Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation (...) of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison. (shrink)

This paper explores the laborious and intimate work of turning bodies of research animals into models of human patients. Based on ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary Danish research centre NEOMUNE, we investigate collaboration across species and disciplines, in research aiming at improving survival for preterm infants. NEOMUNE experimental studies on piglets evolved as a platform on which both basic and clinical scientists exercised professional authority. Guided by the field of multi-species research, we explore the social and material agency of research (...) animals in the production of human health. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “collaborative survival”, we show that sharing the responsibility of the life and death of up to twenty-five preterm piglets fostered not only a collegial solidarity between basic and clinical scientists, but also a transformative cross-fertilization across species and disciplines—a productive “contamination”—facilitating the day-to-day survival of piglets, the academic survival of scientists and the promise of survival of preterm infants. Contamination spurred intertwined identity shifts that increased the porosity between the pig laboratory and the neonatal intensive care unit. Of particular significance was the ability of the research piglets to flexibly become animal-infant-patient hybrids in need of a united effort from basic and clinical researchers. However, ‘hybrid pigs’ also entailed a threat to the demarcation between humans and animals that consolidates the use of animals in biomedical research, and efforts were continuously done to keep contamination within spatial limits. We conclude that contamination facilitates transformative encounters, yet needs spatial containment to materialize bench-to-bedside translation. (shrink)

Rule is commonly conceptualized with reference to the compliance it invokes. In this article, we propose a conception of rule via the practice of resistance instead. In contrast to liberal approaches, we stress the possibility of illegitimate rule, and, as opposed to critical approaches, the possibility of legitimate authority. In the international realm, forms of rule and the changes they undergo can thus be reconstructed in terms of the resistance they provoke. To this end, we distinguish between two types of (...) resistance—opposition and dissidence—in order to demonstrate how resistance and rule imply each other. We draw on two case studies of resistance in and to international institutions to illustrate the relationship between rule and resistance and close with a discussion of the normative implications of such a conceptualization. (shrink)

A noteworthy development that has transpired in American sociology in the past quarter century has been the increasingly sophisticated interest in the analysis of human cultural systems. Sadly, however, these analyses reveal that social scientists rarely appreciate the profoundly evolutionary aspects of human culture. The chief purpose of this essay is to address this shortcoming and to offer some tentative suggestions toward its rectification. The essay begins by briefly reviewing recent developments in the analysis of cultural systems, primarily by reference (...) to the influential work of Wuthnow. Second, a common flaw in these approaches is addressed—namely, the absence of any recognition of the value of grounding sociocultural theory in an informed evolutionary framework—and the case is made that this shortcoming is avoidable, even within the context of the intellectual traditions of the social sciences. Third, the evolutionary foundations of human cultural behavior are explored in terms of an analysis of relevant theoretical and empirical developments in the evolutionary neurosciences. Fourth, the value of these insights is illustrated by reference to an evolutionary critique of a recent and thought-provoking contribution to the study of modern political culture—Douglas and Wildavsky’s analysis ofRisk and Culture. Finally, the article concludes by emphasizing the value of and the necessity for incorporating evolutionary reasoning into the domain of sociocultural theory. (shrink)

This article examines the cultural practices through which a group of professionals infuse their work and community with charisma. Although previous research has theorized the “charisma of office” (Weber 1978), we know little about how the occupants of such offices sustain it. I focus on a group of psychoanalytically-inclined psychotherapists, whose field, despite its early charismatic beginnings, has been especially embattled in recent decades. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I reveal how they share stories emphasizing their “idealization” by others, (...) draw boundaries between their professional and private lives to manage their work identities, and perform interpersonal affective work that shores up their claims to extraordinary abilities. Together, these cultural practices constitute charisma within the professional group. This article thus makes a case that, as expertise becomes increasingly contested, we must look beyond social organization and the evidentiary bases of knowledge to understand professional authority. (shrink)

This article proposes a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus as context-specific, multiple, and decentralized based on nine months of participant-observation fieldwork with dumpster divers in New York City. Dumpster divers are mostly white, college-educated people in their twenties and thirties who eat food from retail trash as a lifestyle choice. Sociologists have recently theorized culture as a fragmented, incoherent “toolkit” of cultured capacities acquired throughout the lifetime. Bourdieu on the contrary, theorized socialized culture as habitus, a relatively durable, classed structure acquired (...) during childhood. While he recognized the possibility of acquiring “specific” habitus (Bourdieu 2000) later in life, he never developed the theoretical implications of socialization across multiple contexts. Building on ethnographic evidence of dumpster divers’ contradictory pursuit of food taste through the distasteful behavior of eating from the trash, I develop an alternative model of habitus as interlinked bundles of dispositions acquired in specific contexts. To theorize the bundled quality of habitus, I introduce what I call the practical congruity of dispositions. I show how rather than being disparate elements of a cultural repertoire, ways of seeing, common sense, dexterity, and orientations “make sense” in conjunction as actors mobilize them in specific contexts: dumpster diving acquires a commonsensical character based on the practical sense practitioners acquire. My understanding of habitus goes beyond the fragmentation assumed in notions of culture as a repertoire of cultured capacities, on the one hand, and the continuity and coherence premised in notions of primary and secondary habitus, on the other hand. (shrink)

Magda Arnold is recognised as one of the pioneers of modern cognitive approaches to the study of emotion. Indeed, her definition of appraisal is still employed more or less unchanged by many researchers. Somewhat less well known is Arnold's broader theory of emotion, personality, and human development that formed the context for her ideas about appraisal. In this paper, I examine the influence of the psychology of Thomas Aquinas on Arnold's thinking about appraisal, emotion, the self and self-actualisation. I then (...) critique current conceptions of appraisal in the light of her ideas about emotion and the person. I end with a plea to broaden our conception of what constitutes a moral emotion. (shrink)

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are socially constructed as more ‘dirty’ than other gynaecological conditions. This article analyses women’s accounts of interactions with clinicians, subsequent to a diagnosis of genital herpes simplex virus or human papilloma virus. Women conceptualised consultations as a ‘moral event,’ different from other consultations. This moral component is highlighted drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘the confessional.’ Additionally, Douglas’ anthropological construction of ‘dirt’ is used to consider why these consultations are ‘confessional’ experiences. Email interviews were conducted with 26 (...) women diagnosed with a viral STI and 12 sexual health clinicians. Data were analysed thematically using a feminist, poststructuralist approach. Findings indicated that discourses of morality shape sexual health consultations. Five themes were identified in relation to the moral ‘work’ in clinical consultations about a viral STI diagnosis: the particular ‘dirtiness’ of viral STIs, clinicians as moral agents, the ‘non‐judgmental’ clinician, women juggling truth‐telling and risk and clinicians prescribing moral work. Clinicians support and educate women more effectively if they recognise subjective, moral aspects of sexual health consultations rather than assuming that effective clinical teaching is rational, scientific and non‐judgmental. (shrink)

Gilligan’s (1982) refinement of Kohlberg’s theory on moral development operates on two theses: (1) females, more so than males, reach moral decisions based on the personalities of the relevant individuals; and (2) female behaviors stemming from moral decisions are based upon “care” and “responsibility for others.” This article accepts the first thesis but argues that the second is incorrect. That is, self-interest—i.e., aiding “blood” kin and/or carefully monitoring reciprocity—rather than “altruism” is argued to be the operant dynamic in forging distaff (...) morality and resultant behavior. Six empirical examples are presented as contraindicative of Gilligan’s second thesis. Finally, it is suggested that selection for the psychological traits of independence and the mastery of subtle social chess yielded ancestral females who had more descendants—us—than did females with alternative profiles. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore how food can be analyzed in terms of signs and codes of everyday life, and especially how food can be used to express ethical concerns. The paper investigates the potential of a semiotic conceptual analysis: How can the semiotic approach be used to analyze expressions of ethics and food ethics in everyday life? The intention is to explore from a theoretical point of view and with constructed cases, how semiotics can be used (...) to analyze the role of food as an expression of ethics in everyday life among families, friends, and colleagues: How do foodstuffs function as signs of ethics in everyday life? How is food used to send signals about care and concern? How are the signs of food ethics perceived? It is concluded that analyzing ethical considerations with respect to food with the help of the semiotic model can show us perspectives that otherwise would be difficult to see and thus we can address everyday food ethical issues that otherwise might not be noted. The semiotic approach to food ethics in everyday life is a conceptual framework that can be used to draw attention to certain domains and fields of food ethical behavior that otherwise would tend to remain implicit and unspoken. (shrink)

I consider reasons for questioning ‘the laws of logic’, and suggest that these laws do not accord with everyday reality. Either they are rhetorical tools rather than absolute truths, or else Plato and his successors were right to think that they identify a reality distinct from the ordinary world of experience, and also from the ultimate source of reality.

This is an excerpt from the contentIn the fall of 1970, as a visiting professor at London University, I was introduced to Mary Douglas by mutual friends at University College and the Institute of Education. In addition to having lunch periodically, we would join Basil Bernstein for a drink at a pub on Gower Street. Our meetings were casual and intellectually quite enjoyable. Mary was always quick to introduce research topics of mutual interest. When I joined Basil and she at (...) the pub, the discussion was more “aggressive” but always civil and stimulating. These episodic memories have never weakened, and as I recall those pleasant occasions I am reminded of the intellectual challenges that Basil and Mary created and their friendship.After my year in London, I did not see Mary for several years, but there were occasional messages that were given to me orally by mutual acquaintances. We did meet more often when she came on visits to the U.S., and especially after she took up residence in New York while at the Russell Sage Fo. (shrink)

My purpose is to analyze lawyers creating meaning in three well-known cases in Anglo-American legal history: Commonwealth v. Woodward (1997) the famous Boston ‘nanny’ case, the O.J. Simpson Murder Trial (1995), and the John Peter Zenger Libel Case in Colonial New York (1734). In each case, creative lawyers were able to shift the question before the jury from the formal legal question—did Woodward and Simpson commit murder? Did Zenger publish libelous material?—to issues of vengeance and catharsis, and of the ability (...) of the legal system to represent the community’s sense of justice. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theology and sociology on two levels. The first is in terms of the general disciplinary closure that has marked much of their coexistence, despite the many topics on which they potentially meet. The second level is more specific and concerns the tension in Britain between religious sociology, in which sociology is put to serve faith, and the secular sociology of religion, where religion is studied scientifically. This tension has been addressed before with respect to (...) the history of sociology in France and the United States, but the British case, hitherto relatively unknown, illustrates the potential there was for a more fruitful relationship between sociology and theology in Britain that went undeveloped as the secular sociology of religion eventually replaced early religious sociology. The existence of religious sociology has been written out of the history of the discipline in Britain, such that when theology and sociology began a more serious engagement in the 1970s in Britain and elsewhere, particularly as biblical studies discovered sociology and as theologians and sociologists first met jointly, this earlier dialogue was entirely overlooked. (shrink)

Scholars have argued that transnational networks of right-wing economists and activists caused the worldwide embrace of neoliberalism. Using the case of an Italian think tank, CESES, associated with these networks, the author shows that the origins of neoliberalism were not in hegemony but in liminality. At CESES, the Italian and American right sought to convert Italians to free market values by showing them how Soviet socialism worked. However, CESES was created in liminal spaces that opened up within and between Soviet (...) socialism and Western capitalism after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Scholars from East and West at CESES developed new knowledge about actually existing socialism, which, due to the shifting context of the Cold War, seemed to provoke left-wing sympathies among the scholars and the students involved. CESES in fact required left-wing scholars, who had necessary skills and a fascination with a common project of democratic or market socialism, to create this new knowledge. The new knowledge that developed out of an East–West dialogue not only helped right-wing transnational networks to reorient their hegemonic projects, but also helped those on the left to understand actually existing socialism and what socialism might become. This knowledge could not be obtained without this dialogue and had to travel through liminal spaces. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology often reject the mere possibility of symbolic causality. Conversely, theories in which symbolic causality plays a central role tend to be both anti-nativist and anti-evolutionary. This article sketches how these apparent scientific rivals can be reconciled in the study of disgust. First, we argue that there are no good philosophical or evolutionary reasons to assume that symbolic causality is impossible. Then, we examine to what extent symbolic causality can be part of the theoretical toolbox of (...) the evolutionary social sciences. This examination leads to the conclusion that it is possible to make evolutionary sense of Mary Douglas’s theory of disgust, and that her view of symbolic causality can and should inform evolutionary theories of (sociocultural) disgust. (shrink)

How are social and institutional circumstances linked to the knowledge that scientists produce? To answer this question it is necessary to take risks: speculative but testable theories must be proposed. It will be my aim to explain and then apply one such theory. This will enable me to propose an hypothesis about the connexion between social processes and the style and content of mathematical knowledge.

In this paper I critique two popular, non-scientific attitudes toward genetically engineered foods. In doing so, I will be employing the concepts of ambiguity, purity/impurity, control/resistance, and unity/diversity as developed by Latina feminist metaphysicians. I begin by casting a critical eye toward a specific anti-biotech account of transgenic food crops, an account that I will argue relies on an anti-feminist metaphysics. I then cast that same critical eye toward a specific pro-biotech account, arguing that it also relies on such an (...) anti-feminist metaphysics. I will argue further that this metaphysics yields a less accurate account of genetics. I end by arguing that if we adopt a Latina feminist metaphysics we can more accurately understand plants, genetics, and genetic engineering. (shrink)

In an age of apparent disrepair as the climate crisis takes hold and neoliberalism fails to liberate, as the cost of living rises and rights are retracted, the need for a reparative turn is overdue. But what is repair? If repair is contained in moments of total breakdown, then the reparative acts of care that sustain the world are denied. Countering these forces and the urgency prescribed by the crisis of disrepair and in what too often appears as the proprietary (...) epistemology of repair, in this paper I offer an account of ‘repairability’. Structured in relation to the reparative gaze of feminist theory and poetic thinking, repairability assumes a material trace, I contend, through the vernacular archive of Cuban artist-ethnographer Ernesto Oroza. Oroza’s work offers a compelling case study through which to think the possibility of repair as an act of worldly becoming. (shrink)

In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets to new arenas – to courts and government committees, in particular – and switched to (...) a techno-managerial discourse of maintaining river health. What accounts for this change? This article traces the trajectory of cultural politics around Indian rivers within the larger imagination of the nation, the rise of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism, and the emergence of environmental bureaucracies. It argues that, alongside being shaped by this context, current anti-dam campaigns also contend with the legacy of earlier social movements, their gains as well as losses. This political field has narrowed the potential for radical critique, large-scale collective mobilization and, ultimately, keeping rivers alive. (shrink)

This paper explores recent vigilance attending pedophilia in the UK context. It examines governmental and popular responses to the perceived threat posed by child sex offenders, exhibited respectively in provisions for sex offender orders within the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, and in press and public campaigns for the “naming and shaming” of paedophiles. These two responses cohabit in current contexts of concern about childhood as innocence and vulnerability, and are worked out against the figure of the paedophile as a (...) “dangerous individual”; nevertheless, they invoke different visions of political community. Developing Foucault's observation that contemporary political rationalities combine two distinct models of political community, that of the juridically constituted polity and that of the society rendered calculable and organized through normalizing models of risk, the paper argues that both of these models are evident in governmental and popular responses to paedophilia. However, where the former, a technical and administrative response to a problem of social order, aims to achieve public safety through the professional prediction and management of risk, the latter is premised on the elimination of danger,demanding the public outing of paedophiles and their exorcism from the community. While these responses contest whether danger can be turned into risk through professional management, they are mutually enhancing in fostering governmental and popular concern with public and community safety. (shrink)

This article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocultural—we make a case for a translational medical humanities framework for tackling the multifactorial crisis brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 (...) infection. This innovative entanglement of perspectives has the merit of carving out a new space for translation research at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, providing sustainable ways to conceptualize the production of science at times of crisis, and challenging conventional views of translation as a primarily linguistic and cultural phenomenon that traditionally does not engage with science. (shrink)

Drawing from Goffman’s original observations on stigma and the consequences of interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct a 20-year review of the diverse literature on stigma to revisit the collective nature of stigmatization processes. We find that studies on stigma’s origins, responses, processes, and outcomes have diverged from Goffman’s relational view of stigma as they have overlooked important relational mechanisms explaining the processes of (de)stigmatization. We draw from those conclusions to justify the need to study (...) stigma as a collective phenomenon. We develop a relational perspective on stigma based on understanding how attributes are stigmatized (or not) by audiences in their interactions. We argue that to advance stigma research, it is necessary to build on Goffman’s theory to include the stigmatizers (i.e., the normal) and supporters (i.e., the wise); how they create, sustain, or remove stigma; and how they relate to the stigmatized (i.e., the targets). Accordingly, we provide a research agenda on stigma as a collective phenomenon that theorizes a relational perspective, proposes a typology of how audiences relate to stigmatization, and identifies patterns of relations between audiences. We thus offer a missing piece to existing accounts of stigma by focusing on the key role of audiences (i.e., stigmatizers or supporters of the stigmatized) rather than on the targets of stigma (i.e., the own). (shrink)

In The Culture of Control Garland describes the ‘policy predicament’ of late modern society as involving the normality of high crime rates and the acknowledged limitations of the criminal justice system. This combination has triggered a contradictory range of policy responses that Garland describes as adaptive and non‐adaptive, with the non‐adaptive responses characterised as ‘denial’ and ‘acting out’. Garland’s invocation of these Freudian constructs invites a more fully developed psychoanalytic reading of the contemporary landscape of penal policy. Drawing on the (...) writings of Jung and Freud as well as more recent psychoanalytic interpretations of punishment and punitiveness, we aim in this paper to put the Culture of Control ‘on the couch’. That is, we try to draw out some of the psychoanalytic themes that Garland so tantalisingly dangles before us, and begin to flesh out the implications of a full‐fledged psychoanalytic interpretation of Garland’s argument. (shrink)

This paper explores the experiences of infertile women who occupy a liminal space in society, and argues that the fertility clinic served as a space to tolerate women's experiences of liminality. It provided not only rituals aimed at transition to pregnancy, but also a space where women's liminal experiences, which are caused by the existential chaos of infertility, could be tolerated. The British experience seemed to differ from the American one identified in the literature, where self‐management and peer group support (...) are described as strategies used by infertile women to manage infertility. The British women in this study did not appear to draw so much on self‐management or peer group support to deal with their experiences of infertility. They appeared to be isolated in their experience. The clinic thus provided a space in which recognition was given to their intensely private experiences of difference from those in the outside fertile world and allowed them to manage these socially unacceptable, culturally taboo and invisible experiences. However, because of its very limited success rate in enabling women to become pregnant, rather than facilitating the transition of status from infertile to fertile woman, the clinic also served to reinforce the liminal experiences of those women who remained infertile. Inadvertently, the clinic offered a way of being in limbo while at the same time reinforcing the liminal experiences of women. (shrink)

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be (...) transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (shrink)

This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose (...) neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such associations and argue that the brain plasticity of human adolescence constitutes an “experience expectant” developmental period for ritual conditioning of sacred symbols. We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space. (shrink)

This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose (...) neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such associations and argue that the brain plasticity of human adolescence constitutes an “experience expectant” developmental period for ritual conditioning of sacred symbols. We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space. (shrink)

From a distance the Mark 1 radio telescope at Jodrell Bank is an edifying sight. It is a steel structure of over 1000 tons, holding aloft a fully steerable dish of wire mesh which focuses incoming radio waves from astronomical objects. It is set in gently rolling Cheshire countryside. Its striking appearance can easily be recruited as a powerful symbol of progress and of science as the pursuit of pioneering spirits.

How does material culture matter for institutions? Material objects are increasingly prominent in sociological research, but current studies offer limited insight for how material objects matter to institutional processes. We build on sociological insights to theorize aesthetic style, a shared pattern of material object presence and usage among a cluster of organizations in an institutional field. We use formal relational methods and a survey of material objects from religious congregations to uncover the aesthetic styles that are part of the “logics (...) of god” in the United States’ Christian religious field. We argue aesthetic styles help structure an institutional field by spanning objects’ meanings across space and time, stabilizing objects’ authority, and demarcating symbolic boundaries. Our research provides a conceptual tool for understanding how objects bridge the material and symbolic dimensions of institutions and a methodological example for examining the meaning of objects across numerous organizations in an institutional field. (shrink)

The history of the field of business ethics in the U.S. remains understudied and misunderstood. In this article I begin to remedy this oversight about the past, and I suggest how it can be beneficial in the present. Using both published and unpublished primary sources, I argue that the business ethics field emerged in the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of the establishment of business schools in major universities. I bring to light four important developments: business ethics lectures at (...) the University of California and Yale University, Leon Marshall’s curriculum at the College of Commerce of the University of Chicago, and the William A. Vawter Foundation on Business Ethics at Northwestern University. Then, I consider the payoffs of my historical account for business ethics theory, pedagogy, and practice. Specifically, I present four implications of my account under these headings: business ethics as a public problem; the place of ethics in business schools; historicizing business ethics; and historical self-knowledge. (shrink)

Alongside the public and private, the sacred can represent a third social-political dispensation, as Raymond Geuss notes. The modern liberal public/private divide represents a historical anomaly, w...

An increasingly popular suggestion is that empathy and/or sympathy plays a foundational role in understanding harm norms and being motivated by them. In this paper, I argue these emotions play a rather more moderate role in harms norms than we are often led to believe. Evidence from people with frontal lobe damage suggests that neither empathy, nor sympathy is necessary for the understanding of such norms. Furthermore, people's understanding of why it is wrong to harm varies and is by no (...) means limited to considerations of welfare arising from the abilities to sympathize and/or empathize. And the sorts of considerations of welfare that are central to sympathy and, to some extent empathy, are often already moralized. As such, these considerations cannot form the non-moral foundation of harm norms. Finally, empathy and sympathy are not the only emotions that motivate harm norms. Indeed, much of the evidence that has been adduced in favor of the motivational force of empathy and sympathy are studies on helping, which is quite a different behavior than aggression inhibition. Understanding and being motivated by harm norms are complex abilities. To understand them better, we need to move beyond the current fixation on empathy and sympathy. (shrink)

The cultural turn has yet to fully reconfigure ‘class’ as a set of fictions, tropes, discourses and enduring culture-structures. Existing Durkheimian approaches have stalled at his middle period morphological reductionism. This paper constructs a more radical understanding in the late-Durkheimian idiom. It shows how class operates as a signifier in a language game of purity and pollution, virtue and vice. Taking a lead from studies of the ‘unruly’ working class, the paper opens up the more subtle pollution that attends to (...) the mythical ‘bourgeoisie’ and its associated and imagined ‘bourgeois’ culture. As a sign system this class location is deemed inauthentic, sybaritic, and as strangely deadening to cultural vitality. Although commonly found in contexts of gentrification and commodification that involve class conflict, this critical discourse is also applied within the bourgeois milieu. Such needless auto-critique suggests a relative autonomy from determination by class struggle. The possibilities for this approach are illustrated at length with reference to a paradigm case: the highly bourgeois milieu of the composer Richard Wagner and his Bayreuth Festival. (shrink)

Para estudar os processos de conversão e cristianização que se verificaram em Goa entre os sé­culos XVI e XVIII, e os seus impactos sociais, importa entender como é que na tópica dominan­te no reino se explicava a alteridade, como é que esta se manifestava no quadro legal e institu­cional, e, simultaneamente, se transplantava para os territórios imperiais. Com este estudo pretende-se mostrar que as atitudes da coroa portuguesa em relação às populações residentes nos territórios do império se inspiraram naquelas que (...) no reino se estava a ter em relação às comunidades de origem judaica, depois cristã-nova. Creio que a par das revisitações «clássi­cas», também este modelo de pensar, identificar, e gerir a alteridade no interior do reino serviu de grelha referencial das novas situações sociais, e desse paralelismo resultaram, intra e extra territorium, grupos sociais (conversos e novamente convertidos) cujas identidades liminares persistiram pelo menos durante dois séculos. (shrink)