Showing papers by "Bryan S. Turner published in 2007"

Investigating Citizenship: an agenda for citizenship studies

Abstract: This essay takes stock of our editorial collaboration in the past decade and outlines those ideas that we find most promising and approaches that are most fruitful in investigating citizenship. We offer it as an agenda; not so much a dogmatic sequence of principles as an ethos toward conceiving democratic citizenship as a cosmopolitan virtue. We propose a cosmopolitan mobility tax and a cosmopolitan goods and services tax to illustrate how that cosmopolitan virtue must find a practical expression.

The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility

Abstract: In contemporary sociology, there has been significant interest in the idea of mobility, the decline of the nation state, the rise of flexible citizenship, and the porous quality of political bounda...

Religious Authority and the New Media

Abstract: In traditional societies, knowledge is organized in hierarchical chains through which authority is legitimated by custom. Because the majority of the population is illiterate, sacred knowledge is conveyed orally and ritualistically, but the ultimate source of religious authority is typically invested in the Book. The hadith (sayings and customs of the Prophet) are a good example of traditional practice. These chains of Islamic knowledge were also characteristically local, consensual and lay, unlike in Christianity, with its emergent ecclesiastical bureaucracies, episcopal structures and ordained priests. In one sense, Islam has no church. While there are important institutional differences between the world religions, network society opens up significant challenges to traditional authority, rapidly increasing the flow of religious knowledge and commodities. With global flows of knowledge on the Internet, power is no longer embodied and the person is simply a switchpoint in the information flow. The logic of networking is that control cannot be concentrated for long at any single point in the system; knowledge, which is by definition only temporary, is democratically produced at an infinite number of sites. In this Andy Warhol world, every human can, in principle, have their own site. While the Chinese Communist Party and several Middle Eastern states attempt to control this flow, their efforts are only partially successful. The result is that traditional forms of religious authority are constantly disrupted and challenged, but at the same time the Internet creates new opportunities for evangelism, religious instruction and piety. The outcome of these processes is, however, unknown and unknowable. There is a need, therefore, to invent a new theory of authority that is post-Weberian in reconstructing the conventional format of charisma, tradition and legal rationalism.

Introduction Making Islamic Authority Matter

Abstract: A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scriptural...

Managing religions: state responses to religious diversity

Abstract: After 9/11 there is a general sense of the crisis of liberalism and secularism, and the need for greater security and surveillance. Diasporic Muslim communities have been increasingly the target of government interventions and investigations, resulting in various forms of governmentality that in fact constitute a ‘management of Muslims.’ The traditional strategies of benign neglect have been replaced by periods of intense governmental activity. The idea of ‘managing Muslims’ is often disguised by a more neutral terminology such as pluralism or multiculturalism. This article examines two versions of the management of religions from policies of ‘upgrading’ or retraining of Muslims for modernity to more robust policies of containment, rendition and seclusion. The result of securitisation and globalisation is the rise of a new type of society that I call ‘the enclave society.’ In such societies governments are creating new policies of ‘enclavement’ to quarantine communities that are undesirable or unwanted or dangerous. The mobility of a global society is now being constrained by encirclement and enclavement through building walls, ghettoes, catchments and no-go areas. Such policies are likely to be counter productive, requiring an escalation of draconian interventions.

The life-extension project: a sociological critique

Abstract: In this article we explore and critically assess recent developments in bio-gerontology which promise a delaying of the ageing process in human beings through some form of significant 'life- extension'. Various arguments for prolonging the human life span are being discussed intensely in the biomedical sciences: sociology has yet to make a tangible contribution to these debates. Although significant modifications to the human lifespan remain a futuristic goal, we argue that the life-extension project has immediate repercussions for contemporary society. Drawing on the available literature in the humanities and the social sciences, we discuss the value of the life- extension project and its social justice, human rights and ethical implications. For example, we consider, assuming the presence of economic scarcity, various aspects of increasing social inequality which would arise from any significant growth in life expectancy. We argue that this form of biomedical research has potentially far greater negative consequences for the status of humans than has been previously recognised, and conclude with a consideration of the religious and ethical implications of 'prolongevity'. (author abstract)

Globalization, Habitus, and the Balletic Body:

Abstract: The aim in this article is to write an evocative ethnography of the embodiment of ballet as a cultural practice. The authors draw on their fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London), where they conducted 20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff (and watched "the company at work" in class, rehearsal, and performance). They explored dancers' (n = 9) and ex-dancers' (who are now teachers, administrators, and character dancers; n = 11) perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that have occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. They focus on their accounts of the homogenizing effects of globalization on the culture of the Royal Ballet. Although this research is set within the elite and narrow cultural field of dance, the authors hope that it is an interesting addition to broader debates on the interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and society, and globalization and culture.

Culture, technologies and bodies: The technological Utopia of living forever

Abstract: There are two parts to my discussion of the sociology of the body. I first examine, via an account of the development of anthropology and sociology, how technology and culture have historically been analysed as mediations between the scarcity of natural resources and the vulnerable human body. Technology has been crucial in providing societies with some control or dominion over nature, including therefore control over the human body, yet is often thought to involve hubris against the gods and a threat to human life. Culture, in contrast, has more usually been seen as nurturing nature, providing humans with a symbolic means of mediating and domesticating their external physical environment. Whereas culture nurtures nature, technology can so easily destroy it. In the second part of my article, I demonstrate how these conceptual distinctions have assumed new dimensions in the contemporary era and analyse these by focusing on the implications of medical technologies for longevity (for example, therapeutic stem-cell research, regenerative medicine, and new reproductive technologies). Medical technology holds out the promise of prolongevity as a new mirage of health, offering life-enhancement or the secular promise of eternal life.

Religion, Romantic Love, and the Family

Abstract: This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Body, Reproduction, and the Sacred The Early Christian Church: Marriage as a Necessary Evil Feudalism and Capitalism: Property and the Family Secularization, the Family, and Christian Fundamentalism Fundamentalism and the Veil: Islam and Women's Rights in Marriage Conclusion: The Problems of Religion and the Crisis of the Family

Islam, Religious Revival and the Sovereign State

Abstract: The A. deals with the question of what is new about the globalization of Islam, drawing upon Asian as well as other cases of illustration. He notes that while post-colonialism and post-communism have resulted in new opportunities for Muslim revival, they have also posed complex challenges for Muslim world. He suggests that the key challenge for the Muslim world in today's environment is to make the transition to global society "without a profond , self-destructive transformation of its identity as a religion".

Globalization, religion and empire in Asia

Abstract: This chapter concerns with the complex interaction between politics and religion for social and political hegemony in Asia. With globalization, however, the Christian West is confronted by the growth of a variety of significant diasporic communities of ‘Asian religions’, and therefore the issue of religious militancy becomes a pressing issue of state policy, especially with the substantial growth of Muslim communities in Europe and North America. These changes are one aspect of the growing crisis around multiculturalism, secularization, laicite and desecularization. The chapter argues that the success of Christianity in Asia cannot be separated from economic and imperial power, and that its spread in Asia has also been a function of the strength or weakness of other religions, especially Islam. The growth of both Christian churches and Muslim mosques will more likely be constrained by growing Han nationalism and a revival of Confucian and Taoist ethics. Keywords: Asia; Christianity; globalization; Islam; multiculturalism; Muslim mosques; secularization; Taoist ethics

Minorities and Modernity: The Crisis of Liberal Secularism

Abstract: The Enlightenment as the origin of modernity and as the foundation of moral universalism has been much invoked by social theory in recent years especially by writers influenced by Michel Foucault's essay on the subject. Postmodernism and cultural anthropology have made the question about Enlightenment universalism ever more pressing. At one level the issue is very simple. By its emphasis on universalism in knowledge and ethics, the Enlightenment made particularity a problem and it resulted in a stigmatization of those social groups that patently departed from its magisterial interpretation of rationality appear to be irrational, premodern and dangerous. Aamir Mufti claims uncontroversially that the Enlightenment idea of universalism set up a series of contrasts between the universalism of the bourgeois world of civility, civilization and citizenship on the one hand and local practices and customs on the other. The result was to construct a classification of social minorities who were deemed to be in need ...

Rule of Virtue: China and Human Rights

Abstract: Books under review in this essay: China's Compliance in Global Affairs. Trade, Arms Control, Environmental Protection, Human Rights. Series on Contemporary China, by Gerald Chan. New Jersey: World ...

Extract from "pragmatism and european social theory", edited by patrick baert & bryan s. turner, © the bardwell press, 2007

Abstract: In writing about pragmatism in European social thought, it is impossible not to consider the wider and more complex issue of the difficult relationship between the European and the American traditions. Where does European social theory start? The traditional answer is associated of course with the rise of sociology, and in Robert Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition (967) we find the argument that sociological theory was mediated through liberal, conservative and socialist responses to the industrial revolution and then the French Revolution. The characteristics of “industrial society” preoccupied Auguste Comte and Saint Simon, and formed the social object of much of the subsequent work of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The topic of industrial society continued to be significant in sociology until the 960s, being the basis for example of Raymond Aron’s Sorbonne lectures in the late 950s, comparing western and Soviet industrialization (Aron 96). While the idea of industrial society may have been somewhat eclipsed more recently by the notions of post-industrial and post-modern society, the philosophical influence of the French Revolution may prove to be more enduring. Behind the political events of the Revolution in 789 lay the debates of the French Enlightenment.