Generative Ritual Among Nonmetropolitan Lesbians and Gay Men: Promoting Social Inclusion

Generativity is typically studied as a normative adult inclination expressed through social roles (D.P. McAdams & E. de St. Aubin, 1992). We extend this research by examining generativity through the lenses of social marginality and ritual. Toward this end, we utilize in‐depth interview and observational data about family rituals from 49 downstate Illinois residents who participated in a larger survey of nonmetropolitan lesbian and gay life. We first examine their ritual intentions and the locations where they are enacted. Then we identify what makes the rituals generative and identify their facilitating and moderating conditions. The findings suggest a distinction between normative and queer generativity. Our final product is a substantive grounded theory of generativity among sexual minorities that extends current theory.     

SOCIAL DENSITY AND PUBLIC RITUAL IN NON-INDUSTRIAL COMMUNITIES

An implication of Durkheimian theory—that different types of rites and the elaborateness of public rituals are determined by social density—is empirically tested, using data available for 183 non-industrial communities derived from Murdock's Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Support for the hypothesis is sustained even when alternative predicting variables are added. Contrary to social evolutionist theory, an increase in the division of labor does not appear to suppress ritual activity. This reaffirms the interest of some contemporary sociologists in ferreting out the forms and functions of ritual in modern societies.     

Structural Influences on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Women's Health Care

This paper summarizes recent research about several structural influences on racial and ethnic disparities in women's health care. While disparities in women's health care access and quality emanate from a number of sources, this paper focuses on the intersection between race/ethnicity and several structural factors (access to insurance coverage, discrimination, neighborhood characteristics, and social isolation). We identify gaps in the literature and suggest directions for future research. Particularly needed are gender studies of the impact of race/ethnicity that transcend the black–white dichotomy, that attend to location, that examine variation in social networks, and that clarify the impact of discrimination on women's health care.     

Therapeutic ritual. Helping families grow

1. Family development can be inhibited by lack of social or family rituals to facilitate life cycle transitions. Therapeutic rituals can be used to help families mobilize their resources for healing, growth, and change. 2. A therapeutic ritual can help a family to resolve conflicts and resentments, to negotiate new roles and relational boundaries, and to develop new shared meanings among its members about their ongoing life together. 3. The success of a therapeutic intervention is influenced by the nurse-therapist's understanding of the family's culture, values, and needs, as well as familiarity with the directive nature of strategic therapy concepts on which therapeutic rituals are based.     

Die Wirkung organisationaler Rituale – Eine qualitative Interviewstudie

Organizational rituals pose a paradox. They are ubiquitous in business and other organizations; however, they do not fulfill an obvious organizational purpose. Psychological research on ritual suggests that group rituals fulfill important social functions and thereby solve the adaptive problems associated with living in large groups. Prior research on organizational ritual is dominated by case studies that often neglect the ritual participants’ perspective. Thus, in this article we aim at investigating which effects organizational members attribute to organizational rituals and at tapping into the implicit theories concerning the evolution of these effects. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with employees of different organizations from different sectors, holding different positions and employment contracts, the effects of organizational rituals on the individual as well as on the group level will be presented. Results suggest that organizational group rituals are linked above all with positive effects, whereby fostering and establishing group cohesion is the most frequently mentioned effect. The article will conclude with practical implications derived from the study results.     

Gender relations,transnational ties and rituals among Bosnian refugees

In this article I show how Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugees reproduce, contest and construct their ethnic and religious identities. Using ‘ritual’ in a broad sense to refer to everyday routinized activities and practices that characterize family hierarchies and gender relations, as well as more easily identifiable religious rituals, I show that rituals assert belonging to a community and an identity, but are also, in the process of construction and contestation, selectively evoked and ignored. ‘The Other’ constructed through certain rituals is not merely the non–Muslim Bosnian (Serbs and Croats), but also, for refugees, other Bosnian Muslims who stayed behind. Moreover, engagement in secular and religious rituals, and the wider issue of identity constructions cannot be understood fully without exploring the dynamics between refugees and people who have remained in Bosnia. Competing constituencies claiming ‘Bosnianness’ and ‘Muslimness’ can be found across national boundaries and complicate the attempt to construct a community of believers or nationals, or both.     

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF STRUCTURAL AND STRATEGIC FAMILY THERAPIES: A DELPHI STUDY

The present study employed the Delphi procedure to examine the similarities and differences in the theory and practice of structural and strategic family therapy. A three-phase Delphi questionnaire was sent to a national panel of knowledgeable structural and strategic therapists, who were asked to identify and reach a consensus of opinion about items they thought important to a profile of either structural or strategic family therapy. In addition, questions were devised to examine the Mental Research Institute, MRI, Haley/Madanes, and Milan/Ackerman approaches to strategic family therapy. The final profiles are described and discussed.     

DO RACIAL AND ETHNIC STEREOTYPES DEPEND ON THE SEX OF TARGET GROUP MEMBERS? Evidence from a Survey‐Based Experiment

Several social scientific perspectives suggest that racial and ethnic stereotypes vary by the sex of minority group members. However, prior research has not used survey data to test the hypothesis that the public holds strong gendered racial/ethnic stereotypes. We exploit a between-subjects experiment in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to investigate the extent to which respondents' beliefs about seven attributes of four racial/ethnic target groups depend on the sex of target group members. Consistent with the "contingent" perspective of intersectionality theory, we find that effects of target group sex depend upon the extent to which particular racial/ethnic stereotypes have been gendered in American culture. However, we also find that effects of target group sex are consistently much smaller than those of race/ethnicity. We conclude by discussing implications for survey research on stereotypes across multiple status dimensions.     

Community Organizing with Women of Color:

The problems of women of color are related to gender, ethnic, and class inequality, yet little attention has been paid to methods for changing these structural conditions; most social work literature on gender and ethnicity has focused on individual models for change. Recent research on feminist organizing has identified ways in which community organization methods can be made more effective for use with groups of women. The implementation of these methods with women of color, however, will require addressing deficiencies of feminist theory in analyzing women's experience. This article presents one approach to organizing with women of color that suggests how race and gender issues can be worked on simultaneously. The issues and practice principles are relevant for both women of color and European American women organizing in communities of color.     

Confucius or Mozart? Community Cultural Wealth and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants

Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.     

“Priestesses unto the Most High God”: Gender,Agency, and the Politics of LDS Women’s Temple Rites

This study builds upon previous research on religious women’s agency by drawing from in-depth interviews with active Latter-day Saint (LDS) women to examine the interconnections among LDS temple initiatory rituals, religious identity, and institutional patriarchy. Interviews reveal the ways in which the women in this study used ritual movements, vestments, and symbols to challenge Mormon patriarchy and reimagine themselves as “priestesses unto the Most High God.” The women forged oppositional identities not through resistance but through observance. Despite the construction of these alternative identities, their stories highlight the diverse mechanisms through which the LDS Church appropriates, manages, and suppresses women’s priestess beliefs and identities in ways that maintain the patriarchal organization of the Church. Mechanisms, including the pervasive culture of shaming, silencing, and disciplining LDS women, are explored and implications for the sociology of religion are discussed.     

National Minority, National Mentality, and Communal Ethnicity: Changes in Ethnic Identity of Former Soviet Union Jewish Emigrants on the Israeli Kibbutz

In this paper we examine and compare the ethnic identity of the Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the process of change in ethnic identity among the new immigrants from the FSU. This analysis considers the role of the kibbutz as the first experience of Jewish community in their lives, as well as the location of the first phase of their process of absorption and resocialization into new and unfamiliar surroundings. The data are drawn through a longitudinal research design, with a pre‐ and post‐analysis of changes in the ethnicity of migrants studied from their arrival on the Israeli kibbutz until the completion of the five‐month kibbutz programme. We found that pre‐migration Soviet Jews defined their ethnicity as a discriminated national minority with a weak symbolic ethnicity content. The ambivalent nature of the ethnicity of Jews while in the FSU was expressed in the fact that although a majority were deculturized from traditional dimensions of Jewish life, they nevertheless felt they belonged to a specific ethnic group. Post‐migration ethnicity was found to be remarkably altered; the former ambivalence was dissolved. On the macro‐level, membership in the economically and politically successful Russian‐speaking group of Israeli society is a source of self esteem, rather than a sign of shameful otherness. On the micro‐level of ethnicity, the encounter in the initial phase of absorption in Israel, within the kibbutz Jewish community, often demands a re‐examination of their private concept of Jewishness, serving as a first step in resolving their ambivalent ethnic identity. Consequently, their new ethnic identity may now well have weaker boundaries, but a more positive (non‐alienating) content than that left behind.     

Bike Messengers and the Really Real: Effervescence,Reflexivity, and Postmodern Identity

Out of more than two thousand bike messengers in New York City, a few hundred participate in alleycats—illegal races held in open traffic. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Messengers who race in or attend alleycats carry their messenger identity into all aspects of their lives. Through direct participant observation, this article proposes that alleycats function as Durkheimian rituals for these messengers. Alleycats express the central values of the social world. Lost in collective effervescence, the individual confronts these values as objectified truths, which allow messengers to form stable identities. Further, bicycles, messenger bags, and other objects become sacred symbols within this ritualization process. The ability of messengers to construct such nonreflexive identities is juxtaposed with theories about the self in postmodernity.     

“ZA DUSHA”: AN INTERPRETATION OF FUNERAL PRACTICES IN MACEDONIA*

Anthropologists and sociologists have generally approached an understanding of funeral rituals in terms of their psychological or social consequences. Such functional analyses have typically depended on regarding ritual behaviors as learned reponses that symbolically create or affirm the society's organizational “rules”. An alternative or supplemental approach is the view that ritual behavior, and thus ritual content, results from purposive interactions between individuals determined by their interpretations of the ritual's interactive situation. An elaboration of this view is offered in an examination of funeral practices in the developing city of Skopje in Yugoslav Macedonia where the many commemoratives for the dead typically result in great costs of time, money and effort. Variations and changes in funeral rituals are related to different strategies of adjustment to the city, and, in particular, to the creation and maintenance of relationships within a network of specific others that is essential to urban adaptation. Ritual is also described as providing a means of social boundary maintenance, in addition to the creation of these social networks, thus limiting obligations and claims on resources.     

Many dimensions of Asian American pan‐ethnicity

Asian Americans as a group consist of over 20 national origin groups with distinctive ethnicity, language, religion, cultural practices, immigration history, and perceptions of life in the United States. While “Asian American” has been interchangeably used to refer to both racial and pan‐ethnic grouping of individuals of Asian heritage, the exact meaning of the term varies contextually by one's ethnicity, experiences, and other social, structural, and cultural characteristics. In this article, I investigate three distinctive ways in which Asian Americans understand and enact upon their pan‐ethnicity: (a) as a political instrument, (b) as a social group identity, and (c) as a path of integration into the mainstream society. Then, I briefly discuss implications of pan‐ethnicity for Asian Americans, before turning to the discussion of ways in which future research could further investigate the complexities of pan‐ethnicity. I conclude by attempting to provide a nuanced definition of Asian American pan‐ethnicity based on the literature reviewed in this article.     

Strategic Intersectionality and Political Representation: Female Muslim Councilors in London

This article addresses questions of how race/ethnicity, gender, and religion influence political representation. We use original interview data to test a strategic intersectionality theory developed by Fraga and colleagues (2005) in the case of female Muslim councilors in London, the United Kingdom. The original strategic intersectionality theory proposes that women are more effective advocates for ethnic group interests due to their unique capacity to leverage three primary resources: a substantive policy focus, multiple identity advantage, and gender inclusive advantage. We modify the thesis by analyzing religion as an additional identity marker and further disaggregating the three primary sources of leverage. We use the modified thesis to test whether female Muslim councilors of three London boroughs are more effective advocates for Muslim interests than their non-Muslim colleagues. We find mixed evidence for the presence of the three sources of leverage associated with strategic intersectionality, resulting in a more complex theorizing of this phenomenon than that found in prior research. This study offers a new contribution to the operationalization of intersectionality and the literature on intersectionality and political representation.     

Reconsidering identity: the ethnic and political dimensions of hybridity among majority and Turkish youth in Germany and England1

Sociological research has hitherto largely focused on majority ² and minority ethnic identities or citizenship identities. However, the social connections between youth are not simply ethnic dynamics but also political dynamics involving citizenship categories. This article argues that in postmodern societies, it is important to reconsider the ways we think about youth identities. Drawing upon qualitative data from a study into the political identities of majority (German and British) youth and Turkish youth, educated in two Stuttgart and two London secondary schools, the research found that fifteen‐year‐olds had no singular identity but hybrid ethno‐national, ethno‐local and national‐European identities as a result of governmental policies, their schooling and community experience, social class positioning, ethnicity and migration history. In working‐class educational contexts, many majority and Turkish youth privileged the ethnic dimension of hybridity whereas majority and Turkish youth in the two middle‐class dominated schools emphasized the political dimension of hybridity. The article demonstrates that social class and schooling (e.g. ethos and peer cultures) have a considerable role to play in who can afford to take on the more hybridized cosmopolitan identities on offer.     

Mediatized Ritual – Expanding the Field in the Study of Media and Ritual

The purpose of the article Mediatized ritual – Expanding the field in the study of media and ritual is to identify the key debates in present‐day scholarship on media and ritual and bring them into dialogue with current theorizing on the mediatization of society and culture. The article consists of three parts. The first presents a short outline of the study of media and ritual in modern life. The second discusses the idea of mediatized ritual as an evolving concept in the field. The third provides an empirical illustration of the mediatization of ritual by applying the concept to the analysis of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). In conclusion, it is argued that to study mediatized rituals in today's society is to face the theoretical and empirical challenge of engaging the two social realms of ritual and media in a close interplay. This intellectual venture changes our understanding not only of rituals and media (what they are and what they do) but also of society. This said, to study mediatized rituals is, in fact, to study society in action.     

The last of the Li: ritual texts and shifting ethnicities in Hainan

On Hainan, it is commonly believed that people who identify themselves as Han employ ritual masters (commonly known as daogong 道公) who use texts, while those who view themselves as Li employ the service of geba (no applicable Chinese characters) who do not. This paper argues that the use of Chinese ritual texts implies that the specialist possessing them belongs to a larger religious movement, while those specialists without texts emphasize their own powers as well as those of the masters who instructed them. At the same time, however, my historical and field research indicates that the use of texts has been spreading throughout the Five Finger Mountain region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thereby prompting significant changes towards hybrid rituals and the denial of any Li connection. While the ethnic differentiation (minzu shibie 民族識別) campaigns beginning in the 1950s have promoted a sense of ethnic identity, the growing use of written texts indicates that Li ritual practices have been converging with those of the Han.     

CHARISMA, RITUAL, COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE, AND SELF-ESTEEM

Durkheim expected ritual in conjunction with collective effervescence to transform the psyches of individuals; Weber held similar expectations for charisma. Yet, little work examines the social-psychological effects of charisma and ritual. The present study remedies this oversight, examining the effects of charisma, ritual, collective effervescence, and other variables on self-esteem.
Data are drawn from the Zablocki-Bradley-Aidala national sample of urban communes. This study includes 286 individuals from 44 groups. About half of these groups (including about half of the individuals) have a charismatic leader. The groups also have varying types and numbers of rituals.
The results indicate that the existence of a charismatic leader significantly interacts with group rituals and group size in affecting group members' self-esteem. Individual involvement in collective effervescence, and interpersonal power positively affect self-esteem regardless of charismatic leadership. The results are robust in the face of a variety of methodological controls.