Social Rela Research Articles

Niematerialny świat Dul-dul at. O procesie zanurzania w świat Innych, o relacjach, ludziach i innych bytach


 
 
 This essay is a non-linear record of memories from the author’s anthropological field- work in southern Kyrgyzstan. The research concerns a place called Dul-dul at, a site of petroglyphs with a dominant motif of animals interpreted as a pair of horses. The area at the foot of the rock with petroglyphs is also a pilgrimage and ritual site for healing and spiritual practices. The narrative of memories shows the transformation not only of the place of research, but also of the researcher: between the first stay (in 2006) to the last (in 2019). Subsequent studies reveal the dependencies of people involved in social rela- tions on the material and non-material world of Dul-dul at. Consecutive memories reveal layers of knowledge and ignorance, and how the researcher penetrates the community of the Others and the way they perceive the world.
 
 

Brazilian Women's Filmmaking: From Dictatorship to Democracy. By Leslie L. Marsh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 248. Notes. Bibliography, Index. $85.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.

REVIEWS 571 710:). While the intent of the vaccination program regulations is to encourage people to participate, the effect is to discourage people not only from getting vaccinations but also from using the clinic at all. I-Ian/ey’s work is not meant to be a study of the ethnomedicai system itself. Rather, it is an excelient study of language use in health care. The emphasis is on the social rela- tions and communication in medical encounters and how they affect resource utiliza~ tion and healing, with the aim of uncovering the cultural and linguistic factors that complicate cross-cultural meciical care, rather than revealing Maya medical beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, more detail on the syncretism reflected in and practiced by Miriam, the nurse and Maya healer would have sharpened the analysis. Although he shows that her healer role is considered by the Maya to be a divine or a spiritual gift mandated from birth, and her manner of communication during the consultation fol- lows a Maya pattern rather than a biomedical one, the analysis would better illustrate this syncretism if there were more information concerning what it is about her beliefs or practices that derives from her training as a nurse vs. her training as an ajkun. A suggested next step would be to expand the “ethnography of polyphony” method- ology to incorporate the behaviors that accompany the verbal interaction, such as light- ing candles, burning incense, spraying with holy water, massaging, pulsing, praying, using the stethoscopc——any physical examination that might occur during the consul- tation. This would provide a type of choreography to accompany the score. Harvey makes a significant contribution, both tnethodologieally to linguistics and com- munication studies and substantively to Maya studies. It should be of interest to grad- uate students and scholars in both of these areas. Rutgers Univmity SHEILA COSMINSKY Camden, New ferxey Bmzilimz Women’: Filmma/dug: From Dz'cmto1'.r/aip to Democracy. By Leslie L. Marsh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 248. Notes. Bibliography, Index. $85.00 cloth; $28.00 paper. Women have long had an important presence in Brazilian cinema as actors, directors, and producers. Starting in the late 1910s and continuing into the early 1950s, Carmen Santos, the founder of the Brasil Vita studios, starred in several films and produced numerous others, including major works by film pioneer Humberto Mauro. Gilda de Abreu followed suit in the 19405 and 195 Os, directing or scripting such films as O Iibrio and Comgio Mmteruo. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed the emergence of major new female actors; however, women tended to remain in front of the camera during the period dominated by the Cinema Novo movement and not in directing or producing. It was only in the 1970s that the number of women directors began to increase, and that is where Leslie L. Marsh’s book begins in its attempt to provide a sense of films directed by women from that time until the mid 2000s.

Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions within the Occupy Movement

Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions withinthe Occupy Movement Molly Talcottand Dana Collins During week six of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City's Zuccotti Park, Angela Davis spoke to the Occupiers with enthusiasm in a much-circulated video. Her speech was narrated through the "people's mic" (where people repeat the speaker's words verbatim and in unison), and she issued a vital challenge to the young movement: "We have come together as the 99 percent. There are major responsibilities linked to your decision to assemble here in community. So, how can we be together? How can we be together in a unity that is not simplistic and oppressive? How can we be together in a unity that is complex and emancipatory?"1 It is this enormous yet promising challenge—the building of a complex, emancipatory unity among diverse collectives of activ ists— that has intrigued us as witnesses to the growth of the Occupy movements that sprang up in the United States in 2011 and that continue to exist, expand, and morph. As we discuss below, the ethos of masculinized resistance that is often present within such spaces, along with the very language of "occupying" used by the movement, are troubling from a transnational antiracist feminist perspective. However, we feel that it is vital to carefully peer into these spaces with a feminist curiosity that searches for openings, listens for the difficult dialogues, and glimpses the feminist and decolonial perfor mances of resistance occurring from within. FeministStudies38, no. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 485 486 Molly Talcottand Dana Collins Through our photographic analysis of the Occupy Los Angeles (OLA) movement, we ask: How are women, in particular, challeng ing the masculine, racialized, and imperial/nationalistic logics that continue to operate within some Occupy spaces? Are they contributing to the building of this complex and emancipatory unity from within the movement of the 99 percent?2 If so, how? And which women? Photographs do not capture an external or stagnant real ity; rather, as Wendy Cheng has argued in her photographic explo ration of urban political history of Los Angeles, photography is a part of a method of social storytelling, requiring the photogra pher to be a social actor among the urban spaces she seeks to repre sent.3 The photos and analytical reflections shared here arise out of our own participation in OLA—we frequently attended the OLA encampments, taught and participated in workshops at the on-site People's Collective University, and were in the encampment the night of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) raid on Novem ber 30, 2011. Dana has used photography to document OLA as well as regional labor and racial justice protests that have adopted the language and ethos of the 99 percent following the formation of OLA.4 These photographs emerge out of the performative social rela tions of political protest; they reflect interactions between a white woman photographer and the women who agree to be photo graphed.5 I (Dana) photographed widely; however, I am most inter ested as a feminist visual sociologist in how women shaped Occupy protest space, particularly given the critiques of the masculiniza tion of the movement. Social positioning shapes the very production of these photographs, as women express openness to being repre sented by a politicized woman photographer (Dana) whose visual sociological method encourages women to choosehow they will pose with their signs for the photograph. While the smiles of the women in the following photos might at first seem to relay a romanticized resistance, we interpret their posing as a forceful expression of their politicized display of bodies, signs, and presence. Our analysis below therefore combines our photographic work at OLA, our participant observation, our assessment of Occupy images and discourses as they have circulated on the Internet, and our commitment to deco lonial/antiracist feminist social transformation. Molly Talcottand Dana Collins 487 We feature imagery that represents, from our specific OLA refer ence point, reoccurring patterns that we recognize. Other settings may have different outcomes and dynamics, but we begin from the OLA context as a way to pose questions relevant to the...

Feminism, Neoliberalism, and SlutWalk

Feminism, Neoliberalism, and SlutWalk KathyMiriam By now many of us know the Toronto police officer's comment that sparked the wildfire called SlutWalk. This set of events has been lauded as "bold" and "original" by feminist columnists such as Katha Pollitt in The Nation.1 The most common defense of the name SlutWalk—when the event has been often debated—is that it attracts attention and that it is a brand that travels well. But does it really take media savvy (as Pollitt attri butes to the protestors) to utilize the same currency of patriarchal fantasy that makes mass media everywhere go round: the figure of the sexual ized, young, thin female? The idea that media savvy is praiseworthy in and of itself indicates a puzzling lack of critical analysis and an obviously instrumentalist approach to politics where the means of doing something displaces reflection on the ends. What does it mean when activists trade on the very semantics of rape culture—male fantasy—to relay a message against rape? What does it mean when the branding of a message assumes greater importance than the message, with the message itself off the table for any serious deliberation or theorizing? SlutWalk, at its core, is an example of a kind of feminism that has effectively supplanted a collective world-changing project with individ ualized empowerment. Feminism here is converted from a term refer ring to a political movement to an identity term with no content save whatever empowers the individual woman who chooses the identity. It might sound gutsy to shout along with Jaclyn Friedman, the celebrity femi nist who led chants in Boston, that we're here to demand a world in which what we do with our bodies is nobody's business. But what women actually do with our bodies is, in reality, majorly big business. Indeed, to the tune of billions, corporate investment in branding female sexuality is obvious; ever-new body-modifying and mutilating procedures are promoted as necessary for women's "self-esteem." The structural causes of how women dress Feminist Studies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 262 Kathy Miriam 263 and adorn ourselves as a class are obfuscated by the emphasis on individual self-determination. Thus a main slogan of SlutWalk—most often trum peted by women dressed in Victoria's Secret lace and stilettos—is that women should be free to choose how they dress, and it's not an invita tion to rape. While rape is of course never invited, this statement only makes sense from the most one-dimensional, flattened perspective — one that removes the individual woman from the matrices of social rela tions through which our choices are structured. If the choice of sexual self-presentation for women were such a free, unconstrained choice, why does it seem to come in only one flavor, namely, some preconceptual ized variant of the patriarchal construct of "slut"? And why does corpo rate patriarchy have such a mammoth investment in this construct? In light of these questions, a main claim of SlutWalk, "I have the pussy, so I make the rules"2 seems more like a declaration of self-deception than — as intended—self-determination. SlutWalk has been hailed as a practice of female self-determination. The problem ignored is that how a woman or girl dresses and/or sexually self-presents is more of an obligation than a choice — or it is a choice that is obliged. As so many feminists have argued, from early in girls' lives, femi ninity consists in learning to fulfill the obligation to signal sexual availabil ity to the male. Yet in a situation defined by women's sexual exploitation, sexual self-presentation is a double-bind since, whatever choice of presen tation is made by a woman, she will be punished — or sometimes both rewarded and punished.3 Women are both exhorted to self-present as sexy and yet are punished as sluts: failure to self-present as sexy is punished as prudish or as lacking worth within a system that bases women's value — and indeed very visibility — on competency in displaying sexual availabil ity (aka "sexiness") without falling into the "slut...

Innerfamiliale Beziehungen und Bildungserfolg

According to Coleman, social capital lies in the social relations between parents and children and constitutes a child's social background in addition to the family's human capital and economic resources. in this perspective, Coleman emphasizes the importance of social rela - tions as an independent third factor for the acquirement of human capital. Considering the early selection into the different types of secondary education in the educational system after fourth grade, not only effects of social relations at this decisive point in time are investigated, but also changes across time towards this transition. Therefore, using longitudinal data is of special advantage in this field of research, which is dominated by cross-sectional analyses. Applying multinomial logistic regression it is shown that structural aspects as well as pro- c ess-related aspects of the parent-child-relation have a significant effect on academic achievement. Under this perspective indicators for school-related parent-child interaction are as important as

Suizidalität im Alltagsdiskurs: populare Deutungen des "Selbstmords" im 20. Jahrhundert

?Suicidal tendencies in everyday-life discourse: Popular interpreta of suicide in the 20th Century?. Starting with gender specific suicide rates, this essay analyzes popular interpretations of suicide in the 20th century in german-speaking countries. Under the term suicidal tendencies, all thoughts, notices, attempts and committed suicides are summarized. In a first step it will be shown that suicide was for both men and women a topic of autobiographical writing. They used the German term Selbstmord in a neutral way without judging the deed morally. After this the insignificance of religion for populare interpretations of suicide will be demonstrated. The next chapter analyzes the scope of popular explications of suicidal tendencies. Focusing on Social rela tions popular explanations resembled psychoanalytic ones. That was not the case for pathologizing medico-psychiatric explanations, that did not enter eve ryday-life discourse. Instead, these explanations followed a polythetic and po lys?mie logic that will be analyzed in the third step with a methodologically extended discourse analysis. Finally, genderspecific explanations will be pre sented. Popular interpretations endowed meaning for the surviving to compre hend the suicide as legitimated means to cope with life and crisis management. The essay is based on 155 unpublished, so called popular autobiographies from Germany (without GDR), Austria and Switzerland. They were analyzed quali tatively and quantitatively.

Gibt es eine qualitative Netzwerkanalyse

Does Qualitative Network Analysis Exist??. Social network analy sis was formed and established in the 1970s as a way of analyzing systems of social relations. In this review the theoretical-methodological standpoint of so cial network (structural analysis) is introduced and the different forms of social network are presented. Structural argues that social actors and social relations are embedded in social networks, meaning that action and perception of actors as well as the performance of social rela tions are influenced by the network structure. Since the 1990s structural analy sis has integrated concepts such as agency, discourse and symbolic orientation and in this way structural has opened itself. Since then there has been increasing use of methods in network analysis. They are used to in clude the perspective of the analyzed actors, to explore networks, and to under stand network dynamics. In the reviewed book, edited by Betina HOLLSTEIN and Florian STRAUS, the twenty predominantly empirically orientated contri butions demonstrate the possibilities of combining quantitative and methods in network analyses in different research fields. In this review we ex amine how the contributions succeed in applying and developing the structural perspective, and the self-positioning of qualitative network analysis is evaluated.

Beyond attachment theory and therapy: Towards sensitive and evidence‐based interventions with foster and adoptive families in distress

ABSTRACTElements of attachment theory have been embraced by practitioners endeavouring to assist foster and adopted children and their parents. Attachment theory articulates the potential risks of experiencing multiple caregivers; emphasizes the importance of close social relationships to development; and recognizes that substitute parents may not always have close relationships with children who have experienced adversities before joining them. Attachment theory offers concerned parents what they believe to be a scientific explanation about their lack of the close, satisfying parent–child relationship they desire. Yet the scientific base of attachment theory is limited both in terms of its ability to predict future behaviours, and especially with regard to its use as the underpinning theory for therapeutic intervention with children experiencing conduct problems. There is a critical need to review the role of attachment theory in child and family services and to consider its place among other explanations for children's disturbing behaviour. An important step towards pursuing alternative approaches is for researchers and practitioners to understand the reasons the attachment paradigm appeals to so many adoptive and foster parents, given the apparent widespread prevalence of attachment‐based interventions. Such understanding might assist in the development of adoption‐sensitive uses of appropriate evidence‐based treatment approaches.

Power in International Politics

The concept of power is central to international relations. Yet disciplin- ary discussions tend to privilege only one, albeit important, form: an actor control- ling another to do what that other would not otherwise do. By showing conceptual favoritism, the discipline not only overlooks the different forms of power in inter- national politics, but also fails to develop sophisticated understandings of how global outcomes are produced and how actors are differentially enabled and constrained to determine their fates. We argue that scholars of international relations should employ multiple conceptions of power and develop a conceptual framework that encourages rigorous attention to power in its different forms. We first begin by producing a tax- onomy of power. Power is the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their circumstances and fate. This general concept entails two crucial, analytical dimensions: the kinds of social rela- tions through which power works (in relations of interaction or in social relations of constitution); and the specificity of social relations through which effects are pro- duced (specific/direct or diffuse/indirect). These distinctions generate our taxonomy and four concepts of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. We then illustrate how attention to the multiple forms of power matters for the analysis of global governance and American empire. We conclude by urging scholars to beware of the idea that the multiple concepts are competing, and instead to see connections between them in order to generate more robust understandings of how power works in international politics.

The Social Self in Japanese Philosophy and American Pragmatism: A Comparative Study of Watsuji Tetsuro and George Herbert Mead

The Japanese notion of ie (family, household) has in modern times come to represent the generalized idea of group-consciousness. Scholarly writings in the area classified as Nihonjinron (studies of Japanese uniqueness), notably works by cultural anthropologist Nakane Chie, have pointed to the group-consciousness of the ie system as a defining characteristic of Japanese society. Indeed, it is now commonplace in the recent proliferation of Nihonjinron texts to characterize Japanese corporate society in terms of such notions as familism, groupism, Japan, Inc., and so forth. However, in this study I will seek to locate the structural basis of ie or familial group-consciousness in the Japanese concept of the person. Toward this end I undertake a textual analysis of Rinrigaku (Ethics) (1937) by Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960), wherein he elaborates a Confucian/Zen model of the self as a network of familial and social rela-

Le bon voisin, le mauvais voisin: ébauche d'une sociologie de 1'6thos de voisinage

In this article, the author sets out to study how inhabitants of a neighbourhood invest part of their social stakes in neighbourly relations and realize a miniaturization of the play of conflict and integration. The neighbourhood scene is the opportunity or the pretext for expressing or trying out value systems in play in social rela tions. The author has not started out by studying these values themselves. She has preferred to come to them at the end of her study. Through concrete study, she has brought out the set of relations which make up a system and which involve general value-forming mechanisms.

The Historical Development of the Concept of Intelligence

In the historical development of capitalism differing conceptions of the foundations for social classes appear. During the phase of competitive capitalism, faculty psychology dominated the thinking of theoreticians. Its prin cipal postulate was that industriousness socially categorized individuals but that the human mind was more or less equally perceptive. In the period of monopoly capitalism an entirely new ideological conception of social relations arose. That conception was intelligence, a central theme within the pragmatism of James and Dewey. Intelligence was intended to dissolve the class struggle which intensified in the period of monopoly capitalism. The essence of intelligence is an inward- looking individualism that negated struggle as the basis for social change. In stead, intelligence postulated the irrationality of attempting to change society since society was nothing more than a sum total of an innate character, intelli gence. Lastly, intelligence was an ideological form that reflected the social rela tions of production. As such the practical application of the ideological concept, i.e., I.Q. testing, reinforced a consciousness corresponding to monopoly capital ist society.