Revisiting “the Long Night” of Iranian Workers: Labor Activism in the Iranian Oil Industry in the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 176-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maral Jefroudi
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Oil Workers ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis article reviews the labor historiography of Iran for the period between the 1953 coup and the early revolutionary activism of late the 1970s, an interlude marked by a lack of histories of labor activism. Based on a qualitative analysis of the types of collective actions that oil workers engaged in during the period, this article argues that contextualizing the struggles of workers and the types of collective actions they engaged in will tell us more about the social and political changes that they experienced and participated in than the search for an ideal type of labor activism. It is argued that the social and political climate of Iran during the 1960s, characterized by political repression and an extensive centralized reform program, added new tactics to workers’ repertoires of action as they made use of the discourse of the regime for their own ends. This study is based on archival research at the International Institute of Social History archives in Amsterdam, the BP archives at Coventry, the National Archives of UK in London, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC.

Colonialism from the Middle: African Clerks as Historical Actors and Discursive Subjects

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 21-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph A. Austen
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Social ◽  
Amadou Hampate Ba ◽  
External Sources ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Late Stages ◽  
Indirect Rule

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.” The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,” or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage.I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.” I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades). The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ's most widely read book.

Individuals and Aggregates

1980 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Paul F. Bourke ◽  
Donald A. DeBats
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Electoral Behavior ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Vexing Question

After more than a decade's impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.

scholarly journals Norwegian Political Theatre in the 1970s: Breaking Away from the “Ibsen Tradition”

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Anna Watson
Keyword(s):  
Deep Sea ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Made In

The dominant theatre aesthetic in Norwegian theatre has been, and remains at large to be, psychological-realism and the bourgeois “living room drama”. In a Norwegian context this tradition is best represented by Henrik Ibsen’s dramas, staged at Nationaltheatret and Den Nasjonale Scene. However, throughout the 20th century there have been several attempts to break with the “Ibsen tradition”, especially among left-wing political and socially engaged theatre-makers and playwrights such as Gunvor Sartz, Olav Daalgard, and Nordahl Grieg in the 1930s, and Jens Bjørneboe and Odin Teatret in the 1960s. I argue that the clearest and most decisive break with Realism and the Aristotelian dramaturgy, in a Norwegian political theatre context, was made in the late 1970s, instigated by the independent theatre groups Perleporten Teatergruppe and Tramteatret. Their break did not only constitute an aesthetic and dramaturgical break, but also a break in organizational terms by breaking the hierarchy of the institutional theatre ‘machine’. Perleporten Teatergruppe and Tramteatret aimed at making a political, progressive theatre both in form and content. Perleporten and Tramteatret were both inspired by contemporaneous political and experimental theatre in Europe and Scandinavia as well as by the historical avant-garde experiments, and, for Tramteatret’s part, the workers' theatre movement from the 1920s and 30s in their search for a theatre that could express the social and political climate of the day. In this article, I will place Tramteatret and Perleporten Teatergruppe’s debut performances Deep Sea Thriller (1977) and Knoll og Tott (1975) within a historiographical and cultural-political context.

scholarly journals Rurality, ruins and archives: mapping the architectural history of the Greek countryside.

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 08004
Author(s):  
Afroditi Maragkou
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Greek Landscape ◽  
Rural Part

What remains unexamined and undervalued in the Greek landscape, are the extreme and abandoned limits of the small non-metropolitan regional areas. At the limits of Greek cities, we can identify a great dispersion, a marginal instability, states of transition and deposition. The architectural and planning policies of the Greek state, through the modernistic period, have set a significant number of traces on the rural part of the country. These traces on the countryside, can only be recorded and historically analysed through systematic approach and subjective mapping, such as the methodology of oral history promotes. The landscape of the lowlands of Thessaly is selected as a paradigm of a changing reality, where one can see and recognize a number of exemplary transformations and specificities. The resettlement phenomenon of the mountain populations in Karditsa region, which was affected by the reclamation infrastructure of the 1960s (construction of Megdova dam), is the springboard for a dispersion of new residential settlements in the lowlands. This relocation process had a significant impact on the transformation of the rural landscape of Thessaly, as well as on the social life of the countryside. The architectural and historical research is motivated from the current ruin condition of these promising residential settlements on the countryside of Thessaly and systematically examines the policies that lead from the construction of Megdova dam to these abandoned traces on the landscape. The methodology of this research is based on an ongoing microhistorical archive which aims to raise microhistory as the main interpretation tool. Composed by oral testimonies, historical sources, state documents, blueprints and other official recordings, this microhistorical archive will be able to map andinterpret the architectural, topological and social history of these modernistic interventions on the countryside of Thessaly.

Objectivity and the Politics of Disciplines

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Medical Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Universal Quantification ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter assesses the bearing of bureaucratic cultures on science, then shows how inferential statistics became standard in medicine and psychology as a response to internal disciplinary weakness and external regulatory pressures. The massive effort to introduce quantitative criteria for public decisions in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply an unmediated response to a new political climate. It reflected also the overwhelming success of quantification in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences during the postwar period. This was not a chance confluence of independent lines of cultural and intellectual development, but in some way a single phenomenon. It is no accident that the move toward the almost universal quantification of social and applied disciplines was led by the United States, and succeeded most fully there. The push for rigor in the disciplines derived in part from the same distrust of unarticulated expert knowledge and the same suspicion of arbitrariness and discretion that shaped political culture so profoundly in the same period. Some of this suspicion came from within the disciplines it affected, but in every case it was at least reinforced by vulnerability to the suspicions of outsiders, often expressed in an explicitly political arena.

Popular Culture, Violence, and Religion in Gloria's Story

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Wertheimer
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
Wealth Concentration ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Hospital Births ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

One of the most vexing challenges accompanying any attempt to reconstruct the legal history of the family is deciding how much interpretive weight to assign to social factors as opposed to legal factors. “Gloria's Story” is loaded with social history, in part because it focuses on a small group of decidedly non-elite characters. It discusses non-legal matters as big as the impact of wealth concentration on the Guatemalan family and as small as the social significance of home births, as opposed to hospital births, in Quetzaltenango during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the most important factors driving the analysis are legal, not social. The article's central argument—that “modernizing” legal reforms adopted in Guatemala since the mid-nineteenth century have fortified, not weakened, adulterous concubinage—emphasizes the effects of legal change.

scholarly journals Dmitrii Blagoev in Russia: An Autobiographical Letter

1964 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Labelle
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Russian Edition ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Literature

A letter from Dmitrii Blagoev, Bulgarian Social Democrat and later leader of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, has been preserved in the archive of A. N. Potresov at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In reply to an inquiry fromD. Kol'tsov, who was preparing a Russian edition of Alphonse Thun's well-known history of the Russian revolutionary movement, Blagoev wrote twelve pages describing his activity in 1883–85 as a member of the first significant Social Democratic circle in Russia. Kol'tsov published extracts from the letter in his edition of Thun, including the Social Democratic program which Blagoev had published in Bulgaria subsequent to his expulsion from Russia in 1885. Kol'tsov's pen, however, struck out some of the more interesting biographical passages, and corrected Blagoev's good, if somewhat erratic Russian. It is particularly interesting to note Blagoev's references to the intellectual bases for a socialist Weltanschauung in the middle 1880's: Lassalle, Lavrov and Chernyshevskii appear beside Marx in the posts of honor. No less interesting is the question which Blagoev raised in this letter – whether the lack of clarity of Socialist views in 1885 was connected in any way with the rise of Economism among workers and socialist intellectuals in the Russian capital during the closing years of the last century. Literature on the Blagoev circle is not lacking, but there is a shortage of sound studies on the relationships between Marxism and indigenous Russian political philosophies between 1880 and 1895.

Sociology and History: Partnership, Rivalry, or Mutual Incomprehension?

2005 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Classical Economic ◽  
The Impact

The 1960s was a period of ferment, intellectual excitement, optimism and expansion in all the social sciences, including sociology. It is, therefore, an appropriate starting point for a discussion of the relationship between history and sociology in Britain. The ferment affected different branches of history in different ways: political and diplomatic history hardly at all; social and economic history much more. The impact of the social sciences on economic history came primarily from neo-classical economic theory allied to econometrics. Historians looked to the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s for concepts, theories, and methods which would assist them to reinvigorate the writing of history. There can be little doubt that economic history was much more influenced between 1960 and 1990 by economics than was social history by sociology. However, history since the 1960s has drawn more on the insights and methods of the social sciences than the social sciences in Britain, including sociology, have drawn on history; this is to the detriment of scholarship in the social sciences.

scholarly journals “Family Strategies”: A Contested Concept

2002 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-421
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Strategies

In the past three decades a fair number of historical demographers and family and labour historians have used the concept of “family strategies” as a means to understand better the social behaviour of individuals and families. At the 26th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association (Chicago, November 2001), a session of the Family/Demography Network was devoted to a critical discussion of this concept of family strategies. Given the importance of the issue, we have invited three of the panelists to rework the papers they gave on that occasion. Two of them, Katherine Lynch and Pier Paolo Viazzo, have joined forces here to discuss the matter from a predominantly theoretical perspective with particular attention to the use of the concept in social anthropology, and in medieval and early modern history. Based on recent Dutch empirical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Theo Engelen questions the use of the concept of family strategies, given the availability of the broader concept of agency. The riposte to these critiques comes from Jan Kok, who is actively engaged in the application of the concept of family strategies in the research programme of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Book Reviews

1983 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-194
Author(s):  
M.A. Bakel ◽  
A. Ysebaert-Deen ◽  
Gerard J. Broek ◽  
Georges Condominas ◽  
H.J.M. Claessen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
International Institute ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adaptive Processes ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Mode Of Production

- M.A. van Bakel, A. Ysebaert-Deen, Schippers onderweg: Sociale relaties van een ambulante groep, Amsterdam 1981, A.S.C. - Gerard J. van den Broek, Georges Condominas, Nous avons mangé la forêt, Paris: Flammarion, 1982. - H.J.M. Claessen, Adam Kuper, Wives for cattle. Bridewealth and marriage in Southern Africa, 1982, London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 202 pp. Notes, index, bibliography, tables and figures. - H.J. Duller, Jeroen H. Dekker, Curacao Zonder / Met Shell. Een bijdrage tot bestudering van demografische, economische en sociale processen in de periode 1900-1929, De Walburg Pers, Zutphen, 1982. - M. Hekker, J. van Baal, Man’s quest for partnership. The anthropological foundations of ethics and religion. Van Gorcum, Assen, 1981. 337 pp. - Fokko P.C. Kool, Dick A. Papousek, The peasant - potters of Los Pueblos - Stimulus situation and adaptive processes in the Mazahua region in central Mexico, van Gorcum, Assen 1981. 181 pages, 5 maps, 11 illustrations. - Adrianus Koster, L.D. Meijers, Chassidisme in Israël: De Reb Arrelech van Jeruzalem, Assen, Van Gorcum (Serie Terreinverkenningen in de Culturele Antropologie 17), 1979, 129 pp. - Peter J.M. Nas, I. Box, Van theorie tot toepassing in de ontwikkelingssociologie. Sociologen en antropologen over onttwikkelingsproblemen. Boekaflevering 56e jaargang Mens en Maatschappij, Van Loghum Slaterus b.v., Deventer, 1981, 139 p., D.A. Papousek (eds.) - S.A. Niessen, Toos van Dijk, Ship cloths of the Lampung, South Sumatra; A research of their design, meaning and use in their cultural context, Amsterdam: Galerie Mabuhay. 79 pp., 17 plates., Nico de Jonge (eds.) - Cees L. Post, Jacques Le Goff, Le Charivari, Paris, The Hague, New York; Mouton, 1981. 444 pp., maps, ills., annexes., Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds.) - N.E. Sjoman, Wim van der Meer, Hindustani Music in the 20th Century, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague/Boston/London, 1980, 252 pp., 8 ills. - Pieter van de Velde, Fritjof Tichelman, The social evolution of Indonesia: The Asiatic mode of production and its legacy, The Hague etc.: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980. Translated from the Dutch (1975; with revisions up till 1978) by Jean Sanders. Studies in social history no. 5, International institute of social history, Amsterdam. xiv + 301 pp., index, bibliography. - Torben Anders Vestergaard, Jonathan Wylie, The ring of dancers. Images of Faroese culture, with a foreword by Einar Haugen, Symbol and culture series, Philadelphia: University of Pennysylvania Press, 1980. 182 pp., David Margolin (eds.)

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