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Tony Lawson’s book The Nature of Social Reality is an impressive overview of a philosophically coherent social ontology that he has been developing for at least a decade. The book, and the earlier ...

This paper presents ways in which animated cartoons influence primary school children's views of social reality based on students’ relationships with these characters and their perception of these ...

Beyond its physical nature, climate change is also a social artifact manufactured through discourses that organize social reality by the meanings and practices they entail. The aim of this paper wa...

Reiland Rabaka’s The Negritude Movement (2015) addressing, in five main sections, the social reality that gave birth to the negritude movement. While focusing on the negritude as a social movement,...

The Nature of Social Reality: Issues in Social Ontology, by Tony Lawson. London and New York: Routledge. 2019. Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0367188931, $40.62, 266 pages.Readers of the JEI are familiar ...

Researchers rely on theory to explain social reality. The theories may be disciplined-based or borrowed from others as a result of the absence of discipline-based theories. The purpose of the study...

This essay focuses on the conceptual relationship between Veblen and Bourdieu given that several important aspects of their works remain less widely discussed, or even inadequately explored in a co...

When many Chinese immigrants settled in the Malay peninsula in the late 19th century, they not only brought the patron gods of their homeland, but also created a new local patron deity – the alien ...

There are elective affinities between poetic expression and legal thought. Well-turned verse can do something more than delight the ear or express emotions. It can also depict social reality in a p...

The article analyzes Alexander Bogdanov’s systemic approach to historical process. Society is portrayed in development—like a living creature that evolves in response to the challenges of its envir...

In traditional Marxism, domination and exploitation constitute two distinct processes that, in turn, belong to two different spheres of social reality. This essay attempts to show that within the c...

This article seeks to recover a strand of postdramatic theatre that is engaged with feminist concerns. The motivation for this is three-fold: firstly, to redress the relative lack of attention paid to postdramatic forms and female practitioners whose work might be broadly identified as postdramatic in feminist theatre scholarship to date. Secondly, to develop a mode of feminist analysis and theory suited to postdramatic aesthetics which are typically only obliquely concerned with political matters. In order to do so this article, thirdly, suggests a return to feminist poststructuralist theorists of difference, specifically Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. The continued usefulness of ideas from both theorists is developed in relation to two case studies: Pina Bausch’s Café Müller (1978) and The Wooster Group’s The Town Hall Affair (2016). Through close analysis of both pieces in relation to negativity (Kristeva) and the poetic (Cixous), the article asks for a re-evaluation of the use of their ideas to facilitate a broader historical understanding of feminist theatre. The article concludes that feminism in postdramatic theatre might be considered doubly oblique: formally, in its indirect approach to feminism and historically, in its tendency to lie at an angle to more readily recognised feminist waves.

In approximately the last two decades, journalism scholars have debated whether or not news journalism, just like any other social reality like the economy, technology, and the general human & soci...

Narrative, we argue, can (re)construct social reality. Alternative imaginaries of ‘being in the world’ can lead to alternative ways of ‘doing in the world’. We discuss the current dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands as an example. Westphalian logic would have the two countries come to blows, if not go to war, over the Islands. The Westphalian account of the dispute centres on the key principle of sovereignty. But what if we utilized a different imaginary to re-narrate the conflict? We turn to popular culture in both Japan and China as a guide, and juxtapose two anime, Appleseed and Time of Eve, with one Chinese TV drama, Nirvana in Fire. Each of these upends conventional analyses of the Islands dispute and offers alternative conceptions of sovereignty. We conclude by considering the implications of such alternative imaginaries for the study, if not practice, of international relations.

Inclusive education has been put on the global agenda to appreciate diversity on a broader level and reduce educational inequality. In order to optimally prepare secondary pre-service teachers for inclusive education, a highly innovative cooperation of five different teacher training institutes in and around Antwerp (Belgium) developed a collective Inclusion Pathway embedded in the various teacher education curricula. Through an explorative qualitative research study based on content data and semi-structured interviews, we studied (1) the programme's perceived impact on participating pre-service teachers' competences (attitudes, knowledge and skills) with respect to inclusion, and (2) how the pre-service teachers experience the inclusion programme. The results indicate a positive impact of the programme on the participants' attitudes with respect to inclusion. Participants also mention that the theoretical frameworks provided, the classroom observations and the teacher conversations helped them to enlarge their knowledge base and feel more confident to change their teaching practice. However, the participants also made some critical remarks. The teacher training institutes converted these insights into several organisational improvements and content-related action points.

Greenfield’s subjectivist approach to the construction and interpretation of social reality is examined and applied to school organizations in an attempt to demonstrate that such organizations may ...

Social reality is refined and redefined through media. This article explores the representation of discourse of multilingualism in a series of Hong Kong government public service advertisements cal...

While much research in the past four decades has demonstrated a turn toward postmaterial values in many developed countries in the world, there are continual debates regarding the factors behind such cultural changes. This study examines the role of certain cognitive factors in the adoption of postmaterial value orientations. Analysis of three surveys conducted between 2012 and 2016 in Hong Kong illustrate that postmaterial values are, at the individual level, tied to criticisms against social inequality and immobility. The relationship is stronger among better educated people and people with higher levels of news exposure. The analysis contributes to the broader literature on cultural change in modern societies by suggesting that social affluence is not a sufficient condition for the rise of postmaterial values. Instead, specific combinations of social conditions and a process of cognitive mobilization could initiate a postmaterial turn.

Based on Foucault’s discourse theory, this article deals with the construction of social reality through contemporary German cinema. More precisely, the case study explores the discursive formation...

peer-reviewed This article argues that Irish Travellers’ ideologies of languageness and their definition of Cant are closely linked to their perceptions of social reality. Cant is a communicative code which Travellers use beside English in Traveller-specific situations. Based on the analysis of focus groups, I take a folk-linguistic and anthropological approach and examine instances of metacommunication in which languageness and the status of Cant are negotiated among speakers, and explore what they suggest about the community and the local social setting. The analysis uncovers the criteria of ‘ownership’, ‘activity’, ‘understanding’ and ‘privacy’ as essential in the participants’ definition of languageness. I argue that these criteria are strongly linked to the community’s understanding of themselves and relationships with Irish society. Further, I analyse speakers of different age groups’ evaluations of Cant according to the above criteria, and show how what is considered as ‘authentic’ Cant is linked to life trajectories and perceptions of linguistic and social reality. ACCEPTED peer-reviewed

LGBT/queer film festivals provide counter-public spaces for marginalised subjects to formulate community, negotiate identity and rally under political banners. At the same time, screening work by LGBT* filmmakers interpellates spectators into a common subject position and locates discursively ‘homeless’ subjects in space and time. The creation of queer, urban, community space is particularly vital in the current context of rapid urban gentrification which has resulted in the steady decline of queer venues in many Western urban centres. This article argues strategies of space re/claimation mobilised by LGBT/queer film festivals today can be conceptually understood in relation to women’s film events of the 1970s. Women’s film festivals staged a direct challenge to the social reality of gendered access to space and proposed alternative modes of spatial configuration. Focusing on UK- and US-based festivals, I will argue that it was precisely the way in which women’s film festivals, feminist filmmaking...

This article examines in what sense the decline of the coal industry contributed to the emergence of a debate about the genesis, shape und future of ‘Britishness’ in the 1990s and early 2000s. Taking a discourse-analytical approach, it argues that the decline of the coal industry contributed to bringing about the debate in two ways: firstly, by feeding into popular narratives of national decline and renewal, it helped to provide the debate’s intellectual background. Secondly, the political cleavages of the 1980s and 1990s between Old Labour, Thatcherism and New Labour elevated the coal industry to a contested symbol for a way of life and a political orientation. These differing interpretations, in return, were associated with a particularly British social reality, a self-conception of the British nation that was embedded in the London-centric political and cultural discourse. Changes to this self-narration required an explanation, which various contributions to the discussion of ‘Britishness’ in p...

This Special Issue is devoted to studying the role of cultural aspects in the innovation dynamics of small firms within the context of their territorial environments. Cultural elements are viewed as strategic assets because of their capacity to enhance small firms’ action and to provide opportunities to compete in the knowledge economy. Innovation studies use a variety of approaches and definitions for studying how the symbolic aspects of social reality shape innovation. In this Guest Editorial, our aim is to help clarify this topic of research. Departing from the contributions of this Special Issue, we use analytical definitions of values, norms, cognitive repertoires and institutions as layers of the cultural domain that can be present both in firms and in the surrounding innovation system. We describe important mechanisms related to innovation processes in SMEs and micro firms. The 10 selected articles provide an intellectual map of current research and investigate different angles of cultural ...

Based on research carried out over two years amongst groups of students from the United Kingdom, France, United States and Russia, this article explores how churnalism is not only having an impact on what people read but also on how they read it, with far-reaching consequences for what has traditionally been perceived as the news genre. Drawing on genre as a social action, we explore the ways in which churnalism is changing news consumption. New news genres are appearing in response to new social interactions that users repeatedly act out predominantly online. As users, we produce and consume texts which we refer to as “news” in multiple situations which can be sorted into patterns. Our comparative analysis offers surprising insights into how these patterns form new news genres, characteristic of social media (many-to-many) instead of mass media (one-to-many). Genres should be studied not only through textual analysis but also through the prism of social reality and recurrent social actions, particularly ...

This paper presents a neocommunitarian conception of citizenship identified in two textbooks of the programme ‘Education for Democratic Citizenship’, organised by the Council of Europe. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the key themes of the textbooks T-Kit 7: Under construction: Citizenship Youth and Europe and Compass Manual enclosing citizenship and human rights discourses, respectively. An intra-disciplinary discussion follows drawing on critical political economy. The findings of the analysis are that the textbooks exhibit an abstract representation of social reality as well as moral relativism stemming from neoliberal communitarianism. The identification of the neocommunitarian conception of citizenship reveals the power of citizenship education today.

This short paper is a commentary on Duineveld et al.’s article [(2017). Power/knowledge and natural resource management: Foucaultian foundations in the analysis of adaptive governance. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, this issue]. A Luhmannian systems-theoretic perspective proposed in this commentary reaffirms the Foucaultian conceptualization of natural resource management as a site for the interaction of discourses constituting social reality through radical entwinements with materiality, with livelihoods being a key example of such entwinements. Several extensions of Duineveld et al.’s argument are proposed. First, the Luhmannian perspective stresses the problematic nature of such entwinements in view of the inherent system–environment adaptation problems. Second, the idea of livelihoods advocated by the authors is interpreted as the reflection of the sensitivity to the environment beyond the limits imposed by the systemic operational closure and complexity reduction. Third, it is ...

This article examines the experience of crossing legal, political, and socio-cultural boundaries by Japanese migrant women in international marriages in Australia. The data is drawn from oral history interviews with 16 Japanese women living in Australia and married to Australian citizens or permanent residents. Australia is one of the most popular destinations for Japanese emigrants. For Japanese women in particular, applying for permanent residency as a spouse of an Australian citizen or permanent resident has been a popular settlement path. I analyze the women’s negotiations between their perceptions of socio-legal systems constructed in Japan and their newly experienced social reality in Australia. The women’s negotiations reflect their individual ways of crossing boundaries. Their practices of the Japanese socio-legal custom of changing one’s surname at the time of legal marriage provide a focus for the article. I argue that individuals’ experiences of crossing boundaries are shaped by, and embedded in, their personal histories constructed in their land of origin. In this sense, their act of ‘crossing’ means creating a connection between both sides whereby the rigidity of these boundaries is blurred.

One of the most horrific major events of human history only ended in the mid-1970s; to say that it is within living memory is to profoundly understate its ongoing social reality. Huge numbers of cu...

The Ant Trap is a terrific book, which opens up new opportunities to use philosophical methods in the social realm, by drawing on the tools and techniques of contemporary metaphysics. Epstein uses concepts of dependence, constitution, and grounding, of parts and whole, of membership and kindhood, both to clarify existing accounts of social reality and to develop an account of his own. Whilst I admire the general strategy, I take issue with some aspects of Epstein’s implementation, notably his distinction between grounding and anchoring. I recommend that he give up this distinction, which is not crucial to his project.

In this paper, I trace out Alasdair MacIntyre’s assessment of managerial capitalism as a uniquely positioned critique occupying an intersection between the sociology of knowledge, ideology critique, and social science metatheory. The first part of this paper outlines MacIntyre’s historical claim that social science principles diffused into an ‘industrial social science’ in the first half of the twentieth century. Tracing out this history allows us to identify four major categories of critique levelled against managerialism, spanning managerialism’s practices to its social location as a discourse of scientific, objective knowledge. That four category typology provides a framework to understand MacIntyre’s specific critique of managerialism as concerned primarily with metatheoretical flaws. MacIntyre's argument provides a valuable sociological account of how flawed presuppositions lend to the creation of flawed descriptions of social reality. These descriptions come to serve as the ‘ideology of bure...

This article presents a singular historical moment in which the ethnic counter-theatre of the 1970s in Jerusalem, which had emerged out of the Hapanterim Hashchorim (Black Panthers) social movement, generated another social movement. This offers a particular example of a grassroots theatre that directly affected and intervened in the complex social reality in Israel at that time. Moreover, this theatre planned and implemented a unique form of activism based on the combination of on-stage and off-stage non-violent actions. The discussion of this historical-theatrical event presents an alternative socio-aesthetic intervention in conflict-affected situations and places, as well as contributing to the discourse on the multi-faceted relationship between theatre, society, and the community in general, and on the transformative power of theatre in particular.

This paper examines the re-aestheticisation of hunger and poverty with the emergence of austerity blogs. These blogs, which chronicle personal narratives while re-directing gaze in creating food through limited budgets and in sharing the intimate brutalities of hunger, bring a renewed focus and interest to poverty through daily lived experiences of hunger. Beyond personalising hunger in a climate of austerity, blogs as a symbol of articulation of the laypeople for the general public become interstitial spaces between government rhetoric and media representations, making poverty an intimate, personal and present proposition. Blogs as peoples’ archives of social history are hybrid spaces of personal iterations amenable to public consumption and media scrutiny. In the process these can re-mediate and disrupt the social reality of first-world hunger, inviting a gaze through first-hand narratives. Poverty becomes a contested entity online where blogs perform both resistance and reiteration of the neo-l...

This article introduces the present special issue, which focuses on the relevance of ethnographic experience to methodological practice and to understanding the conditions of social reality in the ...

The aim of this paper is to reconsider the doctrine of Socialist Realism against the backdrop of the tradition of modern realism as an aesthetic form of instructing the modern subject through sentimental political education. Socialist Realism is here considered as a school for instructing the reader to an understanding of historical and social reality that is based on an idea of a transference between reality and literature proper to modern realism. I look in particular at Fedor Gladkov’s rewritings of Cement to examine how reality and literature fuse in a narrative describing the genesis of an oeuvre. I argue that what is characteristic for Gladkov is that he as a writer was willing to learn how to write in the image of Gor′kij because he considered literature as a school of learning how to write and at the same time how to acquire the correct awareness and knowledge of historical reality. This was also what guided him in the editions. The reason for doing so was that he was set on reality, and n...

Dewey’s social ontology could be characterized as a habit ontology, an ontology of habit qua second nature that offers us an account of intentionality, social statuses, institutions and norms in terms of habituations. Such an account offers us a promising alternative to contemporary intentionalist and deontic approaches to social ontology such as Searle’s. Furthermore, it could be the basis of a social ontology better suited to explain both the maintenance and the transformation of social reality.

In considering the outlines of the emerging global cosmos of which museums and received notions of liberal cosmopolitanism are a small historical part, we now have to consider the movement of capital and labour, the continuation of the military-industrial complex, climate change and the human relationship with other species. This is the new global assemblage and, as in any network, we should be able to discern, as in the manner of fractals, the elements of the whole within specific networks or sub-assemblages. One of the problems with the way the ethnography of the book treats the movement of people is as a social reality external to the museum. This has a number of consequences for how the museum assemblage is constructed. The impact of the migration of people is seen as something museums have to adapt to, rather than as part of the assemblage of the museum itself. Levitt is right in pointing to migration as a crucial factor in the future of human habitation, culture and communication: why then leave the movement of people within the museum, the museum’s audience, out of the account? Of course, there are serious conceptual, logistical and resource issues entailed in studying audiences in any depth and the project of the lone scholar is singularly ill equipped to undertake such research. But without some way of considering the practices of audiences, we know little of the cosmopolitan outlook or otherwise of the museum’s visitors.

In the struggle of Jewish labor in the port of Haifa during the British Mandate, the Thessalonikian dockers played a major role. Until recently the story of their absorption was analyzed ‘from above’ with a functionalist-nationalist explanation. The Thessalonikians arrived equipped with professional skills, enthusiasm, and Zionist solidarity, which ostensibly was to be sufficient for their successful occupational integration at the waterfront. This article looks again on (1) the push–pull factors of migration, and (2) the professional and economic absorption in the waterfront of Haifa, but according to social history approach and ‘from below’, from which emerges a much more complex story. We note failures and successes to gain a foothold in the maritime labor market, the persistence involved, and the partial withdrawal from the struggle. The deepening chasm between national idealism and social reality brought an ongoing polemic between the Thessalonikian dockers and the Zionist elites of the inter...

Sustainability is often presented as the Holy Grail for mass tourism. There is a wide consensus linking the environmental upgrade of tired resorts with the competitiveness of mass tourism (Bramwell, 2003). The mantra of sustainability is particularly strong in the Balearic Islands, which is often presented as an example of sustainable mass tourism (Bardolet, 2001; Batle, 2000; Buswell, 2011). However, there are many doubts about how serious mass tourism is about sustainability (Buckley, 2007) and the lack of theoretically informed critical assessment (Bramwell & Lane, 2014). The academic consensus on sustainability is not always reflected on the ground, where contradictory logics coexist. The objective of ‘sustainability’ is particularly fragile at times of economic recession.\ud \ud This paper looks at the changing politics of mass tourism in the Balearic Islands. Specifically, it questions whether during the last period of recession there has been a shift away from a sustainable vision of mass tourism in favour of a more aggressive growth-orientated model. The paper addresses this question by examining a new tourism act adopted by the regional parliament in 2012 and subsequently modified in 2013 and 2014. The act was promoted by a conservative government to promote tourism growth in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The paper follows a discursive approach to policy analysis as articulated by Hajer (1995), which emphasises the constitutive role of discourse in political practice. Central to this approach is the notion of story line, the narrative on social reality that provides the basis for a common understanding of the problem, which then underpins policy interventions. By looking at the 2012 Tourism Act as a discursive intervention, the paper shows the extent to which ideas of tourism, its challenges and opportunities are at stake in mature destinations.

The current scholarship on development aid has asserted that a “transformation” of development, one that “puts people first”, is presently taking place in the particular form of volunteer aid. In southern Israel, this claim is evident in recent attempts to “strengthen” depressed “development town” communities through a movement that combines Zionist settlement with the volunteer aid of university students. Based on ethnographic work in the development town of Yeruham, this article problematises this claim by investigating the daily encounter of volunteers with members of their multiply marginalised host community. It challenges such claims of “transformation” and exposes the complex social reality of what it means to “develop” and “empower” a population routinely framed as disadvantaged and targeted for aid.

Marcuse argued that subversive visions of a better reality can emerge from “low” as well as “high” culture, from within as well as outside the repressive apparatus. This article leverages Marcuse’s aesthetic theory to consider whether the enormously popular AMC cable series, The Walking Dead, might be considered emancipatory art. Set in a post-neoliberal America suffering through a zombie apocalypse, the dark, existential themes and urgent political ambivalences of this series reflect collective yearnings, tensions, and fissures in the current social reality worth attending to. I argue that The Walking Dead does have emancipatory potential, in that it addresses “depth dimension” concerns that occupied Marcuse; reflects disillusionment with core aspects of American neoliberalism; and reaches for less repressive, more life-affirming, alternative political visions. Time will tell if the show will sustain such visions or surrender to the status quo.

This article examines the nature of social media ‘talk’ generated by reality television (TV) audiences of Khumbul’ekhaya, a popular South African ‘docureality’ or ‘social reality’ series that has aired on SABC 1 since 2006. The article uses waThiong’o’s (1981) re-interpretation of the notion of ‘empty space’ to examine Khumbul’ekhaya viewers’ feedback on Facebook. In the article I argue that this social media ‘talk’ reflects the fact that audiences typically treat Khumbul’ekhaya as an ‘empty space’ or a canvas which they variously re-constitute in their own languages.

Starting from the contemporary critical-theoretical notion of an objective violence that organizes social reality in capitalism, including processes of systemic racism, as well as from phenomenological inquiries into processes of race and identity, this article explores the relationship between racism and reasonableness in education and society. The category of the reasonable connects the content of particular propositions with the inner truth of the form of thought. At the same time, the reasonable refers to what can be legitimated not only intellectually but practically and morally. I describe how the force of this category, working through neoliberal modalities of appropriation and penality, is an anchor for persistent processes of racial oppression in educational policy and curriculum. Furthermore, if the reasonable is a central figure for ideology, then a kind of thinking that would break with it will show up in the first instance as unreasonable. Thus, I argue that critical pedagogy in the present n...

The present conflict between Marxism and a certain strand of feminism centers on the role of class in the oppression of women. This debate can be examined in a recent Chinese ‘women’s film’. Lunar Eclipse (Yue shi月蚀, 1999), written and directed by the renowned Chinese director Wang Quan’an (b 1965) which is acclaimed as one of the earliest leading art film in China by the Chinese sixth-generation auteur. This article aims to explore the cultural-political import and social significance of the film through analysing its narrative structures and cinematic methodology. It contends that through layers of love stories and the notion of searching for the ‘other half’, it represents the rampant class division and restructuring in Chinese society after the 1990s. Ultimately, in terms of aesthetics, it depicts the harsh social reality through its deployment of a realist approach. However, the lack of a class perspective prevents the film from going deeper into an exploration of the social contradictions an...

In June 2015 High Representative Mogherini presented her strategic assessment The European Union in a changing global environment as the express point of reference for the new EU Global Strategy. Grounded in the premise that this assessment is not simply a description of the state of the world but plays into the construction of social reality, this article sets out to understand the openings and closings of possibilities that it holds. My analysis generates a number of concrete insights, ranging from insights into the distinct nature of the challenges the EU is facing, to the discovery that there is no “existential threat” and the importance of “regions” as a guiding category. Grounded in an understanding of the world as being reflexive modern, I interpret these findings as displaying an intriguing and paradoxical interpretive disposition. On the one side, there is a notable opening towards unconventional conceptions of the world; on the other side, there is a symbolic conservation of existing EU ...

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize...

This paper reconstructs Gramsci’s account of social objects in light of recent developments in analytic social ontology. It combines elements of Gramsci’s account with that of John Searle, and argues that when taken together their theories constitute a robust account of social reality and a nuanced view of the relation between social reality and power. Searle provides a detailed analysis of the creation of social entities at the level of the agent, while Gramsci, by employing his concepts of hegemony and domination, is able to provide an analysis of the differential ability of societal subgroups to construct the social world.

Recent critical interventions challenge the Enlightenment critique of war as the radical antithesis of ‘peace’. The negation of war as an epitome of unreason is, indeed, dangerous to the extent that it tends to excite pacifying ‘wars against war’. Yet, what follows from this? The article argues that a popular counter-perspective, which conceives of war as a ‘tamed’ and reasonable exercise, itself premised on the imagination of an essentially antagonistic and generative political space, is just as dangerous. It constructs war as a real object of knowledge, a social reality. Asking whether the critique of ‘police war’ can be reconciled with a critique of the ontology of war proper, the article reads Walter Benjamin and concludes that we should return to the Enlightenment’s view of war as unknowable chaos and disorder. Only instead of negating and fighting war, a fundamental critique ought turn this perspective on its head and affirm war in its unintelligibility, its impossibility.

Maurice Godelier has become one of the major anthropologists of the second half of the 20 th and of the 21 st centuries. Often too quickly categorised as a Marxist anthropologist, his research and publications have in fact with perseverance investigated the complex relationship between the material conditions of existence, the social relationships that organise access to and control of these resources, and the imaginary rationales (and symbolic bodies) that articulate and legitimise these relationships. From La production des Grands Hommes (1982), his major ethnographic monograph on the Baruya of Papua New-Guinea, to L'ideel et le materiel (1984) where his conclusions are formulated into much wider applicable theoretical suggestions, or L'enigme du don (1996), Metamorphoses de la parente (2004), Au fondement des societies humaines (2007), and Levi-Strauss (2013), to quote just a few, Godelier has gradually evolved in the ways he articulates the relationship between the fundamental triad mentioned above. To make a long story short, while in earlier works he suggested that kinship and gender relationships are fundamental in the ways in which societies organise their access to resources and define the ways in which they conceive themselves as an entity of belonging, in his latest contributions he gradually moved the perspective to an upper level considering that it is the articulation of power relationships with belief systems within the political-religious domain that are universally at the core of social reality and cultural diversity, as well as of their historical evolution. Through this trajectory, Godelier has also used, coined or redefined notions that have become part of his theoretical toolbox in the analysis of these political-religious systems.

This article is a critical philosophical assessment of John Searle’s theory of human rights as it is articulated both in his earlier book, The Construction of Social Reality and especially in his more recent book, Making the Social World.

This article examines the social aspects of Australian-Hungarians’ return to Hungary after the collapse of communism. I suggest that one of the most disillusioning aspects of homecoming for this group of Australian-Hungarians was the cold welcome they received from those who had stayed behind. The main task of this article is to analyse how returnees grappled with the negative attitudes of the stayees. Three major strategies are identified by means of which returnees facilitated their feeling of belonging: contestation, acceptance or dismissal of stayees’ perspectives. Returnees’ efforts to achieve a sense of belonging suggest that the nature of national membership is fundamentally fragile and porous and underlines that self-definitions are far from being either unconditional or ascribed. By placing contrasting narratives side by side, this article draws attention to the intersubjective elements involved in defining belonging.