Haunting Wholeness: Inviting Ghosts on the Bridge So We Can Transform

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 1022-1038
Author(s):  
Cristina M. Dominguez
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Community Member ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Knowing

In this article, I share my journey toward haunting wholeness in the social justice work that I am beginning to take up as a scholar, teacher, and community member. I evoke Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting, defining it as an experience in which “that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.” Investigating hauntings that take place in our lives can take us to a “dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.” Should we dwell and work in this site, should we take up hauntings and their “ghostly things,” I believe, as Gordon does, that we can conjure “a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening,” an affective and transformative way of knowing about our moving and relating in the world with others as social beings.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

scholarly journals Poetry as a Social Document: The Social Position of the Arab Woman as Reflected in the Poetry of Nizâr Qabbânî

1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-494
Author(s):  
Arieh Loya
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Harsh Environment ◽  
Arab Woman ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Nomadic Life ◽  
Social Document

No other people in the world, perhaps, have given more information in their poetry on their cultural and social life than have the Arabs over the centuries. Many years before the advent of Islam and long before they had any national political organization, the Arabs had developed a highly articulate poetic art, strict in its syntax and metrical schemes and fantastically rich in its vocabulary and observation of detail. The merciless desert, the harsh environment in which the Arabs lived, their ever shifting nomadic life, left almost no traces of their social structure and the cultural aspects of their life. It is only in their poetry – these monuments built of words – that we find such evidence, and it speaks more eloquently than cuneiform on marble statues ever could.

The Dictatorship of Appearance or Simulation in Present-Day "Democracies" against the Background of the Market Ecocide of the Foundations of Human Life on Earth

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Subetto
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
Environmental Destruction ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Point Of No Return ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Near Future

It is proved that the current era is characterized by many governments around the world as dictatorship of "appearance" or "simulation" of the most activities transforming politics, even the tragic events like local ecological catastrophes, local wars, "colour revolutions", the elections in a "theatre", "acting", on the background of market ecocide – really accelerating processes of the first phase of a Global Environmental Disaster, which, at the transition "point of no return" in the near future, may turn into a process of irreversible environmental destruction of all mankind. This dictatorship of "appearance" or simulation as a "curtain" market democracy, hiding the capitalism-led, process of dehumanization of man, is an indicator of the inadequacy of states and political "elites" imperative of survival of mankind, as the imperative out of the ecological impasse of history in market-capitalist format. There comes a reckoning for this departure into the " market-capitalist illusion of apparent prosperity. The societies of the world, including Rossiya, have faced a dilemma:either environmental destruction, or the Noosphere Breakthrough, which, in its essence, is a change in the social organization of social life and its reproduction – the transition from the dominance of capitalism and the market to the Noosphere Ecological Spiritual Socialism on the basis of scientific and educational society and the management of socionatural evolution.

Colonization, Decolonization, and Power: Ruptures and Critical Junctures Out of Dominance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Liu ◽  
Felicia Pratto
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
National Identity ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The Impact

Colonization and decolonization are theorized at the intersection of Critical Junctures Theory and Power Basis Theory. This framework allows human agency to be conceptualized at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, where individuals act on behalf of collectives. Their actions decide whether critical junctures in history (moments of potential for substantive change) result in continuity (no change), anchoring (continuity amid change with new elements), or rupture. We apply this framework to European colonization of the world, which is the temporal scene for contemporary social justice. Several critical junctures in New Zealand history are analyzed as part of its historical trajectory and narrated through changes in its symbology (system of meaning) and technology of state, as well as the identity space it encompasses (indigenous Māori and British colonizers). The impact of this historical trajectory on the social structure of New Zealand, including its national identity and government, is considered and connected to the overarching theoretical framework.

The Social Life of Fighting Words

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-124
Author(s):  
Ronald S. Stade
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Context

Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in-motion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.

scholarly journals Przestrogi dla utopistów. Wizje optimum dóbr w historii idei w książce Andrzeja Waśkiewicza

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Orders

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.

scholarly journals Affirmative Action for Minorities in India: Constraints and Possibilities

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 246
Author(s):  
Mohd. Sanjeer Alam
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

India is one of the most socially fragmented and unequal societies of the world. At the same time, it has the distinction of having the longest history of most elaborative affirmative action programmes for alleviating socially structured inequalities. While the affirmative action programmes have wider coverage in terms of social groups, there is continuing demand by new social groups for getting acknowledged as ‘disadvantaged’ and inclusion in the system of affirmative action. While group based ‘reservation’ as the most vital instrument of social justice has long been under fire and grappling with several challenges, the social justice regime is faced with the charge that it has largely excluded nation’s religious minorities. Of course, religion based affirmative action is faced with many constraints; nevertheless there are possibilities for it. This article discusses the constraints and possibilities of affirmative action for disadvantaged religious minorities, Muslims in particular.  

The Second Royal Society Nuffield Lecture Anthropological models and social reality

1966 ◽  
Vol 165 (998) ◽  
pp. 20-34 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Social Life

In trying to show you the character of social anthropology as an academic discipline, I might try to sketch some substantive and perhaps intriguing findings in the field, or the history of its development, or some of its major intellectual problems today. I have chosen the last of these alternatives, because by showing the general problems we are grappling with I hope to reveal to you, in part no doubt inadvertently, the ways that anthropologists think, and also how our difficulties in part arise from the character of the social reality itself, which we confront and try to understand. The fundamental questions which social anthropology asks are about the forms, the nature, and the extent of order in human social life, as it can be observed in the different parts of the world. There is no need to prejudge the extent of this order; as members of one society we know how unpredictable social life can be. But concretely, human life varies greatly around the world, and it seems possible to characterize its forms to some extent. We seek means systematically to discover, record and understand these forms.

scholarly journals The Rain Keeps Falling

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-127
Author(s):  
Deborah Rose
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Bob Dylan ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S

The force of disaster hit me in the heart when, as a young woman, I heard Bob Dylan sing ‘Hard Rain’. In a voice stunned by violence, the young man reports on a multitude of forces that drag the world into catastrophe. In the 1960s I heard the social justice in the song. In 2004 the environmental issues ambush me. The song starts and ends in the dying world of trees and rivers. The poet’s words in both domains of justice are eerily prophetic. They call across the music, and across the years, saying that a hard rain is coming. The words bear no story at all; they give us a series of compelling images, an account of impending calamity. The artistry of the poet—Bob (Billy Boy) Dylan—offers sequences of reports that, like Walter Benjamin’s storm from paradise, pile wreckage upon wreckage.

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