scholarly journals Witnessing, Remembering, and Testifying: Why the Past Is Special for Human Beings

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 428-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes B. Mahr ◽  
Gergely Csibra
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

The past is undeniably special for human beings. To a large extent, both individuals and collectives define themselves through history. Moreover, humans seem to have a special way of cognitively representing the past: episodic memory. As opposed to other ways of representing knowledge, remembering the past in episodic memory brings with it the ability to become a witness. Episodic memory allows us to determine what of our knowledge about the past comes from our own experience and thereby what parts of the past we can give testimony about. In this article, we aim to give an account of the special status of the past by asking why humans have developed the ability to give testimony about it. We argue that the past is special for human beings because it is regularly, and often principally, the only thing that can determine present social realities such as commitments, entitlements, and obligations. Because the social effects of the past often do not leave physical traces behind, remembering the past and the ability to bear testimony it brings is necessary for coordinating social realities with other individuals.

scholarly journals Membaca Semangat Hermeneutika Hanafi

MELINTAS ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Masmuni Mahatma
Keyword(s):  
Social Reality ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sacred Values ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Dynamic

Alquran cannot be detached from the chain of history accompanying it. Alquran has always been associated with sacred values it contains. That is it’s <em>fitrah</em>. Hasan Hanafi, born in Cairo, develops a unique hermeneutics to view Alquran as revelation. In safeguarding the originality of the Scripture as much as possible, the potential of reason and thought cannot be avoided as well. For the Scripture is an ideal ‘mirror’ of the expressions of the reality in life together with all the social dynamic continuously approaching the believers. Without the involvement of reason and thought the Scripture might not be so much different from an ‘inscription’, which is passive, cold, and barely engendering things characterised as dialogical and productive. Viewed in its process of descent to human beings, the scriptural revelation is not something suddenly flying and drifting without reason. The revelation is closely related with the reality (of the past) tied up together by Allah. Each verse or set of verses in the Scripture has mirrored solution to particular problem in the banality of individual and communal life. The Scripture is not simply a ‘text’, for it is always breathing ‘context’. By having context, the Scripture cannot be uncoupled from the social reality of the believers who put their trust in it. The Scripture is a text merging with context, which in turn illuminates the believers all around the world.<br /><br />

The Role of Past in the Simulation of Autobiographical Future Episodes

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 419-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Gamboz ◽  
Maria A. Brandimonte ◽  
Stefania De Vito
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Delayed Recognition

Human beings’ ability to envisage the future has been recently assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature of episodic memory ( Schacter & Addis, 2007 ). In the present research, young adults mentally reexperienced and preexperienced temporally close and distant autobiographical episodes, and rated their phenomenal characteristics as well as their novelty. Additionally, they performed a delayed recognition task including remember-know judgments on new, old-remember, and old-imagine words. Results showed that past and future temporally close episodes included more phenomenal details than distant episodes, in line with earlier studies. However, future events were occasionally rated as already occurred in the past. Furthermore, in the recognition task, participants falsely attributed old-imagine words to remembered episodes. While partially in line with previous results, these findings call for a more subtle analysis in order to discriminate representations of past episodes from true future events simulations.

Émile Durkheim’s Restitutive Humanitarianism: from Organic Solidarity to the ‘Solidarity of Things’

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Magdalena Zolkos
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Normal State ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Organic Solidarity ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Industrial Societies

This chapter analyses the legal-sociological trope of restitutive justice in Émile Durkheim’s 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, as well as in his later anthropological studies on punitive institutions and laws. It shows that Durkheim theorizes restitution in terms of the social effects of intensified division of labour in industrial societies, which is identifiable within the domain of law, and which consists of corrective and remedial response to wrongdoing that aims to do justice for, and to repair, the consequences of wrongdoing for the social fabric. This is expressed in the metaphor of a clock that is turned back, as if expressing the underlying desires of the restitutive law to ‘restore the past’ to ‘its normal state’. It is situated as a binary opposite to the categories of ‘repressive law’ or ‘punitive law’, which are said to characterize traditional societies, and which aim at making the wrongdoer suffer. In turn, in his later writings Durkheim makes a conceptual and philosophic link between restitution and humanitarianism. This shows that the corrective and remedial workings of modern law operates upon activation of humanitarian affects: what sets restitution in motion, is the extent to which such wrongs coincide with sites of suffering.

scholarly journals The possible as a field of inquiry

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Petre Glăveanu
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Counterfactual Thinking ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Field Of Inquiry ◽  
Made In

In this editorial I introduce the possible as an emerging field of inquiry in psychology and related disciplines. Over the past decades, significant advances have been made in connected areas – counterfactual thinking, anticipation, prospection, imagination and creativity, etc. – and several calls have been formulated in the social sciences to study human beings and societies as systems that are open to possibility and to the future. However, engaging with the possible, in the sense of both becoming aware of it and actively exploring it, represents a subject in need of further theoretical elaboration. In this paper, I review several existing approaches to the possible before briefly outlining a new, sociocultural account. While the former are focused on cognitive processes and uphold the old dichotomy between the possible and the actual or real, the latter grows out of a social ontology grounded in notions of difference, positions, perspectives, reflexivity, and dialogue. In the end, I argue that a better understanding of the possible can help us cultivate it in both mind and society.

scholarly journals THE CRISIS OF ECONOMICS AND FOR SEARCH OF THE NEW PARADIGM

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
VLADIMER PAPAVA
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Economic Study ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Reality ◽  
Economic Studies

The article analyzes the crisis in the economics, its primary causes and its manifestations. It shows how traditional economics “turns a blind eye” to many significant aspects of economic reality. Within this crisis, the economy lags behind the economic reality and so various economic theories are used to attempt to interpret the economic phenomena. Some of the clearest examples of economies falling outside of reality are seen in the transition economies of the post-Communist period on their way to a market economy as well as the events of the global financial and economic crisis in 2007-2009. The most recent example of the crisis in economics is cryptocurrency which has already spread over almost the entire world over the past several years but which has not yet become a topic of systematic study in economics. In order to overcome the crisis situation in economics, it will be of utmost importance as to how well the human factor is reflected in economic studies and to what extent it will be approximated to the behavior that is characteristic of human beings in reality. For this purpose, economists must apply the knowledge about human nature that has been amassed in the field of social sciences such as philosophy, psychology, law and political science. For the development of economics and for its relevant transformation, the conditions referred to in the traditionally used phrase “other things equal” (“ceritasparibas”) need to be minimized in economic studies. This will be possible if an economic study relies not only (and in certain cases not to a greater extent) on mathematics but also on philosophy, psychology, law, history, geography and political science. In this regard, economists need to conduct studies by expanding their scope; that is, along the lines set out by the above-mentioned fields of the social sciences. Given the variety of economic theories, seeking possible ways to synthesize them becomes of great importance and this will assist economists in perceiving a given economic reality in a comprehensive way.

Social being and cultural practices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Ray ◽  
Julian Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
North Park ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Current Practices

Human societies are held together by relationships, conventions, traditions, institutions, and tacit understandings. These things are intangible, and while humans themselves are reproduced as corporeal beings, their societies are sustained by practical activities that continually recreate knowledge, customs, and interpersonal bonds. Just as a language would ultimately disappear if it ceased to be used as a means of communication, so the rules and routines of social life are maintained only if they are practised. The corollary of this is that societies are not fixed and bounded entities as much as arrangements that are continually coming into existence, works (if you like) that are never completed. But material things are also in flux, constantly ripening, maturing, being made, being used consecutively in different ways through their ‘lifespans’, eroding and decaying: so that the social and substantial worlds are as one in being in an unending state of becoming. Nonetheless, objects often have the capacity to endure longer than habits, rules, or affiliations. They continue to exist independently of human beings and their actions. As a result, old artefacts and places occupied in the past can serve to give structure to current practices and transactions, providing cues and prompts, or reminding us of past events and appropriate modes of conduct. Hunter-gatherers have generally lived a way of life that involves making continual reference to natural features and landmarks. Certain distinctive cliffs, hills, islands, trees, and lakes have represented places to return to, or at which to arrange meetings or encounter game. As such they will have been places of periodic resort, and were incorporated into collective history and mythology. Meanwhile, other places acquired a meaning simply because specific people camped there, or met there, or died there. During the Mesolithic in Britain, some locations seem to have been persistently returned to over very long periods of time. One example is the site at North Park Farm, Bletchingley in Surrey, which appears to have been visited sporadically over hundreds of years, although the structural evidence for this at the site was sparse, being limited to a group of fireplaces.

Toward discourse involution within China’s Internet: Class, voice, and social media

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482096675
Author(s):  
Ping Sun ◽  
Guoning Zhao ◽  
Zhen Liu ◽  
Xiaoting Li ◽  
Yunze Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Discursive Power

Despite scholarly concern regarding the online discussion in China’s cyberspace, research tracing the trends in discourse expression on social media remains scant. Revolving around the concept of discursive power, this study explicates how the voices of different social classes have been represented and expressed in social media during the past decade. Employing longitudinal content analysis on class-based voice in 2009 ( n = 1374) and 2018 ( n = 25,330), the results demonstrate that online discussion in China’s social media has displayed a trend for “discourse involution,” where the increasing appropriation of the Internet among different social classes results in a continued divide of the discursive power in cyberspace. We argue that this discourse involution is achieved through the asymmetry of discursive expression, centralization of voice representation, and polarization in the emotional expression online. The study contributes to the current debate on the social effects of online discussions using a discursive and class-based approach.

Uses of Anthropology in Nursing

1988 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 2-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliene Lipson ◽  
Eleanor Bauwens
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Diagnosis And Treatment ◽  
Policy Statement ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Potential Health ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

The articles in this issue reflect a mutually rewarding relationship between nursing and anthropology over the past twenty years. In the late 1960s, such nurse-anthropologists as Agnes Aamodt, Eleanor Bauwens, Pamela Brink, Liz Byerly, Jody Glittenberg, Margarita Kay, Oliver Osborne, and Antoinette Ragucci were utilizing both fields in teaching, research and practice. Anthropology and nursing have a lot in common, such as a holistic view of human beings and a humanistic rather than positivistic stance. In "Nursing: A Social Policy Statement" (American Nurses' Association, 1980) nursing was defined as "…the diagnosis and treatment of human responses to actual or potential health problems" (emphasis ours). "Human responses to" differentiates nursing from medicine, and nursing potentially includes the whole range of human responses and the social, cultural, psychological, and environmental factors that affect such responses.

scholarly journals Communications ’ Efects on Politics and Social Change: A Study on Harold A. Innis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Mehmet Sebih Oruç
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Communication Tools ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media And Communication

The importance of communications on social change increasingly recognized in both academic and popular works. Te effect and presence of communications are felt in all aspects of human life and these tools are usually considered to have signifcant effects on human activities in the social, political and cultural spheres. Harold A. Innis is one of the frst scholar who studied and paid attention to that aspect of communications and came with one of the most original and provocative theory about media and communication systems. Innis’s theoretical legacy is particularly important nowadays as the use of these tools in life is increasing. However, there is not even one single article devoted to present his opinion in Turkish and this is an important missing part for the literature. Innis examined the communication tools on the basis of their relation with time and space. He examined them under two main categories: time-bias communications and space bias communications. He tried to understand what these communications mean today and what they have meant for civilizations throughout history. According to him, the means of communication have many cognitive and social effects and the history of civilization can only be understood when these effects are taken into account. In this article, his theories about technologies, communications and social change will be discussed and evaluated. In this context, the article has two main aims. First, to examine Innis’s works and his Teory in the context of his time. Second, to shortly summarize how communications affect society and human beings by giving some historical and contemporary examples. Te article argues that communications are incrisingly becoming both time and space bieas and thus it becomes difficult to understand their effect. Tat recuires more feld work to see all dimentions of the changes they cause.

scholarly journals In the Jaws of Time: First Reflections of Episodic Memory in Human Beings

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Simona Petru
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Past ◽  
Perception Of Time

Memories of the personal past seem to be something natural for us, because they determine our identity and, at least partly, our character as well. Well-developed episodic memory, which enables us to mentally travel into our personal past and imagine our personal future, makes such perception of the past possible. Animals probably do not have this form of memory, or it is much less evolved in them than it is in humans. Archaeological finds suggest that in human evolution episodic memory evolved to the present extent relatively late, probably not until Modern man emerged. Such a conclusion can be made because archaic human species did not leave behind any material proofs, such as lasting jewellery and unambiguous ritual burials that would reflect the modern perception of time and desire to preserve personal memories.

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