Naturalisation, as it is called in political terms, or, more comprehensively, assimilation is a complex process of classification which has of course more than one end. […] Making citizens is an outlet for the energy of many groups of the native born. When the outlet is denied them, when foreigners are considered too disparate for assimilation to become possible or when immigrants have resisted assimilation … [ Read more ]
Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subject: Immigration
Self-control is a means to controlling other people. So is self-classification. The feeling of having our class back of us gives us self-assurance… we enhance our sense of power. Similarly, by declassifying or demoting others or by suspending their regular classification, so to speak, we get a pleasurable sense of our own power.
Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Psychology | Behavior
Classification, [Elsie Clews] Parsons observes, is not just what we do with others but what we do with ourselves in our struggle for belonging and self-inclusion — a struggle that sometimes metastasizes into a tendency toward punitive exclusion directed at those we place outside the boundaries of our self-elected classifications.
Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste is in all classes a manifestation of the will to power.
Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subjects: Concepts, Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Power
The preeminent function of social classification appears therefore to be social rule… Classification is nine-tenths of subjection. Indeed to rule over another successfully you have only to see to it that he keeps his place — his place as a male, her place as a female, his or her place as a junior, as a subject or servant or social “inferior” of any kind, as … [ Read more ]
Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]
Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology