Social categories, Standardized Relational Pairs and identity work in World War II-narratives

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Membership Categorization Analysis ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
Membership Categorization ◽  
The Social ◽  
Concentration Camp Survivors

Abstract Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we aim to tease out how narrators talk into being the social group constellations in their storyworlds and how these – potentially shifting – constellations can be related to the narrator’s identity constructions. We investigate two World War II-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors and scrutinize whether the expected Standardized Relational Pair of victim-perpetrator – viz. the camp prisoners versus the Nazis – is in operation, how these two categories are talked into being, whether other social groups are mentioned and how all these processes affect the narrators’ identity work. It proved to be the case that, even though the victim-perpetrator Standardized Relational Pair is indeed present in both testimonies, it functions very differently in both stories, resulting in almost opposing identity work by the two narrators.

Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199214
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
World War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Expert Status ◽  
The One

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

Alfred Vierkandt’s notion of the social group

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110531
Author(s):  
Sandro Segre
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
German Sociologist

German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological oeuvre in Germany, the United States, or elsewhere. His key notion of the social group found no acknowledgment among other contemporary or later sociologists, even though several of them used this notion and discussed social groups in their own writings. Moreover, those who paid close attention to his writings, like Abel and Hochstim, evaluated them quite critically. Both before and after World War II, Vierkandt remained a solitary and relatively unknown author.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

The Social Identity of Hosts and Patrons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Post War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.

Do We Need a Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World?

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cross Fertilization

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.

Stabilizing American Society: Kenneth Boulding and the Integration of the Social Sciences, 1943–1980

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.

The Elusive Search for Evidence: Evgenii Khaldei’s Budapest Ghetto, Images of Rape, and Soviet Holocaust Photography

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Social History ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Jews ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.

scholarly journals The (Immediate) Post-World War II Period

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-189
Author(s):  
Antonello Tancredi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Domestic Law

This chapter addresses the development, after World War II, of two different currents of thought inherited by the Italian international law doctrine from the interwar period: dogmatism and structuralism. The analysis of some fundamental writings concerning topics such as the foundation and the social structure of the international legal order tries to offer a reading lens on some of the most important scientific trends (especially ‘realism’ and ‘neo-normativism’) of the post-World War II period and on the scholars that animated such approaches. Thanks to the identification of some structuring ideas, it will then be possible to briefly examine other issues concerning, for instance, the relationship between international and domestic law after the 1948 Republican Constitution, sovereignty, etc. The evolution of the methodology of international law will have a relevant part in the analysis of theoretical approaches developed by Italian scholars in this period.

The ‘ideal perpetrator’: The French National Railways and the social construction of accountability

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 327-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Federman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mass Atrocity ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Ideal

Mass atrocity requires the participation of numerous individuals and groups, yet only a few find themselves held accountable. How are these few selected? This article offers a framework that is useful for understanding how the condemned often embody attributes that keep them in the spotlight. Because norms used to identify perpetrators can set the context for future violence, long-term security requires interrupting both the actions of perpetrators and the discourses about them. A form of praxis, this study of the contemporary conflict over the French National Railways’ (SNCF) amends-making for its World War II transport of deportees towards death camps considers how certain perpetrators come to stand for the many. The SNCF remains in the spotlight not because of greater culpability or an unwillingness to make amends but because it embodies attributes of an ‘ideal’ perpetrator: it is (1) strong, (2) abstractable, (3) representative of the nature of the crime, and (4) has a champion-opponent who focuses attention on the perpetrator. Understanding the labeling process makes visible who and what we ignore at our own peril.

EVALUATION OF THE PHENOMENON OF SPATIAL SEGREGATION IN LVIV. HISTORICAL ASPECT

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-83
Author(s):  
Senkiv Z ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Spatial Segregation ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Historical Aspect ◽  
Historical Aspects ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

The article attempts to outline the phenomenon of spatial segregation in Lviv. It highlights the historical aspects of this phenomenon, and their impact on the current situation. Also is outlined the own classification of the social groups which have developed at present city is considering the degree of their mutual isolation. It was found that in the historical aspect of spatial segregation in Lviv can be divided into three periods: - medieval (when it was discriminatory), Soviet (when it was a privilege marking of politically "trustworthy"), and modern (associated with property stratification). Each of these segregation stages has left its mark on the spatial character of the city, albeit to varying degrees. Thus, the medieval discriminatory segregation of space is now practically inactive; the Soviet partially changed its direction and lost its original meaning, the modern one is at the stage of active development and deepening. Eight social categories have been identified in modern Lviv, in relation to which the process of spatial segregation is taking place. Accordingly, an assessment of the phenomenon of spatial segregation is given, which should take into account the following factors: a) the frequency of intersection of social groups of different categories; b) the place where this intersection takes place (for example citywide holidays); c) territorial distribution of spatially segregated groups. Preliminarily assessed the isolation level of different social groups, which also has a urban dimension.

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