scholarly journals ‘A Life of Their Own’? Traditions, Power and ‘As If Realism’ in Political Analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172092150
Author(s):  
Karl Pike
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Social World ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
As If

This article explores the role of tradition in the social world and offers a theory of why some traditions ‘stick’. Building on the ontological insight of ‘as if realism’, I argue that traditions are constitutive both of an actor’s beliefs and of their institutional context, and so critical to political analysis. The relative resonance of traditions can be understood as contingent upon power relations and ideational maintenance of traditions by groups of upholders – what could be termed ‘socially contingent’. Traditions help us understand why a person believes what they believe and how a person’s strategic calculations are affected by perceptions of what others believe. They exert a powerful pull to political actors as orientation tools in complex social settings and through the symbols and argumentation attached by those who uphold them. While traditions are contingent upon people’s beliefs, it is ‘as if’ they have a life of their own.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

Energy Markets and Trading

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mares
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Adjustment Costs ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Energy Markets ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Impact Risk

This chapter discusses the role of energy in economic development, the transformation of energy markets, trade in energy resources themselves, and the geopolitical dynamics that result. The transformation of energy markets and their expansion via trade can help or hinder development, depending on the processes behind them and how stakeholders interact. The availability of renewable, climate-friendly sources of energy, domestically and internationally, means that there is no inherent trade-off between economic growth and the use of fossil fuels. The existence of economic, political, social, and geopolitical adjustment costs means that the expansion of international energy markets to incorporate alternatives to oil and coal is a complex balance of environmental trade-offs with no solutions completely free of negative impact risk. An understanding of the supply of and demand for energy must incorporate the institutional context within which they occur, as well as the social and political dynamics of their setting.

Voorbij navelstaren en narcisme

KWALON ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Müller
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Auto Ethnography

Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography The labeling of auto-ethnography as navel-gazing does not do justice to the variety with which auto-ethnography is applied. A distinction should be made between emotional and analytical auto-ethnography. In the first form the central person of the researcher plays the central role, in the second auto-ethnography is applied to get a better understanding of the social world which is being studied. In this article the author discusses the second approach by using the work of Jeff Ferrell. Ferrell is a well-known cultural criminologist, who focuses critically on the cultural understanding of social life. By looking at how Ferrell applies auto-ethnography, insight is gained into the added value of this method for qualitative studies: (1) the integration of the personal experiences of researchers in texts in order to achieve a richer description of the social worlds they explore, (2) making explicit the role of the researcher in publications, and (3) developing new (more appealing) forms of representation.

Jacques Rancière

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Action Taking ◽  
As If

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

Maps, Power, and the Pacification of La Araucanía-Chile, 1850–1900

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Azócar Fernández ◽  
Zenobio Saldivia Maldonado
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Critical Cartography ◽  
History Of Cartography ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The 19Th Century

In the history of cartography and in critical cartography, there is a link between the role of maps and power relations, especially during the conquest and domination of territories by national states. Such cartographic products have frequently been used—for both their scientific and persuasive content—in different places, such as in Chile in the Araucanía region during the so-called pacification process, led by the Chilean state during the second half of the 19th century. From a cartographic perspective, the “epistemological and unintentional silences on the maps” can be observed for maps produced during this process. It implied that the “scientific discourse” and the “social and political discourse” of the cartographic images generated during this process of conquest and domination were relevant for the expansionist objectives of the Republic of Chile.

scholarly journals Digital Survivance: Mediatization and the Sacred in the Tribal Digital Activism of the #NoDAPL Movement

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Schofield Clark ◽  
Angel Hinzo
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Communication Media ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Further Development

To explore the role of contestation in mediatization processes, this article utilizes digital and visual methods to analyze instances of Indigenous digital survivance. Focusing on recent examples at the heart of the #NoDAPL movement allows us to flesh out and argue for a decolonizing approach to the study of mediatization, which we define, following Clark (2011), as the process by which collective uses of communication media (1) extend the development of independent media industries and their circulation of narratives, (2) contribute to new forms of action and interaction in the social world, and (3) give shape to how we think of humanity and our place in the world. The article therefore concludes with suggestions regarding the further development of methodological approaches to studying processes of mediatization in relation to contestations over normative claims and pragmatic concerns regarding the role of media systems in our collective future.

scholarly journals Queer utopias and queer criminology

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 510-522
Author(s):  
Lynne Copson ◽  
Avi Boukli
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Forms

Drawing on the concept of utopia to reflect upon the emerging field of queer criminology and José Esteban Muñoz’s account of queer theory as essentially utopian, we draw two conclusions. First, we suggest that queer criminology is currently limited by tinkering at the edges with piecemeal reforms instead of focussing on radical, wholesale changes, and second, that queer theory contains within it the potential for a more holistic reimagining of the social world. In doing so, we question rigid cis/trans binaries and reject accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of structural harm. We draw on Ernst Bloch’s concepts of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopia to suggest that while queer criminology has succeeded in producing largely ‘abstract’ utopias, it struggles in translating these into ‘concrete’ ones. By introducing examples of trans literary utopias as potential transformative cultural forms, however, we consider the potential of queer theory for realising ‘concrete’ utopia through a more radical rethinking of the social world.

The function of metaphor framing, deliberate or otherwise, in a social world

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Thibodeau
Keyword(s):  
Framing Effects ◽  
Social World ◽  
Target Domain ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Metaphor Processing ◽  
Pragmatic Dimension

Abstract Metaphor frames highlight certain aspects of a target domain and deemphasize others, thereby encouraging specific patterns of inference. A recent series of studies (Reijnierse, Burgers, Krennmayr, & Steen, 2015; Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014), however, raises questions about the role of metaphor in communication and reasoning by (a) failing to find metaphor framing effects on a series of policy judgments, (b) critiquing the methods that have been used to test for metaphor framing effects, and (c) arguing that current theories of metaphor processing fail to consider the social-pragmatic dimension of metaphor in communication. Here, I reflect on these concerns and present novel analyses of data collected by Steen and colleagues, which reveal metaphor framing effects in these studies but fail to support a prediction of Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT): that extended metaphors are more likely to be remembered. DMT attempts to situate metaphor framing effects more intentionally along a social-pragmatic dimension; developing and testing the theory was a primary motivation of the studies conducted by Steen and colleagues. I discuss the implications of these findings and offer a perspective on how DMT can help grow our knowledge of the function of metaphor in a social world.

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