STUDI DI SOCIOLOGIA - 2009 - 2

The cultural foundations of welfare state policies and their contribution to the development of welfare states are gaining increasing attention in comparative welfare state research. The article introduces reflections on how the impact of cultural factors on the development of welfare state policies can be analysed. Three different levels be distinguished with regard to the relationship between welfare culture and welfare state policies: 1) values and models on which welfare state policies are based; 2) values and models for the welfare state that are dominant in the population; 3) discourses of social actors in relation to such values and models. Cultural change can contribute to change in welfare state policies according to two different types of processes. Moreover, when analysing the influence of globalisation on the development of welfare states it is important to analyse the controversial influence of neo-liberal values on welfare culture and the discourses established by political elites to propagate such values.

The object of this paper is training sociologists in «person-centered» ethnographic research, i.e. centered upon the social actor, protagonist of the cultural contexts to study. A training model is proposed, based on two cultural approaches: one being spiritual and the other psychological. More precisely, we refer to the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Society of Jesus) and the psychological approach of Carl Rogers (psychologist of the humanistic approach). The goal is to provide useful operational tools in various stages of ethnographic research, enabling researchers to: a) choose the identities through which to have the best access to the field of study, b) establish face to face interactions that are based on the respect of the social actors involved in the study, c) transform those who are called «subjects» of research, in the classic approach of participant observation, into «collaborators of the ethnographer», d) adapt quickly to sudden changes of the field that often characterize studies of «other» cultures.

This paper aims to report a resistance process that was carried on by black quilombolas community (slave descendant) in the Alcântara region (Maranhão-Brazil). These communities have been in contrast through the times with the military institutions which ordered them to leave their traditional lands. Basing themselves on the international, federal and national legislation, and rediscovering their cultural ethnic heritage, and economic specificity, the different communities have carried on experiences of community opposition and cohesion, of political association, and have introduced new identity pronouncements, on which they have built their social and cultural ransom paths, as well as those of leadership recognition. The theme offers the opportunity to discuss some political anthropology issues, such as identity politics, the concept of power, and the social relationships.

Despite the undoubted relevance emotions have for the social action and for society itself, Sociology started to deal with them directly only around the half of Seventies in the last century; the United States, therefore, have up for lost time: the Sociology of emotions has by now earned the statute of an autonomous scientific and academic doctrine. In this article, after a quick introduction to the Sociology of emotions and its main theoretical perspectives (Positivism, Constructionism and Interactionism) I’ll take into consideration the sociological theory of emotions by Arlie Russell Hochschild. She should be certainly considered as one of the main autoritative theorist of the interactionist approach, even deemed by someone as the founder of the Sociology of emotions; by surveying some of the main theoretical assumptions, I’ll try to select those thematic cores (emotional control, emotion labor, feeling rules, emotional devienza, emotional culture) which supply the conceptual and lexical framework for the understanding of the more general sociological reflection about emotions.

The Phenomenology says that every knowledge is a perspective knowledge, because every knowledge is situated in a time and in a space. The human’s embodiment discloses a perspective overview on the world. The paper claims the aim to analyze how the sexual and gender dimensions, which are incarnated in a determinate body, are present in the qualitative research, specifically into the ethnographic observation. First for all, we hypothesize that the gender is a border for the access into a field and not in other, so to be man or woman is not neutral for the knowledge of a specific social context. Moreover, the performative dimension of the gender, which shows the norms that pre-exist and that conduct the role’s interaction (i.e. the role’s gendered content and the role’s gendered language) is another tie in the participant observation. The awareness that all the knowledge is gendered, requires to the fieldworker to play a double competence (ability). The researcher must use the self reflexivity to point out his gender identity and his background on this theme: he must point out his background frame relatively to the gender, his gender behaviour’s expectations in the interaction, and his correlated opinions. The researcher, moreover, must know that exist a cultural mainstream about the gender, but that the concrete gender playing is based on the interaction in a concrete frame. So, we have a lot of concrete ways in which the gender is embodied. The researcher on the field, so, must enter in a knowledge’s circulation in which must point attention to: the epistemic interdependence, i.e. the knowledge borns in the symbolic interaction between the researcher and the subject; the gendered nature of the communicative interaction between the researcher and the subject; the negotiable nature of the concrete managing of the gendered role in the interaction.