Abstracts KE1 [2012]

Maria Vidali

The art of being an art lover

The rise and impact of the marketing process on the modus operandi of museums is increasingly regarded as a kind of natural expediency. To such an extent is this so that what is nowadays seen as the «modernization» debate on the future of museums −in the form of both public deliberations and discussions within the respective professional fields− concerns the way of enforcing such a process rather than the evaluation of its significance, role and repercussions. Much of the ongoing research in the field of the sociology, concerning cultural consumption, and museum attendance in particular, frequently supports the approach of an «administrative shakeup of museum policies» and of the managerial administration of museum organisation, thus contributing to the ratification of a new doxa –founded on a museum-centrism- that tends to predominate in the field of museum management. Exploiting the data of a comprehensive empirical survey on the Greek museum public and some critical theoretical work, the article attempts to put the relationship of sociology of cultural diffusion and sociology of education on a new basis.

Nikos Panayotopoulos & Maria Vidali

The world of performances (A): The social space of theatre audiences

Based on a survey on Greek theatre audiences, this article aims to demonstrate that when we want to examine the nature of theatre goods being consumed and the way they are consumed, we perceive two fundamental facts. More specifically, we observe the close relationship linking theatrical practices (or respective opinions) with the educational capital (which is measured by criteria of qualifications acquired) and social provenance (assessed here through the educational standards of the father, the educational level of the paternal grandfather, the occupation/ profession of the father and that of the mother) as well as the fact that educational capital being equal, the import of social provenance and mostly that of cultural heritage in the explanatory system of practices and preferences is definitively increased as we move away from the most legitimate genres.

Despoina Valassi

Privileged learning or learning of privilege. The social space of elite private secondary education in Greece

The choice of elite private secondary education schools represents a dominant educational strategy for those social strata of Athenian society who are at the top of the social hierarchy, achieving through this path a way to give to their offspring a privileged and selective environment of education. Conducting a quantitative field survey of students at 13 well-known private schools in Athens, using a questionnaire completed by students in the final year of secondary education in the particular private schools and analyzing the social space of elite private secondary education in Greece as a socially hierarchal and structured space, through the social characteristics of the «customer» of the schools, this paper introduces the fundamental principles of this space: on the one hand, elite private are schools segregated from the other private and public schools, establishing, thus, a definitive social boundary between «the great door and the small door» within the Greek education system, and, on the other hand, a distinction within the space of elite private secondary education between schools of an «aristocracy» and less famous and selective schools. The construction of a multidimensional social space provides the opportunity of a real sociological insight into the Athenian bourgeoisie, their internal differentiations and their strategies.

Theodoros Thanos

Social distribution and social discrimination in education: the access of social groups to higher education at the beginning of the 21st century.

This article discusses young people's chances of access to Greek higher education during the decade of 2000. Following a previous work of the author, which studied the same subject during the postwar period, the present study shows that Greek higher education continues to perform selectively, directly from the hierarchy of internal orientations: thoroughly analyzing the young people's access to higher education, depending on their parents’ and their school’s budgets, the present research finds that the chances of studying at a university change significally in benefit of the teenagers who come from the upper social classes. Finally, the author compares the results of this research to the rationale of the recent educational changes.

Franz Schultheis

Intercultural comparison: methods and practices

Since the birth of the social sciences, in the late 19th century, the comparative approach is something more than a mere method among others; it constitutes a simulation of the experimentation of the natural sciences which is not generally applicable in their domain. In an increasingly globalised world, this approach is omnipresent and is applied by a growing number of institutions and researchers. This particular «will to know» seems to represent a genuine power mechanism, an influential tool of social regulation, to which political discourse frequently resorts in order to find arguments that would legitimise its respective aims and strategies. At the same time, this undertaking is particularly fraught with pitfalls and may lead to considerable heuristic errors. The article aims to focus on these theoretical and methodological problems of intercultural comparison and sound a warning as regards the social utilisation of a powerful but doubtful heuristic source. 

Christian de Montlibert

Querying globalisation discourses

We would never be able to record every discourse on the virtues of globalisation. Until recently, everyone insisted on its beneficial consequences: prosperity, freedom, emancipation and peace were the prevailing terms. The elaborations and generalities of some intellectuals were followed by the laudation of globalisation; we were thus led to speak of mass culture and technical civilisation, post-modernity and the information and communication technology revolution. Nevertheless, what lurked behind such abundant discursive activity was a neoliberal advance supported by North American power structures, allowing financial institutions and speculative practices to practically destroy all institutions of social security.

Bernard Vernier

Can social anthropology merge with the anthropology of the symbolic? On secondary incest in the work of Françoise Héritier

In 1994, Françoise Héritier published a book entitled Two Sisters and their Mother. She suggested an explication of the prohibition of incest taking account of the interdictions between allies, which Claude Lévi-Strauss had overlooked. These interdictions could be explained through the function of human thought which contrasts sameness and difference. If, for instance, a man cannot marry his wife’s sister, this is because, by having intercourse with two sisters, he would bring into contact the identical through the circulation of sexual fluids. This theory affirms the primacy of the symbolic and is characterised by the negation of the social.

Secondary incest does not exist, but in the context of social anthropology it would be possible to develop another unitary theory. We cannot comprehend the incest ban unless we take account of the internal functions analysed by Malinowski and the external ones emphasised by St. Augustine and other Holy Fathers, long before Lévi-Strauss. In both cases, we need to establish the prerequisites of cooperation: either by reducing the friction within the group and its allies or by establishing bonds of alliance with other groups.

Virgílio Borges Pereira & João Queirós

State, housing and the «social question» in the city of Porto (1956-2006): an analysis on the making of doxa, orthodoxy and “alodoxia effects” in the (re)production of state housing policies

Taking as reference an inventory of the state housing policies developed in the city of Porto, in Portugal, between 1956 and 2006, we study the set of devices and beliefs that the agents involved in the field power produced in the domain of public housing intervention. The intense experience of inequality, both social and spatial, during the period was lived within a frame of political struggle with alternative configurations. These configurations stabilised different doxas that gained real institutional expression. By their reading we can identify the global action that organized the state’s production of the answers for the social question in the housing domain. Under the dictatorial regime (which lasted until 1974), such configurations were organized around a highly stratified set of social housing programmes that will always be beneath the social needs and that will contribute to the reproduction of the hierarchies of places and social classes. With the democratic turn in 1974, a relevant heterodox approach to the social question, through participated housing policies, was implemented in some of the relevant working class neighbourhoods of the inner city, thus, developing processes of housing that materialized the right to the city for segments of the working class. Yet, this approach was quickly abandoned. In a process that started in the mid 1980’s, social housing policies recovered some of the main properties of the old doxa; these were mixed with managerial and neoliberal inspired practices, thus producing a new doxa and also not irrelevant allodoxy effect.