The Variety of Ritual Experience in Premodern States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Blanton
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Structural Property ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Political Rituals ◽  
Rational Evaluation

Any turn to collective action in polity-building will create a fertile ground for argumentative discourses about human nature as well as about new cultural production that aims to transform entrenched cultural designs. This chapter addresses how ritual may play a role in such discourses. While no classifying system will properly capture all the nuance and complexity of ritual practice, to add substance to my comparative exercise I follow Stanley Tambiah’s sense that some rituals can be understood as “constitutive” acts, serving to reaffirm that which is bound by convention and not subject to conscious evaluation. For example, Balinese political rituals serve to reaffirm the central, unquestioned, and timeless fact of Balinese kingship (legitimacy of rule)—the sanctified status of corporeal god-kings. By contrast, I found that in the more collective polities, ritual, as Tambiah explains, can more often be understood to “regulate a practical or technical activity … without actually constituting it.” Rather than to “astonish thousands of peasants” and thereby reproduce the central structural property of a government, as in Bali, the civic rituals of the more collective polities allow for a rational evaluation of the polities’ operative principles and their theories of human nature.

Nearly Got Shot Dead, and He Didn’t Get His Little Check Yet: Workers, Crime, and Law and Order in New York City, 1962-1970

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422199964
Author(s):  
Glenn Dyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
York City ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Management Conflicts ◽  
High Crime ◽  
New Yorkers

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well for the members of Communication Workers of America Local 1101. In their case, such concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. Repeated incidences, largely in the city’s black ghettoes, prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action.

The Uses of Tragedy: Reinhold Niebuhr's Theory of History and International Ethics

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
World Order ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
International Ethics ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Political Ethic ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
The Cold War

As Smith points out, Reinhold Niebuhr's political ethic is closely linked to his philosophy of history. This view of history blends a dualistic understanding of human nature and rigorous contingency of experience - all sobered by a creative sense of tragedy. Niebuhr's modest sensibility was forged amid the early catastrophes of the century and fell on fertile ground early in the Cold War. But in the ironic wake of that superpower struggle there is much in Niebuhr's anitriumphalism to commend to today's international relations theorists and practitioners. Following Augustine, Niebuhr offers no escape from the complexities and contingencies of history, but neither does he view history as gloomily fixed. Rather, Niebuhr's complex and often contradictory sense of historical destiny reflects a sober hope for a more just and peaceful world order.

Figural Judaism and Political Thought in the Marquis d'Argens's Lettres juives

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-380
Author(s):  
Catherine R. Power
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Secular Politics

AbstractDespite its immense popularity at the time of publication in the 1730s, the marquis d'Argens's (Jean-Baptiste de Boyer) Lettres juives is largely overlooked by contemporary political theorists and the history of political thought. The Lettres’ contribution is noteworthy in its multilayered literary presentation incorporating many of the polemics and paradoxes of Enlightenment ideas. It is also significant as an early example of one way that post-Christian thought made use of imagined Jews and Judaism to articulate, debate, and popularize philosophical and political ideas. In this paper, I submit that d'Argens appropriated Christian figural Judaism in the service of secular philosophical inquiry. D'Argens's imagined “Jew in speech” proved to be a fertile ground upon which to conceptualize and debate post-Christian ideas about human nature and secular politics that subsequent diverse thinkers would make use of in the centuries that followed.

scholarly journals Peer Production and Collective Action

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Milan
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Peer Networks ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Peer Production ◽  
Production Mechanisms

A variety of social movements across the world and the political spectrum are now taking advantage of peer production mechanisms such as collaboration, co-production, and self-organisation. This essay investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and remediates social change activism today. It explores the convergences and tensions between peer networks and contemporary social movements ranging from informal coalitions and amorphous grouping to traditional social movement organisations. First, it traces the historical trajectory of peer production as it has come to permeate the progressive social movements of the last three decades, linking distinct approaches to organizing to technological innovation. Second, it reflects on the so-called social affordances (and constraints) of digital infrastructure and their role in fostering specific modes of creativity and convergence apt to support protest actors. Third, it explores three types of consequences of peer production for social movements, namely cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. The chapter then examines three tensions that might emerge in the process of embedding peer production mechanisms and values in instances of collective action, namely: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self-organized vs. commercial infrastructure.

scholarly journals Worldview Analysis in a Comparative Context: Fishing for Data in Muddy Waters

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Lucas Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Value Sets ◽  
Ways Of Life

Drawing on the five-fold revision of the concept of “worldview” offered by the issue editors, I investigate whether some nonreligious modes of cultural production might be profitably investigated using such a typology. In my comparative study of religious and secular sustainability-oriented social movements I offered skeletal definitions of the categories “religion” and “sustainability,” and suggested ways in which public deployments of such terms might offer fertile ground for collaboration between individuals and groups with different value sets. In more recent work among particular rock music and festival scenes, I have found it necessary to offer a dramatically different understanding of the category “religion.” In a sort of thought experiment, I imagine whether the revised concept of “worldview” might be applicable, and indeed whether it offers some advantage over the category “religion.” My conclusions are that in general, in some cases the category of worldview may have some advantages, but it may also gloss over or ignore important cultural contestations over terms such as religion, and at best underplay important affective activators of belonging and identity. The notion of “ways of life,” or “lifeways” may offer a term which avoids some ethnocentric impositions, but would require greater elaboration to be broadly useful to ethnographers.

Guerrilla fan translation, language learning, and metalinguistic discussion in a Catalan-speaking community of gamers

ReCALL ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Boris Vazquez-Calvo
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Computer Assisted Language Learning ◽  
New Members ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Language Classrooms ◽  
Learning Language ◽  
Effective Integration

Abstract Driven by their affinity to popular culture, fans frequently engage in linguistic practices that may be conducive to language learning. This study seeks to find out how a group of Catalan-speaking gamers decided to start producing fan translations of video games from English into Catalan. Based on a digital ethnography (online interviews and observation of the group’s activity), two types of analysis were conducted: a content analysis for recurrent trends and a focused analysis of internal metalinguistic discussions on the quality of translations. Results indicate that fan translators (1) organize hierarchically with set roles and functions, (2) curate their group identity and care for the promotion of Catalan as a vehicle for cultural production, (3) learn language incidentally in three ways: while translating (ensuring the comprehension of English and the linguistic quality and creativity of the transfer into Catalan), through sharing language doubts with their peers on their Telegram group and dialogically agreeing on pragmatically acceptable English-Catalan translations, and through metalinguistic discussions on translation tests received from potential new members. The study resonates with a novel subfield in computer-assisted language learning: language learning in the digital wilds, which might be fertile ground for studies on incidental and informal language learning online. The study may also serve as inspiration for effective integration of translation into language classrooms in a manner that bridges vernacular fan translation and pedagogic translation, considering the importance of metalinguistic discussion for language learning and the sociocultural dimension of both translation and language learning.

The political economy of fanzines on the threshold of state socialism and post-socialism: The story of Czech(o)slovak fanzines

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110074
Author(s):  
Karel Šima
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies

In this article, I analyse Czech and Slovak fanzine-making during the transition from state socialism to post-socialism. The regime change ushered in new dominant forms of cultural production, and thus a situation emerged in which cultural hierarchies were being negotiated and new ways of collective action being formed. Fanzines played a crucial role in building up alternative communities in the new neoliberal system, when there was strong demand for Western subcultural styles and the need of safe space of domestic scenes. Independent publishing depends heavily upon that which it opposes, and when major social changes occur, fanzine-making provided a space for negotiating cultural hierarchies, resulting in specific ways in which fanzines help build and maintain alternative scenes.

scholarly journals Turning the Inside Out: Presuppositions of Alberta Educational Leaders Promoting Progressive Reform, c. 1920 – 1950.

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Lemisko
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Educational Leaders ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Action Collective ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Inside Out

ABSTRACTAlberta’s educational leaders appeared to be taking united collective action in promoting progressive programs and pedagogy, c. 1920 to 1950. However, there were deep differences in their presuppositions about human nature and the relationship among human beings that shaped their ways of thinking about what students needed to know and how students learned. Utilizing a methodology advocated by R. G. Collingwood, this study reveals these differing presuppositions and argues that three predominant and conflicting ways of thinking among Alberta’s educationists—that is, conservative, liberal, and collectivist—had an invisible but significant impact on their educational reform efforts.RÉSUMÉEntre 1920 et 1950, des spécialistes en éducation albertains ont semblé prendre une action collective en faveur de programmes et d’une pédagogie progressistes. Cependant, de profondes différences dans leurs présuppositions sur la nature humaine et sur les relations entre les individus ont façonné leur conception quant aux connaissances à acquérir et sur la manière dont les élèves apprennent. Cette étude qui s’appuie sur la méthodologie préconisée par de R. G. Collingwood expose ces différentes présuppositions et met en évidence, parmi les spécialistes en éducation, l’existence de trois systèmes d’idées prédominants et conflictuels. Sans être apparentes, les idéologies conservatrice, libérale ou collectiviste ont eu malgré tout un impact sur les réformes envisagées.

Economic Man and Original Sin

1981 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hollis
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Economic Man

Are we descended from Adam or from rational economic homunculi? Rational-man theories usually favour the latter. But all four main versions run into famous puzzles of collective action. The cause is an underlying Humean philosophy of mind, by which desires, not reasons, move the rational man. When this is replaced, the idea of expressive rationality can be made to work. It requires a model of man, which gives human nature less variables and more constants. Among the constants there needs to be a pride, which spurs men both to create a social framework and to undermine their own creation. The old name for this source of social contradictions is Original Sin.

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