“I Told You the Invisible Can Kill You”: Engaging Anthropology as a Response in the COVID-19 Outbreak in Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 250-258
Author(s):  
Selenia Marabello ◽  
Maria Luisa Parisi
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Containment Measures ◽  
Reception System ◽  
Emilia Romagna Region ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Asylum Seekers And Refugees

Italy has been the European country first struck and most heavily affected by COVID-19. Exploring the outbreak’s impact on the migration reception system in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna region, we show how anthropological tools have been applied to mitigate public health misunderstandings and the effects of legislative measures among vulnerable mothers, asylum seekers, and refugees. Following a description of the legal horizon and migrant reception systems, we explore the gaps in representations of COVID-19 containment measures. By observing the underlying structures of social inequality and the relationship between individual/social/political bodies, this essay offers an ethnographically grounded analysis. It investigates how the outbreak has been experienced and represented by vulnerable migrants—diseased adult men, sex trafficked, and mothers migrants—living in reception structures. Although their experiences differ with gender, age, and material conditions, they all show what is at stake: the cultural diffraction of disease representations and symbolic meanings according to a visible/invisible conceptualization in particular institutional forms. Monitoring the social pandemic and local response to COVID-19, we shed light on the reconfiguring of sociocultural beliefs and people’s lived experience of containment measures, quarantine, and prescribed behaviors.

Consumption as an Althusserian Ideological Apparatus

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-145
Author(s):  
Omer Ersin Kahraman
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Francis Fukuyama ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Raymond Aron ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Labour Power

The end of ideology has been declared for several times by different writers like Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell and Francis Fukuyama. However, ideology still has an important role in the social order even though its structure has been adapted to the contemporaneous material conditions. Consumption, the consumptive production of labour power, has turned into a new language of socio-symbolic meanings in the twentieth century. In this way, consumption overshadowed its material basis, the needs, and obtained a new duty in the ruling ideology as an ideological State apparatus, keeping the masses in line. This article aims to investigate this aspect of the modern consumption practice in accordance with ideology approach of Louis Althusser.

The perspective of children of hoarding parents (COHP)

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 164-166
Author(s):  
Cecilia A. Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Child Welfare ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Early Identification ◽  
Childhood Adversity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Programme Development ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The perspective herein is based upon the lived experience of adult Children of Hoarding Parents (COHP). The weight of parental hoarding on COHP is not derived solely from the physical adversity of living within a hoarded home but also comes with the social and psychological challenges they carry into adulthood. The view of hoarding as a family disorder with lasting impact evokes research questions including the exploration of the relationship between childhood adversity and parental hoarding, and the application of attachment theory to hoarding behaviours and family relationships. These types of research studies may lead to policy adoption and programme development for early identification of and intervention within families where parental hoarding represents a threat to child welfare.

“Strange Aphrodite”

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-142
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
Complex Forms ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Split Form

This chapter brings to a close the argument of the first part of the book through an analysis of the social crises Ruskin discovers in the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Ruskin gave the name “the English death,” to the grim combination of economic and military violence and social indifference characteristic of the nineteenth century, which he finds at the heart of the achievement of his preeminent modern painter. According to this account, even Turner’s most beautiful landscape is shaped by the boyhood experience of urban poverty that determined the painter’s sensibility, and which fitted him to capture the melancholy forms of alienation and suffering in reaction to which the experience of nature derives its force. This chapter puts Ruskin’s claims about the formal evidence of the sources of the painter’s sensibility in relation to later theoretical and artistic attempts to represent the relationship between material conditions and the reactions they provoke. Returning to the split form of Raphael’s Transfiguration and looking forward to arguments about historical crisis in Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, it proposes the recognition of the power of material conditions driving both the nineteenth-century painter and his major critic by highlighting a number of linked displacements that have been difficult for criticism to address: not just the sophistication of the political work entailed in the creation of beautiful objects in the nineteenth century, but the complex forms of solidarity and social analysis that may be discovered in the critical work of the period

Contested Britain

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cultural Constraints ◽  
The Relationship

This book offers a powerful and distinctive analysis of how the politics of the UK and the lived experience of its citizens have been reframed in the first decades of the 21st century. It does so by bringing together carefully articulated case studies with theoretically informed discussion of the relationship between austerity, Brexit and the rise of populist politics, as well as highlighting the emergence of a range of practices, institutions and politics that challenge the hegemony of austerity discourses. The book mobilises notions of agency to help understand the role of austerity (as politics and lived experience) as a fundamental cause of Brexit. Investigating the social, economic, political, and cultural constraints and opportunities arising from a person’s position in society allows us to explain the link between austerity politics and the vote for Brexit. In doing so, the book goes beyond traditional disciplinary approaches to develop more interdisciplinary engagements, based on broad understandings of cultural studies as well as drawing on insights from political science, sociology, economics, geography and law. It uses comparative material from the regions of England and from the devolved territories of the UK, and explores the profound differences of geography, generation, gender, ‘race’ and class.

RESISTANCE TO THE GILDED AGE: ROBERT HERRICK'S RADICAL MIDDLE CLASS

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Brynnar Swenson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Social Totality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precarious Situation

Often overlooked, Robert Herrick (1868–1938) was an experimental novelist who produced a sustained and critical engagement with the economic, political, and aesthetic effects of unregulated capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth century. Focusing onThe Web of Life(1900) andTogether(1908), this essay argues that Herrick's novels forcefully document a radical middle-class political position and demonstrate how the middle class was capable of apprehending and resisting the functionings of capitalism—especially its fragmentation of lived experience and its foreclosure of any practical exterior to the social totality. Given how recent economic trends toward deregulation and privatization have resulted in a precarious situation for the middle class worldwide, Herrick's depiction of the emergence of the modern middle class in 1890s Chicago also presents a dynamic foil from which to view our present moment. Though his genre-bending and politically ambiguous literary and political experiments have long contributed to critical confusion and even dismissal of his work, today Herrick's novels are a powerful tool for rethinking the long-accepted understanding of the relationship between literary realism, the struggles surrounding the emergence of corporate capitalism, and the political standpoint of the professional middle class.

Shyness, Egocentricity, and Psychopathology: Their Relationships among Nonhospitalized Individuals and Mental Hospital Patients

1992 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 995-1004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Flanagan
Keyword(s):  
Mental Hospital ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hospital Patients ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

To investigate the relationship between shyness and egocentricity in both psychiatric (hospitalized) and nonhospitalized groups, 162 adult men and women diagnosed as paranoid or undifferentiated schizophrenic, and a control group of 162 nonhospitalized individuals matched for age and gender were studied. Shyness was assessed on the Social Reticence Scale and egocentricity by the Self-focus Sentence Completion. Analysis indicated that the patients were more shy than nonhospitalized individuals. Paranoid schizophrenics were not different from undifferentiated schizophrenics on egocentricity and the Self-focus Sentence Completion subscales. Nonhospitalized individuals and the mental hospital patients were egocentric on the Self-focus Sentence Completion. For this reason, relationships among shyness, egocentricity, and psychopathology could not be demonstrated.

The Sonic Archive of Black Spatiality

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
James Gordon Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

The epilogue expands on the purpose of the book and the author’s approach to it. Although the book does not abandon positivism, the author never privileges traditional research musicological methods over his own lived experience—as an African American improviser, composer, and theorist—or the lived experiences of the improvisers discussed in the book. The chapter expresses a hope that the book will provide further insight into the relationship between African American improvised music and cultural notions of spatiality in relation to improvisation. The chapter further elaborates on Black musical space: it is not defined by a defiance of whiteness or white supremacy. It is defined by joy, struggle ad infinitum, and reliance on community. Black musical space expressed through humanity ultimately escapes attempts to codify it. The chapter continues with a final summary of the author’s findings about each musician discussed in the book. While Blanchard, Higgins, Carrington, Akinmusire, and Hill express their ideas differently in the language of Black musical space, they are all connected by how they cross bar lines to emphasize the social context connection between their lived experiences and their improvisational and compositional practices.

Language and Embodied Sexuality

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian W. King
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Use ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Agency ◽  
Language And Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Features ◽  
The Relationship

Embodiment has long been of interest to scholars of language in society, and yet theoretical discussions of the inseparability of language and the body have been paradoxically minimal until quite recently. Focusing on the processes by which sexualized bodies are understood, this chapter examines two research case studies—intersex bodies and male bodies—to outline the ways that language and sexuality scholarship can contribute to knowledge of the confluence of the social and the soma during social interaction. Bodies are both subjective and social: in one sense we have subjective, embodied knowledge of what it means to live in our sexualized bodies and “speak from” them as part of lived experience, and in another sense our bodies are also observed from outside and “spoken about” as sexual. The analysis presented here explores the relationship between physical features of bodies, discourse, language, and power, and links these insights to notions of confluence, demonstrating that bodies can be unruly, obtrusive, overdetermined, and excessive. The chapter considers the implications of this analysis for language use, intelligibility, and sexual agency.

scholarly journals DISCOURSE AGONALITY AND RESOURCES OF ITS REALIZATION

2016 ◽  
pp. 66-71
Author(s):  
O. Kochubeynyk
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Contest Competition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The article problematize the relationship of discourse to inequality, exclusion, subjugation, dominance and privilege. The linkages between discourse, modes of social organization, lived experience and strategies of resistance is discussed. Discourse is understood as both an expression and a mechanism of power, by which means particular social realities are conceived, made manifest, legitimated, naturalized, challenged, resisted and reimagined. The term discourse has also been used to designate particular ‘modes of talking’ associated with particular social institutions and reproduced by them. It means that social institutions produce specific ways or modes of talking about certain areas of social life, which are related to the place and nature of that institution. The main attention in the article is paid to illuminating the generative power of discourse in constructing, sustaining and challenging inequitable modes of social organization. The author has proposed a model that accounts for the two ways in which power is present in discourse and thus in society - a model which might be used as a basis for the development of a framework for discourse analysis as well as for the conceptualization of social change and its relation to language change. The author has used the notion of agon to explain some processes which occurred in constructing of social reality. Agon comes from the Greek word agōn, which is translated with a number of meanings, among them «contest,» «competition at games,» and «gathering». Agonality (agon) is declared as main specialty of discourse. It is proposed to see in the agonality the striving of discourse to its own self-assertion, which is manifested in the clash of forces, which potentially lies in social inter-relations. The author also considers the category of «symbolic violence» as a function of the power, the ability to impose values and recognize their legitimacy. In the social system of symbolic violence is implemented through the discursive implications and is carried out in two ways - through the textual and non-textual resources.

Datafied times: Surveillance capitalism, data technologies and the social construction of time in family life

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 1545-1560
Author(s):  
Veronica Barassi
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Family Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This article maps three different yet interconnected hegemonic temporalities that define data technologies: immediacy, archival and predictive time. These hegemonic temporalities, it will be argued, cannot be understood without considering the political economic structures of surveillance capitalism. However, to understand the relationship between data technologies and the social construction of time, we also need to consider the multiple ways in which these temporalities are reproduced and experienced through everyday temporalizing practices. Drawing on an ethnographic project which investigates the impact of data technologies on family life, the article will explore different ways in which these temporalities are impacting the lived experience of family life. Looking at the ways in which everyday experiences intersect with hegemonic constructions of time enables us to ask critical questions about how data technologies surveille and govern subjects through time and consider their implication for our democratic futures.

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