bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Standpoint theory, situated knowledge and the situated imagination
Authors: Stoetzler Marcel , Yuval-Davis Nira
Published: July 2003

The aim of the article is to further assess and develop feminist standpoint theory by introducing the notion of the `situated imagination' as constituting an important part of this theory as well as that of `situated knowledge'. The article argues that the faculty of the imagination constructs as well as transforms, challenges and supersedes both existing knowledge and social reality. However, like knowledge, it is crucial to theorize the imagination as situated, that is, as shaped and conditioned (although not determined) by social positioning.
Making the Economic Habitus
Authors: Bourdieu Pierre
Published: July 2003

During the war of national liberation Algeria offered a quasi-laboratory situation for analysing the mismatch between the economic dispositions fashioned in a precapitalist economy, embedded in relations of group honour, and the rationalized economic cosmos imposed by colonization. Ethnographic observation of this mismatch revealed that, far from being axiomatic, the most elementary economic behaviours (working for a wage, saving, credit, birth control, etc.) have definite economic and social conditions of possibility which both economic theory and the `new economic sociology' ignore. Acquiring the spirit of calculation required by the modern economy entails a veritable conversion via the apostasy of the embodied beliefs that underpin exchange in traditional Kabyle society. The `folk economics' of a cook from Algiers allows us to grasp the practical economic sense guiding the emerging Algerian working class at the dawn of the country's independence.
Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia
Authors: Burawoy Michael , Krotov Pavel , Lytkina Tatyana
Published: July 2003

While much has been written on the unprecedented degeneration of the Russian economy, how people survive or do not survive remains a mystery. A close 5-year tracking of workers from a liquidated furniture enterprise in Northern Russia reveals two types of survival strategy: defensive and entrepreneurial. Defensive strategies retreat to a primitive domestic economy in the face of the collapse of industry and agriculture while entrepreneurial strategies reach into the more dynamic sector of trade and service. In both cases families that manage to spread risks among multiple strategies rather than rely on singular ones do better under Russia's precipitous economic involution. By examining the deployment of inherited assets - material, social, skill and citizenship - we see how permutations of Soviet economic strategies are reenacted to survive in the post-Soviet world. Thus, as industry and agriculture have disintegrated, the fulcrum of production and redistribution has moved from factory to household, elevating women's previous role as organizer and executor of the domestic economy. At the same time that men become more marginalized in working class families they have become more dominant within the New Russian Bourgeoisie and the political descendants of the old nomenclatura. Here women are expelled from public decision-making into subordinate, often decorative positions within the household.
The Hyper-Shantytown
Authors: Auyero Javier
Published: July 2003

Ethnographic observation, archival data, surveys and newspaper reports are combined to depict the social transformation of Argentine shantytowns during the last two decades, focusing on three different kinds of violence that impact the lives and social strategies of their residents: daily interpersonal violence, intermittent state repression, and the structural violence of mass unemployment. These violences are interrelated expressions of the broader socio-economic and institutional changes that have swept Argentina as the country adopted and implemented neo-liberal economic policies. As a consequence of the withering away of the wage-labor economy, the official indifference of the state, and the breakdown of the organizational fabric of these territories, shantytowns run the risk of becoming functionally severed from the larger society.
Ire in Ireland
Authors: Scheper-Hughes Nancy
Published: July 2003

When Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland was published some 20 years ago, it was promptly made a classic of psychological and medical anthropology by academics in the United States and simultaneously broadly and heatedly criticized in the Irish press as an egregious violation of community and cultural privacy, a debate that has blown hot and cold over the intervening decades. Following a recent return to `Ballybran' in the summer of 1999 which ended in her expulsion from the village, Nancy Scheper-Hughes recounts her attempts to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography with respect for the people who once shared their homes and their secrets with her, thereby offering candid and vivid reflections on balancing the ethics and the micropolitics of anthropological work.
El Ghorba
Authors: Sayad Abdelmalek
Published: July 2003

This article offers a socio-analysis of the discourse and strategies of one young emigrant from rural Kabylia to disclose the social conditions that simultaneously triggered and obfuscated the springs of mass emigration from Algeria to France during the post-war decades. Drawing on Kabyle mythical tradition, the informant produces a folk model of the mechanism whereby emigration is produced and reproduced in which the alienated and mystified experience of exile ( `el ghorba') plays a pivotal role. The collective misrecognition of the objective truth of emigration is maintained by the whole group: the emigrants select the information that they bring back when visiting their home village; former emigrants `enchant' the memories they have kept of France; and the candidates for emigration project onto `France' their most unrealistic expectations. Such symbolic collusion is the necessary mediation through which economic necessity can exercise itself and emigration perpetuate itself even when the material forces that gave rise to it turn out illusory or vanish.
The Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Migration
Authors: Bourdieu Pierre , Wacquant Loïc
Published: July 2003

One of the most original contributions to the anthropology of immigration of the past century, the work of the late Adelmalek Sayad demonstrates the potency of three principles for the study of peregrination. The first insists that, before becoming an immigrant, the migrant is first an e-migrant and that the sociology of migration must therefore start, not from the receiving society, but from the structure and contradictions of the sending communities. The second takes seriously the fact that migration is the product of a historical relation of inter-national domination, at once material and symbolic, a repressed relation of state to state which every migrant unwittingly recapitulates in her personal strategies and experiences. The third recognizes that, like other processes of group (un)making, migration requires collective dissimulation and social duplicity. A corollary of these principles is that the sociology of migration must be reflexive and include a social history of the lay and scholarly discourses that swirl about it in the societies involved. Sayad elaborated these propositions because he was more than a scholar of migration: he was the phenomenon itself. The ethnographic sensibility and rigor that animate his work were rooted in his active solidarity with Kabyle migrants; they enabled him to dismantle prefabricated representations of immigration and to use the migrant, as social hybrid devoid of legitimate place, in the manner of a flesh-and-blood analyser of the collective unconscious and to pose anew the question of the relationship between citizen, state, and nation.
The Consumption of the Poor
Authors: Farmer Paul E.
Published: July 2003

In an era in which we have effective therapies, why has tuberculosis remained the leading infectious cause of young adult deaths in much of the world? This article argues that in order to answer such a question, we must explore not only the life experiences of those sick with tuberculosis, but also the larger social contexts in which they become infected, fall ill, and meet with a series of therapeutic misadventures leading to complications, ongoing transmission to others and, often enough, death. The `ethnographically visible' is only part of the story, since the experiences and commentaries of the sick and their providers must be embedded in broader analyses informed by history, political economy, epidemiology and a sociology of knowledge. Such an analysis brings into relief not only cultural specificity but also jarring similarities: living with both poverty and tuberculosis means poor outcomes whether you live in rural Haiti, urban Peru or the inner-city United States.
The Power of Violence in War and Peace
Authors: Bourgois Philippe
Published: July 2003

The Cold War sanitized the author's analysis of political violence among revolutionary peasants in El Salvador during the 1980s. A 20-year retrospective analysis of his fieldnote(s) documents the ways political terror and repression become embedded in daily interactions that normalize interpersonal brutality in a dynamic of everyday violence. Furthermore, the structural, symbolic and interpersonal violence that accompanies both revolutionary mobilization and also labor migration to the US inner city follows gendered fault lines. The snares of symbolic violence in counter-insurgency war spawn mutual recrimination and shame, obfuscating the role of an oppressive power structure. Similarly, everyday violence in a neo-liberal version of peacetime facilitates the administration of the subordination of the poor who blame themselves for character failings. Ethnography's challenge is to elucidate the causal chains and gendered linkages in the continuum of violence that buttresses inequality in the post-Cold War era.
The Native Collector
Authors: Seaton Elizabeth P.
Published: July 2003

Louis Situwuka Shotridge ( c1882-1937), a high-born Tlingit from Kluckwan, Alaska, collected Northwest Coast Native artifacts for the University of Pennsylvania Museum at Philadelphia for a period of 17 years. As proxy for both Nativeness and white cultural institutions, Shotridge enacted performances which were variously commensurable with, and `othered' from, each other. Compelled to mimic a subjectivity located within an imaginary semiotic of Ancient Tradition, Shotridge's performances of Nativeness benefited the Museum's epistemological authorities, at the same time as they facilitated their success in the anthropological trade. And yet Shotridge also succeeded in arrogating to himself - through the roles of collector, assistant curator and field ethnographer - cultural capital which approximated that of elite Anglo-Americans. Through an analysis of his letters, field notes, selected newspaper accounts and other biographical information, this paper explores the conflicting and collusive relations involved in Shotridge's role of `Native collector'.
`Writing Culture' Under the Gaze of My Country
Authors: Weiss Meira
Published: July 2003

An experiment in `writing culture' through biographical positioning, this article identifies the central symbol of Israeli military and masculine identity as `the chosen body' and traces through some of the practices that support and exemplify it. Within and against this masculinization and militarization of Israeli society, I explore my own and other women's experiences as citizen, daughter, mother and writer, to argue for resistance of and in the female body which finds a non-discursive expression in `somatic dissidence'.
Strife in Nazareth
Authors: Rabinowitz Dan
Published: July 2003

This article is an ethnographic account of the two-year siege by Muslim activists of the plot adjoining a shrine in Nazareth, and the ensuing efforts by a variety of local, regional and national players to bring the crisis to a peaceful resolution before the historic visit of Pope John Paul II in March 2000. It documents the efficacy of the consecration of space by personal sacrifice and collective passion, and demonstrates the roles played by local history, demography, class and politics in struggles over the meaning of place.
Tunneling Towards Capitalism in the Czech Republic
Authors: Altshuler David S.
Published: July 2003

Over the past decade, Czech society has been bombarded with reporting on a variety of corruption scandals. The most prominent example is tunelování [tunneling], a uniquely Czech form of large-scale corruption rooted in privatization and post-socialist economic reforms. Since it first appeared in print some time in 1996, tunelování has become a staple of the Czech media and public discourses. Its ubiquity makes it a useful lens through which to explore many significant issues in post-socialist Czech society: tensions over the meanings of justice, morality, emergent socioeconomic differences, national identity and international reputation. This article explores the workings of tunelování and suggests the ways these discourses gain meaning within the specific context of the Czech transition.
The International Production of Authoritative Knowledge
Authors: Moore Sally Falk
Published: July 2003

As one might expect in this social science minded era, the formation of what passes as authoritative knowledge underpins all international development policy. At present, major parts of West Africa are turning into desert. This environmental circumstance is the rationale for international plans for managing West African political and economic affairs. The documents and official talk that surround this asymmetrical relationship reveal the donor view of the African situation, and what is considered `good for' West Africa, economically and politically, now and in the future. These European ideas about the way development should proceed, and the way they are inserted in the West African scene, are the subject of this article. Ethnographic observations of meetings of international donors, of life in African villages, and of the doings of African officials give substance to this picture of purported conformity and illfitting realities.
The Birth of a Discipline
Authors: Goldman Michael
Published: July 2003

After 10 long years of growing social movement pressure, the World Bank has effectively responded with a new work paradigm, `environmentally sustainable development', that aggressively incorporates lessons from its worst critics (as well as some of the critics themselves). This article focuses on a case study of the World Bank's transformation-in-progress in Lao People's Democratic Republic to explicate the institutional and epistemic framework on which the Bank's new forms of intervention are based. This article argues that the World Bank successfully produces a green authoritative knowledge that contradictorily caters to the critics' demand for democratization and the investors' call for privatization. The article explains both the process of knowledge production and the way in which it becomes authoritative, situating newly produced forms of green knowledge and eco-rationalities within the institutional context of `development' and its expanding relations of power.
`Strategic' Challenges to Gender Inequality the South African Gender Commission
Authors: Seidman Gay W.
Published: July 2003

As part of constructing its new democracy, South Africa created the Commission on Gender Equality, a horizontal independent body charged with monitoring and stimulating efforts to create gender equality. With unusual powers and resources, staffed by energetic and committed feminists, the Commission is an unusual experiment in strategic feminist intervention. Based on a five-month participant observation study, this article describes the Commission's efforts to define `women's interests' and to set priorities. While international feminist ideas and support were important in the construction of the Commission, the article argues that local concerns about avoiding controversy and building broad support have been more important in explaining the Commission's trajectory.
Transnational Feminism
Authors: Thayer Millie
Published: July 2003

Accounts of globalization often depict a world awash in faceless flows of global capital that deprive broad sectors of humanity of a role in the international division of labor. Extrapolating from this economic analysis to politics and culture, some theorists conclude that meaning has evaporated from local sites, leaving their isolated inhabitants unable to articulate their own alternatives to global agendas. However, fieldwork with a rural Brazilian women's movement in one of these `structurally irrelevant' places finds another face of globalization with more potentially positive effects. These local activists create meaning in a transnational web of political/cultural relations that brings benefits as well as risks for their movement. Rural women engage with a variety of differently located feminist actors in relations constituted both by power and by solidarity. They defend their autonomy from the impositions of international funders, negotiate over political resources with urban Brazilian feminists, and appropriate and transform transnational feminist discourses. In this process, the rural women draw on resources of their own, based on the very local-ness whose demise is bemoaned by globalization theorists.
Gallo's Body
Authors: Phillips Susan A.
Published: July 2003

Permanent body marking both reinforces and challenges existing social divisions. Looking at the life of a Chicano tattoo artist, this article presents an analysis of tattoo as self-damnation. For gang members and prisoners, layers of tattoos evince personal experience and social history alike. While they are tools of empowerment, individuality, and livelihood, tattoos also represent oppression and exclusion from the larger social world. Inescapable outside judgment rests in the inked articulations of barrio or prison histories, miring people permanently in lives they may later wish to leave behind. The irony that confronts many who are tattooed is that their material strategies for survival in one realm of life all but guarantee their failure in another.
The Meaning of the Purchase
Authors: Bernstein Elizabeth
Published: July 2003

Feminists and other scholars have debated theoretically what exactly is being purchased in the prostitution transaction and whether sex can be `a service like any other', but they have scarcely tackled these questions empirically. This article draws upon field observations of and interviews with male clients of commercial sex-workers and state agents entrusted with regulating them to probe the meanings given to different types of commercial sexual exchange. Manifested by client arrests and re-education, vehicle impoundment, stricter laws on underage prostitution and the possession of child pornography, recent state efforts to problematize male sexuality throughout the USA and Western Europe have been developed alongside an increasingly unbridled ethic of sexual consumption, as evidenced by soaring demand for pornography, strip clubs, lap-dancing, escorts, telephone sex and `sex tours' in developing countries. By situating commercial sexual exchange within the broader context of post-industrial transformations of culture and sexuality, we can begin to unravel this paradox.
Dying Alone
Authors: Klinenberg Eric
Published: July 2003

In July 1995 over 700 Chicago residents, most of them old and impoverished, died in a short but devastating heat wave. As part of a `social autopsy' of this disaster that goes beyond natural factors to uncover the institutional forces that made the urban environment suddenly so lethal, this article examines the social production and lived experience of everyday urban isolation. Accounts from ethnographic investigations in the affected neighborhoods and of the city agencies entrusted with dealing with the issue are used to highlight four key conditions: (1) the increase in the number and proportion of people living alone, including seniors who outlive or become estranged from their social networks; (2) the fear of crime and the use of social withdrawal and reclusion as survival strategies; (3) the simultaneous degradation and fortification of urban public space, particularly in segregated neighborhoods that have lost major commercial establishments and other attractions that entice people out of their homes; (4) the political dysfunctions stemming from social service programs that treat citizens as consumers in a market for public goods despite a growing population of residents who lack access to the information and network ties necessary for such `smart shopping' for city support. Together, these conditions create a formula for disaster that the 1995 heat wave actualized for the city of Chicago and might yet recur in other US metropolises.
Being Lost at Sea
Authors: Lundberg Anita
Published: July 2003

This article probes the sense of loss attendant upon beginning fieldwork in the whale-hunting village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia. This feeling of ontological absence was heightened when four boats were towed away by a harpooned whale, a tragedy which invoked the origin story of the first whale hunt that tells how Lamalera ancestors disappeared at sea. Each of these tales, those of the ethnographer and those of the whale hunters, speaks of the psychoanalytic fear of lack. Yet the details of their narration suggest that the syncopated moments in these heroic quests are cracks through which a different story may begin to emerge. Informed by theories ranging from feminism to phenomenology to anthropology, this article proposes that the space of no-thing offers new ways of being and knowing. Syncope is thus a vital moment in the stories that inform our lives, whether these be fiction, tales of adventure, fieldwork experiences, cultural performances and myths - or the disciplined story of the practice of anthropology itself.
Seeing Like a Mayor
Authors: Verdery Katherine
Published: July 2003

A decade after the law returning land rights to previous owners in Romania had been passed in 1991, the process was still incomplete; titling was delayed and lawsuits dragged on by the year. Contrary to widespread opinion, I argue that this delay came not primarily from a government that intended to postpone land restitution but from obstructionism by officials in the administrative units (communes) charged with implementing restitution. Using data from ethnographic research, I discuss a variety of ways in which mayors and their commune allies hindered the restitution process: through their structural relations with the center, their use of land to accumulate political capital and their control over the knowledge that counted most in pursuing a claim as well as through the abdication of responsibility by both lower- and higher-level authorities who might have checked mayors' ambitions. The results of their actions included undermining both the legitimacy of private property institutions and the strength of the emergent Romanian state.
Crossroads
Authors: Stoller Paul
Published: July 2003

This article explores the social lives of West African street vendors in New York City through the eyes of one such trader, Issifi Mayaki, an African immigrant from Niger who sold cloth and other items in Harlem and other areas of the city during the 1990s. The article describes how Issifi made his way in America and probes how he has drawn on native cultural and social resources to secure a niche in New York City. Issifi's financial and marketing strategies and his response to consumer demands, state regulation and local politics are also analyzed. From this description and analysis it is clear that people like Issifi inhabit complex, hybrid and fluid social worlds. How can social scientists capture this contemporary complexity? This article proposes that social scientists can, indeed, capture `on the ground' complexity by linking narrative, ethnographic description and social theory.
The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil
Authors: Caldeira Teresa P.R.
Published: July 2003

This article addresses some of the main challenges to the democratic reform of police institutions in Brazil, particularly in São Paulo. It identifies and explores patterns of police abuse through an analysis of a famous kidnapping together with the field observations, interviews and available statistical evidence. It analyses the sources and logic of popular support for a `violent police', which coexists with a negative evaluation of the police and a high victimization of working-class people. It argues that the roots of this paradox are found in a long history of state disrespect for civil rights, in particular poor people's rights, and in a deep disbelief in the fairness of the justice system and its ability to function without bias.
`They Scorn us Because We are Uneducated'
Authors: Walley Christine J.
Published: July 2003

This article addresses the relationship between science and popular knowledge within Tanzania's Mafia Island Marine Park. It examines the ways in which various forms of knowledge circulate within the park, as well as how knowledge is evaluated and used by representatives of international organizations, national government officials, and Mafia residents. Despite the ostensibly `participatory' goals of the marine park, island residents continue to be excluded because they fail to speak the language of the `educated'. At the same time, forms of knowledge within the park serve as potent cultural markers of class status, ethnicity and `modernity' in ways that buttress the social position of national and international elites and undermine that of island residents.
Mating Welfare and Workfare
Authors: Murard Numa
Published: July 2003

With the onset of mass unemployment the obligation to work has been intensified by policies of assistance to the poor in France, as in most western European countries such as Britain. Rather than replacing traditional welfare, `workfare' is thus reinstated at its heart: the destitute are given a minimum income in exchange for their goodwill, which they must henceforward manifest by a willingness to work, real or simulated. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a region of central France to dissect how these new processes of `moralization' of the poor unfold at ground level. Reconstructing the strategies used by recipients of the RMI (France's guaranteed minimum income allocation) and by those who control them brings to light the ordinary scenes of social life wherein the obligation to work is reasserted and uncovers the chain of connections between different sites and scenes from the bottom to the top of the new world of public assistance, linking the most dispossessed to the local notables of the political and administrative apparatus.
Between War and City
Authors: Agier Michel
Published: July 2003

Two elements constitute a new category of world population, that of 50 million displaced persons and refugees: on the one hand, so-called `dirty' or `low-intensity' wars, with the endless exoduses, suffering and multiple losses they provoke; on the other, the humanitarian response that accompanies them very closely. The camps are both the emblem of the social condition created by the coupling of war with humanitarian action, the site where it is constructed in the most elaborate manner, as a life kept at a distance from the ordinary social and political world, and the experimentation of the large-scale segregations that are being established on a planetary scale. Created in a situation of emergency as a protective device intended to provide for the physical, food and health safety of all kinds of survivors and fugitives from wars, refugee camps agglomerate tens of thousands of inhabitants for periods that generally last far beyond the duration of the emergency. In this article, we describe and analyse camps as an urban ethnographic case. Social and cultural complexities emerge with the formation of the novel sociospatial form of `city-camps' in which new identities crystallize and subjectivation takes root.
Hearing children's voices: methodological issues in conducting focus groups with children aged 7-11 years
Authors: Morgan Myfanwy , Gibbs Sara , Maxwell Krista , Britten Nicky
Published: July 2003

Children are increasingly acknowledged to have rights in the determination of decisions that affect them. This has encouraged research to be undertaken with children themselves to understand their own views, experiences and relationships, and has demonstrated a considerable gulf from parental concerns and observations. Methods for research with children are, however, relatively under-developed. This article reflects on our experience of conducting focus groups with children aged 7-11 years to examine their experiences of living with asthma. It discusses the use of child-friendly techniques to promote participation and access children’s meanings, and raises issues about the size and composition of groups and recruitment strategies, group dynamics, tensions and sensitive moments. We conclude that focus groups are a valuable method for eliciting children’s views and experiences and complement personal interviews, while important questions relate to enhancing children’s participation in other stages of the research process.
Using the theory of social representations to explore difference in the research relationship
Authors: Howarth Caroline
Published: July 2003

This article explores how the question of difference can be addressed within the research relationship. The first part of the article analyses the consequences of difference in one particularly compelling research encounter where accusations of racism damaged the research relationship. The author argues that we need to examine the researcher-researched relationship in detail and investigate the recognition of difference that structures this relationship in order to analyse material drawn from research. The second part of the article shows how this may be done within a particular social psychological perspective - that of the theory of social representations. This enables an exploration into the relationship between what is said, who said it and to whom, or, in other words, an analysis of the relationship between representations emerging and identities being played out in the research context. The value of this approach is illustrated by studying an example from the author’s own research. The final part of the article demonstrates that difference in the researcher-researched relationship is not simply a problem of methodology but needs to be analysed as a feature of human relations. The article argues that an understanding of the relationship between social representations and identities illuminates the question of difference in qualitative research and demonstrates the value of difference.
Confidentiality in qualitative research: reflections on secrets, power and agency
Authors: Baez Benjamin
Published: July 2003

This article makes a philosophical case for recharacterizing confidentiality in qualitative research from static notions of harm and privacy to one that accounts for a critical agency which exposes, subverts and redefines oppressive social structures. Confidentiality protects secrecy, which hinders transformative political action. Transformative political action requires that researchers and respondents consider themselves involved in a process of exposing and resisting hegemonic power arrangements, but such action is thwarted by secrecy and the methods used to protect it. This article suggests that in order for qualitative research to be transformative the convention of confidentiality must be questioned.
On writing fieldnotes: collection strategies and background expectancies
Authors: Wolfinger Nicholas H.
Published: July 2003

Fieldnotes are a vital part of ethnographic research, yet little attention has been paid to the practical details of note-taking. Exactly how does an ethnographer decide what to write about? This article uses fieldnotes from various sources to show that, irrespective of any formal strategies for note-taking, researchers’ tacit knowledge and expectations often play a major role in determining which observations are worthy of annotation. A greater understanding of these dynamics could complement existing trends in reflexive ethnography by increasing insight into the note-taking process.
The risk of ‘going observationalist’: negotiating the hidden dilemmas of being an insider participant observer
Authors: Labaree Robert V.
Published: July 2003

Based on a review of the literature and the author’s own experiences, this article develops a framework for understanding the hidden dilemmas of being an insider participant observer. A common assumption made about participant observation is that being an insider offers a distinct advantage in terms of accessing and understanding the culture. However, these advantages are not absolute and the insider must be aware of ethical and methodological dilemmas associated with entering the field, positioning and disclosure, shared relationships and disengagement. The article discusses these dilemmas and identifies issues that need more careful evaluation and analysis within the field of qualitative inquiry. The assumption that insiderness provides the researcher with greater access and deeper understanding is often true, but the degree of achieved insiderness is related to a number of critical factors that are determined by the circumstances of the moment.
Metaphors as Principles of ‘Visuality’
Authors: López José
Published: July 2003

This article argues that, in contemporary sociological debates, questions about social structure are too frequently posed within the ‘structure and agency’ problematic. Some of the limitations of this problematic are briefly discussed, and it is argued that it is necessary to open up new theoretical and conceptual spaces where more productive questions can be posed. One possible avenue is contained in the recognition that since social theory is a language-borne practice, then the attempt to develop concepts, of social structure in this case, simultaneously presupposes the deployment of a variety of discursive and narrative strategies. Thus the potentialities and limitations contained in these strategies should be put at the very centre of discussions over, and about, social structure. This point is developed by examining the constitutive role of metaphorical strategies in conceptual and theoretical innovation. The point is further illustrated through the development of an analysis of some of the metaphorical strategies found in Marx's attempt to develop a concept of social structure that is capable of capturing the complexity of capitalism as a social system. It is argued that Marx's attempt to conceptualize social structure cannot be reduced to the base/ superstructure model; Marx's Capital contains another model that is predicated on a conception of labour grounded in an ‘energeticist’ metaphor. The article concludes by briefly exploring some of the implications of this wider reading of Marx's attempt to develop a concept of social structure.
The Gift of Life
Authors: Joas Hans
Published: July 2003

In the last decade of his life, Talcott Parsons devoted a large part of his scholarly attention to the sociology of religion and to the history and symbolism of Christianity. This part of Parsons' work has been almost completely neglected – both in the literature on Parsons and in the sociology of religion. In my interpretation, Parsons' late systems-theoretical ‘human condition paradigm’ is separated from his quasi-structuralist analyses of Jewish and Christian myths. The core of these myths is, according to Parsons, the idea of life as a gift. The article analyses the importance of this idea for(1) a sociological understanding of Christianity, (2) some aspects of contemporary moral theorizing, particularly the question how the Judeo-Christian tradition can be appropriated under the condition of highly developed autonomous individuality, and (3) the question of a latent Protestant bias in Parsons' theory of social change.
Weber's Inaugural Lecture and its Place in his Sociology
Authors: Barbalet J. M.
Published: July 2003

Max Weber's early studies of agrarian social structure, and especially his inaugural lecture of 1895, are conventionally not considered to be part of his sociological corpus. The inaugural lecture, in particular, is largely ignored by sociologists. It is shown in the present article that the 1895 lecture is in fact an absolutely necessary key to the proper appreciation of Weber's subsequent work. Indeed, a reading of Weber's later writings through the prism of the inaugural lecture provides new, challenging and corrective understandings of Weber's argument and meaning. In a discussion of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Weber's methodological essays, two things are shown. First, that the continuities between the 1895 lecture and the subsequent works are strong and readily demonstrable. Second, that an appreciation of Weber's argument in the inaugural lecture transforms the conventional understandings of the later works.
Weber and the Sociology of Revolution
Authors: Collins Randall
Published: July 2003

Weber wrote about the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 while they were in progress. Analytically, he held that revolution is a non-legitimate form of change, insofar as the source of legitimate power is the authority of military command in a community of fate organized for foreign war. He thus adumbrates some aspects of contemporary state-breakdown theory, in which revolution hinges upon geopolitical strain and fiscal crisis splitting elites. Yet Weber remained closer to classic Marxian theory of revolutionary interest groups mobilized from below. He broadened interest groups to include status groups as well as economic classes. His description gives leads for a theory of revolutionary process centered on alliances and splits, bandwagon effects and turning points, and the volatility of revolutionary ideas arising from the social organization of full-time political militants. Weber predicted structural change in Russia leading to bureaucratic dictatorship.
The Antinomy of Values
Authors: Oakes Guy
Published: July 2003

In this article, I revisit Max Weber's lecture `Science as a Vocation' by considering his position that choices between values are, in the end, irrational. In examining an argument, which he attributes to Tolstoy, on the relationship between modern culture, science and the meaningless of death, I attempt to prove that Weber's position nullifies the premises on which it is based. As a result, his case for the irrationality of values is self-destructive and incoherent.
On the Sociology of German Anti-Semitism
Authors: Elias Norbert
Published: July 2003

The cause of German anti-Semitism should not be sought at the level of individual attitudes but, firstly, in the context of German history and social development, and, secondly, in the changing social position of the Jews within that setting. During the Middle Ages, when the estates and guild-orders prevailed, there were severe tensions between Christians and Jews. These began to be moderated with the development of capitalism, as members of the Christian middle class became involved in a struggle to end traditional restrictions. In that context, independently of their attitudes towards them, emancipation of the Jews appeared to middle-class Christians as a precondition for the emergence of Jews as good German citizens, and Jewish merchants and bankers became welcome allies in economic expansion. However, once the struggle of the middle classes against the nobility had been won, the Christian sections of the newly dominant ruling class underwent a political u-turn; hostility against the Jews, who had become a middle class of second rank, increased. It increased still further with the loss of the First World War and the crises that followed it, especially among the most economically constricted strata. In that situation, the Jews were socially conspicuous but relatively powerless. They had few resources for struggling effectively against what had become, for them, a crippling social order. Better to fight for a home in Palestine, or at least to accustom themselves to behaving in a self-aware but unobtrusive way. [Translators' text.]
Parsons and Sorokin
Authors: Zafirovski Milan
Published: July 2003

This article compares the main elements of Parsons' and Sorokin's sociological work in the context of the formation and development of an American school of social theory during the 1930s-1950s. Of these elements, four are meta-theoretical, and four substantive or theoretical. Included in the first group are the problems of methodology, selection, convergence versus divergence, and interpretation. The possibility of social dynamics, the conception of the social system, micro versus macro-social and economic action comprise the second. The comparison suggests that the different roles of Parsons and Sorokin in American social theory are to be, in part, accounted for by extra-scientific rather than strictly scientific factors.
Why Is Werner Sombart Not Part of the Core of Classical Sociology?
Authors: Grundmann Reiner , Stehr Nico
Published: July 2003

The life and work of Werner Sombart poses an intellectual puzzle in the genealogy of modern social theorists. During his lifetime, Sombart was probably the most influential and prominent social scientist in Germany as well as in many other countries. Today he is among the least known social scientists. Why did he lose his status as one of the most brilliant and influential scholars and intellectuals of the 20th century? Why is his work almost forgotten today? While Weber's thesis about the influence of Protestantism on the development of capitalism is widely known, even beyond sociological circles, few sociologists today know that Sombart had an alternative explanation. An obvious explanation for Sombart's fall from grace is his embrace of Nazism. As Heidegger provides a counter-example, Sombart's fate requires a more complex explanation. In addition, we explore the different reception of his work in economic and sociological circles as compared to cultural theory and history.
Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of Modernity
Authors: Witz Anne
Published: July 2003

Current evaluations of Simmel’s theoretical writings on men, women and modernity have read these too generously, relying on a curate’s egg motif culling the good parts from the bad parts. The good parts are judged insightful and prescient, revealing the workings of a sociological imagination and even anticipating elements of contemporary feminist epistemology. The bad parts reveal the unfortunate incursion of ideological baggage or blinkered romanticism that periodically surface and impede the productive workings of the sociological imagination. A more astute reading is proposed here: one which recuperates the bad parts as symptomatic of the workings of Simmel’s philosophical imagination where he crafts a deep ontology of gender, in the form of an a priori, absolute duality of incommensurate modes of male and female being. This deep ontology of gender fatefully consigns woman to the wastelands of his philosophical imagination, whilst releasing man, and man alone, into the more fertile and productive workings of his sociological imagination. Hence, Simmel constructs a masculine ontology of the social. This is induced by Simmel’s ontological grounding of the objective in the male and by the ‘radical dualism’ he recommends as a more women-friendly alternative to ‘relative dualism’.
Organizing Husserl
Authors: Paul Axel T.
Published: July 2003

Whereas the voluminous work of Niklas Luhmann (1927-98) can be considered as a major focus of discussions in theoretical sociology in the German-speaking world, it has only been translated sporadically and remains widely unknown in the English-speaking world. This review article provides a general introduction to Luhmann’s systems theory. Section I embeds systems theory in a broader philosophical context and traces its particular legacy. It demonstrates, in contrast to Luhmann’s rhetoric of starting afresh, that his theory inherits and reformulates the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In Section II, Luhmann’s basic concept of system is developed, modeled on his early understanding of formal organization. The epistemological and ontological uncertainty that lies beneath the necessity of organizing proves to be the raison d’être of social systems in general. Finally, in Section III, the problem of uncertainty is translated into a situation of double contingency which, according to Luhmann, makes up the core of every form of socialization. It is shown how systems theory provides an alternative to conceiving society as being either normatively or rationally constituted.
Unexpected Interactions
Authors: Gross Matthias
Published: July 2003

Georg Simmel reflected intensively on the place of human beings in nature, developing a sociological perspective for observing natural and social changes that so far have been largely ignored. This article discusses Simmel’s theoretical starting point for observing the natural in contrast to the social. In his writings, Simmel became adept at moving back and forth between the two sides of observation - the natural and the cultural. The significance of his ideas is demonstrated by using current ecological field practices as an example.
Marcuse’s Maternal Ethic
Authors: O’neill John
Published: July 2003

Marcuse’s historicization of Freud’s eternal conflict between the reality and pleasure principles sought to redeem the cognitive and moral status of phantasy for utopian socialism. To save the pleasure principle, Marcuse also revised the cultural myths of Narcissus and Orpheus in place of the productivist myth of Prometheus. It is argued that this move committed him to patriarchal revisionism at the expense of the historicist reading of matriarchy in Bachofen’s Mother Right (1861), to which he alludes without sufficient study. The consequences of this move for later feminist critique of Marxism is also examined.
‘Domination’
Authors: Athens Lonnie
Published: July 2003

We owe a great debt to George Herbert Mead for, arguably, analyzing the ‘social act’ more profoundly than anyone else before or after him. While undeniably profound, his analysis, which rests on the principle of ‘sociality’, still suffers from four shortcomings that, to one degree or another, can be traced back to his downplaying the importance of dominance in social action. First, he cannot adequately account for the superordinate and subordinate roles that always arise during complex social action. Second, he can adequately account for the immediate impact of conflict on an unfolding social act, but not its ultimate origin in social action. Third, he makes people’s temporal orientation a constant, when in actuality, it varies depending on the nature of the social act in which they are participating. Finally, Mead obscures some of the basic analytical components of the social act, which he otherwise identifies brilliantly. These four inherent problems in Mead’s analysis of the social act are not only identified, but resolutions for each of them are also provided. It is ultimately concluded that Mead’s principle of ‘sociality’ must be replaced by the principle of ‘domination’ because the latter principle better explains complex human social action.
Pluralism in the Thought of Oakeshott, Shils and Weber
Authors: Grosby Steven
Published: July 2003

Michael Oakeshott recognized the existence of categorially distinct modes of being related that, while subsisting in conjunction with one another, could not be reduced to any particular one. This recognition was shared by Edward Shils, who wrote of the incommensurate plurality of orientations of the human mind; and by Max Weber when he wrote of both the types of social action and the various directions of the religious rejections of the world. While this convergence is of interest, it is especially so insofar as it helps us to understand better the nature of human cognition and action.