P A Mellor
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3493 |
|---|---|
| NOME | P A Mellor |
| PRENOMES | P A |
| SOBRENOME | Mellor |
| ASSINATURA | MELLOR P A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6954-4442 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 356 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1991 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Social character, interdependence, and the dualities of other-directedness
David Riesman's exploration of the other-directed characterological form, suited to corporate capitalism and the rise of the service sector, became one of the most influential sociological analyses of the twentieth century. Yet sociologists interested in the contemporary fate of those dispositional qualities suited to mutual adjustment confront a paradox: why, in an age of increasing interdependencies apparently conducive to the sustenance of oth…
Edgework, Uncertainty, and Social Character
This article proposes a novel conceptual understanding of 'edgework' - a term denoting the voluntary embrace of risk - by drawing on the long-standing sociological tradition of character studies. In doing so, it addresses the paradox that while first-generation research into high-risk leisure suggested that these activities provided identity-affirming escapes from bureaucratised capitalism, second-generation writings argued that edgework exists i…
The Fate of Social Character in an Age of Uncertainty
This article develops the long-standing sociological tradition of 'character studies', arguing that the accelerated change and associated uncertainties central to late modern life have been accompanied by what we refer to as a new opportunity-directed form of individuality. Engaging with Sayer's agenda-setting return to the subject, we acknowledge the ideological uses to which the promotion of this characterological form may be put, but argue tha…
Arbitrage, uncertainty and the new ethos of capitalism
This paper examines the arbitrageur as a figure who both embodies the new ethos of uncertainty central to 'financialized' capitalism, and exemplifies the issues of ethics and innovation raised by those who now personify what Weber called the 'devotion to the calling of making money'. We begin by providing a brief background to financial 'abstraction' in the economy, and the issues of dissimulation with which this has been associated, before sugge…
For a Sociology of Deceit
Deceit occupies a significant role in historical conceptualizations of social order, but dominant approaches to the subject are limited by the normative assumptions and conceptions of agency and structure on which they rest. This article suggests that renewed sociological engagement with deceit is overdue and can illuminate the 'situational logics of opportunity' within modernity (Archer, 2010). Focusing on the contemporary era, and building upon…
Sociology of the Sacred
Drawing on classical and contemporary social theory, Sociology of the Sacred presents a bold and original account of how interactions between religious and secular forms of the sacred underpin major conflicts in the world today, and illuminate broader patterns of social and cultural change inherent to global modernity. It demonstrates: * How the bodily capacities help religions adapt to social change but also facilitate their internal transformat…
Re-conceptualising the religious habitus
The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional concepti…
Re-Conceptualizing Sport as a Sacred Phenomenon
Sociological studies of sport have established their subject matter as significant to a wide range of sociocultural concerns. Despite a broad consensus about its global importance, however, the reasons for the particular, even ‘extraordinary’, societal importance of sport today remain deeply contested. Most studies account for it by highlighting its entanglement within a range of secular phenomena including state building, rationalization, biopol…
Making things sacred
The sociological importance attributed to 'the sacred' has varied historically as theorists have sought to explain the relationship between religion and early capitalism, the rise of twentieth-century secularization processes, the profusion of nationalism in post-Soviet societies, and the recent global upsurge in religious movements. Paradoxically, however, sociology's concern with the social significance of the sacred has not been accompanied by…
Retheorising Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion
In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the po…
The Religious Habitus
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Charisma, Rationalization, and Technological Culture Emotions, Symbols, and Rituals Religion as Habitus Conclusion Bibliography
Body pedagogics and the religious habitus
Sociological theory has been central to the modern study of religion. In the face of the global resurgence of religious phenomena, however, and the challenge this has presented for the assumptions that characterised much twentieth century sociology, there is a need for new theoretical models to make sense of religion today. This paper contributes to this task by building upon Durkheim's suggestion that religious social facts become fully efficaci…
Saved from pain or saved through pain? Modernity, instrumentalization and the religious use of pain as a body technique
Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain - by situating it aga…
Sociology and the Problem of Eroticism
Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when religion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This ar ticle examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructiv…
The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together to provide authoritative exposition of how history s most important philosophical thinkers from antiquity to the present day- have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Volume 4 comprises an introduction, presenting an overview of Nineteenth-Century philosophy of religion, and a series of essays on Ninetee…
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) is, along with Max Weber, unquestionably one of the two most important ‘founding figures’ of sociology, as well as a major influence on contemporary sociologies of religion, culture and society. Outside sociology, however, he also had a huge impact on anthropology, social psychology and criminology, as well as various branches of philosophy. Born in Épinal, France, he grew up in the Jewish community of Alsace-Lorraine a…
Cultures of Embodied Experience
Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between h…
Religion, Realism and Social Theory
This text challenges those contemporary sociologists who argue that the notion of 'society' is an outmoded basis for sociological analysis and instead revitalizes the idea that sociology is truly 'the study of society'
Orientalism, representation and religion
Said's Orientalism has been called an ‘epoch-making’ and ‘paradigm constitutive’ book. While it undoubtedly caused a stir on its appearance and proved an important influence upon post-colonial studies and other developments in literary and cultural theory, a careful re-reading of it reveals a deeply flawed work that offers a confused analysis of human representations and realities, a highly selective and partial engagement with Western and Middle…
Religion, Culture and Society in the 'Information Age
In some forms of sociology, “culture” has come to replace “society” as the central object of study. This has encouraged an epistemological relativism that overrides a proper engagement with human ontology, while it has also allowed for the development of forms of reductionism where culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. Some influential contemporary accounts of the “information age” exhibit bo…
The Sociological Ambition
Shilling and Mellor argue that classical and contemporary social theories must be studied in relation to the ambition that shaped and established sociology from its earliest days as a scientific discipline
Beyond the Body
Beyond the Body presents a new and sophisticated approach to death, dying and bereavement, and the sociology of the body. The authors challenge existing theories that put the body at the centre of identity. They go 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing. Chapters draw together a wide range of empirical data, including cross-cultural case studies and fieldwork to…
Rational Choice or Sacred Contagion? “Rationality”, “Non-rationality” and Religion
Drawing from the utilitarian tradition of economics to propose the leanest formal theoretical models for sociology, “rational choice theory” rejects the Durkheimian interest in society as a reality transcendent of the individual in favour of a revitalization of individualist and rationalist conceptualizations of social order. This theory has, arguably, had one of its strongest substantive applications within the sociology of religion, though Durk…
Re-Forming the Body
Re-Forming the Body
Journal Article Reforming the Body, by Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling. London: Sage Publications, 234 pp. $75.00, $26.95 (pbk) Get access R. Marie Griffith R. Marie Griffith Princeton University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 60, Issue 2, Summer 1999, Pages 200–201, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711750 Published: 01 July 1999
Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death
Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed…
Durkheim, Morality and Modernity
The issue of morality has lost its position of importance within the discipline, yet a growing number of sociologists interested in the ambivalent character of (post) modernity have returned to this subject in recent years. This article examines the revival of interest in morality and suggests it would benefit by engaging creatively with Durkheim's writings on homo duplex, collective effervescence, and the social construction of moral orders. Aft…
Cultures of Embodied Experience
Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between h…
Retheorising Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion
In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the po…
Embodiment, Structuration Theory and Modernity
Body pedagogics and the religious habitus
Sociological theory has been central to the modern study of religion. In the face of the global resurgence of religious phenomena, however, and the challenge this has presented for the assumptions that characterised much twentieth century sociology, there is a need for new theoretical models to make sense of religion today. This paper contributes to this task by building upon Durkheim's suggestion that religious social facts become fully efficaci…
Death in High Modernity
Re-conceptualising the religious habitus
The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional concepti…
Re-Conceptualizing Sport as a Sacred Phenomenon
Sociological studies of sport have established their subject matter as significant to a wide range of sociocultural concerns. Despite a broad consensus about its global importance, however, the reasons for the particular, even ‘extraordinary’, societal importance of sport today remain deeply contested. Most studies account for it by highlighting its entanglement within a range of secular phenomena including state building, rationalization, biopol…
For a Sociology of Deceit
Deceit occupies a significant role in historical conceptualizations of social order, but dominant approaches to the subject are limited by the normative assumptions and conceptions of agency and structure on which they rest. This article suggests that renewed sociological engagement with deceit is overdue and can illuminate the 'situational logics of opportunity' within modernity (Archer, 2010). Focusing on the contemporary era, and building upon…
Saved from pain or saved through pain? Modernity, instrumentalization and the religious use of pain as a body technique
Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain - by situating it aga…
Arbitrage, uncertainty and the new ethos of capitalism
This paper examines the arbitrageur as a figure who both embodies the new ethos of uncertainty central to 'financialized' capitalism, and exemplifies the issues of ethics and innovation raised by those who now personify what Weber called the 'devotion to the calling of making money'. We begin by providing a brief background to financial 'abstraction' in the economy, and the issues of dissimulation with which this has been associated, before sugge…
Orientalism, representation and religion
Said's Orientalism has been called an ‘epoch-making’ and ‘paradigm constitutive’ book. While it undoubtedly caused a stir on its appearance and proved an important influence upon post-colonial studies and other developments in literary and cultural theory, a careful re-reading of it reveals a deeply flawed work that offers a confused analysis of human representations and realities, a highly selective and partial engagement with Western and Middle…
Protestant Buddhism
The adoption of Buddhist religious forms by English people does not entail such a radical break with western structures and influences as has often been envisaged. Individuals may take personal decisions to become Buddhists, but Christian discourses and forms of life continue to have an observable influence on English Buddhism. The significance of the person is a useful point at which to begin assessing these continuities between English Buddhism…
The Fate of Social Character in an Age of Uncertainty
This article develops the long-standing sociological tradition of 'character studies', arguing that the accelerated change and associated uncertainties central to late modern life have been accompanied by what we refer to as a new opportunity-directed form of individuality. Engaging with Sayer's agenda-setting return to the subject, we acknowledge the ideological uses to which the promotion of this characterological form may be put, but argue tha…
Sociology and the Problem of Eroticism
Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when religion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This ar ticle examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructiv…
Reflexive modernity and the religious body
There are a growing number of attempts to reconsider the nature and role of contemporary religion with reference to the issues of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’. Against these, it is suggested here that efforts to reconstruct the study of religion within the framework of an assumption that we are entering a postmodern social order would be fundamentally misconceived. While the emergence of features within the present social order are acknowl…
Edgework, Uncertainty, and Social Character
This article proposes a novel conceptual understanding of 'edgework' - a term denoting the voluntary embrace of risk - by drawing on the long-standing sociological tradition of character studies. In doing so, it addresses the paradox that while first-generation research into high-risk leisure suggested that these activities provided identity-affirming escapes from bureaucratised capitalism, second-generation writings argued that edgework exists i…
Making things sacred
The sociological importance attributed to 'the sacred' has varied historically as theorists have sought to explain the relationship between religion and early capitalism, the rise of twentieth-century secularization processes, the profusion of nationalism in post-Soviet societies, and the recent global upsurge in religious movements. Paradoxically, however, sociology's concern with the social significance of the sacred has not been accompanied by…
Religion, Culture and Society in the 'Information Age
In some forms of sociology, “culture” has come to replace “society” as the central object of study. This has encouraged an epistemological relativism that overrides a proper engagement with human ontology, while it has also allowed for the development of forms of reductionism where culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. Some influential contemporary accounts of the “information age” exhibit bo…
Self and Suffering
In a study of the religious significance of food to medieval woman, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that the ascetic practices embraced by these women are signs of a commitment to explore the religious potentialities of the body rather than being indications of a hostile attitude to the flesh. She comments that belief in the ‘salvific potential of suffering flesh (both our's and God's)’ differentiates Christianity from other world religions, since i…
Protestant Buddhism
The adoption of Buddhist religious forms by English people does not entail such a radical break with western structures and influences as has often been envisaged. Individuals may take personal decisions to become Buddhists, but Christian discourses and forms of life continue to have an observable influence on English Buddhism. The significance of the person is a useful point at which to begin assessing these continuities between English Buddhism…
The FWBO and tradition
Death in High Modernity
Reflexive Traditions
The following discussion is an attempt to make an initial assessment of the value to Religious Studies of certain aspects of the social theory of Anthony Giddens. I suggest that debates centred on the nature of ‘high’ or ‘late’ modernity have substantial implications for the study of contemporary religion. The theoretical work of Giddens encourages us to reconsider the nature of ‘tradition’ as it is expressed and deployed in modern religious cont…
Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death
Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed…
Reflexive modernity and the religious body
There are a growing number of attempts to reconsider the nature and role of contemporary religion with reference to the issues of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’. Against these, it is suggested here that efforts to reconstruct the study of religion within the framework of an assumption that we are entering a postmodern social order would be fundamentally misconceived. While the emergence of features within the present social order are acknowl…
Embodiment, Structuration Theory and Modernity
Lorsque l'on jette de l'huile sur le feu ardent
Throughout much of the 20th century, sociology has sought to uncouple religious phenomena from any enduring or foundational relationship with patterns of human sociality. Nevertheless, in recent years, notions of a “return of the sacred” are now increasingly widespread. We suggest that such notions offer an opportunity to reflect again upon the character of modernity and, more broadly, the constitution of human societies by looking at the relatio…
Durkheim, Morality and Modernity
The issue of morality has lost its position of importance within the discipline, yet a growing number of sociologists interested in the ambivalent character of (post) modernity have returned to this subject in recent years. This article examines the revival of interest in morality and suggests it would benefit by engaging creatively with Durkheim's writings on homo duplex, collective effervescence, and the social construction of moral orders. Aft…
Re-Forming the Body
Re-Forming the Body
Journal Article Reforming the Body, by Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling. London: Sage Publications, 234 pp. $75.00, $26.95 (pbk) Get access R. Marie Griffith R. Marie Griffith Princeton University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 60, Issue 2, Summer 1999, Pages 200–201, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711750 Published: 01 July 1999
Mauss
Rational Choice or Sacred Contagion? “Rationality”, “Non-rationality” and Religion
Drawing from the utilitarian tradition of economics to propose the leanest formal theoretical models for sociology, “rational choice theory” rejects the Durkheimian interest in society as a reality transcendent of the individual in favour of a revitalization of individualist and rationalist conceptualizations of social order. This theory has, arguably, had one of its strongest substantive applications within the sociology of religion, though Durk…
The Sociological Ambition
Shilling and Mellor argue that classical and contemporary social theories must be studied in relation to the ambition that shaped and established sociology from its earliest days as a scientific discipline
Beyond the Body
Beyond the Body presents a new and sophisticated approach to death, dying and bereavement, and the sociology of the body. The authors challenge existing theories that put the body at the centre of identity. They go 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing. Chapters draw together a wide range of empirical data, including cross-cultural case studies and fieldwork to…
Religion, Realism and Social Theory
This text challenges those contemporary sociologists who argue that the notion of 'society' is an outmoded basis for sociological analysis and instead revitalizes the idea that sociology is truly 'the study of society'
Orientalism, representation and religion
Said's Orientalism has been called an ‘epoch-making’ and ‘paradigm constitutive’ book. While it undoubtedly caused a stir on its appearance and proved an important influence upon post-colonial studies and other developments in literary and cultural theory, a careful re-reading of it reveals a deeply flawed work that offers a confused analysis of human representations and realities, a highly selective and partial engagement with Western and Middle…
Religion, Culture and Society in the 'Information Age
In some forms of sociology, “culture” has come to replace “society” as the central object of study. This has encouraged an epistemological relativism that overrides a proper engagement with human ontology, while it has also allowed for the development of forms of reductionism where culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. Some influential contemporary accounts of the “information age” exhibit bo…
Cultures of Embodied Experience
Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between h…
The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together to provide authoritative exposition of how history s most important philosophical thinkers from antiquity to the present day- have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Volume 4 comprises an introduction, presenting an overview of Nineteenth-Century philosophy of religion, and a series of essays on Ninetee…
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) is, along with Max Weber, unquestionably one of the two most important ‘founding figures’ of sociology, as well as a major influence on contemporary sociologies of religion, culture and society. Outside sociology, however, he also had a huge impact on anthropology, social psychology and criminology, as well as various branches of philosophy. Born in Épinal, France, he grew up in the Jewish community of Alsace-Lorraine a…
The Religious Habitus
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Charisma, Rationalization, and Technological Culture Emotions, Symbols, and Rituals Religion as Habitus Conclusion Bibliography
Body pedagogics and the religious habitus
Sociological theory has been central to the modern study of religion. In the face of the global resurgence of religious phenomena, however, and the challenge this has presented for the assumptions that characterised much twentieth century sociology, there is a need for new theoretical models to make sense of religion today. This paper contributes to this task by building upon Durkheim's suggestion that religious social facts become fully efficaci…
Saved from pain or saved through pain? Modernity, instrumentalization and the religious use of pain as a body technique
Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain - by situating it aga…
Sociology (32 obras) · Epistemology (30 obras) · Philosophy (29 obras) · Social science (17 obras) · Aesthetics (16 obras) · Religion and Society Interactions (16 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Modernity (12 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Psychology (10 obras)