The market place as space in early modern England

The reinsertion of space into critical theory (Soja, LeFebvre) has stimulated some historians to reconsider space in its historical contexts. Exactly how one elucidates spatial organization-as represented space or as space produced by social action and practice-continues to exercise our minds. What we can be more certain about is that significant spaces existed which were, and were regarded by contemporaries, as public and open and that these spaces were sites of social action (but also, it should not be forgotten, of concealed activity too). In early modern England, market places constituted spaces of social and 'political' action and interaction, among which penance and punishment were important aspects. From office causes in ecclesiastical act books and from directions by the justices at quarter sessions, the social and 'political' employment of market places can be illuminated, particularly here in the archdeaconries of Colchester, Leicester, Nottingham and Essex, and from the sessions for Wiltshire and Somerset. Moreover, penance and punishment directed to market places reveal much about spatial relationships more widely, not least between administrative jurisdictions and people in spaces and between the urban and rural situation. In this way, we can begin to assemble the jigsaw which will illuminate further how space was formed by people in the past.     

Cultural practice and utopian desire in German Social Democracy: Reading Adolf Levenstein's Arbeiterfrage (1912)

During the Wilhelmine period, leaders of the German Social Democratic Party began to redefine socialism as a 'cultural movement' which was concerned as much with the educational, artistic and leisure-time needs of workers as it was with trade union struggles and the future prospect of revolutionary social transformation. This drew them into a debate about the relationship between politics and 'culture', understood in terms of both 'high' and 'mass' culture, and the role of the latter in mobilizing German workers to the cause of socialism. Drawing on the methods of cultural studies, this article offers a close reading of Adolf Levenstein's important survey of the attitudes, 'hopes and wishes' of male rank-and-file Social Democrats and trade unionists from 1912, and his other related publications, in order to examine the ways in which German workers assigned meanings to cultural texts. In this way, it identifies the utopian political investments revealed in workers' leisure-time practices, ranging from poetry writing to novel reading, and their challenges to the structuring binarisms - oppositions between culture and politics, high culture and mass culture, art and everyday life, the masculine and the feminine, and reality and fantasy - of Social Democratic cultural politics in pre-war Germany.     

'The heart and home of horror': The great London fogs of the late nineteenth century

This article centres on the unprecedentedly severe fog crisis which afflicted London between the 1870s and the mid-1890s. An overview of meteorological developments prefaces an interrogation of the mid-Victorian origins of environmental cost-benefit analysis and the only slowly dawning awareness that adverse weather conditions might make a significant contribution to mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease. At the same time, exceptionally degraded air quality came to be associated with the threat of physical and psychological degeneration in the poorest inner and eastern districts of the city. Perceived as a totality, these bodies of knowledge and ideology - economic, epidemiological and social Darwinistic - reinforced and legitimated a catastrophist fin de sicle vision of almost unbearably debilitating social, economic and cultural relationships between 'darkness at noon' and the potential implosion of the late nineteenth century metropolis.     

What Hindu Sati can teach us about the sociocultural and social psychological dynamics of suicide

By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self‐sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power‐differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture.     

Touching Consumers,engaging the Senses in Consumption

ABSTRACT

For years, the Campbell's Soup Company advertised their brand of soup through a message of “Mmm, Mmm, Good.” This slogan reached mass audiences primarily through visual and auditory media messages of television and print. Campbell's recently switched to a new form of advertising to consumers through an IAd application. The format works through Apple iPhones by first showing an interactive ad teaser, “You're getting warmer,” then when clicked through asks consumers to download cooking applications individually to their iPhones. This shift represents a change in appealing to consumers' senses and social sensibilities. The former media approach appealed to a rational social sensibility and mass audiences of eating soup at home as an enjoyment shared with others. The latter iAd slogan and iPhones media approach appeals to a more tactile sense and individualistic sensibility. This article explores the particular confluence of social, sensory, and media factors that intersect with a marketed food brand, and discusses its implications for the way manufacturers mix and blend new sensory messages and mobile media channels to appeal to a new sensibility in people's changing eating habits.     

The Festival of Progress: The Globalizing World-System and the Transformation of the Caracas Carnival

While the carnival in Latin America functions as a form of popular entertainment, it can also be viewed as having other roles. Robert Lavenda examines the Caracas carnival as an event which is atonce symptomatic of the social reality that surrounds it and able to bring about change within Venezuelan society. As popular culture, the carnival has been an important mediator in directing this society toward the modern capitalist worJd-system. Lavenda traces how, under the leadership o f Antonio Guzman Blanco, Venezuela took a major step in the second half of the nineteenth certury towards becoming a modern country. Under Guzman's and other modernizers' influence the old carnival, which had been characterized as a wild and rowdy small-group activity, was transformed to bring it into line with contemporary European models, that is, a highly organized and closely monitored mass celebration. The author discusses how the new power relationships that had developed in the city were reflected by the composition of the carnival's governing board. By setting up a series of oppositions between the South American and European versions of the carnival, Caracas' ruling elite hoped to orient the masses away from the former values and towards the latter.     

The governance of charitable trusts in the nineteenth century: The West Riding of Yorkshire

Charitable donations were essential to social welfare provision in England and Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article uses a principal-agent framework to examine the governance problems faced by endowed charities - problems that were uniquely acute because, on one side, the principal (the charity's benefactor) was usually long since dead and, on the other, the main intended beneficiaries (the poor) were inarticulate and politically impotent. The reports of the Charity Commissioners on a sample of endowed charities operating in Yorkshire are used to exemplify the type of governance problems encountered. Such difficulties involved the charities' structure, their resource base and their management. It is shown that the benefactors' intentions were most readily frustrated, and the intended beneficiaries most readily denied their welfare provision, when the politically and socially powerful condoned the alteration of the trusts' functions. This was most obvious in the second half of the nineteenth century for the provision of 'doles' to the poor and for the provision of free grammar schools.     

Knowledge,power and the city since 1700

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the trend of recorded violence in New Zealand broadly paralleled that of Britain. This review appraises critically two local interpretations of social attitudes and behaviour seen to be reflected in the colonial trend. Both provide 'frontier-type' theses in viewing disorder as a by-product of either colonial masculinity or the social atomization of migrants. Accordingly the decline in recorded violence is viewed as the outcome of either a local civilizing process or the emergence of social networks. However, the parallelism of the colonial and British trends suggest that there could be common processes at work. In this context, the nature of colonial violence, patterns of colonial litigiousness and the applicability of V. A. C. Gatrell's interpretation of the development of a disciplinary 'policeman-state' are considered. The need for further comparative research in both the colonial and British context is suggested, so as to test the extent to which the colonial experience of violence may be explained by 'frontier' and/or 'cultural fragment' explanations.     

Groups in contact: Meta‐representations,interobjectivity, and cultural incompatibilities

This analysis departs from social identity being part and parcel of the system of social representations a group holds. Additionally, social identity is seen as being affectively laden with religious or other deeply ingrained ideological beliefs. These systems delimit the space of norms and behaviours where people socially construct the objects defining the local world as an objectively given. The local objectifications differ between groups and cultures and pose a problem for interaction and communication between members of different groups. Inter‐group discrepancies must be bridged by establishing a shared representational space and interobjective understanding. This understanding can be reached if both interactants mutually develop meta‐representations that allow them to grossly anticipate what to expect from the other and to orient their actions accordingly. But there is a catch in establishing interobjectivity: even if the interactants manage to overcome semantic and cognitive barriers, their interaction and open‐minded communication will be blocked if the two objectivities are ethically or affectively incommensurable. I illustrate this process by suggesting that native Europeans will feel blocked to establish interobjective acceptance for example with proponents of a slave holder culture whose values are incommensurable with European ideas of human equality. Accepting a slave holder's worldview would threaten the European's identity. A similar process seems to govern devout conservative Muslims living in 'gated communities' and enclaves in European cities who try to maintain their identity by avoiding regular contact with the non‐Muslim majority. Such contact would threaten their identity if their worldview and sharia rules were measured by the standards of human rights. Native Europeans on the other hand, will feel their own cultural objectivity to be incompatible with traditional Islam that does not equally observe human rights. The implications of such processes are discussed in terms of migrants' integration, multiculturalism, and socio‐political psychology.     

Attention to Rural Populations in Social Work's Scholarly Journals

ABSTRACT

Rural populations should be considered a vulnerable group within social work's social justice framework. However, the degree to which social work research and scholarship engage with questions of significance to underserved rural populations remains unknown. This study sought to determine how many articles in highly ranked social work journals give prominent attention to rural populations and issues. A search of the highly ranked social work journals selected from the Journal Citation Reports for the Social Sciences found only 71 articles that explicitly focus on rural populations among a total of 3,004 peer-reviewed articles in 14 top social work journals during the years 2004 through 2008. Possible reasons for the paucity of rural-focused articles within social work journals are posited. We discuss the relative contributions of these journals to development of a comprehensive and useful knowledge base within social work for addressing the needs of rural issues. Future recommendations are made for expanding attention to scholarship in this area.     

Distinctive alcohol cultural practices amongst Niuean men living in Auckland,New Zealand

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe some of the distinctive cultural practices evident in Niuean men's drinking behaviours. The paper is also intended to illustrate that alcohol is an integral aspect of the Niuean culture and part of the system of cultural exchange. Alcohol has become an integral component of Niuean cultural rituals to the extent that celebrations and festivals are thought to be incomplete if alcohol is not present. Alcohol is used as a tool for expressing cultural values such as fakaalofa (gifting), generosity, respect, status and host obligations. Finally, alcohol is used as a symbol of ‘being Niuean’ and being a ‘real’ Niuean man. This paper will describe how practices specific to Niuean men such as drinking the ‘Niuean way’ and kalaga are symbols that help to reinforce men's cultural identity, enhancing their feeling of communal identity. It is important to emphasize that it is difficult to divorce the ‘cultural’ components of Niuean men's drinking styles from their drinking and behaviour more generally. Culture shapes people's values and behaviours. Although this paper points to some of the specific and distinctively ‘cultural’ aspects of Niuean drinking, we must recognize that all of the participants’ drinking behaviours and attitudes are likely to have been shaped by their cultural and social context. Furthermore, this paper provides only a brief snapshot of how culture and alcohol are intertwined for Niuean men. Educational programmes and host responsibility guidelines need to be culturally appropriate to suit the needs of the Niuean community. Further work is needed to elucidate this complex topic.     

How I am Constructing Culture‐inclusive Theories of Social‐psychological Process in our Age of Globalization

Accepting Cole's the premise that, “cultural‐inclusive psychology has been … an elusive goal” (1996, pp. 7–8) but one worth striving to attain, I first set out to identify my domain of interest and competence as an intellectual. Deciding it to be social interaction between individuals, I then searched out theoretical approaches to this domain that encompassed as many approaches to this trans‐historical concern that have emerged from cultural traditions bequeathing us their legacies. Doing this search comprehensively required me to move outside my Judeo‐Christian, Greco‐Roman, Renaissance heritage and its international diffusion via the European Empires since the 1500's, embodied most recently the American dominance of intellectual discourse since the Second World War. In my case, this journey has taken me in to Chinese culture and psychology where I have worked towards integrating the Chinese worldview and its psychological measures into the discipline of social psychology. Striving for a more inclusive culture‐view, I am now using multi‐cultural data bases to transcend this two‐cultural focus and incorporate wider measures of cultural variation into our theorizing and empirical validation of universal models for social interaction. This paper describes my current procedures for such culture‐mapping.     

'Reading' in Professional Practice: How Social Work Practice Assessors Access Knowledge and Information

This paper presents the results of a survey of the reading habitsof 184 social work practice teachers/assessors in 2005. Newtechnology has transformed the availability of information,but in the UK, social workers, from whom Practice Assessorsare drawn, have been found to have relatively poor access toelectronic resources. The literature also highlights deficitsin social workers’ reading, but suggests that there isa strong oral tradition which may compensate for this. The surveyaimed to show the choices this group of staff makes betweendifferent media and different types of knowledge. It was foundthat oral sources were the most used resource, but that habitsof internet use were also very well developed. Respondents’reading, and particularly their use of the internet, appearedto be strongly influenced by organizational priorities and statutoryroles. Clinical and therapeutic texts and specialist knowledgewere also important to respondents. Books and journals werehighly valued but cost was in many cases a barrier to access.Findings from this survey suggest that Practice Assessors area relatively well resourced group and that the internet is ofgreat importance as a source of information for them.     

The Person-in-Environment Perspective in Social Work Journals

Abstract

Disagreement over the meaning, utility, and implementation of the person-in-environment (p-i-e) perspective represents social work's efforts to continually redefine itself in a dynamic world. The choice of a guiding perspective is significant, particularly in this era in which concern about the interdependence of global social, economic, and environmental systems is growing. Much of the debate about the p-i-e has taken place in social work journals. This article provides an empirical assessment of how social work scholars have interpreted and applied p-i-e related concepts in social work journals, through the use of a computer-assisted content analysis of all article abstracts in core journals reviewed in Social Work Abstracts (SWA) from 1987 to 1996.     

HINE-TITAMA: MAORI CONTRIBUTIONS TO FEMINIST DISCOURSES AND IDENTITY POLITICS

‘Post-colonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order’. (Homi Bhabha 1994, p. 171) Feminist discourses attend to the experiences of women in many social spheres, including that of the artworld. In this paper I, as a Maori woman, offer an outline of Postcolonial Maori Feminism that complies with the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha's notion of ‘Post-colonial criticism’. The connection between feminist discourse and the accomplished Maori artist Robyn Kahukiwa has not been strongly emphasised in current published literature. The cultural context that Robyn Kahukiwa refers to in her art is, primarily, that of Maori women. I argue, by using one exemplary picture entitled Hine-Titama, that Robyn Kahukiwa and her artwork align with the work of some other Maori feminists. I also posit an association between Kahukiwa and some examples of ‘non-Maori’ feminist writing that furthers our understanding of cultural identities based on gender and race. I refer to those cultural identities as they relate to Maori women in New Zealand.     

The destruction of liberty in French Guiana: law,identity and the meaning of legal space, 1794–1830

Abstract

This article examines the colonial legal culture of French Guiana from 1794 to 1830 during a period marked by dramatic historical rupture; slaves in the colony who were liberated by decree of the French legislature in 1794 were returned to slavery under Napoleon. People who managed to remain free in the nineteenth century endured humiliating legal handicaps as well as challenges to their free status. In Guiana during this period, a person's access to the ‘rights of man and citizen’ depended on intricate and ultimately fragile legal structures. The perils besetting Guiana's freed people during and after the French Revolution often arose from the highly adjustable character of legal space – the legal status of imperial territory in relation to domestic soil. This article draws on archival materials including notarial documents and trial records to reconstruct the role of law and legal discourse in mediating everyday life, familial relationships and social encounters on the French colonial frontier.     

Agrarian elites and economic growth in nineteenth-century Portugal: The example of the Alentejo in the Liberal era (1850-1910)

The Alentejo is a southern Portuguese region which is generally recognized for the social and economic importance of the latifúndio system and for its economic backwardness, phenomena which are usually associated with the existence of a regional elite of the traditional type. This article seeks to review this question by examining the action of the economic elite which operated in the region during the second half of the nineteenth century, when modern capitalism was just beginning to develop in Portugal and Liberal institutions were being established. How this sociologically renewed and plural elite group conducted its private business dealings is described, and investment strategies and sources of financing are examined, as well as the management of farm businesses. Three aspects are highlighted here: the varied nature of investments, although over the long term there was an increase in the acquisition of land; investment carried out at the cost of growing indebtedness to the regional banks, the modern financial institutions which the elite helped to set up; and the high degree of involvement of land-owners in the running of large estates, which were marked by a trend towards division into smaller units, moves towards productive diversification, and the drive for technical progress and the modernization of rural buildings. Examined as a whole, this scenario suggests that the new economic elite which emerged with the triumph and development of Portuguese Liberalism in the nineteenth century was not a force for conservatism in the regional economy.     

On Acting Against One's Best Judgement: A Social Constructionist Interpretation for the Akrasia Problem

Akrasia is a philosophical concept meaning the possibility to perform actions against one's best judgement. This contribution aims to clarify this phenomenon in terms of a social construction, stating it as a narrative configuration generated by an observer. The latter finds himself engaged in justifying a “problematic” line of action with regard to specific cultural beliefs referring to the self, the others and the behaviour. This paper intends to make explicit the assumptions underlying the traditional definitions of akrasia when, paradoxically, an agent performs an action not in accordance with his/her best judgement. In the transition from modern to post‐modern psychology, we here propose an interpretation of the phenomenon in psychological terms, envisaging akrasia as a narrative form functional to the identity processes and to the social dynamics of the structures of contemporary societies. Implications in the psychological practice will be taken into account.     

清末北京社会教育述论

19-20世纪之交,在清政府和一些热心人士的推动下,北京社会教育通过近代报刊、宣讲所、阅报处、简易识字学塾、半日学堂、夜学堂、戏曲等途径逐渐开展起来。这些活动不仅增加了北京普通民众的识字机会,激发了北京市民的爱国热情,而且对净化当时北京地区的社会风气起到了一定的作用。     

“It's not all tied up with bureaucrats and funding”: Autonomous volunteer participation in the rural resettlement of refugees

This paper reports on a study that explored the experiences, perceptions and motivations of a new type of autonomous volunteer emerging in modern society, in particular, those working to assist in the rural resettlement of refugees in Australia. The volunteers filled a gap left by under resourced government and community services. In‐depth semi structured interviews revealed that their motivation was due in part, to the lack of bureaucratic' red tape'. Their drive to address social issues was based also in part on values to see social justice expressed in their community. Some challenges and tensions due to cultural differences were identified. Questions for community development and social capital are raised. Implications are raised for volunteer groups' and resettlement organisations' policy and practice to enhance the resettlement process for both the host community and those with a refugee background.