Subjectivity (Culture)

Sentiments of Disdain and Practices of Distinction: Boundary-Work, Subjectivity, and Value in the Hindi Film Industry

by Tejaswini Ganti

Published in Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 85 no.1, Winter 2012

This article complicates the discussion of commercial mass media production and takes it beyond simplistic assertions... more This article complicates the discussion of commercial mass media production and takes it beyond simplistic assertions of the “bottom-line” by focusing on a specific feature of the everyday life of film production in Mumbai, India, home to the Hindi-language film industry, more commonly known as “Bollywood.”  It examines the inordinate amount of criticism and contempt expressed by Hindi filmmakers about the workings of the industry as well as filmmakers’ efforts to assert their difference from a generic norm – ranging from discourses about behavior to a fetishization of technology.  These sentiments and discourses operate as a form of “boundary-work,” which serves to create alternate regimes of value and criteria of prestige that are independent of commercial outcome.  The article also demonstrates how it is possible to carry out ethnographic research within large-scale media industries that addresses core anthropological concerns about subjectivity, social life, and social practice.  It illustrates how the sites and processes of media production, and not simply the finished outcomes, are invested with social and cultural meaning.

'Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre': assembling and governing the motorway driver in late 1950s Britain

by Peter Merriman

Published in 2006 in "The Sociological Review", volume 54 (Supplement 1), pp.75–92. This special supplement was simultaneously published as a book edited by S. Böhm, C. Jones, C. Land, and M. Paterson, entitled "Against Automobility", Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/ Sociological Review, pp.75–92.

The catastrophic imperative: subjectivity, time and memory in contemporary thought: introduction

by Gert Buelens

Comiendo Nostalgia

by Axel Manuel Navarro

Co-authored with Márquez-Barradas, M. L. Psychological Resarch Principal. Veracruz University

The human being is the only species that besides differing among himself in choosing the food he eat, the way to... more The human being is the only species that besides differing among himself in choosing the food he eat, the way to cooking it, the person who to eat him with and what utensils to use for that. All this constitutes the socio-cultural inheritance, which structures and distinguishes us as individuals; this culinary knowledge is built and re-built in a communicative and introyective process that is passed on from generation to generation. In this process are gestated specific connivances characterized by two elements; first, there is an attached link or bind to common values and customs, established mainly by one affective element: the feeling to belong to some group. Second, there is a phenomenon to creative innovation, which permits including, changing or even eliminating some culinary practice element or procedure. This text pretends to show how around these behaviors there are emotions that keep in a long time as a morphologic footprint. Thus, it will be showed the analysis from three different generation’s interview regarding their culinary pattern and the feelings associated.

La comida mexicana, Las determinaciones de sus quehaceres

by Axel Manuel Navarro

Co-authored with Márquez-Barradas, M.L. Psychological Research Principal. Veracruz University

El término ‘civilidad’ ha recibido diferentes connotaciones a lo largo de su historia, todas ellas han revelado un... more El término ‘civilidad’ ha recibido diferentes connotaciones a lo largo de su historia, todas ellas han revelado un solo significado general. Este último connota las maneras de trato que deben seguir los miembros de una clase o grupo social, en sus encuentros con sus ‘iguales’ y en sus encuentros con sus ‘posibles iguales’. Las personas social y humanamente ‘distintas’ reciben otras maneras de trato, las maneras de trato asignadas al excluido. El concepto de Civilidad, de Civilité, es, para Norbert Elias, un antecedente conceptual del concepto de Civilización. El calificativo ‘civilizado’ agrupa a quienes reciben ese calificativo, y deja fuera de esa agrupación a los considerados como ‘carentes de civilidad’ o como “bárbaros”. Históricamente, los quehaceres de la cocina, del servir y del comer, en los hogares mexicanos, han involucrado a dos tipos de personajes: los de ‘dentro’ y los ‘acarreados’. En los hogares indígenas y mestizos esos personajes han sido, de un lado, los padres y los hijos, y del otro, las parejas de los hijos. Entre las clases mexicanas medias ‘acomodadas’ y altas, esos mismos tipos se amplían para incluir a la servidumbre, es decir, a los de ‘fuera’. El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar las civilidades que caracterizan a las relaciones entre los personajes involucrados en cada uno de esos quehaceres, y las formas de poder personal asociadas a cada tipo de personaje y a cada quehacer.

Espacios cotidianos y subjetividad, el caso de la cocina.

by Axel Manuel Navarro

Co-authored with Márquez-Barradas, M. L. Psychological Research Principal. Veracruz University

Family is the social organism that attends to express the begining and final of civilitys, is the social legitim... more Family is the social organism that attends to express the begining and final of civilitys, is the social legitim organization to shelter, inside the visible and invisible walls, the private and closer spaces like secrets in each one. Also attends the normity that cover the group for future relationships. According to Norbert Elías there is a mechanism who get the civilizatory action, this mechanism is linked with the self-regulation of every human been in a civilizatory process. The self-regulation interferes as the way in how to response to specific situations as the social groups’ expectations, in this way the family. This work tries to explore the imbrication between civility in the day-to-day spaces, specifically in the kitchen. To do that, we try to explore four variables: power, the kind of family, the food and the stablished and outsiders. The main author consulted was Norbert Elías with his civilizatory process theory.

POWER, SUBJECTIVITY AND POLICY OF REPRESENTATION IN BIROBIDZHAN, THE JEWISH AUTONOMOUS OBLAST (RUSSIA)(Wladza, podmiotowosc i polityka …

by Agata Maksimowska

I Love You to Death: Sadomasochism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

by Diana Eidson

“Love Never Dies.” The tagline used for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula suggests that the... more “Love Never Dies.” The tagline used for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula suggests that the supernatural horror of the vampire legend hides an untold tale of a romance that supersedes the parasitic bloodlust of the undead. Although sexuality has long remained an element of vampire folklore, never is it romance and long-lasting fidelity that the vampire experiences with his/her victim. Instead, vampiric sexuality traditionally consists of lust, depravity, and perversion. The Coppola film proffers not a vision of true love and loyalty, but instead a cast of the female undead who transgress gender roles. Two female characters are eroticized, victimized, vampirized, and exorcised. Their resultant foray into sadism, a distinctly male realm, must be quelled. These women must either be brought back into the proper roles of wife and mother or they must die. Because their transgression is eventually punished, the ending of the film suggests that the hegemony of white masculinity must be perpetuated. Consequently, Bram Stoker’s Dracula proves to be an ultra-conservative visual text.
The conservative text attempts to protect the status quo. The unfolding of Coppola’s Dracula story is fraught with much more than mere romance: what is at stake is a portrayal of gender that privileges the scientific patriarchy of Western thought over the mystical matriarchy of Eastern thought. Camille Paglia notes that the Marquis de Sade viewed a return to nature, which she calls “the Romantic imperative,” as giving free rein to violence and lust (2). Furthermore, she notes that the aesthetic of Romanticism is steeped in sadomasochistic eroticism (Paglia 231). Leitmotifs of nature and sadomasochism pervade the film, but the denouement undercuts the film’s focus on sexual violence, chastening and channeling that violence in order to maintain the status quo. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for all its Romantic celebration of nature and erotic love, ultimately privileges the Enlightenment’s belief in the ability of reason to control nature.

The ambivalent practices of reflexivity.

by Susanne Gannon

Qualitative Inquiry, 2004

Reflexivity involves turning one’s reflexive gaze on discourse—turning language back on itself to see the work it does... more Reflexivity involves turning one’s reflexive gaze on discourse—turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) self that seems to contradict a focus on the constitutive power of discourse. This article explores this site of slippage and of ambivalence. In a collective biography on the topic of reflexivity, the authors tell and write stories about reflexivity and in a doubled reflexive arc, examine themselves at work during the workshop. Examining their own memories and reflexive practices, they explore this place of slippage and provide theoretical and practical insight into "what is going on" in reflexive research and writing. (co-authored)

La traducción del cuidado. La teoría del actor-red y el estudio de la interdependencia en la teleasistencia para personas mayores

by Tomás Sánchez Criado

Sánchez-Criado, T. & López, D. Published in Estudios de Psicología, 30(2), 199-213, 2009

En los últimos años las políticas de cuidado han dado un giro importante hacia la “promoción de la autonomía” frente a... more En los últimos años las políticas de cuidado han dado un giro importante hacia la “promoción de la autonomía” frente a la “asistencia a la dependencia”. Esto ha generado un importante debate entorno a las nociones de autonomía y dependencia en las ciencias sociales. El presente texto es una contribución a este debate a través del breve análisis de la instalación de un servicio de teleasistencia domiciliaria, una de las tecnologías de atención que se inscriben más directamente en la lógica de la promoción de la autonomía. Nos centraremos en la noción de interdependencia que, a nuestro juicio, permite salvar la tendencia al individualismo y al sociologismo que impera en estos debates, pero creemos que debe ser completada incorporando a los otros-no-humanos. A través de la noción de traducción argumentaremos que la interdependencia se da siempre como resultado de un proceso de corporeización y estabilización de diversas ecologías de prácticas.