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2 Social movement theory and collective identity Tiny flags attached to massive chunks of wood On 15 January 2011, I was involved in a protest against the Greek government’s plan to construct a 12-km, anti-immigration wall along the Turkish border. A group of leftists, anti-racists and migrants gathered to protest against the construction of a barrier that many saw as amplifying the dangers and miseries confronting already vulnerable migrants. By mid-morning around 3,000 protesters had convened outside the Athenian Metro stop at Πανεπιστήμιο (Panepistimio
7 The nexus of resources, political opportunity structures and collective identities This penultimate chapter considers the implications of the findings discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 for our understanding of older people’s interest organisations and the collective action of older people. It relates these findings to the literature and topics addressed in Chapters 1 to 4. Adopting Tarrow’s (2011) suggestion to synthesise the examination of the subject of collective action, it explores the interaction of political opportunity structures, organisational resources
5 Collective identities and cultural communities? Introduction Chapter 4 examined some areas of the interviewees’ lives which are defined in terms of the ‘individualism pole’ of identity. It looked at how certain interviewees expressed their desire to participate in ‘society’ according to universalist principles. Also included in the analysis were those interviewees who could be described as wanting to ‘escape’ their communities of origin, whether the term ‘community’ is defined in cultural or in socio-economic terms. Still using the ‘triangle of identity’ as our
-authoritarian collective identity. Collective identity: street-protest rituals, performative violence and Black Bloc tactics Street-protests are multifaceted forms of political and social communication that contain a high salience of performative violence, the latter referring to symbolic, antagonistic rituals of political, social and cultural communication. For the most part, street-protests are ‘any temporary occupation by a number of people of an open place, public or private, which directly or indirectly includes the expression of political opinions’ (Fillieule, 2012: 235). An
The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. This book is concerned not so much with anarchist theory, as with examining the forces that give the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement its specific shape. The author draws on Alberto Melucci's (1995a) work on collective identity, while offering a first-hand, ethnographic account of Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians in action, based on his time there in 2011 and 2013, living, squatting and protesting within this milieu. In the course of the chapters of the book, the author argues that varying shades of anarchic tendencies, and ensuing ideological and practical disagreements, are overcome for the most part in (often violent) street-protests. Athenian anarchists and antiauthoritarians are a pertinent area of research because of both their politics and their geographical location. There is the whole 'rise of anarchism throughout the activist world' phenomenon, visible from Seattle to Genoa, Quebec City to São Paulo. Anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements are prominent actors in resistance to the current phase of capitalism in multiple, global locations. Throughout Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Antipodes, radical resistance to neo-liberalism often has an anarchist and/ or anti-authoritarian cast.
social advancement. 14 But, as we have seen in this section, exactly how continuous training and intellectual, moral and social growth were to be attained through vocational education was up for debate. Collective identities Graphic practitioners’ educational ambitions went hand in hand with the articulation of new forms of collective identity. From the perspective of social identity theory, collective or group identity is ‘the image which a group has in the context of other groups’. 15 It entails a process of
On the basis of a body of reggae songs from the 1970s and late 1990s, this book offers a sociological analysis of memory, hope and redemption in reggae music. From Dennis Brown to Sizzla, the way in which reggae music constructs a musical, religious and socio-political memory in rupture with dominant models is illustrated by the lyrics themselves. How is the past remembered in the present? How does remembering the past allow for imagining the future? How does collective memory participate in the historical grounding of collective identity? What is the relationship between tradition and revolution, between the recollection of the past and the imagination of the future, between passivity and action? Ultimately, this case study of ‘memory at work’ opens up on a theoretical problem: the conceptualisation of time and its relationship with memory.
The chapters in this volume, by established scholars and early-career researchers in history and archaeology, shed new light on the identities and experiences of people affected by leprosy (Hansen’s disease) in medieval western Europe. Building on recent research that challenges the view that people with leprosy were excluded and stigmatised, the book demonstrates the complex and varying status of the illness and its sufferers. The authors provide case studies from Italy, Germany, France and England between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, with some chapters adding a broader global perspective. The source material includes archival documents, archaeological data, hagiography and artworks. The book makes a new contribution to our understanding of social provision for people with leprosy, with chapters exploring how leprosy hospitals sat at the boundary between integration and segregation. It also describes how some sufferers lived outside institutional settings. The central question of identity enables consideration of how people with leprosy related to each other, and the extent to which their lives were transformed by the disease. While leprosy had a significant impact on social, professional and religious identities, people retained aspects of their previous identities after developing the condition. Furthermore, the collective identity of leprosy sufferers was shared by individuals who were labelled ‘lepers’ but did not have the illness. The book reveals the cultural and social significance of leprosy, a disease with deep metaphorical and spiritual associations. It also demonstrates how people with leprosy exerted their agency, although their perspectives are usually absent from the sources.
The Venerable Bede has often been held as creator of a single collective identity for the Germanic inhabitants of Britain: the English (gens Anglorum). This article examines how Bede crafted his notion of Englishness, reviewing his use of terms for nation, race and peoples to exclude those of whom he did not approve. It included the Northumbrians and the people of Kent whom Bede regarded as the progenitors of the English Church. It excluded the Mercians who were rivals and sometime enemies of Bede‘s own people, the Northumbrians. By the time Bede finished his account (731) the term gens Anglorum had begun to lose its usefulness in binding together the Northumbrians and Kentishmen as custodians of a unitary Church. After Bede terminology remained unstable, writers such as Boniface or Alcuin being as likely to call the people of England Saxons as Angles/English. Bedes role as the father of Englishness is thus here nuanced and seen to be historically contingent.
This book brings together a range of sociologists and economists to study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process. Starting with a broad conceptual overview of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption, it goes on to offer different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits into evolutionary models of economic development. The book then looks at food consumption as an example of innovation by demand, including an examination of the dynamic nature of socially constituted consumption routines. It includes an analysis of how African Americans use consumption to express collective identity and discusses the involvement of consumers in innovation, focusing on how consumer needs may be incorporated in the design of high-tech products. It also argues for the need to build an economic sociology of demand that goes from micro-individual through to macro-structural features.