Showing papers on "Face (sociological concept) published in 1989"

Truth and goodness, mirrors and masks Part II: a sociology of beauty and the face

Abstract: What is the face? The face, as unique, physical, malleable and public is the prime symbol of the self. It is unique, for no two faces are identical, and it is in the face that we recognize each other, and identify ourselves. Our faces are pictured in our passports and identification papers. The face is physical, and therefore personal and intimate, yet the face is also 'made up', 'put on' and subject to fashion. It is public, but also intensely private and intimate. And, malleable, with its eighty mimetic muscles, the face is capable of over 7,000 expressions. Furthermore, the face indicates the age, gender and race of the self with varying degrees of accuracy, also our health and socio-economic status, our moods and emotions, even perhaps our character and personality. The face is also the site of four of our five senses: sight, taste, smell and hearing, and the site for our intakes of food, drink and air. It is also the source of verbal communication, and an important source for non-verbal communication. Gloria Swanson once said: 'We didn't need dialogue. We had faces.' Moreover the face is also the principal determinant in the perception of our individual beauty or ugliness, and all that these perceptions imply for self-esteem and life-chances. The face indeed symbolizes the self, and signifies many different facets of the self. More than any other part of the body, we identify the face as me oryou. Nothing indicates the significance of the face more than the failure to recognize faces and facial expressions. Dr Sacks has described one such person, a victim of Korsakov's syndrome who, during the medical examination, apparently mistook his wife for a hat, and tried to, literally, pick her up to put on his head; not surprisingly, he could not recognize facial expressions either. Yet another patient, horrifyingly, could not recognize his own face in a mirror (1987: 11-13, 21). The face, however, and indeed beauty and the physical body also, have been largely ignored by mainstream sociology, at least until relatively recently. Only Simmel ( 1901/ 1965) and Veblen ( 1899/

Telling age in later life: Identity and face implications

Abstract: The disclosure of age-in-years in later life is a frequent characteristic of intergenerational talk among first-acquaintances. Qualitative analyses of particular sequences show that considerations of age and of appraised health/wellbeing are structurally interrelated in these disclosures. Through this relationship, chronological age can function as a token in the bilateral negotiation of age-identities in discourse. Despite its ritualised character, age-disclosure can impact significantly on elderly people's self-esteem and on cross-generation attitudes. Variably, at different points in the life-span, taboos and normative prescriptions are associated with both seeking and providing information about age. Personal experience (in the absence of empirical studies) suggests that children and adolescents are often asked to tell their age by distant relatives or new acquaintances, or have this information revealed for them by parents or guardians. Inquiring about age in these contexts, to the extent that it is more than ritualised, seems to be part of a signalling of engagement and perhaps nurturance by well-meaning adults interested in following the growth and development of the young. In the middle years of life, age-in-years, and perhaps all discussion of own age, drops out of unmarked usage, appearing to feature predominantly in mockdenigrating remarks about the passing of time, references to the unwanted arrival of birthdays, commercially promoted through the greetings-card industry. Age-talk finds its place as part of a broad spread of ageist constructions in Western society across several domains — literature (Berman and Sobkowska-Ashcroft, 1986), humour (Palmore, 1971), magazine fiction (Martel, 1968), television drama and commercials (Kubey, 1980). The admixture of fear, reticence and regret with which, facetiously or 01655-4888/89/0009-0129 $2.00 Text 9 (2) (1989), pp. 129-151 © Mouton de Gruyter 130 Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland and Howard Giles not, many middle-aged adults appear to represent their own ageing, and the consequent teasing and chiding of those whose ageing comes up for review, undoubtedly form part of the interactional means by which negative images of ageing and the elderly are reproduced (cf. Kenwood, N. Coupland, J. Coupland and Giles, submitted). Images crassly invoked here amount to a checklist of negative elderly stereotypes: frailty, sexual inactivity, incompetence, grouchiness, unsociability, and so on (Braithwaite, 1986; Giles, N. Coupland, Kenwood, Harriman and J. Coupland (in press); Stewart and Ryan, 1982). Within this calendar-marking tradition and associated discourses, personal life-spans are viewed as incremented scales with natural boundaries which are bench-marks to decrement: physical, social and socio-psychological (cf. Branco and Williamson, 1982; N. Coupland and J. Coupland, in press b). Decade-boundaries seem to have a particular salience in this respect, as do transitions from one generational category to another (parent to grandparent, for example). On the other hand, in old age, the life-span territory we explore in this paper, age-in-years re-surfaces from its underground life. The data we draw on, from two audio-recorded contexts, confirm the prevalence of disclosing chronological age (DCA) among at least some elderly groups. Given the pejorative associations of advancing age among younger groups (as we have speculatively sketched them), we are led to ask why elderly DCA might be not only tolerated but positively construed on occasions. The particular aim of the paper is therefore to consider the social functioning of DCA in context, and to achieve this through examining the discursive sequences and routines through which, in our data, age-disclosure is managed. Our interpretations are couched in terms of age-identity, and more particularly the various elderly-identifications that DCA can encode. For this reason, we begin with a brief consideration of the diverse literatures that have been concerned with age-identity and age-marking in later life. Approaches to age-identity An early experimental psychological tradition (for example, Tuckman and Lorge, 1954; Riley and Foner, 1968) was concerned to assess elderly self-concepts, and found a common tendency for ageing people to 'deny' their elderliness, judging themselves as younger than their chronological age in years. More recent research has explored different interpretations of such age-categorizations (see, for example, Guptill, 1969; Mutran and Burke, 1979), though methodological criticisms have also been made (cf. Telling age in later life 131 Breytespraak and George, 1979). A recent, more global 'life-position indicator' is Rubin and Rubin's (1982; 1986) index of'contextual age', a questionnaire-based measure aggregating objective and subjective dimensions of elderly people's health, mobility, finances, social networks, and other variables. On the other hand, symbolic interactionists (see, for example, Spence, 1986) and Meadian theorists (Chappell and Orbach, 1986) have argued for studying the ageing self as process rather than in static terms. It is this tradition of concern for 'identity-in-the-world' (Ainley and Redfoot, 1982) which is most receptive to the discourse analytic approaches to identity that Potter and others (Potter 1988; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) have argued for. (For a more detailed review, see J. Coupland, N. Coupland, Giles and Kenwood, in press) Still, linguistic studies of age-categories and age-references are rare. There have been some literary and dictionary analyses (Berman and Sobkowska-Ashcroft, 1986; Covey, 1988), and occasional experimental studies (for example, Nuessel, 1982; Rodin and Langer, 1980). Barbato and Feezel (1987) asked people in three age-bands (17-44, 45-64, 65 + years) to rate a list of 10 terms referring to an elderly person on five semantic differential scales. Predictably, terms including 'senior citizen', 'retired person' and 'mature American' were more favourably perceived than, for example, 'elderly', Old', and Old folks'; there were few differences between the responses of different age-groups. Research of this sort needs to confront the criticisms (for instance of Potter and Wetherell, 1987, ch. 6) that group-attributes and even social categories themselves are not static givens, and can be constructed out of the socio-psychological needs and goals of interactants in discourse. As a result, the objective of obliterating ageist terms from the language (Oyer and Oyer, 1976) may be misguided, ignoring the essential creativity of group-attributions and hence ageism in context, and their consequent resistance to change (cf. Singh, Lele and Martohardjono, 1988; Snyder, 1981). In a recent paper (J. Coupland, N. Coupland, Giles and Henwood, in press), we have attempted to overview the range of processes by means of which age-identity is marked, variably and negotiatively, in intergenerational talk. We have identified two broad categories of such processes. First, 'Age-Categorisation Processes', subsuming direct and indirect references to the elderly participant's group-membership, time of life, generational role, etc., identification of frailty and age-associable problematical circumstances (cf. N. Coupland, J. Coupland, Giles, Henwood and Wiemann, 1988), and the disclosure of chronological age. As a second general set, we consider 'Temporal Framing Processes', which include the adding of a time-past perspective to current issues (cf. Boden and Bielby, 1986), elderly people self-associating with the past, and the 132 Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland and Howard Giles recognising of historical/cultural/social change. Intergenerational talk in the first-acquaintance interactions under investigation was in fact imbued with interweaving age-identity-marking processes under these headings, though highly specific contextualisation possibilities and implications are associated with each dimension. Our earlier overview has been unable to explore the sequential characteristics of each of these processes in individual sequences of talk, though it is, we argue, at this level that interpretive inferences of goals and consequences are most secure. It is against this background that, in the present paper, we examine the management of chronological age-disclosure as a particular and particularly focused means of negotiating elderly identity in conversation.

Not Just a Game: Essays in Canadian Sport Sociology

Abstract: Organized sport as we know it is not an expression of social consensus or of continuing progess toward a better world, nor is it a homogenous, cohesive entity. This book invites us to consider the hidden face of Canadian sport.

The realism of Realism: the state and the study of International Relations

Abstract: On the face of it, the title of this article must look rather odd, especially to any non-specialist who happens to light upon it. For ‘Realism’ surely connotes enterprises and appraisals of a realistic kind, ones which take full account of the facts and constraints of life. Accordingly, it might well be thought clearly superfluous to assert that such things, already identified as realistic, are indeed so.

Creating a Just Future: The Politics of Peace and the Ethics of Creation in a Threatened World

Abstract: Here is Moltmann discussing the questions that matter more than any others for our world: How is it possible to create a world society worth living in? What positive contribution can Christians make in the face of the nuclear threat? What can be done to mobilize concern for the future of the environment and its natural resources? Moltmann provides a new combination of insights from the Bible and from oriental religion as he has come to know it through his work in the Far East to produce some fresh and challenging perspectives on the primary global issues of our time.

Strong Leadership: Thatcher, Reagan and an Eminent Person

Abstract: What do we want when we seek a strong leader? How do strong leaders differ from other leaders? What limitations are they likely to have? "Strong Leadership" draws portraits of three political leaders of recent years in an attempt to answer these questions. Margaret Thatcher may well be the most significant world leader of the last decade. Ronald Reagan, while seeming implausible in the role, completed two terms in the world's most powerful office. Malcolm Fraser was the first of the trio to re-introduce "strong leadership" into the political agenda and has gone on to oppose its most controversial face, the system of government-maintained racism in South Africa. In this book Graham Little writes of the lives and ideologies of these three leaders. Analyzing their work-styles and relations with colleagues and other people, he sketches the leading characteristics of their personalities. Finally, he examines each leader's childhood and adolescence, and gauges the influence of their parents and siblings on their personality and leadership qualities.

‘I must put my face on’: Making up the body and marking out the feminine

Abstract: From a mere masquerade to the mask, from a role to a person, to an individual, from the last to a being with a metaphysical and ethical value, from a moral consciousness to a sacred being, from the latter to a fundamental form of thought and action — that is the route we have now covered. (Mauss, 1979:90)

Teaching black literature

Abstract: The author examines the role of literature in a multicultural curriculum. She argues that for the text to be valued, it cannot simply be a matter of introducing a few Black texts in the early years of schooling which reduce in number and attention once students face public examinations. Her concern is for the ways in which readings of Black literature may challenge the restrictive criteria of an established canon of literature.

The situated processing of situated language

Abstract: People often characterize the semantic component of a natural-language processing system as the implementation of a semantical theory. As system designers they adopt or perhaps even develop a theory of natural language semantics (frame semantics or Montague semantics, say). Then they provide a computational mechanism that derives the semantic representation used in that theory from the syntactic representation produced by a parser. That mechanism may in turn connect to the rest of a system in such a way as to ensure appropriate action by the agent. This characterization, though simple, illustrates an important point: the search is for a single semantical account that can serve simultaneously as an account of the semantics of the utterances of the language and as the semantic representation of those utterances to be used by a computer.1 There is growing evidence, however, that suggests the need for a re-evaluation of the assumption that there is, or could be, any such single account. On the face of it, one might imagine that a serious challenge could come quite simply from fundamental differences between humans (and hence, human language) and computers. After all, we might imagine that because computers and humans are different, computers could not in any robust way be endowed with anything like the human language ability. From this point of view, no matter what your account of human language is like, if it were to adequately describe full-blooded language use, it couldn't be embodied in a computer. Arguments of this type have been made of course, Searle's (1980) Chinese box argument being an especi ally familiar one. One can also imagine arguments against the direct embedding of a linguist's account in a computer coming from differences in the way linguists theorize and what seems best from an implementer's point of view. And there have been cogent arguments of this latter sort too, at least for syntactic representations (see, for example, Shieber, 1984, 1986). Finally, one can imagine limits arising from more standard practical exigencies of computers themselves, i.e., their limits on time and memory. But and this is perhaps unexpected there is also an argument

The Application of Behavioral Techniques to Business Communication Instruction.

Abstract: A review of the history of writing instruction reveals that current instructors face essen tially the same problems as did their counterparts in previous generations and that their complaints remai...

L"Approche Biographique Face aux Sciences Sociales: le Problème du Sujet Dans la Recherche Sociale [The Biographical Approach in the Social Sciences: the Problem of the Subject in Social Research]

Abstract: Note: italian translation: La Critica Sociologica, No. 90-91, 1989, pp. 1-32. Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-173331 Record created on 2011-12-27, modified on 2017-09-01

Theoretical Observations on Applied Behavioral Science Role Taking and the Study of Majority/Minority Relationships

Abstract: This article presents the major theoretical issues concerning "role taking" and "role making," particularly as these relate to relationships between majority and minority groups. The author examines the barriers researchers and others face when seeking to take the roles of others, and finds that we must recognize how ethnic and/or gender differences affect role taking. Three problem areas are examined: circumstances in which one group has more power than another, unexamined roles, and contradictory role expectations. The author concludes that role taking and role making have major methodological implications, and that further analysis of these concepts is essential to our understanding of the relationships among persons from different sectors of society.

A Quantitative Examination of Ethical Dilemmas in Public Relations

Abstract: This research examined ethical responses of public relations preprofessionals to dilemmas they may face later in their careers. Subjects were required to respond to a request for information ordered suppressed by their employer. Results support earlier findings that students expect personal moral‐ethical values to override organizational concerns. Implications of the findings are discussed.

‘Self‐exploitation’ and Workers' Co‐operatives—or how the British Left get their concepts wrong

Abstract: In this article I examine the concept ‘self-exploitation’ and its use in criticising workers' co-operatives. I argue that the concept is incoherent and that the kind of exploitation which members of workers' co-ops actually face is ‘market-exploitation’. Moreover, some of the criticisms of workers' co-ops which are made by those who employ the confused concept ‘self-exploitation’ are shown to be inapposite when ‘market-exploitation’ is recognised to be the real problem. I conclude with a discussion of the reasons for the acceptance of the misguided concept ‘self-exploitation’ by a number on the Left in Britain today.

The death instinct and the future of humans.

Abstract: Freud’s notion of the “death instinct” has been conceived of by many subsequent authors in many ways. One of the misuses of it is as an excuse for passivity in the face of the current crisis in hum...

The concept and problem of public enlightenment

Abstract: Outline of the problem A new problem seems to be emerging in the Western industrialized countries concerning the relationship between the ordinary person and the information he or she receives from the surrounding world. I shall argue that the problem is serious, that it ought to attract more attention from scholars as well as from the informed public, and that it is a problem for educationalists to face, not least those concerned with adult education and communication.