The social stuff of revelation: pattern and purpose in Zionist dreams and visions

Africa ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. Kiernan
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Purposive Action ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Dreams And Visions ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Social Act

Opening ParagraphAnthropologists are beginning to investigate the sociological dimension of dreams, at least of those purporting to be channels of religious revelation. Two recent examples of this tendency are Charsley (1973) and Curley (1983), each of whom researched dream phenomena in an African independent church. The sociological approach is a firm rejection of earlier and some current attempts to extract patterns of culture and personality from the subjective reconstruction of the dream-as-dreamed, a purely private event. In contrast, the sociological emphasis isolates as its primary datum the dream-as-told to others, an essentially social act, which leads to an analysis of dreams as social assets, which can be manipulated to advantage or disadvantage. Consequently, the method of analysis demands that as much attention be directed to the act of recounting as to the content of the narration, although in practice this seems to mean that content is subordinated to purpose and can be related to social arrangements only indirectly through purposive action. I shall endeavour to correct this latter impression in subsequent argument. The second methodological requirement is to connect narration to social action, social relations and social organization, and to demonstrate the tactical use of dreams in social encounters.

The main causes of social anxiety in the context of social action

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.

From speech as “situated” to speech as “situating”: insights from John Gumperz on the practical conduct of talk as social action

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Erickson
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Practical Conduct ◽  
Further Development

AbstractThe article begins by reviewing the early research interests of John Gumperz and their further development across the course of his career. His doctoral research documented spoken language in an immigrant community. He then focused on bilingual speech communities and “code switching.” Later he became concerned with various aspects of style shifting within a language. Whether he was considering language switching, or dialect switching, or shifts in register, Gumperz showed that speakers were creative in their language use — active agents rather than passive rule followers — alternating among disparate styles to communicate metaphoric and usually implicit social meaning. Through changes in speech style, interlocutors could be seen to be reframing their social relations, modifying the social situation they were in. ( NB This lability in situational framing is a major point of emphasis in Gumperz's notions of “contextualization” and “conversational inference.”) The article continues by presenting and discussing two of Gumperz's “telling cases” of contextualizing frame shifts by speakers. In concluding, a few examples from the author's own research are presented, with emphasis on the use of contextualization in establishing local alignments of solidarity-in-the-moment among interlocutors — indexical shifts to a footing for interaction that the author has termed “situational co-membership.”

scholarly journals Identity and help in calls to Victim Support

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Tennent
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Discursive Psychology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Competent Person ◽  
Victim Support ◽  
Seeking Help ◽  
The Relationship

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help.  The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable.  Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided.  The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves.  The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>

scholarly journals Bourdieu’s theory and the social constructivism of Berger and Luckmann

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-537
Author(s):  
Milos Jovanovic
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

The paper compares Pierre Bourdieu?s sociological approach with the one developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The aim of the paper is to identify the complementarities and incongruences of these approaches. The main similarity consists in the intention to ?dialectically? overcome/bridge the gap between ?objectivism? and ?subjectivism? in social theory. Another parallel includes a negative attitude towards the relativistic tendencies of postmodernism. These authors share the thematization of: the body as a locus of social influences, the centrality of language in social life, the social functions of knowledge, and the importance of power in social relations. Differences in theorizing are attributed to the different intellectual, theoretical, and socio-cultural contexts in which these scientists operated. The divergences of these theoretical approaches become evident when one examines the different meaning and significance attached to the concepts of individuation, structure, action, habitus and habitualization, structure of relevance and relation of common-sense and scientific knowledge. Finally, there is a visible difference in political views: Bourdieu was a critic ?from the left,? while Berger and Luckmann were self-proclaimed liberal conservatives.

Political Economy of the Crisis in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Smart E. Otu
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
Organization Of Production

Conventional western social science scholars hold the view that the current crisis in Zimbabwe is but the consequence of misgovernance by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF led government. This paper debunks this viewpoint and considers it a short-circuit analysis of the complex nature of Zimbabwe’s crisis. Instead, the political economy approach is adopted which is considered more far-reaching, holistic, historic, dialectic, and more empirically-scientific-based. The critical analysis of the crisis reveals that the key to the current socio-economic and political impasse in Zimbabwe lies in the nature of the social organization of production and the class character of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe’s social system which are strongly tied to the land issue. To this end, the paper confirms that Zimbabwe’s economy, polity and social relations are organized in a manner that many Zimbabweans are at the fringe of the social structure. The main argument of this paper is that social organization of production in Zimbabwe is such that does not guarantee ordinary Zimbabweans access to land to produce their basic material needs, and to participate in making decision about how this major means of production is organized for production, distribution and consumption. This paper concludes by noting that the way out of the current crisis in Zimbabwe lies in a radical overhauling of the feeble social organization of production while not undermining the importance of a congenial political milieu in Zimbabwe

scholarly journals Social Organization of Work and Labour Conflicts in Proto-Industrial Iron Production in Sweden, Belgium and Russia

1994 ◽  
Vol 39 (S2) ◽  
pp. 83-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Florén
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Single Mode ◽  
Iron Production ◽  
Organization Of Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
Rural World

There exists no such thing as a single mode for the social organization of proto-industrial iron production, but a number of alternative ways. In the following article the dominance of one or another mode is viewed as dependent on its societal context, and not least on the social relations of the rural world. Each mode of organization had its own peculiarities and generated its own contradictions and conflicts.

Moral Regulation: A Reformulation

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannu Ruonavaara
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Foucauldian Analysis

Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer introduced the concept of moral regulation to contemporary sociological debate in their historical sociology of English State formation, The Great Arch (1985). In their work they fuse Durkheimian and Foucauldian analysis with a basic Marxist theory. However, this framework gives too limited a perspective to their analysis. I suggest that moral regulation should not be seen as a monolithic project, as merely action by and for the State, nor as activity by the ruling elite only. It should be seen as a form of social control based on changing the identity of the regulated. Its object is what Weber calls Lebensführung, which refers to both the ethos and the action constituting a way of life. The means of moral regulation are persuasion, education, and enlightenment, which distinguishes it from other forms of social control. Analyzing the social relations of moral regulation provides a useful perspective on this form of social action.

The Prostatic Imperative and the Social Relations of Medical Technology

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Willis
Keyword(s):  
Prostate Cancer ◽  
Prostate Specific Antigen ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Technology Assessment ◽  
Medical Technology ◽  
Specific Antigen ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Psa Testing ◽  
The Social

AbstractA sociological approach to medical technology assessment is outlined in this paper, first in general and then with specific reference to controversies surrounding the use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing to population screening for prostate cancer.

The Social Structure of the Nyakyusa: a Re-evaluation

Africa ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Mckenny
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Value System ◽  
The Social ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Western Tanzania

Opening ParagraphThe Nyakyusa of south-western Tanzania have received very substantial ethnographic coverage. Nonetheless there remain certain gaps in our knowledge of this society. The field-work by Dr. Godfrey Wilson and Professor Monica Wilson was done largely in the mid 1930s before structural-functional analysis had achieved its present refinement and was evidently influenced by Malinowski who was not himself known for a concern in sociological analysis per se. In these studies of the Nyakyusa, values, beliefs, and ritual were a main object of attention; they present Nyakyusa society as though it were a direct result of the Nyakyusa value system, although the actual workings of the society have been left rather obscure. It is presented as coherent, values and social organization reinforcing each other at every point. But internal evidence contradicts this picture, and on a priori grounds it may also be seen that there were several structural pressures towards incoherence, or rather, conflict between the actual development of social organization through time and those presumably timeless values reputed to maintain it.

Dreams of power: social process in a West African religious movement

Africa ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard T. Curley
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Social Process ◽  
West African ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Church Members ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church

Opening ParagraphIn the present paper we shall describe the ways in which dreams are regarded by the members of a West African religious sect and explain how dreams figure in the social organization of the sect. Our point of departure will be largely sociological, and in this respect our study differs from most anthropological writings on dreams. The dream narrations which we are considering arise as much out of the social organization of the sect as from the psyche of the individuals. Furthermore, the narrations are public performances and are evaluated by members of the sect for the purpose of situating each other within the community of church members. The narrations are used by church members to demonstrate the depth of their religious commitment and to assist them in competing for key roles within the church. Thus dreams are important as indicators of a person's worth and as instruments of social mobility. Following Charsley's treatment of dreams in a Ugandan independent church we will not focus on the use of dreams as a ‘privileged channel of insight into the culture’ (1973: 244), although the themes and symbols which are described in the narratives can indeed reveal much about the beliefs of church members and suggest ways in which their beliefs might guide their behaviour. It is appropriate to discuss some of these themes and symbols en route to our objective, and in doing so it will be possible to shed some light on the teachings of the sect and on the mentality of many of its members. It is important to state, however, that the primary data of this study are not accounts of dreams such as those that might be told privately to an analyst or an ethnographer. Rather they are mostly accounts which people present in public at church services. They are sometimes retold, embellished and circulated throughout the community of church members. Thus the data are speech events which are often used instrumentally by the narrator, sometimes for the purpose of ennobling the self and sometimes for the purpose of praising the sect. This means that one would have to question the authenticity of the narratives if one were to use them as windows into the minds of church members. We are on safer ground if we view the narratives of dreams as public performances which are patterned in accordance with the expectations of the church community and which have an effect on social action within that community.

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