Individuality, subjectivation, and their civic significance in contemporary China: The cultivation of an ethical self in a cultural community

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-349
Author(s):  
Lin Yi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Cultural Community ◽  
Cultural Activities ◽  
Coastal City ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Way

Drawing upon ethnographic data collected from fieldwork among a reading-based community in a coastal city over 10 years, and Michel Foucault’s notion of the cultivation of an ethical self, the primary aim of this study is to examine three issues: (1) how do middle-class citizens articulate and practise the cultural activities that they advocate?; (2) are their practices simultaneously individualized and totalized in the way that Foucault demonstrates?; and (3) do these internally oriented practices have civic significance?

Sanctifying the expansion of carceral control: Spiritual Supervision in the religious lives of criminalized Latinas

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 681-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Guzman
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
State Power ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Religious Participation ◽  
Rehabilitation Services ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
And Control

Drawing from ethnographic data and interviews collected in a Latina/o Pentecostal organization based in Northern California’s Bay Area, this paper analyzes how a religious street ministry that offers rehabilitation services and spiritual aid to criminalized individuals enacts spiritual supervision. Spiritual supervision refers to the process by which religious organizations incentivize middle-class individuals to participate in the construction of a criminalized class of individuals, as part of how they practice their Christian identities. This article analyzes how middle-class congregants supervise the actions and behaviors of criminalized individuals who perform gendered physical labor and participate in public dramatizations of their criminal stigma in exchange for housing, food, and religious participation. Spiritual supervision provides a novel theoretical framework for analyzing how carceral state power spreads through the institutional missions and practices of institutions that aim to rehabilitate but also reinforce racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies that further stigmatize and control criminalized people. As a less visible form of punishment imposed outside formal criminal justice institutions, spiritual supervision illuminates how carceral control operates and affects spiritual and religious landscapes.

The lords of humankind re-visited

2003 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE HALL
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Irish Catholics ◽  
The Way

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.

The queer time of death: Temporality, geopolitics, and refugee rights

Sexualities ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 998-1015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sima Shakhsari
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Time Of Death ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Different Populations ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Way

Using the ethnographic data from interviews with the Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants in Turkey, the UNHCR, and NGOs in Istanbul, Ankara, Denizli, Kayseri, and Nevsehir, I explore the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes queer and transgender refugee subjects, while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. Through examining the chronopolitics and geopolitics of rights within the refugee discourse, I point to inconsistencies in the universality of human rights and argue that while the designation of an act as “violation of human rights” committed by states or citizens, is arbitrary and contingent on the place and time of the act, the recognition of the refugee in the human rights regimes relies on essentialist and timeless notions of identity that travel in the teleological time of progress. The Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill. The “protection” of trans and queer refugees under the rhetoric of rights in this in-between zone is tied to the management of life and death of populations through the politics of rightful killing.

Anthropology, Class and the ‘Big Heads’: An Ethnography of Distinctions between ‘Rough’ and ‘Posh’ amongst Women Workers in the UK Pottery Industry

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hart
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Pottery Industry ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Global Corporation ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
The Way

In the context of the take-over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family-owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke-on-Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re-structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives. I was the first one in our family to go in decorating end and they thought I was a bit stuck-up. My sister was in clay end as a cup-handler and I had used to walk off factory without her, or wait for her to leave before I left, though she said, ‘If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have anything to paint!’ They were much freer in the clay end – had more to do with men – we thought we were one up. 1

scholarly journals Vietnam and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC): Prospects, Challenges and Opportunities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hoa Thi Hai Vu
Keyword(s):  
Community Building ◽  
National Level ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Cultural Community ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Unity In Diversity ◽  
The Way

<p>Although there is a large literature on ASEAN regionalism, comparatively little attention has been devoted to Southeast Asia’s efforts to build a shared social and cultural community. This thesis examines how the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) is understood in ASEAN and explores challenges that stand in the way of the Community being realized by its 2015 deadline. The study reviews the origins and response to the ASCC at both the regional level, and at the national level through a case-study of Vietnam’s participation. It argues that although the ASCC is an important component of the ASEAN Community building process and member states have proclaimed their determination to realize the ASCC by 2015, the reality in ASEAN with its “unity in diversity” and “ASEAN Way” norms, means there are many obstacles in the way. Divergent national interests and priorities have led to different priorities in designing and implementing the ASCC Blueprint in the period 2009-2015. The thesis concludes by speculating about the likely scenario for ASCC implementation. It argues that in 2015, the most likely scenario for the ASCC is one in which a nascent ASCC will be formed but with only some of its components in place. ASEAN needs a longer journey to realize its aspiration of a shared socio-culture community.</p>

scholarly journals A Place Called Supermarket

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The City

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.

The Archaeology of Ancestors: The Saxe/Goldstein Hypothesis Revisited

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Morris
Keyword(s):  
Historical Comparison ◽  
Specific Instance ◽  
Archaeological Interpretation ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Dead ◽  
New Archaeology ◽  
The Way

Since the mid-1980s, debates between competing schools of archaeological interpretation have become more theoretical and abstruse, moving away from confrontations over specific methods of analyzing our data. This article reopens arguments over one of the more controversial propositions of the New Archaeology - Saxe's claim that the emergence of formal cemeteries corresponds to the appearance of agnatic lineages monopolizing vital resources through inheritance. The hypothesis is examined in three ways: through a generalized ethnological model; through specific ethnographic data from Taiwan and Kenya; and through a historical comparison of Athens from 500 to 100 BC and Rome from 200 BC to AD 200. It is argued that all three methods lead to a similar conclusion, that many societies do indeed talk about the dead in the way the Saxe/Goldstein hypothesis maintains, but that in any specific instance the cemetery/property message may well be subverted by other arguments which the buriers are making.

Marriage and Lineal Authentication

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Religious Values ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Marriage Patterns ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines marriage patterns in Arabian history and how knowledge of these patterns became a key element of Saudi Arabia's modern genealogical culture. It begins with a review of new historical evidence from the central Arabian oasis town of al-Ghāt, which reveals the way marital patterns preserve knowledge about premodern status hierarchies. It then considers Hamad al-Jāsir's use of marital patterns as a tool of lineal authentication, a practice epitomized in his study of a historically maligned Arabian tribe, Bāhila. It also shows how al-Jāsir made use of Arabian marital patterns as a form of ethnographic data that could serve as a basis for rehabilitating the reputation of historically maligned Arabian tribes and advancing a nativist ethical blueprint for modern Saudi society in which tribal and religious values could cohere harmoniously against perceived external threats.

Self-segregation strategies through school choice in Chile: A middle-class domain?

2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332110365
Author(s):  
Alejandro Carrasco ◽  
Manuela Mendoza ◽  
Carolina Flores
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Middle Class Families

Sociological research has shown that marketized educational systems favour middle-class families’ self-segregation strategies through school choice and, consequently, the reproduction of their social advantage over poorer families. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals, habitus and strategy, we analyse quantitative and ethnographic data on parents’ school choice from Chile to introduce nuances to this argument, evincing more extended and complex mechanisms of self-segregation in the Chilean marketized educational system. We found that not only middle-class parents but also parents from different socioeconomic groups displayed self-segregating school choice strategies. We also found that these strategies were performed both vertically (in relation to other social classes) and horizontally (in relation to other groups within the same social class). These findings unwrap a possible stronger effect of the Chilean school choice system over segregation.

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