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Social Boundaries (social + boundary)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Performing Race in Four Culturally Diverse Fourth Grade Classrooms: Silence, Race Talk, and the Negotiation of Social Boundaries

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2009
Rebecca Schaffer
This article addresses how preadolescents produce and perform race through an ethnographic study of 8- to 11-year-old students in four fourth grade classrooms in the southeastern United States. Although Asian, Latino, and white students tended to avoid explicit talk of race, many white students constructed black students as disruptive "troublemakers." Black students were more likely to openly discuss race and racism and used race talk to silence or isolate certain students.,[race, identity, media, elementary school, multicultural education] [source]

Stabilizing flows in the legal field: illusions of permanence, intellectual property rights and the transnationalization of law

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2003
Paul Street
In this article I examine some of the problems that ,modern' legal theory poses for a consideration of the extended reach of social actors and institutions in time and space. While jurisprudence has begun to engage with the concept of globalization, it has done so in a relatively limited manner. Thus legal theory's encounters with highly visible transnational practices have, for the most part, resulted not in challenging the prevailing formal legal paradigm, but in a renewed if slightly modified search for a general jurisprudence that ultimately takes little account of the manner in which the work of law is carried out transnationally. In the first part of this article I examine how legal theory's concern to maintain its own integrity places limitations on its ability to examine the permeability of social boundaries. In the latter part I draw on critical human geography, post,structuralism and actor,network theory (ANT), to examine the manner in which transnational actors have been able to mobilize law, and in particular intellectual property rights (IPRs), as a necessary strategy for both maintaining the meanings of bio,technologies through time and space, and enrolling farmers into particular social networks. [source]

Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth1

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 4 2005
Angela Reyes
This article explores the ways in which Asian American teenagers creatively appropriated two African American slang terms: aite and na mean. While some teens racialized slang as belonging to African Americans, other teens authenticated identities as slang speakers. Through close analysis of slang-in-use and particularly of the metapragmatic discussions such uses inspired, this article examines how the teens specified relationships between language, race, age, region and class, while achieving multiple social purposes, such as identifying with African Americans, marking urban youth subcultural participation, and interactionally positioning themselves and others as teachers and students of slang. As slang emerged with local linguistic capital, the teens used slang to create social boundaries not only between teens and adults, but also between each other. The discursive salience of region implicitly indexed socio-economic status and proximity to African Americans as markers that teens drew on to authenticate themselves and others as slang speakers. [source]

Outside the glass case: The social life of urban heritage in Kyoto

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009
CHRISTOPH BRUMANN
ABSTRACT Recent anthropological and other literature tends to assume that the uses of heritage in modern societies lead to the falsification, petrification, desubstantiation, and enclosure of the things and practices so designated. Yet two traditions of Japan's ancient capital Kyoto,the historic town houses (kyō-machiya) that have found a new appreciation since the 1990s and the Gion matsuri, one of the most famous festivals of the nation,contradict these assumptions. Their well-documented histories are not widely distorted; they are not forever fixed but allowed to evolve; they are valued not only for their traditionality but also for other, substantive qualities; and their appreciation is not dominated by a concern for social boundaries. This is influenced by the urban, relatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan background of both traditions, as it is in parallel cases elsewhere. Greater attention to the perspectives of their carriers, however, will very likely show that the social uses of other traditions too are more complex than the standard assumptions lead one to believe. [Japan, cultural heritage, invention of tradition, vernacular architecture, festivals, urban anthropology] [source]

Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
Deirdre McKay
Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ,Igorot' to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ,tribal slot', somewhere between ordinary peasants and ,backward' primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse tying indigenous or ,tribal' culture to particular places. Colonial and, now, local anthropology has been recruited to this process through the mapping of community boundaries. This has allowed groups to secure official status as ,cultural communities' and gain legal recognition of their ancestral domains. Ironically, even as ancestral domains are recognised, the municipalities that hold such domains have ceased to be bounded containers for Igorot localities, if they ever were. Participation in global indigenous networks, circular migration, and ongoing relations with emigrants overseas blur the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of Igorot communities. Transnational flows of people, information, and value are recruited to support the essentialised versions of indigenous identity necessary for negotiations with the state. Here, I show how the specific history of the Igorot ,tribal slot' enables communities to perform essentialised indigeneity and simultaneously enact highly translocal modes of cultural reproduction. [source]

Where is the British national press?1

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
John MacInnes
Abstract Although globalization has highlighted the danger of conflating state, society and nation, sociologists remain insufficiently alert to such banal nationalism. Newspapers offer a strong test case of the extent of diversity in the construction of state, national and social boundaries, since Billig and Anderson have argued they comprise a special case where their orientation to an audience simultaneously located in a state, society and nation allows them to reproduce a sense of national identity. However, despite the commonsense obviousness of the term, it proves remarkably difficult to define what the ,British national press' might comprise. Circulation density of titles varies substantially across different parts of the UK and editorial copy is altered to address diverse ,national' readerships. ,British' newspapers also circulate in other states, especially the Republic of Ireland. After reviewing how newspapers might be defined as ,national' and/or ,British', we conclude that both Anderson and Billig over-estimate the congruence, relevance and obviousness of state, society and national boundaries. If the conceptualization of such boundaries is problematic in the case of the press, it follows that it must be still more so for most other objects of sociological analysis, including that of ,society' itself. [source]

No "Rip Van Winkles" Here: Amish Education Since Wisconsin v. Yoder

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2006
David L. McConnell
This study examines the educational implications of the shift in economic livelihood in a Ohio Amish community since a landmark 1972 Supreme Court decision paved the way for control of their schools. The clash between tradition and economic pragmatism, and their multiple interpretations, has led to diverse educational pathways, including public schools, charter schools, homeschooling, GED programs, and vocational courses. The diverse ways in which the Amish continue to renegotiate social boundaries with their English neighbors suggests the need for more attention to internal diversity in the anthropological study of schooling in so called "folk societies." [source]

Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2000
John C. Meyer
The compelling power of humor makes it a recurrent topic for research in many fields, including communication. Three theories of humor creation emerge in humor research: the relief theory, which focuses on physiological release of tension; the incongruity theory, singling out violations of a rationally learned pattern; and the superiority theory, involving a sense of victory or triumph. Each theory helps to explain the creation of different aspects of humor, but each runs into problems explaining rhetorical applications of humor. Because each theory of humor origin tries to explain all instances of humor, the diverging communication effects of humor remain unexplained. Humor's enactment leads to 4 basic functions of humor in communication. Two tend to unite communicators: the identification and the clarification functions. The other 2 tend to divide 1 set of communicators from others: the enforcement and differentiation functions. Exploration of these effects-based functions of humor will clarify understanding of its use in messages. Humor use unites communicators through mutual identification and clarification of positions and values, while dividing them through enforcement of norms and differentiation of acceptable versus unacceptable behaviors or people. This paradox in the functions of humor in communication as, alternately, a unifier and divider, allows humor use to delineate social boundaries. [source]