scholarly journals Cultural Crisis of Caste Renouncer: A Study of Dasnami Sanyasi Identity in Nepal

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Madhu Giri
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Institutional Characteristics ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Philosophical Orientation ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
Caste Status ◽  
Rank One

Jat Nasodhanu Jogiko is a famous mocking proverb to denote the caste status of Sanyasi because the renouncer has given up traditional caste rituals set by socio-cultural institutions. In other cultural terms, being Sanyasi means having dissociation himself/herself with whatever caste career or caste-based social rank one might imagine. To explore the philosophical foundation of Sanyasi, they sacrificed caste rituals and fire (symbol of power, desire, and creation). By the virtues of sacrifice, Sanyasi set images of universalism, higher than caste order, and otherworldly being. Therefore, one should not ask the renouncer caste identity. Traditionally, Sanyasi lived in Akhada or Matha, and leadership, including ownership of the Matha transformed from Guru to Chela. On the contrary, Dasnami Mahanta started marital and private life, which is paradoxical to the philosophy of Sanyasi. Very few of them are living in Matha, but the ownership of the property of Mathatrans formed from father to son. The land and property of many Mathas transformed from religious Guthi to private property. In terms of cultural practices, Dasnami Sanyasi adopted high caste culture and rituals in their everyday life. Old Muluki Ain 1854 ranked them under Tagadhari, although they did not assert twice-born caste in Nepal. Central Bureau of Statistics, including other government institutions of Nepal, listed Dasnamiunder the line of Chhetri and Thakuri. The main objective of the paper is to explore the transformation of Dasnami institutional characteristics and status from caste renunciation identity to caste rejoinder and from images of monasticism, celibacy, universalism, otherworldly orientation to marital, individualistic lay life. Both philosophical orientation and behaviors are transformed. Who are the Dasnami Sanyasi? Why did the Dasnami Sanyasis campaign for the identity? How has the Dasnami Sanyasi been changing? Based on key informant interviews, observations in different Dasnami Sanyasi communities, their historical institutions, and self-reflection as a member of Dasnami Sanyasiare methods of data collection.  

Chutes, Not Ladders

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-130
Author(s):  
Pavithra Nagarajan
Keyword(s):  
School Success ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Boys Of Color ◽  
And Control

This article explores how a single-sex school for boys of color intentionally and unintentionally (re)defines masculinity through rules and rituals. The school’s mission posits that boys become men through developing three skills: selfregulation, self-awareness, and self-reflection. Drawing from qualitative research data, I examine how disciplinary practices prioritize boys’ ability to control their bodies and image, or “self-regulate.” When boys fail to self-regulate, they enter the punitive system. School staff describe self-regulation as integral to out-of-school success, but these practices may inadvertently reproduce negative labeling and control of black bodies. This article argues for school cultural practices that affirm, rather than deny, the benefits of boyhood.

The Bolsheviks and the Family

1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Waters
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Family ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
The Masses

The Bolsheviks considered the family to be a minor matter. The ABC of Communism, a popular exposition of Bolshevik Marxism published shortly after the October Revolution, detailed the economic and political institutions of Soviet Russia with only a passing reference to the public services that would emancipate women in the future society.1 Its authors, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, understood the revolutionary process chiefly as the by-product of economic development and expected socialism to come through the manipulation of economic mechanisms by central government, and in this they echoed the views of their party. The Bolshevik scenario did not preclude the ‘participation of the masses’ to use the vocabulary of the times. Individuals, women as well as men, were to enjoy unprecedented access to the political process, and as masters of the nation's resources would decide matters of state, each acting as part of the whole, or more exactly as part of a number of collectivities, first and foremost as members of the proletariat, but also as members of other groups including nationality, youth and women. While families in the past had played a crucial role in the creation and transmission of private property, with the overthrow of the exploitative capitalist system they would cease to function as providers of economic and psychological welfare. Instead the individual's social place and action would be determined by class and, to a lesser extent, by ethnicity, age and gender. Families belonged to the superstructure and were symptom rather than cause; they adapted to the needs of society, changing in response to the transformation of economic relations. Families, in other words, could look after themselves, and appropriate forms of private life would evolve without much outside intervention.

“The Utter Destruction of the Home Circle”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Talbot
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Social Consequence ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Plural Marriage ◽  
Independent Thought

This chapter discusses anti-Mormon literature from its beginnings in domestic fiction. Anti-Mormons objected to polygamy not only because they believed it promoted licentiousness and degraded its participants but, perhaps of deeper social consequence, because it also undercut the distinctions between public and private that middle-class white Americans so highly prized. Plural marriage upset the private intimacy of romantic love and introduced outside influence into the home circle. Indeed, Anti-Mormons claimed that under polygamy, public and private merged together, such that neither the home nor the polity could exist in a viable form. Moreover, if monogamous private life created and maintained the good citizen, then the perversions of Mormon polygamy did the opposite; it turned privacy into religious despotism, private property into socialism, and citizens into blind followers incapable of independent thought.

scholarly journals Politeness and other types of facework

Pragmatics ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 681-706 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nieves Hernández-Flores
Keyword(s):  
Social Situation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Institutional Characteristics ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

TV-panel discussions constitute a communicative genre with specific features concerning the situational context, the communicative goals, the roles played by the participants and the acts that are carried out in the interaction. In the Spanish TV-debate Cada día, discourse is characterized as semi-institutional because of having both institutional characteristics – due to its mediatic nature – and conversational characteristics. In the communicative exchanges the social situation of the participants is negotiated by communicative acts, that is, facework is realised. Facework concerns the speakers’ wants of face, both the individual face and the group face. In the present article face is described in cultural terms within the general face wants autonomy and affiliation and in accordance with the roles the speakers assume in interaction. In the analysis of an excerpt from the TV-debate Cada día two types of facework are identified: On the one hand politeness, that is, when an attempted balance between the speaker’s and the addressees’ face is aimed at and, on the other hand, self-facework, which appears when only the speaker’s face is focused on. No samples of the third case of facework, impoliteness, are found in this excerpt. The results of the analysis display the relationship between the communicative purposes of this communicative genre (to inform, to entertain and to convince people of political ideas) and the types of facework (politeness, self-facework) that are identified in the analysed data.

scholarly journals Explaining the Data Double: Confessions and Self-Examinations in Job Recruitments

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 640-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hedenus ◽  
Christel Backman
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Human Resource Professionals ◽  
Recruitment Process ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Background Checks ◽  
Hiring Managers ◽  
Surveillance Practice ◽  
Personal Interests

The practice of cybervetting—i.e., online background checks of a jobseeker’s ‘data double’—is considered to be a valuable tool in the recruitment process by an increasing amount of employers. As a consequence, jobseekers lose some control over what aspects of their past, personal interests or private life they will share with the employer. Moreover, jobseekers are expected to confess, explain and contextualize unfavorable information about them if they want to be perceived as employable. This study aims to show how cybervetting recruiters encourage and anticipate such confessions, and use the outcomes to evaluate jobseekers’ honesty and capacity for self-reflection. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 36 Swedish human resource professionals, hiring managers and employers, and guided by Foucault’s theoretical work on self-examinations, along with the confessional culture and its related concepts. We argue that confessions about information found on the internet are an important factor of what we label ‘online employability’: jobseekers’ capability to sanitize, keep track of and explain their data doubles. Hence, as the recruiter can examine a jobseeker’s private spheres, cybervetting is a surveillance practice with direct consequences on recruitment as well as clear effects on jobseekers’ self-examinations and interactions with human resources personnel.

Militarized Masculinities: Shaped and Reshaped in Colonial South-East Punjab

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 713-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
PREM CHOWDHRY
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Recruitment ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Entire Structure ◽  
Caste Status

AbstractThis paper offers a gendered perspective to British domination in India through the British Indian Army—which in many ways was central to their entire structure of economic and political domination in India. Locating its understanding drawn from the political economy of south-east Punjab, it argues that the designated martial castes and military recruitment structurally and ideologically identified with and privileged those trends of existing masculinities in this region which suited their power structure and empire building. It was a constellation of marital caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique or physical strength that ideologically came to connect and configure dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab. An Army profession fully supported it. During the two world wars it emerged as the militarized masculinity, amply supported by legal and administrative measures introduced or apparently adopted in deference to certain popular cultural practices. The associated economic and political privileges turned ‘loyalty’ into an inherent and special ingredient of ‘masculinity’ which the nationalists had to confront and deal with till such times that it came to be firmly linked with nationalism and patriotism.

scholarly journals Parsing the Popular

Ethnologies ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Laba
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Knowledge Spaces ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Folklore Studies ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Expressive Strategies

This work argues for an engagement with, and analysis of folkloric expression through the concept and cultural practices of communicative action. The article is motivated by a critical need to situate folklore within dynamic and compelling currents of popular culture. It is suggested that the capacities of folklore as popular culture serve to renew and impel folklore studies for traction and relevance in analytic encounters with contemporary media, culture, and society. Foundational concepts and theoretical trajectories in folklore and communication are detailed, challenged and revised with a view to capturing the substance and significance of folklore in cultural terms. The analysis presented is premised on the notion that there is a decisive intersection of the concepts and practices of folklore and popular culture to the extent that definitional boundaries between them are imprecise and unsustainable. The analysis explores how folklore as popular culture socially articulates, negotiates and asserts meaning in codes, practices, knowledge, spaces and expressive strategies in contemporary cultural conditions and environments.

Neoliberalism and Communication

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter K. Bsumek
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Free Markets ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Political Project ◽  
The One ◽  
Explanatory Concept

Neoliberalism has become a central topic in critical cultural studies and communication. Broadly speaking, neoliberalism refers to economic theories, political discourses, and cultural practices that support free markets and private property. It is a political project dedicated to rolling back “the welfare state” and instituting a society based on market principles, as well as the ideologies and forms of governance that justify and enable such reforms. Neoliberalism is seen by many in the critical cultural tradition as a threat to enduring values such as justice, equality, and the ideals of “the public good” and the “common interest.” Others are critical of it as an explanatory concept, arguing that it lacks coherence and is used promiscuously as an all-purpose category of denunciation. In general, communication scholars have approached neoliberalism in two main ways. On the one hand, they have attempted to analyze communication about neoliberalism by focusing on the ways that communication is utilized to represent, enable, and justify neoliberal ideas, policies, and practices. This scholarship is largely concerned with the persuasive effects of communication and rhetoric. On the other hand, they have focused on the forms of communication that produce the cultural and material realities of neoliberalism. These scholars are generally concerned with the circulation of communication and rhetoric. It should come as no surprise that the distinction between the two approaches is not always neat and tidy. This is so, at least in part, because the critical traditions that inform this scholarship do not necessarily agree upon what exactly neoliberalism is. Communication scholars have engaged neoliberalism by aligning with, building upon, and mobilizing a variety of critical cultural scholarly approaches. Three of the most common approaches are discussed: neoliberalism as hegemonic project and ideology, neoliberalism as governmentality and biopolitics, and neoliberalism as political project and process. Each of these traditions assumes that neoliberalism constitutes, to a significant degree, the world we now inhabit.

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