Elias-I

The sixth Norbert Elias Prize will be awarded in 2009. The Prize consists in a sum of €1,000 and it will be awarded to a significant first major book published between 1 January 2007 and 31 December 2008. First-time authors from any part of the world are eligible for the award.

The Prize is awarded ‘in commemoration of the sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990), whose writings, at once theoretical and empirical, boldly crossed disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences to develop a long-term perspective on the patterns of interdependence which human beings weave together’. This does not mean, however, that the prize-winning book will necessarily be directly inspired by Elias’s own work.

Previous winners of the Elias Prize have been:

1999 David Lepoutre, Coeur de banlieue: Codes, rites et langages (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997)

2001 Wilbert van Vree, Meetings, Manners and Civilisation (London: University of Leicester Press, 1999)

2003 Nikola Tietze, Islamische Identitäten: Formen muslimischer Religiosität junger Männer in Deutschland und Frankreich (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001)

2005 Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

2007 Georgi Derlugian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

For the 2009 prize, the jury will consist of three previous winners of the prize, under the chairmanship of Wilbert van Vree.

Nominations for the prize should be sent to Marianne Bernard, Secretary to the Norbert Elias Foundation, by 31 March 2009, either by post to J.J. Viottastraat 13, 1071 JM Amsterdam, The Netherlands, or by email to elias@kpnmail.

New titles in the Collected Works of Norbert Elias series published by University College Dublin Press, in co-operation with the Norbert Elias Foundation:

Elias with Eric Dunning, QUEST FOR EXCITEMENT, edited by Eric Dunning, 978-1-904558-43-9 60 Euro or £45

Elias with John L. Scotson, THE ESTABLISHED AND THE OUTSIDERS, edited by Cas Wouters, 978-1-904558-92-7 60 Euro or £45

QUEST FOR EXCITEMENT includes an extra essay by Elias, never before published, and a completely revised and updated essay on football hooliganism by Eric Dunning. THE ESTABLISHED AND THE OUTSIDERS includes the essay ‘The Maycomb Model’, written by Elias a few weeks before his death and not previously published in English. The editors have in both cases made many corrections and annotations to the earlier texts.

All Elias books are currently available from the UCD Press website at 20 per cent discount
http://www.ucdpress.ie/offers.asp

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
See our new website www.ucdpress.ie

Barbara Mennell
Executive Editor
UCD Press
Newman House
86 St Stephen’s Green
Dublin 2, Ireland

tel. + 353 1 477 9812
fax. + 353 1 477 9821
www.ucdpress.ie
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Olle Edström, Professor of Musicology at Göteborg University, has written a history of Western music from an Eliasian perspective. Details are:

A Different Story: Aesthetics and the History of Western Music (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008). 309 pp. ISBN 978-1-57647-123-4.

The original book in Swedish came out in 2002, but only now has it been translated into English.

I plan to review the book myself in Figurations, but I thought readers of this blog might like to know about this book in advance.

Stephen Mennell

Greetings all,

I have a couple quick questions but, first, a quick response to a previous post on Elias and ANT.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any secondary lit on ANT (at all!) but there no small amount on the relationship between them internal to ANT. Which is most welcome: Elias and ANT have a lot to teach each other. Anyway, from Organizing Modernity onwards, John Law continuously writes on the relationship between the ANT approach and Elias. Most of this is rather veiled. From the top of my head, there are only ever broad references to the The Court Society and TCP . More significantly he writes in Organizing Modernity that what he aims at formulating is a sociology of verbs (It might be necessary to disclaim that this might be aimed more at Michel Serres than Elias. Serres, the philosophical inspiration behind ANT, calls for a philosophy of pre-positions — in the sense of that which lies before the position, constitutes it, demarcates it, or, as Latour says, “makes it be.” For both Serres and Latour, in seeming contrast to Law, time is only ever secondary, it is an effect. Time percolates or, put differently, is filtered by circulating entities). In a later article (where he also cites Elias) Law tellingly writes that one could call ANT process sociology. Finally, in Reassembling the Social, Elias is accused by Latour of not paying due diligence to objects. Objects, Latour says, are not enough to “load the social” for Elias. I will say only that this is rather odd: Elias is explicit in saying that  the process of civilization (which, of course, has no start) and the process of technization have always been inter-twined.

Anyway:

I know that Elias wrote a fair amount on science, and am very curious as to whether he was interested at all in nonlinear thermodynamics/complexity theory (i.e. thermodynamics as it is applicable to systems that are open and/or far from equilibrium). I understand that several members of this list knew Elias personally, but am crossing my fingers: the link might be rather obscure.

My reason for asking might be worth supplying. Simply put, there seems to be a rather stunning parallel between process sociology and said theory of complexity. This is especially true when one contrasts nonlinear thermodynamics with its historical precursors (the relationship is far more complex and contradictory than I can presume to know).  First among these is Newtonian dynamics — which is characterized by a complete forgetting of time. Each moment is technically replaceable with the next. Insert your least favorite static social theory as an analogy! Second among these precursors is standard thermodynamics (Carnot etc.), which achieved similar results to Darwin in the field of biology, Hegel in philosophy and Comte in sociology. Namely, it introduces time and processes. The analogy between them all is apt because they seem to have the same problem: time is irreversible and uni-linear — and, in the case of the latter two, is conceived as a normative progression. Like complexity theory, Elias disagrees in important respects. For example, for Elias, there is neither a single arrow of time or a final state, no single equilibrium: civilizing and de-civilizing processes are co-present. Moreover, time is nonlinear; no one thing can be said to cause the other in the strictest sense. This is the realm of catalysis; specific events and specific processes create the conditions for their (and other processes) continued existence — or impede them.

Outside of this specific question of time, Elias seems to share the belief that chaos only appears as chaos because we do not have a good enough theory. And similarly, both complexity theory and Elias agree that to think about time we must think/rethink the link between ‘man’ and ‘nature.’ I will stop listing similarities because, frankly, I am getting bored.

My second question is related to the comparison between Darwin and Elias. Elias himself mentions Darwin at least a couple times (he says somewhere something along the lines that Darwin might be understood as one of the first precursors to understanding processes) and I wonder how great or distant this similarity is. Let me say first that Elias seems to be a functionalist in a limited or ex post facto sense. I don’t mean that as a pejorative at all. And this is only important because my question is as to how accurate it might be to suggest that there is something like a “searching mechanism” is Elias. A mechanism, to be more specific, that might be seen to ‘guide’ or ’steer’ processes. For example, he writes on the double-bind relationships in inter-state relationships (in The Germans and Involvement and Detachment) which seems to have this kind of role. Such a “searching mechanism,” if it would be fair to call it that, would obviously be endogenous to the process itself. Nonetheless it would still “select” or maybe make desirable certain actions and, conversely, foreclose or make more difficult others.

To clarify, my question is partly motivated by the closing sentences of Johan Goudsblom’s The Sociology of Norbert Elias: Its Resonance and Significance. There he talks about how Elias spoke of an “infrastructure” to long term process that guide short term processes. Unfortunately, the reference there is to a lecture which I do not believe has been been published. Is there anywhere else where he picks up this theme?

In any case, I hope my two question emerged in a clear enough fashion. I also thank all who made it this far for their time.

Regards,

Edwin

I’m delighted to inform you that my dissertation is now published in the VS-Verlag:

Barzantny, Anke: Mentoring-Programme für Frauen. Maßnahmen zu Strukturveränderungen in der Wissenschaft? Eine figurationssoziologische Untersuchung zur akademischen Medizin.

In this research project I employed Norbert Elias’ Established-Outsiders-Figuration in order to describe the situation of men an women in academia and to evaluate a so called “mentoring-programm” at a german university and clinic. For my study I conducted qualitative interviews with people (from student to director) who were working in a university hospital. The results show quite clearly, firstly, the constraints of the figuration which may hinder women’s progress in medical science and secondly, the intended but also not intended effects of formal mentoring.

10th Congress of the French Association of Political Science (AFSP), Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Grenoble, 7–9 September 2009

Workshop No. 44:
Sociology and History of the Mechanisms of Depacification of the Political Game

Workshop organisers:
Paula Cossart (GRACC, Université Lille III), cossart.paula@free.fr
Emmanuel Taïeb (IEP of Grenoble), emmanuel.taieb@iep-grenoble.fr

Many studies in historical sociology have investigated the processes through which the political game within the western democracies has become pacified. They have highlighted a civilising process in political manners, a ‘routinisation’ of non-violent repertoires used during social protest, a debarment of violence through the practice of elections, and more generally a delegitimisation of the use of physical violence in the political contest. Henceforth, for participants in politics, beyond political divsions between them, pacification and its effects have become the common rule, leading to frequent condemnation of those who do not comply with it.

But this pacification is never finished. And in fact, opposite processes, of depacification, are at work in the political game – processes that contest, resist, or misappropriate the benefits of pacification, and force political participants and groups to define and reconstruct themselves with respect to them. These mechanisms of depacification are consubstantial with the political game, and challenge its limits. They imply new definitions of deviant or ‘off-side’ actionsm which may eventually be made illegal, even defined as crimes.

The aim of this workshop is to study the forms taken by these mechanisms of depacification in the political struggle, and the way that pacification is sometimes corrupted in order to get involved in different ways in the political game. We think that political depacification has three complementary dimensions, along which contributions to this workshop can be oriented:

1. First, verbal or symbolic forms of depacification – such as a public insult, defamation, a loss of self-control, a blow ‘below the belt’, the use of arguments seen as non-political, inappropriate references (regarding sexual preference, social origin, religion, skin colour), excessive caricaturing, or lynching by the media.

2. Second, depacification characterised by the use of violence. For example, terrorism, political assassinations, ‘state violence’, sporadic low intensity violence, such as public disorder, taking people captive, sit-ins or arson in places of work, the outbreak of violence during a demonstration or an election campaign, etc.

3. Third, a more subtle form of depacification which this workshop wishes to explore: the notion of depacification in regard to related ideas like decivilising processes, brutalisation, and all forms of informalisation of political manners.

Proposals may be written in either English or French. All abstracts and proposals should be submitted electronically, and sent to one of the two organisers.

Deadline for submission of proposals: 15 October 2008.

More information about the Congress: http://www.congresafsp2009.fr/

Please note that, after two rounds of corporate takeovers, the email address of the Norbert Elias Stichting’s office in Amsterdam is now:

elias@kpnmail.nl

As most subscribers will know, Marianne Bernard took over from Saskia Visser as Secretary to the Foundation at the beginning of 2008. All other contact details remain unchanged:

J.J. Viottastraat 13
1071 JM Amsterdam
Netherlands

Tel./Fax: +31 20 671 8620

SJM

UCD PRESS COLLECTED WORKS OF ELIAS

The Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English are available for direct order from the UCD Press website at 20% discount until 15 September 2008. Titles already available are:

Vol. 1 Early Writings
Vol. 2 The Court Society
Vol. 8 Involvement and Detachment
Vol. 9 An Essay on Time

Titles to be published in late September 2008, which can be pre-ordered:

Vol. 4 The Established and the Outsiders
Vol. 7 Quest for Excitement

Also on special offer are related titles:

Norbert Elias, The Genesis of the Naval Profession (eds René Moelker and Stephen Mennell)
Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: An Introduction

Click on this link http://www.ucdpress.ie/offers.asp

After 15 September, single copies of Collected Works titles will continue to be available direct from the publisher at 10% discount.

Scheduled for publication in late 2008 and early 2009 are three volumes of Elias’s collected essays:

Vol. 14 Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences
Vol. 15 Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity
Vol. 16 Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities

Those wishing to subscribe to the series should contact the publisher: ucdpress@ucd.ie

UCD Press
Newman House
86 St Stephen’s Green
Dublin 2, Ireland
tel. + 353 1 477 9812
fax. + 353 1 477 9821
www.ucdpress.ie

Sad news just received via the Theory Section of the ASA:

Many of you have heard the sad news already, but for those who haven’t, Charles Tilly passed away on Tuesday after a long battle with lymphoma. He was a prodigious scholar, an innovative theorist, a generous mentor, and steadfast friend to so many of us in the discipline. He had agreed to speak on one of the Theory Section Miniconference panels in August, on the topic of “Theoretical Careers,” in which I asked him to reflect on the ways in which his theoretical ideas had changed over time in dialogue with the complexities of the empirical world. There is no better person than Tilly to speak to this topic, as he rethought and challenged his own theories in substantial and probing ways, in response not only to his empirical research, but also to his conversations and debates within a broad research community. He was a champion of relational thinking, and manifested this commitment in his own far-reaching intellectual networks. His absence will be sorely felt not only on our panel in August, but throughout our discipline and far beyond.

Below, you can find statements from Columbia University about Chuck’s passing.

With warm remembrances,

Ann Mische Continue Reading »

Dear Colleagues,

the Provisional Programme and more details of the International Conference:

Self-Regulation or Self-Care.
The Sociology of the Subject in the 21st century.

are online.

You are kindly asked to register online to participate until June, 21:

Special details for accommodation, arrival etc. you will find here:
http://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/index.php?id=4600&L=0&L=1

or
http://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/srsc

Stefanie Ernst