordliness and transcendence.Key words: Ageing theories; gerotranscendence; cultural gerontology; postmodernism

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Occupying and Reclaiming a National Historical Monument

Latin American Perspectives ◽

10.1177/0094582x16666342 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 43 (6) ◽

pp. 54-74 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Francisca Márquez ◽

Valentina Rozas-Krause

Keyword(s):

At Risk ◽

Social Construction ◽

Shared History ◽

Historical Monuments ◽

Historically Situated ◽

Ethnographic Examination ◽

Controversial Nature

Conceptual and ethnographic examination of the ideology that has given form to one of Chile’s most representative national historical monuments, the Casa Central of the Universidad de Chile, indicates that monuments are a complex social construction of historically situated ideologies and practices and that, simply by being artifacts, they are always at risk of never achieving unanimity as to their truth. The controversial nature of the monument’s meaning presents us with a problem with regard to its verisimilitude and its incorporation into a shared history. It may be suggested that the historical meaning of a monument is manifested in its commemoration and in corporal uses and practices. Un examen conceptual y etnográfico de la ideología que le ha dado forma a la Casa Central de la Universidad de Chile—uno de los monumentos históricos nacionales más representativos del país— revela que un monumento es una construcción social compleja de ideologías y prácticas situadas en un contexto histórico y que, simplemente por ser un artefacto, siempre correremos el riesgo de nunca alcanzar unanimidad en cuanto a su verdad. La naturaleza controvertida del significado del monumento nos plantea un problema con relación a su verosimilitud y a su incorporación en una historia compartida. Podemos decir que el significado histórico de un monumento se manifiesta en su conmemoración y en usos y prácticas corporales.

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WOMEN, GENDER, AND ISLAM IN AFRICA AND BEYOND

Journal of Law and Religion ◽

10.1017/jlr.2013.8 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 170-175

Author(s):

Sarah Eltantawi

Keyword(s):

Legal History ◽

Islamic Law ◽

Gender Justice ◽

Legal Studies ◽

Ethnographic Data ◽

Historically Situated

Scholars of Islamic law, gender, and Africa will be pleased with the arrival of two important new volumes that are bold in their bringing together of ethnographic data with legal history and analysis. Margot Badran's Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law, and Christina Jones-Pauly and Abir Dajanfi Tuqan's Women under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law collectively advance a movement in Islamic legal studies that focuses on interdisciplinary explorations into the ways particular constructions of Islamic law are foregrounded and reified in accordance with the existential impulses and demands of a particular society at a particular time, what we might call the “hermeneutic of experience.” I would argue that gender functions as the category that most regularly exposes the limitations of various historically situated concepts of orthodoxy, and these books bear out this claim.

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Satire, masculinity and the rhetoric of conflict resolution in War Chhod Na Yaar and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore

New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film ◽

10.1386/ncin_00014_1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 151-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Shailendra Kumar Singh

Keyword(s):

Conflict Resolution ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Armed Conflicts ◽

War Films ◽

Critical Attention ◽

War Rhetoric ◽

Historically Situated ◽

Alternative Configuration

Unlike its western counterparts, Hindi war films constitute a rather peripheral genre, one that has understandably received scant critical attention over the last two decades. The conventional aesthetic registers and thematic templates of these films reveal an explicit engagement with questions relating to heroic masculinity, exceptional leadership and nationalist triumphalism. And yet, movies such as War Chhod Na Yaar (‘Quit the war, dude’) (Haider 2013) and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (‘Delhi and Lahore are not so different after all’) (Raaz 2014) categorically denounce idealistic notions of armed conflicts and sensationalized portrayals of ostensibly justified violence. This article examines the rhetoric of conflict resolution that constitutes the organizing principle of these two films. It demonstrates how War Chhod Na Yaar discursively satirizes the earlier Hindi war films through a pronounced emphasis on the fanciful camaraderie that exists between the respective battalion captains of India and Pakistan. By contrast, the anti-war rhetoric of Kya Dilli Kya Lahore is not only historically situated within the larger framework of Partition narratives, but is also facilitated by an alternative configuration of masculinity that resists territorial divisions in favour of affective solidarities and shared lived experiences.

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Inhabiting Whiteness: The Eoan Group La traviata, 1956

Cambridge Opera Journal ◽

10.1017/s0954586719000016 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 63-84

Author(s):

Juliana M. Pistorius

Keyword(s):

South Africans ◽

Race And Class ◽

Cultural Ideal ◽

Historically Situated ◽

Politics Of Race ◽

La Traviata ◽

Apartheid Regime

AbstractActive at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.

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Nietzsches affirmative Genealogien

Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie ◽

10.1515/dzph-2019-0034 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 67 (3) ◽

pp. 429-439

Author(s):

Matthieu Queloz

Keyword(s):

Historically Situated ◽

Historical Origins ◽

Original Point

Abstract This paper argues that besides the critical and historically informed genealogies of his later work, Nietzsche also sketched out genealogies that are not historically situated and that display an under-appreciated affirmative aspect. The paper begins by looking at two early examples of such genealogies where datable historical origins are clearly not at issue, which raises the question of what kind of origins Nietzsche is seeking. It is argued that these genealogies inquire into practical origins – into the original point of certain conceptual practices given certain needs – and that this reflects Nietzsche’s instrumentalist approach to concepts. It is then argued that this focus lends the genealogies an affirmative dimension, because they present their object as naturalistically intelligible and practically indispensable. Finally, it is shown how the nature and limits of this affirmative dimension can be tentatively sharpened by connecting it to Nietzsche’s later notion of an economic justification of morality.

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