Spectator sport or serious politics? όί περιεστηκότες and the Athenian lawcourts

1997 ◽  
Vol 117 ◽  
pp. 183-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriaan M. Lanni
Keyword(s):  
Social Drama ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Spectator Sport ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Masses ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Civic Space

In his tractA Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Jeremy Bentham repeatedly refers to the courtroom as the ‘theatre of justice’. Bentham's description has been borne out by recent scholarship on Athenian law. As a form of civic space, the Athenian lawcourts were similar to the Theatre of Dionysos in many respects: litigants faced each other in a competitiveagon, delivering lines written for them by logographers to a mass audience which would range, ordinarily, from 200 to 1500 jurors. Moreover, modern scholars have drawn on the notion of ‘social drama’ introduced by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the Athenian lawcourts as an arena for socially constructive feuding behaviour, as a public stage for the social élite to compete for prestige, or as a forum for ongoing communication between élite litigants and mass jurors ‘in a context which made explicit the power of the masses to judge the actions and behavior of élite individuals’.

scholarly journals The Social

2022 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Marvin T. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Behavior Patterns ◽  
Social Diversity ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Shared Humanity ◽  
New Form ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Civic Space

AbstractThe social is constituted by on-going communication and behavior patterns that influence participants perceptions, expectations and moral boundaries. For some, moral boundaries protect the racial hierarchy of American prosperity by calling natural what is actually social. Controversary about the meaning of sex, race, and ancestry can help us understand this difference, and thereby sharpen our awareness of our experiences of the social from social diversity to social amnesia. Social amnesia eliminates any awareness of the climate of injustice. In this context, a disturbing trend is our increasing reliance on private philanthropy to solve social problems, which moves us toward a new form of feudalism instead of a civic democracy. In a civic space that arises from the connections between our shared humanity and social differences, it is possible to listen to diverse voices and to make incoherent stories coherent.

scholarly journals Pornography, Society, and the Law In Imperial Germany

1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Stark
Keyword(s):  
Human Sexuality ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mass Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Attitudes Toward Sex ◽  
The Masses

In recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cultural historians, as has the response of the social elite to this form of popular culture. Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the history of what must surely be one of the most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object; stigmatization and repression of pornographic literature helps define and uphold the authority of socially sanctioned sexual norms, while at the same time revealing something about how stable or vulnerable that society imagines its established values to be.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Akshaya Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Comparative Media ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Film Form

This chapter prepares the comparative media crucible – an intensive synthesis of approaches to understand the media, in relation to capital, infrastructure, film form, narration, sovereign voice and geography. The book takes shape inside this analytical dwelling at the intersection of various grids – the recruitment of the province, capital and narrative voice, and the ideological containment of the masses – preparing the grounds for reading the coalitional tendencies before reassembling the role of media within the social order. It also assesses the provincial imperative acting upon ‘Bollywood’, and the attendant translations and purifications of the processes investigated in the book. The book thus grapples with a constellation which, this chapter argues, addresses an overflow of tendencies tethered to an unknowable ‘mass audience’. This search for an abstract mass, which breaches the embankments of region, class, language and culture, forces us to prepare the crucible with robust comparative analytics.

Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880–1895

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare L. E. Foster
Keyword(s):  
Greek Drama ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Made In ◽  
Performance Text

This chapter examines Wilde’s championship of serious theatre and the authentic performance text by analysing his reviews of the first so-called ‘archaeological’ productions of Greek plays and Shakespeare. It offers a wider context in which to understand the rapidity of his disaffection with Greek plays, as practised among the social elite; and it suggests some ways in which his early enthusiasm for authentic Greek drama and Shakespeare is related to his own later classically informed playwriting, which combines old ideas of theatre as about and for its audiences with new ideas of drama as the appreciation of a literary object. Wilde’s own work as a dramatist straddled that change, prefigured by a comment he made in 1885: ‘An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience.’ He combines both these directions of gaze in his 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

The Struggle of My Life

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Student Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Freedom Movement

The present work, The Struggle of My Life: An Autobiography of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, is an English translation of Sahajanand’s autobiography, written in Hindi, Mera Jeevan Sangarsh. It carries an introduction by the translator which briefly deals with the Swami’s life and legacy. It needs to be emphasized that this is not an autobiography in the common run. Its primary focus is not on Swami’s persona; its central theme is the cause of the freedom movement in general and in particular, of the peasant movement under his leadership. It tells of the life and legacy of one of the most uncompromising and fearless freedom fighters and peasant leaders. It covers the social and political history of one of the most crucial periods of our national life, 1920–47. Today, when the Indian peasantry is faced with a number of intractable problems, it reminds them of the struggles of the peasants of yesteryears and the kind of trials and tribulations they went through. It is also remarkable that despite his vast learning and command over Sanskrit, Swami chose to write in simple, colloquial Hindi. That only speaks for his total identification with the masses. Both the teaching and student community as well as general readers would find this book useful, interesting and intellectually stimulating.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

A chronology of Distributed Adaptive Control

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. M. J. Verschure
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Control ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Integration Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
Distributed Adaptive Control ◽  
Core Components ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Convergent Validation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

This chapter presents the Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) theory of the mind and brain of living machines. DAC provides an explanatory framework for biological brains and an integration framework for synthetic ones. DAC builds on several themes presented in the handbook: it integrates different perspectives on mind and brain, exemplifies the synthetic method in understanding living machines, answers well-defined constraints faced by living machines, and provides a route for the convergent validation of anatomy, physiology, and behavior in our explanation of biological living machines. DAC addresses the fundamental question of how a living machine can obtain, retain, and express valid knowledge of its world. We look at the core components of DAC, specific benchmarks derived from the engagement with the physical and the social world (the H4W and the H5W problems) in foraging and human–robot interaction tasks. Lastly we address how DAC targets the UTEM benchmark and the relation with contemporary developments in AI.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

Central Banks and the New Regulatory Regime for Banks

2019 ◽  
pp. 502-527
Author(s):  
David T. Llewellyn
Keyword(s):  
Central Banks ◽  
Employee Attitudes ◽  
Social Costs ◽  
Regulatory Regime ◽  
Bank Failures ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Banking ◽  
Regulated Firms ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Attitudes And Behavior

The most serious global banking crisis in living memory has given rise to one of the most substantial changes in the regulatory regime of banks. While not all central banks have responsibility for regulation, because they are almost universally responsible for systemic stability, they have an interest in bank regulation. Two core objectives of regulation are discussed: lowering the probability of bank failures and minimizing the social costs of failures that do occur. The underlying culture of banking creates business standards and employee attitudes and behavior. There are limits to what regulation can achieve if the underlying cultures of regulated firms are hazardous. There are limits to what can be achieved through detailed, prescriptive, and complex rules, and when, because of what is termed the endogeneity problem, rules escalation raises issues of proportionality, a case is made for banking culture to become a supervisory issue.

scholarly journals To sext or not to sext. The role of social-cognitive processes in the decision to engage in sexting

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 1410-1429
Author(s):  
Claire Wilson ◽  
Tommy van Steen ◽  
Christabel Akinyode ◽  
Zara P. Brodie ◽  
Graham G. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Relationship Status ◽  
Injunctive Norm ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Insight Into

Technology has given rise to online behaviors such as sexting. It is important that we examine predictors of such behavior in order to understand who is more likely to sext and thus inform intervention aimed at sexting awareness. We used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine sexting beliefs and behavior. Participants (n = 418; 70.3% women) completed questionnaires assessing attitudes (instrumental and affective), subjective norms (injunctive and descriptive), control perceptions (self-efficacy and controllability) and intentions toward sexting. Specific sexting beliefs (fun/carefree beliefs, perceived risks and relational expectations) were also measured and sexting behavior reported. Relationship status, instrumental attitude, injunctive norm, descriptive norm and self-efficacy were associated with sexting intentions. Relationship status, intentions and self-efficacy related to sexting behavior. Results provide insight into the social-cognitive factors related to individuals’ sexting behavior and bring us closer to understanding what beliefs predict the behavior.

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