scholarly journals Making the Self in a Material World: Food and Moralities of Consumption

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle De Solier
Keyword(s):  
Stainless Steel ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
Farmers Markets ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
World Food ◽  
A Site

Food is increasingly central to consumer culture today. From fine dining restaurants to farmers’ markets, stainless steel kitchenware to celebrity chef cookbooks, there is a stylish array of culinary commodities available for fashioning our identities. Yet this occurs at a time when commodity consumption more generally is under greater question as a site of self-making, with the rise of anti-consumerist sentiment. This article examines how people negotiate these issues in their identity formation, by focusing on those for whom food is central to their sense of self: ‘foodies’. I draw on theories of consumption, identity and material culture, in particular the work of Daniel Miller, to examine ethnographic research undertaken with foodies in Melbourne, Australia.

The Changing Face and Function of Museums

1998 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Face ◽  
National Museums ◽  
And Function ◽  
A Site ◽  
Internal Pressures ◽  
New Museology

Museums are currently undergoing a number of changes as a repercussion of their histories and professional developments, and of new social and cultural contexts, not to mention as a result of pressure from competition and economic forces. This article explores the current ‘reinvention’ of museums — in particular, national museums — by examining some of the factors of change — some of the major internal pressures that have been the result of museological initiatives and also various exogenous influences. New museology and postcolonialism represent not only separate forces, but also a synthesis of pressures that are not only changing the face, but also the role, of museums, whilst also transforming relationships between museums and their users. A concern of this study is to look at those museums which have a ‘nationalising’ function, and to determine whether changing policies and practices are inhibiting or advance a renegotiation of the relationships between museums and their constituencies. In the last two decades, we have seen some trends confirmed. There has been a move from material culture studies to concern with the ideas contained in objects, whilst the older notion of the museum as a treasure house has given way to a stronger educative role and, more recently, an information centre and also a site of leisure, entertainment and identity-formation. These ‘reinventive’ processes, it is suggested, are closely allied to a postcolonial imperative.

What’s My Line?

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-92
Author(s):  
Mike Miley
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Game Show ◽  
Slumdog Millionaire ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Long Division ◽  
Line P

Round One explores works that use (and abuse) trivia to reveal how the hypermediated consumer culture of late capitalism traps individuals in a metaphorical isolation booth, unable to establish a stable sense of self. Just as the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s nearly killed the quiz show, works such as Quiz Show, Melvin and Howard,Slumdog Millionaire, and Chuck Barris’s “unauthorized autobiography” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind suggest that a rigged game presents an existential threat to the self. Amidst the pressure to conform to the norms of the community of television, individuals betray themselves to get ahead in America, often finding themselves trapped in the isolation booth of their social class. Further, Philip Roth’s novel Zuckerman Unbound,Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division,and Robert Olen Butler’s story “The American Couple,” show how these questions of selfhood in the age of the game show can be exacerbated when the protagonist is an outsider to game-show culture.

Affirmation and Care: A Feminist Account of Bullying and Bullying Prevention

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-417
Author(s):  
Tim R. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Zero Tolerance ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Bullying Prevention ◽  
The Self ◽  
Relational Model ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Media

Despite the amount of attention that activists, educators, psychologists, and the media place on bullying and bullying prevention, there has been no sustained philosophical reflection on bullying, nor has there been a feminist analysis of the growing literature on bullying. This essay seeks to satisfy those two needs. The first section is a broad introduction to the literature on bullying. I define bullying and distinguish it from teasing, sassing, roughhousing, and other more benign interactions. I also outline two common solutions to bullying: zero‐tolerance policies and “ecological” interventions. The second section uses feminist ethics of care to analyze the effectiveness of each approach. I argue that ecological approaches to bullying are preferable to zero‐tolerance policies because they operate on a relational model of the self and identity‐formation. I elaborate a notion of affirmation as the mechanism that stabilizes and solidifies our sense of self across time. I then use affirmation to analyze three things: why people bully one another, the specific harm inflicted by bullying, and why ecological approaches are more effective in reducing bullying. The third section uses my account of affirmation to critique the scientism and troublingly gendered assumptions that underlie much of the work on bullying.

Fictive Fathers in the Field

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Katrina Daly Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Impact

Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concept of “the field” to examine the impact of narratives about fathers on not only the field as a site of ethnographic research but also on the field of African cultural studies.

Narrated Photography

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Sarah Dunlop ◽  
Peter Ward
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Shed Light

This article describes how a recently refined visual ethnographic research method, “narrated photography,” contributes to the study of religion. We argue that this qualitative research method is particularly useful for studies of lived religion and demonstrate this through examples drawn from a study the sacred among young Polish migrants to England. Narrated photography, which entails asking people to photograph what is personally significant to them and then to narrate the image, generates visual and textual material that mediates the subjective. Through using this method we discovered that family was considered to be sacred, both in terms of links to religious practice and a desire for a secure home which family relationships provide. Additionally, narrated photography has the potential to expand our conceptions of lived religion through the inclusion of visual material culture and the visual context of the research participants. In this case the data revealed that the Polish young people view structures within their landscape through a particularly Polish Catholic lens. These findings shed light on the religious tensions that migrants encounter in everyday life.

Learning the anthropology of development: the university as a site of knowledge construction and identity formation

Journal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Jakimow
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Classroom Teachers ◽  
Practical Skills ◽  
Student Reactions ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University ◽  
Anthropology Of Development

Recent work exploring student reactions to the anthropology of development highlights the importance of going beyond simply imparting practical skills, or alternatively delivering content that offers an unrelenting critique (Djohari 2011; Handler 2013). In this paper, I argue that by casting an anthropological eye on the classroom, teachers can provide a learning environment in which students transform into reflective ‘novice’ practitioners equipped for lifelong learning. This involves making explicit the processes of knowledge construction in the classroom, and by extension, the development field. It entails providing the resources through which students can become social beings in the development sector, with attention to expanding the possibilities for the formation of multiple identities. 

Juvenal in the Specular City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. J. Larmour
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self

Juvenalian satire writes specularity, firstly, by mirroring its own constitutive elements and discursive procedures, and, secondly, through its preoccupation with gazing at others and the self. The roving satirist-narrator, who resembles Kristeva’s ‘deject’ and Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’, inhabits the paradoxical space of Maingueneau’s paratopia within the specular city of Rome. As a specular text, Juvenal’s collection strives for coherence through various devices of doubling, repetition, and mirroring (linguistic, rhetorical, and thematic); yet in this cityscape the search for a unified sense of self, and an accompanying topographical wholeness, is continually frustrated, as the satirist—along with us, the spectators accompanying him—is confronted by human and architectural embodiments of ambiguity, transgression, and the pernicious mixing of categories, including Umbricius at the Porta Capena (3.12–20 and 318–22), Otho with his mirror (2.99–109), and Gracchus’ appearance as a retiarius in the arena (2.143–8 and 8.200–10).

scholarly journals Identity (Re)Construction of Female Adolescents with Substance Use Disorders

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (13) ◽  
pp. 7022
Author(s):  
Danielle Treiber ◽  
Lize A. E. Booysen
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Substance Use Disorders ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Female Adolescents ◽  
Situational Analysis ◽  
Developmental Milestone ◽  
Practical Implications

Identity formation is a developmental milestone for adolescents, and their identities are constructed and re-constructed through their interactions with others and contextual factors in their environment. When considering adolescents with substance use disorders (SUD), often this developmental milestone is misappropriated, misunderstood, and misrepresented. The purpose of this article was to explore how adolescents with substance use disorders form identity and construct a sense of self. Firstly, we explored the identity formation and reconstruction of 20 female adolescents with SUDs based on an in-depth grounded theory methodology (GTM) which included a situational analysis (SA). Secondly, we offered a theoretical model to explain identity construction and reconstruction of adolescents with SUDs that emerged from this research. We conclude this article with practical implications for treatment, and care of adolescents with SUDs.

Decolonization and Coloniality in Human Development: Neoliberalism, Globalization and Narratives of Indian Youth

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 207-221
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Global South ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
American Psychology ◽  
Urban Indian

In this article, I argue that globalization is interwoven with colonialism and coloniality and both psychology and human development are shaped by the enduring legacy of Eurocentric colonial knowledge. In particular, I draw on my ethnographic research in Pune, India, to show how the transnational elite, middle- and working-class urban Indian youth are engaging with new practices of globalization. I examine how particular class practices shape youth narratives about globalization and “Indianness” generally, as well as specific stories about their self, identity, and family. This article is organized around three questions: (a) How has Euro-American psychology as a dominant force supported colonization and racialized models of human development? (b) What kind of stories do urban Indian youth from varied classes tell about their identity formation in contexts of neoliberal globalization? (c) How can we create and promote models of human development and psychology that are inclusive of the lives of people who live in the Global South?

scholarly journals “Incompleteness” and the Quest for Multiple Identities in South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard C. Lategan
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
The Self ◽  
Important Goal ◽  
Alternative Approach

The article explores the contours of multiple identities in contrast to singular identities in situations of social complexity and cultural diversity. Nyamnjoh's concepts of “incompleteness” and “frontier Africans” imply an alternative approach to identity formation. Although the formation of one's own, singular identity is a necessary stage in the development of each individual, it has specific limitations. This is especially true in situations of complexity and diversity and where the achievement of social cohesion is an important goal. With reference to existing theories of identity formation, an alternative framework is proposed that is more appropriate for the dynamic, open-ended nature of identity and better suited to encourage the enrichment of identity. The role of imagination, a strategy for crossing borders (with reference to Clingman's concept of a “grammar of identity”), the search for commonality, and the effect of historical memory are discussed. Enriched and multiple identities are not achieved by replacement or exchange, but by widening (existing) singular identities into a more inclusive and diverse understanding of the self.

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