scholarly journals Watching reality from a distance: class, genre and reality television

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 697-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrik Stiernstedt ◽  
Peter Jakobsson
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
Social World ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Distance Class ◽  
Television Programming ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Detailed Picture

The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The purpose of this analysis is to deepen our understanding of the cultural and ideological dimensions of reality television as a genre, and to give a more detailed picture of the imaginaries of class in this form of television. The results bring new knowledge about the reality television genre and modify or revise assumptions from previous studies. Most importantly, we show that upper-class people and people belonging to the social elite are strongly over-represented in the genre and appear much more commonly in reality television than in other genres. This result opens up a re-evaluation of the cultural and ideological dimensions of the reality television genre.

Emotional Responses to Social Comparisons in Reality Television Programming

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicky Lewis ◽  
Andrew J. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Social Comparisons ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Target Group ◽  
Television Programming ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specific Comparison ◽  
Comparison Target

Abstract. In recent years, the viewing of reality television has become increasingly prevalent among television audiences. However, little is known about the psychological processes at work when viewing these programs. This study examined how social comparisons to cast members influenced emotional responses to reality television programming. Participants (N = 231) were cued with a specific comparison target group and placed in a situation of self-image enhancement or threat. Afterwards, participants watched a clip from a reality television program and then reported their emotional reactions to it. The manipulations of comparison target group and self-image affected both the direction of social comparisons made and their associated emotional responses. Participant gender also influenced social comparisons to the cast members and resulting emotional responses to the content. Although we were unable to compare the social comparison-related emotional responses to reality programs with those of scripted programs, the results of this study bring to bear the associations between specific emotional responses and the types of social comparisons that take place when watching reality television programming.

Alexander Crummell and the Anti-Slavery Dilemma of the Episcopal Church

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 767-784
Author(s):  
THOMAS STRANGE
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church

Alexander Crummell's application to enter the General Theological Seminary in 1839 was problematic for the Episcopal Church. Admitting the African American abolitionist would have exacerbated divisions over slavery within a denomination still recovering from the American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. The Church's increasing financial dependence on its upper-class members was a further complication. In Northern states the social elite supported anti-abolitionist violence, whilst in the South support for the Church came predominantly from slaveholders, who opposed any form of abolitionism. In order to safeguard the Episcopal Church's future, the denomination had to reject Crummell's application.

The Company Oracle: Corporate Security and Diviner-Detectives in Angola's Diamond Mines

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filipe Calvão
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social World ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Mining Company ◽  
Corporate Security ◽  
Diamond Mining ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Control

AbstractIn 1957, the security force of Angola's colonial diamond mining company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft in Lunda. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divinatory practices with techniques of corporate surveillance in Lunda's political economy of security. In their overlapping features of secrecy and control, divination and corporate security can be understood as historically aligned evidentiary practices, or what I call “corporate divination.” By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the “occult” apparatus of corporate surveillance, and the figure of a colonial sorcerer-detective renowned for his “divinatory” prowess, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. The cultural significance of divination within the context of a mining company, I suggest, exposes the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social world in which it intervenes, and conversely, the cultural resources that potentially shape or undermine corporate life in a colonial context.

scholarly journals Infants recruit logic to learn about the social world

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolò Cesana-Arlotti ◽  
Ágnes Melinda Kovács ◽  
Ernő Téglás
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Acquisition ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social World ◽  
Logical Reasoning ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Available Information ◽  
Two Alternatives

AbstractWhen perceptually available information is scant, we can leverage logical connections among hypotheses to draw reliable conclusions that guide our reasoning and learning. We investigate whether this function of logical reasoning is present in infancy and aid understanding and learning about the social environment. In our task, infants watch reaching actions directed toward a hidden object whose identity is ambiguous between two alternatives and has to be inferred by elimination. Here we show that infants apply a disjunctive inference to identify the hidden object and use this logical conclusion to assess the consistency of the actions with a preference previously demonstrated by the agent and, importantly, also to acquire new knowledge regarding the preferences of the observed actor. These findings suggest that, early in life, preverbal logical reasoning functions as a reliable source of evidence that can support learning by offering a logical route for knowledge acquisition.

Faking It: Social Bluffing and Class Difference in Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Marchand
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Class Difference ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bourgeois Culture

In Howells's distinctive vision of the social world, there is something inimitable about upper- bourgeois culture—something that defies the aspirants' attempts to acquire or fake upper-class behaviors. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, he dramatizes for readers what none of his characters can articulate but all of them finally “feel,” namely the “fine yet impassable” differences between classes.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

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.

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