Search Results

NMD and the ‘everyday’

Natalie Bormann

in National Missile Defence and the Politics of US Identity: A Poststructural Critique

This chapter further discusses missile defence, although it shifts from the official strategic documents to ‘everyday’ practices, first describing the realm of the everyday as one which covers an ... More

This chapter further discusses missile defence, although it shifts from the official strategic documents to ‘everyday’ practices, first describing the realm of the everyday as one which covers an entire network of socially embedded meaning, and then stating that NMD connects with the sphere of daily life in various ways. The next section considers the use of the image of the defence shield to describe the function of NMD and takes a look at the place where missile defence – as identity practice – is reproduced in and intersects with daily life discourses. The chapter also introduces David Tanks' analogy, where the defence system is compared to the stages of a baseball match, and the intimate correlation between popular culture and the textual practices of US foreign policy.Less

Can the Pentecostal Subaltern Speak?

Daniel Ramírez

in Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century

The concluding discussion joins the current deconstruction—offered by several theorists of migration, religion, and culture—of the notion of apolitical Pentecostals and rural-to-urban migrants on ... More

The concluding discussion joins the current deconstruction—offered by several theorists of migration, religion, and culture—of the notion of apolitical Pentecostals and rural-to-urban migrants on "social strike" in urban religious haciendas (Lalive D'Epinay). The recovered data from the early to mid-twentieth century demonstrates that folks can remain at once both Pentecostal and socially engaged or migratory and politically active—and politically active in unexpected ways. This historical awareness can help nuance the study of religion and politics in Latin America and Latino USA. In terms of culture viewed through theoretical lenses of habitus and everyday practice (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau), the Pentecostal subaltern now appears to have been busily at work—adapting, poaching, and reassembling evangelicalismo's offerings—in the first six decades of the twentieth century. The Pentecostal subaltern's voice, it turns out, was never silent, but rather redacted out of the historical record. No longer.Less

Introduction: Ambiguous Habits and the Paradox of Asian American Racial Formation

Ju Yon Kim

in The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday

This book explores the historical and theoretical relationship between the racial formation of Asian Americans and the mundane. More specifically, it considers how the paradox of Asian American ... More

This book explores the historical and theoretical relationship between the racial formation of Asian Americans and the mundane. More specifically, it considers how the paradox of Asian American racial formation is sustained through the mundane's ambiguous relationship to the body: it is enacted by the body, but may or may not be of the body. It highlights the social significance attached to certain everyday practices and to the possibility of adopting and transferring those practices across racial lines. It also examines the relationship among racialization, theatricality, and the racial mundane by reading two plays: The Yellow Jacket by J. Harry Benrimo and George C. Hazelton, Jr., and Our Town by Thornton Wilder.Less

Michel de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces

in Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory

This chapter describes Michel de Certeau's anthropology of mixed and indeterminate space. Certeau writes a cultural anthropology that discerns the unconscious religious tenor of everyday life. His ... More

This chapter describes Michel de Certeau's anthropology of mixed and indeterminate space. Certeau writes a cultural anthropology that discerns the unconscious religious tenor of everyday life. His The Practice of Everyday Life develops a different concept of the body, closer to language and psychoanalysis. He believes that Azouz Begag's immigrant experience can be strongly associated to the experience of space and time. For Certeau and Begag, space is less produced than developed through dynamic movement and practice among ordinary people who reinvent the everyday to ‘make’ the city from heteroclite ways of living and from the encounter between immigrants and natives.Less

Knowledge Mobilization in Healthcare Networks: The Power of Everyday Practices

Sue Newell and Marco Marabelli

in Mobilizing Knowledge in Healthcare: Challenges for Management and Organization

This chapter focuses on practices aimed at supporting knowledge mobilization to improve coordination across a network of organizations that are each involved in the care of children with complex ... More

This chapter focuses on practices aimed at supporting knowledge mobilization to improve coordination across a network of organizations that are each involved in the care of children with complex health needs. Improving knowledge mobilization in network settings is particularly challenging because there are typically no formal hierarchical relationships that can be used to “impose” change. The chapter therefore explores the power of everyday practices that can promote changes associated with improved knowledge mobilization and overall care coordination. Using data from a longitudinal in-depth case in Canada, it demonstrates the power of talk, text, and objects to promote and make durable improved knowledge mobilization across healthcare networks. The practice view of power used in the analysis provides, as we illustrate, very different insights into what allows network change to happen when compared with the view that assumes this depends on the power and resources that can be mustered by individuals “in charge.”Less

“I am not that type of grandmother”: (non)compliance with the grandmother archetype among contemporary Czech grandmothers

Lucie Vidovićová and Lucie Galčanová

in Grandparenting Practices around the World

This chapter discusses the ways in which a literary character from The Grandmother: A story of country life in Bohemia, written in 1855 by Božena Němcová, is translated into the contemporary ... More

This chapter discusses the ways in which a literary character from The Grandmother: A story of country life in Bohemia, written in 1855 by Božena Němcová, is translated into the contemporary conceptualization of the ‘typical’ grandmother in popular culture and an archetype in the sociological meaning of the word, and how it serves as a frame of reference for narrative expressions of identity among contemporary Czech grandmothers. The results are based on the analysis of cultural production and qualitative interviews with Czech active agers, who connect the literary character both positively and negatively to changing social role performances via everyday practices such a food preparation, care and appearance. The chapter concludes by enhancing existing typologies of grandparental roles and shows how the normativity of the ideal operates within the narrative accounts of today´s young-old persons..Less

Introduction: Doing Domesticity

Susan Fraiman

in Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins

Stages my argument over against left critiques of domesticity, which tend to privilege domestic ideology while overlooking non-conforming versions of “home.” Introduces the idea of “extreme” ... More

Stages my argument over against left critiques of domesticity, which tend to privilege domestic ideology while overlooking non-conforming versions of “home.” Introduces the idea of “extreme” domesticities: the non-normative households of gender rebels; the marginal households of those dealing with dislocation and economic insecurity. Offers an extensive analysis of Luce Giard’s neglected study, “Doing-Cooking,” a model for appreciating the devalued, everyday domestic lives of women. Argues for Giard’s importance as a pioneer of everyday life studies alongside her more celebrated collaborator, Michel de Certeau.Less

The Power of Everyday Aesthetics in World-Making

Yuriko Saito

in Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making

This chapter argues for the importance of cultivating aesthetic literacy and vigilance, as well as practicing aesthetic expressions of moral virtues. In light of the considerable power of the ... More

This chapter argues for the importance of cultivating aesthetic literacy and vigilance, as well as practicing aesthetic expressions of moral virtues. In light of the considerable power of the aesthetic to affect, sometimes determine, people’s choices, decisions, and actions in daily life, everyday aesthetics discourse has a social responsibility to guide its power toward enriching personal life, facilitating respectful and satisfying interpersonal relationships, creating a civil and humane society, and ensuring the sustainable future. As an aesthetics discourse, its distinct domain unencumbered by these life concerns needs to be protected. At the same time, denying or ignoring the connection with them decontextualizes and marginalizes aesthetics. Aesthetics is an indispensable instrument for assessing and improving the quality of life and the state of the world, and it behooves everyday aesthetics discourse to reclaim its rightful place and to actively engage with the world-making project.Less

Introduction

Ryan A. Quintana

in Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s argument, explaining the emphasis on state space, developmental politics, and slavery. It examines the broader historiography of political ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s argument, explaining the emphasis on state space, developmental politics, and slavery. It examines the broader historiography of political development in early America, and the South in particular. And it explains the importance of focusing on the everyday practices of the enslaved to better understand the production of the modern state.Less

Information and Communication Technology Design in a Complex Moral Universe: Ethnography-Based Development of a GPS Monitoring System for Persons Who Wander

Claudia Müller and Lin Wan

in Socio-Informatics

Increasing life expectancy and reduced birth rates as results of the recent demographic changes are linked to drastic changes in age structures. Aging societies are facing enormous challenges that ... More

Increasing life expectancy and reduced birth rates as results of the recent demographic changes are linked to drastic changes in age structures. Aging societies are facing enormous challenges that are linked to increased age, reduced physical and mental capabilities, and the risk of social isolation and reduced autonomy. In an attempt to address these challenges, the fields of active aging and ambient assisted living currently focus on the use of technological innovations, which aim at developing innovative products as well as services and concepts to be implemented in care settings such as dementia care. However, sustainable implementation of these IT-based innovations often fails, because such innovations are not embedded in the everyday practices of elderly people and their surrounding social networks. Practice-based design enables acknowledging the often complex organizational, ideological, and practical issues that form part of a moral universe.Less

The Household as Infrastructure: The Politics and Porosity of Dwelling in a Time of Environmental Emergency

Fiona Allon

in The Greening of Everyday Life: Challenging Practices, Imagining Possibilities

Modern water, waste, and energy infrastructures are inseparable from everyday practices, bodily habits, and political ideals at both intimate and public levels. In the twenty-first century such ... More

Modern water, waste, and energy infrastructures are inseparable from everyday practices, bodily habits, and political ideals at both intimate and public levels. In the twenty-first century such infrastructures are in crisis, and they are being radically rethought in terms of both the delivery of public services and individual consumption. The chapter takes this historical conjuncture as its starting point, investigating the identities, norms of resource use, and political values that are “baked in” to infrastructures. This focus allows a consideration of the roles played by both human and nonhuman agents in the coevolution of ways of life, ethics, and politics formed over time and across space. The chapter also addresses the range of amateur, DIY, and everyday household practices that are using and managing water, energy, and waste in new and innovative ways, and thereby creating new biopolitical norms and relations between nature/culture, public/private, and the human/nonhuman.Less

Praise and Affirmation

Peggy J. Miller and Grace E. Cho

in Self-Esteem in Time and Place: How American Families Imagine, Enact, and Personalize a Cultural Ideal

Chapter 5, “Praise and Affirmation,” is the first of three chapters that examine families’ everyday practices, based on ethnographic observations of six Centerville families over the course of a ... More

Chapter 5, “Praise and Affirmation,” is the first of three chapters that examine families’ everyday practices, based on ethnographic observations of six Centerville families over the course of a year. This chapter describes parents’ use of praise and affirmation in and around the home. Consistent with their expressed belief that praise boosts children’s self-esteem, parents dispensed praise for a wide array of accomplishments, however small, in dramatic contrast to the ethnographic cases discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Praise ranged from the automatic to the strategic and inventive. By age three, children were adept at praising themselves and soliciting praise from adults. The chapter presents vignettes of observed episodes that illustrate the complex ways in which praise was garnered, enacted, and sustained by parents and children. This chapter also describes praise and affirmation dispensed by others outside the home, including teachers and coaches who regularly interacted with the children.Less

Friendly Profiteers

Peter Robb

in Useful Friendship: Europeans and Indians in Early Calcutta

This chapter focuses on the management of works on the Calcutta circular road and its northern extension at Saum Bazar (Shyambazar), and especially on underhand trade-offs between them and the ... More

This chapter focuses on the management of works on the Calcutta circular road and its northern extension at Saum Bazar (Shyambazar), and especially on underhand trade-offs between them and the parallel project at Government House, designed to conceal the latter’s excessive cost and protect the profits of its architect, Charles Wyatt. Issues include the recruitment and control of labour, the supply of materials, land acquisition, and the official scrutiny of progress and quality. Once again, a mode of ‘friendly cooperation’— here involving economical practice, professional reputation, favours, and social influence—was more important than forms and regulations, in combating malice, self-interest, and incompetence. A contrast is made between the ‘back-scratching’ and irregularities of public works, in everyday practice, and contemporary protestations about the ‘wise and auspicious’ administration of Wellesley and the ‘mild and just’ imperial rule by Britain.Less

Material Histories of the World: Scales and Dynamics

Frank Trentmann

in History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century

The modern world has involved an unprecedented ballooning of stuff. How can historians make sense of this massive surge? This chapter offers some conceptual and methodological tools and suggestions. ... More

The modern world has involved an unprecedented ballooning of stuff. How can historians make sense of this massive surge? This chapter offers some conceptual and methodological tools and suggestions. Instead of opting for either micro or macro histories, it argues that we need to move between these scales to capture, analyse, and explain the forces that drive greater consumption. The chapter links locally situated material culture with the aggregate global analysis of material flows. It discusses the influence of empire and political economy on taste, norms, and conventions and reflects on the dynamics of demand in contemporary societies by showing how everyday practices, energy systems, and networked infrastructures are interdependent and need to be studied together. It challenges a neat separation between demand and supply and calls on historians to straddle different spatial scales of the material world.Less