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The sociology of the body developed as a reaction against Cartesian conceptions of homo clausus that haunted disciplinary thought in the late 20th century but exhibited anthropocentric tendencies in neglecting non-human animals. Building upon recent attempts to address this situation, I develop a transactional approach towards body pedagogics that explores how the shifting borders governing human–animal relations influence people's embodied identities. Transactions between humans and (other) animals have been an historic constant across contrasting societies, but the patterning of these exchanges is framed by specific cultural body pedagogics. Focusing on the institutional means, characteristic experiences and corporeal outcomes of 'civilising' and 'companionate' human–animal body pedagogics, I explore the identity-shaping impact of these different modalities of inter-species inter-corporeality and demonstrate the sociological utility of this transactional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the 'body pedagogics' of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific 'ways of life'. Focused on practical issues associated with 'knowing how' to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in 'vélo worlds', I develop Dewey's pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological research into the body pedagogics of occupational, educational, religious and sporting groups focuses on cases in which the social and material environment reproduces these 'ways of life', yet devotes little attention to how cultures persist within circumstances hostile to their maintenance. Developing a transactionalist approach to body pedagogics, I address this lacuna by investigating the case of cycling within societies dominated by automobility. Cycling, in these contexts, requires individuals to engage creatively with challenging physical and environmental exchanges. Such exchanges frequently alienate but can involve the development of 'outsider' mobile status, have been reorganised into stable practices by vélo cultures, and highlight embodied processes relevant to general sociological investigations into marginalised cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the long-standing sociological tradition of 'character studies', arguing that the accelerated change and associated uncertainties central to late modern life have been accompanied by what we refer to as a new opportunity-directed form of individuality. Engaging with Sayer's agenda-setting return to the subject, we acknowledge the ideological uses to which the promotion of this characterological form may be put, but argue that its core qualities can help suitably situated persons negotiate radical uncertainty via a reflexive, future-oriented commitment to agency. Despite the advantages of this orientation in the contemporary era, however, we conclude by suggesting that opportunity-directedness is associated with certain 'pathologies', involving psychological costs and social inequalities, that raise questions about its desirability and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary research into the field of body pedagogics has produced a growing number of studies concerned with the embodied character of cultural transmission, experience, reproduction and change. This article advances this sociological development by reinterpreting recent writings on situated epistemic relations (SER) and practical epistemological analysis (PEA) as complementary, methodological, techniques that can enhance these investigations. After outlining existing explorations into the body pedagogics of occupational, sporting, religious, educational and other cultures, the author demonstrates how the interlinked approaches to learning made possible by systematizing SER and PEA can be developed into a new approach that increases the effectiveness with which the theoretical and empirical concerns of studies into embodied acculturation are harnessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this process, existing research highlights the significance of body work, practical techniques and the senses to these pedagogic processes. What has yet to be explicated adequately, however, is the embodied importance of cognition to this incorporation of culture. In what follows, I address this lacuna by building on John Dewey’s writings in proposing an approach to body pedagogics sympathetic to the prioritization of physical experience but that recognizes the distinctive properties and capacities of thought and reflexivity in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the arbitrageur as a figure who both embodies the new ethos of uncertainty central to 'financialized' capitalism, and exemplifies the issues of ethics and innovation raised by those who now personify what Weber called the 'devotion to the calling of making money'. We begin by providing a brief background to financial 'abstraction' in the economy, and the issues of dissimulation with which this has been associated, before suggesting that engaging creatively with Weber's writings can help us identify uncertainty as key to the character of contemporary financial decision-making. It is against this background that we analyse the arbitrageur as an ideal-type personality who embodies a newly abstract approach to capitalism. This approach is frequently portrayed as unethical, but we suggest it can be associated with an ethics of managing the unknown through an innovative commitment to overcoming limits that has consequences for human life in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deceit occupies a significant role in historical conceptualizations of social order, but dominant approaches to the subject are limited by the normative assumptions and conceptions of agency and structure on which they rest. This article suggests that renewed sociological engagement with deceit is overdue and can illuminate the ‘situational logics of opportunity’ within modernity (Archer, 2010). Focusing on the contemporary era, and building upon Simmel’s argument that individuals lead a ‘doubled existence’, within and outside social forms, we view deceit as neither a personal trait nor an effect of social structures. Instead, it emerges through, and assumes contrasting meanings as a consequence of, people’s interested and strategic engagements with the social world. Developing this theoretical analysis substantively, we then focus on several examples of how deceit is used to subvert or reaffirm boundaries between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ groups, including those emergent from sociology’s own ‘doubled existence’ relative to modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as the sociology of moderation, political moderation in relation to growing social inequality, and pragmatism.

The sociological importance attributed to ‘the sacred’ has varied historically as theorists have sought to explain the relationship between religion and early capitalism, the rise of twentieth-century secularization processes, the profusion of nationalism in post-Soviet societies, and the recent global upsurge in religious movements. Paradoxically, however, sociology’s concern with the social significance of the sacred has not been accompanied by commensurate interest in those contrasting and varied sacrificial processes implicated in creating the sacred. This paper suggests that this imbalance limits our understanding of the relationship between the sacred, religion and society, and makes it difficult to assess the contemporary relevance of classical writings on the subject. Specifically, it hinders our knowledge of why certain phenomena become sacred, and in so doing limits our appreciation of how societies develop cultural priorities, of how they stimulate individuals to become certain types of social subjects, and of the risks and opportunities that arise in milieux characterized by shrinking or expanding prospects for creating sacred phenomena. This is because sacrifice (sacer facere), ‘the making of sacred things’, constitutes a crucial mediator of these phenomena; illuminating the nature and consequences of specific modalities of sacred rituals, actions and objects, and revealing much about their location within or dislocation from particular social milieux, identities and religions. Our argument progresses by viewing sacrifice as an example of what Mauss refers to as a ‘total social fact’, and by engaging with the writings of Bataille, Girard and Simmel; three figures to have made important, sociologically underexplored, contributions to the subject. In so doing, we aim to lay the foundations for a sociology of the contemporary nature and function of sacrifice, suggesting it should be a core issue for twenty-first-century sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including food packaging can be seen not simply as waste, how waste is organized in modernity and materialism regarding food waste.

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including relationship between the methods and values of sociological research, crisis in social method and value and eroding the lines between sociologists and other professions.

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory - including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes - as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in 'abnormal' forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain — by situating it against processes of instrumentalization and medicalization, and within a broader context of other social developments conducive to a heightening of affect control — this article builds on Mauss’s analysis of ‘body techniques’ in suggesting that the cultural, physiological and psychological dimensions of pain can be combined in various ways. In examining this point further, we then compare contrasting religious engagements with pain as a way of detailing how it can be positively productive of cultural meanings and identities, and conclude by using these comparisons to illuminate the relationship between the current Western approach to pain and the Christian traditions that shaped the West historically. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when religion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This article examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructive. Utilizing the contrasting theories of Weber and Bataille, we explore sociology's ambivalence towards eroticism, and criticize contemporary sociological approaches to the subject, before turning to the writings of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva for alternative models of the religiously informed eroticization of daily life. The perspectives these French theorists bring to the subject, and the issues that remain unresolved in their work, identify new lines of inquiry and re-emphasize the importance of building a sociology of eroticism that can address adequately its relationship to questions of order and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting developments in consumer culture, the politics of social movements, public health policy, and medical technologies, the body has since the early 1980s become one of the most popular and contested areas of academic study. The following discussion introduces this monograph by positioning the body as a subject within contemporary sociology, accounting for the discipline’s historical ambivalence towards embodiment in terms of sociology’s foundations, and tracing the factors behind the ‘rise of the body’ across the social sciences and humanities. Having examined the background to the subject, I then explore how this volume makes three main contributions towards the ongoing embodiment of the discipline. The chapters that follow explicate and build sociologically upon the legacy of sociological, feminist and anthropological approaches towards embodiment. They also apply these approaches to issues such as conflict, health, cultural differences and technology that have become increasingly important in contemporary society. Finally, they demonstrate the empirical utility of taking embodiment seriously via a series of case-studies that focus on body pedagogics. In so doing, they outline a new approach towards the body, able to combine a concern with social power, cultural (re)production, lived experience and physical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of emotions is an established specialism within the discipline and its products have become increasingly visible parts of the sociological landscape since the late 1970s. This specialism has also demonstrated, at least to its own satisfaction, the importance of emotions for social action and order, and for those related moral issues concerned with self-determined and other-oriented action. Paradoxically, however, the relationship between the sociology of emotions and mainstream sociology remains relatively cool. Emotional issues are still portrayed in many general accounts of the discipline as a luxurious curiosity that properly resides on the outer reaches of the sociological imagination. Just as unfortunately, certain sociologists of emotions have accused the foundations of the discipline of neglecting emotional issues, and have sometimes excluded classical theorists from their discussions. This chapter argues that emotional phenomena occupy an important place in sociology's heritage which has yet to be explicated fully by the sub-discipline. The subject of emotions, like the closely related subject of the body, may fade from various classical writings. Nevertheless, the major traditions of sociological theory developed particular orientations towards the social and moral dimensions of emotional phenomena. I begin by examining the relevance of emotions to the context out of which the discipline emerged, and then focus on how the major theorists of order (Comte and Durkheim) and (inter)action (Simmel and Weber)conceptualized emotional phenomena. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of Parsons's contribution, and suggests that his analysis of the religious foundations of instrumental activism provides a provocative account of the relationship between values, emotions and personality that can usefully be built on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the ‘lived experience’ of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology’s central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide have motivated important theoretical advances in the discipline, and the development of 'structuration theories' and 'analytical dualism' has promoted fresh thought about dominant views of the human agent. These approaches have sought to release sociology from any residual reliance on the oversocialised conception of the individual that formed part of the legacy of Parsonian sociology. It is the argument of this paper, however, that while structuration theory and analytical dualism focus on the creative powers of human reflexivity, as part of their rejection of the 'oversocialised agent', the theoretical weight they place on consciousness neglects the socially shaped somatic bases of action and structure, and results in an undersocialised view of the embodied agent. If the relationship between socialisation and agency needs analysing in terms of embodiment as much as in terms of the cognitive internalisation of norms and values, however, there are good reasons for structuration theory and analytical dualism rejecting attempts to ground subsequent notions of the embodied agent they may develop in dominant, static notions of the habitus. These minimise creativity and make it difficult to analyse social change. An important challenge for future reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide, then, is to construct a sociology which recognises the significance for human agency of a socially shaped form of embodiment, yet which refuses to make the embodied actor a mere product of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed. In this paper we examine the relationship between self-identity, the sequestration of death, and the period Anthony Giddens terms 'late' or 'high modernity', and argue that the organisation and experience of death have become increasingly privatised. This has acquired particular significance as a result of three central characteristics of high modernity: the growing role played by the reflexive re-ordering of biographical narratives in the construction of self-identity (Giddens 1991); the increased identification of the self with the body; and the shrinkage of the scope of the sacred. This is not to argue that people lack survival strategies when dealing with death, but that these strategies become increasingly precarious and problematic in the conditions of high modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to challenge the marginal status of the body in sociology by examining the place of `the physical' in the production of social inequalities. After reviewing briefly Bourdieu's concept of embodied capital, I seek to extend his analysis by examining some recent work which looks at gender and the body-society relationship. It will be argued that a social analysis of the body is central to understanding the production of gender inequalities, and that sociologists should take more seriously the multiple ways in which bodies enter into the construction of social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the concept of emotion from a sociological perspective, focusing on how some of the core questions facing the sociology of emotions can be interrogated productively. It outlines some of the core concepts of the sociology of emotions by putting emphasis on work done on the sociology of emotion by Emile Durkheim and other notable sociologists. Durkheim's analysis of the relationship between social gatherings and emotional effervescence exposes the limitations of language as an exclusive means of apprehending human sensuality, and demonstrates how the emotionally saturated bases of action can either solidify or render ineffective those internal controls which have been seen as a prerequisite of civilized life. What is perhaps most useful about Durkheim's approach is his placing of the somatic sensation of society at the very heart of social theory. From this perspective, the study of emotions needs to be saved from becoming yet another enclave within the discipline and connected instead to a series of issues central to the sustenance of social groups. These include the education of children's emotional dispositions, as well as the fate of those sacred phenomena that have supposedly been on the decline within the modern world yet are important to the affective attachment of individuals to society.

People and boards that the series editor would like to thank, including the editorial board of the journal, series reviewer Dr. Paul Hodkinson and editors to the book "Radical Futures? Youth, Politics and Activism in Contemporary Europe," are mentioned.

The article acknowledges the work of the editorial board of the periodical "The Sociologcal Review" and other contributors to the production of the journal's monograph series including David Smith.

The article briefly discusses special supplements published by the journal.