Wedding the dragon: The powerful feminine as seen in Jewish women’s dreams

Abstract

This article addresses the theological and liturgical problem of incorporating mythic traditions of the divine feminine into contemporary practice, given the typically essentialist nature of these traditions. The article considers the dream practice of a Jewish women’s learning community, the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, and applies this practice to several “dragon dreams” in which dragons appear as powerful, erotic, sacred figures that “queer” the divine feminine by offering a norm-upending vision of what the feminine is and does. These dragon dreams provide a powerful alternative to traditional Jewish images of the female dragon in which the dragon represents the demonic feminine. I suggest that dreams can offer a “queering” of mythic images of the sacred feminine because they contain images that have mythic depth but also upend norms and expectations. The article then explores how these dragon images have made their way into the liturgy and theology of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute.     

The search for community in modern society: An interpretation

Community theory, at present, gives little importance to communal character in modern urban settings. This “search for community” results from continually conceptualizing community rigidly in terms of the traditional social forms of kinship and rooted neighborhood. Recent interest in social networks has revealed that individuals characterized by mobility and high achievement may not participate in traditional community, but rather in primary friendship networks based upon other variables such as affectivity. A comparative analysis of such networks and traditional community is presented. The primary friendship network while containinggesellschaft characteristics is community-like. Community theory, therefore, must consider manifold forms of primary association to gain a fuller understanding of the communal elements present in modern urban society. This is a revision of an earlier paper entitled “Evolving Community, Friendship and Communion: Some Conceptual Notes” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August, 1976. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of several persons to the development of this paper. T. Dunbar Moodie, Judith-Maria Buechler, L. C. Young, James L. Spates, Lynn E. Crevling, and especially Jack Dash Harris have provided challenging, and therefore valuable, criticism.     

Energy Conservation and Attitudes toward Technology

An exploratory survey of a small suburban community near LosAngeles investigated the attitudes and values underlying acceptanceof technological applications, examined the relationship ofgeneral attitudes toward technology to conservation attitudesand behavior during the energy crisis of 1973–1974, andcontrasted college students with the surrounding community intheir regard for technology and energy conservation. Two distinctdimensions of attitudes toward technology utility and affect–weredefined and found to relate to belief in the reality of theenergy crisis and preferred solutions, but not to reported conservationbehavior. Moreover, in contrast to popular images, no strongantitechnology sentiment was found among the college sample     

Changing Space,Making Race: Distance,Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico

In this article, I critique some of the discursive terms in which blackness is folklorized and celebrated institutionally as part of the nation in Puerto Rico. I examine a government-sponsored housing project that meant to revitalize and stylize the community of San Ant n, in Ponce, as a historic black site. Although government officials tried to preserve what they considered to be traditional aspects of this community, conflict arose because not all residents agreed with this preservationist agenda. I document the controversy, linking the government's approach to racial discourses that represent blackness as a vanishing and distant component of Puerto Rico. I argue that this inclusion and celebration complements ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and race-mixture that distance blackness to the margins of the nation and romanticize black communities as remnants of a past era. I link these dynamics to modernizing State agendas and discourses of authenticity that fuel cultural nationalism worldwide.     

MEMORY AND ECHO

Much contemporary writing about law treats popular culture as a creature of modern technology and the phenomenon of mass media. This misunderstands both its continuity with traditional forms, and the precise differences that modern technology creates. Popular cultural representations of law and justice appeal to a longstanding tradition evident in familiar archetypes of cowboys and superheroes. Indeed, such a tradition reaches back to much older Christological models of justice and subjectivity, which modernism has deflected but never destroyed. On the other hand, hi-tech media embeds those traditions in technology's language of passivity and its strange but insistent erasure of the past. Under conditions of the contemporary world, popular culture appears not as the memory of past thinking about law, but as an echo. The irony is that while popular culture's presentations of law appeal to a substantive tradition, their formal hyper-modernity not only negates that past but undermines the pluralist and discursive openness which are its well-spring. In a world shorn of faith in the traditional structures sustaining the ‘moral economy’ and a moral legality, the appeal to simply trust in an inarticulable justice opens the prospect not of salvation but of legal tyranny.     

The Shifting Foundations of Social Capital Formation in the Pacific Basin: Towards More Autonomous Personalities

Whereas past accounts of the Pacific Basin stressed the penchant for orderliness and control including the tendency to use values education to shape habits of national loyalty and obedience, the élite respondents of the 21 settings participating in the Sigma survey suggest a new era may be emerging with an increased emphasis on personal autonomy and responsibility. Looking to the future in the Pacific Basin, the élites indicate that values of nationalism are likely to be balanced with increased civic consciousness. Values of hard work are to be balanced with increased creativity and competitiveness. Values of unique national heritages are to be balanced with increased respect for the traditions and languages of others. And values of hierarchy and patrimony are to be balanced with the values of equity and respect for the rights of women as equal partners in the labor force. Perhaps the major dilemma faced by Pacific Basin educators is that their current views, if put into practice, may foster increased personal autonomy but at the cost of weakening past approaches to preserving and strengthening social capital.     

Homosexuality as Practice and the Social Implications of Representation

ABSTRACT

What tends to be represented when talking about homosexuals is not the diversity of people who have sex with others of the same sex-gender, but a kind of group or a defined collective with some identifiable characteristics and specific identities: a collection of others, a historically oppressed minority, a community. As a result, not all people who practice homosexuality are included in the representations of homosexuals, nor do all included in these conform to the images projected onto them. This involves a series of social and political consequences, related to the reproduction of hegemonic gender and power structures. Therefore, I question the use of these representations in social sciences and propose to consider, as the analysis element, sexual practices and not the identities and categorizations created around them, showing the power relations that exist between them.     

Why Are Some People's Needs Unmet?

Australia has legislation that states that 'people with disabilities have the same rights as other members of society to services', yet nearly one-third of all people with spinal injuries have their need for community services unmet. If all people have the same rights, why are some people's needs unmet? How equitable is the distribution of services? This study challenges service providers' beliefs that decisions about the provision and distribution of services are made objectively and equitably. To obtain needed services, people had to demonstrate their worthiness by conforming to providers' stereotype-based expectations of the disabled, based in entrenched philosophies. Service structures reinforce these disabling ideologies Service provision must thus undergo fundamental philosophical and structural change in order to meet community service needs.     

Fishing for success without rocking the boat: Value conflict and work control in a maritime context

This paper deals with the role of work control in managing tensions between communitarian social organization and individualistic values. It uses data from a peripheral maritime community, where communitarian control is emphasized above all else; yet work there is organized as petty entrepreneurship, with expressed values on individualism and the Protestant Ethic. The dominant community institution controlling work (the Methodist Church), the structure of the work place and social organization of labor, and the face-to-face transactions concerning work and rewards that have allowed these conflicting ideologies to coexist on a day-to-day basis are examined. For example, entrepreneurial success is controlled by informal communal and church pressures, which encourage watermen to produce at the same levels. Consumption is controlled by community norms and gossip so that people have basically the same possessions. These practices, along with work information control mechanisms, curtail tendencies to convert individual work outcomes into community status. They permit a sense of individual freedom and success in the work place yet at the same time control it so that equality and communitarianism predominate.The author wishes to thank Steven Cole, Rose Laub Coser, Bill Gromfein, Lyle Hallowell, Robert W. Hodge, John McCarthy, Charles Perrow, Pat Roos, Ed Royce, Gerald Suttles, Eugene Weinstein, Glenn Yago, Stony Brook Research Seminar, and editors and reviewers ofQualitative Sociology for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Toward increasing avian diversity: urban wildscapes programs

Residential development in urban and suburban settings is a major cause of habitat change affecting avian communities. The effects from land-clearing prior to initiation of construction followed by landscaping focused on traditional aesthetics has reduced habitat diversity at multiple levels. These residential developments generally emphasize the use of ornamental, nonindigenous vegetation with little to no concern for native species and natural vegetation parameters. As a result, avian community composition and diversity is changed. We compared avian communities at three sites in Bexar County, Texas; two residential neighborhoods in the city of San Antonio and an unincorporated undeveloped site, Government Canyon State Natural Area. The residential neighborhoods were a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department certified wildscapes development and a traditionally developed neighborhood. Bird abundance and species richness in the neighborhoods were greater than at Government Canyon State Natural Area (P < 0.01), but no differences existed between the neighborhoods. Bird diversity was greatest at the wildscapes neighborhood (P < 0.01). Further, bird diversity did not differ between the traditional neighborhood and the natural area. Evenness differed among sites (P = 0.006) with the natural area having the greatest value. Bird diversity measures correlated with woody plant density and vertical cover (r = 0.358 to 0.673, P < 0.05) at residential sites. Residential areas incorporating natural landscapes into their design attracted a greater variety of birds than traditionally landscaped residential areas.     

Hispanic Assimilation and Fertility in New U.S. Destinations

This paper evaluates comparative patterns of fertility in new Hispanic destinations and established gateways using pooled cross‐sectional data from the 2005–2009 microdata files of the American Community Survey. Changing Hispanic fertility provides a useful indicator of cultural incorporation. Analyses show that high fertility among Hispanics has been driven in part by the Mexican origin and other new immigrant populations (e.g., non‐citizens, those with poor English language skills, etc.). However, high fertility rates among Hispanics cannot be explained entirely by sociodemographical characteristics that place them at higher risk of fertility. For 2005–2009, Hispanic fertility rates were 48 percent higher than fertility among whites; they were roughly 25 percent higher after accounting for differences in key social characteristics, such as age, nativity, country of origin, and education. Contrary to most previous findings of spatial assimilation among in‐migrants, fertility rates among Hispanics in new destinations exceeded fertility in established gateways by 18 percent. In the multivariate analyses, Hispanics in new destinations were roughly 10 percent more likely to have had a child in the past year than those living in established gateways. Results are consistent with subcultural explanations of Hispanic fertility and raise new questions about the spatial patterning of assimilation and the formation of ethnic enclaves outside traditional settlement areas.     

Using a 'domains' approach to build community empowerment

This paper provides two case study examples of how communityempowerment can be better conceptualized, planned and appliedwithin a programme context by using a ‘domains’approach. What is new about this approach is that it does notstart with a blank slate onto which participants inscribe theirown problems or needs but provides a predetermined focus througheach of nine ‘empowerment domains’: Improves participation;Develops local leadership; Increases problem assessment capacities;Enhances the ability to ‘ask why’; Builds empoweringorganizational structures; Improves resource mobilization; Strengthenslinks to other organizations and people; Creates an equitablerelationship with outside agents; and Increases control overprogramme management. The importance to community developmentpractice is that the approach provides a more systematic meansfor community empowerment in a programme context.     

From modernity through postmodernity to reflexive modernization. Did we learn anything?

Modernization, in the sociological tradition, was usually understood as increasing differentiation. Theorists as different as Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons all shared the view that modernization meant the opening of new horizons. The publication of Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition transformed the discursive universe: contrary to the tradition of differentiation theoretical sociology the pamphlet interpreted modernization as a process in which the plurality of local cultural traditions was destroyed and their various narratives were rearticulated into a unified modern canon under the repressive meta-narratives of science, progress and the Enlightenment. At first, sociologists were at odds with this new interpretation until Beck, Giddens and Lash brought up the idea of modernity in two phases in their Reflexive Modernization (1994) and related publications. According to them, ‘traditional modernity’ was based on cultural closures, such as unified class-identities, nationalities and fixed gender-identities, but it was followed by a ‘second’ or ‘reflexive modernity’, where several traditions lived side by side, just as the postmodernists claimed. An intense debate emerged. The article asks: did we learn anything from the debate on reflexive modernization and if so, can the learnt lessons be used fruitfully in the study of contemporary society? The answer seems to be negative for the most part. However, the modernization theoretical approach can still be seen as a useful tool for framing research questions and contributing to the diagnosis of the era. This is how it can still provide a point of departure for research, but not deliver all the answers.     

Do Traditional Fathers Always Work More? Gender Ideology,Race, and Parenthood

Research has shown that men who express traditional gender ideologies spend more time in paid work when they become fathers, whereas men who express egalitarian ideologies spend less time in paid work. This study extends previous research by examining racial differences among men. We drew on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N = 23,261) and found that fatherhood was associated with an increase in married White men's time spent in paid work. The increase was more than twice as strong for traditional White men than for egalitarian White men. In contrast, both egalitarian and traditional African American men did not work more when they became fathers. These findings suggest that African American men may express gender traditionalism but adopt more egalitarian work–family arrangements. This study also presents evidence of an interaction among race, class, and gender ideology that shapes fathers' time spent in paid work.     

Axiomatizations of the normalized Banzhaf value and the Shapley value

A cooperative game with transferable utilities– or simply a TU-game – describes a situation in which players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation. A solution concept for these games is a function which assigns to every such a game a distribution of payoffs over the players in the game. Famous solution concepts for TU-games are the Shapley value and the Banzhaf value. Both solution concepts have been axiomatized in various ways. An important difference between these two solution concepts is the fact that the Shapley value always distributes the payoff that can be obtained by the `grand coalition' consisting of all players cooperating together while the Banzhaf value does not satisfy this property, i.e., the Banzhaf value is not efficient. In this paper we consider the normalized Banzhaf value which distributes the payoff that can be obtained by the `grand coalition' proportional to the Banzhaf values of the players. This value does not satisfy certain axioms underlying the Banzhaf value. In this paper we introduce some new axioms that characterize the normalized Banzhaf value. We also provide an axiomatization of the Shapley value using similar axioms. Received: 10 April 1996 / Accepted: 2 June 1997     

The poverty of organizational theory: Comment on: “Bourdieu and organizational analysis”

American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply Bourdieu’s approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse, evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind of sweeping analysis that makes Bourdieu’s classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are being pursued piecemeal, in distinct paradigmatic projects that explore the character of fields, the emergence of organizational habitus, and the changing forms of capital that are key to the control of modern organizations. A number of these programs build on the same sociological classics that Bourdieu built his own theory on. These share the same lineage, even if they were not directly influenced by Bourdieu.

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Why Sociology Abandoned Communication

This paper considers the possibility that early sociological interest in the integrative role of mass communication may have been undermined (1) by the short-run study of media “campaigns,” and the declaration that such persuasive efforts have only “limited effect”; (2) by the wrangling over theories of “mass society”; and (3) by a quasi-journalistic emphasis on “media events.” In spite of the theoretical basis for reconciling these traditions, the rift over the academic locus of communications research has not been repaired.     

New information communication technologies and the development of a children's 'community of interest'

This paper is concerned with the potential of new InformationCommunication Technologies as a means of furthering a children’s‘community of interest’. A ‘community of interest’is taken from Raymond Williams’ concept of people formingcommunities not around place but around specific ‘interests’.I wish in this paper to explore the forms and tensions of achildren’s ‘community of interest’ that mightbe facilitated around ICTs in general and the Internet in particular.The paper draws on community development literature around thepotentials and use of ICTs as a means of developing communities.The paper highlights these potentials but also investigatesthe obstacles that a children’s online ‘communityof interest’ may confront.     

Towards a parental muda for new Basque speakers: Assessing emotional factors and language ideologies

The concept of muda refers to how specific biographical moments can precipitate changes in the speaker's linguistic repertoire (Pujolar & Gonzàlez, 2012). In recent years, more inclusive or participatory approaches to intergenerational transmission in language revitalization contexts have been encouraging all parents, including those with low proficiency in the minority language, to participate in their child's language acquisition. This article examines a Basque‐ language campaign that instructs low‐proficiency parents to adopt child‐directed speech in Basque to mould affective orientations in the home environment. Drawing on a case study, I explore the complications of new speakerhood, especially the difficulties of bringing about a parental muda. I demonstrate how mudas are traversed by competing ideologies of language and language socialization. In disrupting monolingual ideologies, participatory approaches which aim at increasing the symbolic value of the language clash with the attitudes of speakers who view these mudas as inconsequential for achieving normalization.