scholarly journals Capitalism and Metaphysics

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Lash
Keyword(s):  
Information Society ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Global Finance ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Global Information Society ◽  
Physical Causation ◽  
Time Information

Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a ‘physical’ capitalism – of the national and manufacturing age – with a ‘metaphysical capitalism’ of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of (1) extensity, (2) equivalence, (3) equilibrium and (4) the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism’s (1) intensity, (2) inequivalence (or difference), (3) disequilibrium and (4) the noumenal. Most centrally: if use-value or the gift in pre-capitalist society is grounded in concrete inequivalence, and exchange-value in physical capitalism presumes abstract equivalence, then value in contemporary society presumes abstract inequivalence. The article argues that the predominantly physical causation of the earlier epoch is being superseded by a more metaphysical causation. This is discussed in terms of the four Aristotelian causes. Thus there is a shift in efficient cause from abstract homogenous labour to abstract heterogeneous life. Material cause changes from the commodity’s units of equivalence to consist of informational units of inequivalence. Formal cause takes place through the preservation of form as a disequilibriate system through operations of closure. These operations are at the same time information interchanges with a form’s environment. Final (and first) cause becomes the deep-structural generation of information from a compressed virtual substrate. This may have implications for method in the social and human sciences. The article illustrates this shift with a brief discussion of global finance.

COGNITIVE TURN IN SOCIETY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Naukovedenie ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 54-71
Author(s):  
Alexander Ali-Zade ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Global Information ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Social Self ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Information Society

The review analyzes a new cognitive trend in the social sciences and humanities. It is argued that digital communication technologies, which have formed a global information society with an unprecedented level of social self-organization, have created a public demand for a broad democratization of knowledge. It is shown that in response to this demand, social and human sciences are forced to adjust their theoretical, methodological and methodical tools accordingly.

Women's Worth and Wedding Gift Exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara M. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Pastoral Economy

Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger could assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘dowry’ in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the decline of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to informal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled. Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visible ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. With the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureaucratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate ‘search for money’ to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While the outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importance of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive resources has radically altered both the content and the significance of gift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from ability within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding position within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and further into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.

scholarly journals SOCIOCULTURAL METHODOLOGY AS A THEORETICAL BASIS ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF MODERN SOCIETY

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Y.N. Ivlyeva ◽  
◽  
D.G. Shormanbayeva ◽  
О.М. Khmelnitskaya ◽  
M.A. Seydinova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Information Society ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociocultural Approach ◽  
Methodological Tool

This article attempts to explicate the socio-cultural aspect as a general methodological tool that will allow making an integral analysis of modern society. The possibility of using the methodological potential of the sociocultural approach to analyze the process of change in modern society, which is increasingly called informational and communicative, is considered. This concept of the information society functions and creates social ideals and values ​​that are widely discussed in the social and human sciences within the framework of a social and cultural approach. Analysis of the information society is a multidisciplinary field of research, and sociocultural analysis is designed to answer important questions: in what direction and for what purpose is the social situation developing and what is the axiological component of this process? The synthesizing nature of the sociocultural analysis of the information society shows the direction of predicting its subsequent advance, the search for new normative concepts that suggest the possibility of localizing this process in a socially desirable channel, while ignoring both excessive optimism and extreme pessimism.

Micah’s Theory of the Justice of Judgement (Micah 3:1-12)

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Blessing Onoriode Boloje
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Background Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Society ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Special Concern

This article is an examination of Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements. While there are competing perspectives in the justice of judgement in the book of Micah, particularly in relation to the extent of judgement, this article concerns itself with the interrelatedness and connection between sin and judgement. The judgements envisioned in Micah’s oracles are provoked by the violations of the traditional moral and social solidarities resulting from the Covenant, which formed the basis of society. As an egalitarian society, the social blueprint of Yahweh’s Torah for Israel advocated special concern for weak and vulnerable individuals as fundamental. The gift of Torah inaugurated Israel as a community meant to personify Yahweh’s justice. However, increasing injustice profoundly jeopardized this witness to God’s healing agenda. For failing to uphold justice the perpetrators are liable and the judgements constitute justice. This justice may not necessarily be corrective in quality but punitive. The article therefore examines briefly the background, structure, and approaches to the book of Micah, analyses a unit of judgement oracle (3:1–12), and concludes by synthesising Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements.

Social and Cultural Significance of Reading in the Information Society

2010 ◽  
pp. 61-65
Author(s):  
Tatyana B. Markova
Keyword(s):  
Information Society ◽  
Knowledge Society ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Functions

The article discusses the social and cultural functions of reading. Philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of reading reveals its transformation into knowledge society. The types of modern reading are analyzed and a new role of libraries in society is showed.

Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Material ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Leonard Woolf

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.

Practicing Narrative Inquiry II

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-328
Author(s):  
Arthur P. Bochner ◽  
Andrew F. Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Pragmatic Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
Small Story ◽  
The Life Course

Narrative inquiry provides an opportunity to humanize the human sciences, placing people, meaning, and personal identity at the center of research, inviting the development of reflexive, relational, dialogic, and interpretive methodologies, and drawing attention to the need to focus not only on the actual but also on the possible and the good. In this chapter, we focus on the intellectual, existential, empirical, and pragmatic development of the turn toward narrative. We trace the rise of narrative inquiry as it evolved in the aftermath of the crisis of representation in the social sciences. The chapter synthesizes the changing methodological orientations of qualitative researchers associated with narrative inquiry as well as their ethical commitments. In the second half of the chapter, our focus shifts to the divergent standpoints of small-story and big-story researchers; the differences between narrative analysis and narratives under analysis; and narrative practices that seek to help people form better relationships, overcome oppressive canonical identities, amplify or reclaim moral agency, and cope better with contingencies and difficulties experienced over the life course. We anticipate that narrative inquiry will continue to situate itself within an intermediate zone between art and science, healing and research, self and others, subjectivity and objectivity, and theories and stories.

Coerced Human Mobility and Elite Social Networks in Early Dynastic Iraq and Iran

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Vitali Bartash
Keyword(s):  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Male Adult ◽  
Early Dynastic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
City State ◽  
Social Profiles

AbstractThe article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unfree humans among the political-cultic elite in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf during the Early Dynastic IIIb period, ca. 2475–2300 BCE. The analysis of the written data from the Adab city-state demonstrates that the royal house used the unfree as gifts to maintain a sociopolitical network on three spatial levels – the internal, local, and (inter)regional. The gift-givers and gift-receivers were mostly male adult members of the local and foreign elite, whereas the dislocated unfree humans were heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and the ways they lost their freedom. The author relates the social profiles of both groups to the logistics of human traffic to reveal the link between social status and forms and nature of spatial mobility in the politically and socially unstable Early Dynastic Near East.

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