The Classification of Style

Author(s):  
Joanna Bosse

This chapter introduces the reader to to the tenets of ballroom dance by focusing on the various classificatory systems used in social dances. It begins with a discussion of the “ballroom umbrella” and the wealth of symbolic resources it encompasses, first by considering dancesport and social dancing, followed by an analysis of International and American styles of ballroom performance. It then examines four themes that emerge from classificatory systems: an emphasis on a high degree of specialization in performance; the demonstration of control over the body and its movement; the rationalization of movement and the ideas articulated by it, especially as mediated by language and other symbols; and an association with Western Europe. The chapter suggests that dance classifications also function as social classifications that serve to stratify individuals and groups according to their perception of the social order. More specifically, they articulate the betwixt-and-between-ness that characterizes the American middle class.

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-762 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Nicholas Edwards ◽  
Robyn L Jones

The primary purpose of this article was to investigate the use and manifestation of humour within sports coaching. This was particularly in light of the social significance of humour as a critical component in cultural creation and negotiation. Data were gathered from a 10-month ethnographic study that tracked the players and coaches of Senghenydd City Football Club (a pseudonym) over the course of a full season. Precise methods of data collection included participant observation, reflective personal field notes, and ethnographic film. The results demonstrated the dominating presence of both ‘inclusionary putdowns’ and ‘disciplinary humour’, particularly in relation to how they contributed to the production and maintenance of the social order. Finally, a reflective conclusion discusses the temporal nature of the collective understanding evident among the group at Senghenydd, and its effect on the humour evident. In doing so, the work contributes to the body of knowledge regarding the social role of humour within sports coaching.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethan L. Davies

Abstract Participant evaluations have been at the heart of recent discursive (im)politeness research, yet despite their importance, there has been little consideration of how we identify such behaviours and how we can substantiate their worth in an analysis. In this paper, it is proposed that we need to distinguish between different, ordered, categories of evaluation because these provide different levels of evidence for participants’ understandings of (im)politeness. Using online comments from Daily Mail articles relating to the Penelope Soto court hearings, I show that apparent agreements in the classification of linguistic behaviour as (im)polite can mask disagreements in the underlying rationales for those judgements. It is these rationales that provide the strongest warrant for analysts because they represent the ideological basis behind an individual’s understanding of politeness – why people should behave in this way. This links to Haugh’s (2013) use of ‘moral order’ and also Eelen’s (2001) key, but underdeveloped, notion of argumentativity. The rationale behind an individual’s judgement provides the argumentative link between metapragmatic behaviour and the social order. Classifications and positive/negative assessments of person are only clues to this underlying rationale, and need to be treated as such. Understanding these differences will assist analysts in assessing the ideological weight of metapragmatic behaviour and provide better-informed warrants for their analyses.


1982 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 564-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. E. Nettleship

Contemporaries and historians alike have regarded the 1880s as a watershed in Victorian thought. They have argued that before the 1880s the well-to-do held firmly to a belief in Political Economy and attributed economic success to the high moral character and hard work of the individual. By the 1880s these beliefs had begun to waver, and many who had themselves prospered from the new economic system began to question its assumptions and develop a sense of responsibility toward those beneath them in the social order. One institution which seems to represent this change is Toynbee Hall, the first English settlement house, founded in 1884. Headed by a middle-class clergyman, Samuel Barnett, staffed by well-educated and well-to-do volunteers and dedicated to bringing education and culture to the poor, it seems to be an example, par excellence, of the newly heightened middle-class social conscience typical of the 1880s.2 But close examination reveals that the origins of Toynbee Hall date back to the 1870s, to the broad church orientation and parish practices of Samuel Barnett. Rooted in his modest day-to-day pastoral work rather than in new concepts of social justice, Toynbee Hall raises the question of whether in fact the 1880s constitute a great divide in Victorian thought or a period of continuation, expansion and institutionalisation of earlier ideas and practices.


Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-335
Author(s):  
JELLE HAEMERS ◽  
GERRIT VERHOEVEN ◽  
JEROEN PUTTEVILS ◽  
PETER JONES

One of the key concepts of Max Weber's writings on cities was that in north-western Europe, the landed nobility and urban elites were clearly distinguished. For Weber, this was indeed a main reason to locate the occidental city in the north rather than in the Mediterranean. Christof Rolker tackles this question in his ‘Heraldische Orgien und Sozialer Aufstieg. Oder: Wo ist eigentlich “oben” in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt?’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 52 (2015), 191–224. The in-depth analysis of one of the largest and at the same time most widespread armorials in the late medieval Holy Empire, namely that of Konrad Grünenberg (d. 1494), demonstrates that in Konstanz (where Grünenberg lived) guilds (and not the nobility) first insisted on patrilineal descent as a proof of status. Traditionally, Grünenberg is seen as a paradigmatic social climber, as he left his guild to join the society of the local nobility (called ‘Zur Katz’). Yet his sumptuous armorial, containing over 2,000 coat of arms mainly from the south-west of the Empire, does not mention any single member of this noble society. Instead, it praises the tournament societies of which Grünenberg was not a member, and highlights chivalric events in which he never participated. This, Rolker argues, indicates that armorials were not only about status already gained or to be gained, but also a manual for contemporaries to discuss the social order in a more abstract way. In his ‘Wappenbuch’, Grünenberg constantly explains why he could not join the noble societies he praised, while at the same time he ignored the ‘Zur Katz’ association of which he was a member. Therefore, Rolker concludes that it was not only members (or would-be members) of the respective social groups who knew and reproduced social codes. So the boundary between noble and urban elites was more blurred than Weber claimed – though Rolker is of course not the first to criticize Weber on this. Clearly, Grünenberg's armorial was part and parcel of a wider discussion of origins and kinship, namely patrilineal kinship that took place in several social milieux, rather than simply a book which displayed inherited status.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesa Lindemann

Responding to the critique of methodological ethnocentrism, Lindemann develops a new general social theory that is also highly sensitive to socio-cultural differences. Drawing on Helmuth Plessner’s theory of excentric positionality, social order is understood as a symbolically and technically mediated spatio-temporal order that is integrated by an order of violence. Lindemann hereby brings together three significant aspects of recent debates: the debates on the necessity of a theoretical turn (such as the linguistic turn, the material turn, the body turn, the pictorial turn and the spatial turn); second, the debates on the actor status of non-humans and the borders of the social world, and third, the discussions about the role of violence in structuring social processes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Artemiy M. Kuchinov

The reality of Russia confirms the relevance of studying the specifics of the historical form of policy prevalent in the country. In order to analyze the nature of the existing order of power in post-Soviet Russia, different analytical categories are required compared to democracy or authoritarianism. This warrants using approaches and methods which lie at the border between political science and sociology. Such approaches allow for examining politics as a process and a result of not only the elites’ doings, but also a group of actors, which is not only not outlined, but, on the contrary, isn’t really limited. The author of this article offers an authentic policy typology, starting with its ideal variety, being institutionalized, based on universal trust rather than force and on competition between projects and decisions aimed at common benefit, conducted within an indefinite circle of free citizens. Compared to true policy, the main distinctions of other phenomena is a lack of institutionalization in the case of “under-policy”, lacking principles of unrestricted participation and alignment towards common good in the case of “pre-policy”, and the use of unlawful violence in the case of “anti-policy”. These phenomena can be described using the collective term “quasi-policy”. “Under-policy” and “pre-policy” are inherent to people’s “natural state”, and can be used as a means to adjust public life and the circulation of resources, while “anti-policy” is a perverse form of social order which arises from not knowing any non-violent solutions to various problems. Based on the empirical data, the author shows that “pre-policy”, which is becoming ever less effective, is prevalent in Russia, while also considering possible trends for its subsequent transformation. “Pre-policy” is characterized by syncretism of the governmental, economic and legislative domains of public life, being an archaic phenomenon by default. However, the degree of “pre-policy’s” archaism varies. In Russia’s case it is quite high. In Russia we see a high degree of integration on the social level within situational informal groups (cliques), combined with a low degree of trust on the societal level, which leads to there not being ideologically manifested political differentiation. The tendencies when it comes to the transformation of Russia’s “pre-politics” are multidirectional and conflicting: together with amplified “pre-policy” by means of increasing archaism, we can also observe pre-political actors occasionally resorting to certain principles of “under-policy” and “anti-policy”, when “pre-policy” is unable to help said actors solve the problems that they face.


Author(s):  
Jamie Page

Prostitution played a major role in structuring medieval gender relations. Prostitutes were seen to be an example of extreme female sinfulness which all women risked falling into, while at the same time prostitutes themselves were seen to play a vital social role in many towns by providing a sexual outlet to unmarried men. This book is the first full-length study of medieval prostitution to focus primarily upon how gender discourse shaped the lives of prostitutes themselves. It is based on three legal case studies from the late medieval empire which examine constructions of subjectivity between the period c.1400–1500. This period saw the rapid rise of tolerated prostitution across much of western Europe and the emergence of the public brothel as a central institution in the regulation of social order, followed by its equally rapid suppression from the early 1500s. By analysing how individuals interacted with cultural discourses surrounding the body, sexuality, and sin, the book explores how the concepts that defined prostitution in the Middle Ages shaped individual lives, and how individuals were able—or not—to exert agency, both within the circumstances of their own lives, and in response to official attempts to regulate sexual behaviour.


Author(s):  
Bob Andrian

Many experts believe that in the sociological paradigm an order of community life is dynamic in nature, in accordance with the factors that shape the social construction of the community itself. These factors include those contained in the social order itself, ethnicity, race, religion, culture, type of work, level of education, social status, and other elements. These elements will be an important factor in shaping cultures in society. Included in it is the mainstay culture between elements of society, which is then known as the culture of communication. In terms of general aspects, the classification of society is very diverse. Some are known as peripheral communities, border communities, industrial societies, laborers, even including the academic community. However, in terms of geography or demography, there are two classifications of society, namely rural communities and urban communities. Where in between, inspiration certainly has differences and characteristics of each, especially in the cultural aspects, namely the culture of communication.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora

AbstractDuring a revolutionary period of cultural production and anticolonial political commitment in 1950s Baghdad, the modernist poet Husayn Mardan was put on trial for his “obscene” collection entitled Qasaʾid ʿAriya (Naked Poems). Heavily influenced by Baudelaire, Mardan's poetics provide a revolutionary paradigm focused on the gratification of the corporeal. This paper considers how Mardan's poetry, largely marginalized from the canonized modernist Arabic poetic tradition, registers resistance to an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic social order through a transgressive poetics that displace the political onto the body. Lampooning social uprightness and middle-class sterility, Mardan's poems encourage sexual licentiousness, embrace the space of the brothel, and celebrate filth and germs. Through a consideration of Mardan's appropriation of Baudelaire, this essay theorizes the translation and transformation of Baudelaire's paradigmatic literary representations of modernity into the context of a modernizing Baghdad and therefore historicizes the appearance of modernist aesthetics in a non-European space.


1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uli Linke

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).


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