Because the source for Norbert-Elias-The Civilising-Process-for-Dummies notion I have is not even Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies, it is Proceedings of I Think I Heard This In A Conference Presentation Once.
Anyway, I was given to think about it by reading various of those infuriating accounts of people not observing requirements to wear masks ( Read more... )

Here is another person following the call of the wiilllld, following the call of the wild:
For seven years, Miriam Lancewood and her husband Peter have lived a nomadic life - she is the hunter and he is the cook.
And as he is nearly 40 years older than she is, that strikes me as an equitable and sensible division of labour, no?
However, they do not ( Read more... )

David Mitchell: The French thinker Michel Onfray says western civilisation is on the way out and there’s nothing we can do about it. Hardly a new thought, eh, what? This one must have been running and running. I am pretty sure that my darling Dame Rebecca's meditations in the conclusion to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon about identifying with a woman ( Read more... )

Have recently come across work of sff which features humanoid species in which the females come into heat and set off a massive (and, we are to presume, though I don't think it's stated, completely consensual) gangbang within the group.

Which made me think about whether, among groups which were no longer Simple Children of Nature (bloomy ( Read more... )

At the colloquium I attended some months ago, I was intrigued to observe the revival of interest in Norbert Elias's theories of the Civilising Process. One of the papers drew on manuals for conduct, and showed that over time a particular behaviour became sufficiently internalised that warnings against it simply fell out of the prescriptions for ( Read more... )

About 'political correctness' and Norbert Elias's theory of the civilising process and the way new canons of behaviour get internalised over time and generations, and when spitting in public became a no-no, and the changes in attitude towards smoking over my life-span, and Erwin Goffmann's ideas about 'onstage' and 'offstage' behaviours, and why ( Read more... )

Further to yesterday's post and comments thereon, while I concede the benefits of advances in medical and domestic technology, I was also thinking more generally of the social contract embedded in the idea of civilisation (inadequate and incomplete as it is in practice) that people, by and large, behave reasonably well even when the forces of the ( Read more... )

I was remembering this post as being about feminist post-apocalyptic fiction of the 80s-90s, whereas in fact it's feminist dystopias (actually, the dystopias themselves aren't feminist, quite the reverse), but these two categories do tend to overlap insofar as the dystopias are often the product of some major collapse of civilisation if not actual ( Read more... )

I've been reading this, on and off, for some while now, and have now finished. It's not really a book one wants to sit down and read all at once, but I've been wanting to read it ever since I read an interview with Clara Greed in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. This was just after I'd been asked to be A Nexpert on the history of public ( Read more... )

This is deeply ugh: The doctor-patient relationship is built on trust. But for thousands of women it can turn into one of abuse (am a bit iffy about the actual headline about 'sex-hungry' docs: surely it's about power and opportunities?). Though at least, in principle, and although there is an enormous amount of cover-up and sheer inefficiency in ( Read more... )