Ethnography of racial identities in Paris: public indicators of social hierarchy. A research note

2007 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-605
Author(s):  
Benjamin P. Bowser
Keyword(s):  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Central Hypothesis ◽  
The Moment

Those who are French by acquisition versus French by birth now represent a new challenge to French social stratification. Do social inequalities exist based upon cultural acquisition as opposed to birth? If so, are they increasing or decreasing? For the moment there is no way to answer these questions directly. The author conducted an ethnographic study in Parisian public spaces during the winter and spring of 2005. The central hypothesis is that social divisions can be observed and even measured in public spaces if representative social behaviors are recurring. The author described four patterns of deference in public spaces that people of color who are French by acquisition give to those who are self-identified French by birth. Suggestions were made of how these observations could be confirmed or not by others.

Ascriptive hierarchies: Caste and its reproduction in contemporary India

2015 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Surinder S Jodhka
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Open System ◽  
Large Volume ◽  
Closed System ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Social Science Literature ◽  
Individual Achievement

Social science literature on caste tends to view it as a peculiar institution of the Hindus, emanating from their past tradition and religious beliefs/scriptures. This view also presumes that the processes of urbanization and industrialization, unleashing the process of modernization, will end caste, eventually producing a shift from a closed system of social hierarchy to an open system of social stratification based on individual achievement, merit and hard work. Drawing from a large volume of recent writings the author argues in this article that this approach to the understanding of caste is based on an assumption of Indian exceptionalism. Such an orientalist view of caste also denies the possibility of deploying the framework of caste for understanding caste-like ascriptive hierarchies that exist in many other (if not all) societies. Some of the recent theorizations of caste could perhaps provide useful conceptual tools for developing a comparative understanding of social inequalities.

State-Sponsored Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuang Chen
Keyword(s):  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
The State ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Political Hierarchy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Agrarian Societies ◽  
Stratification System ◽  
The Many

The book explores the social economic processes of inequality produced by differential state entitlements. Drawing on uniquely rich source materials from central and local archives, the book provides an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the creation of a socio-economic and political hierarchy under the Eight Banners in the Qing dynasty in what is now Shuangcheng County, Heilongjiang province. Shuangcheng was settled by bannermen from urban Beijing and elsewhere in rural Manchuria in the nineteenth century. The state classified the immigrants into distinct categories, each associated with differentiated land entitlements. By reconstructing the history of settlement and land distribution in this county, the book shows that patterns of wealth stratification and the underlying social hierarchy were not merely imposed by the state from the top-down but created and reinforced by local people through practices on the ground. In the course of pursuing their own interests, settlers internalized the distinctions created by the state through its system of unequal land entitlements. The tensions built into the unequal land entitlements therefore shaped the identities of immigrant groups, and this social hierarchy persisted after the fall of the Qing in 1911. The book offers an in-depth understanding of the key factors that contributed to social stratification in agrarian societies in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Moreover, it also sheds light on the many parallels between the stratification system in Qing-dynasty Shuangcheng and the structural inequality in contemporary China.

scholarly journals Publications about Women, Science, and Engineering: Use of Sex and Gender in Titles over a Forty-six-year Period

2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392110276
Author(s):  
Mary Frank Fox ◽  
Diana Roldan Rueda ◽  
Gerhard Sonnert ◽  
Amanda Nabors ◽  
Sarah Bartel
Keyword(s):  
Social Stratification ◽  
Critical Case ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Analytical Issue ◽  
Key Features ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Science Policies

This article focuses on key features of the use of sex and gender in titles of articles about women, science, and engineering over an important forty-six-year period (1965–2010). The focus is theoretically and empirically consequential. Theoretically, the paper addresses science as a critical case that connects femininity/masculinity to social stratification; and the use of sex and gender as an enduring, analytical issue that reveals perspectives on hierarchies of femininity/masculinity. Empirically, this article identifies the emergence, development, and stabilization of published articles about women, science, and engineering that use sex and gender in their titles. The distinctive method involves search, retrieval, and review of 23,430 articles, using intercoder reliabilities for inclusion/exclusion. This results in a uniquely specified and comprehensive set of articles on our subject and the identification of titles with sex and gender. Findings point to (1) the growth of gender titles, (2) their increase in every field, (3) differing concentrations of sex and gender titles in journals, (4) a span of telling topic areas, and (5) higher citation rates of gender, compared to sex, titles. Broader implications appear in reasons for the growth of gender titles, meanings of topic areas that occur, insights into social inequalities and science policies, and emerging complexities of nonbinary categories of sex/gender.

Social Fragmentation of Industrial Workforces. Yugoslav Motor Vehicle Industry During Self-Managed Socialism

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Schult
Keyword(s):  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Complex Environments ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Collar Workers

AbstractThe article addresses the social differentiation among industrial workforces in two Yugoslav motor-vehicle factories in the period between 1965 and 1985. Along which lines did social inequalities, which were negated in official communist ideology manifest and how were they articulated? How were they dealt with in the complex environments of self-managed enterprises in respect to the official doctrine? Based on archival material from factory archives, the League of Communists and the socialist mass organisations and on published sources such as factory newspapers, the industrial workforces are described as heterogeneous with shifting affiliations between its sub-groups. Three dividing factors (1. blue-collar vs. white collar workers, 2. gender and 3. profession) are examined. Intersectional entanglements can be found, which systematically accumulated social advantages for certain social groups. Serbian and Slovene enterprises demonstrate many comparable tendencies. In reaction, official ideology attempted to detract attention from social stratification, employing symbolic recognition and calls for greater implementation of the principles of self-management.

Study abroad, human capital development, language commodification, and social inequalities

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Goldoni
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Study Abroad ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Human Capital Development ◽  
Capital Development

Abstract Neoliberal discourse has seeped into various practices of higher education and study abroad (SA), emphasizing the value of human capital development through international education and foreign language learning. Applied linguists have been strongly critiquing neoliberal ideologies, and how they reproduce social inequalities. In this study, the examples of Albert, Theresa, and Rebecca, three U.S. undergraduates in Spain, exhibit how elements of neoliberal discourse and the consumerist notion of second language education as a commodity perpetuate social inequalities abroad and at home. These students were part of an ethnographic study (2007–2008) that included 117 U.S. undergraduates enrolled in four academic SA programs in Spain. The stories of Albert, Theresa, and Rebecca are significant because they had traction within their SA cohort. The consumerist notion of education as a commodity was employed as the analytical framework in conjunction with Bourdieu’s concept of capital (1986). This study problematizes the neoliberal logic and the promise of human capital development associated with language learning through SA. It calls for more diversity, equity, inclusion in SA. A social justice pedagogical paradigm is discussed as a valid, alternative approach to help students emphasize humanistic imperatives over individualist imperatives, gain global understanding, and contribute to world justice.

Hierarchical or Egalitarian?

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-164
Author(s):  
D. W. Harding
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Complexity ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Historic Archaeology ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Grave Goods

The model of social structure in British prehistory still owes much to the legacy of Gordon Childe, for whom economic competition was the catalyst of social inequalities. Even from the Neolithic, however, control of land or stock would have conveyed status, and the construction of major works such as tombs or henges implies authority over labour and resources, even if it was religious rather than temporal. Classical sources indicated that late pre-Roman Iron Age society was stratified, but recent opinion has questioned how far back this extended into earlier prehistory. Using grave goods as a proxy for social status may be simplistic, though whether explained as possessions of the dead, debts repaid by dependents, dedications to deities or ancestors, or displays of communal wealth consumption, they surely indicate social complexity. Settlements in British prehistory or early historic archaeology seldom display clear evidence of social hierarchy, since social status was evidently not expressed in the same terms as in contemporary materialistic and capitalistic societies. Anthropological models of social development from simple communities to chiefdoms and state societies can now be seen as neither consistent nor uniform in progression.

Social Inequalities

2019 ◽  
pp. 646-652
Author(s):  
Raj Kollmorgen
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Relative Deprivation ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact

Social inequality means the existence of social status groups and, therefore, a normatively embedded structure of social stratification. This chapter deals with social inequalities and their dynamics as conditional and causal factors and as results of processes of radical change. Concerning the first aspect, the chapter discusses social class inequalities and dynamics of (absolute) impoverishment, relative deprivation, and rising expectations among certain social groups that may determine ‘transformative’ pressure or even revolutionary situations. Regarding the impact of social transformations on social inequalities, the chapter suggests that the more radical and complex the social transformations, the greater are their effects on social structures and regimes of social inequality. This thesis is underpinned by providing empirical findings on social mobility and income inequality in different historical waves and (sub-)types of transformation. Finally, the chapter identifies seven crucial bundles of factors determining the extent of income inequality as an outcome of current societal transformations and their characteristics.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Racially Ambiguous ◽  
Free People

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

scholarly journals The Consequences of Gender in Homogamic Couples

Sociology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Social Distance ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Static Approach ◽  
Work Family ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Interpretative Approach

In studies which analyse the social distance between spouses at the moment a couple is formed, and which attempt to understand the role of the family, and in particular of marriage, in crystallising social divisions, the concept of homogamy has often been purely descriptive. This article questions this static approach and seeks to pinpoint the changes which social homogamy undergoes in the course of conjugal life, addressing women’s decisions on work–family articulation. Drawing on a critical approach to the concept of rational choice, the article intends to demonstrate the merit of an interpretative approach by analysing how members of a sample of 27 university-educated Portuguese partnered mothers take their decisions in the context of an interdependency framework in which the dynamics of family interaction tend to thwart individual career path development, rendering spouses dependent on each other.

Travel blogging: An auto-ethnographic study of how online interactions influence a journey

First Monday ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelangelo Magasic
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Online Interactions ◽  
Internet Connection ◽  
The Core ◽  
Similar Images ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The Moment

Travel blogging’s necessary routine and connectedness directly challenge the sensation of liminality seen as the core experience of travel. Using the lens of auto–ethnography, this paper finds that the practice of travel blogging affects the experience of travel in three main ways:by creating a routine in which the traveller needs to regularly find an Internet connection;in taking the traveller out of the moment and putting them into a detached narratorial role; and,by mediating the experience of travel as the blogger frequently takes their online audience into account as they travel.Taken together, these results suggest that blogging precipitates a constraining effect on travel as it creates structure and commitments which limit the freedom of the journeyer. Moreover, the requirement to narrate in a way that matches the conventions of the blogosphere suggests that blogging travellers will have more homogenous patterns of travel as similar images, sites and destinations are pursued.

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