Social Eminence Research Articles

ROLE OF MEDIA AND SOCIAL NETWORKS IN PROMOTING THE POSITION OF AFGHAN WOMEN’

This research endeavours to explore and identify the impact of media and social networks on advancing the position of Afghan women during the final year of Ashraf Ghani's presidency, prior to the Taliban's resurgence. Employing a qualitative approach, this study utilizes semi-structured interviews for data collection, and theme analysis is applied for data interpretation. The research focuses on educated women, social activists, and users of Afghan social networks as the target population. Sampling is conducted through targeted and snowball methods, resulting in 15 interviews until theoretical saturation is achieved. The findings of the study reveal divergent perspectives, categorized into two main patterns of thought: agreement and disagreement, regarding the role of media in promoting the status of Afghan women. Supporters of media's positive role highlight themes such as "leaving the traditional space," "reducing social isolation," and "modelling and identification." They advocate for the positive influence of media in enhancing the status of women. Conversely, opponent’s present themes such as the "Pathology of Media Activities," "Intra-Media Challenges," and "Causes of Media Failure," expressing scepticism about the effectiveness of media in promoting women's social eminence. The research also uncovers a noteworthy conflict between traditional religious media and secular media in Afghanistan concerning women's issues. This conflict is indicative of a virtual battle between traditional and modern media outlets in the representation of women's positions. The findings illuminate the complex landscape in which Afghanistan's media landscape operates, revealing the struggles and challenges faced in shaping public perception and discourse on the status of women. In conclusion, this research provides valuable insights into the nuanced interplay between media, social networks, and the position of Afghan women. The contrasting viewpoints and conflicts within the media landscape underscore the complexity of the societal discourse surrounding women's roles and the challenges faced in leveraging media for positive societal change.

The social supremacy of the constitution "An analytical study"

The focus of this research is on the social supremacy of the constitution, as it stands at the extent of individuals' attachment to their constitution and constitutes one of the constitutional foundations in the modern state, and through it the proper constitutional and political construction is formed in the state, due to the link between the legal system in the state and the constitutional provisions that must be applied to all legal rules in force in the state. If these laws or regulations conflicted in their texts, spirit, or objectives with the social eminence of the constitution, then the predominance or preponderance of the latter, so our research came to address this by reviewing the constitutional organization of social eminence as one of the basic elements for achieving political stability and social security. Individuals feel a sense of belonging to the homeland, and gives them the right to state protection.

A Conceptual Model of Adaptive Protective Factors for Migrant Workers

About 450 million of 1.2 billion Indians migrated within the country, according to recently released Census 2011 data. Of this, 78 million, or 15.6% of all domestic migrants, moved from rural to urban areas. This is how their numbers have changed over 2001 and where they moved. Migrant workers show an enhancement in the occurrence of stern maladaptation to the host cities due to slaughter of social eminence, inequity and parting from the family. Several migrant workers are not entitled to avail of basic facilities such as education, social security, housing and medical benefits. Using a resilience perspective, this study attempted to find out adaptive protective factors responsible for the resilience of migrant labour in the host city. Data was collected through an interview schedule by using a structured questionnaire on 240 migrant workers in the Tiruchirappalli district of Tamil Nadu. The questionnaire was constructed on demographic characteristics and different dimensions of adaptive protective factors such as structural adaptation, labour market competitiveness, opportunity for informal entrepreneurship, language acquisition and access to mobility on the seven-point Likert scale. By doing structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), it is found that favourableness in structural adaptation and opportunity for informal entrepreneurship stood out as the most predictive adaptive protection factors along with language acquisition, access to mobility and level of competitiveness in the labour market for migrant workers.

Personal Citation, Rhetorical Practice and the Reinvention of <i>Oríkì</i> Tradition

This essay responds to the shaping influence of Yoruba oriki on personal citation, a written text that constructs individual identity in contemporary time. It reads personal citation as a cultural production that is realised through performance. Through a close reading of two purposively selected citation texts, the essay examines the various angles of interpolations between this written literature and the rhetorical practice of Yoruba oriki. Specifically, it explores the use of oral features such as animated speech, histrionics, and narrative aesthetics, and direct discourse in its delivery and proposes that the construction of social eminence in personal citation depends largely on praise chants. It concludes that there is a noticeable appropriation of the linguistic and textual context of panegyric to which shows personal citation as a hybrid text that contests cultural homogeneity and textual boundaries as it operates within the logic of complementarity in its poetic reflections and linguistic manipulations.

Mann der Tat, Enterprise Culture and Ethno-preneurs: Discussing the Scope of Affirmative, Critical and Pragmatic Approaches to Entrepreneurship in Spain

Abstract This contribution suggests a classification of different anthropological contributions to entrepreneurship research. Critical approaches to entrepreneurship focus on the ideological bias of the term. As the work of Mary Douglas, they critique the methodological individualism and the utilitarian self-concept underlying the entrepreneur. Affirmative approaches, in the tradition of Joseph Schumpeter or Frederik Barth, are concerned with the definition, understanding and transformative outcomes of entrepreneurship. Pragmatic approaches use tactically the social eminence of the term by expanding it to a wide range of apparently distant topics, such as the ‘ethno-preneur’ coined by John and Jean Comaroff. To illustrate the analytical scope of each of these approaches, I discuss some of my empirical material from Spain, such as the discourse on entrepreneurship in the 2015 parliamentary elections, the case of a media entrepreneur in rural Andalusia and the politics of heritage entrepreneurship and the M...

Shakespeare and the Staging of English History by Janette Dillon (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Staging of English History by Janette Dillon Wai Fong Cheang (bio) Janette Dillon . Shakespeare and the Staging of English History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 150. $75.00. In Shakespeare and the Staging of English History, Janette Dillon aims to reconstruct stage pictures on early modern stages for selected scenes from Shakespeare's history plays. The book begins with a discussion of the opening [End Page 262] stage direction of 1 Henry VI, reasoning how an important stage property, the coffin, is borne and adorned, in what order each attendant enters, what position on the stage each character occupies, and what kind of atmosphere as a whole is created onstage. By focusing primarily on the logic of spatial allotment of both stage properties and characters, Dillon's approach to Shakespeare's history plays reflects the perspective of a professor of drama, who envisions the plays in detailed stage performances. One of the most intriguing features of the book is Dillon's claim that it centers on "the nature and meaning of performance on early modern stages" (5). Our knowledge about the actual productions of Shakespeare plays in the Renaissance is very limited because unlike written texts that may survive over time, stage productions are ephemeral without modern filming devices. Dillon mentions the existence of evidence such as "inventories of costumes and props and occasional eyewitness testimony" (1), and this circumstantial evidence has inspired her discussion. However, the main parts of her reinterpretations are still based on clues from stage directions and lines from characters within the plays. Dillon makes an apology on the very first page of the introduction by informing us that "words like 'probably' will figure frequently" (1). This apology may be considered a self-evident drawback by some critics. I have in mind the word "conjectured" that E. K. Chambers uses in his criticism of Edmond Malone's description of the sign of the Globe, and Chambers's skeptical comment, "I do not know where he got this information."1 However, just like all defenses of poetry since Aristotle, which shield the imaginary and the fictitious, Dillon's apology can be considered justifiable. She explains, at least, how she has inferred her probable stage pictures. Since even the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare has long been a subject of contention, conjectures about original Shakespearean staging practices are naturally difficult and debatable. A basic premise of the book is that space onstage parallels social relationships, not just for early modern actors but also for early modern audiences. Dillon writes that "early modern actors and audiences had a strong shared sense of 'right' and 'wrong' about position and movement in social space and were inured to the idea that spatial and kinetic practice encoded certain aspects of social relationship" (7). She adds a note here that on spatial codes in the early modern period, we can refer to her earlier study The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Nevertheless, since the premise is critical to the whole book, it requires more elaboration than this note and the two brief examples she gives subsequently—the everyday practice of children kneeling to their fathers and women sitting on the left of men (7). Actually, not only the stage but also the whole theater, with its differently priced seating and spaces (groundlings did not have seats), was encoded with meanings of social relationship. Even though Dillon pays very little attention to the immediate spatial context of the stage, from critics such as Andrew Gurr, [End Page 263] a major academic advisor to the reconstruction of the Globe in London, we learn about the spatial arrangement of the theater in the form of a circle around the stage. Gurr brings attention to the significance of this circular notion of theatrical space at the beginning of Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, where he points out that "Shakespearean playgoers were members of a crowd surrounding the speakers," and there were even some seats behind the stage indicating the occupants' "social eminence."2 This important fact about the existence of different viewing angles is only mentioned in parentheses, where Dillon uses the...

LADY YUCHI IN THE FIRST PERSON: PATRONAGE, KINSHIP, AND VOICE IN THE GUYANG CAVE

Recent research sheds new light on the importance of maternal and matrilineal kin relationships during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period. Yet accounts of women’s family lives remain rare in the historical record, and first-person accounts still rarer. The dedication of Buddhist images by women during this period provides the occasional exception to this rule. The Maitreya niche sponsored by Lady Yuchi in 495 ce in the Guyang Cave at Longmen, dedicated to her deceased son, constitutes a first-person account of her own identity and her place in her husband’s family. Despite the social eminence of her husband’s primary wife, an imperial princess, she omits the princess and her son from the family group represented in her niche. Lady Yuchi depicts instead a nuclear family group centered on herself, and privileges her own mother-son relationship over all others in commemorating her son Niujue.

“The Fearful Crimes of Ireland”: Tabloid Journalism and Irish Nationalism in The Playboy of the Western World

“The Fearful Crimes of Ireland”: Tabloid Journalism and Irish Nationalism in The Playboy of the Western World T. J. Boynton (bio) Near the beginning of act 2 of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Pegeen Mike returns to her father’s shebeen to discover her newfound beau Christy Mahon basking in the attentions of a throng of her female neighbors. After casting out her romantic competitors in a fit of jealous rage, she purges her irritation by intimating that word of his parricide has reached the ears of the authorities. She tells him, “I was down this morning looking on the papers the post-boy does have in his bag. . . . For there is great news this day, Christopher Mahon” (39). Following Christy’s panicked response—“Is it news of my murder?”—Pegeen continues to needle him: “Murder, indeed. . . . There was not, but a story filled half a page with the hanging of a man. Ah, that should be a fearful end, young fellow, and it worst of all for a man who destroyed his da, for the like of him would get small mercies. . . .” (39). Pegeen prolongs Christy’s punishment until, as he moves to flee the shebeen, she admits her charade: “I’m after going down and reading the fearful crimes of Ireland for two weeks or three, and there wasn’t a word of your murder. They’ve likely not found the body. You’re safe so with ourselves” (42). To date, critical accounts of Playboy have said little regarding what, aside from its entanglement with Anglo-Irish colonial law, appears the most salient sociological aspect of Pegeen’s report: namely its engagement with the print culture of contemporary Ireland through the medium of “the papers.” This dearth of attention is especially striking considering that contemporary Irish nationalism—routinely adduced as the most significant context for interpreting the play—identified newspapers as a primary source of Irish Anglicization. Emphasis on [End Page 230] Synge’s dramaturgy as an ethnography of Irish peasant life or on his aesthetic practice as a kind of primitivism has obscured the play’s depiction of western Ireland as already immersed in the consumption practices of metropolitan Britain. Any reading that takes seriously the relevance of Irish cultural nationalism to Playboy’s concerns, however, must take this immersion into account. In what follows, I argue that our understanding of Playboy’s aesthetic design, from its ethnographic and primitivist implications to its postcolonial ones and beyond, can be significantly enriched by doing so.1 Specifically, this essay places Playboy in the context of what recent Irish Studies texts call fin-de-siècle Ireland’s metrocolonial or semicolonial condition.2 Such terms designate the extent to which early twentieth-century Ireland had been integrated into the domestic culture of Britain even as it continued to bear markers of a properly colonial sociopolitical position. Particularly in the economic domain of consumption, Irish life had become functionally indistinguishable from that of its imperial counterpart, to the point that Irish subjects shared a common popular culture with the occupying power.3 To nationalists seeking to foment a distinct cultural identity as a precursor to independence, forms such as the music hall song, the musical comedy, the lowbrow fiction of the “penny novelette,” the “penny dreadful,” and the “shilling shocker,” as well as the tabloid fare of British periodicals and newspapers, suddenly appeared as vehicles [End Page 231] of Anglicization—and therefore of colonial hegemony. Ireland’s metrocolonial condition, a state of simultaneous identity with and difference from Britain, is aptly emblematized by the Revivalist campaign to achieve a functional cultural independence by expelling such popular-cultural media from the national marketplace. Synge’s richest play advances a very specific response to the nation’s enmeshment in the consumer economy of the British metropole. Playboy signals that its account of a parricide’s rise to and fall from social eminence is deeply engaged with contemporary concerns over the Irish consumption of British tabloid journalism. This reading suggests not only that Synge shared his contemporaries’ belief that Irish minds had become colonized by the popular-cultural forms of British capitalism but also that Playboy...

Situational Stratification: A Micro-Macro Theory of Inequality

Are received sociological theories capable of grasping the realities of contemporary stratification? We think in terms of a structured hierarchy of inequality. A prominent imagery is Bourdieu's (1984) field of economic power and a hierarchy of cultural tastes internalized in individuals, with these two hierarchies mutually reproducing one another; the image helps explain the frustrations of reformers attacking inequality by attempting to change educational attainment. Empirical researchers report on inequalities in income and wealth, education and occupation, as changing slices of a pie, and as distributional shares for races, ethnicities, genders and ages. We see an abstract scaffolding of hierarchy manifested in a shell of objective-looking quantitative data. Does this image of fixed, objective hierarchy come to grips with the realities of lived experience? The distribution of income and wealth has become increasingly unequal since 1970 (Morris and Western 1999). Yet observe a typical scene in an expensive restaurant, where the wealthy go to spend their money: Waiters greet customers informally, introducing themselves by name and assuming the manners of an equal inviting a guest into their home; they interrupt the customers to announce menu specials and advise what they should order; as Goffmanian ritual, it is the waiters who command attention for their performance while the customers are constrained to act as polite audience. Other examples: Celebrities of the entertainment world appear on ceremonial occasions in deliberately attire, unshaven, or in torn clothes; far from a demeanor giving ritual honor to the occasion, they adopt a style that a previous generation would have associated with laborers or beggars; this style, widely adopted among youth and others when occasions allow (e.g., casual Fridays at work), constitutes a historically unprecedented form of anti-status or reverse snobbery. High-ranking government officials, corporation executives, and entertainment celebrities are targets of public scandals involving their sexual lives, employment of housekeepers, use of intoxicants, and efforts at privacy; social eminence, far from providing immunity for petty derelictions, opens up the high-ranking to attacks by lower-ranking functionaries. A muscular black youth, wearing baggy pants and hat turned backwards and carrying a boom box loudly playing angry-voiced rap music, dominates the sidewalk space of a public shopping area while middle-class whites palpably shrink back in deference. In public meetings, when women and ethnic minorities take the role of spokespersons and denounce social discrimination against their group, white men of the higher social classes sit in embarrassed silence or join in a chorus of support; in public opinion-expressing and policy-making settings, it is the voice of the underdog that carries moral authority. How are we to conceptualize these kinds of events? The examples given are microevidence; my contention is that they characterize the flow of everyday life in sharp contrast to the ideal type of a macrohierarchy. The hierarchic image dominates our theories, as well as our folk concepts for talking about stratification; indeed, the rhetorical tactic of taking the morally superior stance of the underdog depends upon asserting the existence of a macrohierarchy while tacitly assuming underdog dominance in the immediate speech situation. Conflicts over the issue of so-called political correctness, which might be called authoritative imposition of special consideration for the underdog, hinge upon this unrecognized disjunction between micro and macro. In social science, we generally accord

Latent-variable models of posthumous reputation: A quest for Galton's G..

Galton's (1869) theory of genius posits an intimate correspondence between personal ability and social eminence. This connection implies that the covariance structure for multiple indicators of distinction is described by a simple single-factor model. After defining rival models that predict no traitlike consistency and stability, structural equation software programs (TETRAD and EQS) were used to test 4 alternative measurement models on 5 data sets of between 6 and 16 indicators each (28 presidents, 2,012 philosophers, 772 artists, 696 composers, and a subset of 92 composers)

For Better or for Worse . . .

For Better or for Worse . . . Bea Knodel (bio) Sinclair Lewis, in the Novels of his most satisfactorily productive decade, the 1920s, looks critically but often with incisive clarity at American life. In portraying the vulgarity and stultifying narrowness of the small town as exemplified by Gopher Prairie, the essential emptiness of the life of George F. Babbitt, or the yearnings and self-searchings of Sam Dodsworth as he measures the American experience against the European, Lewis was also portraying marriages—occasionally happy marriages, many humdrum marriages, and some utterly wretched marriages—and in the process he made some telling comments about what marriage meant to American wives in the first quarter of the twentieth century. If it is true, as Daniel Aaron has said, that Main Street is "a work of historical importance . . . not merely as a reflection partly unconscious, of American tastes and assumptions, but also because it helped Americans to understand themselves" (177); if The New York Times saw the central character in Babbitt as "real, alive and [End Page 555] recognizable as a known, familiar, and abundant type" (Schorer 345); and if in Dodsworth Lewis presented once again a representative type of American, "the American boy-man, the 'mythical' archetype" (Moore 160), it then seems fair to use these three novels as a means of seeing into a time now gone and of examining the lives of women in that vanished time. Happy wives are not much seen in Main Street, Babbitt, and Dodsworth. Occasionally, there are wives who at least appear to enjoy their lives and their marriages; and there are two, Vida Sherwin Wutherspoon and Bea Sorenson Bjornstam (both in Main Street), who are most definitely, most radiantly married. It may be, of course, that some of the wives who appear to be happy are simply not unhappy, an entirely different thing; but there is a quality of enjoyment of life in women such as Juanita Haydock (Main Street) and Matey Pearson (Dodsworth) that seems to argue that they find their days, their husbands, and their own roles satisfactory enough. Juanita is described as "acidulous and shrewd and cackling" (242). Her home, carefully detailed by Lewis, is new, an over-heated concrete bungalow furnished to a pitch of Gopher Prairie fashion, and she herself is "highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath mats" (90). That she sees herself as having achieved distinction as the leading light of the Young Married Set, Lewis assures us; that she sees any reason to question the absolute significance of that achievement, we are nowhere led to believe. She accepts the limitations of Gopher Prairie because she does not recognize it as having limitations. She enjoys the summers at the lake, the squabbles with the grocer, and the social eminence of the Jolly Seventeen. She is, in short, satisfied. Matey Pearson, the wife of Sam Dodsworth's longtime friend Tub, is, in almost every particular, vastly different from Juanita Haydock; but Matey, like Juanita, has apparently found happiness in an acceptance of things as they are. Fran Dodsworth may dismiss Matey as "dreadfully uninteresting. And fat!" (257), but Matey plays "a rare shrewd game of poker" (263), dances lightly, grows Zenith's most admirable dahlias, and shows herself cheerfully affectionate toward her husband, whom she says, with apparent truth, she adores. Lewis does not show us many details in the lives of Juanita and Matey or of other women who appear to find their lives and their marriages satisfactory, but the glimpses [End Page 556] he does reveal are of pleasures enjoyed, not of dull boredom or lonely pain. Lewis goes much further, however, in showing the possibilities for wives' finding happiness when, in Main Street, he describes the marriages of Vida Sherwin and Bea Sorenson. And because, Tolstoy's remark to the contrary, all happy families are not alike, it is worthwhile to explore in some detail the reasons why Vida and Bea are so happily married. Vida is thirty-nine years old when she marries Raymie Wutherspoon, and she has behind her long years of struggling with sexual "fears, longing, and guilt" (244), of knowing she is perceived as plain, the stereotypical old maid...

SAMUEL BOOTHOUSE AND ENGLISH ARTISTIC ENTERPRISE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

This article concentrates upon the Anglo-Dutch merchant Samuel Boothouse who traded from Livorno between 1625 and 1640. Whilst he never aspired to the social eminence of a Horace Mann, it is clear from his extensive correspondence that he was much courted by English travellers who depended upon him for their entrée to Florentine society.

SAMUEL BOOTHOUSE AND ENGLISH ARTISTIC ENTERPRISE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

AbstractThis article concentrates upon the Anglo-Dutch merchant Samuel Boothouse who traded from Livorno between 1625 and 1640. Whilst he never aspired to the social eminence of a Horace Mann, it is clear from his extensive correspondence that he was much courted by English travellers who depended upon him for their entree to Florentine society.

The British Food Journal Volume 60 Issue 8 1958

The cultivation of the vine, and the making and drinking of wine date back into unrecorded past history of the human race, occurring in many parts of the world; as soon as the Flood was subsided, the Scriptures tell us, Noah planted a vineyard, and the Psalmist refers to wine making glad the heart of man. But this country of ours is not a place where the vine can grow, at least with any degree of comfort; as a consequence the drinking of wine has never been a typically British habit, and up to comparatively recent times it was mainly confined to the “ upper ” classes. It used to be customary, however, among some of less elevated rank and station, particularly when it was desired to show some signs of aspiration toward, or pretence of, gentility, to keep the odd decanter of wine on or in the sideboard, for production on particular occasions and for special visitors. There had been much hard drinking in the “ good old days ”, both of spirits and malted liquors by the lower orders, and of wine by their betters, and one of the early manifestations of the Victorian conscience was a reaction against this lamentable tendency of our forebears, leading to the formation of a strong temperance movement, which has remained with us to this day, labouring with varied success. That “ wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging ”, was accepted as an awful truth in certain circles, and in them the use of wine was proscribed. But the word “ wine ” still retained a sort of cachet, having been so long associated with high life and social eminence, and the blue ribbon hostess still felt the need to remain fashionable, and to be able to offer to the occasional caller the customary glass of something genteel and comme il faut. Here was a commercial opportunity which led to the appearance on the market of “ non‐alcoholic” wines, and the Non‐conformist madam could now still say her polite “ A glass of wine?” with no qualms of conscience or straining of her temperance principles.

THE RELATION OF THE PHYSICIAN TO SANITATION.CHAIRMAN'S ADDRESS BEFORE THE SECTION ON HYGIENE AND SANITARY SCIENCE, AT THE FIFTY-FIFTH ANNUAL SESSION OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, AT ATLANTIC CITY, JUNE 7-10, 1904.

On the question of hygiene and sanitation much, if not all, of the practice of medicine rests. The nearer that the individual personally and the nearer the public or masses of individuals collectively live and conduct themselves in accordance with the conditions provided by Nature, so much less will be the need of medical interference. What asepsis is to the surgeon, perfect hygiene is to the medical practitioner. Unfortunately, however, under the stress of accomplishment of great results in every line of effort except that of health, Nature's pristine conditions are forgotten and abuse of all her natural laws follows. In the effort of the ignorant mother to improve on the diet provided by Nature, she seeks to add to the infant's strength by feeding it with all sorts of indigestible foods. The woman of knowledge, striving for social eminence, forces on her infant a diet, scientific