The Frankfurt school of sociology and more recent scholars such as Juliet Schor and Robert Kuttner have criticized consumerism without focusing on the family. Family scholars such as William Goode or Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg have focused on the family without attending much to consumerism. Indeed, with the exception of Viviana Zelizer, Christopher Lasch, […]
Месяц: Сентябрь 2015
Science and Radicalism
These assumptions of naturalness were nevertheless challenged from several directions. One was evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1874 offered a detailed account of ‘sexual selection’ as a mechanism of evolution alongside the ‘natural selection’ emphasized in the Origin of Species. In his unemphatic style Darwin took the issue of sex out of […]
SOCIOLOGY TODAY
Sociology in Britain in 2001 is very different from 1968. It is much bigger: far more staff, students and departments, and far more sociologists teaching medical students, dental students, nurses, social workers, and other professions. Whole new areas of empirical research have been opened up, which I have discussed in Chapter 3. There is, however, […]
Somesthesia and Balance
Imagine that you are locked in an embrace with a lover right now. Think about how good it feels when you are caressed lovingly, the tingly sensations you get. You can thank your somesthetic system for that; without it, you probably wouldn’t bother. Remember Bertha, the older woman worried about falling? To maintain balance and […]
Why were men so focused on winning?
When I was a boy and went to a museum 1 can remember seeing a head cut off from its body and being told by the curator that it was thought to be die head of the captain of the uinnmg team in a Mayan ball court game (roughly a Mayan and Aztec equivalent of-football). […]
The Lessons of Separatism
The strength of female institutions in the late nineteenth century and the weaknesses of women’s politics after the passage of the suffrage amendment suggest to me that the decline of feminism in the 1920s can be attributed in part to the devaluation of women’s culture in general and of separate female institutions in particular. When […]
Hearing
Experiencing hearing loss is one of the most well — known normative changes with age (Aldwin & Gilmer, 2004). A visit to any housing complex for older adults will easily verify this point; you will quickly notice that television sets and radios are turned up fairly loud in most of the apartments. Yet you don’t […]
CONTEXTUALISING FOUCAULT: POWER, TRUTH AND DISCOURSE
Michele Barrett, in her text The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (1991), contextualises Foucault’s concept of ‘discourse’ as the focus of an alternative theoretical model to that of ideology. She defines Foucault as an exemplar of the poststructuralist critique of the theory of ideology, and frames the Foucauldian model within the broader shift […]
The Political Legacy
The separate institution building of the late nineteenth century rested on a belief in women’s unique identity that had roots in the private female sphere of the early nineteenth century. Increasingly, however, as its participants entered a public female world, they adopted the more radical stance of feminists such as Stanton and Anthony who had […]
The effects of drought and other hardships
Somali pastoralists use risk-averting strategies to survive and measures to predict and adjust to ecological dynamics. Multi-species herding in different ecological zones, and splitting the herds into different grazing areas, are the most common strategies. They maximise their herd size and keep high proportions of female animals for rapid recovery from lean times. They have […]