Maintenance Of Social Inequalities Research Articles

Political Instrumentalization of Ethnicity and Maintenance of Social Status Quo in Multi-Ethnic Contexts

This research examines the effect of political instrumentalization of ethnicity on maintenance of social status quo in societies characterized by the ethnic heterogeneity of their populations. It defends the thesis that the objective of the manipulation of ethnic identity is not to change the system made up of dominant and dominated groups, but rather to overthrow the existing hegemony to install another one or maintain it as it is. Theoretically, it is within the framework of the instrumentalist approach of interethnic conflicts (Henderson, 2010), but it differs from it because it analyzes a second aspect of the social function of the mechanism of political instrumentalization of ethnicity: its contribution to the perpetuation of social inequalities in intragroup and intergroup relations, between members of the governing elite (dominant group) and populations (dominated group). This function is not well documented by the psychosocial literature; hence its interest for this study. From a methodological point of view, this research proceeds to a review of the constitutive works of the literature relating to the inclination of individuals in favor of maintaining social inequalities. It emerges that the political elites exploit the naivety of the populations, who live in uncertainty about reality and social exclusion, to provoke inter-ethnic tensions and serve, at worst their selfish interests, at best, the interests of their ethnic group of belonging. Thus, the political instrumentalization of ethnic groups does not only generate intergroup tensions. It also contributes to the establishment and maintenance of social inequalities within groups where it is used as a strategy for capturing material and symbolic resources.

Spatial analysis of tuberculosis and its relationship with socioeconomic indicators in a medium-sized city in Minas Gerais

ABSTRACT: Objective: To analyze the tuberculosis spatial pattern and its relationship with socioeconomic indicators, from 2008 to 2015, in a priority city for tuberculosis control by the National Tuberculosis Control Program, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. Methods: Ecological study in which the units of analysis were 81 urban regions of Juiz de Fora. Secondary data from Notifiable Diseases Information System and 2010 Demographic Census were used. Georeferenced data from 1,854 notifications were used to elaborate thematic maps in order to verify the distribution pattern of average tuberculosis rates and socioeconomic indicators within the city. Global spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) and local (Local Indicator of Spatial Association) and multiple linear regression model were estimated to analyze the relationship between the average tuberculosis incidence rate and socioeconomic indicators. Results: The average tuberculosis incidence rate was 48.3 cases/100,000 inhabitants/year. It was found that the urban regions corresponding to central regions of the city had lower rates with a progressive increase toward the urban regions representative of the most peripheral neighborhoods. All variables showed significant spatial autocorrelation. The regression model showed an association between the average tuberculosis incidence rate and the proportion of poor, household density, and aging index. Conclusion: The dynamics of tuberculosis transmission in Juiz de Fora may be explained by the maintenance of social inequality and urban space organization process.

O setor sucroenergético no Triângulo Mineiro: crescimento econômico e manutenção das desigualdades sociais nas “cidades da cana”

O trabalho visou avaliar alguns antagonismos existentes no processo de expansão das atividades do setor sucroenergético (produção de cana-de-açúcar e derivados) no Triângulo Mineiro, porção oeste do estado de Minas Gerais. Tais antagonismos se expressam através de um crescimento econômico, assentado no incremento das atividades produtivas resultante da instalação de usinas sucroenergéticas nesta fração do território, em contraste com a manutenção das desigualdades sociais e da pobreza de parcela significativa da população. Tal condição pode ser verificada particularmente nos municípios mais especializados e dependentes da cultura, cujas sedes estamos reconhecendo como “cidades da cana”. São avaliados aspectos do crescimento econômico resultante do ingresso da atividade em municípios especializados, bem como os que evidenciam a manutenção das desigualdades sociais e a produção de vulnerabilidades territoriais.
 Palavras-chave: Setor sucroenergético, Desigualdades socioespaciais, Cidades da cana, Triângulo Mineiro.

Neglected tropical diseases in Brazilian children and adolescents: data analysis from 2009 to 2013

BackgroundNeglected tropical diseases (NTDs) prevail in conditions of poverty and contribute to the maintenance of social inequality. Out of the NTDs prioritized by the Brazilian Ministry of Health, four parasitic infections require mandatory notification: acute Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, malaria, and schistosomiasis. Data on the behaviour of these NTDs in the young population are currently limited. This study seeks to analyse the epidemiological aspects of these parasitic infections in children and adolescents in Brazil.MethodsA retrospective exploratory ecological study was conducted. A spatial analysis of the cases reported between 2009 and 2013 in individuals aged between 0 and 19 years that were notified through the Health Notification Aggravation Information System (SINAN) was performed.ResultsIn total, 64,567 cases of cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis, malaria, schistosomiasis, and acute Chagas disease were recorded in the SINAN database, representing a rate of 20.15 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The average age of the cases was 12.2 years and 62.32% were male. Four hundred and three deaths related to these obligatorily reported parasites were recorded, indicating a case fatality rate of 0.62%. Visceral leishmaniasis and acute Chagas disease had the highest rates of lethality. A heterogeneous spatial distribution of the studied parasites was observed.ConclusionsThe number of cases and the lethality rate described in this study show that these diseases still represent a serious problem for public health in Brazil. This points to the need to encourage new research and the reformulation of social, economic, and public health policies aimed at ensuring better health and living conditions for all individuals, especially those among the populations considered vulnerable, as is the case of the young.

Struggles over the Use of Public Space: Exploring Moralities and Narratives of Inequality. Cartoneros and Vecinos in Buenos Aires

AbstractBased on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.

Children's digital literacy practices in unequal South African settings

Contemporary movements of people and resources across rural and urban settings, city locales and national and regional borders produce challenges for familiar ways of studying languages as located and stable systems and of literacies as standardised ways of reading and writing texts. This study contrasts children's digital communicative literacy practices in two homes in Cape Town, South Africa, showing major differences between how suburban middle-class children, on one hand, and urban township children encounter and engage with digital resources at home. Drawing on an understanding of new media as placed resources which operate in specific ways in particular contexts, this study shows these children as material, social and cognitive ‘sites’ where linguistic and sociopolitical norms are engaged with, absorbed and enacted. Rather than democratising resources, this research shows digital media as at least partially complicit in a ‘widening of the gap’ to the extent that the differential uses and availability of resources across social classes produce different imaginings of self, social ambitions and investments, and differing ways with social semiotics. Such differences translate into and contribute to the maintenance of social inequalities in school settings that coincide with language and social class divides.

Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub

Although social status plays a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of social inequalities, how status processes operate in naturalistic social contexts remains less clear. In the following article, I provide a case study of doormen—individuals who simultaneously represent status experts and status judges—at a highly exclusive nightclub to investigate how people draw status distinctions in micro-social settings. Using interview and ethnographic data, I analyze on what bases doormen evaluate the relative worth of patrons and confer the status prize of admission. I find that in making such decisions, doormen drew from a constellation of competence and esteem cues, which were informed by contextually specific status schemas about the relative material, moral, and symbolic worth of particular client groups. Moreover, the ways in which doormen used these cues and schema depended on the identity of the specific patron being evaluated. As such, I argue that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are contextually specific, culturally embedded, and interpersonally variable. Despite such variations, a patron’s perceived social connections seemed to outweigh other types of cues in admissions decisions. I conclude by discussing these findings in light of both status characteristics theory and Bourdieu’s work on the transubstantiation of capital to suggest that social capital is a powerful status cue that can, under certain conditions, be a more potent source of social distinction and status advantage, or hold a greater conversion value, in systems of stratification than other types of qualities.

The Tender Trap

In this article, I analyze elder care in Southern California through the ethnographic case of Sunta Barbara. Specifically, I investigate the power-laden work relationships that exist in private homes through Mexican immigrant women’s narratives of paid care. In these narratives women say that they contest structural conditions of work, but also the care ethics imposed by employers. In so doing workers create a “tender trap” for themselves and contribute to “stratified reproduction. ” These experiences illustrate that even in dissent, human care workers of necessity may participate in the maintenance of social inequality.

Clinical Psychology: Reinforcing Inequalities or Facilitating Empowerment?

To what extent do psychologists continue to reinforce inequalities by unquestioningly reaffirming existing oppressive theorising and practices, thereby maintaining the status quo and endorsing human rights violations? Or, to what extent do they attempt to facilitate empowerment by those who have suffered human rights violations, and do they challenge the social and political order by offering theoretical and practical alternatives towards a more just psychology? It is argued that for any psychologist committed to the humanitarian values embedded within psychology, the challenge is, first, to engage in critical reflection of their own professional and personal biases, which serve the social order and which contribute to the perpetration of abuses of power and the maintenance of social inequalities; and, second, to seek more just alternatives.

CITING THE RINCHIERA: THE POLITICS OF PLACE AND PUBLIC ADDRESS IN TRECENTO FLORENCE

The intention of this article is to study the significance of the raised platform, or ringhiera, of the Palazzo Pubblico in Florence as both an architectural and symbolic construct, and to examine how its physical situation and literary citation imagined it as the locus of legitimation in the context of continued political struggle within the nascent popular commune of the Trecento. The premise of the argument is that the consideration of the sociology of space provides an important tool in understanding the cultural construction of community, the socio-political configuration of power relations, the origins and maintenance of social inequality, and the possibilities for resistance. In assuming this perspective, the ringhiera of the Florentine Palazzo Pubblico is understood as neither an inert material place within and around which communal rituals and social relations revolved, nor a symbolic space which determined such activity. Rather, it is conceived as an active component in the continual redescription of ideological boundaries. An examination of the platform's liminality, therefore, is necessary, for whilst conferring legitimacy upon its occupants during periods of civic peace, it was the site where anxiety concerning the permanency of the prevailing political order was most clearly evidenced in times of political upheaval.

‘Are we not [Civilized] Men?’: The Formation and Devolution of Community in Northern Mexico

Abstract The paper engages several of the issues raised by Cohn and Dirks’ statement on The Nation State, Colonialism and the Technologies of Power’ (“Beyond the Fringe’1988). It presents an account of the relationship between a community of armed peasants and the state in northern Mexico. The argument is that despite cyclic periods of coincidence and antagonism between the politico‐ideological projects of state and community, an historical analysis of the experience of the people and town of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, reveals certain continuities in the forging of an alternative political‐cultural space, regardless of the character of the community's relationship to the state at any time.In Mexico ‐ as everywhere ‐ the function of the State is the maintenance of the existing order, i.e. the maintenance of social inequality. A task for the social scientist is to document and analyse the regional strategies of the State, through the study of both the federal government and the actors who receive delegated power from it…. [T]he State apparatus is also in charge of distributing differential benefits among the population. The logic of this distribution transcends rural aspects and regional boundaries and refers to the historical dynamics of the Mexican nation, which manifests itself in the configuration of the State at different periods of time and is conditioned by the existing correlation among international forces. But from such macro‐political panorama one must descend to its implications for regional development (Guillermo de la Pefia 1981: 259–260).Neither the peasants nor the State is an autonomous entity. Both are associated with other complex dependencies, with other forces and pressures. Both are stratified within and divided by interests that often contradict each other. The contradiction between the peasants and the State is not the only one in the country, and thanks to a coalition of many interests, it is not even the most apparent. However, it is the essential one in the sense that the changes that would radically and basically affect the entire situation can only be generated within it (Arturo Warman 1980:7).

Can schools further democratic practices?

Can schools further democratic practices?

Language variation and cultural hegemony: toward an integration of sociolinguistic and social theory

Although the social theory behind sociolinguistics is in need of explicit formulation and critique, basic insights from the field can be of considerable value in addressing current debates concerning social reproduction. Using sociolinguistic concepts of status and solidarity and empirical evidence from Catalonia and other community studies, this paper argues that the emphasis by reproduction theorists on formal institutions such as the school is misplaced, and that the structuralist representation of dominant, hegemonic ideologies as impenetrable does not capture the reality of working-class and minority community practices. Attention to sociolinguistic evidence by social theorists could advance the understanding of hegemonic and oppositional cultural practices in the maintenance of social inequality. [Spain, language variation, sociolinguistic theory, cultural hegemony, social reproduction]

Honor Ideology, Marriage Negotiation, and Class-Gender Domination in New Mexico, 1690-1846

The ways in which societies organize marriage provide us an important window into how economic and political arrangements are construed. When people marry, they forge affinal alliances, change residence, establish rights to sexual service, and exchange property. Besides being about the reproduction of class and power, however, marriage is about gender. The marital exchange of women gives men rights over women that women never gain over men. This feature of marriage provides a key to the political economy of sex, by which cultures organize maleness and femaleness, sexual desire, fantasy, and concepts of childhood and adulthood (Rubin, 1975: 166). With these theoretical moorings in mind, I present here an essay on the history of marriage in a colonial setting, New Mexico between 1690 and 1846, an environment in which class domination was culturally articulated and justified through hierarchies of status based on race, ethnicity, religion, and gender. My major concern will be to examine the key role that control over marriage choice played in the maintenance of social inequality, focusing on changes in the mode of marriage formation during the period under study-a decline in the incidence of parentally arranged nuptials and an increase in those freely contracted by adolescents on the basis of love and personal attraction. Rather than discussing the roots of these changes abstractly, I will explore how parents and children negotiated their behavior, the disparities of power