Civility and Humiliation under the French Flag: The Tensions of Colonial Liberalism in Pondicherry, 1871–86

This article explores the extension of political “liberty” and franchise – as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights – to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s–80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste‐based rituals and rules? I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican “civility” of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time.     

Education in Gerontological Social Work: Application of the Task-Centered Model

There is an increasing need both for effective interventions with the elderly and for social workers trained in clinical gerontology. This paper discusses an attempt to integrate gerontological knowledge, clinical knowledge, and clinical experience in a master's-level curriculum and to develop the task-centered model as an effective base for social work with the elderly.     

Internet Poker Websites and Pathological Gambling Prevention Policy

Despite the widespread increase in online poker playing and the risk related to excessive poker playing, research on online poker websites is still lacking with regard to pathological gambling prevention strategies offered by the websites. The aim of the present study was to assess the pathological gambling-related prevention strategies of online poker websites. Two keywords (“poker” and “poker help”) were entered into two popular World Wide Web search engines. The first 20 links related to French and English online poker websites were assessed. Seventy-four websites were assessed with a standardized tool designed to rate sites on the basis of accountability, interactivity, prevention strategies, marketing, and messages related to poker strategies. Prevention strategies appeared to be lacking. Whereas a substantial proportion of the websites offered incitation to gambling such as betting “tips,” few sites offered strategies to prevent or address problem gambling. Furthermore, strategies related to poker, such as probability estimation, were mostly reported without acknowledging their limitations. Results of this study suggest that more adequate prevention strategies for risky gambling should be developed for online poker.     

Factors in the Transition to Homelessness in the Chronically Mentally III

Although there is a great deal of literature on homelessness and mental illness, few studies have examined the factors which may lead to homelessness in the mentally ill. The objective of this research was to examine the factors in the length of time between when a client of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health entered the system and when he or she was first homeless on admission to a service (time before homelessness, TBH). Past psychiatric records of 142 currently homeless clients were examined through the Automated Information System of LACDMH. Results showed that total admissions to any service and total admissions to prison services were predictors of shorter TBH; being younger and being both African-American and female were predictors of longer TBH. TBH shortened dramatically from 1973 to 1993; mental health funding levels for the previous year were significantly correlated with TBH Results show that demographic, clinical, and system variables all impact on homelessness in the chronically mentally ill.     

Loneliness and Adolescents’ Neural Processing of Self,Friends, and Teachers: Consequences for the School Self‐Concept

The present interdisciplinary study explored whether perceived loneliness is associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) activation during self‐ and social judgments (friends and teachers) in adolescents. Moreover, we examined how vMPFC activity is related to the academic self‐concept (ASC). Results of manifest path analysis indicated that high perceived loneliness was related to lower neural response to self‐judgments. In turn, high neural response to self‐judgments was positively associated with the ASC, whereas there was a trendwise negative association between high neural response to teacher‐related judgments and ASC. This study reveals associations between perceived loneliness and neural processing of the self, underlining the idea that feeling isolated from others may hinder self‐insight and, by extension, the formation of a stable academic self‐concept.     

Organic food and the plural moralities of food provisioning

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first aim is to unfold the moral complexity of organic food consumption as part of household food provisioning. By acknowledging this complexity, and the difficulty of determining what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ in food provisioning, the idea is to allow for a better understanding of how organic food may, or may not, fit in with the various concerns of food provisioning. The second aim is to analyse how food provisioners handle this complexity so that food provisioning can proceed as an ordinary everyday activity.The paper analyses empirical material from a study of household food provisioning in Denmark. Theoretically, it draws on French pragmatic sociology as represented by the work of Boltanski and Thévenot on moral conventions and regimes of engagement. The analysis illustrates that food provisioning involves several competing sets of moral conventions and that the status of organic food in relation to these is often uncertain and contested. However, it also identifies among provisioners different strategies for handling this moral complexity in ordinary everyday life. The paper calls for some modesty in trying to change consumer behaviour in favour of organic products. Providing consumers with more information about organic food may not make it easier to determine what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ when buying food. It may only add to the complexity of food provisioning and thus to the need for compromise and pragmatism.     

A still,small voice: Letter‐writing,testimony and the project of address in Etty Hillesum's letters from Westerbork

Abstract

This paper derives from an exploration of the ways in which the letters of Holocaust writer Etty Hillesum, which are seemingly resistant to many of the interests of current trauma theory, can be read in relation to contemporary writing on testimonial. In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Derrida, Caruth and Irigaray, directly address Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a central text in the current refiguring of trauma. This paper traces the ways in which Hillesum's letters can be read across the theoretical accounts. An interpretation of Hillesum's writing emerges in which the conventional emphasis on the mystical aspect of her texts is reinterpreted in terms of Caruth's emphasis on the life drive. Viewed as forging a creative language of departure, Hillesum's letters are situated in a central relation to the most recent developments in the theoretical discourse around testimony.     

Parental altruism and nest leaving in Europe: evidence from a retrospective survey

We use retrospective life-history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to assess parental altruism through the effect of parental resources and home characteristics on the age at which individuals now aged 50 or more left the nest in 13 countries. We show that the nest leaving age has declined from one cohort to the next and that the tendency has been of a relative decline in leaving one’s parents to start a family and an increase in leaving home to pursue higher education, even if the first pattern was still the most common for the baby-boomers. We test an altruistic model where constrained parents push the child out, where less constrained “proximity altruistic” parents can help the child by providing a home or even, for the richest “active altruists”, help the child leave the nest. Taking into account the endogenous child’s choices of education, we find that most parents helped by being proximity altruists, while some helped their children move out and that the quality of the home had an important influence on the nest leaving age.     

Entwickeln im Team – Effekte für den Einzelnen

This study tested the effects of a 2-day team building intervention on team members’ team identification, social support and collective self-efficacy. Members (n?=?32) of three teams from different sectors completed questionnaires before, directly after and six weeks after the team building intervention. Two teams served as control groups. Results showed lasting positive effects of team building on identification, support and collective self-efficacy in the training groups but no changes in the control groups.