Review Essays

Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Personal Narratives Group (Eds.). Writing a Woman's Life. Carolyn G. Heilbrun. Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Christie Davies.     

Narratives, community and land use decisions

This article explores the narrative character of community, arguing that communities are intrinsically storied. Narratives are conceptualized as social acts and are thereby of inherent importance to social scientific endeavor. Following Weber, narratives also are seen to be entrenched in institutions and in the political economy of communities. State tourism and land use decisions are suggested as ideographic situations in which such entrenchment is found.     

Cultural and Intergenerational Narratives: Understanding Responses to Elderly Family Members in Declining Health

Culture exerts powerful influences on each generations' responses to older members in declining health. Narratives, the stories people tell about their lives, depict the different the ways that the elderly and their children experience their world. Their personal narratives chronicle their connections to culture the past. They also illustrate the ways that the cultural values are transformed to accommodate the present and future. The stories are influenced by immigration, assimilation, development, interpersonal relationships, and life events. These differences between the cultural narratives of the elderly and the following generation are particularly apparent during times of chronic stress. One such situation occurs during chronic illness when the younger generation is called upon to provide for the elderly and chronically ill.     

Fostering supportive interactions in the neighbourhood: Using visualized narratives

The use of art (e.g. visualized narratives) in social work may stimulate dialogue between community members about family support in their neighbourhood. The Visualized Narratives on Parenting Interactions in the Neighbourhood (VN-PIN) were developed in order to foster this dialogue. The aim of this study was to evaluate the implementation of the VN-PIN in social work practice and to gain insight in mechanisms that stimulate dialogues supported by visualizations. A qualitative process evaluation was conducted to explore the use of the VN-PIN in various urban settings. We observed meetings (N = 14) where the VN-PIN was applied and interviewed professionals and community members (N = 81). The results of this study show that the VN-PIN intervention gives parents a voice and allows them to recognize and reflect on their own parenting behaviour, thereby contributing to mutual exchanges in a supportive community. The conclusion of this study is that the VN-PIN is a useful intervention that social work professionals can use to foster dialogues about parenting within diverse contexts in super-diverse neighbourhoods. The intervention fosters a supportive structure to share experiences of various community members. Future research is needed to further evaluate the experiences and satisfaction of community members with the intervention.     

Mobile phone parenting in work-separated Chinese families with young children left behind: A qualitative inquiry into parenting dimensions and determinants

Although recent studies have documented how working-elsewhere parents remotely achieved parenting through mobile phones, namely, ‘mobile phone parenting’ (MPP), a comprehensive conceptualization of MPP dimensions remains underexplored. Very few researchers have focused on the case of millions of work-separated families with young left-behind children from rural China from the perspectives of parenting dimensions and parenting process (determinants of parenting). By a thematic analysis approach, this qualitative study analysed interview data from 21 rural-to-urban Chinese migrant parents to characterize and contextualize their MPP behaviours. Narratives were organized into the first theme, MPP dimensions, including parental support (responsivity and autonomy granting), psychological control and behavioural control (directive control, proactive control and harsh punitive control). The second theme reflected that parents' perceptions of their own and offspring's well-being, family media literacy and co-parenting could elucidate the process of these participants' MPP practices. There was evidence for the consistency with universal parenting dimensions, but also for some unique MPP behaviours in the context of migration and remote communications. The findings indicate the importance and ecological complexity of MPP that involves technologies, multiple participants and their interplay. The conceptual framework originating from this study may be used in future studies and guide quantitative assessments of MPP.     

Opportunity,outlook and coping in poor,urban, African American,late-age,female adolescent contraceptors

This article explored the concepts of resilience, equal opportunity, and coping within a person-process-context model among urban Black adolescents in the US. Data were obtained from narrative accounts and interviews among 20 pregnant and 16 nonpregnant Black female adolescents aged 17 and 19 years. Respondents were recruited from prenatal and family planning clinics of a large metropolitan hospital and were representative of a low-income community with many female household heads and at-risk behaviors. The instruments included a 24-item structured interview of demographic data, and the 56 item semi-structured Pregnancy Adulthood Negotiation of Status Interview (PANSI). The interview elicited responses based on concrete experience, dialogue for assessing knowledge, and an ethic of caring and personal accountability. Contextual analysis revealed seven themes: adulthood preparation, role model formulation, decision-making, protective sensibility, sex and gender role commitment, opportunity mobility, and mate selection. All females shared similar demographics. Most resided in female-headed households and were high school graduates. The subsample differed in behaviors and attitudes on church affiliation, college attendance, registered voter status, sense of care and protection of self and others, self expectancies of social mobility, dating, and mate selection. Nonpregnant females were more likely to have part-time work experience and have mothers with post-high school achievement. Low-income nonpregnant adolescents were effective contraceptors and had social mobility aspirations. Narratives suggest that nonpregnant adolescents had an inner strength and belief, and commitment to advancement of career and vocational goals. The affiliations acted as social supports. These women used skillful coping mechanisms. Clinical social workers should reinforce resilience and work values.     

Book Reviews

Through the Window, Out the Door: Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather, to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion. Janis P. Stout. A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States. Sheila Rowbotham. Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials. John William Sayer. A West Texas Soapbox. Jim Sanderson. A Guide to American Crime Films of the Thirties. Larry Langman and Daniel Finn. A Guide to American Silent Crime Films. Larry Langman and Daniel Finn. All Things Herriot: James Herriot and His Peaceable Kingdom. Sanford Sternlicht. Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Class Culture. Allen Douglas and Fedwa Matli-Douglas. Bing Crosby: A Bio-Bibliography. J. Roger Osterholm. Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's “Wolf Man.” Whitney Davis. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930. Katherine C. Grier. Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. Dona Brown. American Popular Culture at Home and Abroad. Ed. Lewis H. Carlson and Kevin B. Vichcales. Encyclopedia of Pop Culture: An A to Z of Who's Who and What's What, from Aerobics and Bubble Gum to Valley of the Dolls and Moon Unit Zappa. Jane and Michael Stern.     

Books Received

Martini, Manuela, Fedelia alla Terra. Scelle economiche e attività pubbliche di una famiglia nobile bolognese nell' Ottocento (Il Mulino, 1999).

Maume, Patrick, The Long Gestation. Irish Nationalist Life 1891-1918 (St Martin's Press, 2000).

Murray, Alexander, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. II: The Curse on Self-Murder (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Niezen, Ronald, Spirit Wars. Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building (University of California Press, 2000).

Nobles, Melissa, Shades of Citizenship. Race and the Census in Modem Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000).

sPflugfelder, Gregory M., Cartographies of Desire (University of California Press, 1999).

Phillips, Laura, Bolsheviks and the Bottle (Northern Illinois University Press, 2000).

Prashad,Vijay, Untouchable Freedom. A Social History of a Dalit Community (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Richardson, R.C., The Study of History. A Bibliographical Guide, 2nd edn (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Ackerman, Peter and Duvall, Jack, A Force More Powerful. A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (St Martin's Press, 2000).

Amadiume, In, Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women Struggle for Culture, Power and Democracy (Zed Books, 2000).

Bolster, Richard, Marie d'Agoult. The Rebel Countess (Yale University Press, 2000).

Bono, Salvatore, It Mediterraneo. Da Lepanto a Barcellona (Morlacchi Editore, 1999).

Bonus, Rick, Locating Filipino Americans. Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Temple University Press, 2000).

Brendon, Piers, The Dark Valley. A Panorama of the 1930s (Knopf, 2000).

Curtin, Mary Ellen, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (University Press of Virginia, 2000).

Derné, Steve, Movies, Masculinity, and Modernity. An Ethnography of Men's Filmgoing in India (Greenwood Press, 2000).

Engerman, Stanley and Gallman, Robert (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. Ill: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Fabian, Ann, The Unvarnished Truth. Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2000).

Falconbridge, Anna Maria, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone, ed. Christopher Fyfe (Liverpool University Press, 2000).

Favez, Jean-Claude, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

George, Susan, Liverpool Park Estates (Liverpool University Press, 2000).

Gleadle, Kathryn and Richardson, Sarah (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760-1860. The Power of the Petticoat (St Martin's Press, 2000).

Service, Robert, Lenin. A Biography (Harvard University Press, 2000).

Spink, Ian, Henry Lawes. Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Vanita, Ruth and Kidwai, Saleem (eds), Same-Sex Love in India. Readings from Literature and History (St Martin's Press, 2000).

Wilford, John, The Mapmakers. The Story of the Creat Pioneers in Cartography - From Antiquity to the Space Age, rev. edn (Knopf, 2000).

Green, James, Taking History to Heart. The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

Grofman, Bernard (ed.), Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (University Press of Virginia, 2000).

Harding, Susan, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Hart, Mitchell, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Honeyman, Katrina, Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870 (St Martin's Press, 2000).

Jardine, Lisa and Brotton, Jerry, Global Interests. Renaissance Art between East &; West (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Kelly, Gail (ed.), French Colonial Education. Essays on Vietnam and West Africa (AMS Press, 2000).

Kersten, Andrew, Race, Jobs and the War. The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46 (University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Kinloch, Graham and Mohan, Raj (eds), Ideology and the Social Sciences (Greenwood Press, 2000).     

试论广西大明山国家级自然保护区的开发与建设

生态文明是一种生态合理和环境友好的绿色文明。生物多样性的保护已成为世界普遍关注的热点问题。大明山是毗邻南宁的国家级自然保护区,具有生物多样性、代表性、稀有性等显著特点,负氧离子含量极高,是一个不可多得的生态绿肺。因此,推进这一资源的保护和开发尤显得重要。     

浪漫主义大师的阁楼窗——浪漫主义者创作母题研究之一

浪漫主义不是一个让人坦然的概念。抛却文化与地理的相对性,浪漫主义精神还是一种隐喻,一种渴求,同时又是一种虔诚的祈祷,它与不同时代思维敏锐的人紧密联结。弗里德里希、凡.高、蒙克、蒙德里安、达利对于传统母题窗的直接描绘在世俗中追求神圣,并在经验中找寻超验。他们的艺术追求同莫奈、马蒂斯的法国伊壁鸠鲁主义者迥异。弗里德里希谱系所延续下来的精神异于苏格拉底、黑格尔的精神,它充满神秘与生机。浪漫主义不惟拥有其特有的渴望、梦想与哀愁,它还是一种姿态、一种操练。     

Conditional expected,extensive utility

Luce and Krantz (1971) presented an axiom system for conditional expected utility. In this theory a conditional decision is a function whose domain is a non-null subevent and whose range is a subset of a set of consequences. Given a family of conditional decisions that is closed under unions of decisions whose domains are disjoint and under restrictions to non-null subevents, the second major primitive is an ordering of the family. Axioms were given that are adequate to construct a numerical utility function over decisions and a probability function over events for which the conditional expectation of the utility is order preserving. Several of the axioms are quite complex and seem a bit artificial, and the proof is very long. Here the structure is modified by adding to the set of outcomes a concatenation operation, and the representation theorem is modified by requiring that the utility function be additive over this binary operation as well as exhibiting the expected utility property. The advantages of this pair of changes are, first, it exploits the obvious fact that the union of consequences is itself a consequence; second, it reduces the mathematical burden carried by the set theoretic structure of conditional decisions and, as a result, the axioms can be made much easier to understand; and third, it permits a considerably shorter proof because one can draw more readily on known results. The major drawback of this approach is, of course, that it is inconsistent with the evidence that utility is not additive over consequences - at least, not over increasing amounts of a single good (diminishing marginal utility).This work was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Institute for Advanced Study. I wish to thank P. C. Fishburn and F. S. Roberts for their comments.     

民族与伦理实体

人类世界由诸多民族构成。民族与文化间的联系是深刻而密切的,而决定民族文化发展方向的是居于核心地位的伦理文化,可见伦理对于一个民族所具有的不言而喻的重要性。作为伦理钍的共体的民族与作为普遍物或普遍定在的精神的结合就是民族精神。民族精神是伦理精神的具体化,伦理精神内在于民族精神之中。伦理精神和民族精神实质上是一个精神,即民族作为伦理实体的精神。民族伦理实体一经形成,其内在的伦理关系与伦理秩序便处于相对稳定的动态平衡之中,并以“整个的个体”即主体的形式出现在由诸多民族伦理实体所构成的伦理世界之中。在全球化语境下,要增强作为伦理实体的中华民族的伦理认同,以提高中华民族的自觉、自信、自强及在世界文明对话中的地位,并为构建和谐世界、推动人类社会整体进步做出积极贡献。     

从民族之镜到现代之境——20世纪中国哲学思想逻辑的基本演变

20世纪中国哲学的历史就是一个从确立现代民族意识(无论是反传统的,还是拥护传统的,其实在这一点上都是民族主义的)到形成现代化的社会意识形态的过程首先是一面民族之镜,一种民族精神的折射;其次也是一面现代之镜,是对现代文明的接受与批判。这是一个现代的形式(现代西方的哲学、科学、文化范畴、政治经济制度)与民族的灵魂(传统文化心理)的冲突与融合的过程;是一个用民族之镜反映与接受现代世界文明的、艰难痛苦的观念转变过程,一个逐步走进现代社会现实之境的、批判性反思性的曲折实践过程。     

The Deep Side of Preference Theory

An individual is said to have a taste for a particular menu, i.e. a subset of available commodities, if he is indifferent between all commodity bundles that contain the same quantity for each commodity which actually is in the menu, whatever the rest of the bundle. Then, a taste is directly defined as a deep property of preferences. As a first result, it is shown that a complete and transitive preference relation over the commodity bundles is equivalent to regular tastes where regularity means that tastes can be derived from a pure qualitative relation between the different commodities. Besides, a preference family based on preference relations corresponding to each particular commodity is said to be rationalizable if there exists a metapreference over commodity bundles which consistently summarizes the preference family and then allows to decide. As a second result, it is shown that if a preference family is rationalizable, then the tastes are organized thanks to a reflexive and transitive qualitative relation between the different commodities.     

Population monotonic path schemes for simple games

A path scheme for a game is composed of a path, i.e., a sequence of coalitions that is formed during the coalition formation process and a scheme, i.e., a payoff vector for each coalition in the path. A path scheme is called population monotonic if a player’s payoff does not decrease as the path coalition grows. In this study, we focus on Shapley path schemes of simple games in which for every path coalition the Shapley value of the associated subgame provides the allocation at hand. Obviously, each Shapley path scheme of a game is population monotonic if and only if the Shapley allocation scheme of the game is population monotonic in the sense of Sprumont (Games Econ Behav 2:378–394, 1990). We prove that a simple game allows for population monotonic Shapley path schemes if and only if the game is balanced. Moreover, the Shapley path scheme of a specific path is population monotonic if and only if the first winning coalition that is formed along the path contains every minimal winning coalition. We also show that each Shapley path scheme of a simple game is population monotonic if and only if the set of veto players of the game is a winning coalition. Extensions of these results to other efficient probabilistic values are discussed.     

作为思想的形而上学

思想是人类的能力和本性,思想的本性是永恒的否定和超越,思想的本性即是人的形而上学本性。以思想的方式把握世界,世界即是思想中的世界,时代就是思想中的时代。反思思想内容的基本逻辑规定,就是揭示存在和世界的本质。逻辑学即形而上学,思想是形而上学的秘密。思想形而上学的界限是以思想的形式把握世界的界限。表象、情感、意志和实践态度的把握世界的方式,亦有自身的真理和价值。所以,当代哲学超越形而上学的思想或后形而上学思想,根本问题在于寻求一种“非规定性的思”,或使思想得以可能的“存在”、“无”或“他者”。     

For Bourdieu, Against Alexander: Reality and Reduction

Jeffrey Alexander argues that despite Bourdieu's considerable achievements ultimately his work is reductionist and determinist. He further argues that though Bourdieu is a middle range theorist he is implicitly realist in his meta-theoretical assumptions. This article accepts these conclusions but argues that Bourdieu's meta-theoretical realism is a virtue rather than a vice and that the manner in which he is a reductionist and determinist necessitate a re-thinking of what is meant by these notions. Alexander uses Bourdieu's concept of habitus to demon-strate a fundamental contradiction in Bourdieu's theorising. According to him habitus presents us with the oxymoron of unconscious strategisation. This article uses a discussion of habitus in order to demonstrate that in its relationship with the concept of field it instead produces a practical resolution of long standing theoretical problems concerning structural determination and human agency. It is also argued that these problems are resolved at the meta-theoretical level in the form of critical realist ontology and that it is Alexander's misunderstandings on this level which cause him to fail to appreciate the significance of Bourdieu's achievements.     

Women as Mothers and the Making of the European Mind: A Contribution to the History of Developmental Psychology and Primary Socialization

A major purpose of this essay is to show that our assumptions regarding human development in general, and in particular, the mother and child have their roots in a Christian-humanistic tradition. I also wish to locate the origins of the discourse on the mother and child within a critical historical review of notions of a changing anthropology of the human subject. The working hypothesis is as follows: A changing view of the human being is associated with a changing approach to child care and child development. This changing approach to child is accompanied by a 'new woman'. Women are newly constructed when children, and thus a future person and a future society is defined.     

从欲望的压抑到欲望的表达——德勒兹后现代唯物主义欲望观的转向

欲望在西方传统思想中一直被理解为匮乏或缺失,是一种不完善的表现,尤其在精神分析中,欲望受到强烈的压抑和否定.德勒兹极力批判这种具有唯心主义性质的传统欲望观,提倡一种积极的欲望观.他认为,欲望不是消极的力量,而是一种积极的力量,具有生产性和建设性.在这个意义上,欲望不但不应受到压抑,而且应得到自由和充分的表达.德勒兹的欲望观是一种后现代的唯物主义欲望观.