scholarly journals What is a rite? Émile Durkheim, a hundred years later

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo D’Orsi ◽  
Fabio Dei

Abstract This paper is focused on the anthropological concept of ritual, starting from Emile Durkheim's approach in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912). We discuss three different aspects of the Durkheimian perspective on religion and rituals: a) the sacred/profane dichotomy; b) the concept of collective representations - which establishes a substantial continuity between religious and scientific thought; c) a ‟practical” and performative interpretation of rites as the basis of social bond. During the twentieth century, these aspects have influenced different and sometimes opposing theoretical approaches (including ‟symbolist” and ‟neo-intellectualist” theories and Victor Turner's ‟anthropology of experience”). We briefly review each of them, arguing for the importance of reconsidering them into a unitary perspective, centred on religious phenomena as basically moral experiences and as the language of social relations. In the conclusions, we will show how such unitary approach helps us understand the transformations as well as the continuities of rituality in the individualized and secularized societies of what we call nowadays the Western world.

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Charlotte Bloch

Charlotte Bloch: Emotions and Social Bonds in Academia The purpose of this article is to expand our understanding of social relations in academia by examining the role that the emotional dimensions of these social relations play in academic life. It is based on the results of an interview study of emotions and emotional culture among people in various scholarly positions in academia. The article makes analytical distinctions between the structural conditions of emotions, the emotional culture of academia, lived or felt emotions and the management of emotions. And it identifies different ways of managing the emotions of uncertainty, shame, anger, pride and laughter. These feelings emerge from the structural conditions of the social relations in academic life, and the tacit rules of feeling in academic life define how these feelings are managed. Life in academia presupposes a certain amount of feeling labour and management of feelings. Thomas Scheff’s theory about emotions and social bonds is employed to identify what this management of feelings means for social relations in academia. Bonds in academia are stable and fluctuate between solidarity, isolation and engulfment, but primarily the last two. Loneliness, group conformity, absence of real cooperation, and weakening of individual and collective creativity are some of the consequences of this kind of social bond.


Author(s):  
Alicja Węcławiak

Eastern Slavonic cultures are often a conglomeration of patterns of several cultures, which resulted from the past. As Paul Ricouer said, the past is a place of our hidden identity, hurt by the greatest disaster of the twentieth century — bloody regimes. Nazism and bolshevism left their mark on the western world, whose painful consequences we still face today. Bieszczady is a part of Poland, which suffered particularly acutely during and after WWII. It is a place with a kind of a legend, becoming more and more appreciated, because of its tourist attractions, unspoiled nature, magical and largely virginal landscapes. This is a very important area for Slavonic identity, a place with a rich and troubled history — Bieszczady witnesses the actions of the Ukrainian InsurgentArmy and Operation “Vistula”. This article concerns this question, presents excerptsof interviews and memories of participants in those events and shows Bieszczady as a region of the heterogeneous Slavonic culture and a place of memory — both individual and collective.


2021 ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
A. Yе. Shevchenko ◽  
S. V. Kudin

The article explores the variety of theoretical approaches to legal interpretation. It has been determined that the variety of approaches to legal interpretation is due to the complexity of the nature of the origin of this phenomenon, the conditions for the development of post-non-classical science, and the recent influence of the paradigm of comparism, which assumes pluralism of opinions and ideas in legal research. It was found that in modern science there are four traditional theoretical approaches to the essence of legal interpretation. It has been determined that the content of the first approach is revealed within the framework of legal hermeneutics through a number of categories. The essence of the second approach (formal dogmatic or static) is expressed in the fact that the subject of interpretation must strictly and rigorously follow the letter of the law, establish only the meaning of the normative legal act, which the lawmaking body enshrined in it at the time of the publication of the act. That is why normative legal acts cannot, through interpretation, adapt to the changing economic, social, political, cultural internal and external conditions of public life. It is proved that the essence of the dynamic theoretical approach lies in the fact that the subject of legal interpretation adapts the normative legal act to the changes that occur in various social relations. It was found that there is a contradiction between the dynamic and static approaches in legal interpretation, which is reflected in the traditionally called objective and subjective theories of interpretation. According to the subjective theory, the purpose of legal interpretation is to establish the «will of the legislator», and according to the objective theory – to establish the «will of the law». It has been substantiated that the essence of the activity approach is that interpretation is considered as a special kind of legal activity aimed at understanding and clarifying the content of legal texts. The authors of this article point out that in order to establish the true nature of legal interpretation, the methodological foundations of the study should be presented much broader and more diverse, and not be limited only to traditional approaches. When studying it, a comprehensive, integrative approach is needed, which, based on the relevance of interdisciplinary relationships, would include logical, language (linguistic), philosophical, sociological, psychological, axiological (value), ethical, legal, historical, economic, political, mathematical and other substantiation of legal interpretation. Keywords: diversity, theoretical approach, legal interpretation, interpretive practice, integrative approach


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial

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.


1998 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 227-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucio Biggiero

Industrial districts are local hyper-networks of self-organizing and innovating small and medium-sized companies (SMEs), which, in terms of competitiveness and employment, play an important role in Italy's society and economy. Italy's industrial structure is deeply embedded in social relations, which are stratified and vary from territory to territory. The university, partially replaced by innovation centres, plays a weak role. For industrial districts to survive the current crisis, an industrial policy based on new theoretical approaches is needed, capable of analysing and dealing with emergent forms of industrial organization.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Yongle Zhang ◽  
Colleen Howe

Abstract Compared to Wang Shaoguang’s approach to re-interpret the old concept “democracy” to overcome the Schumpeterian model of political legitimation, Daniel Bell’s Political Meritocracy takes a more challenging path, attempting to build a new discourse of legitimacy centering on the concept “meritocracy” and incorporating elements of ancient China’s traditions, the socialist revolutions in the twentieth century, and the system of competitive elections common in the Western world today. This inspiring work is full of incisive arguments, but could be improved by further considering the tension between the Confucian tradition and the revolutionary tradition in the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman

This chapter reconstructs the meanings of holiness from representative texts of the Jewish tradition. The discussion is anchored on two claims. First, biblical thought does not divide the world into a neat dualism of sacred and profane. Second, the Bible and subsequent Judaism conceive of holiness in three different ways: holiness sometimes refers to a property, holiness indicates a status, and holiness is a value or project. These three characteristics of holiness are examined in detail using the Bible. The chapter is primarily concerned with the ideas of the holiness of the people of Israel and the holiness of the Land of Israel. It considers the sacred/profane dichotomy by focusing on the views of twentieth-century scholars such as Emile Durkheim, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade. It also explores holiness and purity as they relate to God before concluding with an analysis of holiness in ancient and medieval rabbinic Judaism.


Author(s):  
Andrea Bachner

This chapter explores different links between sound and writing, from Rilke’s and Adorno’s reflections on phonographic grooves as a type of proto-writing in the early decades of the twentieth century to contemporary media theories that invest sound with the powers of immediacy, immersion, and corporeal resonance on the one hand and to poststructuralist fantasies of sound as an embodiment of écriture on the other. Sound theorists invest sound with contradictory desires: as a counter to phonocentric phantasms of presence as well as an alternative, resonant way of thinking, as that which is most mediated as well as a figure of non-mediation. And figures of inscription—as overt or disavowed imaginary, as well as negative foil—frequently represent and mediate between these differing theoretical approaches to sound. The genealogy of intextuated sound that this chapter narrates throws light on the strategic deployment of media in theory, for which sound (and its conceptual imaginaries) becomes a hallmark of reconceptualizing corporeality and materiality as well as a way of negotiating between mediation and the unmediated.


2017 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Faisal Devji

The Indian philosopher Muhammad Iqbal developed one of the earliest Muslim criticisms of liberalism in the early twentieth century. Given the caste, communal and other differences that he thought made a European form of nationalism and so democracy impossible in India, Iqbal asked how social relations there might be envisioned in its absence. He went on to question the three liberal categories, interest, representation and contract, that underlay the liberal form of nationalism and democracy, and describe and try to re-imagine the non-liberal ways in which Indians related to one another in moral, philosophical and aesthetic terms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Maren Freudenberg ◽  
Tim Weitzel

The introduction to the special issue on ‘charisma’ offers a very brief overview of the development of the concept in the social sciences and various critiques and intersecting debates. It casts a close look at Max Weber’s sometimes contradictory use of the concept and the different ways he conceptualized it in his sociology of religion and his sociology of domination. It then examines alternative theoretical approaches to ‘charisma’ that emerge in the course of the twentieth century before outlining this special issue’s contribution to the conceptual debate and the individual articles’ operationalization of the term by viewing charisma as relational, communicative, procedural, as well as related to ideas, practices, and objects.


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