Origin Stories about Segregationist Philanthropy

Author(s):  
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-690
Author(s):  
Susan J. Wolfson
Keyword(s):  

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.


Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen ◽  
Francisco Apurinã ◽  
Sidney Facundes

Abstract This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories. Analogous to the ways that speakers of many other languages who distinguish the entities that they talk to or about, the Apurinã make use of linguistic resources to establish the ways they interact with different entities. Besides these resources, the material means of mediating stories is a crucial tool to narrate the worlds of humans and nonhumans. Storytelling requires material mediation, and a specific context of plant substances. It also involves community meeting as a space of trust in order to become a communicative practice and effectively introduce the history of the people. Our sources are ethnography, language documentation, and autoethnography.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146960532110198
Author(s):  
María Nieves Zedeño ◽  
Evelyn Pickering ◽  
François Lanoë

We highlight the significance of process, event, and context of human practice in Indigenous Creation traditions to integrate Blackfoot “Napi” origin stories with environmental, geological, and archaeological information pertaining to the peopling of the Northwestern Plains, where the northern Rocky Mountain Front may have played a prominent role. First, we discuss the potential and limitations of origin stories generally, and Napi stories specifically, for complementing the fragmentary records of early human presence in the Blackfoot homeland. Second, we demonstrate the intimate connection among processes, events, place-making practices, and stories. Last, we aim to expand multivocality in the interpretation of the deep past through an archaeological practice that considers Indigenous philosophies and stories to be as valid as non-Indigenous ones.


Author(s):  
Nathaniel Chapman ◽  
David Brunsma

Beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. This unique book carves a much-needed critical and interdisciplinary path to examine and understand the racial dynamics in the craft beer industry and the popular consumption of beer. The book's guiding theoretical perspectives are race and the founding of the United States; racial ideology and the boundaries of Americanity; the production of (beer as) culture; and cultural diversity and brewing. It begins with an overview of the whiteness of craft beer. Looking at the history of beer and its origin stories in the 'new world' shows that beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. Given the very quick and meteoric rise of the craft beer industry, as well as the myopic scholarly focus on economic and historical trends in the industry, the book states that there is an urgent need to take stock of the intersectional inequalities that such realities gloss over.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Charles S. Preston

The origin story of the Licchavis, retold in two commentaries on Nik?ya texts, has received some scant attention in the modern scholastic record, yet has usually been either cast aside as so much myth or has been recast in thematic or structural studies that align it with other tales of incest, foundling narratives, or origin stories of ga?a-sa?ghas. This article argues against those interpretations and offers a thorough rereading of the story as not only encoding a class hierarchy but also, in so doing, critiquing the Brahmanical class structure and the concept of svabh?va by birth. In this new interpretation of the story, and by reading it alongside other narratives, it becomes apparent that the origin story of the Licchavis makes sense within the context of the Buddhist commentaries where it is found. The account of their origins is not merely retelling an old story but furthering a Buddhist message.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

How do we explain the behavior of the many people we meet throughout our lives? Children and adults sometimes consider other people in terms of their social category memberships (e.g., assuming that a girl likes pink because she is a girl), but people view some categories as more informative than others, and which people think of as informative varies across cultural contexts. One type of culturally-embedded knowledge that appears to shape whether people view particular categories as providing explanations for behavior are beliefs about how the category came to be. In the current studies with 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 206), we ask how learning about quasi-scientific or supernatural causal origins of a category shapes young children’s use of categories to predict and explain what category members are like. In Study 1, children more often used a category to explain behavior when they heard the category described as intentionally created by a powerful being than when they heard no explicit information about its origins. In Studies 2 and 3, learning about both quasi-scientific and supernatural causal origins shaped children’s social category beliefs via a common mechanism: by signaling that the category marked a non-arbitrary way of dividing up the social world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Ziewitz ◽  
Michael Lynch

Why would anyone still want to go to the laboratory in 2018? In this interview, Michael Lynch answers this and other questions, reflecting on his own journey in, through, and alongside the field of science and technology studies (STS). Starting from his days as a student of Harold Garfinkel’s at UCLA to more recent times as editor of Social Studies of Science, Lynch talks about the rise of origin stories in the field; the role of ethnomethodology in his thinking; the early days of laboratory studies; why “turns” and “waves” might better be called “spins”; what he learned from David Edge; why we should be skeptical of the presumption that STS enhances the democratization of science; and why it might be time to “blow up STS”––an appealing idea that Malte Ziewitz takes up in his reflection following the interview.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document