Week 6 Flashcards
1
Q
Belief
A
- Anything that you personally think is true
- Single beliefs are combined with other interrelated belief into organized sets of belief systems… like religious doctrines and specific disciplines
- 2 kinds of relationships between belief systems and deviance: (1) belief systems as deviance and (2) belief systems as social typers of deviance
2
Q
Religion
A
- The foundation for dominant moral codes for most of history
- Dictated to followers by leaders and ‘experts
- Your religious beliefs may be considered to be deviant
- Your religious beliefs may provide you with a moral code that defines others as deviant… A social-typer of deviance
3
Q
Religion guides…
A
- Micro… our own individual behaviour + what/how we think about ourselves and others
- Macro… individual/social level, social institutions
4
Q
Deviant religions
A
- Historically, religious belief systems have been categorized using different typologies
- A religions place in the typology determined whether it was considered deviant
5
Q
Typologies
A
- Ecclesia… state religions, not considered deviant
- Churches… not ‘official religions of society but large, powerful religious groups (e.g. Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) well established, highly bureaucratized, not considered deviant usually
- Sects… smaller religious groups usually broken apart from larger churches, more rigid doctrine, require higher levels of commitment (e.g. Amish, Taliban), deviant in need of social control
- Cults… smallest, intense commitment, single leader, deviant in need of social control
6
Q
Sects
A
- Lower social status + members of marginalized groups drawn (reward comes in afterlife)
- Sects vary in requirements
- Level of tension experienced by a particular sect is determined by… magnitude of difference between sect & society, level of antagonism that sect feels abt society, extent to which sect separates itself
- Deviancy amplification can happen
7
Q
Cults
A
- Portrayed in the news media, ‘cult menace’ frame, constructs them as threatening and dangerous (moral panic)
- Played out in the deviance dance… the various means of social control of the deviant religions and the corresponding resistance to those means of control
8
Q
Controlling ‘deviant’ religions
A
- Universal declaration of human rights proclaims freedom of religious belief and practice as a right
- But this isn’t invincible cuz threats to public health, order + infringement on the rights of others give governments valid reasons to violate these freedoms
9
Q
Anti-cult movement
A
- Acting as moral entrepreneurs
- 1960s started as concerned parents, over time numerous professionals and researchers became involved in the anti-cult groups
- They only target specific religious groups
10
Q
Counter-cult movement
A
- Been around for more then a century
- Members are opposed to religious freedom itself (primarily conservative Christians)
- Their concern is ppl having the ‘wrong’ belief system + any religion that isn’t theirs is called a cult
11
Q
Media
A
- Sects and cults use media to convey messages but the media also frames them
- Cult narrative in entertainment frames cults in 5 ways… distinctive clothing, isolated areas, communes, delusional and highly visible
- This social control reinforces and maintains the othering of certain beliefs
12
Q
Governments
A
- Have power to create legislation + policies to destruct the nature of deviant religions
13
Q
Characteristics of destructive cults
A
- Leader places group above the law
- Leader doesn’t follow same rules as others
- Leader exerts control beyond religion
- ‘mind control’
- Group follows policy of deceiving outsiders
- Group based on apocalyptic vision
14
Q
Reisting a deviant label
A
- Religious groups may engage in resistance within the legal system
- Use the media to resist (impression management)
- Not from the groups but from academia (changed from traditional typologies to more open thinking… new religious movements or minority religious groups)
15
Q
Witch persecutions
A
- Religious and political interconnection
- Christian church governed + 100 000 witches were persecuted, killed
- Everything bad was blamed on them
- Most were women + were brutally tortured, also ppl who weren’t Christian, midwives or just anyone
16
Q
Malleus Maleficarum : the hammer of witches
A
- This document was used to create a massive, paranoid fueled moral panic
- The church printed documents for the educated people at the time (it told them how to identify and lead investigations for suspected witches
- All information was communicated by expert representatives
17
Q
Residential schooling
A
- Colonization, residential schooling to guarantee assimilation
18
Q
Victorian child-savers
A
- Essential to child welfare reforms, education, prohibition and many other government policies in Canada
- Social Gospel
- State’s responsibility to provide moral environment for kids but the lower class ppl were automatically considered immoral so most effort was directed there
19
Q
Science
A
- Is subjective
- Beliefs fall into 2 categories… (1)claims about the nature of reality + way world works, (2)ethical + moral claims embedded in scientific belief system
- Some are characteristics of science as a whole but others are specific to different disciplines
- Science has a social control function and is subject to social control itself to prevent deviance
20
Q
Science as deviance
A
Scientists can be socially typed in 2 ways…
1. Individual scientists may be socially types as deviant when they scientific misconduct
2. An entire discipline may be deviantized for being pseudoscience
21
Q
Scientific misconduct
A
- Practices unacceptable cuz they intentionally manipulate research outcomes (a lot in biomedical research)
22
Q
Extent of scientific misconduct
A
- Prevalence is difficult to determine + varies across different fields of study
- There are very low response rates in the research of this
- We can track the amount of retractions
23
Q
Explanations for scientific misconduct
A
- Bad apple/bad person theory… Deviant acts committed by scientists explained on individual factors, just few ‘ bad’ scientists, we need to find them and throw them out so they don’t spoil the barrel
- Iceberg theory… says misconduct is far more common than we might think + detected is just tip of the iceberg, scientists undergo a lot of pressure + they become deviant to do ‘better’
- Iceberg theory has used techniques of neutralization (helps scientists justify their actions), strain theory (gap between legitimized goals and access to legitimate means) and self-control theory
24
Q
Misconduct + corporatization of science
A
- Prevalence + reasons of scientific misconduct are influenced by ties with corporate industry
- Corporate funding and pressure (corrupt science for profit, litigation)
- Corporatization of science has encouraged the production of ignorance
25
Q
Controlling scientific misconduct
A
- Informal regulation : workplace gossip
- Formal regulation : legal action, lose their positions and credibility
- Preventative social control
26
Q
Pseudoscience
A
- An entire science can be socially typed as deviance when its belief system/technologies are called into question… become determined as not science at all
- Can be a continuum
- A science perceived as deviant at one time may become accepted science later, and this is some of the arguments they make for validity
- Media reproduces pseudoscientific beliefs
27
Q
Science as a social typer of deviance
A
- When claims to truth come from places of institutionalized power, those claims become institutionalized
- Ppl believe it cuz its experts, they rarely question the scientist
- Technocracy
- So social typing by science tends to be effective
28
Q
social Darwinism
A
- Just as biological species evolve over time, so do societies (indigenous ppl vs white European colonization)
- Turned into the science of eugenics, scientific theory took on the new method of justification for domination
- Biological developments used to support the argument that some social groups were more evolved than (and biologically superior to) others
29
Q
Eugenics
A
- Based on discourses of degeneracy and social reform
- Which groups were target of focus vary across nation (race vs. class, immigration, disability etc.)
- Sterilization in Alberta for feeble minded women, still happens w AIDS ‘at risk groups’
- Nazi Germany went real far
30
Q
Problem with eugenics
A
The problem with eugenics is to make such legal, social and economic adjustments that…
- A larger proportion of superior persons will have children than at present
- That the average number of offspring of each superior person will be greater than at present
- That the most inferior persons will have no children
- Other inferior persons will have fewer children than now
31
Q
Medicalization
A
- Medicalization of deviance and normality has reached level of human genome and resulted in debates over genetic technologies (some call this new eugenics)
- Draw attention to dangers of labelling certain biological characteristics as superior vs. inferior
- UN prohibits human cloning and provides guidelines for genetic science
Just cuz technology available doesn’t mean it should be used
