scholarly journals Historicizing Fashion: Clothing, Culture, and Chores

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 168-174
Author(s):  
Anjani Shankar Pandey

The present paper is a study on the history of clothing in ancient India to historicize fashion in the Ancient Indian context. Relying primarily on textual sources of the period The Kāmasūtra of Vatsyayana ( 4-5th CE) and The Nātyaśāstra of Bharata (200 BCE-200CE), the paper seeks to examine the implications on patterns of dressing: clothing and accessorizing on different social categories based on gender, class, and caste being governed by the power relations operating within the social milieu of the texts. By looking at varied range of social and gendered categories the essence of clothing and dressing has been observed and commented upon. It has been primarily argued that dressing patterns reveal homogeneity in a particular group, who were part of a heterogeneous whole.

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 697-732
Author(s):  
Thomas Amossé

The result of a process begun in the nineteenth century, the French system of socio-professional classification (code des catégories socio-professionnelles) was drawn up between 1951 and 1954 and has only been slightly modified since. With no strong theoretical framework and conceived according to a realist approach, it gave substance to social classes in the description of postwar society. During a period of “reworking” (1978-1981), it became an exciting topic of sociological exploration, furnishing a representation of Pierre Bourdieu’s two-dimensional social space and serving as a laboratory for the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. In a subsequent period of “updating” (1995-2001), administrative caution regarding changes contrasted with the evolution of categories used in labor law and the goal of analytical purity underpinned by econometrics. The history of this classification details the peculiar position of a statistical tool for representing the social world, ostensibly static amidst constant changes to the institution that managed it, the actors who used it, the social categories—everyday or legal—to which it referred, and, finally, the sociological theories that gave it a conceptual grounding.


Author(s):  
Pablo Azócar Fernández ◽  
Zenobio Saldivia Maldonado

In the history of cartography and in critical cartography, there is a link between the role of maps and power relations, especially during the conquest and domination of territories by national states. Such cartographic products have frequently been used—for both their scientific and persuasive content—in different places, such as in Chile in the Araucanía region during the so-called pacification process, led by the Chilean state during the second half of the 19th century. From a cartographic perspective, the “epistemological and unintentional silences on the maps” can be observed for maps produced during this process. It implied that the “scientific discourse” and the “social and political discourse” of the cartographic images generated during this process of conquest and domination were relevant for the expansionist objectives of the Republic of Chile.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Cătălina Chelcu

For the historical period we refer to, no proper inventories have been made containing the unjustly appropriated goods. They are just mentioned as such or listed, if that was the case, according to the size of the damage. There are also documentary sources in which the object of the theft is less represented, the justice system focusing in those cases rather on the wrongdoers, than on the wrong actions. That is why, the blood money “paid for some reason”, with no other specific details, is quite frequently cited. Rare or frequent, these documents are complaints addressed by the victim to the Prince and his officials, documents in which the perpetrators admitted their fault, or deeds issued by the judicial authority subsequent to the investigation of the criminal act. In discussing the theft of/from the wealth, i.e. from the whole amount of the available goods, we are interested in clarifying some aspects pertaining to a reality that the historian should reconstruct, with all the complexity of its evolution: the motivations of the theft and its circumstances, the types of theft, the social categories involved, the time and space of the misdemeanour, the perpetrators’ punishment. Briefly, the study is about starting to write a history of the reprehensible acts liable to punishments for theft and robbery in 17th and early 18th century Moldavia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s work with the social history of medicine and evaluates its potential for analyzing the political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foucault reveals the bond between quarantine measures in European cities and the gradual perfection of techniques of power. He uses organized anti-epidemic activities applied to leprosy and plague as examples of “compact models” of power relations that he discusses in terms of exclusion and discipline. He reveals complex relationships between the physical body of an individual and what he calls the “social body” of a state. Foucault describes how “health policy” was formed during the second half of 18th century when it drastically changed urban space and became one of the key techniques of government. In Foucault’s lectures published as Security, Territory, Population, he turns to the concept of a “prevailing” or literally “reigning” disease. The countermeasures against the disease enable the development of special techniques applicable to the population in a given historical period. He uses the statistical description of patients suffering from smallpox as an example of how a regime of power and government of the population develops by invoking security and risk assessment. In the concluding section, the author estimates the potential of Foucauldian historical analysis as a tool for anticipating the tendencies inherent in the techniques of power mobilized to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Manna Dey Manna Dey

Discourse analysis is a branch of study that encompasses a variety of varied, primarily qualitative methods to the investigation of the interactions that exist between language in use and the social environment. Language is often viewed by researchers in the subject as a sort of social practice that has an impact on the social world and vice versa. Many contemporary kinds of discourse analysis have been overtly or indirectly informed by Michel Foucault's theories of power, knowledge, and discourse, which are discussed below. As a result of Foucault's work, there has been an increased interest in investigating the role that language plays in the formation and maintenance of certain knowledge and the maintenance of inequitable power relations. In order to undertake discourse analyses, human geographers often draw on one of three major schools of discourse analysis: Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), critical discourse analysis (CDA), or Gramscian techniques. There are several theoretical and methodological distinctions between these approaches. While different approaches have different strengths and weaknesses, they all provide researchers with an effective means of investigating and exposing semiotic features of power relations in specific sociospatial contexts. While there are no set procedures for these techniques, researchers have recognized certain essential investigative strategies that can be used to inform the performance of any type of discourse analysis project. These strategies are included below. A brief history of Critical Discourse Analysis is offered, along with a full examination of the numerous criticisms levied at CDA and its practitioners over the previous two decades, both by scholars working within the "critical" paradigm and by other critical critics. Reader response and integration of contextual aspects are discussed, as well as a range of objections directed at the underlying premises and analytical technique. Additionally, there is discussion of contentious issues, such as the negative focus of much CDA work and CDA's developing standing as a "intellectual orthodoxy" They highlight the major criticisms that have emerged from this overview and provide some ways to overcome these shortcomings.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Marquilhas

AbstractThis paper discusses the methods that historical sociolinguists can use in order to avoid anachronism. It is argued that there are four practical ways of triggering a sense of scale, both for external variables that correlate with past language use and for the linguistic data that we inherited from past societies: by learning from social and cultural historians, by visiting judicial archives, by making scholarly digital editions, and by using corpus linguistic statistical procedures. The case study focused on here is Portuguese in the Early Modern period, from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The size of an ideal sample of informants is discussed, based on the demographic history of Portugal. Furthermore, social categories are established relevant in the context of Portuguese cultural history, taking into account the social world that made sense to Early Modern people. Next, I introduce a corpus of Early Modern letters containing a close-to-conversational register, and discuss two case studies. An analysis of spelling variation in the corpus shows the diachronic dialectal spread of a merger of sibilants. The statistical analysis of keywords shows the pervasiveness of register markers as well as some typical uses found in epistolary communication by social actors from different social strata.


2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Kjerulf Petersen

What is media sociology? The purpose of this article is to introduce some main themes in media sociology, in particular the question of the various media as particular technological milieu and media as the public. It is possible to analyze media as milieu, that is technologies that not only canalize information, but also, by the manner in which they function, form the social milieu that they are a part of. This is illustrated through analyses of television and computer/internet as media milieu. The question of the public-political as well as broader cultural public, every day life public, taste public-is also a central theme in the study of media. These publics come into being through the media. Hence one be interested in the contents of these publics, for instance the meanings, values, stories, information, rituals that are being communicated. One can also be interested in the process of construction of meanings, for instance the conditions for creation and maintenance of publics, the power relations involved in production and transmission of meaning and the reception of the meanings that are being communicated.


1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Mundy

Abstract The stereotype of people with autism as unresponsive or uninterested in other people was prominent in the 1980s. However, this view of autism has steadily given way to recognition of important individual differences in the social-emotional development of affected people and a more precise understanding of the possible role social motivation has in their early development.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


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