The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Reischer ◽  
Kathryn S. Koo
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Social

Theorising love in sociological thought: Classical contributions to a sociology of love

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihai Stelian Rusu
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Sociological Tradition ◽  
Binding Force ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Social ◽  
Set Up

This article sets out to explore the contributions of classical social thinkers to a sociological understanding of love. It builds on the premise that despite its major relevance and consequential importance in shaping both individual lives and the social world, until recently love was a heavily undertheorised topic in the sociological tradition. Moreover, the body of disparate sociological reflections that have been made on the social nature of love has been largely forgotten in the discipline’s intellectual legacy. The article then proceeds in unearthing the classics’ contributions to a sociology of love. It starts with Max Weber’s view that love promises to be a means of sensual salvation in an increasingly rationalised social world based on impersonal formal relationships. Next, it critically examines Pitirim A. Sorokin’s integral theory of love. It then moves to address Talcott Parsons’ view on love as a binding force whose social function is to integrate the conjugal couple of the modern nuclear family in the absence of the external pressures exerted by the kinship network. The article concludes by showing how these conceptualisations of love were all embedded in wider theoretical constructions set up to account for the modernisation process.

Habitus and Field

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Heuristic Devices

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.

Colourful psi’s sleep furiously: Depicting emotional states in some African languages

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 57-83
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Figurative Speech

This study sets out to investigate the “poetry of grammar”, more specifically the role of the body in figurative speech, in African languages mainly belonging to Nilotic and Bantu. Apprehending the semantics and pragmatics of metaphorical and metonymic expressions in these languages presupposes an interaction between a number of cognitive processes, as argued below. Interestingly, these languages seem to use these strategies involving figurative speech in tandem with alternative strategies involving on-record statements. This multivocality only makes sense if we place language and language structure more in the social world in which it is used.

The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Social Connectedness ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Devotional Writings

Chapter 4 articulates more explicitly than the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. The chapter examines Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection leads him to posit an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that is analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself his poetry (the subject of chapter 3). This vision anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Vaughan also describes a form of sexuality that anticipates Leo Bersani in imagining the body as socialized and yet as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness.

Solitude and Meditation

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-161
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Solitary Confinement ◽  
Perceptual Sensitivity ◽  
Pace Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time And Energy ◽  
Meditative Practices ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes the role of solitude and meditation in Buddhism. Solitude does play an important role in many Buddhist practices. The problem one is out to solve is very difficult and the intellectual, perceptual, and emotional habits that stand in the way are deep-seated. This means that attacking the problem requires focused time and energy. Establishing some distance from the diversions and pace of life allows the space to confront the problem in a sustained way. Many practices involve not only sustained focus, but also a greater degree of perceptual sensitivity to what is happening in the body and mind. It is not just being away from distractions that helps, but being away from the demands of the social world. Buddhists, particularly those who specialize in meditative practices, can take retreats that last for years. For those just starting out, such long periods of solitude can be dangerous. There is a reason that solitary confinement can be traumatic: Being suddenly alone for long stretches without preparation is psychologically risky.

Why clothes matter: the role of dress in the everyday lives of older people

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-196
Author(s):  
Julia Twigg
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Constitution ◽  
Frail Elders ◽  
Consumption Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday

Dress is part of the material constitution of age, providing as it does the vestimentary envelope that presents the body to the social world. Drawing on a series of empirical studies, this chapter explores the role of dress in the embodied lives of older people. It argues that a focus on dress is relevant not just to the younger old and to arguments concerning the new role of consumption culture among this group, but also for the day to day embodied lives of frail elders, in this case those with dementia.

Religion of Monarchs

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Patricia Sauthoff
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Royal Patronage ◽  
The Social ◽  
Widespread Agreement

Chapter 6 examines the socio-historical practicalities of a monarch participating in the Tantric sphere. The twelfth-century chronicle Rājataraṅgiṇī offers a useful guide. Its narratives demonstrate how practitioners who have shed caste identity through initiation still retain it in the social world. It focuses largely on monarchs, disapproving of their participation in Tantric rites. The chapter discusses literary evidence that demonstrates the widespread agreement on what qualifies as prohibited and the penalties for transgressions. It discusses evidence of royal patronage before turning to specific rites related to the king. These rites include marking the body and food of the king with preventative ritual objects and mantras and large-scale rituals that protect everything under the king’s purview. The chapter contrasts these public or semi-public rituals with the private rituals to maintain the monarch’s health.

Bolognina gym

Ethnography ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Scandurra
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Social World ◽  
Children Of Immigrants ◽  
The Body ◽  
Vocational School ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Family Responsibilities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Abstract This article describes the social organization of the ‘Tranvieri’ boxing gym in Bolognina, a working class Bologna neighbourhood that has seen rapid change over the last 20 years due to the closure of factories and arrival of immigrants, especially from the Maghreb. The population of the gym has changed accordingly: currently, about two-thirds of those attending the gym as a leisure centre are children of immigrants. I have studied the practices of everyday life, the ‘techniques of the body’ of these young boxers born in Italy but without citizenship, who frequent the gym daily after vocational school or work and attending to family responsibilities. For these young men, boxing is not a solution to the frustrations inflicted by a social world they perceive as indifferent, if not hostile, towards them; rather, it offers them a chance to be represented within that world as something other than merely excluded. As scholars have shown, boxing is a male world: women are perceived as extraneous to the gym and, although two or three women practise boxing at Tranvieri, female boxing is generally met with disapproval. The tension between the boxing world and the world of women is also exhibited in the conflict between trainers, who wish to strictly control the athletes in terms of diet, schedules and sexual practices, and the boxers’ mothers, wives and girlfriends.

scholarly journals Connection between the psychological sovereignty and social beliefs: personal boundaries in the social world

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
S.K. Nartova-Bochaver
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Just World ◽  
Social Beliefs ◽  
Social Stereotypes ◽  
Social Axioms ◽  
Fate Control ◽  
Personal Belief ◽  
Personal Boundaries ◽  
The Social

Connections between the psychological sovereignty and social beliefs: belief in a just world, religiosity, reward application, fate control were exanimated. 288 respondents (Mage = 23,7), 66 males participated in the survey. The foolowing tools were used: the Sovereignty of the psychological space questionnaire — 2010 (Nartova-Bochaver, 2014), the General and Personal Belief in a Just World Scales (Dalbert, 1999), and the Social axioms survey (Leung et al., 2002; Tatarko, Lebedeva, 2008). There has been found that social beliefs differ depending on the sovereignty level. In addition, it has been revealed that in deprived individuals the body and territory sovereignty predicted the social beliefs, and in super-sovereign individuals the regime habits and territory sovereignty did. In the group of moderate sovereignty there weren’t any significant connections. It was concluded that the most adapted group is free of typical beliefs as a form of social stereotypes.

Colourful psi’s sleep furiously

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Figurative Speech

This study sets out to investigate the “poetry of grammar”, more specifically the role of the body in figurative speech, in African languages mainly belonging to Nilotic and Bantu. Apprehending the semantics and pragmatics of metaphorical and metonymic expressions in these languages presupposes an interaction between a number of cognitive processes, as argued below. Interestingly, these languages seem to use these strategies involving figurative speech in tandem with alternative strategies involving on-record statements. This multivocality only makes sense if we place language and language structure more in the social world in which it is used.

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