Marker Of Membership Research Articles

Reclaiming disabled creativity: How cultural models make legible the creativity of people with disabilities

The field of creativity studies underrepresents—even excludes—creators who have disabilities. The underrepresentation partly reflects an approach that pathologizes disability. Disability as a pathology or marker of ineligibility makes the contributions of people with disabilities invisible or illegible to creativity research. However, disability operates as a marker of membership in a larger disability culture. Considering disability and creativity as cultural phenomena locates a means for including disabled creators in creativity studies. Cultural models describe creativity in terms of groups sharing values, experiences, and resources. People with disabilities participate in subcultures (e.g., deaf communities) and/or larger cultures (i.e., disability culture). Disability cultures encapsulate shared experiences and values as well as resources. In the following article, I pair three propositions from cultural creativity models with evidence from creators with disabilities to demonstrate that (a) members of disability culture experience the world in ways that generate creative expression, (b) encountering a world designed for abled bodies incites the creativity of disabled people, and (c) disabled and abled people collaboratively create. However, not all methodological approaches effectively include creators with disabilities. Qualitative approaches suit best when the researcher practices reflexivity and allows creators with disabilities the right to manage their own representation within the project.

The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation

Abstract Evolutionarily-minded scholars working on the most puzzling aspects of human cooperation-one-shot, anonymous interactions among non-kin where reputational information is not available-can be roughly divided into two camps. In the first, researchers argue for the existence of evolved capacities for genuinely altruistic human cooperation, and in their models emphasize the role of intergroup competition and selection, as well as group norms and markers of membership that reduce intragroup variability. Researchers in the second camp explain cooperation in terms of individual-level decision-making facilitated by evolved cognitive mechanisms associated with well-established self- and kin-maximization models, as well as by ‘misfires’ that may result from these mechanisms interacting with novel environments. This essay argues that the manner in which culture provides information that de-anonymizes intragroup strangers suggests that neither evolved capacities for genuine altruism nor widespread misfires are necessary to account for anonymous, one-shot cooperation.

Interest Groups, Political Communication, and Jeffrey Alexander’s Sociology of Power

This essay argues that Jeffrey Alexander’s magnum opus, The Civil Sphere, presents a valuable but curiously narrow account of how political power works in American society, especially the power of interest groups. Alexander neglects the extensive literature on the “faces of power” in political science and the classic, critical literature on “source reporting” in journalism studies, both of which offer analyses of interest-group activity and discourse that are more compelling than Alexander’s analysis. Using the example of religious interest-group politics, the essay suggests that the language a group employs is not so much a marker of membership in a “civil sphere,” as it is a strategic discourse of ordinary politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that Alexander’s civil sphere may be simply a particular vocabulary of politics rather than a separate and independent social realm.

The Dialectal Tribe and the Doctrine of Continuity

AbstractIn Australia, applicants for native title—legal recognition of proprietary interest in land devolving from traditions predating colonization—must meet a stringent standard of continuity of social identity since before the advent of Crown sovereignty. As courts and the legislature have gravitated toward an increasingly strict application of the continuity doctrine, anthropologists involved in land claims cases have found themselves rehearsing an old debate in Australian anthropology over the degree to which post-contact patterns of subsistence, movement, and ritual enactment can support inferences about life in precontact Australia. In the 1960s, at the dawn of the land claims era, a handful of anthropologists shifted the debate to an ecological plane. Characterizing Australia on the cusp of colonization as a late Holocene climax human ecosystem, they argued that certain recently observed patterns in the distribution of marks of social cohesion (mutual intelligibility of language, systems of classificatory kinship) could not represent the outcome of such a climax ecosystem and must indicate disintegration of Aboriginal social structures since contact. Foremost among them was Joseph Birdsell, for whom linguistic boundaries, under climax conditions, would self-evidently be congruent with boundaries in breeding pools. Birdsell's intervention came just as the Northern Territory Supreme Court was hearing evidence on the value of dialect as a marker of membership in corporate landholding groups in Yolngu country, and offers an object lesson in how language, race, mode of subsistence, and law come together in efforts to answer the questions “Who was here first?” and “Are those people still here?”

The social meaning and function of humour in physiotherapy practice: An ethnography

ABSTRACTAn ethnographic study was undertaken over a period of 8 months to explore the social meaning and function of humour in the practice of a team of physiotherapists in a UK National Health Service hospital. Interviews were carried out following the observations to gain the therapists' perspectives in an open critical exploration of assumptions and ideas. The analysis was iterative and followed a systematic recognised ethnographic approach. The findings revealed explicit and implicit meanings of the team's humorous interactions. Explicitly, they appeared light-hearted and enhanced camaraderie but implicitly they demonstrated the team leadership and management skills of the most senior member of the team who had an authoritative influence on the other members, and facilitated this explicit marker of membership. By hiding their concerns in humour, the team members were able to avoid a real confrontation with issues of authority and hierarchy that underscored these activities. Humour, in this instance, was used as a stabilising force to give the team a sense of certainty juxtaposed by the prevailing unpredictability of their daily activities; it was part of their professional culture to allow them to handle stressful situations and to build up a socialisation process. By creating a collective identity, the individual members came to understand the team's underlying philosophy of practice. As a resource, humour was seen to be used as a vehicle of negotiation and a catalyst for change.

Power and place

This paper explores the role of Spanish in an academic community in Southwest Texas in order to demonstrate how power, history and place affect linguistic attitudes. The changing status of Spanish from being an index of low wage paying jobs to being a marker of membership in an exclusive academic community serves as a case to investigate how power relations and history interact to shape linguistic attitudes of individuals and groups. Members of the Bilingual Creative Writing Graduate Program at the University of Texas, El Paso, were interviewed to identify the prevalent attitudes towards bilingualism, Spanish in the community and Spanish language users. A discourse analysis of the interviews revealed that participants in this community value Spanish use and bilingualism in the academic context, but have mostly negative attitudes towards local varieties of Spanish and monolingual speakers. This study demonstrates the importance of history, power and place in understanding language attitudes as shared evaluations of language users and uses.