Voorbij navelstaren en narcisme

KWALON ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Müller

Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography The labeling of auto-ethnography as navel-gazing does not do justice to the variety with which auto-ethnography is applied. A distinction should be made between emotional and analytical auto-ethnography. In the first form the central person of the researcher plays the central role, in the second auto-ethnography is applied to get a better understanding of the social world which is being studied. In this article the author discusses the second approach by using the work of Jeff Ferrell. Ferrell is a well-known cultural criminologist, who focuses critically on the cultural understanding of social life. By looking at how Ferrell applies auto-ethnography, insight is gained into the added value of this method for qualitative studies: (1) the integration of the personal experiences of researchers in texts in order to achieve a richer description of the social worlds they explore, (2) making explicit the role of the researcher in publications, and (3) developing new (more appealing) forms of representation.

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 23-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rom Harré

This article strongly argues the priority of symbolic, especially discursive, action over the material order in the genesis of social things. What turns a piece of stuff into a social object is its embedment in a narrative construction. The attribution of an active or a passive role to things in relation to persons is thus essentially story-relative: nothing happens or exists in the social world unless it is framed by human performative activity. Drawing on Gibson's notion of `affordance', Harré affirms that material things may be disposed towards many different usages, and may acquire multiple identities according to different narrative constructions, even though the range of their possible `existences' is constrained by certain material features. Objects acquire their full significance only if one takes account of their double role in both the `practical' order, which includes social arrangements for maintaining life, and the `expressive' order, which creates hierarchies of honour and status, and which enjoys priority over the former. Reasoning from a microsociological constructionist perspective, Harré restates his view that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and joint management of meaning, including the meaning of things; the illusion that some thing is real is merely an effect of certain interpretational grammars which remain stable across the generations or even the centuries.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.


Author(s):  
Michel Meyer

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223
Author(s):  
Nadir N. Budhwani ◽  
Gary N. McLean

The Problem There is a growing need to explore the role of the centuries-old tradition of Sufism and its teachings which, through social movements, have contributed to, and continue to influence, human resource development (HRD) at various levels—individual, group, organization, community, nation, and international. The Solution To address this need, we present cases of social movements inspired by Sufi teachings in selected parts of the world. We discuss, using literature and personal experiences, links among Sufi teachings, social movements, and HRD, and provide a framework for understanding Sufi teachings within the context of the social movement phenomenon. We end with recommendations for practice and research. The Stakeholders We target broadening the horizons of HRD researchers, practitioners, civil society members, and social movement activists, encouraging them to address long-term changes and collective learning through the quest for unconditional love and liberation, which represent the core of Sufi teachings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 184-196
Author(s):  
Maja Dorota Wojciechowska

PurposeSocial capital, understood as intangible community values available through a network of connections, is a factor in the development of societies and improving quality of life. It helps to remove economic inequalities and prevent poverty and social exclusion, stimulate social and regional development, civic attitudes and social engagement and build a civic society as well as local and regional identity. Many of these tasks may be implemented by libraries, which, apart from providing access to information, may also offer a number of services associated with social needs. The purpose of this paper is to present the roles and functions that libraries may serve in local communities in terms of assistance, integration and development based on classical social capital theories.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the classical concepts of social capital in the context of libraries. It analyses the findings of Pierre-Félix Bourdieu, James Coleman, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Putnam, Nan Lin, Ronald Stuart Burt, Wayne Baker and Alejandro Portes. Based on their respective concepts, the paper analyses the role of the contemporary library in the social life of local communities. In particular, it focuses on the possible new functions that public libraries may serve.FindingsA critical review of the concept of social capital revealed certain dependencies between libraries and their neighbourhoods. With new services that respond to the actual social needs, libraries may serve as a keystone, namely they may integrate, animate and engage local communities. This, however, requires a certain approach to be adopted by the personnel and governing authorities as well as infrastructure and tangible resources.Originality/valueThe social engagement of libraries is usually described from the practical perspective (reports on the services provided) or in the context of research on the impact of respective projects on specific groups of users (research reports). A broader approach, based on original social theories, is rarely encountered. The paper draws on classical concepts of social capital and is a contribution to the discussion on possible uses of those concepts based on an analysis of the role of libraries in social life and in strengthening the social capital of local communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-47
Author(s):  
Siti Karomah ◽  
Agus Hermawan

Abstract— Literary work, directly or indirectly, is the realization and imagination of the author as a reflection and the reality that the author gets from society. Literary works can be found through the life forms of society. Thus, literary works cannot be separated from the elements around them. Literary work along its journey always implicate man, humanity, life, and life. In essence, literary works are born for the surrounding community. Literary works are the products of authors who live in the social world. That way, short story literary works in the form of fairy tales are the author's imaginative world that is always related to social life. There are interesting things that are given to our children to change attitudes and daily ethics. Keywords—: Literary works; short stories; fairy tales.


Author(s):  
Alan Ryan

This chapter describes a “dramatistic,” “dramatic,” or “dramaturgical” approach to the study of social interaction. It asks whether the dramaturgical model insists on the theatricality of social life merely in the sense of insisting that people fill roles just as persons act parts in a play. This is the question of whether the crucial element in the dramaturgical picture is that cluster of insights that goes under the general heading of “role distance.” The chapter considers the peculiarities of rational explanation and about the role of reconstructions of “the thing to do” other than the role of explaining an action or series of actions by focusing on voting behavior in the terms proposed by Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy. It also examines some recent accounts of the phenomenon of suicide, along with the rationality principle, which Karl Popper calls “false but indispensable” to the social sciences.


Author(s):  
Naomi Haynes

This chapter explores moving as a value, an animating idea that gives social life on the Copperbelt its shape. It shows how people in Nsofu structure their relationships around the possibility of moving through two types of social ties. Most important here are relationships of patronage, or “dependence,” which connect poorer people to those with greater economic and social resources. People also move through relationships that produce alternating indebtedness, including rotating credit associations and the “committees” that finance expensive events like weddings. In both cases moving requires asymmetry, which makes these ties particularly vulnerable to the leveling forces of economic downturn, and the chapter concludes by describing how events like the 2008–2009 financial crisis have impacted the social world of Nsofu. It is these economic factors, coupled with a cultural emphasis on novelty, that make Pentecostalism especially compelling.


Author(s):  
Martin Brückner

The symbolic and social value of maps changed irreversibly at the turn of the nineteenth century when Mathew Carey and John Melish introduced the business model of the manufactured map. During the decades spanning the 1790s and 1810s respectively, Carey and Melish revised the artisanal approach to mapmaking by assuming the role of the full-time map publisher who not only collected data from land surveyors and government officials but managed the labor of engravers, printers, plate suppliers, paper makers, map painters, shopkeepers, and itinerant salesmen. As professional map publishers, they adapted a sophisticated business model familiar in Europe but untested in America. This chapter documents the process of economic centralization and business integration critical to the social life of preindustrial maps and responsible for jump-starting a domestic map industry that catered to a growing and increasingly diverse audience.


Author(s):  
Justin Carville

Justin Carville draws on recent debates in relation to photography and the everyday in order to examine the role of street-photography in the cultural politics of religion as it was played out in the quotidian moments of social relations within Dublin’s urban and suburban spaces during the 1980s and 90s. The essay argues that photography was important in giving visual expression to the social contradictions within the relations between religion and the transformation of Irish social life, not through the dramatic and traumatic experiences that defined the nation’s increased secularism, but in the quiet, humdrum and sometimes monotonous routines of religious ceremonies and everyday social relations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document