Form Of Symbolic Action Research Articles

Ideological Vandalism of Public Statues: Copyright, The Moral Right of Integrity and Racial Justice

This paper considers the regulation of ideological vandalism by the Australian copyright and moral rights regimes in the context of the defacement of public art statues that occurred in Australia and overseas during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Statue vandalism is approached as a form of anti-racist or anti-colonial iconoclasm that contributes to discourse around previous and continuing racial inequities. Law is approached as a form of symbolic action that can consolidate the alienation and othering of vulnerable groups in public spaces. The authors investigate whether, when public statues are within the copyright term, intellectual property rights symbolically devalue anti-racist discourse by de-prioritising agonistic art encounters. It is identified that copyright’s exclusive rights do not render direct physical interventions with the statue unlawful, but that the moral right of integrity held by the statue’s creator is problematic. The moral right of integrity privileges the connection between the artist and their work as a matter of reputation, and any public interest in the graffitied counter-monument is irrelevant to a finding of infringement, which in our view justifies reform. The paper concludes that public spaces should be democratic spaces, and that intellectual property law in post-colonial states and states with a history of racial injustice should do more in support of this goal.

Исследуя знаки с Кеннетом Берком (1897–1993)

Always attuned to the dialectical relationship between literary productions and their sociohistorical contexts, the writings of Kenneth Burke refuse to essentialize literary discourse by making it a unique kind of language. This article maintains that Burke’s theory of literature and language as symbolic action is capable of encompassing both these intrinsic and extrinsic aspects without being reducible to either of them. Dramatism is his name for the theory, and its strength derives from its recognition of the necessarily ambiguous transaction between the system of signs and the frame of reference. Nevertheless, there is an essentializing tendency in Burke’s thought. Logology, a perspective on language that achieves fruition in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), is symptomatic of this tendency. I argue that there is a perceptible discontinuity between the dramatistic idea that literature and language are to be considered as symbolic action and the logological idea that words about God bear a strong resemblance to words about words. Logology— words about words—discovers in theology—words about God—the perfectionism implicit in all discourse. I conclude, however, that despite his flirtation with linguistic essentialism, Burke never loses sight of the fact that words are first and foremost agents of power, that they are value-laden, ideologically motivated, and morally and emotionally weighted instruments of persuasion, performance, representation and purpose. As a form of symbolic action in the world, literature is inextricably linked to society and history—it is not a privileged form of language that exists in its own separate and autonomous sphere.

Tecnologias em transformação: inovação e (re)produção dos objetos entre os Asurini do Xingu

Os significados e as implicações das transformações culturais relacionadas aos processos de permanência e mudança nas tecnologias de produção e uso dos objetos, nos mais diversos contextos sociais, são temas de várias pesquisas nas últimas décadas. Essas pesquisas revelaram que as permanências e mudanças nas tecnologias de produção e no uso dos objetos ocorrem em diferentes escalas ao longo do tempo e resultam de fatores sociais, econômicos, políticos e culturais específicos de cada contexto. Também evidenciaram que o entendimento das transformações nas tecnologias implica a apreensão das condições que levaram à mudança ou, ainda, a análise dos processos de inovação. Este artigo contribui com esse debate, descrevendo e analisando alguns aspectos relacionados à produção e à utilização dos objetos pelos Asurini do Xingu, um povo Tupi que vive às margens do rio Xingu, no estado do Pará. Demonstro como as inovações, nas suas práticas tecnológicas, e as apropriações dos bens ocidentais (objetos e matérias-primas), no período pós-contato, podem ser entendidas como uma possibilidade de expressão estética e criativa e, ainda, como uma forma de ação simbólica, carregada de significado identitário.

Marriage: Its Relationship to Religion, Law, and The State

This Article draws inspiration from the work of Fr. John Lynch, especially his studies of canonical influence on secular legal orders. Fr. Lynch appreciated that, in common with other legal systems, canon law was not a self-contained system of rules that should be studied in isolation from other intellectual currents. He further understood the pervasive influence canon law has had on western law generally, secular as well as sacred. While the paper's purpose is broad - to examine the relationship of religion, the state, and marriage, it is largely historical in focus and concerned with the ways in which medieval canon law both directly and through the mediation of early-modern Anglican canon law, influenced American jurists and judges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has a philosophical dimension also, in its contention that this historical record reflects an inevitable human reality - that law and religion, marriage and the state not only have historically influenced each other but that they must do so, as a condition of a healthy society. Marriage has been associated, within the western tradition, for nearly two millennia, with religious insight. In all societies, marriage is signified by some form of symbolic action or exchange; it reflects commitments not only by the individuals involved, but by larger communities, whether they be family, church, locality, or something larger or smaller than these groups. Marriage is a commitment that embraces not only the good of the parties, but points to something larger - a given society's sense of the ultimate. Law itself points to a larger substantive vision of the good. For this reason, some, like Harold Berman, argue that the law itself has a religious dimension that we deny at the risk of imperiling the soundness of a society's legal order. And this religious dimension of law, this sense that the law must embody some larger, more transcendent understanding of right and wrong, also lies behind and animates much of the contemporary debate over marriage. Legislative or judicial attempts to sever the traditional bonds among marriage, religion, and law, are, for these reasons, doomed to failure, in either the short or the long term.

The carpenter's revolt: youth, violence and the reinvention of culture in Nigeria

This paper examines the cultural repertoires of the youthful, ‘militant’ faction of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC) in Nigeria, pointing to ways in which violence and ritual can be interpreted both as an instrumentally rational strategy of power struggle and as a form of symbolic action with cultural meanings. The OPC case strongly challenges the bifurcation of tradition and modernity, given the way the group appropriate culture in negotiating Yoruba identity, while also retaining democratic rhetoric. It argues that the activities of the OPC constitute not stable, bounded manifestations of culture, but rather fluid, ambivalent and paradoxical ethnic-power relations and formations.

Social Problems as Lived Experience: A Response to Educational Theory as a Form of Symbolic Action

Social Problems as Lived Experience: A Response to Educational Theory as a Form of Symbolic Action

Educational Theory as a Form of Symbolic Action

While educational experts write about a range of topics from a variety of theoretical perspectives, many share an avid belief in causation. This faith in causeand-effect relationships gives rise, as Susanne Langer observed, to a “practical vision” that is dominated by a “literal minded conception of reality” and a matterof-fact kind of attitude. In saying this, her hope was to shed light on what literalmindedness casts in its long shadow, and her philosophical efforts are the source of my inspiration.

Health culture and the clinical encounter: Vietnamese refugees' responses to preventive drug treatment of inactive tuberculosis.

A majority of Vietnamese refugees entering the United States test positive for inactive tuberculosis (TB). In asymptomatic conditions like inactive TB, it is often difficult to obtain compliance with medical treatment. The clinical encounter has been analyzed as a form of symbolic action between doctor and patient critical to patient trust and compliance. However, it is equally, if not more, important to understand the health culture of patients, that is, the broader sociocultural context of the patient within which his or her illness is interpreted and understood. In this article I look at health culture elements that influence compliance and noncompliance by Vietnamese American clients with courses of preventive drug therapy for inactive TB. Key factors in compliance are: (1) cultural interpretations of the therapy's side effects as "hot"; (2) the role of family members and peers; and (3) community perceptions of the drug treatment. Culturally incongruent elements of the clinical encounter and the funding of community-based organizations for health education also are examined.

Pierced by Murugan's lance: ritual, power, and moral redemption among Malaysian Hindus

An analysis of the Thaipusam festival of the Hindu Tamils of Malaysia and the vows they make to the god Murugan. It explores the meaning of vow fulfilment as reflected in social, economic and political divisions in the Tamil community, and the practice of ritual as a form of symbolic action.

Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and the Structure of Value in Chinese Rituals

Chinese religion is inseparable from the entire spectrum of discourses and texts (including, in addition to written and printed texts, all kinds of rituals, shamanism, architecture, economic transactions, knowledge, even daily conversation) through which meaning is produced, reproduced, and fought for, and in which individuals create themselves socially and (which amounts to the same thing) society socializes individuals. The meaning generated in all forms of symbolic action is premised on, and perpetuates, what is almost always an unspoken, usually unconscious epistemology. I take these to be among the central insights of the deconstructionist movement in Western academia (see, for example, Sturrock, 1979). An important corollary of this view of things is that such epistemologies and the institutions in which they are embodied and reproduced depend on suppressing consciousness of their own genesis in social reproduction. This suppression is not

The dialectic of substance: Rhetoric vs poetry

Distinguishing between rhetorical and poetic forms of symbolic action, derived from the works of Kenneth Burke, this essay finds the substance of each in identification/division and in the power of entitlement. Whereas the symbolic power of poetry arises from acts of identification/division apparent within the text, the symbolic power of rhetoric arises from the acts of identification/division that extend beyond the text, implicating auditors in the action that appears there. Distinctive responses result from the unique understanding required of each form of symbolic action.

LAW AS SYMBOLIC ACTION: KENNETH BURKE'S SOCIOLOGY OF LAW*

In this paper, I present Kenneth Burke's sociology of law as a critical interactionist alternative to the now dominant functionalist sociology of law. Burke's perspective conceives of the law as a form of symbolic action that contributes much to social order. Further it ties the structure and operation of the law to the ontological symbolicity of human being. Finally I suggest that the use of this theoretical framework in research on the place of law in society will produce results that are both critical and hermeneutic.