Michael P Carroll
Biographic Data
| ID | 75246 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael P Carroll |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael P |
| FAMILY NAME | Carroll |
| SIGNATURE | CARROLL M P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7027-4985 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 88 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1945 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Forgotten Story of the Bombings of the Italian Church of Saints Peter and Paul in San Fransisco
Research Article| January 01 2020 The Forgotten Story of the Bombings of the Italian Church of Saints Peter and Paul in San Fransisco Michael P. Carroll Michael P. Carroll MICHAEL P. CARROLL is a professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He has published a number of articles and books about popular Catholicism in different national contexts, including Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (1996…
What Evicting Grizzly Bear Spirit Does (and Doesn't) Tell Us about Indigenous "Religion" and Indigenous Rights
The Canadian Supreme Court's (2017) decision in Ktunaxa First Nation v. British Columbia is instructive because it demonstrates the continuing incompatibility of what religion "means" in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, respectively. There are, however, additional lessons to be learned by looking carefully at an aspect of this case that troubled many non-Indigenous commentators, namely, that much of the Ktunaxa claim seemed to rest …
Reconciliation and the Representation of Indigenous Peoples in Introductory Sociology Textbooks
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has indicated that education has a central role to play in the reconciliation process. This article assesses how well sociology is doing in this regard by looking at what introductory textbooks say about three topics: (1) residential schools, (2) Indigenous “religion;” and (3) the social construction of Indigenous identities. The findings are mixed. While most textbooks mention the “loss of culture” and the…
The not-so-crypto crypto-Jews of New Mexico: Update on a Decades-Old Debate
For over two decades an academic debate has raged over a possible crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico. On one side are scholars who advance two claims: first, that many of New Mexico’s early colonists were crypto-Jews and second, that practices associated with some Hispano families in modern New Mexico reflect crypto-Jewish traditions originating in the colonial period. On the other side are scholars who question the evidentiary basis of both cl…
World Religions” in Introductory Sociology Textbooks: In Search of the Sociology
A section on “world religions” (WRs) is now routinely included in the religion chapters of introductory sociology textbooks. Looking carefully at these WR sections, however, two things seem puzzling. The first is that the criteria for defining a WR varies considerably from textbook to textbook; the second is that these WRs sections contain little or no sociology. These puzzles are resolved, however, once we understand that under the guise of prom…
Anne M. Martínez. Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905–1935
In Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905–1935, Anne M. Martínez focuses on the period when the U.S. extended its influence, often but not always by direct annexation, over parts of the world that had once been part of the Spanish Empire. At the time, the dominant cultural narrative justifying this expansionism suggested that the U.S. had embraced modernity by virtue of its Protestant foundations and was now in the p…
"The Early Robin Hood and "The Myght of Mylde Marye: Revisiting the Lived Experience of Catholicism in Late Medieval England
A number of reformist commentators in late medieval England suggested that stories about Robin Hood were especially popular with people who were not especially devout. On the other hand, notwithstanding these reformist comments, we also have evidence that Robin Hood stories were sometimes used as sermon exempla, which suggests that they were seen (at least by some preachers) as promoting acceptable forms of Catholic devotion. At one level, the us…
Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History
The rationale for this collection of essays stems from a historiographical incongruity described by R. Scott Appleby in the concluding chapter. On the one hand, Catholics have been a powerful presence in modern life in the United States. After all, Appleby points out, they are “the nation's largest religious body”; “constitute nearly one quarter of the American population”; “have built powerful political machines” in several major cities; have cr…
Rodney Stark's One True Vision: Retrograde Historiography and the Academic Study of Religion
Although Rodney Stark is best known for his work on religious economies, he has recently turned his attention to the social effects of monotheism. If we look carefully on the theoretical trajectory evident in this recent work, what we find is a social-evolutionary approach to religion that was prevalent in the 19th century, but long ago assumed by most academics to be discredited. Furthermore, as becomes increasingly evident going through this se…
Ruth Simpson, Men in Caring Occupations: Doing Gender Differently
Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews
Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture
The Psychoanalytic Study of Myth Since Freud Pursuing the Dream
Who now reads Parsons and Bales: Casting a critical eye on the “gendered styles of caregiving” literature
Comment on Keith Haartman's “Religious Ecstasy and Personality Transformation in John Wesley's Methodism: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations”
Keith Haartman argues that childrearing practices distinctive of the English middle class in the 18th century produced a type of personality structure characterized by excessive splitting. Methodism proved popular because the Methodist experience providing a way of confronting and working through the conflicts generated by this sort of personality structure. Unfortunately, although Haartman's argument is plausible, there is little or no evidence …
The Incomplete Revolution: Theorizing Gender When Studying Men Who Provide Care to Aging Parents
In a 1985 article, Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne argued that the tendency to treat 'gender' as an unproblematized dichotomous variable functioned to contain feminist influence in sociology. Although there has clearly been a revolution in gender studies since that time, there are still whole areas of sociological investigation where this revolution is at best incomplete. One such area involves the literature on the care that adult children provi…
It is: Reflections on the Role of Music in Sartre's 'La Nausee
Music plays an important role in Jean-Paul Sartre's existential archetype, La Nausée (1938). In the novel the central character, Antoine Roquentin, attempts to overcome the debilitating tawdriness of his everyday reality by seeking solace in the ragtime tune 'Some of these Days'. His fascination with the tune encapsulates Sartre's nascent philosophical and ideological views. Sartre uses Roquentin's response to the tune as a means to reconcile two…
How the Irish Became Protestant in America
It often comes as a surprise to learn that most contemporary Americans who think of themselves as "Irish" are, in fact, Protestant, not Catholic. While commentators generally agree that these Protestant Irish-Americans are descended mainly from the Irish who settled in the United States prior to the Famine, the story of how theybecamethe Protestants they are is-this article argues-more complicated than first appears. To understand that story, how…
Upstart theories and early American religiosity: A reassessment
Attempts to assess the theory of religious economies developed by Rodney Stark and his associates have generated an enormous secondary literature. For Stark himself, one beneficial effect has been a new paradigm in the study of religion that gives more emphasis to the social than to the psychological. A case is made here that key assertions in the theory have been falsified, that disconfirming evidence has been ‘explained away’ rather than explai…
Give Me that Ol' Time Hormonal Religion
Rodney Stark (2002) has sought to explain the greater religiosity of women, something that he asserts to be a cultural and historical universal, by suggesting that male physiology makes males more impulsive and so less likely to submit to religious prohibitions. Although he presents evidence suggesting that greater female religiosity is true today cross-culturally, he presents no real evidence establishing that this generalization was true prior …
"Were the Acadians/Cajuns (really) "devout Catholics
For almost three centuries the Acadians of Acadia and their Cajun descendants in Louisiana have been described as "devout Catholics." Unfortunately, anyone who searches for evidence of this long-standing stereotype, either in the historical or ethnographic literature, finds that such evidence is simply not there. Given this problem, my goal in this article is to merge feminist theory with the few bits and pieces of information that we do have abo…
The Debate over a Crypto-Jewish Presence in New Mexico: The Role of Ethnographic Allegory and Orientalism
Since the 1970s, an increasing number of Hispanics in the Southwest have claimed descent from Sephardic crypto-Jews who settled in that area centuries ago to escape the Inquisition. Although these claims were generally received sympathetically by scholars and scholarly journals, serious doubts about these claims have now been raised in the popular media. One goal of the present article is to provide a balanced overview of the debate as it now sta…
Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion
The study of pre-19th-century religion in Ireland has been dominated by a model which sees the extended pilgrimages and rituals performed at holy wells as remnants of an archaic, pagan tradition. The author of this study argues these rites were not ancient, but arose in the wake of the Reformation as ordinary Catholics attempted to merge ideas imported from Counter-Reformation Europe with distinctively Irish traditions. The variant that resulted …
Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion
Journal Article Irish Pilgrimage — Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion, Michael P. Carroll. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 226pp. $38.00 Get access Gareth Higgins Gareth Higgins School of Sociology & Social Policy Queen's University, Belfast Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 62, Issue 2, Summer 2001, Pages 263–264, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712459 Publi…
Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion
The Distancing of Emotion in Ritual [and Comments and Reply]
There is an ambivalence toward ritual in social science. On the one hand, it is seen as immensely valuable to the individual and to society. On the other hand, there is an underlying feeling that ritual is impotent. This paper presents a theory of the distancing of emotion which integrates the positive and negative orientations toward ritual. The theory links ritual to the process of catharsis of repressed emotion, which subsumes the positive ori…
Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and the trickster: A New Perspective Upon an Old Problem
Central to Lévi-Strauss's well-known analysis of the trickster figure in North American mythology is an association between the trickster and the animal category "carrion-eater." A review of the major tricksters in North America indicates that this association is present in one case (Raven), uncertain in the second (Coyote), and demonstrably absent in the case of other major trickster figures (such as the Algonquian Nanabush) who - if anything-ar…
Revitalization Movements and Social Structure: Some Quantitative Tests
After reviewing some of the methodological difficulties which have faced investigators trying to investigate the rise of revitalization movements, the methodological advantages of studying the acceptance of the Ghost Dance (circa 1889) by North American Indians are delineated. These advantages are: (1) a relatively large number of tribes (N=37) were all exposed to what was more or iess the same revitalization movement; (2) information on the degr…
The Trickster as Selfish-Buffoon and Culture Hero
Leach, Genesis, and structural analysis: A Critical Evaluation
The first half of the article critically evaluates Leach's classic analysis of the Genesis myth. The two primary hypotheses advanced by Leach are (1) that Genesis proceeds by introducing oppositions and by then introducing mediating concepts, and (2) that the two Creation stories and the Cain and Abel story are in many ways structurally equivalent. A comparison of his arguments with the text of Genesis, however, indicates that although there is m…
Freud on Homosexuality and the Super-Ego: Some Cross-Cultural Tests1
Cross-cultural data that have recently become available make it possible to test several hypotheses derivable from Freud's theories relating to male homosexuality and the development of the super-ego. These hypotheses are (1) relatively little father-son contact during early childhood increases the probability of homosexuality; (2) under a condition of relatively high father contact, increased sexual attachment to the mother decreases the probabi…
Lévi-Strauss on the Oedipus Myth: A Reconsideration
The first half of the article presents a critique of Lévi-Strauss' well-known analysis of the Oedipus myth. A consideration of Greek beliefs suggests that Lévi-Strauss is incorrect in tying certain events in that myth to the "overvaluation of blood relations" and in asserting that the myth is concerned with the "affirmation/denial of man's autochthonous origins." The second half of the article presents a different structural analysis of the entir…
Who now reads Parsons and Bales: Casting a critical eye on the “gendered styles of caregiving” literature
The Incomplete Revolution: Theorizing Gender When Studying Men Who Provide Care to Aging Parents
In a 1985 article, Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne argued that the tendency to treat 'gender' as an unproblematized dichotomous variable functioned to contain feminist influence in sociology. Although there has clearly been a revolution in gender studies since that time, there are still whole areas of sociological investigation where this revolution is at best incomplete. One such area involves the literature on the care that adult children provi…
World Religions” in Introductory Sociology Textbooks: In Search of the Sociology
A section on “world religions” (WRs) is now routinely included in the religion chapters of introductory sociology textbooks. Looking carefully at these WR sections, however, two things seem puzzling. The first is that the criteria for defining a WR varies considerably from textbook to textbook; the second is that these WRs sections contain little or no sociology. These puzzles are resolved, however, once we understand that under the guise of prom…
What Evicting Grizzly Bear Spirit Does (and Doesn't) Tell Us about Indigenous "Religion" and Indigenous Rights
The Canadian Supreme Court's (2017) decision in Ktunaxa First Nation v. British Columbia is instructive because it demonstrates the continuing incompatibility of what religion "means" in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, respectively. There are, however, additional lessons to be learned by looking carefully at an aspect of this case that troubled many non-Indigenous commentators, namely, that much of the Ktunaxa claim seemed to rest …
Praying the Rosary: The Anal-Erotic Origins of a Popular Catholic Devotion
In the opinion of early commentators like Thurston (1900a), saying the was for centuries the single most popular of all the popular devotions in the Roman Catholic world. Even as recently as the 1970's, a survey conducted among a national sample of U.S. Catholics found that 36% of those surveyed had prayed the rosary in the preceding 30 days. At least until recently, it was a fairly common practice for rosary beads to be entwined around the finge…
A Structuralist Exercise: The problem of Moses' name
The Virgin Mary at LaSalette and Lourdes: Whom Did the Children See
Despite the continuing importance of Marian apparitions within the Roman Catholic Mary Cult, few scholars have been concerned with explaining why these apparitions appear to some individuals and not to others. This article explores this question by considering in detail two particular Marian apparitions: the apparition seen by Maximin Giraud at LaSalette, France in 1846 and the apparition seen by Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France in 1858. W…
Visions of the Virgin Mary: The Effect of Family Structures on Marian Apparitions
Following a brief review of recent literature dealing with the Mary cult, this article focuses on one aspect of that cult: Marian apparitions. Investigation of 50 well-documented apparitions of the Virgin Mary between 1100-1896 and this indicates that 1) Marian apparitions are as likely to occur to males as females; 2) seers are likely to be sexually mature individuals who lack obvious sexual partners; and 3) Italy has always accounted for a disp…
A New Look at Freud on Myth: Reanalyzing the Star-Husband Tale
Upstart theories and early American religiosity: A reassessment
Attempts to assess the theory of religious economies developed by Rodney Stark and his associates have generated an enormous secondary literature. For Stark himself, one beneficial effect has been a new paradigm in the study of religion that gives more emphasis to the social than to the psychological. A case is made here that key assertions in the theory have been falsified, that disconfirming evidence has been ‘explained away’ rather than explai…
Allomotifs and the Psychoanalytic Study of Folk Narratives: Another Look at ‘The Roommate's Death’
OVER the past two decades or so, folklorists have paid increasing attention to a form of oral narrative that circulates widely in modern industrialized societies. Such narratives are most often called 'contemporary legends' though the labels 'urban legends', 'urban belief legends', 'modern migratory legends', 'mercantile legends' (and others) have also been used. Whatever the label, these stories are localized in a setting familiar to those telli…
The Castrated Boy: ’ Another Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Study of Urban Legends
OVER the past decade folklorists have increasingly turned their attention to the study of urban legends.' These are stories which circulate widely in industrialized societies, which are believed to be true by those who pass them on, which are usually localized in a place familiar to the teller, and which-upon investigation-almost always prove impossible to verify. A good many of them seem to be told as much for entertainment as anything else, and…
One more time: Leviticus revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Myth, Methodology, and Mathematics: Rorschach in the Trobriands
Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History
The rationale for this collection of essays stems from a historiographical incongruity described by R. Scott Appleby in the concluding chapter. On the one hand, Catholics have been a powerful presence in modern life in the United States. After all, Appleby points out, they are “the nation's largest religious body”; “constitute nearly one quarter of the American population”; “have built powerful political machines” in several major cities; have cr…
Rodney Stark's One True Vision: Retrograde Historiography and the Academic Study of Religion
Although Rodney Stark is best known for his work on religious economies, he has recently turned his attention to the social effects of monotheism. If we look carefully on the theoretical trajectory evident in this recent work, what we find is a social-evolutionary approach to religion that was prevalent in the 19th century, but long ago assumed by most academics to be discredited. Furthermore, as becomes increasingly evident going through this se…
Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews
How the Irish Became Protestant in America
It often comes as a surprise to learn that most contemporary Americans who think of themselves as "Irish" are, in fact, Protestant, not Catholic. While commentators generally agree that these Protestant Irish-Americans are descended mainly from the Irish who settled in the United States prior to the Famine, the story of how theybecamethe Protestants they are is-this article argues-more complicated than first appears. To understand that story, how…
On Bartlett's Psychoanalytic Views
Considerations on the Analysis of Variance Paradigm in Sociology
Applying Heider's Theory of Cognitive Balance to Claude Levi-Strauss
It showed that the presence in a given society of any one of the sentiment patterns predicted by Levi-Strauss follows as a logical consequence of Heider's theory only on the assumption that the relation between father and mother's brother-a relation not originally considered by Levi-Strauss -is negative. While this argument cannot be directly tested, due to the unavailability of the needed data, two hypotheses were derived which provided indirect…
The Effects of the Functionalist Paradigm Upon the Perception of Ethnographic Data
Engels on the Subjugation of Women: Some Cross-Cultural Tests
Revitalization Movements and Social Structure: Some Quantitative Tests
After reviewing some of the methodological difficulties which have faced investigators trying to investigate the rise of revitalization movements, the methodological advantages of studying the acceptance of the Ghost Dance (circa 1889) by North American Indians are delineated. These advantages are: (1) a relatively large number of tribes (N=37) were all exposed to what was more or iess the same revitalization movement; (2) information on the degr…
Reply to Brown
On Aronoff and Crano's Re-Examination of the Cross-Cultural Principles of Task Segregation and Sex Role Differentiation in the Nuclear Family
Of Atlantis and Ancient Astronauts: A Structural Study of Two Modern Myths
The Distancing of Emotion in Ritual [and Comments and Reply]
There is an ambivalence toward ritual in social science. On the one hand, it is seen as immensely valuable to the individual and to society. On the other hand, there is an underlying feeling that ritual is impotent. This paper presents a theory of the distancing of emotion which integrates the positive and negative orientations toward ritual. The theory links ritual to the process of catharsis of repressed emotion, which subsumes the positive ori…
Leach, Genesis, and structural analysis: A Critical Evaluation
The first half of the article critically evaluates Leach's classic analysis of the Genesis myth. The two primary hypotheses advanced by Leach are (1) that Genesis proceeds by introducing oppositions and by then introducing mediating concepts, and (2) that the two Creation stories and the Cain and Abel story are in many ways structurally equivalent. A comparison of his arguments with the text of Genesis, however, indicates that although there is m…
Putting Lévi-Strauss, Festinger, Heider and Noah into the Same Boat or Some Social Psychological Contributions to the Structural Study of Myth
This article attempts to resolve certain ambiguities within Lévi-Strauss's structuralist approach to myth by using the theory of cognitive dissonance to clarify the concept 'opposition' and Heiderian social psychology to specify a procedure whereby a myth can be decomposed into its constituents units. The value of the refinements suggested here is illustrated through structural analyses of the Biblical account of the Flood and of Lévi-Strauses th…
Freud on Homosexuality and the Super-Ego: Some Cross-Cultural Tests1
Cross-cultural data that have recently become available make it possible to test several hypotheses derivable from Freud's theories relating to male homosexuality and the development of the super-ego. These hypotheses are (1) relatively little father-son contact during early childhood increases the probability of homosexuality; (2) under a condition of relatively high father contact, increased sexual attachment to the mother decreases the probabi…
The Savage Bind: Lévi-Strauss' Myth Analysis and Anglophone Social Science
One more time: Leviticus revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Myth, Methodology, and Mathematics: Rorschach in the Trobriands
Lévi-Strauss on the Oedipus Myth: A Reconsideration
The first half of the article presents a critique of Lévi-Strauss' well-known analysis of the Oedipus myth. A consideration of Greek beliefs suggests that Lévi-Strauss is incorrect in tying certain events in that myth to the "overvaluation of blood relations" and in asserting that the myth is concerned with the "affirmation/denial of man's autochthonous origins." The second half of the article presents a different structural analysis of the entir…
Lévi-Strauss on Art: A Reconsideration
Critique de l'hypothese avancee par Levi-Strauss sur le rapport entre la structure de l'art et la structure sociale des Caduveo d'Amerique du Sud. L'A. propose une revision de l'hypothese de Levi-Strauss et procede ensuite a l'application de cette hypothese aux blasons produits par une certaine procedure heraldique qui a donne en France et en Angleterre des formes presque identiques a celles des Caduveo
Rejoinder to Landsman
The Sex of Our Gods
A New Look at Freud on Myth: Reanalyzing the Star-Husband Tale
Lévi-Strauss on Art: A Reconsideration
The Gap between Male and Female Income in Canada
A structuralist looks at chess
What's in a Name
Sociology (56 works) · Philosophy (47 works) · History (42 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Art (27 works) · Psychoanalysis (20 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · History (18 works) · Law (17 works)