Sociocultural Origins Research Articles

Theology of Prosperity as the Leading Ideological System of Charismatic Communities in Modern Christianity

The aim of the article is to define the doctrinal features of the theology of prosperity, its spiritual and socio-cultural origins, the reasons for its spread in the neo-Protestant environment, as well as the representation of the traditionalist views of this non-Christian phenomenon.Research methodology. The comparative method is used to distinguish the theology of prosperity from the traditional Christian doctrine.Results. In modern Protestantism and other Christian denominations, the charismatic movement that promotes itself as the correct version of Christianity is rapidly spreading. This movement does not have a clearly defined doctrine, organizationally divided into almost independent congregations, but the basis of its ideology is the common phenomenon — the theological substantiation of the necessity of the successful life and material enrichment — the theology of prosperity. The reasons for the spread of this phenomenon are both in purely Protestant features and in the aspiration of a modern man not to torture the difficult path of the spiritual perfection, but to live a prosperous and comfortable life. The theology of prosperity refers to the numerous projects for the renewal of Christian theology, which have been updated on the day of postmodern.Novelty. The theology of prosperity was first analyzed as a postmodern theological project, defined as a modernization line in Christianity, using pseudo-biblical rhetoric.The practical significance. The material in this article can be used in the preparation of the academic disciplines in religious studies and the history of contemporary culture.Keywords: theology of prosperity, neo-Christianity, charismatics, neo-Pentecostalism, ecumenism, consumer society.

Historiosophical Sources and Meanings of the Russian Philosophy of History

The article analyzes the socio-cultural and theoretical origins of the Russian philosophy of history. These origins determined the development of the philosophy of history as a special feld of philosophical knowledge. This process took place in the second half of the 19th century, a significant factor of which was the split within the cultural and spiritual unity of Russian society on the wave of Alexander II’s reforms associated with the abolition of serfdom. In this period the subject-matter of the philosophy of history was defned. In the author’s opinion, the subject-matter of the philosophy of history includes: 1) the historical process in its universal human dimensions and in “past – present – future” movement, 2) the life of society in historically concrete forms of the organization of human community, 3) historical epistemology. The article shows why the philosophy of history, formed in this research feld, was established in the public consciousness and intellectual context as historiosophy, i.e. knowledge of spiritual senses, the beginning and end of history. This philosophical-historical paradigm excluded the oppositions, on the one hand, between philosophical knowledge and historical science and, on the other hand, between the philosophy of the history and social philosophy. As the main ideas of the Russian philosophy of history during that period, the author considers the idea of the integrity of historical existence as an “organic life” (Granovsky) and the idea of the variability of the historical process, interpreted as the constant inclination of history to “permanent improvisation” (Herzen). The author pays special attention to the development of the concepts of “transitional form” and “chaos,” which provide the acceleration of the progressive movement of history and the possibility of an active and responsible participation of an individual and masses in it. The attention to this problem introduced the spiritual and moral component into the ontological basis of the historical process as well as the concept of necessity and chance, freedom and violence, revolution and evolution into the conceptual apparatus of philosophical and historical knowledge. As a result, simultaneously with the metaphysical principles, the principles of concrete historical and axiological analysis were integrated into the methodology of the philosophy of history. This approach to the analysis of the historical process has preserved its heuristic potential to the present day.

Value-based counselling: Reflections on fourteen years of psychosocial support in Afghanistan

The psychosocial and mental health support system in Afghanistan has evolved significantly over the last decades. Inge Missmahl, founder and director of the International Psychosocial Organisation gGmbH traces the history of the sector over the last fourteen years and reflects on working towards the long-term integration of biopsychosocial mental health care in the Afghan Public Health System. Health system integration was accomplished through development and training delivery of a value-based counselling approach. The approach is based on six fundamental principles which consider the sociocultural origins and context of the individual’s symptomatology, emphasises personal empowerment over pathologisation and promotes a symmetrical relationship between counsellor and client. Over 300 Afghanis were trained in this approach and qualified as psychosocial counselors and counselled over 10,000 clients in total. The work to date highlights the importance of designing long-term, applied training programmes which include self experience and qualitative supervision in psychosocial support provision.

Language deprivation syndrome: a possible neurodevelopmental disorder with sociocultural origins.

There is a need to better understand the epidemiological relationship between language development and psychiatric symptomatology. Language development can be particularly impacted by social factors-as seen in the developmental choices made for deaf children,which can create language deprivation. A possible mental health syndrome may be present in deaf patients with severe language deprivation. Electronic databases were searched to identify publications focusing on language development and mental health in the deaf population. Screening of relevant publications narrowed the search results to 35 publications. Although there is very limited empirical evidence, there appears to be suggestions of a mental health syndrome by clinicians working with deaf patients. Possible features include language dysfluency, fund of knowledge deficits, and disruptions in thinking, mood, and/or behavior. The clinical specialty of deaf mental health appears to be struggling with a clinically observed phenomenon that has yet to be empirically investigated and defined within the DSM. Descriptions of patients within the clinical setting suggest a language deprivation syndrome. Language development experiences have an epidemiological relationship with psychiatric outcomes in deaf people. This requires more empirical attention and has implications for other populations with behavioral health disparities as well.

Fear of Infection or Justification of Social Exclusion? The Symbolic Exploitation of the Ebola Epidemic

Public discourse in Western countries on the 2014 Ebola epidemic provided a unique natural opportunity to study the relationship between a disease's sociocultural representation and health policy support. Our main prediction stated that among Western citizens, support for restrictive health policies (e.g., mandatory quarantining) would be determined more through preexisting prejudice towards African immigrants than fears of Ebola infection. A questionnaire study with time‐lagged measurement of predictor and criterion variables employing a German sample (N = 218) that was heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, profession, political orientation, and income level provided clear support for this assumption. Although variables related to fear‐of‐infection were significant predictors, prejudice‐related variables explained several times more variance in participants’ support for restrictive policies. Moreover, the degree to which participants adopted prevalent beliefs regarding the sociocultural origins of Ebola (e.g., eating bushmeat) further intensified the impact of prejudice‐related variables.

Becoming Criminal: The Socio-Cultural Origins of Law, Transgression, and Deviance

Becoming Criminal: The Socio-Cultural Origins of Law, Transgression, and Deviance

Socio-cultural origins of the patterns of technological innovation: What is the likely interaction among religious culture, religious plurality and innovation? Towards a theory of socio-cultural drivers of the patterns of technological innovation

Religion shapes people's attitude of mind, education, culture and institutions of countries and likely is a main socio-cultural determinant of the patterns of technological innovation. This study analyses the process of technological innovation exploring the predominant religious culture of countries and tests the hypothesis that a higher religious plurality, a main proxy of cultural diversity, the higher the technological outputs in advanced economies. The findings show that, on average, societies with a predominance of the Protestant, Jewish and Eastern religions tend to have technological performance higher than societies with other predominant religious cultures. In addition, the statistical evidence supports de facto the hypothesis that a higher religious fractionalization, ceteris paribus, has a positive effect on technological outputs. This appears to be particularly true among richer and more democratic countries, which are mainly located in the European and North-American geo-economic areas. Further discussion is needed to understand true causality for developing a socio-economic theory of the origins of patterns of technological innovation.

From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity by Miles White (review)

IDENTITIES Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity. By Miles White. (African American Music in Global Perspective.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. [163 p. ISBN 9780252036620 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9780252078323 (paperback), $22.] Appendix, bibliography, index.In Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity, Miles White traces the ways in which racial masquerade has proven central to the development of working-class masculinities from nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy through today's performances of hip-hop. Establishing the contradictory ways that American minstrelsy objectified, fetishized, and commodified representations of in the first chapters, White's body-centered text then examines how hip-hop performance has helped to articulate new models of self and for youth and for white-and notably, for better and for worse (p. 3). Building on the foundational work of Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Lexington Books, 1992), he examines the profound consequences of minstrelsy on subsequent representations of African-American men, arguing that tropes of the brute reached an apotheosis with hip-hop culture and rap music beginning in the 1980s (p. 4). While the stoic hardness of hip-hop artists after Run-D.M.C. provided appealing images of power and self-reliance to young men, White also stresses how hiphop performance nonetheless retained notions of deviant male subjectivity as its most defining subtext, especially in the racial play of white hip-hop artists (p. 3).The pivotal turn, according to White, is a move from hard to hardcore hip-hop after N.W.A. stories of inner-city violence a commercial success (ostensibly an argument about the shiftfrom nascent gangsta rap to commercial gangsterized rap). Extending the frame of John W. Roberts's From Trickster to Bad Man (from The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom [Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl vania Press, 1989]), the author examines the ways that hip-hop eschewed the trope of the bad man folk hero for the self-interested bad nigger stereotype abhorred by whites and blacks alike. Thus, argues White, N.W.A. reformulated minstrelsy's black brute as rapper, and transformed males from the 'hood into totemic performers of a powerful masculine authenticity and identity at a time in which there appeared to be few real men left (p. 64).In the first three chapters White's book really sings. His reading of racial masquerade and its centrality to the formation of American masculinities is crafted with nuance and rife with searing insights on performances of blackness in popular music. Chapter 1, and Act: American Popular Music and the Absent Black Presence, tracks the ways that technologies from burnt cork and sheet music to grease paint and recording technologies made possible a distancing of music from its socio-cultural origins and opened the floodgates for new racial commodities (p. 9). (Each chapter title riffs on titles of influential books, here on Ralph Ellison's classic collection Shadow and Act [New York: Vintage International, 1953], which contains the relevant essay Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.) Especially instructive is the author's explanation of how the ideas of a uniquely American popular culture and normative whiteness were constructed together around (mis)representations of blackness and music. By policing the body in public space and covering music on the stage and later on the airwaves, this process simultaneously centered stereotypes of masculinity and denied the agency of masculine power to men. While he does not delve into the specific musical sleights of hand in blackface minstrelsy, his argument accurately stresses the ways that commercially available music was constructed largely without regard to African-American musical performance practice. …

Theorizing Relational Agency

Gergen's conception of human agency as a relational phenomenon and its adequacy to the tasks of psychological description and explanation are examined. A contrasting view is discussed that shows how psychologically capable agency can be rendered intelligible only by attending to its developmental emergence in historically established sociocultural contexts. It is argued that an elaborated developmental account is necessary to comprehend how psychological agency, once it has emerged, is a unique form of relational being capable of transcending its biophysical and sociocultural origins. From this perspective, agentive personhood is not simply “a social performance,” but rather, an active structuring of existence.

Sociocultural origins of Turkish educational reforms and ideological origins of late Ottoman intellectuals (1908–1930)

The modern Turkish state and society have been greatly influenced by reforms of the education system. Second Constitutional Period reforms can be viewed as the preparatory stage of Republican reforms and a time when many of the later reforms were planned and given limited application. In this way both periods contributed to the foundation of modern Turkey. The innovations pioneered by Late Ottoman intellectuals stemmed from various origins, mostly European positivists and materialist philosophers. American pragmatism was added as an ideological source during the foundation of the Republic. It can be observed that ideological trends took root from Ottoman times according to the degree that intellectuals were affected by them. In this paper, the ideological origins of educational reforms during the Second Constitution Period have been studied in relation to the influence of European philosophers on Ottoman intellectuals of the time and their ideological environments. Late Ottoman intellectuals were found to have been largely affected by France’s positivism, German’s materialism and Comte, Durkheim, Büchner and Spencer. The paper reveals how modern Turkey’s educational philosophy parameters have been shaped by these intellectuals’ ideas.

Review of Studies of How the Mind Publicly Enfolds into Being.

WILLIAM E. SMYTHE and ANGELINA BAYDALA (Eds.) Studies of How the Mind Publicly Enfolds into Being Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, 450 pages (ISBN 0-7734-6351-8, US$129.95 Hardcover) Reviewed by MATTHEW H. STEPHENS This volume contains the fruits of symposium of the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists devoted to the topic contained in the title, though the original idea was expressed by considering psyche and polis (p. viii), the two Greek terms from which our conceptions of and public largely derive. Most of the reflection does not return all the way to ancient Greece, but the essays draw deeply on historical sources, retracing the influences of contemporary thought and reminding the audience of some roads not taken. Judging from the references, the sources of inspiration for many of these essays is predominantly philosophical, with liberal borrowings from sociology, cultural studies, and political theory. Despite the complexity and range of theoretical issues discussed, the contributions are uniformly clear and engaging, credit to authors and editors alike. Henderikus Stam, in the inaugural essay, provides concise and persuasive account of the need to engage with ideas in philosophy and cognitive science, as he shows that psychology's neglect of what self denotes has led to paradoxical results. While noting that self is used as modifier to delineate some 41 categories in the PsycInfo database, the question of what, if anything, the actually is has received scant attention. Save for occasional discussions in undergraduate personality textbooks, the problem of the is all but buried, yet discussions of self-like properties allow psychologists to smuggle in cultural appropriations of the (p. 10). Stam's concluding discussion of dialogic concept of selfhood shows potential as an attempt at repairing psychology's legacy of the (p. 24). Stam's is not the only piece that adds useful background knowledge to the question of the current state of psychological concepts of the self. Several of the essays (e.g., Chapters 1, 3, and 6) provide useful summaries of historical movements in psychology and the history of ideas more generally. This suggests the volume has some pedagogical potential. There is substantial engagement with the psychological literature as well, with Harre in particular looming large. Leendert Mos' essay, Of the Historical Self, draws on the hermeneutic tradition to argue for moral identity grounded in individual agency (p. 59) (rather than self-knowledge) as the centre of our feelings of personhood. Mos' wide-ranging essay integrates great number of diverse sources, and his work shows the degree to which political thought and history depend upon astute psychological reasoning and observation. A dominant idea throughout the essays is that selfhood is to be understood hermeneutically, that is, as an interpretive activity that occurs within socio-linguistic context. As Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman argue, this position offers away of balancing individualist and collectivist perspectives. As they see it, the is a kind of reflective, interpretive understanding that emerges within, yet is underdetermined by, its sociocultural origins (p. 177). The appeal to hermeneutics further manifests itself in various contributors' attention to the nuances of dialogue, including those of social psychologists and psychoanalysts, whose inquiries into particular selves often gravitate in this direction. Randall Tonks provides several interesting case studies of persons struggling with their cultural identities as Aboriginal Canadians, and Baydala and Stam give an interesting gloss on the analyist/analysand relationship as they explicate the program of social reform initiated by the so-called Freudian Left. While the initial essays explore the Hermeneutics of Self, the latter sections of the book are devoted to Emancipatory Possibilities and Cultural Perspectives. …

Changing minds: every family in the land

It is likely that our propensity to categorise people, and then to distance ourselves from and discriminate against certain groups, has time honoured instinctive (Gilbert, 2000) as well as more recent intra-psychic (Hughes, 2000) and sociocultural origins. One campaign working party with members drawn from such fields as cultural anthropology, sociology, behavioural psychology, psychoanalysis, human biology and psychiatry is currently attempting to shed light on this complex matter. The aim is to be helpful to the main thrusts of the Campaign to reduce prejudice and discrimination.

Urban low-income African American men, HIV/AIDS, and gender identity.

In a 1993 Human Organization article, Jerome Wright called for more research on African American male sexual behavior and the risk for HIV infection. The present article is a response to that call. Wright pointed out a well-known fact of HIV/AIDS prevention programs: such programs have not been very successful in reaching low-income African American males. The present article suggests that perhaps the key to better understanding sex-related health-risk behavior is to conduct more systematic research on gender identity, and the historical and sociocultural origins of such identities. I argue that if we are truly interested in developing effective HIV/AIDS programs targeting low-income African American males, then the sociocultural "meanings" that this population attaches to AIDS-related phenomena must be understood in the broader contexts of American constructs of masculinity, and in the real and perceived experiences of black men in America. Data from several ethnographic and qualitative research projects carried out among low-income African American male and female residents of Baltimore, other parts of Maryland, and Washington, D.C. are used in support of my primary arguments.

Mythos and logos: Parallel accounts of sociocultural evolution

Recent multidisciplinary research suggests a conjunction of two distinct historical perspectives—especially among ecological theorists—that may be integrated to form a remarkable global picture of humankind's sociocultural origins. Each perspective—which I call “mythos” and “logos” respectively—may be seen as parallel accounts of our sociocultural evolution reaching back to the Paleolithic era. At some early data prior to the conventional assignment of “written history,” two separate lifestyles may be delineated. I will develop six sociocultural elements of each lifestyle—emphasizing the mythos orientation: (1) the mythos and logos orientations; (2) metaphysical underpinnings; (3) conceptions of spirituality; (4) ecological relationships; (5) social organizations; and (6) sociocultural self-images. Finally, I will discuss possible areas of further research in the human/cultural sciences.

Learning and transfer in everyday cognition

This theoretical article deals with the interrelations and sociocultural origins of everyday cognition, formal reasoning, and transfer in cognitive development. Sociocultural origins are analyzed in terms of modes of informal education and formal schooling. After reviewing studies carried out in a wide variety of cultures, we propose the development of a model that integrates structural accounts of individual development with cultural and situation-bound functionalism. The notion of representation provides a key theoretical link between sociocultural context and individual cognitive constructions. Representation of cultural instruments and cultural goals is presented as the theoretical link between individual cognition and sociocultural context, both in everyday cognition and formal reasoning. Abstract schema representations are seen as crucial to generalized transfer. The conditions that foster abstract schemas include (a) the use of a tool or procedure in a variety of problem-solving contexts, (b) reflection on the structural similarity of problems and their solutions from diverse domains, and (c) exploration of problems and their solutions under conditions of low goal specificity. When these conditions are not present, transfer is less likely to occur. This is the case for both school-based learning and everyday cognition.

'Totemism' in History: The Ritual Passage of West African Strangers

The monolithic view of culture is inadequate for understanding the transformations which take place when strangers with heterogeneous sociocultural origins meet. Problems of the plurality of codes, of switching between alternatives, and the recoding of inequality and differentiation require special conceptualisation. Drawing on the careers of a series of personal security cults, including the External Boghar cult with its extension beyond Taleland to the cocoa farms of southern Ghana, this article puts forward a general framework of regional analysis to illuminate these and other problems of boundary transcendence. It is suggested that shifts in cults from an 'exotic' to an 'indigenous' mode relate to changes in the predicament of strangers with varied conditions of cultural and political encapsulation.

Sociocultural origins of achievement motivation

A theoretical review of current work on sociocultural influences on achievement motivation is presented. Earlier research stemming from the work of David McClelland is reviewed and critically evaluated. It is suggested that the culture and personality orientation of this work, in particular, eventuates in an ethnocentric bias which prevents a full consideration of motivational and achievement possibilities in a wide range of cultural groups. An alternative conception of achievement motivation is proposed which, in addition to personality, stresses the role of contextual and situational factors. In effect, this conception starts with the assumption that all can and do exhibit the behavior that can be termed achievement motivation—it is only a question of when, where, and to what ends. The proposed alternative begins, then, to outline critical contextual factors that may be determinative, including perceived self-other attributional and normative relationships. The value of this alternative approach to achievement motivation for cross-cultural research is specifically stressed.

Essai d'étude comparative selon le milieu socio-culturel d'origine de l'acquisition de la notion d'équivalence numérique.

Aware that a child's progress at school {whether he advances from one class to the next) is strongly related to his socio-cultural origins, we set out to investigate whether the same relation ship exists between the socio-cultural background of kindergarten children and their cognive development, as described in the works of Piaget. The analysis of Piaget's concept of the conservation of numerical equivalence did not indicate any socio-cultural differences in regard to the level of cognitive development in 5 ond 6 years old children. A detailed study of the data, however, did indicate that the two groups of children employed different arguments in the responses they gave, which tended in turn to influence the manner in which the investigator questioned the children. Thus differences were found to exist in adult-child interactions.

Impact of the New Italian Regional Governments on the Structure of Power within the Parties

Introduction The conceptual underpinnings of this article relate to the long-standing, continuing argument among political scientists over the weight and attention to be given to the influence of the formal, legal institutions of government on political behavior. The study in recent years of sociocultural origins of values and comportment, of informal and nonlegal processes, and of unofficial groups and private interests has served to downgrade the earlier concentration on institutions, constitutions, laws, and jurisdictions. In the suspicion that institutions and jurisdictions have perhaps been undervalued, and that in one crucial area of political concern-the distribution of power within a party system-formal institutions could have important effects, this research on the new Italian regional governments was undertaken. Italy provides a useful test case. In 1970, twenty-two years after the Republican Constitution of 1948 provided for them,1 fifteen new regional governments of an nature were established. These were in addition to five regional governments that had been created in earlier years,2 because of the presence of ethnic and linguistic minorities or of postwar separatist movements. They include Trentino-Alto Adige, Valle d'Aosta, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sicily, and Sardinia. The fifteen ordinary regions are: Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Marches, Umbria, Latium, Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Puglie, Basilicata, and Calabria. The Constitution originally listed Abruzzi and Molise as one region, but they were separated into two by an amendment of 1964. My research was limited to a sample of the ordinary regions, since the conditions that made the others special might bias the results. My hypothesis was that the fifteen new regional governments

Review of Sociocultural origins of achievement.

Review of Sociocultural origins of achievement.