scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question

Showing papers on "Face (sociological concept) published in 1997"


Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: In "National Past-Times" as discussed by the authors, Anagnost explores the fashioning and refashioning of modern Chinese subjectivity as it relates to the literal and figurative body of the nation.
Abstract: In "National Past-Times", Ann S. Anagnost explores the fashioning and refashioning of modern Chinese subjectivity as it relates to the literal and figurative body of the nation. In essays revealing the particular temporality of the modern Chinese nation-state, Anagnost examines the disparate eras of its recent past and its propensity for continually looking backward in order to face the future. Using interviews and participant observation as well as close readings of official documents and propaganda materials, and popular media, Anagnost notes the discontinuities in the nation's narrative - moments where this narrative has been radically reorganised at critical junctures in China's modern history. Covering a broad range of issues relating to representation and power - issues that have presented themselves with particular clarity in the years since the violent crackdown on the student movement of 1989 - National Past-Times critiques the ambiguous possibilities produced by the market, as well as new opportunities for 'unfreedom' in the discipline of labour and the commodification of women. Anagnost begins with a retrospective reflection on the practice of 'speaking bitterness' in socialist revolutionary practice. Subsequent essays discuss the culture debates of the 1980s, the discourse of social disorder, the issue of population control, the film "The Story of Qiu Ju", and anomalies at the theme park "Splendid China." "National Past-Times" will interest scholars in anthropology and Asian studies, and in the intersection between cultural studies and international affairs.

270 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors define politeness and rudeness as a deviation from or violation of rules and maxims of cooperative/polite communication and use examples of rude utterances to establish a typology of communicative rudeness.
Abstract: Standard theories of politeness (Lakoff 1975, Leech 1983, Brown and Levinson 1987) face a number of problems. To mention but a few, it can be doubted that these theories have managed to establish truly universal concepts and classifications of (im)polite behavior; they exaggerate the relative importance of indirectness; they do not treat situational and societal constraints sufficiently; finally, they do not deal with rudeness in enough detail.Therefore, it does not seem to be possible to describe rudeness simply as a deviation from or violation of rules and maxims of cooperative/polite communication. Starting from suggestions made by Kasper (1990) and Culpeper (1996), I will try to refine standard definitions of politeness and rudeness. Moreover, examples of rude utterances (mostly taken from spoken and written English and German dialogues) will be used to establish a typology of communicative rudeness. Several subtypes of cooperative (e.g. ritual insults, reactive rudeness, sociable rudeness) and non-cooperative (e.g. strategic rudeness in public institutions) rudeness are distinguished.

242 citations


01 Nov 1997
TL;DR: The key challenges the Internet community will face in the future are not simply technological, but also sociological: the challenges of social interaction and social organization as mentioned in this paper, which is not to diminish the difficulties of creating new technologies, but rather to emphasize that even these tasks will pale besides the problems of facilitating and encouraging successful online interaction and online communities.
Abstract: The key challenges the Internet community will face in the future are not simply technological, but also sociological: the challenges of social interaction and social organization. This is not to diminish the difficulties of creating new technologies, but rather to emphasize that even these tasks will pale besides the problems of facilitating and encouraging successful online interaction and online communities.

236 citations


01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors developed a theoretical framework for illustrating the conflict resolution models in Chinese society on the basis of author's previous analysis of Chinese cultural heritage, which can be viewed as a general framework for understanding Chinese social behaviors.
Abstract: This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework for illustrating the conflict resolution models in Chinese society on the basis of author's previous analysis of Chinese cultural heritage. In my book "Knowledge and Action," I analyzed the structure of Confucianism with a reference to my theoretical model of "Face and favor: Chinese power game." According to my analysis of Confucian ethics for ordinary people, interpersonal relationships in Chinese society are classified into three categories: vertical in-group, horizontal in-group, horizontal out-group. When an individual is in conflict with another in one of these three groups, the conflict resolution models may be further classified into 12 categories according to four aspects of consideration, namely whether s/he wants to maintain interpersonal harmony, whether s/he insists on attaining a personal goal, the interactants’ ways of coordination, and what is the dominant response. The author believes that this model can be viewed as a general framework for understanding Chinese social behaviors. This article proposes a conceptual framework to illuminate the conflict resolution in Chinese society on the basis of the author's previous works on analyzing Chinese cultural heritage. In my paper "Face and favor: Chinese power game" (Hwang, 1987), I developed a theoretical model for explaining Chinese social interaction on the basis of symbolic interactionism and social exchange theory; In my book "Knowledge and Action" (Hwang, 1995), I utilize this model as a scheme for analyzing Chinese cultural tradition including Confucianism, Legalism, and Martial School by the method of structuralism. I believe that the Confucian ethics for ordinary people as described in my book "Knowledge and Action" is an archetype of Chinese social action which can be used to understand the Chinese social interaction in various domains of life. Laudan (1978), a major scholar in philosophy of science, advocated that the criterion for judging the progress of a theory is its problem solving effectiveness, rather than its confirmability or falsifiability. The most important standard for evaluating a theory is its effectiveness for providing acceptable solutions to relevant problems. In other words, a significant feature of scientific progress is to transform the anomaly and unsolved empirical problems into solved problems. So long as an approximate statement of a problem can be derived from a theory, we

236 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors advocate a foreign policy of restraint-the disengagement of America's military forces from the rest of the world, which is a modern form of isolationism: we adopt its military policy of withdrawal, but reject its traditional economic protectionism.
Abstract: T h e Cold War lasted SO long and grew to be such a comfortable part of everyday life that it is now very difficult to chart a new foreign policy course for the nation. U.S. national strategy is a confusing mix of grand rhetoric, false starts, and well-advised caution. U.S. troops remain forward deployed, but in smaller numbers than they were during the Cold War. The United States intervenes often in the conflicts of others, but without a consistent rationale, without a clear sense of how to advance U.S. interests, and sometimes with unintended and expensive consequences. It is time to choose a new course. Here we advocate a foreign policy of restraint-the disengagement of America’s military forces from the rest of the world. Restraint is a modern form of isolationism: we adopt its military policy of withdrawal, but reject its traditional economic protectionism. The Cold War was worth fighting and winning. Soviet expansionism threatened vital US. interests; it seemed ready to swallow America’s allies in Europe and Asia, who were exhausted by World War I1 and racked by national selfdoubt. After victory over the monumental insanity of Nazism and Japanese militarism, the United States sought the prosperity interrupted by depression and a long war. But full enjoyment of its national wealth was postponed by the need to ward off the Soviet Union. Despite the collapse of the Soviet threat, American interests have not changed. The United States still seeks peace and prosperity. But now this preferred state is best obtained by restraining America’s great power, a power unmatched by any rival and unchallenged in any important dimension. Rather than lead a new crusade, America should absorb itself in the somewhat delayed task of addressing imperfections in its own society. The restraint we propose should not be misdescribed as a total withdrawal from the world. On the contrary, we believe in a vigorous trade with other

177 citations


Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: The authors presents a collection of essays on the political by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, including several unpublished essays, including some highly original perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and the political.
Abstract: This collection of essays presents, for the first time in English, some of the key essays on the political by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Including several unpublished essays, Retreating the Political offers some highly original perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and the political. Through contemporary readings of the political in Freud, Heidegger and Marx, the authors ask if we can talk of an a priori link between the philosophical and the political; they investigate the significance of the 'figure' - the human being as political subject - in the history of metaphysics; and they inquire how we can 're-treat' the political today in the face of those who argue that philosophy is at an 'end'.

120 citations


Proceedings Article
01 Jan 1997

63 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the impact of question wording manipulations derived from face management theory on responses to survey questions and found that questions phrased so as to allow the respondent to maintain face while answering in a socially undesirable manner would result in lower rates of socially desirable responding than would control questions.
Abstract: Five experiments were conducted to examine the impact of question wording manipulations derived from face management theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) on responses to survey questions. In general, it was expected that questions phrased so as to allow the respondent to maintain face while answering in a socially undesirable manner would result in lower rates of socially desirable responding than would control questions. The results strongly supported this hypothesis for questions regarding socially desirable knowledge (e.g., Are you familiar with NAFTA?), but not for questions about socially desirable behavior (e.g., Did you vote?). The results were partially supportive for questions about socially undesirable behaviors (e.g., Have you ever shoplifted?).

46 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The other man's death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death of the other, who cannot see it; and as if even before vowing myself to him and accompanying the Other in his mortal solitude, the Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me and in so doing recalls my responsibility.
Abstract: The other man's death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death of the other, who cannot see it; and as if, even before vowing myself to him, I had to answer for this death of the other, and to accompany the Other in his mortal solitude. The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.2

32 citations


Book
01 Sep 1997
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take a practical approach to the subject, and manage to avoid a theoretical stance, and show how managers can approach the ethical dilemmas they face in a complex world.
Abstract: The question of ethics in business has become a major concern for many organizations in recent years. In this text, David Murray takes a practical approach to the subject, and manages to avoid a theoretical stance. The book shows how managers can approach the ethical dilemmas they face in a complex world. It covers both top-level policy and strategic decision-making, and also the day to day concerns of people throughout a company, and demonstrates how everyone can make a real difference within an organization to improve its ethical position.



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of the non-redundant group (n-group) of persons such that the contributions of all are needed, if outsiders do not contribute, to obtain the collective good.
Abstract: To discuss the origins of collective action this paper introduces the concept of the non-redundant group (n-group) of persons such that the contributions of all are needed, if outsiders do not contribute, to obtain the collective good. The paper shows that the members of an “n-group” face the structure of payoffs of the Assurance Game, and therefore, under certain conditions, will pursue collective action.

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of the realisation patterns of requests in British English and Uruguayan Spanish, establishing the similarities and differences between the conceptualisation of politeness by native speakers of both languages, is presented.
Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of the realisation patterns of requests in British English and Uruguayan Spanish, establishing the similarities and differences between the conceptualisation of politeness by native speakers of both languages. The results obtained, based on the analysis of a discourse completion test administered to 30 native speakers of British English and 30 native speakers of Uruguayan Spanish, show that the major difference between British and Uruguayan requests is a matter of orientation. The British appear to be more inclined towards "negative" politeness, thus attaching more significance to negative aspects of "face" such as non-imposition and detachment. On the other hand, Uruguayans appear to be more inclined towards "positive" politeness thus attaching more importance to the positive aspects of "face" such as approval and involvement.

Book
01 Sep 1997
TL;DR: In this article, the shaping motive of American literature is discussed, and the authors discuss the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, Kate Chopin and others.
Abstract: In this work, the author contemplates the shaping motive of American literature. Locating its origins in the age of Bacon, Shakespeare and Donne, he also discusses in depth the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, Kate Chopin and others.






Book
13 Jan 1997
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the benefits of cross-cultural understanding in law enforcement and discuss the challenges faced by the cross-cultural community when dealing with different cultures and cultures.
Abstract: INTRODUCTION "If You Don't Have Much Time" Things to Keep in Mind Some Reasons to be Cautious To Others, We Have a Peculiar Culture, Too! How Much Cross-Cultural Understanding Is Enough? A Checklist of Our Own Tolerances for Differences Be Skeptical! Basics - What? Why? How? - Benefits, and Sources Seven Basic Questions What are Some of the Benefits for Police? What Cross-Cultural Data Cannot Do: Guidelines, Limitations, and Packaging Sources, Methods, Applications: Academic and Law Enforcement Why Some Asians and Asian-Americans may not Like this Book Culture, Police, and Asian Crime The Cross-Cultural Context of Asian Crime in America What Is Culture? How Are Cultural Traits Conceived and Used? Cross-Cultural Competency Is Not Just Language Competency Police as Cross-Cultural Learners Police as Potential Cross-Cultural Specialists CULTURAL "DO'S AND DON'TS" Public Relationships Asian Images of Police To Help Asians Get a Better Image of Cops Asian Families Come First Check with the Amah Know and Be Known Funerals and Weddings Uniform vs. Plainclothes Respect and Social Levels Role Playing Body Language How Not To Sit Yakuza Body Language Humility Privacy Avoidance of Public Confrontation Honor the Elderly Indirectness "Face" Provocation and "Face" Guanxi Street Cops and Guanxi Gossip is Good Beeper/Pager Numbers Street Negotiations Shake Hands Only with Older Recognized Gang Leaders, not with Younger Gang Members Intimidate Gang Suspects by Sitting Next to Them Foreign Courtesy Terms Don't Use Slang, Parables, or 'Pop' References Observe and Balance Paybacks Avoid Co-Option Holidays, Grand Openings, and Surveillance Questionable Community Translators Check Whether the Bunsen Burners are on in the Jewelry Store Asian Newspapers Asian Public Apologies Folk Medicine and Alleged Child Abuse Passport Profiles Forged U.S. Visas and Altered Passports Passports, Visas, and Claims of Diplomatic Immunity Diplomatic Auto License Plates Person-to-Person Relationships Attitudes and Applications Speak Quietly Personal Space Don't Touch Spend Time in the Streets Visit the Temples Identifying Ethnic Groups Gestures Other Physical "Don'ts" Business Cards Applause Spitting Greetings Polite Topics of Conversation Silence Privacy Saying "No" Watch Out for the "Yes" Answers Get Search Warrants, Not Consent To Search Do Beat Around the Bush Removing Shoes Don't Push Things Around with Your Feet Interviewing Witnesses, Victims, and Monks Address Elders First Masks and Fingerprint Identification Names and Dialect Identification Ask Direct and Specific Questions: Information will not be Volunteered Interviews with Police Are "Doing Business" Get the Specific and Cultural History of the Suspect's Extended Family Special Family Names Check Beauty Salon Connections Quietly Check with Dads for Any "Extracurricular Activities" Travel Agents Marian Days Wives, Concubines, and Mistresses Threats of Family Gravesite Desecration in Asia Do the Victims Understand the Bail System? Hoarding Cash at Home Greeting Monks, Religious Leaders, and Family Elders Use Quiet Manners with Unfamiliar Religious Objects Use an Interpreter with a Monk or Religious Leader Witnesses and Some Cross-Cultural Aspects of Trials "But Asians Won't Testify" Be a Long-Term Friend Asian Friendship Home Protection Before Trial Do Not Make Witnesses Lose "Face" Protect Witnesses from Gangs Subpoena Blanks Avoid Loudmouthed Clerks or Reporters Use the District Attorney's Explanatory Time for Relevant Cross-Cultural Topics Educate the Jury About Asian Names Use Posterboards Suspect's Appearances Photograph their Ears Explain the Uses of Standard Telegraphic Code for Chinese Names Home Protection After the Trial Suspect's Records and Affiliations Know the Suspect's Ethnic Background Records and Standard Telegraphic Code Get Three Handwriting Samples of the Suspect's Name in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Characters Photo Books Check Local Hair Salons for Photographs Gang Mobility Vietnamese Community "Safe Houses" Telephone Record Links Check Motel Phone Books Check Home Country and Regional Connections Check Refugee and/or Dialect Connections Women's Married Names Aliases may be Legitimate "INS" Names Check School and Refugee Organization Connections Legal Ages Use INS Agents Victims Profiles Interrogating Suspects and Recruiting Informants Are There Any Significant Differences? Suggested "Do's and Don'ts" Assumptions of Reid Interrogation Across Cultures Interrelations and the Need for Cultural Knowledge Interrogating Home-Invasion Robbery Suspects Recruiting Informants Interrogation and McCarthy's "Gang Crime Magic" Asian Youth Gangs What is a Gang and Who are Its Members? Why Do Some Youths Become Gang Members? Are Gangs Largely of a Single Ethnic Type? Levels of Adherence to a Gang Documentation for Identifying Gang Membership Gangs as Surrogate "Families" Home-Invasion Robbery Victim's Profile Organizational Models and "Pickup" Gangs Caucasian "Throw-Away" Gang Members On the "Toughness" of Asian Gang Members Numbers, Gambling, Tattoos, Food, and Regionalism Some Cross-Cultural Crime-Related Aspects of Numbers Gambling Tattoos and Slang Food and Eating Regionalism, Anti-Stereotypes, and Role-Playing ETHNIC MINDSETS, PROFILES, AND RELIGIONS Contrasting Chinese and American Mindsets An Introduction to Mindsets The Importance and Limitations of Cultural Generalities Comparative Mindsets: Society, Self, Values, Epistemic Models, Religion, and World Views Major Components of Chinese Mindsets Attitudes About Police Authority vs. the Community Chinese Shame Culture vs. American Guilt Culture Pragmatic Contextualism Face Guanxi High-Context Asian Cultures vs. Police Low-Context Culture Formal Manners and "Paybacks" are Important Business Contracts, Time, and Negotiations Suggested Readings: Asian Crime and Cross-Cultural Studies Ethnic Profile: The Chinese Introduction to the Scope of Chinese Crime On Introducing and Summarizing Chinese Cultures Potential Chinese Global Economic Power A Geographical Sketch of China Cultural Sketches Five Deep Cultural Mindsets "Face" (Mian Zi) and Losing "Face" (Diu Lian) Self and Its Status Collectivism vs. Individualism vs. Chinese Group Orientation Guanxi (Networking): A Key to Chinese Society Pride in the Ultimate Superiority of Being Chinese Is Reading Chinese Ethnic Strategists Relevant for Police? Chinese Language, Names, and Holidays The Chinese Language Chinese Names Chinese Holidays and Festivals Suggested Readings Ethnic Profile: The Vietnamese An Introduction to the Scope of Vietnamese Crime A Geographical and Historical Sketch Cultural Sketches Two Deeper Cultural Mindsets: Village Mentality and Time Names, Language, and Scripts Holidays and Calendars Marian Days: Carthage, Missouri Suggested Readings Asian Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism A Brief Comparative Introduction Chinese Confucianism Taoism (Daoism): The Internal Chinese Counterbalance Buddhism Buddhist Contextual Pragmatism and Truth RECORDING, PRESERVING, TRAINING, AND PLANNING Standard Telegraphic Code (STC) What is STC? Why Should STC Be Used? A Hong Kong Example Translation vs. Transliteration The Importance of the World Order of Chinese Names Common Surnames, Personal Names, and Brother Names An Example from the STC Code Book The Problem of Nicknames and Suffixes Asian Police Transliterations/Romanizations The Absence of Materials and Training Sources Reference Materials Preserving the Cross-Cultural Skills Police Already Possess The Unnoticed Pressures on Asian-American Officers Supplementing the Planning of Criminal Justice and In-Service Training Programs A Criminal Justice Prejudice? Cross-Cultural Studies Belong to Social Science Community Policing and Cross-Cultural Training Programs Afterword Appendix A: Chinese Triads, Triad Organizations, and Triad Relationships, Prepared by George F. Harkin, Senior Federal Intelligence Analyst Appendix B: Common Chinese Surnames and Notes on Chinese Language and Dialects, Prepared by Robert M. Hearn, Senior Federal Intelligence Analyst Appendix C: Guanxi: An Important Concept for the Law Enforcement Office, Prepared by M. Cordell Hart, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Department of Treasury Appendix D: Overcoming Language and Cultural Barriers in Dealing with Asian Organized Crime, Prepared by M. Cordell Hart, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Department of Treasury Appendix E: Chinese Culture and the Practice of Actuarial Intelligence, Prepared by Paul Moore, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Federal Bureau of Investigation Glossary Endnotes Index



Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: In this article, a womanist perspective is used to examine the spirituals to understand what they say about the action of God in the face of injustice and oppression in the world.
Abstract: Writing from a womanist perspective, profess ional musician Cheryl Kirk-Duggan probes the spirituals to r eveal what they say about the action of God in the face of r acial injustice and oppression '

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The time required to access name and semantic details by adult and child subjects was examined and it was shown that children were faster at accessing names than occupations when giving vocal responses to presentations of familiar faces.
Abstract: Contemporary models of face recognition explain everyday difficulties in name retrieval by proposing that name information can only be accessed after semantic information (e.g. Bruce & Young, 1986) or by proposing an architecture which puts name retrieval at a disadvantage (e.g. Burton& Bruce,1992). Experiments reportedhere examined the time requiredto access name and semantic details by adult and child subjects. In Experiment 1 adult subjects took more time to match familiar faces to names than to other semantic details (e.g. occupation), a finding consistent with all the previous literature on name retrieval. Experiment 2, however, showed that the youngest subjects were significantly faster in matching familiar faces to names than to semantic details. Experiment 3 also showed that children were faster at accessing names than occupations when giving vocal responses to presentations of familiar faces. These findings are not predicted by rigidly sequential models of face recognition and are discussed with ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the interaction of Brown and Levinson's social principle of face action with speech acts, the cooperative principle, and with general principles of conversational exchange structure in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Melton, Gary B., The Individual, the Family, and Social Good: Personal Fulfillment in Time of Change as discussed by the authors is a collection of essays from the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation.
Abstract: Melton, Gary B., The Individual, the Family, and Social Good: Personal Fulfillment in Time of Change. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. 227 pp. IBSN #0803231857, cloth price $35; paper price: $20. This volume is the forty-second to be published from the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Anyone well versed in family policy and research may not find a substantial amount of new material in any given chapter, but the collection overall is broad enough (covering psychology, economics, anthropology, law and politics) that almost any reader will find something interesting and unfamiliar in it. As Melton states in this introductory chapter, this symposium is not only the most diverse of the entire Nebraska series, but much of it is also uncharacteristically cautionary in tone. (Actually, he claims the chapters are "emotionally charged," which must be relative to the even more academic style of previous volumes.) The chapter by James Garbarino is typical of his work, both stylistically and substantively, and is one of the best parts of the book. Engagingly written, it argues that the reason that children and families face so many problems in the 1990s is that their social environment-in the form of television, violence, economic and other stressors-has become increasingly "toxic." I have two minor complaints with this chapter. One section seems to blame our torn social fabric on the "decline of community" and "highrisk neighborhoods. My other complaint is that Garbarino's laudable solutions are somewhat divorced from current political and economic realities. Tom Tyler and Peter Degoey attempt to tie family and community "approaches to the promotion of social good by viewing the dynamics of social good through a social-psychological lens." This sounds very promising and perhaps most central of all the chapters to the focus of this volume and series. It does include some interesting research on attitudes toward procedural justice in terms of the perceived legitimacy of various kinds of authority and of family and community social identification. But it may be a reflection of how far social psychology has strayed from its applied roots that this chapter ignores so much valuable family and community psychological theory, research, and intervention. Given that Mati Heidments is a professor of social and environmental psychology in Estonia, it is surprising that, except for a brief but enlightening section on communist housing policy, his chapter ignores environmental influences on individual behavior and family well-being. Although it provides an interesting counterpoint to the others, reflecting the recent macropolitical and social upheavals in Eastern Europe, it may be a little too philosophical to have much direct relevance for addressing family problems in either society, and its conclusions are overgeneralized in their point-by-point comparison of communism (bad) and his society's "post-capitalist" (good) future. The other three chapters seem more thorough and practical, perhaps because they are more narrowly focused on disordered social relations within the family. Allen Parkman examines the deterioration of the family from a law and economics perspective. Jill Korbin explores cross-culturally the positive and negative influences of social networks and family violence and Eleanor Maccoby discusses the rights, needs, and obligations of mothers, fathers, and children in divorce and custody arrangements. …

Journal Article
TL;DR: Les Cenelles as discussed by the authors is a collection of poetry written in French written by free men of color under the leadership of Armand Lanusse under the name of the Fair Sex of Louisiana.
Abstract: Si j'allais, me jouant de prejuges du monde, Lui dire: "Femme! il faut a ma douleur profonde Les soupirs de ton coeur" `What if I went, casting off the chains of the elite, To say to her: "Woman! my profound woes must have The sighs of your heart' (1) In 1845 a group of highly-educated New Orleanian free men of color under the leadership of Armand Lanusse published a collection of poetry written in French called Les Cenelles. Historian Jerah Johnson has called this unique anthology "the single most important piece of ante-bellum black literature ever written" (407), but critics have said surprisingly little about the relationship between the poets' political circumstances and the poems themselves, despite the fact that they were written by New Orleans's most marginal citizens under the extremely difficult conditions of the 1830s and 1840s. (2) Commentators explain that legislation passed in 1830 prohibited free persons of color from publishing political criticism, and as a result Les Cenelles could not address social problems (Rousseve 48). Edward Coleman's words are typical: "We read of nightingales, but ... [s]lavery and racial relationships are passed over in silence" (vi). It is my purpose to argue that Les Cenelles is indeed an important, politically charged document and to suggest that these poems anticipate another African-American genre of social complaint: the blues. Besides increasing the national territory of the United States by 140 percent, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 severely disrupted power relations in New Orleans. During French and Spanish rule from 1718 to 1802, wealthy free men of color held a relatively large amount of prestige, but their power quickly waned in the face of an American social and legal system that associated their dark skin color with inferiority and yet feared them as leaders in a potential abolitionist movement. (3) New in town, white Americans worked diligently to supplement their de jure authority with a more subtle cultural capital. In a practically foreign city fraught with already established and unfamiliar rules and eccentricities, one method by which they achieved this was to perform the role of insiders, throwing quadroon balls in imitation of their white French and Spanish predecessors. As a consequence, the position of free women of color in some ways improved, since they were able to gain social status and economic advantage by attaching themselves to American men. Clearly, this situation threatened free men of color the most, and it is their loss of standing vis-a-vis free women of color that leads us to a political reading of Les Cenelles, which is, after all, dedicated to the "beau Sexe Louisianais" ("Fair Sex of Louisiana") (xxxiv). In fact, we can read Les Cenelles as a reaction to quadroon balls; if we do so, these poems transcend classification as mere imitations of French Romantic poetry and can be read as indirect, discreet attacks on an insidious threat to the manhood and cultural integrity of free blacks. "Discretion in the face of power," writes theorist James C. Scott, "requires that a part of the `self' that would reply or strike back must lie low" (114). This self, he argues, "finds expression in the safer realm of ... a `hidden transcript' that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant" (114, xii). Occasionally, a hidden transcript, such as Les Cenelles, enters the field of public discourse, albeit in a disguised and ambiguous form. In contrast, forces of domination most often express themselves with an open, public transcript--for example, through everyday speech, laws, and newspapers. Additionally, the "powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed" (xii). A dialectical method of reading which places subordinate and dominant hidden transcripts in imaginary conversation with each other, then, produces a more comprehensive understanding, which descries political valences that would otherwise be inaccessible through a reading of any one text in isolation. …

01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: This paper investigated how Japanese students learn English and American native speakers of English word complaints and found that Japanese tend to demand an immediate compensation while Americans tend to expect hearers (H) to suggest ways to improve the offensive situation voluntarily.
Abstract: This study was undertaken to investigate how Japanese students learning English and American native speakers of English word complaints. The main goal of this study was to outline the patterns found and examine the implications for language teaching. The results indicate that Japanese tend to demand an immediate compensation while Americans tend to expect hearers (H) to suggest ways to improve the offensive situation voluntarily. Although Americans seem more willing to make complaints, this does not necessarily mean that they think that they are allowed to endanger H's face by behaving in a less polite manner. Such results suggest that it might be better for learners of English to avoid the use of strategies which require that H supply an immediate compensation