This article discusses the transformations in Israeli football over the last two decades, exploring the top-down and bottom-up motivations present in local football and characterizing foreign practices as more Western, or even more ‘civilized’, as Norbert Elias would describe it. Yet, the transformations of English and European football over the last three decades suggest that ‘Western’ is not so much a geographic term as it is a political, moral, and social status, one requiring English, European, and Israeli football to make dedicated political and cultural investments in numerous arenas.
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Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker
Violence and Medieval England
Sara M. Butler
medievalists, the more usual complaint is the seemingly natural conflation between “medieval” and “barbaric.” In large part, this is because Elias, while new to Pinker, is certainly not new to historians. 35 Elias’s theory of the civilizing process is the
Pacifying the Planet
Norbert Elias on Globalization
Roger Deacon
Globalization presages an important new stage in the centuries-old 'civilizing process,' which Norbert Elias analyzed with such clarity and in such depth. At the root of the fundamental transformations of our world of nation-states are combined integrating and disintegrating tendencies, or centralization and individualization, which manifest themselves in a steady monopolization of the means of violence and taxation, an interventionist human rights discourse, and war as a means of democratizing and pacifying the planet. Elias' 'historical social psychological' approach offers new categories of analysis with which to both explain the effects of globalization and indicate how international interdependence fosters both control and resistance, both democratization and radicalization, and both integration and disintegration.
The Canonization of Norbert Élias in France
A Critical Perspective
Daniel Gordon
If social science were a sport, Norbert Elias (1897-1990) would receive the award for comeback of the century. He was undistinguished during much of his career: an interminable graduate student in Weimar Germany; a disregarded refugee in Paris in 1933-1935; a prisoner in a British camp for aliens in 1940; an adjunct in adult-education centers during the immediate postwar years in London; a prey to writer’s block with no publications in the 1940s and only a few articles in the 1950s and 1960s. Elias finally got a full-time teaching job at Leicester University in 1954. The extent of his obscurity is evident from an incident at the meeting of the International Sociological Association in 1956. When a Dutch sociologist, Johan Goudsblom, asked to be introduced to him, Elias was astonished: It was the first time anyone had made such a request. In fact, it was the first time Elias had met anyone outside of his personal circle who had read The Civilizing Process.
Introduction
History, Violence, and Steven Pinker
Mark S. Micale and Philip Dwyer
point of departure for this new historical initiative. In fact, Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature appears second only to Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process in the frequency of its citation. 6 Given the sweeping breadth of its coverage, its
Aro Velmet and Rachel Kantrowitz
embraced and remade this civilizing process from within, working to counter institutionalized antisemitism, on the one hand, and capitalizing on the French assumption that they would prove valuable allies against a hostile Muslim majority, on the other hand
Randolph Roth
Endowment for the Humanities for their support. Notes 1 Pieter Spierenberg, A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); and Norbert N. Elias, The Civilizing Process , trans. E. Jephcott
Dances with Heads
Parasitic Mimesis and the Government of Savagery in Colonial East Timor
Ricardo Roque
civilizing process to savagery” traverses the colonial phenomenon. The latter is inconceivable without a “net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness that ensures civilization its savagery” (ibid.: xviii; see also
Whitewashing History
Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
Philip Dwyer
invention of human rights was the development of empathy, which led to a revolution in the ways in which humans interacted with one another. More than empathy, however, Pinker believes, à la Norbert Elias and the civilizing process, that it was the
The Complexity of History
Russia and Steven Pinker’s Thesis
Nancy Shields Kollmann
civilizing process,” and the decline in homicide rates. 1 Central to Pinker’s argument is the rise of a centralized state (“Leviathan”) that claimed a monopoly of violence and enforced it through policing and judicial punishment. Important here is that the