My favorite quote from this article is:In their minds and souls, as in their blogs and chat rooms, they [i.e. the Iranian young people, RCK] were wired to the globalized world, and yet in their growing bodies and narrowing social restrictions trapped inside an Islamic version of Calvinist Geneva.

It is hard to believe that so many words in English are either of Latin or Greek origin. Yet those two then-dominant cultures are now not even adequately described by that stale expression, "mere shadows of their former selves ( Read more... )

James Scott's contribution Patron-Client Politics and Change in Southeast Asia in Sam Charles Sarkesian's book Revolutionary Guerilla Warfare (1975), p.303-351, makes some interesting meta-points about the study of client-patron relationships:

• One fundamental problem with Marxist' theories of class struggle is (p.303) that in the traditional ( Read more... )

This is based on a Canadian report about criminal networks. The report itself focuses more on organized crime as social relationships rather than as business relationships (a not insignificant part).

The key social relationships within organized crime are all based on something that is already in common between the members, and somewhat out of ( Read more... )

I am currently trying to develop a deeper understanding of client-patronage networks and other forms of social institutions that are employed in the absence of, or in addition to, legal and state-instituted support infrastructure. In addition to biological (blood cousins) and to ritualized kinship (godparents) and the standard form of client/ ( Read more... )

On of the defining books of my life is The Social Construction of Reality by American sociologist Peter L. Berger and German sociologist Thomas Luckmann. In a straightforward and compelling fashion it makes plausible how the process of communicating culture from one generation to the next affects its social construction and explains both continuity ( Read more... )

One of the weirdest experiences of this weekend at the beach was the pulsating sensation of very wet sand. I cannot say that I ever noticed it before: If you play sand castle in the zone of the tide, and you get a lump of very wet sand in your hand, then the sand will feel as if it is pulsating, shaking or wobbling before it settles. My personal ( Read more... )

This may be indicative of European sensibilities, but it is interesting that no one I have read so far on the topic of the Standford Prison Experiment comments on the fact how simple it was to turn staff offices into prison cells: They took out the furniture and swapped out the doors! I.e. the offices already were small and did not have any windows ( Read more... )

Inspired by phoenixcoeur's reading of The Lucifer Effect, I am taking the online reading opportunity my illness is providing me with to get caught up on the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and the work of Philip Zimbardo. I find this extremely helpful, because being the parent of toddlers is a very powerful position, and the work of Zimbardo exposes how ( Read more... )

I had ranted some time back about the misleadingly Romantic image of Native Indian culture that the new Smithsonian was projecting. Now the new National Geographic article on the Rise and Fall of the Mayan culture spells the internal conflicts, the over-exploitation of the environment and the Euroasian style of dealing with ones' opponents out in ( Read more... )