Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica Childhoods

Research on pre-Columbian childhood refers to all those studies that consider the different evidence and expressions of children in Mesoamerica, prior to the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Archaeology, understandably by its very focus, has been one of the most prolific disciplines that has approached this subject of study. Currently, archaeological research focuses on highlighting the different social experiences of the past (or multi-vocality) of social identities, such as gender and childhood, and its relationship with material culture. In addition, archaeologists recognize a modern stereotype that considers children as passive or dependent beings and therefore biases childhood research in the past. Consequently, it is necessary to critically evaluate the cultural specificity of past childhood since each culture has its own way of considering that stage of the life cycle. Another problem, in the archaeological study of childhood, is to consider that children are not socially important individuals. It has been said that their activities are not significant for the economy or the social realm of communities and societies of the past. From archaeology, there exists a general perception that children are virtually unrecognizable from the archaeological record because their behavior leaves few material traces, apart from child burials. It has been since feminist critiques within the discipline that the study of childhood became of vital importance in archaeology to understand the process of gender acquisition through enculturation. This process refers to the way children learn about their gender identity through the material world that surrounds them and the various rituals that prepare them to become persons. Thus, the intent of recent studies on childhood has been to call upon archaeologists to consider children as social actors capable of making meaningful decisions on their own behalf and that they make substantial contributions to their families and their communities. In this sense, studies on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures have focused at the most basic sense on identifying the presence of children in the archaeological record or ethnohistoric sources. Its aim has been to document the different social ages that make up childhood, the ritual importance of Mesoamerican children, funerary practices, and health conditions marked in children’s bones as well as the different material and identity expressions of childhood through art and its associated material culture.

Facilitating Tacit Knowledge Construction

Design knowledge, for its most part, is tacit. The embedded and inherent nature of tacit knowledge implies that it is a cognitive and internal construct acquired through the design act of doing. However, it is also socially constructed through shared experiences, collaborations and interactions. The design studio is a dynamic, pedagogical site that facilitates the construction of tacit knowledge through its myriad of interactive spaces. Online and virtual platforms offer opportunities to extend the learning boundaries of its social realm. Studies in the influence of these spaces on tacit knowledge construction are currently insufficient. An interpretive study was conducted in different studio environments within the Environment and Interior Design discipline of the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to further the understanding of tacit knowledge construction in blended learning environments.

Interpersonal and Intersubjective Alienation in Social Stigmatization and Depression

The subjective experience of social stigma has been widely researched in terms of discrimination, rejection, isolation, etc. These are commonly understood within the traditional individualistic framework of affective experience and sociality, which fails to address the transformative effects of social stigma on how one experiences the social realm and the own self in general. Phenomenology and recent work on the relationality of affective experience acknowledge the central role interpersonal interactions play in subjectivity and offer a suitable approach towards addressing the complexity of the subjective experience of social stigma. Focussing on autobiographical accounts, I propose that the experience of social stigmatization is characterized by an affective atmosphere of interpersonal alienation. Its counterpart, an atmosphere of belonging, is closely related to social empathy, which is eroded by prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes. The breakdown of social empathy establishes a peculiar form of relationless relationality that radically transforms one’s subjectivity. The transformation of subjectivity is structurally similar to disturbances of intersubjectivity in psychopathological conditions such as depression and feelings of disconnectedness, loneliness, and even shame are common in both cases.

Scholar Entangled: The Unattainable Detachment in Social Inquiry

The practice of social studies continues to be a complicated scientific endeavor. From an epistemological point of view, the social sciences, unlike the natural sciences, do not conform to the predominant definition of science. The existing differences among expositions of “science,” “inquiry,” and “studies” lie with the contested role of the intellectual who is embarked on understanding the social realm. The “maturity” of the social sciences is usually discussed in the context of objectivity and rationality. But continuing epistemological debates would be insufficient without reference to the scholar as a human studying humans. The philosophy of science has focused mainly on the procedures of knowledge accumulation, neglecting social context and its implications for inquiry. To address this neglect, this essay sets out first to retrace doubts about the role of the scholar that emerged with the institutionalization of the social sciences at the outset of the twentieth century and then to rethink these issues in terms of recent scientific developments. What surfaces is a new, participatory role for scholars that demands responsible contextualization and a broader conception of causal stories.

Proverb as an Indicator of the Normative Behavior of the Armed Forces of Russia Officers

The purpose of the study is to understand the semantic constructions by which the Russian Armed Forces officers symbolize their attitude to social realm. For this purpose, they were asked to write their favorite proverb, to which they try to “correspond” in their behavior. The authors proceeded from the assumption that interiorized folklore type statements are life guidelines (social values) for representatives of this professional group and informal regulators of their life. The study made it possible to determine the “boundaries” of the proverbial worldview of Russian officers. Further, within the established boundaries, four groups of statements were obtained. The first is proverbs and sayings about labor, work; the second – about the reaction to external stimuli; the third is about human qualities, relationships during service, camaraderie, and interpersonal communication. The fourth is about corporatism and professional solidarity. The article describes the most significant fragments of professional military personnel’s dispositional worldview. Moreover, on the one hand, a desire to work, a willingness to endure the hardships of military service were revealed, on the other hand – a certain fatalism, a conviction that external conditions and circumstances may be insurmountable, but if you acted as the duty requires, then you are allowed not to worry about the consequences. Typical personality traits and the social identity of this professional group, recreated in the study, are determined by the peculiarities of military service, while being within the boundaries of universal human terminal values and have a constructive, solidarizing orientation.

The role of space, time and sociability in predicting social encounters

Space, time and the social realm are intrinsically linked. While an array of studies have tried to untangle these factors and their influence on human behaviour, hardly any have taken their effects into account at the same time. To disentangle these factors, we try to predict future encounters between students and assess how important social, spatial and temporal features are for prediction. We phrase our problem of predicting future encounters as a link-prediction problem and utilise set of Random Forest predictors for the prediction task. We use data collected by the Copenhagen network study; a study unique in scope and scale and tracks 847 students via mobile phones over the course of a whole academic year. We find that network and social features hold the highest discriminatory power for predicting future encounters.

The Muting of the Other: The Technological Reconfiguration of Our Auditory Experience of Others

Increasingly privatized auditory spaces resulting from the mutual engendering of auditory cultural practices and sound technologies that separated the sense of hearing and segmented acoustic spaces have had a muting effect on our experience of Others that has intensified since the advent of mobile listening devices. In Section 1 of the article, I outline features of the social realm of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries that made modern sound technologies possible and then features of the technological realm that have shaped today’s social realm – all with an eye toward our experience of other people. Then, in Section 2, I reach for a few phenomenological tools from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don Ihde to draw out the phenomenological vectors that have taken shape within the enmeshed sociotechnological context described in Section 1. Specifically, I show how technologically mediated auditory experience has been individualized and how the use of sound technologies on the go – whether wearing earphones or in a car – has had a muting effect on our experience of others.

TRADISI PEMBACAAN ASMA’ AL-HUSNA DI MASJID I’TIKAF, PEDURUNGAN KIDUL, SEMARANG (STUDI LIVING HADIS)

This article discusses a phenomenon that has become a religious tradition in Pedurungan Kidul II, Semarang. The mosque, which was originally a place of worship, has become a place of religious ritual over time. People unconsciously have carried out a habit based on al-Qur’an and hadith, specifically reciting Asma’ al-Husna. The discourse of Asma’ al-Husna has been discussed by hadith scholars who state that the hadith about people who keep Asma’ al-Husna going to heaven indirectly has its own reception when it enters the social realm. The reception turned out to have a different meaning when it was carried out by the congregation of the mosque of I’tikaf Baitul Muhajirin. The recitation of Asma’ al-Husna in the mosque originated from a takmir’s desire to introduce and broadcast the reading of Asma’ al-Husna, as time went on the assembly became wasilah to pray, establish friendship, and the names contained in Asma’ al-Husna is a provision for life for the community. This article uses a phenomenological approach and functional theory as a tool to find the meaning contained in these assemblies. Artikel ini mendiskusikan tentang sebuah fenomena yang menjadi tradisi keagamaan di Pedurungan Kidul II, Semarang. Masjid yang mulanya menjadi tempat ibadah, seiring berjalannya waktu menjadi tempat ritual keagamaan. Masyarakat secara tidak sadar telah melakukan sebuah kebiasaan berbasis Al-Qur’an dan hadis, yaitu pembacaan Asma’ al-Husna. Diskursus Asma’ al-Husna telah dibahas oleh para pensyarah hadis yang menyebutkan bahwa hadis tentang orang yang menjaga Asma’ al-Husna akan masuk surga secara tidak langsung memiliki resepsi tersendiri ketika telah masuk di ranah sosial. Resepsi tersebut ternyata memiliki makna yang berbeda ketika dilakukan oleh Jemaah Masjid I’tikaf Baitul Muhajirin. Pembacaan Asma’ al-Husna di masjid tersebut berawal dari keinginan seorang takmir untuk mengenalkan dan mensyiarkan bacaan Asma’ al-Husna, seiring berjalannya waktu majelis tersebut menjadi wasilah untuk berdoa, menjalin silaturrahim, dan nama-nama yang terdapat di dalam Asma’ al-Husna menjadi bekal hidup bagi masyarakat. Artikel ini menggunakan pendekatan fenomenologi, dan teori fungsional sebagai alat untuk menemukan makna yang terkandung di majelis tersebut.

The Social Body of Béla Balázs

Focusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.