Putting Adam Ferguson in his place

This paper re-conceptualizes the relationship between Ferguson's life and work by locating him in his biographical and geographical context for the purposes of better understanding his proto-sociological writings. Ferguson's work is relatively unknown outside limited sets of literature and current representations of the link between his life and work risk misplacing him as both Scotsman and sociologist. The popular portrayal suggests there is a strong connection between his Highland background and his famous book An Essay on the History of Civil Society. It will be argued that this claim reproduces the social construction of space in Scottish society and is based on stereotypical views of his birthplace and upbringing. Ferguson did not construct an autobiographical narrative to offer his own understanding of the link between his life and work. This reflects the strengths and weaknesses of sociology as it was developing in the eighteenth century. The 'self' was not recognized as an object of intention or symbolic construction. Ferguson's writings analysed modernity as it was emerging in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland and contrary to common opinion, there was no self-identity as a Highlander to shape his understanding of that social process.     

Sport and disability: Pistorius does not fit with the categories

Oscar Pistorius presents a major issue to sports organisations, as exposed in the media. First and foremost, media wrongly perceive him as the first disabled athlete to participate in the Olympic Games. Second, they openly question the legitimacy of his participation mainly based on the inequity introduced by his prosthetic legs. Content analysis, in English and French, of written press, International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) texts, from 2004 to 2012, confirms that Pistorius presents a new puzzle to sports organizations. This is partly because they are not able to determine whether his performances are a result of his body strength or if they are biased by his artificial limbs. Furthermore, when he is competing against able-bodied athletes, sports organizsations put him in a ‘monstrous’ position. Similarly, while categorising him as an ‘athlete’ they do not grant him the characteristic feature of this category: certified comparability of performances to ultimately establish ranks.     

Elton Mayo and the English dream

Elton Mayo remains a controversial but elusive figure in the development of applied social science. A re-examination of the principal myths surrounding him is made possible by new evidence chiefly from family letters. These show the importance of England to him both personally and professionally and throw a new light on his lack of integration into American academic life and on the nature of his influence in Britain.     

Bruno Bettelheim and His Window to the Soul

Bruno Bettelheim, a clinical psychologist, was among the most respected voices among American intelligentsia in the twentieth century. His controversial writings covered vast territory and focused on topics ranging from society, art, education, the Holocaust, and fairy tales to child-rearing. It was his clinical work with disturbed children, however, that brought him international acclaim. Yet, subsequent to his death, controversies about him and his ideas erupted and his reputation plummeted. This article is an attempt to keep some of Dr. Bettelheim’s most meaningful contributions from fading further into obscurity.     

Commentary. Mid-life confessions

Although he recalls times in his work as a hospital chaplain when he cared for people superficially, the author notes that patients themselves ministered to him, teaching him more compassionate ways to serve.     

Peter Kireevskii and the Development of Moscow Slavophilism

Abstract

Although the name of the folklorist Peter Kireevskii is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Russia, comparatively little has been written about his place within the Slavophile circle. Some scholars have treated him as the 'first' Slavophile. Others have questioned whether his views were in any sense really Slavophile at all. This article argues that Peter Kireevskii's life-long interest in Russian folklore was rooted both in his understanding of the Russian countryside and his exposure to the influence of a Russian Romantic tradition that viewed the narod as the authentic representative of national identity. It suggests that Kireevskii was from his youth convinced that Russia possessed a culture and history that was equal in value to any country in the West, but that it was only in the late 1830s that he stressed the role played by Orthodoxy in shaping Russia's development. Although his mature views brought him closer to the Slavophile 'mainstream', there were always some elements that set him apart, perhaps reflecting the fact that Slavophilism was a more eclectic and diverse phenomenon than sometimes realized.     

TMZ shifts blame from police to drugs in Floyd death coverage

Last week, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner released the cause of death report of George Floyd, and when celebrity website TMZ got hold of it, it started what seemed like blaming the victim. Floyd's murder by the police was followed by days of protests around the country. The Minneapolis police officers involved — one choked him to death with a knee on his throat while the others watched — were fired. But TMZ's headline said “M.E. says he died from heart attack, had fentanyl…,” and the article went on to interpret the death certificate as follows: “In other words … he suffered a heart attack while they were arresting him, and that complicated their efforts to subdue him. The report says George had fentanyl in his system, and they also found signs of recent methamphetamine use. It also says his manner of death is homicide.”     

Lifelines

Zora Neale Hurston said in her biography Dust Tracks On a Road. “The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere. Made the body of Death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon for his hand to satisfy his needs” (1942, 1984, p. 87).     

Expectations and realisations: the employment story of a young man with cerebral palsy

Britain has laws and a range of policies which promote the employment of disabled people. The lack of progress to get disabled people into paid work has resulted in huge dissatisfaction for some. Evidence of disability and employment problems is often expressed as hard data, but what of the personal experiences of trying to find employment? This article is based on interviews with ‘Nick’, a young man with cerebral palsy who wanted to recount his preparation for work, including work experience, through school, the Connexions service and the local Employment Office. He explained how he felt his voluntary work and work experiences were not fully planned and ultimately unsatisfactory. Nick found paid employment, but soon discovered that there were too many problems for him to continue. He reflected on his experiences, including his own initial confidence, his despair at the ending of his paid employment and the realities of what employment means for him.     

Saying the ‘F word … in the nicest possible way’: augmentative communication and discourses of disability

This paper examines a case study of a severely physically disabled man, Ralph, in terms of his interaction with his carers. He communicates using various systems of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC, such as symbol boards and high-tech devices), the vocabulary for which has mostly been selected for him by others. The starting point of the paper is the assumption that disabled people have traditionally held a disempowered position in society (relative to non-disabled people), and the question asked is to what extent is Ralph further disempowered by the limited vocabulary available to him in his AAC systems, and in the way others interact with him. The paper draws on the work of Bourdieu, according to whom ‘Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power’ (1977, 648). I consider the tensions between the drive towards the empowerment of disabled individuals, as exemplified by the provision of AAC, and opposition to allowing access to certain types of vocabulary (especially expletives such as ‘the F word’), unless it is expressed in ‘the nicest possible way’.     

The case confessions of a pastoral visitor

When a bungled catheterization following surgery causes a life-threatening hemorrhage, this Lutheran minister and hospital chaplain finds himself on the receiving end of professional pastoral care. Regretting the times in offered "Gospel platitudes and sugar-coated Bible verses" to suffering patients, the author finds that his experience has brought him closer to God's presence and made him a better minister.     

Bernard Barber’s social system theory

Conclusion Barber’s theory writing expressed his vocation. For him theory-user-friendliness, academic-sociological-openness, and scientific-empirical-insightful-encouragement seem to have been synonyms. Hence, there is a hypothesis implicit to this memoire that should be tested by a full assesssment of Barber’s academic contribution, perhaps by a doctoral dissertation. It is this: Bernard Barber has continued to contribute sociological theory in the way he began (before his courage students to scientifically reflect upon the “paradigmatic” theory enunciated by Parsons (and Merton), how it bad developed, and how it could he made more fruitful. This was also a special “field of study” which gave ongoing stimulus to his studies in the sociology of science and, finally to his late-in-career exposition of his social system theory. This would have to be confirmed by a careful study of all his works, based upon what he wrote, the accounts of those who knew him, and of those who have studied his work as students and colleagues. It would also involve analysis of the work of his students, colleagues, and collaborators.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

İsmail Hakkı İzmirli (1932), Philosophical Currents in Islam: Ibn Khaldun (732-808)

A leading intellectual of the late-Ottoman and early-Turkish Republican period, İsmail Hakkı İzmirli taught philosophy, theology, and law in İstanbul, and was a prolific writer, with more than forty-five published and unpublished books, and many articles. The article reproduced here in translation, which was part of a series of articles on leading Muslim thinkers, is on the life and work of Ibn Khaldun, in which the author both briefly introduces his major books (al-‘Ibar, al-Muqaddima, and al-Ta'rif in particular) and outlines his methodological principles and main arguments in the Muqaddima. İzmirli treats Ibn Khaldun as a philosopher and historian, admiring his philosophical views and methodological perspective as quite original and in many ways trailblazing, though he also criticizes him for unnecessarily “delving into useless issues such as Sufism.” Finally, he frequently compares him with both Muslim and Western intellectuals, e.g. Ibn Rushd, Ibn Miskawayh, al-Farabi, Ibn Bâjja, Niẓām al-Mulk, and Edward Gibbon, Marx, Spencer, and Comte, often finding Ibn Khaldun as a pioneer anticipating the ideas of later thinkers. He devotes a separate section to compare him with Machiavelli, emphasizing differences as well as similarities between the two, and likening the latter to a “disciple” of Ibn Khaldun's, claiming that “Machiavelli followed his mentor's path in his The Prince.”     

‘Everything is permitted’: William Burroughs’ Cut-up Novels and European Art

Abstract

This essay suggests that during the 1960s William Burroughs was as much an avant-garde European artist as he was an American novelist. It argues that the nature of his cut-up novels requires readers to situate them within the context of twentieth-century European art — specifically collage — as well as American literature. Burroughs held the view that ‘if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting’. This attitude towards his writing led him back into the rich, experimental half-century of European art which had gone before him, and into which his resulting cut-up work must be incorporated if its profoundly confusing and anacathartic effects upon readers are to be in any way tempered.     

Kent,leaving OASAS,reflects on high points and challenges

Rob Kent, longtime general counsel for the New York Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS), is leaving April 1 for a new position with the American Association of Orthodontists in St. Louis. A masterful negotiator with a progressive view toward substance use disorders (SUDs), which made him beloved by treatment providers and harm reductionists alike, Kent also knew and could articulately discuss nuances of legal and regulatory issues affecting the state's SUD treatment providers. We talked to him last week to get his perspective on the high points and challenges of his career at OASAS, which he joined in 2007; before then, he was with the state's Office of Mental Health (OMH).     

Occupational Health and Safety a New “Imposition” for College Staff

Abstract

The use of neuroleptic medicine in the treatment of schizophrenia is often predicated on the goal of eliminating psychotic target symptoms. However neuroleptics, especially when used long-term, may produce unacceptable side effects. An alternative treatment goal, ideally suited for the thought-disordered college student, is to help him/her understand his/her symptoms in a new way, so that he/she responds to them differently even though they persist. A case is presented to illustrate the time-limited use of neuroleptics, in conjunction with psychotherapy that emphasized reattribution of the meaning to the patient of his psychotic symptoms, enabling him to manage the symptoms without further need for medicine.     

From Potent Dead to Potent Places? Reflections on Muslim Saint Shrines in South Asia

This paper analyses the issue of the thaumaturgy of the Muslim saints in South Asia by focusing on the notion of potent place rather than on the exemplary lives of these figures and on their exceptional relations to God. Nevertheless, there is an important contradiction between the ubiquity of the saint, his residence with God and his strict localisation in space. To establish a firm relation with him and obtain his intercession, devotees must visit him precisely where his corpse was buried. Generally, this place was already potent or extra-ordinary before the inhumation of the saint. Does the process of the saint’s institutionalisation through the rites performed on his body transfer the potency of the place onto the saint and the power of the saint to the place? The analysis will draw on fieldwork enquiries conducted at the shrine of the martyr Ghāzī Miyāñ, the oldest (eleventh century) and most popular Muslim heroic figure in Northern India and Nepalese Terai, and at the shrines of two popular Sufi saints of Sindh (Pakistan), Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar and Bodlo Bahār.     

Through the Looking-glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind

Abstract Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault, there remains a tendency, in historical sociology, to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism, realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In Southern Africa, nonconformist missions, the vanguards of empire, conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time, production and personhood. From their very first encounters with native communities, it is argued, they sowed the state of colonialism on which the colonial state - and a more enduring condition of dependency - was founded.
About sunset the king, attended by his brothers and a few more persons, came to our tent…I said that I had brought a small present for him, as a token of friendship—while opening it he remained silent, not moving even his head, only his eyes towards the parcel. I then took from it a gilded copper comb and put it into his hair, and tied a silver spangled band and tassel round his head, and a chain about his neck, and last of all presented him with a looking glass…     

A Whig view of slavery,development and the world market∗

This essay offers an interpretation of an influential theory of the relation between slavery, national development, and international economics developed by the American Whig leader, H.C. Carey, over a period of years, but most fully expressed in a single text published in 1856. Although Carey was widely read at the time, his mode of opposition to slavery was unorthodox, and his political situation put him under certain rhetorical burdens. Consequently his text requires a close reading to be be understood.