scholarly journals Class Structure and Social Mobility in the Chinese Community in Singapore and Malaya 1800–1911

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen Ching-Hwang

The social history of the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be fully understood if aspects of class structure and social mobility are not examined. Of course, the social relations of the Chinese were principally determined by kinship and dialect ties, but they were also affected by class affiliations. Class status, like kinship and dialect relations distanted Chinese immigrants from one another. This paper seeks to examine the nature and structure of Chinese classes, class relations and the channels of social mobility in the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya during the period between 1800 and 1911. The findings of this paper may be applicable to other overseas Chinese communities in the same period outside this region.

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
Hao Shiyuan

When viewed from the perspective of history, China has not had a flourishing anthropology and ethnology. However, China's traditions of ethnographic-like perspectives have flourished for a long time. Since the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC) and Warring States Period (475-221 BC), multiethnic structure and social relations have been recorded in China's history. Ever since Sima Qian's Shi Ji (the Historical Records), the first general history of China compiled around 100 BC, the social history and cultural customs of ethnic minorities had been covered in each dynasty's history. Moreover, some special chapters had been dedicated to keeping the records of ethnic minorities. Of course such records were not completely unbiased.


1975 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy

When I offered to read a paper on this subject, I had a particular hypothesis in mind. I thought—perhaps it would be more honest to say, I hoped—it would be possible to show that, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, the practice of the sacrament of penance in the traditional church had undergone a change which was important in itself and of general historical interest. The change, I thought, could roughly be described as a shift from the social to the personal. To be more precise, I thought it possible that, for the average layman, and notably for the average rural layman in the pre-reformation church, the emphasis of the sacrament lay in its providing part of a machinery for the regulation and resolution of offences and conflicts otherwise likely to disturb the peace of a community. The effect of the Counter-Reformation (or whatever one calls it) was, I suspected, to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual. The hypothesis may be thought an arbitrary one: we can but see. I think it will be admitted that, supposing it turned out to be correct, we should have learnt something worth knowing about the difference between the medieval and the counter-reformation church, and something about the difference between pre- and post-reformation European society. If if did not turn out to be correct, we might nevertheless expect to pick up some useful knowledge about something which is scarcely a staple of current historical discourse, though it threatens to become so.


Author(s):  
Stefan Nygård

This introductory chapter surveys the notoriously ambivalent concept of debt. It connects different approaches to debt in social theory and anthropology to the book’s focus on how past debts are mobilised in political debates in the present, and how the ‘North’ has been portrayed as indebted to the ‘South’ for its development, and vice versa. Both questions are framed by the way in which understandings of debt tend to gravitate towards reciprocity or domination. In view of its fundamental ambiguity, debt thus underpins both social cohesion and fragmentation. While it has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. A tension between debt as the glue of social bonds and debt as hierarchy consequently runs through the social history of the concept. Applied to regional and global North-South relations, discussions on debt have often centred on the question of retribution, involving difficult disputes over possible ways of settling debts in the present for injustices incurred in the past.


Author(s):  
Alysa Levene

Childhood and youth have undergone a period of much more intensive scrutiny within the social history of medicine in the past few decades. This article discusses the significance of health and well-being of the younger generation as it reflects a variety of wider societal concerns about national efficiency, confidence in medical practice, a healthy and well-balanced population, and the quality of social relations. It discusses more insightful discoveries about the nature of child patients and disease by studying how they are treated compared with others experiencing similar impairment. It also deals with the second theme to emerge in recent medical histories of childhood and youth focusing on the boundaries of normal life experiences. The history of child health is moving from the margins of welfare and employment into its own field, and it is hoped that future work will continue to build up a more convincing set of theoretical reference points.


Author(s):  
Warwick Anderson

Shirley Lindenbaum’s study in the early 1960s of the origins and transmission of kuru among the Fore people of the eastern highlands of New Guinea is one of the earliest examples of an explicitly medical anthropology. Lindenbaum later described her investigations as assembling ‘an epidemiology of social relations’. How might the emergence of medical anthropology, then, be related to the concurrent development of the social history of medicine and global epidemic intelligence? Are these alternative genealogies for medical anthropology?


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Brower

In what ways did the development of cities in late tsarist Russiaalter the character of social relations and conflicts in that keyperiod? At first glance, the question may appear poorly posed. It has long been customary to assess the history of Russian society in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries in terms of estate and class, to evaluate change by class differentiation, and to look for the sources of social conflict in the strains engendered by the transformation (to the extent it occurred) of a "society of estates" into a "society of classes." The urban centers of the country fran this point of view provided merely the setting in which key segments of the population experienced and reacted to new economic forces and politicalpressures. Recent books in the social history of the time havesubstantially enlarged and enriched our understanding of the changes under way among the urban population.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Dawood Erfan

Afghanistan, with major rural population is of the countries that face varieties of problems for transformation from tradition to modernity (underdevelopment). Nowadays various social gaps in this geographical area have crystalized in ethnic cleft; has been originated from another background that the most important is the rural-urban gap. This hidden gap has shown itself in different forms in the social history of Afghanistan. Sometimes with a cover of Tribe, sometimes in the form of wealth and poverty and sometimes it rises with a cover over modernity and tradition. Development experts concentrate on other gaps and they didn’t pay enough attention to this important gap. The question is: What has been the role of rural-urban gap in underdevelopment and political changes in Afghanistan? In a country where social relations are generated from rural areas and political changes rise by using violent tools in different forms, necessitate deep socialistic investigations on ruling relations in rural communities that constitute the most population of the country. It seems inattention to rural people needs and problems led to the profound gap which shaped violent changes in the history of Afghanistan. Meaningful rural relations, nomadism and tribal culture, have led to many partitions in the process of development.


Author(s):  
Ariel Toaff

The latter part of the thirteenth century is regarded as a key period in the history of Italian Jewry. During that time many Jewish communities sprang up in the regions of central and northern Italy. Their appearance marked a turning-point in the history of Jews in the Italian peninsula as the Jewish presence had previously been focused on Rome and the south. This acclaimed study, originally published in Italian, captures all the intricacies of everyday life in the medieval Jewish communities of Umbria. The book characterizes in detail the defining features of Jewish life in the region at that time and shows clearly how the common stereotype of a single, undifferentiated Jewish community does not reflect the reality. Instead, the book presents a picture of a complex society that contributed greatly to contemporary society and played a significant role in shaping it, while at the same time also being influenced by the surrounding Christian society. The book elaborates contemporary Jewish traditions and practices associated with love, marriage, food, work, sickness, and death in the context of everyday social relations between Christians and Jews. In so doing it presents a reconstruction of the Jewish life of the period that faithfully reflects the links and divides between the two communities. The book will be of interest to the general reader, while its detailed references to archival documentation make it a particularly valuable source for students of medieval Jewish history and specialists in the social history of medieval and Renaissance Italy.


1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Daniels

Clifford Geertz, in his discussion of the social history of an East Central Javanese town, described how rural migrants attempted to make sense of modern elections and political factions by applying old systems of meanings. As people adjusted to the evolving social conditions of new urban contexts, new knowledge supposedly emerged to order social relations. Yet he observed that in the 1950s this rarely was the case; usually a sense of vagueness and incoherence persisted. Similarly, Geertz's analysis of a Javanese funeral concluded that the ritual “failed” and consequently tensions persisted and intensified as a result of societal and cultural discontinuity; the social and the cultural were moving in opposite directions. Old cultural notions did not tend to give way to new notions more adept at effecting social solidarity. The contest over whose voice, whose sense of self and image of post-colonial Indonesia would prevail eventually culminated in the bloodbath of 1965–66, which marked the abrupt end of the Old Order and the birth of the Suhartoled New Order regime.


2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-318
Author(s):  
Kostas Vlassopoulos

I commence this review with a major contribution to the social history of classical Athens. Athenian social history is traditionally focused on polarities of class, status, and gender; while these polarities were obviously important, it is equally significant to adopt an interactionist approach and explore the shape of encounters between people belonging to the same or different groups. Rafał Matuszewski has chosen to focus on the interactions and communication between male Athenian citizens: in particular, the various spaces in which those interactions took place, as well as the means of communication. As regards the spaces, he explores in detail the noisy streets, the Agora, the various shops, workshops, and places of commensality and entertainment, the baths, the gymnasia, and the palaestrae. This is an excellent synthesis of a large number of social spaces in classical Athens, which have never been explored in the same detail as, for example, sanctuaries and cemeteries. Equally fascinating is the second part of the work and its detailed exploration of the body as a means of communication, alongside elements of material culture like clothes, houses, and graves. The wealth of material that is collected and examined and the interactionist framework employed have the potential to revolutionize how we study Greek social and cultural history; it is to be hoped that Anglophone readers will make the effort to engage seriously with this important German book.


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