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Commercial advertisements as one of television’s programs are effective in presentation and reproduction of women’s position in society and continuity of gender stereotypes. The main purpose of this research is the study of gender stereotypes. In this regard, theory of gender representation of Goffman and symbolic annihilation of Tuchman were used. In this study firstly, the advertisements were segregated according to their subjects and then were studied regarding their gender stereotypes to specify if there is in Iran, differentiation in stereotyping. The method used was quantitative content analysis with reverse questionnaire. Population was commercial advertisements from 20:00 to 23:00 among three channels (channel 1, 2 and 3). The results showed that there is significant relation between gender of performer and presence in advertisements, main character of advertisements, touching of objects, ritual subordination, and voice of narrator and the subject of the advertisements do not affect their method of presentation. This is due to the outstanding stability of gender stereotypes in commercial advertisements behind the subject of advertisements. According to these results, gender stereotypes are re-produced and depicted regardless of what the subject of advertisements is.

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The present study seeks to highlight the contemporary gender socialization narrative in Pakistani media discourse. Media discourse tends to represent dominant gender ideology mechanism which is implicitly employed by the advertisers through semiotic modes. It has the power to (re)frame the ideology of larger audience through significant visual/linguistic content and paves the way for social change through viable social institutions which disseminate information to a wider audience. The study follows theoretical stance propounded by Dyer (1982) in Advertising as Communication. The domain of semiotics (order of signification) is a reliable and valid tool for investigating meaning making process in media discourse. The data is comprised of some popular television commercials which are broadcast on the most viewed channels during the peak time viewership in Pakistani context. Purposive sampling technique has been taken into account for data collection process including only those commercials which largely reflect gender socializing patterns. The study finds that the commercials present layers of meanings via several orders of signification where gender socialization patterns are stereotypically displayed, subscribing to patriarchal structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the instrumentalization of "China" in contacts between the Ming and Qing dynasties and Siam-Ayutthaya. It focuses both on the state-to-state relations and those between various members of the Siamese and the imperial societies. "China" and "Chinese-ness" stood for forms of ascribed identity within the Sinocentric world, for a form of social distinction, and for one of many identities assumed in the games of political loyalty. For the Ming and Qing empires, inclusion of a foreign land within "China" was conducted through the ritual and administrative fictions that situated Ayutthaya within a hierarchy vis-à-vis the imperial capital. Beyond the state's discourses, participation in a vaguely defined Chinese culture were means of building social networks within the merchant and official communities in Ayutthaya. For the junkmen that connected Ayutthaya and South China, multiple Chinese identities were instrumentalized and inflected according to the needs and necessities of the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), its evolution over the past five decades, and the dissatisfaction of the non-nuclear states within it, can be analyzed by focusing on different understandings of power. Within the various concepts of power are claims which distinguish between what is known broadly as "power-over" and a more subtle form of influence, "power-to." This article explores the history of the NPT, showing how the nuclear weapon states have shaped and limited this institution by practices which fall within the relational emphasis of "power-over." Recently, however, non-nuclear states have adopted a "power-to" approach. Frustrated by their inability to bring about substantive change within the limits of the NPT, these states have realized and applied their agency and collective "power-to" in order to create an alternative approach to the problem of nuclear weapons in the context of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how Brajbhāṣā Vaishnava narratives describe the role the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb played in the displacement of Krishna images from the Braj heartland in the 1660s and 1670s. While contemporary discourse frequently suggests that the emperor was a villain persecuting beloved Hindu deities, who in turn are victims forcibly moved from their original homeland, the early-modern vernacular narratives we consider here perceive these peregrinations in rather more complex ways. This article foregrounds the case of the best-known dispersed Krishna image: Śrī Nāthajī, a deity of the Vallabha-Sampradāya, now residing in the Mewar area of Rajasthan. It analyses mostly the discourse of the Śrī Nāthajī kī Prākaṭya-Vārtā, or ‘The story of the Appearance of Śrī Nāthajī’, attributed to Vallabha's descendant, Harirāy. The sectarian logic presents Aurangzeb as an ardent, if uncouth, devotee and Śrī Nāthajī as an autonomous agent, not a victim, but rather a victor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did colonial family law reshape the ethnic and gender norms of a creolized entrepreneurial minority? While the literature on colonial Indonesia has tended to view the Dutch colonial preservation of adat (customary) law as helping to preserve Indonesian women's autonomy and property rights, this essay shows how, in the case of the Indonesian-Chinese entrepreneurial minority, the colonial government's institutionalization of Confucian “Chinese” family law gradually introduced more patriarchal norms for creole Chinese families. The Dutch colonial state's legal regulation of credit and commerce in Java took a moralistic turn in the mid-nineteenth century, giving shape to a more patriarchal and “Chinese” form of the family in Java by the century's end. This legal-moralistic turn took the form of a critique of creole Chinese women on one hand, and the Sinological construction of a body of Confucian “Chinese” private law on the other. For almost half a century, this encroaching colonial ethno-moral critique of creole Chinese credit manipulations and marriage arrangements came up against resistance from Peranakan Chinese matriarchs and patriarchs. In this article, I show how colonial Confucian family law eventually ended creole Chinese women's contract-making and credit-manipulating autonomies by subjecting the “Chinese” household to the civil law authority of the “housefather.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a detailed ethnography of a shrine house based in Havana called Ilé Tuntun, whose leader is the babalawo (priest-diviner of Ifá) Frank Obeché. Ilé Tuntun aims, with the help of Yoruba political and religious dignitaries, to re-establish lost links with Africa and reform Ifá’s practice in Cuba. Ilé Tuntun embodies a current tendency among various Cuban babalawos, who are interested in developing contacts with Yoruba. But this group also offers a very specific discourse as well as significant ritual innovations that aim to unite Cuban babalawos. The claim of a new ritual filiation (or African ancestry) as well as an innovative and learned discourse—based, in particular, on elements stemming from exchanges with Nigerian dignitaries who visited Cuba—are the key-elements that sustain the project. This paper analyses this discourse and its ritual implications, drawing on data collected during a field study with the group. In some ways, these efforts of Ilé Tuntun show continuity with similar attempts that have been made in the past, but they also exemplify more contemporary changes in the Cuban ritual field. However, judging by the reactions of numerous babalawos based in Havana, they appear to be controversial for two reasons. First, Ilé Tuntun, by renewing and reinterpreting historical links to Africa, advocates a ritual subordination to Yoruba religious and political dignitaries. In this sense, the group challenges the legitimacy of Cuban babalawos legitimacy. Secondly, Ilé Tuntun claims supremacy, and its leader claims supremacy and authority, over the babalawo community. The very idea of a possible Ifá unification arouses distrust among Cuban babalawo, and Frank Obeché’s claims of possessing Yoruba royal titles is also doubted by many of his peers, who keep their distance from him and from the group. Still, controversial though it may be, Ilé Tuntun has real visibility in the Cuban capital.

Sociological and social anthropological studies on the Muslim society in India with particular reference to the Other Backward Class (OBC) Muslims of West Bengal are negligible causing a vast lacuna and immense loophole in our perception and understanding of not only the OBC Muslims of West Bengal, but also the Indian Muslim community as a whole from an empirical point of view. The analysis presented in this paper is a modest attempt to examine the socio-economic characteristics of Muslims in West Bengal, India, through an analysis of available statistics of socio-economic characteristics and resulting social stratification among the Muslims within the context of the larger Indian Society. Muslims constitute a minority community with approximately 13% of the billion strong Indian population, thus they are one of the largest Muslim minority communities in the world. However, they continue to have lower scores on socio-economic indices across all indicators which will be presented and analyzed in this paper. The paper also highlights the socio-economic backwardness of the Muslims with special reference to the Muslim OBCs of West Bengal from a historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking to understand play as part of a more general theory of human relationships, the author defines play as one of four fundamental categories of behavior, the others being work, ritual, and communitas. He discusses how each of these behaviors is organized as a "pathway" that offers distinctive opportunities for experiencing life and for discovering "self-locations," specifically privilege, subordination, engagement, and marginality. These pathways and self-locations are understood to be key elements in the formation of experience. Associating play, ritual, work, and communitas with either ascending (self-directed) meaning or descending (other-directed) meaning, he describes their related "emotion sequences," essentially chains of emotions that lead from feelings of anticipation to those addressing occurrences in the present to remembrances. For example, work leads from self-confidence to pride; play, from curiosity to gratitude; communitas, from hope to blessedness; and ritual, from faith to reverence. Each of the four pathways is a profoundly important, but also a limited format for action and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a recent movement to reframe entrepreneurship theory into a more critical and reflexive mode. It builds on the processual notion of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation to theorize a balanced conception of agency and active constraint rooted in the notion of power rituals. We develop a micro-sociological analysis of power rituals that conceives power reproduction and entrenchment as a ‘practice-based’ activity that focuses on what power holders and subordinates concretely do, think and feel. This makes emotion a key dimension of entrepreneurial agency and redefines constraining barriers to agency in terms of a social process of ‘barring’. This novel approach is illustrated using an autobiographical account of a social entrepreneurship project. On the basis of this analysis, a number of insights are provided into the ways in which the power-as-practice approach can inform wider debates in organization studies where the notions of agency and constraint are linked to issues of power and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of the paper is described how the religious implication of Japanese budü can be studied sociologically. The author discusses the results of his research on aikidü gathered within and compared across training settings in Japan and Italy. Interviews and Internet data include US, France, and Malta. This research investigated whether a relationship exists between religious issues and points of emphasis in the training in martial arts where the spiritual perceptions among practitioners generate religious-related concepts. The methods employed here emphasize qualitative approaches, but connect them to quantitative approaches as well and can be used to study a variety of religion-related issues in not strictly religious settings. Although this presentation is narrowed down to Japan, some of the ideas and theories can be applied to the traditions of other locations such as China, Korea, and the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes recent efforts by India's Dalits (Untouchables) to transform centuries-old caste-based discrimination into an international human rights issue. Comparing early failures and later successes in international activism, the article demonstrates that the Dalits have achieved limited but important advances among transnational NGOs, international organizations, and foreign governments since the late 1990s. What explains these successes—and what lessons does the Dalit experience hold for other groups seeking to transform domestic grievances into internationally recognized human rights issues? The article makes two primary arguments. First, organizational changes among Dalit activists played a major role in these successes, most importantly the formation of a unified Dalit network within India and the subsequent creation of a transnational solidarity network. Second, rhetorical changes played a key role, as Dalits moved from their long-standing focus on caste-based discrimination to a broader framing within the more internationally acceptable terminology of discrimination based on "work and descent." The article concludes by discussing broader implications for international human rights activism by other aggrieved groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the Romani mobilization at the national level. It concentrates on developments between significant landmarks in Romani mobilization - the end of WWII in 1945 and the institutionalization of a permanent international Romani body in the form of a World Romani Congress in 1971. The time period covers topics such as the emergence of modern Romani political organizations at the national level and their unification through international Romani umbrella organizations.

In July 2004, a Chinese claim that the ancient Kingdom of Koguryo (37 BC-AD 668) was China's vassal state ignited a firestorm of protest in South Korea. The decade-long South Korean love affair with China appears to have ended, as increasing numbers of South Koreans have begun to view their colossal neighbor with new suspicion. What were the causes and consequences of this controversy? Rather than forwarding the usual political, economic, and security explanations, this paper interrogates the deeper identity politics at stake, arguing that the Koguryo controversy implicates the very meaning of being Korean or Chinese in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since early colonial times, Dutch government officials as well as anthropologists have made a distinction between what have been called "Bali Aga", the allegedly aboriginal inhabitants of Bali (Indonesia), and those inhabitants associated with title-bearing groups oriented towards royal courts and brahmana ritual specialists. While the former have been described as constituting a society characterized by equality and democracy, the latter have been portrayed as being almost the opposite. This article questions the basic assumptions about the "Bali Aga", especially the role of their ritual networks focusing on regional temples. These have been interpreted as a demonstration of equality and of a bounded "Bali Aga" ethnicity. This article suggests a different interpretation, one in which the ritual networks are understood as basic segments, not restricted to the Bali Aga, in the ritual organization of the pre-colonial Balinese state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the photographs as sexual advertisements. Two contrasting perspectives would predict very different observations with respect to what photographs are likely to look like. They are referred as the cultural and the contextual perspectives. The "cultural" perspective would predict that pictures are a small fragment of a society's cultural output and thus are likely to reflect, "reiterate" or "reproduce" its social norms and arrangements, including values, interactional patterns and systems of hierarchy. In the "cultural" model, hegemonic cultural representations serve to socialize members of the society; both subordinate and superordinate, to embrace the status quo, including its hierarchical arrangements. The "contextual" perspective offers a somewhat different emphasis; its advocates would argue that the social context within which cultural materials are produced determines the nature of those materials more than the society's broad cultural directives and the need of its superordinate strata to preserve the existing hegemony.

Research on the restructuring of work has tended to neglect the autonomous effects that symbolic or cultural influences can have on the utilization of new technologies. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in three pulp and paper mills to explore the symbolic boundaries that occupational groups bring to bear on workplace automation. As sophisticated technologies and management methods were introduced, process engineers engaged in subtle yet important efforts to portray manual workers' knowledge in derisive terms. Such boundary work led managers to institute credential barriers that restricted manual workers' opportunities, eventually enabling engineers to gain exclusive control over analytic functions as their own "natural" domain. The study suggests that symbolic representations can have powerful consequences for the restructuring of work, reproducing social inequalities even when new technologies render them unnecessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Changes in temple labor investment and sacrificial offerings indicate that the rise in religious authority of the Hawaiian chiefly hierarchy correlates with an increase in political centralization and the intensifying role of the chief as divine intermediary through time. Initially, temples were small public courts akin to traditional Polynesian shrines used to reaffirm genealogical ties. During a period of intemecine warfare and political instability and conflict in the 15th century A.D., temples became extremely large, a practical symbol of the burgeoning power of elites as they used ritual labor obligations to reaffirm chiefly genealogical relationships and enhance class cooperation. After island unification in the i6th century, chiefly religious activity shifted to sacrificial ceremonies and the consumption of surplus goods and foodstuffs as a result of status competition. By the time of European contact in the 19th century, divinely sanctified rituals associated with war and levying taxes were instituted to enhance the status and power of the paramount chief through personal displays of material wealth. The Hawaiian case appears to follow a common trajectory among complex societies, where religious authority is increasingly expressed through the political economy, and serves as a contextual model of a complex chiefdom undergoing rapid political stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines how women are portrayed in advertisements, focusing on a comparison of two studies undertaken in 1979 and 1994 of the portrayal of women and men in printed Israeli advertisements. Emphasis of both of the studies; Analysis of Israel's advertising print media; Changing nature of women's role in magazine advertisements.