Being Inside and Outside Social Relations

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-124
Author(s):  
Nigel Rapport
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
French Army ◽  
Anne Carson ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Special Responsibility ◽  
The Way

It is a special responsibility to incur individual readings of one’s work from colleagues. I hope the following line of thought does them justice.Nay Rather, an essay by Anne Carson (a translator and poet as well as a classical scholar), begins with an account of the trial of Joan of Arc. Caught in battle against the English and their Burgundian allies on 23 May 1430, a year after she had assisted a French army in lifting the English siege of Orleans, Joan of Arc was put on trial for heresy. The trial lasted from January to May 1431, and Joan was burnt at the stake on 30 May, aged nineteen. In recounting this history, Carson explains that she is particularly interested in the way in which, as she puts it, Joan was ‘distant’ from her own words. Carson (2014: 8) elaborates. Joan of Arc’s guidance, military and moral came from a source that she called ‘voices’. She began to hear them at the age of twelve, and they commanded her style of dress, her beliefs and the revolutionary politics of her action. At her trial, her English ecclesiastical prosecutors wanted to know her voices, for Joan to name and describe them in ways in which they might understand: in terms of recognised religious imagery and emotions, and in a conventional narrative that might then be subjected to mechanisms of theological proof.

scholarly journals Fragile Visions of the Social: Rethinking Solidarity with the Performance Piece Faust and the TV-series Skam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Schumann
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Venice Biennale ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today.

The (Mixed) Times of Revolution

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Rodríguez Matos
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jose Lezama Lima ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Political Foundations ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the role of Christianity in the work of José Lezama Lima as it relates to his engagement with Revolutionary politics. The chapter shows the multiple temporalities that the State wields, and contrasts this thinking on temporality with the Christian apocalyptic vision held by Lezama. The chapter is concerned with highlighting the manner in which Lezama unworks Christianity from within. Yet its aim is not to prove yet again that there is a Christian matrix at the heart of modern revolutionary politics. Rather, it shows the way in which the mixed temporalities of the Revolution, already a deconstruction of the idea of the One, still poses a challenge for contemporary radical thought: how to think through the idea that political change is possible precisely because no politics is absolutely grounded. That Lezama illuminates the difficult question of the lack of political foundations from within the Christian matrix indicates that the problem at hand cannot be reduced to an ever more elusive and radical purge of the theological from the political.

scholarly journals Drawing as a Facilitating Approach When Conducting Research Among Children

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 160940691882255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Søndergaard ◽  
Susanne Reventlow
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Socioeconomically Disadvantaged ◽  
Future Health ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
The Family ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
The Way

Using drawings to bridge the communication barriers between adults and children, this article looks at examples of fieldwork with socioeconomically disadvantaged young families in Denmark with a parent who has multiple diagnoses. Studies suggest a link between a disadvantaged socioeconomic childhood and a predisposition to illness and disease in later life and that children of ill parents tend to be ill more often and be lonelier than their peers with healthy parents. These findings are underpinned by other studies showing how children’s social relations are vital to how they experience childhood and for their current and future health profile. Based on this knowledge, we wanted to study how children from families without a great deal of resources experience their family life but were faced with the dilemma of how to study this phenomenon. Reflection on these experiences shows that drawing is an effective method to facilitate conversations with children about difficult and taboo issues. The method’s strength lies in the way it materializes thoughts and feelings, in the way it generates a sense of “community” between the child and the researcher, which is often challenging in ethnographic research involving children. With their drawings, the children were able to express feelings, sentiments, and experiences that were difficult to articulate in words but not equally difficult to recall as a physical and mental experience or to draw on paper. The drawings illustrated a shared desire among the children who took part in the study for normality, routine, and stability in the family. Please note that we emphasize the importance of including other fieldwork data when interpreting drawings and that it is essential to have a solid contextual understanding of the field.

Citizenship Across the Life Course

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
International Borders ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
The Way

Analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant’s life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites.

scholarly journals Locating Activist Spaces: The Neighbourhood as a Source and Site of Urban Activism in 1970s Calcutta

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrike Donner
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Student Movement ◽  
Local State ◽  
Recruitment Strategies ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Urban Activism ◽  
Urban Neighbourhoods ◽  
The Way

This article analyses the meaning of urban neighbourhoods for the emergence of Maoist activism in 1970s Calcutta. Through ethnography the article highlights the way recruitment, strategies and the legacy of the movement were located in the experience and politics of the urban neighbourhood. As a social formation, the neighbourhood shaped the relationships that made Maoist subjectivities feasible and provided the space for coalitions and cooperation across a wider spectrum than the label of a student movement acknowledges. The neighbourhood appears here as an emergent site for Maoist epistemologies, which depended on this space and its everyday practices, intimate social relations as well as the experience of the local state in the locality.

DECORATED VESSELS: THE FUNCTION OF DECORATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 385-409
Author(s):  
Ellen Swift
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Way

This paper re-integrates decoration with the function of the object and its social context in Late Antiquity. It examines the way that decoration prescribes the function of objects, for example, through the representation upon an object of the activity for which the object is intended to be used. It is suggested that in some instances decoration may also be matched to the interior decor of a room, i.e., to the context within which an object was used. These correlations of decoration with function and context correspond to Roman ideas of ‘appropriateness’ in decor and, in turn, contribute to the structuring of social identities and social relations in Late Antiquity.

scholarly journals Semiotic behaviour in Luke and John

2002 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L Rohrbaugh
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Semiotic Process ◽  
The Way

As socio-linguists have demonstrated, communication is a behavior that follows socially generated and commonly understood rules for how messages are to be produced and received. Moreover, this semiotic process constitutes a complex and pervasive mechanism of social control – even if it is not often recognized as such. It is thus possible to ask how meaning is actually created and acknowledged in a given society. Who determines the rules? How are rules maintained, modified or subverted? Such questions focus our attention on who is producing and receiving what types of meaning and whose interests are being served by the way the process itself is constructed. As a case in point, we shall compare the semiotic process in the Lukan and Johannine presentations of Jesus in order to ask what these processes imply for social relations in the communities that produced them.

scholarly journals Éowyn and the Biblical Tradition of a Warrior Woman

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 405-415
Author(s):  
Dorota Filipczak
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Lord Of The Rings ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
King James Bible ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
The Way

The article discusses the portrayal of Éowyn in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the light of the biblical tradition of the warrior woman. The author focuses on the scene in which Éowyn slays the Nazgûl Lord in the battle of the Pelennor Fields with the help of Meriadoc. This event is juxtaposed against the biblical descriptions of female warriors, in particular Jael and Judith. A detailed analysis of passages from the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims Bible, with which Tolkien was familiar, allows the reader to detect numerous affinities between his vocabulary and imagery, and their biblical antecedents. Filipczak contends that, by defending the body of the dying Théoden, Éowyn defends the whole kingdom; her action can be interpreted in the light of The King’s Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz. Her threat to the Ringraith (“I will smite you if you touch him”) makes use of the verb that can be found in the descriptions of Jael and Judith in the Protestant and Catholic Bibles respectively. Furthermore, Éowyn’s unique position as a mortal woman who achieves the impossible and thus fulfills the prophecy paves the way for a comparison with the Virgin Mary, whose Magnificat contains elements of “a holy-war song” which were suppressed by traditional interpretations. Consequently, the portrayal of Éowyn blends the features of Jael, Judith and Mary with allusions to St. Joan of Arc. Moreover, her act of slaying the Ringraith’s fell beast reinterprets the story of St. George and the dragon. Filipczak argues that Éowyn’s uniqueness is additionally emphasized because she acts out Gandalf’s words from Minas Tirith and sends the Nazgûl Lord into nothingness.

Consumer Credit in Comparative Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akos Rona-Tas ◽  
Alya Guseva
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Consumer Credit ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Credit System ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Growth ◽  
The Way

We review the literature in sociology and related fields on the fast global growth of consumer credit and debt and the possible explanations for this expansion. We describe the ways people interact with the strongly segmented consumer credit system around the world—more specifically, the way they access credit and the way they are held accountable for their debt. We then report on research on two areas in which consumer credit is consequential: its effects on social relations and on physical and mental health. Throughout the article, we point out national variations and discuss explanations for these differences. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future tasks and challenges of comparative research on consumer credit.

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