scholarly journals Ritual, Embodiment and the Paradox of Doing the Laundry

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-31
Author(s):  
Maryann McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Behavior ◽  
Implementation Process ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Parental Role ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Findings

Paradox often provides a starting point for cultural analysis of consumer behavior. The paradox of the laundry in which mothers find the laundry a boring and repetitive task yet hesitate to relinquish the chore to others is examined through the embodied experience of women’s laundry rituals. Performance of the ritual generates feelings of competence in cleaning clothes to an absolute standard of cleanliness and feelings of caring, nurturance and love of family. For mothers, the ritual goal of cultivating subjectivity in children about presentation of self to the world depends on drawers full of clean clothes. Laundry rituals are transformative because they ignite and renew emotions relating to a perceived parental role. This article discusses implementation of anthropological practice in terms of incorporating ethnographic research findings into advertising communications. In the implementation process, agency is key in bridging discourse of mothers and discourse of advertising and in producing culture.

Volleyball – An Ethnographic Drama

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Blackledge ◽  
Angela Creese
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Book Research ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Findings

In this book research in process and research findings are represented in a play script which brings vividly to life both ethnographic research methods and communication in the world of sport. This highly original book brings innovation and imagination to the representation of language in social life.

scholarly journals Młodzież w sieci w czasie pandemii. Diagnoza, problemy, wyzwania

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2 (11)) ◽  
pp. 97-108
Author(s):  
Monika Przybysz
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Large Population ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Preliminary Review ◽  
Adolescent Population ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Youth Population ◽  
Fourth Wave

The post-pandemic world of adolescents is a kaleidoscope of many changes. The research area of problems and challenges faced by adolescents during the pandemic, emerging from numerous studies, undoubtedly requires in-depth research, even extremely demanding and rarely conducted in sociology so-called longitudinal studies. The starting point for further research in this kind of diagnosis, however, is a preliminary review of the research available worldwide on the problems faced by youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its first and second waves. After researching and analysing the most important, interesting and conducted on a large population of empirical research findings in Poland and around the world, those that are symptomatic for the diagnosis of problems and challenges were selected to be mapped for further observation and study. The article is exploratory in nature, outlining the problem phenomena that clearly emerged in the youth population during the pandemic period. The purpose of the article is to review the studies, their comparative analysis, and then to identify the most important phenomena and issues worthy of investigation in the adolescent population during and after the fourth wave of the pandemic, during the pandemic era.

Women, makeup, and authenticity: Negotiating embodiment and discourses of beauty

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 656-677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryann McCabe ◽  
Timothy de Waal Malefyt ◽  
Antonella Fabri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Cosmetic Industry ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
Advertising Discourse

This essay examines women’s makeup practices and cultural tension between inner and outer constructs of beauty in the United States. Ethnographic research reveals competing discourses of beauty in the embodied experience of women, compared to images of beauty as promoted in advertising by the cosmetic industry. While the discourse of women’s embodied experience emphasizes inner worth and connecting internal and external self, cosmetic advertising focuses on physical appearance and critical gaze of self and others. Women incorporate advertising discourses, not yielding to them or resisting them, but rather transforming them to suit their needs in using makeup products for creating confidence and preparing themselves for engagement in the world. At the same time, paradoxical adherence to advertising discourse indicates that gender inequality remains an ideological force in our society. Processes of ritualization produce and legitimize hierarchies of power in society. In this way, women’s relationships to their bodies, commoditized products, and makeup practices are transformative as they are paradoxical.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald A. Landes
Keyword(s):  
Applied Sciences ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Phenomenology Of Perception ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a key figure in twentieth-century French philosophy and one of the principal proponents of existential phenomenology. Through his subtle and wide-ranging descriptions of lived and embodied experience, particularly in his major text Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty made significant contributions on a variety of topics, including behaviour, perception, habit acquisition, language, expression, history and politics. His broader interests in the philosophical consequences of these descriptions led him to address many classical philosophical problems (for example, freedom, temporality, the relation of the soul and body, ontology, etc.). Perhaps his most lasting contribution was in directing philosophical inquiry to the role of the lived body in the operative structures of meaning across all human experience. This aspect of his work has been a starting point for contemporary studies of embodiment in both philosophy and other disciplines, from new approaches in cognitive science to phenomenological contributions in performance studies, gender studies and applied sciences. Merleau-Ponty’s interests evolved throughout his career, leading to a greater engagement with structuralism in the early 1950s and to a more explicit attempt to answer ontological questions about nature and philosophical methodology in the late 1950s. At the time of his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty was developing a phenomenological ontology in a manuscript that was published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible (1964). He argued that human experience is marked by a certain reversibility in that we are at once subjects and objects, touching and touched, seeing and seen. Our bodies are both of the world and open to the world; we are a node or a moment in the flesh of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, in this unfinished ontological project the notion of ‘flesh’ appears to name an ontological principle or element by which a folding back occurs via a self-reflexive experience and thus the spacing takes place where experience and being can appear.

‘I saw a knock-out’: Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Wykes
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
Dominant Meaning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
Sexual Body

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.

Dreams Give Birth to Reality”. Engraving Austroseraphicum Coelum as an Attempt to Create a New Reality by the Spanish Habsburgs Dynastic Propaganda / Sny rodzą rzeczywistość…”. Grafika Austroseraphicum Coelum jako próba kreowania nowej rzeczywistości za pomocą propagandy dynastycznej Habsburgów hiszpańskich

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kurowiak
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
General Condition ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Mission Of God ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church

AbstractAs a work of propaganda, graphics Austroseraphicum Coelum Paulus Pontius should create a new reality, make appearances. The main impression while seeing the graphics is the admiration for the power of Habsburgs, which interacts with the power of the Mother of God. She, in turn, refers the viewer to God, as well as Franciscans placed on the graphic, they become a symbol of the Church. This is a starting point for further interpretation of the drawing. By the presence of certain characters, allegories, symbols, we can see references to a particular political situation in the Netherlands - the war with the northern provinces of Spain. The message of the graphic is: the Spanish Habsburgs, commissioned by the mission of God, they are able to fight all of the enemies, especially Protestants, with the help of Immaculate and the Franciscans. The main aim of the graphic is to convince the viewer that this will happen and to create in his mind a vision of the new reality. But Spain was in the seventeenth century nothing but a shadow of former itself (in the time of Philip IV the general condition of Spain get worse). That was the reason why they wanted to hold the belief that the empire continues unwavering. The form of this work (graphics), also allowed to export them around the world, and the ambiguity of the symbolic system, its contents relate to different contexts, and as a result, the Habsburgs, not only Spanish, they could promote their strength everywhere. Therefore it was used very well as a single work of propaganda, as well as a part of a broader campaign

The Paradox of “A High Standard of Public Honesty”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kennedy ◽  
Ronald Kroeze
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
High Standard ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Patronage Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter takes as its starting point the contemporary idea that the Netherlands is one of the least corrupt countries in the world; an idea that it dates back to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this chapter, the authors explain how corruption was controlled in the Netherlands against the background of the rise and fall of the Dutch Republic, modern statebuilding and liberal politics. However, the Dutch case also presents some complexities: first, the decrease in some forms of corruption was due not to early democratization or bureaucratization, but was rather a side-effect of elite patronage-politics; second, although some early modern forms of corruption disappeared around this period, new forms have emerged in more recent times.

scholarly journals The Case of Ahmad Shamieh’s Campaign against Dublin Deportation: Embodiment of Political Violence and Community Care

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 154
Author(s):  
Jelka Zorn
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Community Care ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
The World ◽  
Dublin Regulation

Differently from studies that analyze antideportation struggles in relation to concepts of state sovereignty and (un)making of citizenship, this paper focuses more on intersection of politics and body. It discusses struggle for the “place in the world” as an embodied experience. Ahmad Shamieh came to Slovenia in 2016 through the humanitarian corridor on the Balkan route. The Slovene Ministry of the Interior refused to examine his asylum claim and instead issued him a Dublin Regulation decision, stating that he was to be deported to Croatia. Ahmad’s and his supporters’ legal and political struggle, which lasted several years, prevented his deportation. In contrast to state’s politics of exclusion, causing dehumanization and traumatization the grassroots community struggle developed the politics of inclusion, solidarity and care from below, in practice transforming the conditions of belonging.

scholarly journals Contracting in land and natural resources: a tale of exclusion

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-153
Author(s):  
Federica Violi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Host Countries ◽  
Developmental Needs ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Public Environment

By browsing the website of Land Matrix, one can measure the extent of land-related large-scale investments in natural resources (LRINRs) and place it on the world map. At the time of writing, the extent of these investments covers an area equal to the surfaces of Spain and Portugal together – or, for football fans, around 60 million football pitches. These investment operations have often been saluted as instrumental to achieve the developmental needs of host countries and as the necessary private counterpart to state (and interstate) efforts aimed at (sustainable) development goals. Yet, the realities on the ground offer a scenario characterised by severe instances of displacement of indigenous or local communities and environmental disruptions. The starting point of this short essay is that these ‘externalities’ are generated through the legal construct enabling the implementation of these investment operations. As such, this contribution lies neatly in the line of research set forth in the excellent books of Kinnari Bhatt and Jennifer Lander, from the perspective of both the development culture shaping these investment operations and the private–public environment in which these are situated. The essay tries and dialogues with both components, while focusing at a metalevel on the theoretical shifts potentially geared to turn a ‘tale of exclusion’ into a ‘tale of inclusion’.

Happiness in Nations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruut Veenhoven
Keyword(s):  
Large Collection ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Happiness ◽  
Research Findings

Today1 there is increasing support for the idea that governments should aim at greater happiness for a greater number of citizens. Is this a mission impossible? The following questions arise in this context: (1) Is greater happiness in a nation feasible? (2) If so, can governments do much about it? (3) If so, what can governments do to raise happiness in their country? (4) How does the pursuit of happiness fit with other political aims? In this paper, I take stock of the available research findings on happiness that bear answers to these questions. To do this, I use a large collection of research findings gathered in the World Database of Happiness. These data show that greater happiness is possible, and indicate some ways to achieve this goal. The pursuit of public happiness fits well with several other policy aims.

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