Distortion: social processes beyond the structured and systematic pdf

Nigel Rapport feels he has come to the right place to further his research in cosmopolitanism. Rapport has joined Concordia’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It’s a change from a small medieval town that he describes as “Cambridge by the sea” to a large city with an urban campus. The British anthropologist has been made the Canada Research Chair, Tier 1, in Globalization, Citizenship and Social Justice. He is also the founding director of the Concordia Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, launching research programs and workshops that promote an appreciation of the rights, the capacities and the experience of the global individual.

Distortion: social processes beyond the structured and systematic pdf by Nigel Rapport

Distortion occurs between the intentions of actions and their outcomes. It can also occur between thoughts and actions; between words and how they are interpreted; between a statement of law and its enactment; between a vision and its artistic representation; and between a cultural tradition or habitus and its animation in contemporary contexts. Escaping the bounds of relationality, of structuration and of systemics, distortion is a form of complex connectedness that has seldom been addressed in the social sciences as a phenomenon in its own right. This volume argues for the key importance of distortion as a concept in the social sciences, and attempts to refine it as a concept. Each chapter examines distortion in the context of an ethnographic case study, examining how its conceptualization can further comprehension of a particular ethnographic situation. It is contended that distortion is an account of the emergent or revolutionary nature of human life, an emergence that can be attached to particular antecedent conditions in a processual or temporal way yet is a transformation of the essential nature of those conditions.