Social Respectability

This chapter explores the construction of class identity and respectability among Irish middle class women in the 120 years following the famine of 1845-50. It examines the factors that underlay social status, the social divides within and between classes, and the importance of religion, work and cleanliness in the self-image of individuals and groups.

Historians have brought attention to African American women's contributions to planning, specifically as it relates to housing and social service program delivery. This article builds upon that scholarship by adding the work of the Farmers' Improvement Society and its Women's Barnyard Auxiliary, African American mutual aid groups active and founded during the Progressive Era. This article foregrounds the contributions of this racial uplift group to planning practice and scholarship. Second, the article sheds light on the unique approach to planning rural, poor mutual aid groups employed. Finally, this article complicates popular assumptions about similar Progressive Era, ''Uplift Movement'' groups.

Feminist media researchers have demonstrated that television particularly provides a view of the world that influences the definition of who we are. At the same time class differences impact the readings of particular shows by women from different class positions. Focusing on how participants responded to selected television advertisements in ways that illuminate their reflexive positioning in respect of the new woman, this article examines the boundaries of identification described by middle class, urban, highly educated, professional women of Bangladesh. Respondents identified themselves as belonging to a group of independent, progressive and middle class women, identified as the new women of Bangladesh, whose composition of various cultural capitals able them to maintain their gendered and classed identities above other classes of women, as well as Western women. Although this research particularly focuses on construction and performance of middle class womanhoods, participants’ responses also address working class, upper class and Western womanhoods which are an integral part of their construction of class identity. As a form of cultural capital, respectability is central to where boundaries lie, what can be incorporated as aspects of participants’ lives and what remains within the realm of the non-respectable ‘other’ woman.  As I will demonstrate, this regulatory regime (Skeggs, 1997) transmutes and changes historically and in relation to specific social spaces where power is exercised and resisted.  Boundaries drawn between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ by the participants are based on three interrelated categories. Firstly, spatial boundaries of urban OVER rural and public AND private, whereby participants’ status as urban women was identified as superior to that of rural women, however in terms of public/private, participants maintaining both private domestic roles as well as having a job in the public sphere was identified as constitutive of middle class new womenness.  Secondly, Higher education OVER less education and bilingual OVER single language proficiency, whereby participants recognized higher education and proficiency in English as a part of the ‘self improvement project’ of middle class. Finally, participants drew professional boundaries between long term career OVER short term financial necessity and highly paid jobs OVER low paid jobs. Highly paid or highly respected jobs such as corporate sector jobs, medicine and teaching were identified as middle class careers while short term low paid jobs or not having a job entirely was identified as outside middle class new women’s disposition. I argue that respondents perform boundary work through sometimes separating the middle class from the working class, upper class and Western women’s practices; and at other times borrowing characteristics from working class and upper class women (family value) and Western women (independence and modernity). New womanhood is a product of and produce, class inequality and distinction in urban Bangladesh while at the same time is a strategy practiced by middle class women to gain increased agency and autonomy.

How might an African based knowledge critically cast doubt upon globally hegemonic notions and traditions in understanding and theorizing men and masculinities? This essay examines this question through a critical reading of what it may mean to be ‘an emerging adult man’. The essay privileged a critical understanding of how poverty, poor crop yields, and climate volatility shape constructions of ‘emergent adulthood’. Drawing on interviews with men from northwestern Ghana, findings suggest that emerging adult men are committed to their cultural obligations as heteronormative breadwinners, yet ‘emergent adulthood’ is complicated by status insecurity, vulnerabilities, and powerlessness. To negotiate emergent adulthood, informants combine migrating to Techiman and joining ‘boys boys’ to achieve social respect and recognition. To understand the meanings of emergent adulthood, I argue for analytical sophistication on multiple issues and daily struggles that encapsulate rural life.

A Postface on recognition
This is a Postface to a collective book on recognition and respect by sociologists and anthropologists, published in 2008. Both the book and this chapter (written in 2007) are in French.

Postface sur la reconnaissance
Ceci est une postface (rédigée en 2007) à un livre collectif sur la reconnaissance et le respect écrit par des sociologues et anthropologues, publié en 2008.

Although the first academic discussion of *augustales dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, after almost two centuries of excellent research, the difficulty to get a grip on ‘the’ *augustales remains. Most scholars agree on the basics: the title *augustalis (and all its 40 local variants found throughout the Roman Empire) refers to an honorary position in local society, mostly bestowed on wealthy freedmen who, because of their servile birth, could not partake in the official cursus honorum. The nomination itself, and the allotment of any further privileges or honours connected to it, was done by the city council. *Augustales were in every way the ‘odd duck’ of municipal life, taking up a hybrid position in local Roman society. Be it the yearly officers, those holding the title as an honorary token, or the former officers convening in associations, they are in between worlds, a group in social limbo: an elite formation, part of a servile world. The apparent need to find a single definition is one of the major difficulties that have plagued the research field. This project is a reaction against any attempt to amalgamate locally based institutions of the lower social strata. Instead of simplifying complex phenomena by labelling it with some all-purpose word, I endeavoured to trace subtle differences between individual *augustales expressed in epigraphy and appreciate these to the fullest. I used a corpus of seventeen hundred and eleven inscriptions from four hundred and fourteen cities. What we have, is research focussing on *augustales as a social structure, and detailed studies of local morphology and terminology. What we need, is a re-evaluation from the point of view of the *augustales and what their title meant for them. In five chapters, I covered many aspects of this *augustalitas in order to demonstrate the complexity of the phenomenon. Therefore, ‘integration’, ‘local development’, ‘differentiation’, and ‘visibility’ were crucial in this discussion. Where possible, I focussed on the individual *augustalis. In the chapter ‘Origin and Context’, a state of the art of some major discussions is given. This part aims to contextualise the origin of *augustales and the terminology used. It focuses, contrary to the rest of the discussion, on more general and institutional aspects: the potential predecessors or examples on which the *augustalitas was grafted, the genesis and raison d’être of *augustales the problems with the terminology used to indicate ‘the’ *augustales, the relevance and usefulness of the old honestiores-humiliores dichotomy and the plebs media debate. In the chapter on ‘Financial and Occupational Differentiation’ I discuss a number of expenditures and benefactions that express the wealth of *augustales, a proxy for their economic potential. Next, I focus on five aspects of the economic position of *augustales in Italy and Gaul; (1) How can occupational differentiation be used to further outline the complexity of the social world in which *augustales operated? (2) Trimalchio’s fictional life has been taken as a representation of the historical lives of former slaves. Despite the presence of this tradesman sevir augustalis in well-known literature, the research on their occupations is very scarce. (3) To outline the economic impact of *augustales, it is necessary to elaborate on the different sectors of the Roman economy. In which sectors are *augustales found most often? (4) Is there a differentiated geographical spread of both types of professional titles (profession and collegial membership)? Can we discern a geographically diverse inclination toward certain economic sectors? Two large commercial hubs were discussed more elaborately: the harbour city of Ostia and the capital city of Lugdunese Gaul, Lugdunum. (5) Are *augustales involved in the imperial and local annona frumentaria, the grain dole and -market? The chapter on ‘Respectability and Visibility’ discusses visibility techniques and different badges of honour. First, I focus on inscriptions listing names of yearly officers (so-called fasti), as well as hierarchical membership lists of the association (known as alba). A second section discusses ornamenta and insignia, ways in which *augustales could demonstrate their prominence in public. The final section discusses iconography on tombs of *augustales and how these inform us on professions in particular. Also, in some cities, buildings were identified as a schola or an aedes of the local *augustales. By becoming a part of the monumental structure of the city, these constructions dramatically enhanced the visibility of *augustales: the buildings were mostly situated on or close to the forum. The fifth chapter is devoted to social positioning, -differentiation and -mobility. How important was citizenship for *augustales? I also focussed on wealth, networks and trade routes, as well as on the importance of proximity to power, the apparitorial accensi and the summa honoraria. I ...

This article uses descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis of texts to examine the turn of middle class Egyptians to multiple religious projects during the early years (1976–1981) of the ‘Islamic Revival’ in Egypt. It draws on letters to the editor and fatwa requests of three Islamic magazines of differing ideological orientation (Brotherhood-Islamist, Salafi-Islamist and Statist) to produce a geographic and socioeconomic profile of the ‘popular participants’ in these magazines. Based on this extensive data, it explores how and why middle class Egyptians pursued ‘religious respectability’ through Islamic magazines and argues that they were formed and formed themselves as religious subjects at the intersection of growing urbanisation and literacy, state educational policies and competing projects of religious mobilisation. It then examines the specific issues of subjectivity formation, with particular attention to questions of public modesty, religious education and daily prayer.

This study is about how urban professional middle class Bangladeshi women, identified as the new women construct and perform fusion identities through embodiment practices. I argue they do so by negotiating, maintaining and contesting multiple embodiment norms that constitute their class identity. These include their personal preference in clothing practices which are influenced by their religion, culture and class, and the organizational aesthetic norms which they often have to negotiate with as part of their profession. New womenness is constructed through fusion clothing, which is termed as ‘smart’ dressing by participants. Smart clothing practice primarily mean the cleverness and/or knowledge of how to negotiate with various modes of embodiment norms in society, such as organizational aesthetic labour norms, with respondents personal taste which is derived of middle class Bengali cultural attires, religious clothing, sexualized clothing (Western) etc. New women conduct boundary work through finding a middle ground between their personal taste in clothing and the organizational aesthetic norms to find suitable clothing practice for specific occasions. Smart clothing is defined by the participants in two folds, firstly it means mixing two or more embodiment practices to find a suitable practice for a particular occasion. Thus it often means glamorization, with expensive designer clothes or materials, and Westernization, often understood in terms of sexualiation through tight fitting or revealing clothes, of Bengali cultural clothes such as the sari in a way that it meets the requirement of corporate organization’s aesthetic norm of stylized and Western attires, simultaneously meeting the new woman’s personal taste of comfortable cultural embodiment practice. Secondly, smart dressing also means context specific aesthetic practices, for instance although participants may prefer to wear cultural clothes such as the sari for family occasions, for multinational corporate business parties they choose to wear western attires to meet the organizational aesthetic labour norm. Thus smart clothing practices bridge together multiple aesthetic practices by personal taste and organizational norms and is used in different ways by different participants to maintain respectability.

New women use smart dressing is a constant dialogical system of embodying multiple different worlds together. Smart dressing is positioned at the boundary of multiple spaces and demonstrates flexible and heterogeneous qualities that participants use differently to acquire status through recognition across communities. Smart dressing dissolves boundaries of distinct disciplines, dispersing the binaries that continue to be reinforced through expectations of certain embodiment practices by organizations, class, culture and religion, yet simultaneously creating new ones. It enables new women to transcend core differences in interpretation and practice of embodiment norms in multiple class, cultural, religious and organization contexts. Thus I represent smart dressing as a boundary object, which different participants from different professions use differently in order to achieve a balance between their personal taste in embodiment and their organization’s aesthetic norms. Overall this paper emphasizes how smart clothing practices is important in understanding how embodiment practices as a cultural capital can acquire status and distinction for the new women in Bangladeshi society. However, their personal classed, cultural and religious understanding of embodied capital is often contrary to the aesthetic norms of their professional fields. I bring the various professions of the participants under scrutiny to study how different professional services are dominated by norms of aesthetics. Although new women are conscious of managing their embodied identities for their professions, they demonstrate a degree of agency to resist, change or adapt to organizational aesthetic labour norms and personal taste in embodiments.