Community, dialect and urbanization in the Arabic-speaking Middle East

1995 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Holes
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Everyday Communication

The purpose of this paper is to explain how changes in the social structure of the countries of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are being reflected in new patterns of dialect use. The last 30 years have seen an enormously increased interest in Arabic as a living mode of everyday communication, reflected in many dialectological, typological and sociolinguistic studies. As a result, we now have a much clearer overall picture of the dialect geography of the eastern Arab world, and the beginnings of an understanding of the dynamics of language change. Inevitably, the focus of many studies has been geographically specific, so that the area-wide nexus between social change and linguistic change has not always been seen in a sufficiently broad context. By examining three case studies documented in the literature, I aim to point up similarities in the dynamics of change which are often obscured by distracting local particularities.

Rough Diamonds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Provincial Society

Hutton was one of many rough diamonds—‘men of great talent but no polish’—who offer an alternative model to ‘politeness’. These self-educated entrepreneurs add a new layer to our knowledge of provincial society. Chapter 2 defines their characteristics, roles, strategies, and impacts. Case studies give life to Hutton’s collaborators and competitors including the printer John Baskerville, the industrialist Samuel Garbett, and the papermaker Robert Bage. They reveal how outsiders fit (or not) into the social structure and how mainstream society responded. Their lack of education and refusal to give deference caused problems, resentment, and grudges that are revealed in Hutton’s ‘Memorandums’. The result is a picture of suppressed conflict that allows us to address questions about social change and mobility. Yet because rough diamonds had confidence to experiment with new ideas, they became driving forces for the spread of mass culture on a less refined but more widespread plane.

Models, Methods, and Metrics to Measure Socioeconomic Resilience

2018 ◽  
pp. 346-367
Author(s):  
Carlos Gonçalves
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Economic Base ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Regional Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Indicator Matrix ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter aims to discuss concepts and methods to measure the landscape resilience of urban systems and test the indicators framework in the Portuguese regional context. The objective is to measure the performance and the direction of the urban changes in different phenomena, as well as to evaluate the level of urban systems preparation for a desired and undesired change adaptability. The approach to these issues is analyzed in the literature, dividing the aforementioned analysis into the resilience of the economic base, of the social structure, and of the urban form. In brief, the chapter meets three objectives: firstly, defining the framework of principles more commonly associated with urban resilience; secondly, providing a selection of indicators that embodies the different proposals of measurement; and thirdly, applying the indicator matrix to two Portuguese case studies (Caldas da Rainha and Évora urban systems).

scholarly journals Understanding Language Death in Czech-Moravian Texas

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 147-163
Author(s):  
Kevin Hannan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Wave Theory ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Language Death ◽  
Symbolic Function ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The Social

Based on several decades of personal interaction with Texas speakers of Czech, the author’s article attempts to correlate social change with some specific stages of language obsolescence and language death. Many instances of language change in that community, as well as cultural and social change, may be explained by the linguistic model known as the wave theory. One hundred and fifty years passed between the introduction of Czech and the death of that language in Texas. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the Czech-Moravians represented a closed community in which individuals defined their identity primarily by the Czech language, ethnicity, and culture. In the final five decades of the twentieth century, as the social template representing Texas speakers of Czech disintegrated, spoken Czech ceased to function as a living language, and much of the ancestral culture connected with the language was lost. Today some among the elderly, described as semi-speakers, terminal speakers, or ‘‘rememberers’’ of language, retain a limited knowledge, but the ancestral language now has only a symbolic function.

scholarly journals Elegant Economy in Elizabeth Gaskells Cranford: A Socialist Feminist Study

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-61
Author(s):  
Megha Ramteke
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Class System ◽  
Feminist Study ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
The Social

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a Victorian writer who had to undergo various kinds of condescension for her writings. After bearing the stigma of being conformist, conventional, and meek as ascribed to her by the contemporary feminist critics, Gaskell’s writings are being revisited with a new feminist perspective in recent years. The present paper is also a humble attempt to rediscover the feminist dimension of her writings by exploring one of her novels, Cranford (1853), through a socialist feminist lens. Cranford presents such a social structure that is devoid of a Class system and constructed by women in a matrilineal society as against the capitalist patriarchal society of Drumble. This Matriarchal socialist social structure is based on the values of cooperation, humanity, and motherly care characteristic to the differently developed gendered subjectivity of women. The social change through the agency of woman foreshadows Gaskell’s far-sighted feminist views of the 1970s.

scholarly journals Arrival Cities: Refugees in Three German Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajo Neis ◽  
Briana Meier ◽  
Tomo Furukawazono
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Host Country ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Host Countries ◽  
Ruhr Area ◽  
The Social ◽  
German Cities

Since 2015, the authors have studied the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East. The intent of theproject is to not only study the refugee crisis in various spatial and architectural settings and aspectsbut also actively try to help refugees with their problems that they experience in the events fromstarting an escape and to settling in a given host country, city town or neighborhood.In this paper, the authors present three case studies in three different cities in Germany. Refugees areeverywhere in Germany, even in smaller towns and villages. The case study cities are at differentscales with Borken (15,000 people), Kassel, a mid-size city (200,000), and Essen a larger city(600,000) as part of the still larger Ruhr Area Megacity. In these cities we try to understand the life ofrefugees from their original escape country/city to their arrival in their new cities and new countries.Our work focuses on the social-spatial aspects of refugee experiences, and their impact on urbanmorphology and building typology.We also try to understand how refugees manage their new life in partial safety of place, shelter foodand financial support but also in uncertainty and insecurity until officially accepted as refugees.Beyond crisis we are looking at how refugees can and want to integrate into their host countries, citiesand neighborhoods and start a new life. Social activities and physical projects including urbanarchitecture projects for housing and work, that help the process of integration, are part of thispresentation.

scholarly journals Muslim tradition and conceptions of national development of Arab States

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksander M. Rodriges-Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Arab World ◽  
National Development ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
The Common ◽  
Arab States ◽  
Common Sign

In the modern Arab world, the search of modernization ways, the forming of state political ideologies as well as creative economical conceptions are still based on the old Muslim tradition. There are 6 schools to be considered. All these schools have significantly influenced both the social structure of the Arab States and people behavior even since the Middle Ages. The common sign of all these schools as well as their strong difference from European philosophy pragmatism is undoubtedly priority of moral and ethic principles over material ones, condemnation of mercantilism and individualism. Thus, the concepts and strategies of Muslim states considering some utopian traditions are essentially national and original, but in any case, they are to be considered as anti-globalist tensions.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Rezk
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Regional Dynamics ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Strategic Context

Exploring these case studies through the secret prism of intelligence tells a dramatically different story of Anglo-American relations with the Middle East than the narratives of ‘failure’ and ‘misunderstanding’ that dominate extant accounts. Indeed for most of these seminal events, analysts had a remarkably good sense of the strategic context and provided warnings to policy makers accordingly. Predicting the tactical details of a revolution or war was considerably more difficult, particularly when these details were closely guarded or even unknown to participants themselves. This concluding chapter explores what lessons can be learned from these case studies. It highlights that assessments produced at the time often revealed an impressive degree of clarity and foresight, frequently foreshadowing the conclusions of later historical scholarship deprived of these valuable sources and writing with the benefit of hindsight. Surviving Egyptian diplomats were notably surprised by how well the analytic community read regional dynamics. ‘Culture’ was a complex and contested double-edged sword, serving as both an aid and an impediment to assessments of the Arab world.

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniella Talmon-Heller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Sacred Places ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Mamluk Period

Focusing on the construction of sanctity and its manifestations in individual devotions, formal ceremonies and communal rites, this book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates Islamic thinking about and practice in sacred places and times through the detailed research of two contested case-studies: the shrine(s) in honour of the head of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAli, and the (arguably) holy month of Rajab. The narrative spans the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, attuned to changing political contexts and sectarian affiliations, and to the input of the social sciences and the study of religion. The juxtaposition of sacred place and time reveals that the two expanses were regarded as complementary venues for similar religious devotions, and imagined by a common vocabulary.

Teachers’ Narratives of Life Satisfaction, Social Mobility, and Practical Sense of Inequalities in Chile

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042110061
Author(s):  
Andrea Lizama-Loyola
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Fluid Model ◽  
Differential Forms ◽  
Objective Measure ◽  
The Social

The academic literature argues that understandings of the subjective experience of social mobility differ from objective measure of social mobility – based on occupational patterns of movement – because people tend to conflate changes of the social structure (social change) and changes within the social structure (social mobility), resulting in a limited sense of social inequalities. This article explores subjective understandings of social mobility through the lens of Chilean school-teachers’ narratives of their life trajectories. Methodologically, data were collected through in-depth interviews with 41 teachers who live in Santiago. They were also asked to draw a timeline with the main transitions in their lives. The findings of this article show that teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories are first expressed as narratives relating to their life satisfaction. Differential forms of social comparison that emerge from teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories reveal how people position themselves within a broader structure of social inequalities. In consequence, teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories contain implicit or explicit narratives of social mobility which are often bound up with a subjective sense of social change and life-course change. This article demonstrates that lay understandings of social mobility potentially illuminate academic understandings, by addressing a multidimensional and fluid model of social mobility as well as the practical experiences of inequalities that frame people’s everyday lives.

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