scholarly journals Construction of Social Reality in Fiction and Phenomenology of Everyday Life

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-532
Author(s):  
S. V. Rudanovskaya

The idea of the constructed character of social reality implies human contribution to institutional arrangements and cultural patterns that determine the shape of collective existence. The article examines the specific features of social construction seen and studied in phenomenological approach by A. Schutz, P. Berger, Th. Luckmann. The concept reveals significance of daily cognitive style which enables people to structure and understand the world they share with others, escaping situations fraught with gaps of meanings and anomy. The author of the article analyzes the process of social construction, distinguishing it from imaginary building of reality that goes beyond the existed order. Reality of daily life is compared with fictional society represented in J.L. Borges’ “Lottery in Babylon”. Telling about the social construction as it may be, the story demonstrates the similarities between the mental procedures that underlie real and antiutopian (inhuman) routines. The article also centers on peculiarities of phenomenological beholder’s attitude towards sociality. On the one hand, it tends to be free from any theoretical abstractions, imaginary constructions or critical destruction of reality, on the other - inclines to transcend the reified forms of social being and engenders a certain critical message.

Author(s):  
Alexander Pisarev

This article outlines an approach to social philosophy as empirical philosophy. Each philosophical act is localized and performed by a particular author in a particular context and agenda. Based on ideas of Kant, Heidegger, Foucault, it is suggested to understand this fact through double structure of finitude. On the one hand, social scientist within his finite existence is produced by the complex of instances, each bearing particular existence and historicity, such as language, social patterns, gender, etc. The fact that he is always-already produced by the world and entangled in it implies that his thinking is potentially contaminated by meanings imposed by these instances. On the other hand, his knowledge is finite that means inherent divide between social reality and discourse about it. This position of a social scientist implies the feautures of social philosophy approach, such as instrumentalization of concepts, separation of method from ontology, empiricism, plasticity of borders of the social and its historicity. In conclusion several examples of the approach are provided.


1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Milan Orlić

Post-Yugoslav literature and culture came out of the stylistic formations of Yugoslav modernism and postmodernism, in the context of European cultural discourse. Yugoslav literature, which spans the existence of “two” Yugoslavias, the “first” Yugoslavia (1928–1941) and the “second” socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1990), is the foundation of various national literary and cultural paradigms, which shared the same or similar historical, philosophical and aesthetic roots. These were fed, on the one hand, by a phenomenological understanding of the world, language, style and culture, and on the other, by an acceptance of or resistance to the socialist realist aesthetics and ideological values of socialist Yugoslav society. In selected examples of contemporary Serbian prose, the author explores the social context, which has shaped contemporary Serbian literature, focusing on its roots in Serbian and Yugoslav 20th century (post)modernism.


Author(s):  
L. I. Ivonina

The article analyzes the main features of the Caroline era in the history of Britain, which were reflected in the cultural representation of the power of King Charles I Stuart and the court’s daily life in the 1630s. The author shows that, on the one hand, the cult of peace and the greatness of the monarch were the cultural product of the Caroline court against the background of the Thirty Years' War in continental Europe. On the other hand, there was a spread of various forms of escapism, the departure into the world of illusions. On the whole, the representation of the power of Charles Stuart and the court’s daily life were in line with the general trend of the time. At the same time, the court of Charles I reflected his personality. Thinly sensing and even determining the artistic tastes of his era, the English king abstracted from its political and social context.


2016 ◽  
pp. 225-239
Author(s):  
Chung-ying Cheng

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. The receptive of the hermeneutic consists in coming to know and acknowledge what has happened, observing what there is as historically effected, foretelling what will happen as a matter of projection of future possibilities, and disclosing / discovering transcendental conditions, fore-structures or horizons of human understanding and interpretation; the creative of the hermeneutic, on the other hand, consists in realizing and demonstrating human sensibilities and human capabilities and needs, conceptualizing what is factual and real based on human cognitive and volitional faculties and experiences, developing values and pursuing regulative ideals of actions, and searching for best possible ways or methods to reach for individual and communal end-goals which will enhance human beings as autonomous entities and moral agents in the world. The receptive is represented by the phenomenological approach to Being and reality whereas the creative is conveyed by an ontology of reflection of human being for self-definition and self-cultivation of human faculties. This amounts to bringing out an existing distinction between ming (what is imparted) and li (the presupposed ground) on the one hand and xing ( human potentiality for being in oneself) and xin (human understanding and interpretation toward action) on the other in the tradition of Confucian metaphysics.Next, I shall focus on Heidegger and Gadamer as taking ontological receptivity (as a matter of fore-structures of Being or Language of human understanding) as the source of meaning of existence and meaningfulness of texts. Th ere are of course creative elements to be identifi ed with forming investigative projects of the Dasein for disclosing truth of the Being, but the main tone is to realize the Being or Language as base structures of our hermeneutic consciousness or hermeneutic space of understanding. Because of spacelimitation, however, I shall leave to another occasion the discussion of the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy in the Yijing tradition as represented in my onto-hermeneutics which takes experiences of ≫comprehensive observation≪ (guan) and ≫feeling- refl ection≪ (gan) as two avenues toward human understanding and hermeneutic enterprise of interpretation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Komal Prasad Phuyal

Prema Shah’s “A Husband” and Rokeya S. Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” present two complementary versions of women’s world: the real in Shah and the imagined in Hossain aspire to make the other complete. The worldview that each author projects in their texts reasserts the latent spirit of the other one. The embedded interconnectedness between the authors under discussion reveals their unique association and bond of women’s creative unity towards paving a road for the upliftment of women in general. The paper seeks to find out the historical forces leading to the formation of a certain type of bond between these two authors from different historical and socio-cultural realities. Shah locates a typical Nepali woman in the protagonist in the patriarchal order while Hossain pictures the contemporary Bengali Islamic society and reverses the role of men and women. Hossain’s ideal world and Shah’s real world form two complementary versions of each other: despite opposite in nature, each world completes the other. Sultana moves to the world of dream to seek a new order because Nirmala’s world exercises every form of tortures upon the women’s self. Shah exposes the social reality dictating upon the women’s self while Hossain’s protagonist escapes into the world of dream where women control the social reality effectively and successfully. Overall, Shah and Hossain complement each other’s world by presenting two alternative versions of the same reality, creating the feminist utopia.


THE BULLETIN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 389 (1) ◽  
pp. 278-283
Author(s):  
N.L. Seitakhmetova

The essence of the integration process in Muslim law has expressed in the enlargement and consolidation of the social relations through the definite points, objects of the concentration of the tension and gradual incorporation of the human being into the community with the system of the relations, with the global order, based on the balance of the regulating influence of the legal systems of the different states and synchronic of the regulating behavior in the different societies. The movable force of the process of the integration is inside the system of the society and social relations in the world scale. Muslim law is an Islamic doctrine about the rules of behavior of the Muslims. The main content of Muslim law is the rules of behavior of believers, that follow from the Sharia and sanctions for non-compliance with these regulations. It was formed in the VII-X centuries in the connection with the formation of the Muslim state - Caliphate. The formation of Muslim law was caused, on the one hand, by the need to bring the actual law in line with the religious norms of Islam, on the other hand, by the need to regulate public relations on the principles, based on the religious and ethical teachings of Islam.


2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-324
Author(s):  
Noel Dyck

This revised address for the 2019 Weaver-Tremblay Award revisits some underlying questions about the practice of anthropology that have figured in my own work. First, why might one choose anthropology as a means of intellectual and practical inquiry into social and cultural phenomena? Second, what kinds of anthropological practice can be pursued? Finally, what types of knowledge can be acquired through anthropological approaches, and to what purposes might this knowledge be applied? These questions are considered within the context of two rather different fields of anthropological inquiry I have pursued: relations between Indigenous Peoples and state governments, on the one hand, and the social construction of sport, on the other. As well as sharing some unexpected analytical commonalities, these ostensibly disparate fields speak to the power that resides in illuminating details of the type that anthropologists are particularly adept in recognizing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Badar Alam Iqbal ◽  
Mohd Nayyer Rahman ◽  
Munir Hasan

The difference between growth and development is not subtle but substantially huge and the gap is ever increasing. The dividing line is social indicators. Countries witnessing high growth rates for decades are not equal performers in development when social indicators are observed. India is an emerging economy on the one hand and a developing on the other hand but a lower income country as per World Bank statistic. While India holds economic indicators that appears to be promising to the world and investors that is not the case with social indicators. The present study is an attempt to critically review the social indicators for India and to trace the trajectory of fall or growth in such indicators while comparing with selected countries.


Finisterra ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (65) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacobo García-Álvarez

The "social construction" of otherness and, broadly speaking, the ideological-political use of "external" socio-spatial referents have become important topics in contemporary studies on territorial identities, nationalisms and nation-building processes, geography included. After some brief, introductory theoretical reflections, this paper examines the contribution of geographical discourses, arguments and images, "sensu lato", in the definition of the external socio-spatial identity referents of Galician nationalism in Spain, during the period 1860-1936. In this discourse Castile was typically represented as "the other" (the negative, opposition referent), against which Galician identity was mobilised, whereas Portugal, on the one hand, together with Ireland and the so-called "Atlantic-Celtic naionalities", on the other hand, were positively constructed as integrative and emulation referents.


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