We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Speech politeness is one of the characteristics of the formula of human speech behaviour, based on the structural aspects of language, anthropology, sociology and pragmatics, and acts as a speech mechanism acquired by speakers at a specific time and in a particular politically and ethnically defined territory. We will attempt to summarize the mentioned findings in a well-arranged plan, which, although in some aspects allows for a simplified but internally structured insight into the functioning of speech courtesy as a cultural artefact, has given preference through the development of the social construct to certain social values over others.
More...
To understand the causes of political dissatisfaction is of great importance in the Czech Republic. Unlike in traditional democracies, it is satisfaction or dissatisfaction with politics that affects the degree of legitimacy of its democratic system. Existing knowledge offers several possible explanations of this phenomenon. The most universal among them is the public assessment of the quality of various aspects of politics and politicians. Following this, this article argues that these findings lack complexity, because they do not reflect the perspective of politicians. The article is based on the assumption that the political (dis)satisfaction and legitimacy of democracy are created in a cyclical process of mutual interaction between the public and politics. So, if the public formulates certain policy change requirements, politicians can potentially respond to them. The main problem is that they do not do that and existing research has no explanation for this. Based on an analysis of interviews with Czech MPs, this article argues that politicians do not respond adequately to public demands because their experience with politics is organised in a specific way. The public organises its experience with politics differently, because media news are the main source of its information about politics. In the form of the organisation of political experience of MPs, it is essential that they perceive political phenomena in a broader context, that they differentiate the degree of importance and relevance of their own experience with them in a specific way, and that they also transform the meaning of some of their aspects. In their perspective, it is, therefore, not the existing form of politics nor even the politicians themselves that should change, it is the public that should change.
More...
This article deals with the face-to-face relation as the necessary and sole axiomatic definition of the human world. The human world, primarily perceived through the perspective of evaluating the world through the relation to the Other, is a cultural and biological construct. The face carries a specific world view that is necessarily formed through its relation to other faces. The human face is a prerequisite for the origin of language, which is exuded by the face, thus being both a product of the animal world as well as strategic human behaviour encoded in the language. Modern man and their behaviour is the result of the evolution of social zoom, a process that determined present-day civilisation solely on the basis of the evolution of a balancing mechanism, i.e. altruistic language behaviour.
More...
The first part of the book, Etnogeneză și țuică (Ethnogenesis and Tzuika) by Vintilă Mihăilescu is the journalistic diary of an undercover sociologist. The meditations and demonstrations regarding the state and authority, the proximity of the authorities and the construction of nations, paternalism and the juvenilization of the population introduce the reader to a cultural dance from which little is left out. With humor and irony front and center, Vintilă Mihăilescu treats the reader with narrative ingeniousness, resorting to the eternal sensibilities of Romanians. Some known, some less known, but all bearing correspondences in concepts and expressions that, sadly, do not pass the sociologists. The gain of philologists would be that much more significant. For example, why does our public discourse slip with predilection from history to myth? the anthropologist wonders.
More...
The main idea of this text is that the concepts of sovereignty and utopia, though at first glance without any apparent connection, do in fact have a common reference, which is the one of modern political philosophy and political anthropology. They pertain also to the mode of being of man as such, to his specific way of inhabiting the world. Besides that I argue with the help of the Arnold Gehlen philosophical anthropology and Jean Jacques Wunenburgers/Gilbert Durands theory of imaginary that this both concepts express some essential features of man and that they pertain to his condition as Mangelwesen, as a being which is characterized through lack. Human beings do not have the natural equipment of the other living beings, no claws, no fur etc, therefore they have to find a way to maintain their existence. Man need to shape himself, his needs, his wishes, and also to create and control this created environment. Utopia is rooted in this need of conceiving a blueprint for man to exercise sovereignty over the environment and himself.
More...
Utopia is more than a discourse or a litaray gener. Utopia is, if we believe Jean Jacques Wunenburger – a disciple og Gilbert Durand – something akin to what his master cvalled anthropological structures of the imaginary. Bassicly utopia is an invariant of the human mind and society, through which mankind imagines a society that is completely organized by man, without the help or through lawas that have an extrahuman or nonhuman origin, for instance natural law or God' Law. It is a matrix that exist alongside and in opposition what the mythical matrix that pervades also human mind and society, but which refers to the ontological dependence of man, which is denied by utopia.
More...
De-a lungul timpului, diferite științe s-au ocupat cu explicarea fericirii și, cu fiecare ocazie, abordarea variază. Tensiunea cea mai puternică este între abordarea calitativă și cea cantitativă a fenomenului. Astfel, antropologia, știință prin excelență calitativă, privește fericirea sub forma unei pulsații spirituale care este totodată și transcendentă (Bernea 2008, Vulcănescu 1991). Economia, însă, știința exactității, privește mai degrabă fericirea sub forma prosperității, într-o relație direct cauzală – prosperitatea determină fericirea (Ricardo 2001). Un indicator al prosperității este și produsul intern brut al unei țări, care adesea este relaționat cu standardul de viață și cu fericirea. Recenta politică socială a „wellbeing”-ului britanic abordează fericirea sub aspect separat de PIB, dar totuși în relație cu acesta, construindu-se un nou indicator, mai complex, al fericirii.
More...
This paper examines a discursive controversy that arose in Slovakia after a conservative civic association initiated a referendum to protect 'traditional families' against the supposed encroachment of LGBTI rights. The 2015 referendum represents a tipping point in the formation of a new Slovak conservative political front. In this article, meaning-making among actors civically engaged in the referendum is brought to light by re-constructing the deep cultural structures in which they are immersed. Drawing upon the strong programme in cultural sociology, I analyse the master narratives woven through the discourse of the referendum organisers and boycotters. These narratives are re-constructed from 20 semi-structured interviews with the engaged actors and a corpus of 82 written documents, such as blogs, speeches, and declarations concerning the referendum. The analysis employs the methods of thick description and the structural analysis of narrative genres. It shows that, first, the referendum controversy presents a clash between a narrative of social decline and a narrative of social progress. The narratives serve as moral regulators by deploying emotionally loaded images of nostalgia for 'traditional families' and a utopia of unconditional progress. Second, although both narratives interpret the referendum as a milestone in the history of Slovakia, they do so in different genres with specific implications for action. Using the example of the decision by referendum opponents to withdraw from the pre-referendum debates, I demonstrate how narrative genres as implicit and deep cultural structures have the power to orient action and shape the contours of controversy.
More...
The purpose of the article is to assess the cultural identification value of documentary literature written by earth scientists who act as amateur biographers and memoirists. One of the tasks is to analyze the literary forms that embody the professional identification of geologists in the context of the problem of genre formation in documentary literature. The scientists realize their creative potential as amateur authors in the works written for commemorative purposes on the basis of real-life plots. The paper presents the comparative analysis of two scientists’ biographies written by their counterparts: the life chronicle of I. V. Belkov written by his wife and colleague I. D. Batieva and the autobiographical novel co-written by V. Z. Negrutsa and dedicated to his deceased wife T. Ya. Negrutsa. The authors and heroes of both books are geologists – doctors of sciences who worked at the Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Both books are characterized by the same type of relation between textual and extra-textual reality as a specific feature of documentary literature. The analysis is based on the ideas that genres are identified according to their common properties of a supra-genre character, which create stable or situational combinations and determine the similarity and diversity of texts. Professional identification is carried out on the basis of principles of documentation, memoirism, historicism, biographism, autobiographism, and commemorative attitude. These principles manifest themselves in different ways under the influence of the author’s motivation, genre form, and writing competence. The intersection of specific and genre features in different proportions and combinations creates unique examples of factual literature that are part of the literary heritage of scientific community. From the socio-anthropological perspective, it is important that these works reveal both stable and varying cultural models of geologists.
More...
In modern forensic practice, in recent years the number of identification studies of a person on the basis of his appearance has increased significantly. This is due to the fact that today, one of the most common sites of inquiry that goes to crime scene labs is video footage of security cameras containing the perpetrator or other persons involved in the crime being investigated. Also, in many of the investigated cases, at the initial stage of the investigation, only data were available that amounted to a description of some of the offender's appearance, his speech, gait, clothing and others, which were perceived as thought patterns. victims or witnesses of the crime.
More...
The paper outlines the discursive process of how the extended social role of the face mask resulted in a complexity of meanings. Originally, it was an object of the health industry, but through time – as a result of the extension of the COVID-19 pandemic – it has become an emblematic material with many semantic layers. In addition, since its presence in everyday life, it has been regarded as a symbol of the pandemic itself and has penetrated folklore. As one of the most common contemporary folklore motives, the facemask was used for example for making a joke about the pandemic. Jokes help us handle obstacles, and the face mask was an obvious tool for creativity and humour. The author started her research at the very beginning of the pandemic (in March 2020) and published her archives and conclusions in an online series on the website of the Research Institute of Ethnology, ELKH. This paper gives an analysis and context of a special topic derived from this archive, with also giving an insight into the folklore of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More...
Perceptual etymology is a new term which is introduced here to refer to an anthropological rather than a purely linguistic interpretation of the origins of words. This author tries to show in what way different aspects of our understanding of etymology can be combined to create a coherent and possibly full image of a word.
More...
The presented article poses a question about the limits of the art of lyricism, and more specifically about the methods of literary studies capturing certain specific or border phenomena that have emerged from it and gained an independent status, and the song/songs is one of such phenomena. Hence, the title of the study includes a quotation from an important work by Paul Zumthor, it is both the starting point and the thesis of the text. The thesis of the study is the judgment that songs can be called literature, provided that we clearly emphasize that they are not poetry, but oral poetry. It is a completely different entity from lyricism, it gained its own language, fully fledged in culture, it emerged from poetry, it evolved and became a new type of cultural text. The aim of the reflection is an attempt to take a closer look at this extraordinary adventure, which this evolution, and even revolution, has become, because it is the rapid expansion of rock music, the outbreak of counterculture in the second half of the 20th century, and with them – the incredible development of various types of songs. The article addresses, inter alia, the following issues: describes “helpful methodologies”, gives terminological suggestions and mentions the “technical” aspects of song studies. Selected examples of research perspectives are also given.
More...
Ziņās par vardarbību Latvijas tiešsaistes medijos ik pa laikam parādās dzīvnieki. Lai labāk izprastu, kāda ir dzīvnieku loma šajā kontekstā, tika atlasīti un analizēti 73 raksti un 220 lasītāju komentāri. Vardarbīgu uzvedību bieži vien skata kā pretēju cilvēciskumam, un dzīvnieki, dzīvnieciskums palīdz veidot morāles robežas, vērtības un zināšanas. Metaforas, salīdzinājumi un arī konteksts, kādos dzīvnieki tiek pieminēti, veido nošķīrumu starp cilvēkiem un dzīvniekiem, bet arī starp dažādām cilvēku grupām. Tajā pašā laikā dzīvniekiem un dzīvnieciskumam ir saliedējošā, empātiskā puse, kuru var izmantot nevardarbīgas uzvedības veicināšanā un zināšanu stiprināšanā par vardarbības novēršanu.
More...
In the article, I analyse responses of Polish primary care practitioners to the COVID-19 pandemic. I apply and develop the concepts of skills and enskilment to shed more light on the practices and knowledge-making strategies employed by doctors to cope with the challenges the COVID-19 outbreak has brought to their professional practice.
More...
The article explores the commonalities of structure in the life histories of a mother and her daughter arguing that sharing the same story does not preclude the existence of a strong and distinctive sense of self. Agency and selfhood are intimately connected with interpretation and the pursuit of understanding. In order to illuminate this relationship the author draws upon ideas of musical form and interpretation that suggest how this might come about. As in the art of music, creation and interpretation are closely linked. The article suggests that authoring and interpretation are as indissolubly linked in the verbal arts of life story telling. Although the author of the original life has died the story lives on and demands a hearing. The dimension of generation allows the first storyteller to choose the beginning of the story but while its re-readings continue its ending is indefinitely deferred. Šajā rakstā analizēšu kopīgos elementus mātes un meitas dzīvesstāstu struktūrā, attīstot domu, ka kopīgi pārdzīvots stāsts neizslēdz spēcīgu un savveidīgu patības apziņu. Rīcības spēja un patība ir nesaraujami saistītas ar interpretāciju un tiekšanos saprast. Rakstā aplūkošu strukturālas nepārtrauktības un unikālas, spēcīgas patības apziņas līdzāspastāvēšanas problemātiku. Lai dziļāk izpētītu šo saikni, izmantošu analoģiju – saikni starp mūzikas formu un interpretāciju.
More...