فصلنامه مطالعات فرهنگی و ارتباطات
پیاپی 16 (پاییز 1388)

The rites of mourning on Ashura is one of the great religious ceremonies which has been carried out by each generation in order to carry lots of concepts and religious values to next generations. There is not a unique form for carrying out these rites which make some challenges and therefore there have been lots of researches to find the best form. In this research we applied a case study in the qualitative method by interview and participant observation that consider on the role of preaching and eulogizing which are the two important elements of these rites. Data state that on the contrary of past era the eulogizers have been became the main stream of this rite as a symbol of emotional religiousness and made the preachers as a symbol of religious authority marginal.

The present article has attempted to distinguish between the interpretation of underground music in Iran and the West and to subsequently introduce rap music in Iran as an underground category of music. The author has attempted to categorize different types of Farsi rap music and to indicate the different characteristics and themes of each category in order to study the audiences of these types of music, and subsequently to discuss the social aspects of Farsi rap music and also to illustrate the atmosphere present in production and distribution of this music, finally the author presents the results of a survey attempted at identifying the grounds for popularity of underground rap music among the youth throughout the city of Tehran. In the end the author has discussed the factors influencing the attraction of youth to this type of music and presented certain strategies to be taken by cultural policy makers when approaching this type of music3.

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the theory of the influence of various stages of life on the pattern of leisure of the elderly based on the analysis of the bio-psychological model and the balancing of the mentioned pattern with the institutional-social model. The objective has been attained through the results obtained from two national researches on Iranian cultural behaviors to reflect the level of compatibility between the two models and the behaviors of the Iranians in rural and urban areas. Researchers have reflected that bio-psychological models despite criticisms made are still able to determine a pattern for the elderly especially in urban areas. However, evidence exists on challenges that the present model has encountered in certain instances.

Information has a prominent position in the new world. This issue has affected the appearance of various new problems in every day life in contemporary societies. In this text, we have attempted to explain the information gap between people and to describe a variety of factors that influence the inequality in access to important data. We have emphasized youth, because this social group has got the most salient subject of change in this respect. We have applied the survey method and our population of research has been the youth of Hamadan. Findings of the survey reflect a positive connection between absence of information literature and the absence of information skills with a digital gap. It has also been possible to find a correlation between the socio-economic status and the level of education with a digital gap. But no relationship was found to exist between gender and the digital gap.

Lifestyles are collective patterns of activities and behaviors based on choices from all options that are available to actors according to structural constrains. Health behavior, like other categories of social behaviors, is influenced by the interplay or dialectical relationship between agency and structure. While agency is the capacity of social actors to choose their behavior, structure refers to regulatory bodies in social interaction, systematic social relationship, and access to resources that constrain or give power to choices. From William Cockerham’s standpoint, structural factors such as age, gender, occupational position, socioeconomic status (SES) can widely control life choices of social actors. Inspired from Cockerham, and in an endeavor to take out and define multiple dimensions of the notion of lifestyle, this paper has drawn on factor analysis strategy of data analysis, based on a sample (n=450) of adolescents living in two districts of the Tehran metropolis. The recruited adolescents into sample were chosen using a PPS cluster sampling strategy. The result of factor analysis shows that the notion of lifestyle has eight underlying variables or dimensions. These dimensions are: Risky driving, passion for driving, beauty driven pleasures, cultural consumption, interest in social activities, religiosity, alcoholism (alcohol abuse), and an interest in physical activities. Out of the extracted dimensions or factors for lifestyle, risky driving, alcohol abuse and an interest in physical activities have sequentially had the most significant effects on the risk of accident. Moreover, significant relationships exist between these dimensions of lifestyle and negative (unsafe) aspects of one’s driving lifestyle.

In every era and time, there is a specific culture that prevails in the society. Therefore, based on the value systems, the norms and the laws, a compatible atmosphere with that culture governs the society. Since human beings are socialized and affected by the society as a result of their interaction with their environment, in each era, the culture of people transforms toward compatibility and adaptation to the culture of their environment. Naturally, youth are influenced more and faster than the elder members of the society. The communication era has accelerated all these changes. Therefore, in the last decades, societies have been experiencing changes (with high or low intensity) in every 10 years. On the other hand, it can be said firmly that in some cases, the communication era has made this ten-year period shorter, and the changesdeeper and more intense.After some qualitative research on the youth in the capital city of Tehran indifferent eras during the years 1371 to 1385, we have noticed such changes in them. In summary, the youth had shifted from holding a collective identity to an individual one. Meanwhile, their citizenship characteristics have shifted from indifference to cooperation and then to indifference again. Following these changes, the form of their social participation has changed too. These changes can be observed in their meaningful signals, their routine behaviors, and their life styles. Elements like their type of clothing, food and music, watching TV or satellite programs, use of the internet, or their preoccupations demonstrate their thoughts and behaviors.

Emphasizing the social dimensions of “language” has made deep revolutions in various cognitive fields such as social sciences or in linguistics itself. Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most typical theoreticians of social science who recognizes language as a social phenomenon by nature, and rejects the distinction between sociology and linguistic by criticizing formalist linguistics and considers the analysis of language in the realm of sociology. This study attempts to explain and investigate Bourdieu’s sociolinguistics descriptively and analytically. Bourdieu’s sociolinguistics is based on the framework of his general theory. Based on his theory, discourse is the product of interactionof “linguistic habitus” and “linguistic market”. Bourdieu’s framework of languagetheorizing relates to the method of extension, contest, gaining legitimacy,domination and in one word, “imposing” a specific from of “classification”.Criticisms of Bourdieu’s sociolinguistics are generally rooted in his generaltheory and the most general point made about it is the one-dimensional deletionof the possibility of “reflexivity” at the level of agency.One of the typical features of Bourdieu’s sociolinguistics is that it provides the theoretical means necessary for systematic analysis of symbolic products of distinct social contexts and presents the mechanisms of production and consumption related to these distinct contexts. In this relation, we tried to extend Bourdieu’s views and besides it, determine the common “linguistic fields” and the relation between “linguistic fields” and “unified linguistic market” are established and presented in a theoretical model.