Social Change in Javanese Town-Village Life

The role of television as a powerful medium of communication is wellrecognised. This one material commodity has most dramatically influenced the social life of India. About 75 percent of India’s one billion people live in villages. Today, in rural India, television is considered as a necessity and it has become a large part of most villagers’ daily life. Johnson’s book is about the role that television plays in the process of social change in rural India. His focus of research has been primarily on the advertising and entertainment aspect of television in the context of village life as a whole.

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The New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 ◽

10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 162-210

Author(s):

John Evelev

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Middle Class ◽

New England ◽

American Literature ◽

Social Values ◽

American Novel ◽

History Of ◽

Residual Space ◽

Village Life ◽

The Village

This chapter focuses on the New England village novel, a prestigious subgenre that figured in many of the midcentury’s critical assessments of what constituted “American literature” but that is now largely forgotten. Once important novels like Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869) tell us about middle-class social values and their investment in reform in their depictions of New England village life during this period of time. This chapter explores some of the contradictions inherent in locating idealized theological and social change within the residual space of the New England village. As a consequence of these contradictions, the utopia of the New England village novel becomes literally “no place,” frozen between nostalgia for a unified national community that never existed and hope that through reform the village could fulfill utopian possibilities for the nation. This genre also maps out the transformation of attitudes toward social reform from the picturesque utopianism of Judd’s Margaret to a much narrower vision of the transformative possibilities of the picturesque in Beecher’s post-Civil War novel, Norwood, a quarter of a century later. This transformation reveals the importance of the picturesque to an alternative history of the mid-nineteenth-century American novel and explores the rise and decline of middle-class use of the picturesque as an authoritative discourse to reshape spaces and enact social change in American life.

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Mobility and Social Change: Understanding the European Neolithic Period after the Archaeogenetic Revolution

Journal of Archaeological Research ◽

10.1007/s10814-020-09153-x ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Martin Furholt

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Large Scale ◽

Animal Husbandry ◽

Human Movement ◽

Political Organization ◽

Small Scale ◽

Neolithic Period ◽

Social Transformations ◽

Village Life ◽

Neolithic Expansion

AbstractThis paper discusses and synthesizes the consequences of the archaeogenetic revolution to our understanding of mobility and social change during the Neolithic period in Europe (6500–2000 BC). In spite of major obstacles to a productive integration of archaeological and anthropological knowledge with ancient DNA data, larger changes in the European gene pool are detected and taken as indications for large-scale migrations during two major periods: the Early Neolithic expansion into Europe (6500–4000 BC) and the third millennium BC “steppe migration.” Rather than massive migration events, I argue that both major genetic turnovers are better understood in terms of small-scale mobility and human movement in systems of population circulation, social fission and fusion of communities, and translocal interaction, which together add up to a large-scale signal. At the same time, I argue that both upticks in mobility are initiated by the two most consequential social transformations that took place in Eurasia, namely the emergence of farming, animal husbandry, and sedentary village life during the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of systems of centralized political organization during the process of urbanization and early state formation in southwest Asia.

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