The Quintessential Rural Sociologist*

Alvin L. Bertrand's career and research have made him an exemplar of humane social scientist, scholar, and academician. For many of his peers, Bertrand is the quintessential rural sociologist. Spending almost all of his career at Louisiana State University, Dr. Bertrand has addressed an extraordinarily broad array of social phenomena, often of a community problem variety, in his research. His research employed a social systems analysis frequently focused on the rural context and had a strong applied orientation with the result that his findings have been widely used as the basis for the formulation of important national and international program and policy decisions. Bertrand's work has attracted wide attention abroad as well as in the United States. Because of his many contributions to the discipline of sociology, he has received numerous awards and recognitions and has also been elected to various offices in professional societies and associations, including the presidency of five such groups.     

Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The polish community of Bradford

Having admitted large numbers of Polish nationals into Britain after the Second World War on grounds of moral obligation and labour shortage, the British government assumed that the newcomers would ‘assimilate’, though no precise meaning was given to this term. In this study of assimilation in Bradford's Polish community it is suggested that in the first generation of Polish settlement many factors combined to preserve rather than dilute Polish culture and identity, whereas cultural dilution was characteristic of the second and third generations. Despite this, a firm sense of identity, based on kinship and memory rather than culture, has remained.     

The Judaic Roots of Neil Postman's Cultural Commentary

Over a period of some 4 decades, Neil Postman's intellectual production took the form of a cultural commentary that addressed topics relating to education, communication, and American culture, informed by a media ecology perspective. This article focuses on the relationship between Postman's religious heritage and his scholarship, noting that he rarely made overt reference to his background, and mostly to support the traditional melting pot ideal of American culture. It is argued that Postman saw himself as being religious without being observant and, in his writing, was often critical of religious close-mindedness and fanaticism without dismissing or derogating the value of religion in general. The Judaic roots of his cultural commentary can be seen in particular in his emphasis on the distinction between verbal and visual communication, and his critique of image culture; in the importance he attached to the word in both its oral and written forms; in his ability to distance himself from contemporary American culture and his call to say no to media and technologies such as television and the computer; in his ongoing concern with education and schooling; and in his concern with social justice and moral responsibility, which informed his approach to media ecology and formed the basis of his argument that we ought to regard social science in general as a form of storytelling and moral theology.     

Is There Hidden Potential for Rural Population Growth in Sweden?

Rural depopulation is a concern in many countries, and various policy initiatives have been taken to combat such trends. This article examines whether hidden potential for rural population growth can be found in Sweden. If such potential exists, it implies that the development prospects for many rural areas are not as unpromising as they may seem today. If not, rapid rural depopulation can be expected and policymakers will have to increase their focus on how to lessen problems associated with population decline. We employ a combination of survey data and register data to identify the characteristics of people who have expressed a desire to move to rural areas and compare this population with those who actually do move to these areas. The results show that more people have rural residential preferences than the actual number of migrants to rural areas suggest. The findings indicate that there is a general potential for rural population growth; however, the characteristics of these two groups are similar and we cannot discern any group as constituting this hidden potential. Nonetheless, we argue that this potential is unlikely to be realized in terms of rural population growth and we discuss the further implications of these findings.     

The ‘Not to be Opened’ Letter: Family Secrets,Hidden Knowledge and Violate Prohibitions

This paper presents a view of family secrets that is informed by their broader biological and cultural context. Two particular perspectives are employed. First, Bateson's biologically-based concept of ‘sacred knowledge’ is extended to apply to human cultural practices, such as the ban on certain forms of intergenerational instruction. Second, the anthropological concept of ‘taboo’, as expressed in cultural practices, myth and folklore, is used to provide insight into the mixture of awe and disgust which surrounds secrets, and into the possibilities for both positive and negative outcomes when prohibitions are violated. From these complementary viewpoints, the author explores why family secrets arouse such intensely polarised feelings in helping professionals as well as in family members, and suggests more morally neutral frames within which therapists might view secretkeeping behaviour. A case illustration is used to illustrate potential problems with the assumption that secret knowledge should always be shared across generational bound-aries. Finally, the ‘not to be opened’ letter is introduced as a therapeutic option in cases where the clients and/or the therapist are unclear about the wisdom of revealing a particular secret.     

The Hidden Costs of Informal Elder Care

Demographic, socio-economic, and political trends throughout the developed world have contrived to make elder care an issue of utmost policy importance. They also have led to sharp reductions in health and social program expenditures. Policymakers are looking to communities to help meet growing care needs because community care is believed to be better and cheaper than institutional care. However, these beliefs become untenable when costs beyond public sector costs are considered. In fact, informal care carries a number of hidden costs that seldom are considered in health and social policy discussions. This article introduces a taxonomy of the costs of informal elder care, which can be categorized as out-of-pocket expenditures, foregone employment opportunities, unpaid labor, and emotional, physical and social well-being costs. Then, an illustration is provided regarding how the taxonomy can be applied to understanding the incidence, magnitude, and distribution of these costs among stakeholder groups. This taxonomy can help inform ongoing debate about health and social policy reform.     

The experience of divorce for the psychotherapy patient—A developmental perspective

In this article the dynamics of divorce are discussed from the perspective of psychoanalytic developmental psychology. This theoretical framework is used to highlight and to explain some typical internal and external responses of psychotherapy patients for whom divorce is an issue. A therapeutic stance is suggested that enables the patient to understand the connection between his or her marital situation, early life experience, and past developmental problems. The patient's preoccupation with the unsatisfactory marital relationship can serve as a catalyst for the strengthening of the patient's overall ego functioning. This article demonstrates Kris' (1951) concept that the material at the psychic surface-in this case divorce-needs to be explored in such a way that the patient's ego is enlisted in his or her total growth.     

The historical universal: the role of cultural value in the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Best known for his pioneering study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian 'discrowning' of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes, popular and high, on a similar footing, equally rooted in specific class practices. Only a careless inattention could support such a conclusion. From his early interventions in French cultural policy debates up to and including The Rules of Art and Pascalian Meditations (1996), Bourdieu has consistently repudiated the view that a sociological approach to questions of aesthetic judgment must result in a levelling form of relativism. In exploring why this should be so, this paper considers the issues at stake in the forms of 'historical universalism' that are associated with Bourdieu's account of the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. It does so with a view to identifying some of the difficulties underlying his understanding of sociology as a historical practice.     

The Bin Laden Tapes

Since the September 11th attacks a series of videos have been broadcast across the globe that feature Osama Bin Laden. These video appearances have confirmed Bin Laden’s continued wellbeing and ability to function as the head of Al Qaeda, in the midst of massive hunt to capture and destroy him. Lacan’s conception of the Imaginary and his commentary on the gaze serve to illuminate the terms in which Bin Laden has used his visual presence in these videos to intimidate his opponents and to continue to participate in the War on Terror. In addition, these video appearances present a gesture of defiance in the face of the strategies of surveillance deployed to achieve a sighting of Bin Laden. The Bush administration’s portrayal of Bin Laden as a figure of profound evil has been fundamental to the Manichean terms in which the administration has sought to configure the War on Terror. Bin Laden’s video appearances have been integral to presenting Bin Laden as such a figure to Western audiences. For these audiences Bin Laden can be said to have come to resemble a type of demon, both in regard to him constituting a figure of supreme evil but also in terms of his ontological status and capacity to appear and disappear seemingly at will. Even if Bin Laden was to be captured or killed, his status amongst his followers as a spiritual figure, and his presence in these videos, mean he possesses the capacity to continue to feature as an influential figure in the War on Terror.     

Whose history is it anyway? The case of Exhibit B

In 2014, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B site-specific installation created a media storm and protests throughout Europe. One such protest was in London, leading to the cancellation of his show at the Barbican. Consternation caused by art work is not a new phenomenon, and indeed one of the enduring purposes of art is to push the boundaries of acceptability and to show sights that are normally kept hidden from the public gaze. From some of the Impressionists’ exhibits to twentieth century art works such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987 and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary 1996, art has caused offence in a variety of ways. This article examines Exhibit B to identify the reasons for its reception. In broad outline, as a white artist his presentation of black oppression was regarded at best as naïve and at worse as culturally inappropriate.     

Hidden Epidemic

Abstract

Rates of HIV infection among the seriously and persistently mentally ill contradict the widely held belief that this population is not at high risk for HIV exposure. The literature suggests that, in part, due to pervasive misconceptions around issues of sexuality and illicit drug use, HI V-positive, mentally ill individuals are not receiving appropriate care. This article focuses on the interplay of mental illness, HIV infection, and service provision through a review of the literature and the presentation of a case study. Available services are detailed and barriers to their success discussed. The importance of comprehensive community-based services specifically designed to address the multifaceted needs of this population is highlighted.     

Chapter 7. The Hidden Population

SUMMARY

The purposes of this chapter are to discuss the economic status of the rural elderly females in Korea and to examine factors related to poverty. It suggests that Korean rural female elderly, often windows, are faced with serious financial problems. Poverty is associated with age, educational attainment, marital status and living arrangement, and health. When these factors are considered together, it is apparent that rural female elders are facing more severe financial problems than urban female elderly and rural male elderly.     

The Science of Practice and the Practice of Science: Pierre Bourdieu and the History of Science

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most celebrated and widely known French sociologists of his time. During his long and very productive career, Bourdieu worked not only on very diverse areas of sociology, such as art, religion, the legal system, and education, but also on the culture of the Kabyle, on the marriage strategies of bachelors in Southern France, and on the sociology of the French intellectuals of his era. However, despite his international influence, his work has remained virtually unutilized within most contemporary historiography of science. This article aims to fill this lacuna. After a short presentation of his main theoretical concepts, I discuss Bourdieu's work on scientific practice. I then present his more historically oriented work and finish by suggesting some ways Bourdieu's insights can be useful for history of science.     

Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's aesthetics

Abstract

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.     

Courage in the Telling: The Critical Rise and Fall of David Leavitt

Openly gay American fiction writer David Leavitt, who had received positive reviews for his previous novels and short story collections, was sued in 1993 over his novel While England Sleeps by English poet Stephen Spender, who claimed that Leavitt plagiarized an episode from his own 1951 memoir World Within World, and grafted pornographic fantasies onto his biography. The accusations created a homophobic backlash against Leavitt, whose career has yet to recover fully. The result is that Leavitt, who had once been viewed as the one gay writer to find a footing in the mainstream literary community, is now firmly positioned in the gay literary subgenre and his work categorized as such. This essay examines book reviews in order to illustrate the difficulties that a writer who deals with gay life frankly and unapologetically finds in being accepted by the mainstream literary establishment, no matter how normal or assimilationist he or others might perceive his work to be.     

The feeling of the incommensurable: Lawrence Grossberg on affect and incommensurability

This essay analyzes Lawrence Grossberg's work on the concept of commensuration, and especially his suggestion that we face a generalized crisis in our mechanisms for commensurating values. In making explicit the ways in which Grossberg's reflections on commensuration connect with his recent assessment of the contemporary social landscape in the United States – particularly the affective landscape that he describes in his work on the election of Donald Trump – I suggest that Grossberg's approach is, in part, distinguished by its attentiveness to the affective dimensions of commensuration (and of incommensurability). It can thus be contrasted with many previous approaches to commensuration, which view it exclusively as a problem at the level of practical reason, focusing on how we adjudicate between different bearers of value and how we justify, or give reasons for, our choices among them. Although such questions are also present in Grossberg's work, I argue that his writings contain a subtle treatment of the moods, attitudes, and tacit dispositions that characterize what if feels like to live through significant breakdowns in established logics of measure and comparison. Following Grossberg, I claim that having an adequate account of this affective dimension is crucial if we are to construct political alternatives that can address the felt sense of crisis in American political life.     

The Structure of Motives*

It is argued that decisions are processes that occur in the ordinary course of a human life and that actions taken in life, when they are not habitual, follow such decisions. Decisions are undertaken in the framework of socially validated identities and are accompanied by vocabularies of motive which serve to guide action as well as to justify them. How then are these decisions reached? These decisions are reached, it is argued, by using various objective structures and three cases—Astrology in Ceylon, the Cuban Missile crisis and the Azande Oracles are used to support this claim and to propose a dialectical and interactionist theory of the relationship between actor and motives. The availability of such objective structures allows an actor to use them to legitimize his lines of action as well as to justify them in any future challenges.     

HAVE YOU BEEN IDENTIFIED? Hidden boundary work in emergency services classifications

Information technologies, such as the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, have fundamentally changed workplace protocols. This paper examines the impacts that the standardized processes associated with the CAD system have on the labour of 9-1-1/police call-takers. Through an analysis of the labour of 9-1-1/police call-takers and their processes for classifying emergency call(er)s, we are able to uncover the negotiated labour between human and machine. It is argued throughout the paper that the standardized processes of the CAD system do not remove the social from call-taking but instead emphasize the use of the social as a resource for classifying call(er)s. The present analysis illustrates how emergency classification is not a standardized process but instead an actively constructed virtual image performed in real space and time by call-takers. It is the call-takers' tacit knowledge and ability to work across the virtual, abstract and material worlds that makes them essential players in emergency response.     

George Herbert Mead on Intelligent Social Reconstruction*

Many thinkers have discussed the possibility of intelligent social reconstruction; but few have examined the nature of such reconstruction as closely as did George Herbert Mead. This paper explores Mead's analysis through his understanding of human nature and intelligence, his discussion of value conflicts and the possibility of their resolution by means of the community, and his recognition of the need for popular commitment as a necessary condition for any wide-spread success. While pointing to certain problems with his position, this paper concludes that there is a basic soundness to Mead's approach.     

The Folk and the Sociology of Takata Yasuma: —His Life and Thoughts—

Abstract  Takata Yasuma, hailed as the father of sociology in Japan and recipient of the prestigious Cultural Meritorious Award in 1964, was also admired by western sociologists for his originality. In this article I discuss The Folk in 1941 with his discussions on ethnic problems around the year 1940 in connection with his inner life and thoughts.
First, I point out Takata makes much of the subjective aspect of the folk, or folk-consciousness, and distinguishes it by this ethnic ego from similar but enforced groups such as nation-state. Then I analyze his folk theory in connection with class, the modern state, nationalism, capitalism and imperialism, and conclude that Takata conflates nationalism quite easily and directly with imperialism without defining narrow-minded nationalism clearly though he rejects Lenin's view of imperialism as the consequence of the development of capitalism.
Secondly I consider the interrelationship of the folk with the slowly but enlarging world society, and make clear that Takata appreciates the socialization of interest (Vergesellschaftung) in the progress of society, though in his heart he has pursued Gemeinschaft 9s the child of a village in spirit. Finally, I emphasize that folk theory thoroughly reflects his inner life and thoughts: the perfect leveler, a free-spoken person, a village child in spirit, and a scholar of originality