Essentialist Terms Research Articles

‘Obligations written in the heart’: the primacy of association and the renewal of political theology

Notions of anarchy and an artificial state-centric system underpin much of modern political and IR theory. However, the primacy of cultural association over anarchy and artifice has once again come to the fore, notably in constructivist and ‘culturalist’ approaches. The paper argues that these approaches make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the international but rest on a secular ontology that brackets religion and transcendent notions of morality and justice out of the equation. By contrast, the work of Edmund Burke offers an alternative conception of the international. Contrary to constructivism, Burke considers association not as socially constructed but as reflecting a natural order governed by customs and traditions. Such an order gives rise to ‘commonwealths of culture’ governed by a transcendent morality that for Burke is God-given. And contrary to ‘culturalist’ approaches, Burke conceptualises identity not in essentialist terms but rather as an organically evolving reality that is shaped by both ideas and material forces—notions of common humanity and universal standards of justice, which are mediated through history and embodied in particular practices. For Burke, the international requires ‘obligations written in the heart’, which are more fundamental than the formal standards of ‘papers and seals’.

Revising deference: Intuitive beliefs about category structure constrain expert deference

Abstract Concepts are grounded in intuitive theories, yet intuitive theories are often sparse and incomplete. Deferring to experts can potentially fill those gaps. Sometimes experts convey new information, such as discovering a new planet (Experiment 1 and 3). Other times they revise past conclusions, such as concluding that Pluto is actually not a planet (Experiment 2 and 3). For non-experts to maintain scientific accuracy, they need to assimilate the expert judgments in either case. However, we find that people are less likely to defer after revision than novel discovery. In each case, their essentialist intuitions explain the pattern of results. The more participants construe categories in essentialist terms, the more they reject category revision; the opposite occurs for novel discoveries. Moreover, people only reject revision when it conflicts with essentialist intuitions (Experiment 4). Thus, the same intuitive theories that encourage deference also constrain it.

The perceived stability and biological basis of religious beliefs, factual beliefs, and opinions

Previous work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit essentialism. An alternative hypothesis, however, is that some beliefs may be perceived as inherited and stable over time—characteristics associated with essentialism. In three studies, we examined two aspects of psychological essentialism regarding three different types of beliefs (religious beliefs, factual beliefs, and opinions) in 8- to 10-year-old children and adults, asking whether beliefs are seen as (a) biologically based and/or (b) stable across time. Both children and adults distinguished among belief types when considering biology; opinions were perceived to be more rooted in biology than were other beliefs. By contrast, fewer consistent differences emerged when children and adults considered stability. For example, both children and adults perceived opinions and factual beliefs to be equally changeable. Finally, although children typically perceived beliefs to be more rooted in biology than adults, more specific patterns across belief types (e.g., perceiving opinions to be more rooted in biology than religious beliefs) remained relatively stable across age groups. Thus, development and social learning may play a larger role in perceptions of the biological component of essentialism than in judgments of particular beliefs. We discuss implications for literatures on essentialism, religious cognition, and social cognitive development.

Introduction: Seamus Heaney’s Europe

Seamus Heaney’s Europe is a space of contradictions. On the one hand, there is his belief in the principle of the national and ethnic identity understood in essentialist terms. On the other hand, there is a vision of the European tradition as multi-layered and devoid of clear outlines and a stable centre. The two moments inform Heaney’s work and are examined in the context of literary fascinations and interdependencies.

The Body of the Mother in Contemporary Black Women Narratives: (Re)Writing immanence towards transcendence

Articulating class, gender and race issues, we analyze black motherhood in novels by contemporary black women writers, the harsh reality of this experience under slavery, colonization and its consequences in contemporary society. They expose the bodily aspects of labor, in deep contrast with the patriarchal, idealized images of Western motherhood; in doing so, however, they reject its characterization as a purely immanent process which defines and entraps women's body in utterly distorted, essentialist terms.

Psychological essentialism, gender, and parenthood: Physical transformation leads to heightened essentialist conceptions.

Psychological essentialism is the tendency to view entities as if they have an underlying, often invisible essence that makes them what they are (Medin & Ortony, 1989), and the presence of a genetic basis for group membership contributes to such conceptions (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011; Keller, 2005). We argue that undergoing visually salient physical transformations in the process of becoming a group member leads to particularly heightened essentialist conceptions. We test this idea in the context of parenthood. Public discourse suggests the category mother is imbued with special properties and is viewed as a deeper, more lasting, and real category than father. Such perceptions may contribute to unequal work outcomes for women relative to men. Collectively, the 5 studies reported show that mothers are perceived in more essentialist terms than fathers, and that physical changes women undergo in the process of becoming mothers play a substantial role in producing this difference. Moreover, viewing mothers as a particularly natural and real category predicted judgments that women struggle to successfully manage their roles as mothers and professionals, but only when motherhood was biological in nature. The role that observable physical transformations may play in the reification of categories is discussed.

Fictionalising music/ musicalising fictionThe integrative function of music in Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing

Twentieth-century scholars tended to describe music either in constructivist terms, as a culturally produced system of signs without real effects, or in essentialist terms, as a universal force detached from sociocultural contexts. Recently, however, the field of sound studies has raised new awareness of the fact that music is, at its core, sound. It is thus both culturally constructed and ineluctably material. Given this shift in the scholarly conception of music, a reassessment of its functions is needed. Starting from the notion that music is a complex system of cultural meanings and concrete sounds, this article investigates its integrative function, that is, the notion that music is able to connect individuals from diverse backgrounds and to integrate them into a community. Richard Powers’ novel The Time of Our Singing (2003) provides a valuable platform for reassessing the integrative function of music, as it unfolds it on two different levels at the same time. On its narrative level the novel insists on the long-term failure of music in uniting people from different racial backgrounds. Yet, by being also a piece of musicalised fiction and, hence, musical itself, the novel tests this function on its aesthetic level as well. It thus shows that, while failing to integrate socially divided people in the long run, in its aesthetic experience, at least, music is able to bring them together for as long as the performance last

What is more informative in the history of science, the signal or the noise?

In many domains of knowledge, from mechanics (McCloskey, 1983) to thermodynamics (Wiser, 1987) to astronomy (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992), it has been claimed that conceptual development in the individual resembles theory change in the history of science. Here, Kampourakis takes issue with that claim in the domain of evolution. In particular, he argues (a) that early evolutionary theorists never construed species as possessing essences and (b) that the distinction between pre-Darwinian and postDarwinian evolutionary thought is muddled and therefore an inappropriate analog for the development of evolutionary thought among today’s students of biology. (Kampourakis makes two additional arguments directed at Ware & Gelman, 2013; which I defer to Ware, this issue). My colleagues and I have argued that students’ evolutionary misconceptions resemble pre-Darwinian theories of evolution—in particular, the essentialist aspects of pre-Darwinian theories—on numerous occasions (Shtulman, 2006; Shtulman & Calabi, 2012, 2013; Shtulman & Checa, 2012; Shtulman & Schulz, 2008), and I maintain that this comparison is both empirically fruitful and theoretically meaningful. With respect to the first argument, Kampourakis notes that historians of science disagree about the veracity of the “Essentialism Story,” or the claim that Darwin’s predecessors and contemporaries essentialized biological kinds. “While it is true that scholars often wrote about the essences of life, of organs, etc.,” writes Kampourakis, “they never accepted that species had to have jointly necessary and severally sufficient conditions, or that members of a species should bear essential properties” (p. 1). Here, Kampourakis conflates two forms of essentialism: construing species in explicitly essentialist terms, which early evolutionary theorists arguably did not do, and positing theories of evolution that are inherently essentialist in their mechanisms of change, which early evolutionary theorists arguably did do (Gould, 1996; Hull, 1965; Mayr, 1982; Sober, 1980). That is,

Race matters and the emergence of class : views from selected South African university students

In 2008, the Department of Education (DoE) produced a report on social cohesion in higher education (HE) noting the importance of investigating and addressing race and student identities. Against this backdrop, this article examines how a group of black working class students at a university in KwaZulu-Natal talk about race. Despite widening participation of black students at the university, class, language and space were invoked during interviews including the middle class space of the 'Italian coffee shop' as entangled in the reproduction of inequalities. The analysis draws attention to the micro dynamics of class in students' understanding of race and its relation to broader social and historical forces which crystallise into sharp inequalities for working class black students. Within the university environment it is important to recognise students' differentiated experiences which serve to complicate a homogenous understanding of race. Treating all students in essentialist or undifferentiated racial terms would miss how class and race are invoked, maintained and produced within specific university settings and has important implications for the development of context specific interventions in HE.

Do Archaeological Cultures Exist?

Archaeological culture still persists as a basic analytical and interpretative concept in Serbian archaeology despite criticism. This paper presents a formal view of archaeological cultures and explores the epistemological implications of this formalization. Formal analysis of archaeological culture is achieved through logical and quantitative explication of the traditional definition of archaeological cultures. The main result of the formal analysis is that there are real patterns of formal variability of material culture that may or may not correspond to traditional archaeological cultures. These patterns are real only in the analytical sense - they are real for given input data and scale of analysis. Unlike the traditional approach where this patterns are equated with archaeological cultures which are furthered interpreted in essentialist terms or as quasi-organic entities such as ethnic groups, it is claimed here that discovered patterns are only the starting point – the empirical situation that needs to be accounted for in anthropological an historical terms. This paper shows how patterns that are traditionally identified as archaeological cultures can arise as a consequence of an entire range of processes – different social and historical realities. The main conclusion is that the traditional concept of archaeological culture is not useful neither as analytical or interpretative tools for two reasons: 1) traditional cultures are subjectively defined entities with no theoretical justification for the criteria used in their definition 2) the empirical pattern cannot be an explanation in itself because it is the thing that needs to be explained. Cultural evolutionary (transmission) theory is proposed as a general framework for defining and interpreting patterns of formal variability of material culture in time and space.

Germans, Hungarians and the Zigeunerkapelle: performing national enmity in late nineteenth-century Transylvania

ABSTRACTFor at least two and a half centuries, the ‘Gypsy as musical performer’ has been one of the principal stereotypes of the Roma, and a symbol of a ‘backward’ Eastern Europe in western narratives. The association between Hungarian culture and Romani musical performance, when embraced, might be understood as a consequence of the triumph of Romanticism in European cultures or, on the other hand, when rejected, as a casualty of the dominant role that positivism came to play in ideological and intellectual discourses. The national paradigm, which by definition acted in an exclusive fashion, enforced boundaries between in-group audiences and foreign listeners. In this study, Zăloagă attempts to go beyond the musicological literature and trace the effects of the representation of the Hungarian-Roma ‘cultural hybrid’ on readers of the German-language press. He highlights the way narratives about Gypsy performances came to be regarded as a call to rebellion among Hungarians who were suspected of covertly using the Roma as a vehicle for the articulation of their own nationalism. More specifically, he looks at how ethnic Germans in Transylvania referred to this narrative association in highly essentialist terms in order to attack their political opponents and, consequently, affirm their belonging both to an elitist national Germanic canon and to the non-chauvinistic official policy of the Habsburgs.

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Ottoman Beirut: Crisis, History, and Sectarian Memory

History writing is a powerful tool in the construction of collective memory. Typically in postcolonial states, history is linked to a national project. Methods and tropes of national history writing aim to create or reinforce a sense of shared identity rooted in past experience. Particular historical actors are valorized and emphasized, as they become protagonists of the national narrative. Often the outlines of the present-day state are anachronistically projected backward as part of attempts to construct a modern national identity. Lebanon's contested history offers a window—or indeed a laboratory—for considering the uses of history in addressing issues of subnational identity. Alongside attempts to construct a national Lebanese narrative rooted in the politics and history of the country's Christian and Druze mountain communities, there exists a counternarrative of the major coastal cities and their predominantly Sunni Muslim populations. Shifting the geographic focus this way means that some of the same tropes and methods used to construct putative national histories can be applied to develop subnational sectarian narratives. This article studies the 1980s-era output of a prolific Sunni Muslim historian of Ottoman Beirut, Hassan Hallak. Hallak's construction of history is interesting by virtue of his close links to Beirut's Sunni communal power structure. His books, published during a period of crisis and trauma in Beirut's and Lebanon's modern experience, paint Beirut in essentialist terms as a timeless Arab and Muslim space. Ottoman-era materials provide the documentary and material evidence to support this interpretation or claim. The present article explores and analyzes Hallak's invocation of the Ottoman past to support a confessionally partisan vision of Beirut's present.

Disability: a welfarist approach

In this paper, we offer a new account of disability. According to our account, some state of a person's biology or psychology is a disability if that state makes it more likely that a person's life will get worse, in terms of his or her own wellbeing, in a given set of social and environmental circumstances. Unlike the medical model of disability, our welfarist approach does not tie disability to deviation from normal species’ functioning, nor does it understand disability in essentialist terms. Like the social model of disability, the welfarist approach sees disability as a harmful state that results from the interaction between a person's biology and psychology and his or her surrounding environment. However, unlike the social model, it denies that the harm associated with disability is entirely due to social prejudice or injustice. In this paper, we outline and clarify the welfarist approach, answer common objections and illustrate its usefulness in addressing a range of difficult ethical questions involving disability.

ESSENTIALIST ARGUMENTS AGAINST DESCRIPTIVISM

This paper considers Kripke's (1972, 1980) modal arguments against descriptivism about proper names, the descriptivist reply that the meaning of a name is given by a description involving the modifier ‘actually’, and Kit Fine's (1994) distinction between necessary and essential attributes. It explains how Kripke's modal arguments can be recast in essentialist terms by appealing to Fine's distinction, and it argues that the resulting essentialist arguments are immune to the abovementioned descriptivist reply to the original modal arguments.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech? The Construction of Cochlear Implant Identity on American Television and the “New Deaf Cyborg”

Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech? The Construction of Cochlear Implant Identity on American Television and the “New Deaf Cyborg”

Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise

Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise Tony Bennett (bio) In proposing a theory of literary reproduction, Pierre Macherey distinguishes its concerns from those of a theory of literature, dismissing the latter as a chimerical quest for an impossible object. Literature, he says, does not exist except as a “historical fiction,” a construction of “the literary genre that is Criticism.” But what does exist, he continues, “and in a perfectly real way, is the literary.” What difference does he see between the two? Literature’s existence is posited in essentialist terms as consisting in a particular set of formal properties, while the literary is construed as an open-ended, dynamic set of intertextual processes which carries its form, conceived as a more fluid set of possibilities, “ahead of itself, by opening up the field of its own modifications, and of their own exuberant proliferation.” If literature consists of a definite textual corpus, the literary is “a complex of processes, dynamically articulating among themselves the labour of writing and the labour of its reproduction—and this independently of a normative ideal which would try to substitute for this ceaselessly pursued movement the illusion of an identity, a stability or a permanence.”1 What can it mean to say that literature is a fabrication, but that the literary exists in “a perfectly real way?” If the labor of a particular form of expertise (criticism) is acknowledged in the first case, what forms of expertise are involved in the processes through which the dynamic reinscriptions of the literary are effected? How are they constituted and exercised? These are the questions I pursue by considering how issues concerning the social articulations of literary and artistic phenomena might now be most usefully posed in the light of new approaches to the concerns and procedures of sociology that have been developed since the “sociology of literature” moment of the 1960s and 1970s. I begin by reviewing what I take to be the distinguishing characteristics of this moment, especially with regard to its concern with the differentia specifica of literature and/or the literary. I shall pay particular attention to the logic of explanation which interpreted these and the aesthetic more generally as a particular set of metaformal properties that was to be accounted for with reference to the organization of social relationships of various [End Page 253] kinds: between classes; the social relations of literary production; or the historical dynamics of literary and artistic fields, for example. I then review a range of subsequent intellectual developments which call into question such constructions of the relations between the literary, the aesthetic, and the social. I chiefly have in mind here the varied strands of assemblage and actor-network-theory whose commitment to flat ontologies, in which texts, devices, knowledges, techniques, and technologies interact with each other in complexly articulated material ensembles, calls into question the explanatory role attributed to the various forms in which the social was invoked in the “sociology of literature” moment. My primary interest here is in how these new theoretical settings displace earlier concerns with the aesthetic, construed as a set of metaformal properties to be given a social explanation, to focus instead on its role as a product of particular forms of expertise whose exercise is tangled up in a distinctive set of processes and apparatuses for ordering and organizing particular kinds of subjectivity. In illustrating these concerns, I look at how investigations of the relations between social, literary, and artistic phenomena might be reordered in the light of Jacques Rancière’s account of the varied “emplotments” of the relations between the “life of art and the arts of life” associated with what he calls the aesthetic regime of art.2 I shall, however, work both with and against the terms Rancière proposes for understanding the properties of this regime: with, in so far as his remarks concerning its capacity for effecting a redistribution of the sensible treat it as a historically distinctive dispositif; against, in so far as his formulations validate specific aspects of the operations of this dispositif as a form of metapolitics that transcends the mundane politics of the state, bureaucracy, and the ethical aspects of social life. By way of...

“It's Just You and Satan, Hanging Out at a Pre‐School:” Notions of Evil and the Rehabilitation of Sexual Offenders

SUMMARYNotions of “evil” are a feature of everyday discourse in civil society. Sexual offenders, individuals often labeled as “evil,” are well aware of public images of themselves and their crimes. This article examines public discourses of “evil” as they pertain to sexual offenders, and the views of sexual offenders themselves on what this means to them. The ethnographic research was undertaken in a prison unit designed for the treatment of sexual offenders. As a result, the issue of rehabilitation figured centrally in their conceptualizations of evil. While admitting to being bad, and perhaps even having committed evil acts, they generally reject the label of “evil” as understood in essentialist terms. The fundamental issue of concern for my analysis here is how secular views on the nature of evil speak to the issue of rehabilitation, an inherently human, “natural” capability. To be essentially “evil,” in their view, is to be almost nonhuman—a view shared by much of the public as well—and, therefore, beyond rehabilitation.

Cricket and modernity: international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of the Imperial Game

This introductory essay seeks to contextualize the contributions in the volume by comparing and contrasting cricket with other sports. Though not wishing to portray cricket in essentialist terms, or as temporally fixed or uncontested, the essay suggests that cricket has certain peculiar features which are not only celebrated by cricket followers and dumbfound its detractors in equal measure, but make the game particular interesting for sports studies scholars. More specifically, drawing predominantly on Allen Guttmann's schema of modern sports forms outlined in From Ritual to Record, the essay argues that particularly with reference to rationalization, specialization and the importance of equality, cricket could be said to contain many unmodern characteristics. The essay builds on these sensitizing ideas to outline the contents of the volume suggesting that four recurrent themes emerge: the importance of identity; the multiple and overlapping forms of identity; the role of cricket in fostering and challenging competing identities; and the playing out of power relations through sport. Taken together, the contributions expand our understanding of the game by inviting three forms of comparison: cultural, temporal and cross-disciplinary.

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited1

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited¹