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Rumor, Trust and Civil Society: Collective Memory and Cultures of Judgment
- Gary Alan Fine
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Contemporary societies are awash in rumor. For better and worse, we live in an information surround in which there is simultaneously too much information and too little. Many wish to persuade us of truth claims, or, at the very least, to share them. These claims may have an uncertain provenance, but, under the right circumstances, we incorporate them into our belief system, act upon them, and recall them through collective memory.
Given these claims, the question becomes who, what, where and when do we trust. To the extent that reactions to assertions about society channel our actions, judgment is necessary, even if it is only implicit and tacit. The analysis of rumor belongs to the sociology of action. To produce a response, we must judge both those who communicate and what they communicate. As an everyday practice, we engage in the politics of credibility and the politics of plausibility. These concepts are tied to issues of public trust within civil society.
Barack Obama and uncertain knowledge
- Gary Alan Fine
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Truth claims pervade the world: assertions that a speaker wishes to persuade an audience are true or at least plausible. But how to judge? Much proposed knowledge has uncertain legitimacy, evaluated through assumptions of how the world operates or by the reputation of its sponsor. In other words, plausibility and credibility shape our judgments. As students of conspiracy theories recognize, many “facts” are available, too many to be easily judged as to their accuracy. Facts are promiscuous. As judges of likelihood, we conclude that some are false, others true, and still others taken out of context. Further, knowledge is never complete and so we must consider error and ignorance (a field of epistemology labeled agnotology) as well as accuracy and awareness. In this article I examine four critical allegations made about United States President Barack Obama: that he was born in Kenya, that he is Muslim, that he engaged in oral sex with another man, and that he is a socialist. While each of these claims may be false, they are false in different ways in light of the different criteria and strategies by which we weigh uncertainty.
5 - The Ballot of Donald and Hillary: Hateful Memories of Celebrity Leaders
- Edited by Thomas DeGloma, Hunter College, City University of New York, Janet Jacobs, University of Colorado Boulder
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- Book:
- Interpreting Contentious Memory
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 June 2023, pp 89-110
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Summary
Shortly after the presidential election of 1968, the honored liberal cartoonist Herblock, a longtime and bitter critic of Richard Nixon, published a cartoon in the Washington Post. Herblock had previously depicted Nixon with a nasty-looking five o’clock shadow. Now, there is a sign in the cartoonist's barbershop: “This shop gives to every new president of the United States a free shave.” Herblock suggested that each elected leader deserves a fresh start, even the ones we dislike.
Some presidents do not receive their free shave. For some elected leaders, a significant portion of the population despises them during the campaign, and these emotions only grow stronger after the election. This is often true for the victors and the vanquished alike, who can each generate feelings of disgust.
In a political system committed to electoral democracy, this is puzzling. Given the likelihood of skeletons in the closets of some (if not most) prominent public servants, why should the public reputation of political figures adored by many come to be reviled by others? How is partisan success meaningfully linked with public representations of moral failure or despicable character? How might collective memory of polarizing presidencies in polarized times be shaped through the uses (and abuses) of the reputations of controversial political figures? Why, given our case, were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, two accomplished Americans in their own ways, so intensely disliked by large segments of the electorate? Why, once elected, did Donald Trump not receive his free shave?
To explore the creation of contentious reputations, our chapter builds on an earlier analysis (Fine and Eisenberg, 2002) that described the barbed animosity aimed at Richard Milhous Nixon and William Jefferson Clinton. These two United States presidents were elected for two terms each despite numerous detractors who not only rejected their policies – a legitimate practice in competitive democracies – but loathed their personas and their pasts, suggesting that as persons they lacked integrity and as presidents they lacked legitimacy. In the eyes of detractors, a president with a loathsome reputation threatens the authority of the office. That essay argued that the hatred was tied to generational politics: Nixon was linked to his role in the McCarthy, communist-hunting era of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Clinton to the radical youth politics of the 1960s that he and his wife symbolized.
Entertaining the Forgotten: Southern Governors and the Performance of Populism
- Weston Twardowski, Gary Alan Fine
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- Journal:
- TDR: The Drama Review / Volume 65 / Issue 1 / March 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 18 March 2021, pp. 144-166
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- March 2021
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During the late 1920s and ’30s, performative populism played a major role in the politics of the American Deep South. In the gubernatorial campaigns of three of the most prominent populist politicians of the era—Huey Long, Theodore Bilbo, and Eugene Talmadge—performance skills and entertainment were key strategies for gaining voter support and crafting personas within a popular imaginary.
13 - The Arts of Together: Social Coordination as Dyadic Achievement
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- By Hannah Wohl, Northwestern University USA, Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University USA
- Edited by Edward J. Lawler, Cornell University, New York, Shane R. Thye, University of South Carolina, Jeongkoo Yoon
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- Book:
- Order on the Edge of Chaos
- Published online:
- 05 December 2015
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- 09 December 2015, pp 248-267
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Abstract
Coordination is the micro-foundation of social order. Smooth interaction requires individuals to attend and respond to one another within the flow of action, each individual continually calibrating actions to correspond to others. While this is taken for granted, the processes by which this occurs warrants examination. We apply philosophical theories of collective intentionality that specify the conditions necessary for two or more people to intend to act together to a sociological analysis of how individuals coordinate action. We treat the dyad as the most basic and prototypical group, examining dyadic encounters across three different social activities: walking together, engaging in sexual intercourse, and making music. We analyze the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication, caution and risk, and scripted action and spontaneity, that underlies social coordination. Order implies a metaphor of rigidity and control, but social order, a product of interpersonal coordination, requires flexibility and adaptation, ranging from the minutest bodily movements to meta-understandings of local meaning.
When people are acting together, doing whatever it is – crossing a street, running a factory, making dinner, playing a gig – they have to arrive at a way of doing that together, getting their specific activities to mesh in some way so that they can get something done, maybe not what they intended but something. How do they do that? Well, they can rely on things they already know (the canon or some version thereof) or they can make it all up from scratch (free jazz, maybe?), or who knows what in between.
Howard Becker (Becker and Faulkner 2013)How do dyads coordinate action to achieve a goal? How is joint action possible? This is a problem of fitting together lines of action (Blumer 1969). We address Becker's discussion of social coordination, how people act together, illustrating the “who knows what” that lies between scripted routines and spontaneous reactions.
Social acts from the most basic, such as walking together, to the more complex, such as playing music, require collaboration that develops from social relations and shared histories. To understand this we treat the dyad as the most basic and most prototypical group (Bratman 1992:327), recognizing structural differences between dyads and larger groups (Simmel 1902–1903). Building on theories of collective intentionality in philosophy and group culture theory in sociology, we argue that smooth coordination is central to social order.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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Pride and Shame in Ghana: Collective Memory and Nationalism among Elite Students
- Erin Metz McDonnell, Gary Alan Fine
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- Journal:
- African Studies Review / Volume 54 / Issue 3 / December 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 18 October 2013, pp. 121-142
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Based on an original dataset of university students, this article investigates Ghanaian collective memories of past events that are sources of national pride or shame. On average, young elite Ghanaians express more pride than shame in their national history, and they report shame mostly over actions that caused some physical, material, or symbolic harm. Such actions include not only historic events and the actions of national leaders, but also mundane social practices of average Ghanaians. Respondents also report more “active” than "receptive" shame; that is, they are more ashamed of events or practices that caused harm to others and less ashamed about events in which they were the “victims.” We advance the idea of a standard of “reasonableness” that Ghanaians apply in their evaluation of events, behaviors, or circumstances: they apply contemporary standards of morality to past events, but they temper their judgment based on considerations of whether past actions were “reasonable” given the power and material imbalances at that time. Ghanaian students identify strongly with both national and pan-African identities, and they frequently evoke their international image to judge a national event as either honorable or shameful. Ethnicity can be one factor in an individual's judgment of precolonial events, whereas political party affiliation is the stronger predictor of attitudes toward postindependence events.
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation - About Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012).
- Gary Alan Fine
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- Journal:
- European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Volume 53 / Issue 3 / December 2012
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 11 January 2013, pp. 372-375
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Trust in Testimony: The Institutional Embeddedness of Holocaust Survivor Narratives*
- Aaron Beim, Gary Alan Fine
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- Journal:
- European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Volume 48 / Issue 1 / April 2007
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 24 August 2007, pp. 55-75
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What makes testimony trustworthy? Based on fieldwork at a Holocaust museum, we argue that testimonies are trustworthy that because they make implicit and explicit truth claims. We argue that confidence is formed by interdependent institutions that vouch for these claims, as well as institutions that produce other cultural objects with comparable meaning, such as museums and films. These claims of truth exist in the testimony act in itself, as well as in explicit claims of truth made by the testifiers. Holocaust testimonies make explicit truth claims through assertions of institutionally legitimated information, personal experiences, and societal remembrance. After considering the creation of trust in testimony, we discuss how it can be generalized to the courtroom.
Why and Why Not? - About Charles Tilly, Why?: What Happens When People Give Reasons… And Why (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006) - Eviatar Zerubravel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (NewYork, Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Gary Alan Fine
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- Journal:
- European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Volume 47 / Issue 3 / December 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 24 May 2007, pp. 468-471
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An Isolationist Blacklist? Lillian Gish and the America First Committee
- Gary Alan Fine, Rashida Z. Shaw
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- Journal:
- Theatre Survey / Volume 47 / Issue 2 / November 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 September 2006, pp. 283-288
- Print publication:
- November 2006
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As it affected the performing arts community, the Red Scare has been examined in great detail.1 Taken together, these studies make clear that external political forces influence the hiring decisions of performing-arts organizations. From the 1930s to the 1950s figures affiliated with left-wing causes and groups found their careers stifled either temporarily or permanently because of their political beliefs. Although attention has focused primarily on institutional pressures from outside the industry on leftist artists, we describe an instance of pressure from within the industry on an artist whose politics were isolationist rather than progressive. In this research note, we present the case of Lillian Gish, describing how interventionists pressured her to distance herself from the isolationism that she had publicly embraced in the period immediately prior to the entrance of the United States in World War II. The attack on those described as “Nazi sympathizers” and their isolationist brethren during 1940–4 has come to be described as the “Brown Scare,”2 playing off the more widely known “Red Scares” of 1919–20 and 1947–54.
14 - Moral boundaries, leisure activities, and justifying fun
- Philip Smith, University of Queensland
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- Book:
- The New American Cultural Sociology
- Published online:
- 18 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 28 June 1998, pp 217-229
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Summary
Some activities receive social approval; others are sneered at or even punished. Within a community, parties may battle over the meaning of an activity, with competing groups having strikingly different definitions and justifications.
This labeling argument is well recognized in sociological studies of deviance, stigma, and criminal behavior. Behaviors such as gambling, prostitution, or smoking are not automatically rejected but can be made so through public debate and legislative action. This labeling approach has been less discussed in examinations of expressive culture.
Olmsted (1988) spoke of a class of voluntary activities he termed “morally controversial leisure.” He recognized that some activities – gun collecting, motorcycling, pool, or pinball – have a moral stigma attached to them. Dungeons and Dragons (Fine 1983; Martin and Fine 1991) is a recent example of a game that has been transformed into a controversial activity: a game that some suggest promotes suicide or Satanism. Moral entrepreneurs attempt to attach a label to a form of play that, for many players, is without a clear moral valuation. The controversy about war toys (Carlsson-Paige and Levin 1990; Sutton-Smith 1988) is another instance in which ideological politics influences the determination of children's play. Play and leisure matter in the organizing of society.
My underlying argument is that play and leisure ultimately are not separate from the values of the society but are a reflection of them and that they are often introjected into the political debate. Olmsted's (1988) emphasis on the class-based dynamics of labeling is compelling.