Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the origin of religion still fires the sociological imagination. By weaving together notions of evolutionism, totemism and the Australian clan
structure, Durkheim turned the religious world around to a sociological perspective with his commanding statement that religion originally sprung from some pre-existing social form, with human sociality the trigger for notions of the sacred and that effervescent feeling of a higher far-reaching power. Are the questions Durkheim asked still worth pursuing? If not, why do his ideas still sound a resonating cord with us? This paper will examine the background behind Durkheim’s thesis on the origin of religion. Then, using modern evolutionary theory, social network analysis and, with an eye to data not available in his time suggest that his ideas on the genesis of religion may not be so far-fetched after all.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For Koreans living abroad, the return to South Korea represents a homecoming of sorts, a psychic return to the country of one’s ancestry, romanticized and distant. This paper is part of a larger project that explores the migration projects of Korean Americans to Seoul, South Korea in search of an ideal Koreanness, embodied in a specific history, culture and traditions. Korean American return migrants are perceived as both foreign yet familiar which informs their positions within Korean society in disparate ways.

Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I center the narratives of Korean American men and women who negotiate the interplay of ethnicity, nationality and gender ideologies. While Korean American masculinity is enhanced by their transnational ties to the U.S., Korean American femininity is perceived as unfavorable compared to ideal notions of Korean femininity. As these actors confront new expectations regarding gender and national identity particularly within their social relationships, divisions arise creating fissures between the Korean American male and female experience which shed light on the gendered dimensions of ethnic identity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The environmental and animal rights movements of the past 35 years, together with a genre of non-fiction literature called "nature writing" have revivedand devloped a romantic concept of nature, namely that the land and its creatures are in some sense "scared" or "enchanted." In this culture, landscapes, trees, coral reefs, and all kinds of animals are seen as having intrinsic value and integrity and participate in a larger spirit or mystery of nature. At its core, a new kind of totemism is being practiced, in which animals and people belong to totemic human-animal families. Nature writers and wildlife photgraphers, through their poetic, spiritually evokative prose and pictures, are "consecrating" wild animals, attempting to change their meaning from simply being profane, inert resources for human use to sacred animals whose continued survival and growth is seen as vitally important. This new totemism thus serves as a fundamental cultural form of the environmental movement. It challenges what classic sociologists such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim saw as fundamental, irreversible processes of modernization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Nearly a century ago, Emile Durkheim proposed that any understanding of religion will remain incomplete until we uncover the origins of religion. To this end, Durkheim proposed that clan totemism was the primal religion and that the origin of religion itself rested on the sheer concentration of individuals, the product of a social environment. While Durkheim's thesis has weathered a great deal of criticism by scholars who claim that his analysis was too focused on the social, his data and terminology were shaky, and his totemic principle was a flight into fantasy, Durkheim thesis has endured and still casts a spell over contemporary sociologists. Why did Durkheim become so obsessed with totemism that he could argue that "Everything that concerns totemism necessarily has repercussions extending into all domains of sociology"? As Durkheim had a deep understanding of the issues he confronted, what was the logic behind his thinking? And, is it possible that Durkheim's original insights into the origin of religion may actually rest on solid ground after all?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Abstract: The first section of this essay examines Theodor Adorno?s concept of mimesis as it is outlined in Aesthetic Theory in relation to the political potential of the work of art. The second section of this essay asks whether art?s seemingly beneficent relationship to social change, as described by Adorno, functions as the fantasmatic support of the status quo by postulating mimetic experience as a kind of supplementary corrective to the experience of diremption in the social. In short, I attempt to develop a way to complicate Adorno?s notion of mimesis by supplementing it with a psychoanalytic approach to subject-object assimilation, so that it can offer an analytic paradigm for discerning different ways in which a subject can assimilate to an object?ways that may not fall neatly into the field of the experience of art works as Adorno understands it. The third section of this essay will turn to a case study of a recent phenomenon called ?Alternate Reality Gaming,? where I will ask if the construction of a ?hive mind,? or collective intelligence around the collaborative production of a dramatic narrative can be understood through the lens of mimetic experience, and also whether Alternate Reality Games, which are equal parts viral marketing campaigns, role playing games and collaborative dramatic performances, can function as objects that are capable of a politically productive mimetic experience.