Early Ozu: Shōshimin Film and Everyday Realism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woojeong Joo
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Production Strategy

This chapter examines the early phase of Ozu’s cinema, from 1927 to 1932, in the context of the development of Japanese cinema into a modern entertainment form. The first part examines the production strategy of Shochiku, especially in regard to the concept of Kamata-chō as the studio’s fundamental tenet, which was developed in the course of Shochiku’s effort to adopt a modern, Westernised cinematic style through the realistic depictions of urban everyday life, although the modernity had to be in constant conflict with more archaic forms and styles such as shinpa. In the second part, the genre of shōshimin (middle class) film is discussed as Ozu’s attempt to further complicate the format of Kamata-chō by developing its existing representation of modern everyday life into a critique of modernity. This point is examined by analysing Ozu’s two representative shōshimin films of the era, Tokyo Chorus (1931) and I Was Born But… (1932), in comparison with the work of other Shochiku directors, such as Shimazu Yasujiro.

The Buddhist Style in Consumer Culture: From Aesthetics to Emotional Patterns

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 28-54
Author(s):  
Zuzana Bártová
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Identity Style ◽  
And Behavior

Abstract This paper contributes to the sociological theorization of religious lifestyles in consumer culture, analyzing one of its most important identity markers: style. Based on a three-year comparative ethnographic research project into five convert Buddhist organizations in France and the Czech Republic, it finds that style is expressed through aesthetics with its adornment practices apparent in everyday life materializations of Buddhist symbols. The stylistic dimension is also found in practitioners’ attitudes towards Buddhism, as they may use the discourse of taste. Moreover, Buddhist style stands for the collective, coherent, and systematic emotional patterns expressed in Buddhist symbols, individual and collective experiences, and the ethics and behavior they display in everyday life. The paper also explores how this style is adapted to the educated, middle-class, city-dweller practitioners and how it respects dynamics of consumer culture with its emphasis on identity, style, and values of well-being, authenticity, and personal development.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Philosophy Of Life

This introductory chapter discusses how Americans in the nineteenth century pursued the American Dream. It argues that moving the American Dream from the stratosphere in which it is often discussed into the mundane realities of everyday life forces it to be considered differently. The topics of relevance cease to be the long-term trajectory through which protagonists rise from rags to riches and become instead questions about the immediate contexts in which people live. It suggests that what we might call middle-class respectability gets us further than continuing to discuss the American Dream as an ideal or philosophy of life. Middle-class respectability was something that people may have aspired to as an ideal, but it was modeled, learned, and exhibited in practice.

Temporality in Mobile Lives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanthi Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Career Pathways ◽  
Work Study ◽  
The West ◽  
Transnational Mobility

This book provides fresh perspectives on 21st-century migratory experiences in this innovative study of young Asian migrants' lives in Australia. Exploring the aspirations and realities of transnational mobility, the book shows how migration has reshaped lived experiences of time for middle-class young people moving between Asia and the West for work, study and lifestyle opportunities. Through a new conceptual framework of 'chronomobilities', which looks at 'time-regimes' and 'time-logics', the book demonstrates how migratory pathways have become far more complex than leaving one country for another, and can profoundly affect the temporalities of everyday life, from career pathways to intimate relationships. Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, the book deepens our understanding of the multifaceted relationship between migration and time.

Late Ozu: New Generation and New Salaryman Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woojeong Joo
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
New Generation

This chapter covers the last years of Ozu’s career in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Shochiku and the director himself were confronted by the younger generation’s challenge to established styles of everyday realism. The first part discusses the contextual basis of this change, from economic recuperation of postwar Japanese society, to the new wave of film industry, as epitomised by the boom of Nikkatsu’s Sun tribe films and the appearance of television. It is suggested that Ozu, though adopting certain aspects of the new changes, essentially maintained his styles and subject matters of urban everyday life and generational conflict, albeit with lesser critical perspective. This can be reflected in his ‘new salaryman films’ of this era, a genre that inherits the middle-classness of the shōshimin film, but with a brighter tone as to class consciousness, anticipating the appearance of television hōmudorama (home drama) genre. In the second part, such new salaryman films as Good Morning (1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962), are critically analysed, in terms of their active acknowledgement of new commodity culture and the ensuing banality of middle class everyday life.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Jennifer Patico
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Charter School ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
Research Setting ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces the argument of the book: that tensions in the way middle-class parents treat children’s food reflect the influence of an underlying ethic that is linked with neoliberal capitalism and that shapes social inequality in the United States. Several literatures and subthemes are introduced, including the politics of parenting in the United States; middle-class aesthetics and anxieties, particularly as these relate to parenting and food; and theories of neoliberalism and its impacts on selfhood and everyday life. In addition, this chapter describes the research setting of the book: “Hometown,” a K–8 charter school and the urban, gentrifying area of Atlanta in which it is located. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the ethnographic methods used to collect materials for this book, including reflexive discussion of the ethnographer’s positioning.

Coming Home: Portraying Japanese Baseball on the Silver Screen

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Early History ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
Baseball Films ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Important Marker

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.

Risiko und HIV / Aids in Botswana

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Bochow
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
The World ◽  
Experience Of Illness ◽  
Hiv Aids

Botswana, one of the few middle-income countries in Africa, has one of the highest HIV rates in the world. In her book Astrid Bochow deals with the Botswana middle class, which has formed since the 1980s: How do these privileged groups handle the permanent threat of infection and the experience of illness and loss? How does their everyday life in family and partnership look like? And what new social and economic opportunities open up for them in the crisis? The author analyzes the resulting political, medical and social discourses on family and health.

Humor Orgies as Ritual Insult

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Patrick Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Group Members

In-group members can display a sense of solidarity by earning license to direct verbal putdowns toward one another in the presence of others. An explanation of the process by which in-group members can maintain a sense of solidarity through putdowns in everyday life, however, is lacking in the literature. Set in a corner donut shop in southern California, this article describes how a group of old straight white middle-class men direct improvisational putdowns toward each other and explains how this banter maintains a sense of group solidarity for these men. The article puts forth a view of ritual insult in the form of “humor orgies” as emergent interactional phenomena characterized by successive, situation-dependent turns whereby group members play with interpersonal meanings in “givin’ it” “on top” and “takin’ it” “on bottom.” The findings raise questions about the extent to which superiority theories of humor are adequate and also suggest a need for ethnographies of everyday improvisational humor in public, non-workplace settings.

scholarly journals Physical attractiveness – who believes it is a ticket to success?

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Outi Sarpila ◽  
Jani Erola
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Physical Attractiveness ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Socio Economic Status ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Nationally Representative

According to previous research, physical appearance is an important asset that contributes to socio-economic success. However, the consequences associated with physical appearance are often considered gendered. By focusing on the two aspects relevant to physical attractiveness and social stratification, gender and socio-economic status (SES), the article examines whether or not women and men in certain socio-economic positions consider physical attractiveness an important asset in everyday life. We use data from a nationally representative survey. Our analyses suggest that women tend to believe that physical attractiveness contributes to success in life more often than men. Furthermore, we find that the representatives of the middle class, in particular, recognise the significance of physical attractiveness. This applies to both women and men. The results suggest that appearance-related beliefs reflect, first and foremost, the internal battle of middle status positions as well as the willingness to separate oneself from a lower status group.

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