The Origins of Charisma as Process: A Case Study of Hildegard of Bingen

A case study of the twelfth‐century visionary Hildegard of Bingen is presented to examine the process through which a charismatic relationship is constructed in interaction between an individual and significant others and more distant followers. Hildegard's identity as a charismatic prophet developed over a number of years through a process of interaction with various ecclesiastical authorities; alterations occurred in both the prophet's self‐identity and the way others viewed her, leading finally to her authorization as a prophet and visionary. The cultural context provided plausibility structures, relevant symbols, and limitations that influenced the form of Hildegard's charismatic status. This status led to unprecedented achievements for a woman of her time, but her efforts mainly supported and strengthened the institutional tradition in which she served.     

WHY DID UNIVERSITIES PRECEDE PRIMARY SCHOOLS? A POLITICAL ECONOMY MODEL OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE

Universities were first established in Europe around the twelfth century, although primary schools did not appear until the nineteenth. This paper accounts for this phenomenon using a political economy model of educational change on who are educated (the elite or the masses) and what is taught (general or specific/vocational education). A key assumption is that general education is more effective than specific education in enhancing one's skills in a broad range of tasks, including political rent‐seeking. Its findings suggest that specific education for the masses is compatible with the elite rule, whereas mass general education is not, which refines the conventional association between education and democracy. (JEL O10, O40, P16, N10)     

Philosophes of the Conservative Nation: Burke, Macaulay, Disraeli

The argument here concerns the myths of the English, and of English history; it suggests that myths of providential England were powerful elements in twentieth-century British political life. Most of all, they powerfully informed Conservative conceptions of civilization, though they also exerted a wider political influence. The essay explores the invention of these myths in three pre-eminent writers: Burke, Macaulay, and Disraeli, and suggests that from their writings emerged a system of narration which came to be 'remembered' as the founding myth of the political nation — the conservative nation — in the twentieth century. By the time of mass democracy, the partisan divisions (between Whig and Tory) had been forgotten in favour of a wider cultural 'transformism,' which did much to cement the emerging coalition of landed and bourgeois politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, the very nature of politics itself came to be redefined.     

Imaginary Vitebsk: the view from the inside

While the term “imagined geography” most often relates to outsiders, views of an unfamiliar environment, also of interest are the views of insiders whose personalities were formed within and by the social space of their original milieu. Sometimes impressions of the latter were written down during the period they discuss and, thus, present an immediacy that appears to be unmediated. When, however, the insider memoirs were written later, the researcher encounters the additional problem of evaluating the work’s authenticity, due to subsequent views of the memoirist which he adopted from his later environment. In regard to places with an ethnically heterogeneous population like Vitebsk, in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century ideas about social space were often expressed in terms of ethnic symbolism and reflected values about what was considered prestigious in cultural and social terms and also on the basic distinction between “us” and “them.” The major cultural and social transformations of the first half of the twentieth century seriously altered the “imagined geography” that had been formed under the conditions of traditional society. The present article examines changes in ideas about social space via a case study of the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, which for many people has become a symbol of the traditional Jewish world. However, the article indicates that, despite all the changes, on the eve of the Second World War the city’s Jews continued to view their social and ethnic space in a traditional manner.     

Different,Like Everyone Else: Stuff White People Like and the Marketplace of Diversity

This article explores Stuff White People Like (SWPL), a popular blog that has lampooned the cultural practices of a certain kind of bourgeoisie‐bohemian White person since its inception in early 2008. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the blog motivated the authors to explore the complexities of this commercial humor project in the context of the twenty‐first century multicultural neoliberalism in the United States. Through analysis of both the blog entries and online audience response, they ultimately claim that SWPL is limited in its potential for antiracist cultural work because it fails to challenge the logic of neoliberalism—indeed, it operates firmly within it—and defers a radical critique of White privilege. Moreover, SWPL facilitates gleeful celebration of essentialized White idiosyncrasies by incorporating a form of White “ethnicity” in the twenty‐first century neoliberal marketplace of diversity.     

The strangers at work in sandwich: Native envy of an industrious minority 1561–1603

This article is not an analysis of the motives and character of the immigration of sixteenth‐century exiles from the Low Countries into Sandwich, but a study of the socio‐economic significance of their presence for the Cinque Port and its consequences for their relationship with the local authorities and townsmen. On an in‐troductionary note, we will first look at the interest of English historians in the subject of the sixteenth‐century immigrants during the last 20 years or so. Thereafter, we will discuss the Anglo‐Flemish trade relations in medieval and Tudor times and the economic role of Sandwich during that period. This is followed by an examination of the socio‐economic evolution of the Strangers from the time of their arrival until the end of the century within a local and national context, with the emphasis on the relationship with the native inhabitants. The article concludes with a discussion on the general traditions of both encouragement of the opposition to the Strangers and the attitude of the English authorities.     

浅谈中职英语教学中的文化导入

语言与文化的关系,决定语言教学与文化教学的关系。英语学习包括许多方面,如语法能力、交际能力等,同时也包括学习者对于本族文化及另一种文化的态度。适当地导入文化在中职英语教学中发挥着重要作用。该文论述了文化导入的重要性、原则、内容和方法,目的在于通过文化导入教学提高中职学生的英语语言能力和跨文化交际能力。     

Symbols,sentiments, and stories: Urban culture and social problems

Cultural approaches to the study of urban life have enjoyed brief bursts of popularity within the social sciences over the past century. Although many urban sociologists acknowledge that meanings, symbols, narratives, and feelings, in other words local culture, help shape urban places, relatively few take this notion any further. In this article, I first lay out the foundations of cultural approaches to the study of urban life. Second, I argue for the continued significance of the distinction between space and place. Third, I describe a contemporary stream of urban sociology called the urban culturalist perspective. Fourth, I describe important insights gleaned from studies embracing cultural urbanist approaches to an area of urban research receiving increasing attention: gentrification. Fifth, and finally, I outline a few ways in which micro‐cultural investigations of urban phenomena provide useful opportunities for public sociology.     

‘Come to Corby’: A Scottish Steel Town in the Heart of England

Cross-border migration to England is a long-established feature of the Scottish diaspora. In the twentieth century, that phenomenon was demonstrated most visibly and persistently in the Northamptonshire steel-making centre of Corby, which from the 1930s to the 1960s was transformed from an English village into an outpost of Scotland in the heart of the Midlands. The migration, which helped to reconfigure the industrial landscape of inter-war and post-war Britain, offers an insight into the social, economic and cultural repercussions of large-scale relocation within both the donor and host communities. The article explores the causes, immediate consequences and long-term legacies of Corby's Scottish influx.     

Legible lesbian lines: The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz

Abstract

This article focuses on the poetry of Jewish lesbian poet Irena Klepfisz, written in New York starting in the 1970s. While drawing on the tradition of Yiddish women’s poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, both as scholar and poet, Klepfisz also creates a brand new, bilingual, Yiddish-English poetic mode. By mobilizing both Yiddish and English to voice her poetic and political concerns, Klepfisz stages the English/Yiddish encounter as a site where dominant norms in both languages can be challenged and new possibilities emerge. Exploring both her turn to the past and her bilingual poetry, this article reveals how Klepfisz puts her politics and scholarship to poetic practice and suggests that Klepfisz offers a model of queer translation that undoes the borders between past and present, English and Yiddish, creating a unique mode of Jewish lesbian reclamation and invention.     

The Occupational Attainment of Immigrant Groups in Australia

It is commonly assumed that immigrants are disadvantaged in the Australian labour market because of a variety of interacting factors, some related to their skills, some to cultural differences between them and the host society, and some to the time it takes to adjust to their new circumstances. Using specially-prepared cross tabulations from the 1996 Australian Census, this article evaluates the assumption for the country's 52 largest immigrant groups, as defined by birthplace. Separate analyses for male and female immigrants relate their concentration in ten occupational groups, including unemployment, to their educational qualifications, facility with the English language, and period of arrival. The analyses suggest that the first two variables are particularly relevant to appreciating the occupational distribution of male immigrants, with period of arrival also being important for females, probably reflecting different cultural norms from their host society.     

‘The Sunshine of Manly Sports and Pastimes’: Sport and the Integration of Jewish Refugees in Britain, 1895–1914

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish refugees arriving in Great Britain were exposed to an ‘anglicisation’ campaign designed to aid their integration into British society and their assimilation of British character traits and cultural values. Within this campaign, especially the element focusing on the children of the migrants, interest and participation in sport was consciously ‘transferred’ through the medium of youth and sporting organisations in order to help in their ‘anglicisation’. This essaywill show how physical recreation was promoted by the English Jewish establishment and how participation in sport amongst young Jews grew.     

The Diffusion of Cricket to America: A Figurational Sociological Examination

Abstract  This paper examines the historical development of cricket in America and seeks to explain why, despite having a significant initial impact, the game ultimately became culturally marginal. It is argued that class and cricketing relations in England in the mid-nineteenth century had a significant and hitherto unacknowledged impact on the diffusion of the game to America, and that this unplanned social process can only be understood in the light of the specific interdependencies between the British and Anglo-Americans, between upper and lower class English immigrants, and between English immigrants and "Native White Americans". Correlatively, this analysis spreads new light on the establishment of baseball as America's national game, illustrating a greater level of dependence on the English and English sport than is traditionally attributed.     

Baghdadi Jews in Hong Kong: converting cultural,social and economic capital among three transregional networks

This article is an analysis of the attempts of Baghdadi Jewish traders in Hong Kong in the second half of the nineteenth century to construct and convert cultural, social and economic capital within and between the transregional networks of the Baghdadi diaspora, the Jewish diaspora and the British colonial elite. The analysis of the multiple and multi‐directional intersections between the cultural, social and economic characteristics of the three networks shows that Baghdadi social capital accounted for significant ruptures and disjunctures between the increasing cosmopolitanization, deterritorialization and hybridization of the Baghdadi traders' cultural identities and the definition of Baghdadi cultural capital. An understanding of the role of Baghdadi social capital in accounting for the construction and convertibility of cultural, social and economic capital among these three transregional networks helps to explain the reproduction of social inequalities under increasing conditions of globalization, that is, under conditions that potentially augmented the number of sources defining cultural capital.     

Raymond Williams and sociology

The purpose of this article is to recover Williams as a major theoretical inspiration for the social sciences, specifically, as the inaugurator of what might be regarded as a research paradigm, cultural materialism. In the first section, Williams's encounter with the discipline of sociology is traced and distinguished as a critical alternative to the presently ascendant – at least in the USA – neo‐Durkeimian school of ‘cultural sociology’. In the second section, his cultural‐materialist programme is proposed as a powerful analytical framework for the study of culture and society today. In the final section, a key concept of Williams's cultural materialism, mobile privatization, is selected illustratively and proposed as a powerful analytical tool for studying the production and technological mediation of typical modes of communicative sociality in the early twenty‐first century.     

Understanding the social and cultural bases of Brexit*

We use data from a large scale and nationally representative survey to evaluate two narratives about the social bases of Brexit. The first narrative sees Brexit as a revolt of the economically left-behinds. The second narrative attributes Brexit to the resurgence of an English nationalism. There is some, albeit not always consistent, evidence that people in relative poverty or those living in areas that have seen greater Chinese import penetration are slightly more pro-Leave. People living in economically deprived neighborhoods are not more pro-Brexit. Using the Weberian class–status distinction, it is social status, not social class, which stratifies Brexit support. Individuals for whom being British is important are more pro-Leave. But those who see themselves as British rather than English, and those reporting omnivorous cultural consumption are less supportive of Brexit. Overall, there is empirical support for both narratives. But the weight of the evidence suggests a strong cultural dimension in Brexit support.     

Occupational Safety and English Language Proficiency

Recent occupational injury data shows a rising trend, which happens to coincide with both increases in the foreign-born population in the U.S. and changes in its composition. This study aims to explore the presence of a statistical relationship between occupational injuries and the level of English proficiency of foreign-born using cross-sectional data on the rate of injury and count of injury incidents. A cultural gap hypothesis is also examined as an alternative explanation for the rise in work injuries. While there is some support for the adverse effect of inadequate English language proficiency of foreign-born, the results for the cultural gap hypothesis are more robust.     

‘Eyesight to the Blind’: Secular and Religious Dialogue in the ‘Devil's Music’

I adopt a dialogic approach to refute Paul Oliver’s claim that there is no challenge to the authority of the black Church or religion in the segregated ‘race records’ of the first half of the 20th century in the United States. I dismiss the claims of some black theologians that the presence of biblical imagery in the blues means that performers were essentially religious. I show that the dialogue between secular song and religious sermons on record involved mutual parody, satire, and polemic in a common speech genre. Attacks on the Church, its members, clergy, and doctrines were common. Recorded sermons spoke back in defense. Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts offer purchase on the relations between secular and religious recordings in an ongoing struggle for hegemony in black cultural production.     

Accountability and nonprofit organizations: A historical perspective

American nonprofit organizations first developed in the nineteenth century as the organizational instruments through which Americans put their First Amendment freedoms of religion and political belief into practice. For one hundred years American nonprofits were held accountable by relatively small, compact communities of people who shared religious or other highly defined beliefs and values. In the twentieth century, many nonprofit organizations have grown very large and have adopted a scientific, general-service-to-the-community ethos. The legal, institutional, and cultural ideas and practices through which traditional nonprofits were, and are still, held accountable no longer seem to work equally well for the larger, more universal nonprofits of the late twentieth century.