Practices Of Sociability Research Articles

Wassail, drinchail et savoir-vivre, ou la disqualification culturelle d’une élite

In the writings of Norman and Anglo-Norman authors of the twelfth century, the pre-Conquest English aristocracy are often depicted as boisterous drunkards, and their table manners are pictured as unfit for a civilized people. On the other hand, the study of late Anglo-Saxon sociability practices shows that nobles’ table manners were more similar than not on both sides of the Channel. This article argues that Anglo Norman clerical authors, moralists first and foremost, built such an image of the pre-Conquest English in order to stigmatise the vices of their own times: first those of the common people, who still practiced cries and gestures most certainly rooted in ancient drinking customs, and those of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, whose manners they found unacceptable. A good way of condemning those manners was thus to attribute them to “the English”, that is to a former ruling class that had been displaced and scorned by the ancestors of those very aristocrats they were trying to reform.

Mobile Devices

The paper is concerned with mobile technology and its interventions on the perception of the body and the space, demanding new behavioural codes and evoking other communication patterns. This technology enables users to be always connected, creating other practices of sociability and composing the urban landscape and the body space with digital contexts. Thus, the space occupied by mobile users is no longer physical or virtual, but hybrid. Hybrid spaces are introduced, and theoretical references configure the idea that mobile technology determines specific modes of interaction, emphasising a ritual dimension. Mobile users have started to perform the same body gestures and bounded intimacies in a social context that configure a specific new bodily spatiality. The authors present artistic projects that examine aspects of significant social mobile uses, transforming users bodily states and spatial domains.

Mobile Connections: An Exploration of the Place of Mobile Phones in Friendship Relations

This paper explores the place and meaning of mobile phones within friendship relations amongst young Pakistani-British women and men. In particular it focuses on the ways in which friendship relations are transformed and reconfigured through new mobile phone technologies; and how ‘doing’ friendship on the mobile uncovers significant insight into contemporary youth cultures of masculinity and femininity. Although the majority of young people of the ‘multimedia generation’ have fully engaged with the mobile telephony revolution, there is no work which grounds mobile phone use within theoretical perspectives on friendship, in particular in different peer group cultures. We draw upon new empirical data from research in the North East of England to explore young people's perceptions and uses of mobile phones. The resulting narratives reveal interesting gendered practices of connectivity and sociability amongst the sample group and important dimensions of developing peer group identities, including diverse performance of femininities and masculinities. Building on these ideas, this paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to debates on friendship and mobile phone use. In particular, we argue for the need to ground the empirical study of young people and mobile phones more firmly within social theory: a development that contributes towards a sharpening of theoretical perspectives on mobile technologies.

FASHIONS AND FUNDAMENTALISMS IN FIN-DE-SI�CLE YEMEN: Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks

This article examines the complex relationships between changing forms of commodity production and consumption and changing styles of religiosity in Zabid, the Republic of Yemen. I examine a couple of prominent logics of veiling in Fin-de-Siecle Yemen: Some reformist women add “Islamic socks” and gloves to their already fully modest garb, while other women don chadors that decorate these garments with embroidery, making them into items of fashionable consumption and adornment. Other commodities, like a Chador Barbie that I found in Yemen's suq, are used to think through changing practices of consumption, adornment, and women's sociability in Zabid.

Searching for Virtue: Physiognomy, Sociability and Taste in Isabelle Teotochi Albrizzi's Ritratti

One of the most famous Venetian women of her time, Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1760–1836) was known not only for her salon, but also for her published works. One of these pieces, Teotochi Albrizzi's Ritratti (1807), a series of literary portraits, reveals Europe's concern over the simulation of virtue in a society beginning to judge merit by behavior and self-presentation rather than birth. Teotochi Albrizzi's portraits demonstrate the strategies used to discern character and how the author drew on ideas concerning sexual difference in the realm of aesthetics to address concerns raised by shifting practices of sociability.

Automotive Emotions

Car cultures have social, material and, above all, affective dimensions that are overlooked in current strategies to influence car-driving decisions. Car consumption is never simply about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. Through a close examination of the aesthetic and especially kinaesthetic dimensions of automobility, this article locates car cultures (and their associated feelings) within a broader physical/material relational setting that includes both human bodies and car bodies, and the relations between them and the spaces through which they move (or fail to move). Drawing on both the phenomenology of car use and new approaches in the sociology of emotions, it is argued that everyday car cultures are implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling in which emotions and the senses play a key part – the emotional geographies of car use. Feelings for, of and within cars (‘automotive emotions’) come to be socially and culturally generated across three scales involved in the circulations and displacements performed by cars, roads and drivers: embodied sensibilities and kinaesthetic performances; familial and sociable practices of ‘caring’ through car use; and regional and national car cultures that form around particular systems of automobility. By showing how people feel about and in cars, and how the feel of different car cultures generates habitual forms of automobilized life and different dispositions towards driving, it is argued that we will be in a better position to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of car consumption and the moral economies of car use.

Antropologia e Internet: quando o "campo" é a cidade e o computador é a "rede"

Artigo que apresenta uma reflexão sobre a estreita associação que atualmente se processa entre computador/Internet e condutas sociais. Um dos aspectos mais claros está relacionado ao cultivo de um tipo de sociabilidade que podemos denominar como sendo "virtual". Esse conceito surge do encontro de determinadas características. De um lado, temos a presença de práticas de sociabilidade ao "modo clássico", sendo mantida pelo encontro face a face. De outro, está presente a especificidade gerada por tal tecnologia: a presença da interface gráfica como mediador do encontro social.

The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the uses of Emulation

The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France analyses the process by which class society developed in post-revolutionary France. Focusing on bourgeois men and on their voluntary associations, Carol E. Harrison addresses the construction of class and gender identities. In their gentlemen's clubs, learned societies, musical groups, gardening clubs, and charitable associations, bourgeois Frenchmen defined a social order in which the atomized individuals of revolutionarly law could find places for themselves in reconstituted social groups and hierarchies. The practices of sociability reflected a bourgeois view of society as harmonious rather than torn by conflict. The potentially universal virtues of bourgeois masculinity provided a basis for a consensus that could protect social order from the destructive competitiveness of French political life and the industrializing economy. The sociable interaction of male citizens was the crucial bridge between the destruction of Frances's old regime and the development of a mature industrial class society.

Les manifestations de rue en France (1918-1968)

The parliamentary system deprives the street demonstration of all legitimacy. Therefore, "street demonstration" is not in France a constitutional right. Nethertheless, we have collected 15000 street demonstrations all around the country between 1918 and 1968, without any interruption, even during the German occupation. Every political party, from the left to the right, every association, every component of French society, every agglomeration was concerned. Furthermore, street demonstrations may played a decisive part in some of the main political or social French crises, in 1934 and 1968 mainly. The probleme raised by their history is to understand how they have succeeded in compelling recognition and, occasionally, in becoming of central importance in the French political system. This dissertation aims to shows that they are a substitute for lost practices of sociability, a way of social and political integration but, mostly, a political action. Its original features can't be understood without taking into account the French Revolution, its relations with street action, and the political system. The dissertaion analyses their process of "nationalization" and "naturalization". It shows how they express the integration in the national culture of people taking part in such events, how street demonstrations were able to become a way of regulation of the political system, how they were integrated by a political system and how this system was affected by them. It considers street demonstration as a symbolical substitute for the vanishing revolution, a mobilizing social myth replacing the general strike.

Les différentes façons d'être bénévole

Die verschiedenen Arten der ehrenamtlichen Tàtigkeit Ehrenamtliche Tâtigkeiten, die sich als freiwillige und unentgeltliche Widmung von Zeit definieren lassen, kônnen auf zwei Arten ausgeûbt werden: innerhalb eines Verbandes - es handelt sich dann um das formelle oder assoziative Ehrenamt - oder als hâusliche Dienste zwischen Nachbarn, Freunden oder Eltern - was als informelles Ehrenamt bezeichnet wird. Ûber die ehrenamtlichen Tâtigkeiten wuBte man in Frankreich lange Zeit nur wenig; ferner beschrânkten sich dièse geringen Kenntnisse meistens auf das formelle Ehrenamt. Die Erhebung Freizeitbetàtigung, die das Insee 1985 und 1986 durchfûhrte, ermôglicht es, die verschiedenen Praktiken abzugrenzen und Aufschlûsse ùber bestimmte Determinanten zu erhalten. Das Ehrenamt in einem Verband hat hauptsâchlich sportlichen und kulturellen Charakter und ist von der emblematischen Vorstellung, der zufolge es sich eher um soziale und karitative Tâtigkeiten handeln wùrde, recht weit entfemt. Es wird eher von Mànnern ausgeûbt und nimmt mit dem Ausbildungsniveau und der Hâufigkeit anderer gesellschaftlicher Aktivitâten zu. Es ist eher in lândlichen Gebieten und in Kleinstâdten als in GroBstâdten anzutreffen, wodurch sicherlich die unzureichenden ôffentlichen und marktorientierten Mittel, die solchen Tâtigkeiten dienen, ausgeglichen werden. Die informelle ehrenamtliche Tàtigkeit, die ebenfalls mit den anderen gesellschaftlichen Aktivitâten zunimmt, weist andere Merkmale als das formelle Ehrenamt auf und unterscheidet sich somit deutlich von ihm. Dièse allgemeinere Art der ehrenamtlichen Tàtigkeit, die hâufiger von Frauen ausgeûbt wird, hat einen grôBeren Bezug zu den sozialen Diensten im tâgiichen Leben und trâgt somit zum Austausch zwischen den Generationen bei.