Sociological Patterns Research Articles

Explanation of the sociological patterns of organ donation: An analytical study.

In many countries, the consent of family members is required for organ donation from brain-dead patients who are potential candidates for organ donation. In this regard, knowing the factors affecting family members' decision for organ donation can help improve the conditions. This qualitative study aimed to identify the factors affecting family members' decision-making regarding donation of brain-dead patients' organs. This research applied qualitative research by focusing on the content analysis approach. The study started from April 2021 in Al-Zahra Hospital in Isfahan and Ayatollah Kashani in Shahrekord and continued until data saturation was reached (September 1401). Participants were assigned to one of three groups: brain-dead patients' family members who consented to organ donation, brain-dead patients' family members who declined to consent to organ donation, and people involved in the organ donation process. The sample was selected using the purposive sampling method. The data were collected using unstructured interviews and the field survey method. In this study, a qualitative content analysis with a contractual approach was used to analyze the data. The analysis of the collected data using different methods yielded 11 main categories, including 1) unresponsive healthcare system, 2) inadequate support from government systems, 3) weakness of social work organizations, 4) fear of being stigmatized, 5) cultural values, 6) symbolization, 7) perpetuation and the society's attitude, 8) development of personality system and generalism, 9) human values, 10) spiritual maturity, and 11) belief-religious challenges, leading finally to three themes, including 1) structural and functional weakness of systems, 2) sociocultural factors, and 3) worldview. The findings of the present research were able to identify the roots and social factors affecting Iranian families' decisions regarding the consent or nonconsent of brain-dead patient members. Health system administrators and organ donation committees in medical sciences universities in Iran can try to solve the shortage of donated organs by using the specific social aspects introduced in this study. It is also recommended to design effective models for more satisfaction of family members for brain death patient organ donation in healthcare based on the underlying concepts of this study.

From Symbol to Reality: Societal Decoding of Power Relations and Cultural Appropriation

This study aims to examine the influence of the state agenda on the transformation of cultural symbols, specifically focusing on the comedic skits and sketches of the Spring Festival and other similar cases. By analyzing these cultural phenomena, the research seeks to uncover the intricate and strategic ways in which the state agenda shapes and impacts societal dynamics, leading to significant and far-reaching consequences. Based on the empirical evidence presented, this article argues that the state not only participates in a basic process of selecting and modifying culture but also strategically appropriates it through its powerful apparatus, thereby establishing profound connections with the thoughts and emotions of the broader population. The presented analysis demonstrates that the interconnections between cultural symbols, cultural appropriation, and the state apparatus are indicative of more extensive sociological patterns, namely the intricate and multifaceted dynamics of power, culture, and society. The complex interaction described not only influences the production and evolution of cultural symbols but also has an indirect effect on the stability and modification of social structures, as well as the identities and conflicts among both people and groups. The investigation of this intricate interconnection and its significant impact on society will be a subject meriting additional examination in future scholarly inquiries.

Ministry Among Immigrants at Risk: Women and Children

Through its analysis of history, race, and theology, this essay offers a unique and compelling approach to the discussion of ministry among women and child migrants. The critical discussion of Asian immigration and sociological patterns will be new and challenging to many readers.

Exiles and Remnants as a Social Phenomenon

Abstract This study identifies similar sociological patterns connected with identity issues in the biblical prophetic literature concerning the Babylonian exile in and two “modern-time diasporas,” the Armenian and the Palestinian. Certain criteria were found common to the inspected cases, suggesting common identity shaping patterns that may transcend time and culture.

Game theoretical inference of human behavior in social networks

Social networks emerge as a result of actors’ linking decisions. We propose a game-theoretical model of socio-strategic network formation on directed weighted graphs, in which every actors’ benefit is a parametric trade-off between centrality measure, brokerage opportunities, clustering coefficient, and sociological network patterns. We use two different stability definitions to infer individual behavior of homogeneous, rational agents from network structure, and to quantify the impact of cooperation. Our theoretical analysis confirms results known for specific network motifs studied previously in isolation, yet enables us to precisely quantify the trade-offs in the space of user preferences. To deal with complex networks of heterogeneous and irrational actors, we construct a statistical behavior estimation method using Nash equilibrium conditions. We provide evidence that our results are consistent with empirical, historical, and sociological observations on real-world data-sets. Furthermore, our method offers sociological and strategic interpretations of random networks models, such as preferential attachment and small-world networks.

Reply to Eric Schliesser

Reply to Eric Schliesser Amy Olberding (bio) I am grateful to Eric Schliesser for his gracious response, and to Philosophy East and West and Roger Ames for hosting this discussion. The challenges currently facing the profession regarding exclusionary practices are many, and Schliesser's work at both NewAPPS and his newer blog, Digressions&Impressions, is sensitive both to how many and how complex these challenges are. Schliesser is correct that my discussion of the profession's conversational patterns is both a bit ungenerous and more than a little ambitious, asking for "revolution" in how the discipline not only talks, but operates. Likewise, Schliesser is right to point out that there are now many, and more than ever before, seeking to probe critically the profession's reflexive habits of mind and, more pertinently, unexamined replications of long-standing hierarchies and sociological patterns. Schliesser's own work on this score is particularly sensitive to several of the issues I address, albeit in different contexts. In his response, Schliesser observes that I largely neglect many of the more charitable or welcoming remarks sometimes found in the profession's discussions of Asian philosophies. To some extent, this but confesses a familiar psychological effect, the human inclination to attend most to what wounds rather than what pleases. However, it also remarks my own sense of being conflicted about the more generous gestures. Schliesser's parsing of David Chalmers' remarks about Buddhist philosophy of mind captures some of what I find dispiriting: too often even the generous gesture can unintentionally certify or "cement" hierarchies, implicitly casting Asian specialists in a subordinate role. The work of Asian specialists may be found good insofar as [End Page 1044] it is good for addressing the preoccupations of "mainstream" philosophers. However, I want here to attend to an even more troubling aspect of professional generosity, an aspect Schliesser invokes but does not explicitly address in his response: the struggle among deviant outliers in the profession with servility. The blog post about this that Schliesser references—his "On Servility in Professional Philosophy"—details a phenomenon I find at once uncomfortably familiar and uncomfortably at work in my own often ambivalent or conflicted reactions to more generous conversational gestures. The phenomenon that Schliesser describes as servility concerns how members of outlier intellectual territories may seek entry points into the "mainstream" or "core" by commending the utility of their work to those resident and working in the more prominent and prestigious areas.1 Inhabitants of deviant areas of philosophy may in effect promote responses such as Chalmers', articulating for "mainstream" peers how deviant work can profit conversations happening within the "core." That this is a servile posture is evidenced by the absence of mutuality and reciprocity: Such conversations about utility rarely extend into addressing how the "mainstream" might assist the deviant. So the risk here is that outliers working in deviant areas are positioned—indeed position themselves—akin to "research assistants" aiding others in the "grand project" of philosophy, a project presumably well under way without them. This self-subordination, then, is what Schliesser characterizes as servility, and it, too, is one of the patterns structuring professional discourse about inclusivity: insofar as deviants participate in discourse about inclusivity, it is quite commonplace to find us doing so by attempting to sell others on our usefulness in helping sort out the "grand project." For my own part, I own that anxieties about servility play an outsized role in my reactions to the more generous conversational gestures. Let me address this, then, by simply describing my own reactions to the generous gestures, the worries about servility that render me ambivalent and often conflicted. First, while I am often mildly pleased that Chinese philosophy has been useful in consideration of some philosophical issue perceived as pressing by contemporary Western-trained philosophers, I internally balk where this is all the notice it receives. For such does not merely encode a hierarchy in which Chinese philosophy serves projects devised external to it; more deeply it represents an unwarranted confidence that the discipline has already well identified what philosophical problems and challenges—whatever we include in invoking the "core" or the "mainstream"—demand our greatest attention. I am not...

Возможности ДСМ-метода для построения социологических гипотез (на примере анализа политического участия)

This article demonstrates the possibilities of the method of formalized qualitative analysis of sociological data (FQASD) for creating sociological hypotheses. FQASD is a version of the JSM Method which is tailored to solve sociological problems. The JSM Method is a logical-combinatorial (non-statistical) method based on using actual logic tools and designed for analyzing causal relations between feature combinations (object characteristics) and the sought-for effect or a variety of effects (object properties).The basic ideas underlying the philosophy of this method include the principles of empirical induction, structural analogy and abduction (in the interpretation of Charles Peirce) as a means of accepting hypotheses. The authors provide theoretical foundation and a brief description of the procedures they have developed.The main investigative question is — who are party activists in medium-sized Russian cities? An additional question — what groups of people can be considered the closest to political activists based on civic participation criteria?To answer these questions we used the FQASD method. First of all, political participation is shown by a small fraction of the voting public (which makes it impossible to use statistics).Second — we are dealing with a great number of characteristics which presumably determine the sought-for behavior (political participation) and we assume that they might have a complex effect.In addition to political activists, we’ve constructed three more groups: Civic Activists, Individual Helpers and Inactive People. The characteristics of political activists were consistently compared to the characteristics of these three groups. In such a comparison they became antipodes to each other. The most non-trivial and substantial conclusion we arrived to concerns how respondents define their own subjectivity and the subjectivity of their fellow citizens. Political activists consistently attribute social subject status to themselves and deny this status to others. In this respect they correlate with the proportion of the respondents with the weakest resource base. Civic activists, being antipodes of political activists, recognize the social subject status of their fellow citizens.The advantages of the FQASD in this and similar cases are that: 1) the results obtained were not formulated as preliminary hypotheses; 2) the results give new directions for analyzing the social activity of ordinary citizens; 3) the method demonstrated the possibility of revealing sociological patterns in small samples.

Educação social e políticas públicas de juventude: experiências socioeducativas no Brasil e em Portugal

From the binomial education and youth, this article approaches the socio-educational experiences had by young adults on social projects linked to social policies from Brazil and Portugal governments. The study is part of a research developed by the Education Postgraduate Program at Federal University of Bahia (Universidade Federal da Bahia), with an internship held at University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa). This article aims to analyze the youth’s perception of social education. Based on Youth Sociology, the paper states a qualitative business case, accomplished according to methodological procedure denominated sociological patterns. It’s discursive text based on two young Portuguese speakers’ statements, one being from Salvador, Brazil, and one from Lisbon, Portugal. The content analysis shows both young Portuguese speakers engaging to each other and establishing strong friendship relations in social projects, while critiquing conventional education. They comprehend community and neighborhood as places of belonging and youth cultural creation, and have the optimistic hope where a university degree has a place of honor.

The Lasting Impact of the ‘Sociological Moment’ on the Churches’ Discourse of ‘Secularization’ in West Germany

This paper focuses on the effect of the religious sociology on the churches’ discourse of “secularization.” The research results refer to transformations within the Catholic and Protestant Church(es) in West Germany since the 1950s. At this point the purpose is not to give comprehensive insight into that topic. Rather, a few general trends are to be considered here. The secularization discourses within the West German Churches can be described as a periodization with three stages. In the period from 1945 to the late 1950s “secularization” was used to give an orientation after the devastating experiences of the Second World War. The concept was at that stage most understood in the classical meaning of a religious decline. “Secularization” was the mirror-image of past, present, and more importantly, the future. The chance of a religious revival on the one hand and the fear of a godless communism on the other hand were the main topics of the secularization discourse in the postwar period. In the 1960s we can find a kind of “theologization” of “secularization.” Based on the work of theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, and Friedrich Gogarten it was the aim to integrate a changed understanding of “secularization” in the sense of a necessary “Verweltlichung” or “Weltlichkeit” into a “modern” and future oriented church model. The churchly debate was influenced and inspired by the general politicization of the West German society. The third period began in the 1970s, but was fully developed in the 1980s. The secularization discourse followed the trend of a scientification of the Churches. The definition of “secularization” was more and more affected by sociological patterns and the theological dimension moved into the background. The churchly discussion benefited primarily from the extension of Church Sociology to Sociology of Religions. This impact of the “sociological moment” improved the future prospects of the Churches, as long as they were willing to adapt to modern society by changing their symbolic, ritual, and institutional form. Already, at the end of the 1970s the first indications of a changed perception of the significance of religion were seen. This also involved attempts to replace the theory of secularization with more plausible accounts of the future of religion.

ДСМ-метод в качественном социологическом исследовании: основные принципы и опыт использования

This article outlines the ideology and the basic principles of the JSM Method created by V.K. Finn and his colleagues. This method already has an extensive application background when it comes to solving sociological problems. The first experiments were carried out in 1997–1998, and since then this method’s possibilities and limitations have been defined, important procedural solutions have been found which allow sociologists to explore sociological patterns based on formalized analysis of various sorts of empirical data (materials surveys, statistics, and observations). The article shows how the JSM Method in its version for solving sociological problems (formalized qualitative analysis of sociological data — FQASD) differs compared to qualitative comparative analysis, which was developed by American sociologist C. Ragin.Methodical solutions are illustrated by examples of empirical studies conducted utilizing this method. One of the tasks was situation analysis (analyzing the context of the examined process). It was fulfilled based on materials from a study of a certain integral feature of labor behavior (namely — employee “stability-loyalty”). Certain parameters which describe the labor market in the city have shown what said feature depends on. The second task was analyzing the internal structure of a certain integrated sociological feature, examining the structure of the “job satisfaction” concept as an example. A certain empirical regularity has been revealed using the JSM Method: job satisfaction may include dissatisfaction with the majority (and sometimes all) of the labor situation parameters. A conclusion is made on the possibilities of using the JSM Method in empirical sociological research. In particular, the JSM-method helps verify the validity of the meaning of those generalization concepts used by the analyst, as well as permit the inclusion of varying types of data into analysis (including non-numeric), and, finally, identify behavior determinants.

Hitmazrehutor Becoming of the East: Re-Orienting Israeli Social Mapping

Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as well as the Mizrahi discursive critique of epistemological violence guiding sociological scholarship, double consciousness and patterns of ethnic passing.

International relations between war and revolution: Wilsonian diplomacy and the making of the Treaty of Versailles

The Peace Treaties of 1919 retain a prominent place within the study of International Relations (IR).The theoretical significance of Versailles for IR can hardly be overstated. For much rests on the question of whether the post-war settlement was problematic due to its liberal nature or in spite of it. Yet, explanations as to why Versailles diplomacy was so problematic vary significantly. What were the central factors affecting policymaking at Versailles? And what does Paris Peace diplomacy tell IR theory about modern foreign policymaking processes? This article provides a critique of standard IR interpretations of Wilsonian diplomacy at Versailles, illustrating how realist and liberals’ uncritical acceptance of Wilson as the quintessential ‘idealist-liberal’ statesman glosses over a core contradiction at the heart of Wilsonian diplomacy: the wielding of power politics to transcend power politics. In doing so, it examines the effects of the Bolshevik revolution as a paradigm-rupturing event transforming the nature and dynamics of the First World War and the post-war settlement. This traces the unique sociological patterns of uneven and combined development thrown up by the war and the geopolitical problems this created for Wilson and the Allies in forging a new international order.

Family Planning Knowledge, Use and Non-use: A Cross Sectional Study in Meghalaya, India

Family planning method first started in India. There are different schemes and programme implemented in rural and urban areas of India on Family planning and target population showed good response and awareness on its uses. The study with this approach on its beneficial uses and sociological pattern of matrilineal society in Meghalaya was conducted in Meghalaya. The study uses the probability proportional to size method and sample size was 540. In each cluster of 30 was chosen in random pattern. From the result it was reflected that women participation is more in its uses and follow the common method of uses like pills but not going for modern method due to unmet of contraceptives.

Mixed Methods and the Logic of Qualitative Inference

Can quantitative evidence be valuable for qualitative research designs? Here, I first examine recent arguments by qualitative methodologists who challenge the conventional view that quantitative evidence is necessary for explanatory generalization, but note that many qualitative researchers frequently incorporate quantitative evidence in their studies, despite methodological arguments to the contrary. I then extend recent developments in mixed methods research to argue that quantitative evidence offers preliminary description of sociological patterns to be explained by qualitative investigation.

Democracy, Meritocracy and the Uses of Education

The Family Resemblances of Democracy and MeritocracyAmong dominant social and political discourses in the United States, and are both freighted with ideological, political and practical significance (Connolly, 1993). Democracy, arguably in its most ideal sense, champions a presupposed equality of persons, while meritocracy is a justification for social inequality and a venue for social mobility within class societies (Arrow, Bowles, & Durlauf, 2000; Davis & Moore, 1945; Hayes, 2012; McNamee & Miller, 2009; Sen, 2000). In common parlance, they often are used synonymously or in close association with the even more diffuse ideas of equality, fairness, justice, liberty, and so forth. Furthermore, some would argue that democracy and meritocracy are interpenetrating concepts even as democracy broadly refers to by the people, or majority consent, whereas meritocracy can be described as rule by a deserving elite.Conflations between democracy and meritocracy derive from the idealized aspirations for a more just society and the rejection of arbitrary domination by aristocracy or accident of and inheritance. Both democracy and meritocracy speak to the potential ennobling of the person according to one's individual ability, effort and virtue, as well as the collective liberties and protections. Democracy and meritocracy are incomplete projects that, in the absence of critical reflection and practice, can as easily perpetuate social inequality as promote social justice. Within the United States, private and public educational institutions-from preschool through postsecondary-are expected to function as incubators and identifiers of exceptional ability and effort. Within an ideal meritocratic model, academic performance from the earliest years of a child's life should determine exposure to comparatively enhanced intellectual nurturance within a protracted career of preparation for adult leadership and the attendant rewards of upward social mobility, social power, and material wealth (Johnson, 2006; Lareau, 2000; LeMann, 1999; McNamee & Miller, 2009; Willis, 1977, Young, 1958). The circumstances of one's birth with regard to socioeconomic status (SES), ethnicity, and gender are presumably held in abeyance as inborn talent, consistent high performance, and constant competition determine an ever self-correcting and just social order (Ainsworth & Roscigno, 2005; Bourdieu, 1973; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Davis & Moore, 1945; Hayes, 2012; Johnson, 2006; Lareau, 2000; McNamee & Miller, 2009; Willis, 1977, Young, 1958).Incidentally, one would expect that educational outcomes and comparative rates of social mobility across ethnicity, gender, and parental SES and educational attainment would serve as robust indicators of the success of the United States' meritocratic project. In fact, educational attainment has been historically championed as the most likely means for social mobility among African Americans and voluntary ethnic minority immigrant groups. Furthermore, insofar as democracy and meritocracy bear strong ideological family resemblances (Wittgenstein, 1953) as hallmarks of an equitable and just society, one might infer that a meritocracy (largely produced through educational attainment) would result in greater representation of the interests of United States citizens within the democratic political process.This article will review the dominant themes of democracy and meritocracy as ideals, ideologies, practices, and institutions. The shadow or unfinished characteristics of democratic and meritocratic practices will be explored in terms of broad historical and sociological patterns of stratification and the distribution of political and socioeconomic capital. A brief survey of the trends of access to educational opportunities and academic achievement in the United States will provide a sobering example of how uncritical receptions of democratic and meritocratic ideals simultaneously obfuscate and exacerbate the corrosive aspects of social inequality (Bourdieu, 1986; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Golden, 2007; Hayes, 2012; Kozol, 2005; LeMann, 1999; Johnson, 2006; McNamee & Miller, 2009). …

The Difficulties of Invention: On the Multiple Invention of Crime Victim Surveys in Scandinavia and the US in the Post-War Era

It is generally assumed that crime victim surveys were almost simultaneously suggested by various American research organizations and a Finnish criminologist in the mid-1960s. This coincidence apparently fits the common sociological pattern of multiple inventions. With hindsight, surveying victims of crime seems so evident an idea that it is a mystery nobody thought of it before—that is, before nearly everybody did. This mystery, however, is entirely a product of our decision to lump together as the same invention unequal contributions to a very broad problem. This hindsight bias is dissected here, using a comparison of different contributions to the application of survey methods to the study of victims of crime. When we speak of multiple inventions, we treat unequal contributions as if they were equivalent, and we become insensitive to the reasons why some have fared better than others. Only by paying attention to these differences can we come to understand why, in the case at hand, American researchers finally brought about an idea with which their Scandinavian counterparts had been toying for two decades.

Designing Health Messages to Promote Social Change

INTRODUCTIONThe following article explores course design of Health Communication, a course taught in an undergraduate liberal arts college, satisfying both communication major and public health minor course requirements. The field of health communication generally explores communication processes that inform and influence our health and healthcare. Topics include communication between providers and patients, in social and cultural communities, in health organizations and systems, and in health promotion and media (see Corcoran, 2007; du Pre, 2000; Geist-Martin, Ray, & Sharf, 2003; Thompson, Dorsey, Miller, & Parrot, 2003). Health Communication curriculum focuses specifically on relationship between health and media.Herein, I articulate how and why Health Communication integrates theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches from communication and public health to evoke individual and social change in health related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors among college students. This article is organized around three central areas of scholarship - media systems and health related content, health promotion, and pedagogy and curriculum design - to demonstrate how course achieves active learning and social change within college community through design and implementation of a public information campaign.Central to organization of health communication is its (re)position with social justice principles. Rodriguez (2006) explains that communication is seen as a transmission phenomenon involving creating, transferring, sharing, giving, expressing, or conveying of messages and meanings (p. 22). Corcoran (2007) states that problems associated with communication theories in health communication include a reductionist nature on individual change, insofar that they do not contemplate how behavior is influenced by wider structural, political, and environmental factors. Accordingly, social justice concerns are often absent from mainstream communication theories, inquiries, and pedagogies used to understand communication of health.Previous scholars offer insight into longstanding role of communication scholars in advancing social justice through teaching pedagogies, theories, research and activism (see also Artz, 2006; Frey, 2006; Rodriguez, 2006; Swartz, 2006; Wood, 1996). Essential in this scholarship is that communication is about study of power, democracy, and hegemony in society. Health Communication engages students in practice of what Mills (1959) calls sociological imagination, which links individual responsibility with social progress. Mills (1959) contends that we must understand interplay of individual and society, and how history, social structures, and sociological patterns influence personal experiences.Health Communication considers how academe becomes a resource for advancing this sociological imagination. Interconnected is a concern that students recognize and understand power struggles that exist within society and impact their own lives (Swartz, 2006). In Health Communication students investigate through media criticism and health promotion extent that media system encourages or discourages social justice and participatory democracy. Social justice pedagogies engage students directly in communication activism; with goal to promote personal and public health, social change, and media reform (Frey, 2006). Social justice is defined as the engagement with and advocacy for those in our society who are economically, socially, politically, and/or culturally underresourced (Frey, Pearce, Pollack, Artz, & Murphy, 1996, p. 110). The following section explains how students meet this goal through assessing information value of healthrelated media messages and reconstituting a health agenda that reflects these democratic aspirations for U.S. media content.MEDIA INSTITUTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF HEALTHIn Health Communication, students critically examine agenda setting function of media, to deduce extent that it may perpetuate status quo and hierarchies of power. …

Bisexual Women in Heterosexual Relationships: A Study of Psychological and Sociological Patterns: A Reflective Paper

The purpose of this study was to examine psychological and sociological patterns and behaviors of bisexual women who are in an ongoing heterosexual relationship and to determine if the variables of income, education, time of disclosure of bisexuality, sexual activity and communication levels had an effect on the satisfaction expressed by the couple in the relationship. Twenty-six couples, comprising 26 males and 26 females, completed a questionnaire and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG). This study discovered that bisexual females and their male partners maintained a satisfactory relationship, independent of the above variables. Although males behaved mostly heterosexually, they exhibited a trend toward a bisexual orientation when they indicated their ideal choices on the KSOG. The majority of the females behaved bisexually, in agreement with their choices on the KSOG. One half of the women were maintaining sexual relationships with other women while in primary heterosexual relationships. Their average sexual contact with another female per month was 1½ times. The majority of the women were satisfied with their sexual experiences with their male partner, and they were having sexual intercourse, on average, 3 times per week.

The Second Modernity and the Second Stage of Brazilian Democratic Transition

Due to current worldwide transformations in the institutional designs and in the state as a whole, it is, indeed, meaningful to understand particularities of the unique South American democratic models, which have been categorized, by several scholars, as possible solutions for European public crises. Post-modern freedom bewilders and constrains because it is absolute. It can also discourage, somehow, social institutions’ stability, development and efficacy, which are primarily elements in deliberative democracy. In this scene, individualism and citizenship clash. Social domination, through culture, and legal and political powers work to obstruct the formation of a strong public. However, this second modernity panel must suffer some adaptations to fit into South American realities, since it was built on European sociological patterns that differ from those found in developing countries.This essay intends to briefly summarize the current socio-democratic conditions in South America, particularly in Brazil, from the standpoint and temporal guide of the relatively recent government’s regimes and the transformations that it imposed. To reach this aim, I will use two elementary categories in social studies, individualism and citizenship, which are naturally and philosophically in conflict and combative in post-modern societies. I will also compare two different transitional models that took place among South American countries and then relate them to important political facts that significantly changed the history of democracy in the continent.

Ethnographic Sorcery (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnographic Sorcery James R. Brennan Harry G. West. Ethnographic Sorcery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 132. Harry West has written a short reflective follow-up to his 2005 study Kupilikula, an important ethnography of sorcery practices in the Mueda plateau of northern Mozambique during its postsocialist liberalization period in the [End Page 145] 1990s and early 2000s. Kupilikula, a Makonde-language verb meaning roughly "to invert," refers to the transcendent maneuvers of both destructive and constructive sorcerers of the Mueda plateau who create phantasms such as man-eating lions and make magical medicines in a never-ending game of one-upmanship. Where the eponymous monograph investigated kupilikula through the lens of contemporary local politics, Ethnographic Sorcery juxtaposes Muedan sorcery with the very ethnography that West himself carried out in Mozambique. Using Jose Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" as his prologue—a story where the protagonist realized he was "a mere simulacrum … a projection of another man's dreams"—West argues that the ethnographer also participated in never-ending transcendent maneuvers by attempting to gain an interpretive ascendancy over a confusing and hostile environment, only to become himself an object of the sorcerer's practice. This potentially glib proposition serves, fortunately, as a useful frame to speculate on the meanings of sorcery and participatory ethnographic fieldwork, as well as to consider the limits of symbolic anthropology. Ethnographic Sorcery addresses several vital themes of contemporary Africanist witchcraft studies and has already attracted much scholarly attention, including a published roundtable discussion (in African Studies Review 51.3 [2008], 135–47). It is a short book comprised of very short chapters that trace the arc of one ethnographer's assumptions, experiences, and epiphanies. Having given up on a preliminary project to study Muedan conceptions of the future, West began to investigate sorcery practices in the 1990s by first seeking classical sociological patterns of accusations. Yet this strategy, itself representative of an earlier anthropological literature (a classic text being Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa [1963]), yielded no discernible patterns, leading the author to embrace a symbolic approach to gain his own "interpretive ascendancy" over the subject—an interpretive strategy that remains the prevailing approach in Africanist witchcraft studies. Speaking at a conference in Mozambique, West suggested that phantasmic man-eating lions were symbols of social predation but also of nobility and power, only to be corrected by a Muedan who objected, "they aren't symbols—they're real" (p. 5). The book's great strength lies in its honest and thoughtful reckoning with this objection. West challenges anthropological strategies that interpret sorcery as metaphors for something else by countering, "whose metaphor is it?" Does the metaphor belong to the riddle-solving anthropologist who stands above the confusion and false consciousness of witchcraft believers by discerning internally coherent but objectively "wrong" social facts, or limning discursive structures otherwise invisible to Muedans who "mistook allegories [End Page 146] for identities" (p. 38)? Uncomfortable with this conceit, West instead offers an analysis of metaphor by calling on the insights of anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers. He comes to endorse the perspective of phenomenologists, who assert that reality exists "only through its apperception" (p. 46), resulting in a "life-world" made out of the meanings people give to it. From this unconventional and often revealing discussion of metaphor, West invokes the conventional and quite durable ontology of coexisting visible and invisible realms, which he argues comprise the key dimensions of the Muedan "lifeworld." The interpretive shift from symbolic anthropology to a phenomenological approach coincides in the text with a serious illness West suffers during his fieldwork, after which his recovery comes to be understood by both himself and others "in Muedan terms." The adoption of this phenomenological approach—heralded by the frequent use of expressions such as "made world," "life-world," and "(re)making of the Muedan world"—has the advantage of taking seriously the experienced reality of sorcery discourse, but at the cost of dulling the riddle-solving impulse to offer up interpretations that risk being right or wrong. What can West or his Muedan interlocutors possibly get wrong interpretively if Muedan sorcery is to be...