Envisioning an Ideal Christian Family in Republican China

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-215
Author(s):  
Yun Zhou

Abstract Amid debates and discussions on the institution of the family in Republican China, foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians played an active role in promoting an ideal Christian family. This article investigates the three waves of prominent theological thinking that underpinned changing ideals of the Christian family throughout the Republican period: Chinese society’s encounter with the gendered ethics of the Christian community in the early Republican period, discussions of domesticity by Chinese Christians amid the social gospel movements of the 1920s, and discussions of domesticity during the National Christianizing the Home Movement. An exploration of Christian publications on domesticity points to a gendered perspective on women’s domestic roles as well as a male-dominated theological construct that attempted to reconfigure the notion of the Chinese Christian family. The discourse on the ideal Chinese Christian family had both secular and spiritual dimensions, shaped by the dynamic transnational flow of ideas and the development of local theological thinking.

Author(s):  
Tanja Bueltmann ◽  
Donald M. MacRaild

Chapter 1 frames the following discussion of English associations and ethnic activities by charting English migration to North America from the mid-1700s. The earlier emigrants carried with them cultural characteristics, habits and customs that were critical in shaping the social and civic life that marked the English as foundational and invisible within America society. We problematize existing scholarship and challenge the assumption that the hegemony of the English language and the early immigrants’ foundational context provided all subsequent English migrants with a permanent and unchanging advantage over other migrant groups by default. Ordinary English migrants faced the same challenges and hardships as any other group; working-class immigrants in particular dealt with many common economic pressures regardless of their origins. Ultimately, the English had much in common with those of other backgrounds. The English settled in all colonies, counties and states; they were loaded towards the urban and industrial areas, but the focus upon the north-east—in both the colonial and early Republican period, as well as north of the border in what was to become Canada—gradually gave way to greater diffusion: a diffusion in line with the spread of ethnic associations. In the nineteenth century, English-born immigrants—the mainstay of English ethnic associations—came to be hugely out-numbered by several immigrant groups, most notably the Irish, with whom innate tensions were reprised in the new country. Chapter 1 explores such factors as a frame for the study that follows.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
nancy siegel

Cooking Up Politics explores the expression of nationalism in the early republican period of American history through analysis of the domestic environment. This includes the development of American recipes, the patriotic ornamentation of imported ceramics and furnishings, and the role played by women as culinary activists who furthered the causes of republican values through a domestic ideology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In particular, this study addresses the naming of recipes in American cookery books, reflective of the growing interest in national sentiment. Recipes for Independence cake, Election cake, and the Federal pan cake, developed by authors such as Amelia Simmons, demonstrate that the meaning associated with food consumption and the social act of gathering to dine could be not only familial but patriotic as well. Such a nationalistic association with food allowed women to create a unique means to express their commitment to the new nation, thus linking language with food.


2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hale Yılmaz

AbstractThis article reconsiders Turkey's 1928 alphabet reform by shifting the focus from the state to the social experiences of alphabet change. Rather than assuming an obedient and indifferent public silently following the decrees of an authoritarian and repressive regime, it explores the actual processes, institutions, and lived experiences of the alphabet reform by drawing on a variety of sources, including unpublished archival evidence and personal narratives collected through oral interviews. It draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of learning to read and write (the new letters) as well as to the persistence of the Ottoman script; it also examines the variety of ways that state authorities dealt with this persistence. The analysis of this particular reformist measure has implications for understanding social change and the emergence of a nationalist culture in the early republican period as well as state–society relations and the nature of the Kemalist state.


Cultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Ke ZHANG

This paper examines the concept of Rendaozhuyi in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Appearing as early as 1903, Rendaozhuyi is the Chinese rendering of both humanism and humanitarianism. For the Chinese intellectuals during the Late Qing and Early Republican period, “rendao” itself represented a modern value of humanity and human dignity. In the wake of the Great War, Rendaozhuyi gained tremendous popularity among the May-Fourth scholars. Some of them held it up as a universal ideal and tool to critique Chinese tradition, while others respectfully disagreed, worrying it would undermine the collective morale of “strengthening the nation”. Finally, the late 1920s saw the rapid ebb of the discussions of Rendaozhuyi.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Marcelo A. Bohrt

Race has shaped the development of the Bolivian state and its institutions albeit with important transformations in the social and political meaning of race. This paper discusses the racialization of the central state bureaucracy in Bolivia along these two dimensions: the distribution of bureaucratic resources and the assumptions and meanings that underpin bureaucratic hierarchy and spaces. It first discusses the relationship between the modern state and the concept of race, and conceptualizes the ethnoracial bureaucracy as a material and symbolic structure. Next, it examines the composition of the public administration sector overall and across the bureaucratic hierarchy in 2001, before the MAS-IPSP’s rise to power. Last, it surveys the narratives of race and nation that Creole and white-mestizo state elites historically mobilized in demarcating the boundaries of state power around whiteness. In contemporary Bolivia, the production of alternative official narratives of race and nation seeks to blur the boundary between indigeneity and statecraft (re)produced since the early republican period, and to legitimize the changing ethnoracial composition of the bureaucracy. The durability of the project is not guaranteed as the sediment of history and competing political projects weighs heavy on this process of transformation and negotiation.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 611-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Weng

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Laura Hall ◽  
Urpi Pine ◽  
Tanya Shute

Abstract This paper will reflect on key findings from a Summer 2017 initiative entitled The Role of Culture and Land-Based Healing in Addressing and Ending Violence against Indigenous Women and Two-Spirited People. The Indigenist and decolonizing methodological approach of this work ensured that all research was grounded in experiential and reciprocal ways of learning. Two major findings guide the next phase of this research, complicating the premise that traditional economic activities are healing for Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people. First, the complexities of the mainstream labour force were raised numerous times. Traditional economies are pressured in ongoing ways through exploitative labour practices. Secondly, participants emphasized the importance of attending to the responsibility of nurturing, enriching, and sustaining the wellbeing of soil, water, and original seeds in the process of creating renewal gardens as a healing endeavour. In other words, we have an active role to play in healing the environment and not merely using the environment to heal ourselves. Gardening as research and embodied knowledge was stressed by extreme weather changes including hail in June, 2018, which meant that participants spent as much time talking about the healing of the earth and her systems as the healing of Indigenous women in a context of ongoing colonialism.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 429-439
Author(s):  
Boğaç Erozan

Established in 1923, Turkey has been a republic without a dominant republican conception of liberty. A chance to install such a conception was missed in the early republican period and never recaptured. The republic was unable to get rid of vestiges of the authoritarian tradition of the past. Centuries-old authoritarian tradition persisted well into the recent and the contemporary periods. Presenting ample evidence, the article underlines the weight of history and the legacy of authoritarian mentality that promoted the use of authority, not liberty, in political problem-solving. The initial failure to abandon an authoritarian problem-solving approach proved fateful for the chances of the deepening of democracy in Turkey.


Belleten ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 82 (294) ◽  
pp. 759-762
Author(s):  
Ayşe Bedi̇r

The purpose of this book review is to fulfi ll the absence of comprehensive study on the Turkey-Sweden relations both Sweden and Turkey yet. Turkey-Sweden Relations (1914- 1938) is an original work, which is suitable for scientifi c criteria and prepared as a doctoral thesis, receives the details of the relations of both countries for the fi rst time in detail, and sheds light on the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the early Republican period of Turkey. Very rich sources are used in this work with a simple language and style. As it is seen that in preparation of the book the sources of the foreign archives and local archives such as Sveria Riksarkivet (Sweden State Archives), Sveria Krigsarkivet (Sweden Military Archives), Kungliga Bibliotek (Sweden Royal Library), Uppsala University, Carolina Rediviva Library, The National Archives (London), League of Nations Photo Archive, Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, Red Crescent Archives, Presidency Archive, Foreign Ministry Archives, Istanbul Sea Museum Archive, Turkish Revolution History Institute Archives have been used. Additionally, the book uses domestic and foreign literature, newspapers and magazines.


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