Exchange Relations and Social Change in Rural Pakistan

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad A.Z. Mughal
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Rural Economy ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Socioeconomic Change ◽  
Rural Pakistan ◽  
Gradual Shift ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Exchange Relations

In recent decades, the nature of exchange relations in rural Pakistan appears to have undergone significant transformations due to the gradual shift from seasonal agriculture to a market-based economy, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. Change and continuity in exchange relations are particularly manifested in rituals and ceremonies associated with childbirth, marriage and death, with socioeconomic transformations in the rural economy triggering shifts in ways of conducting such rituals and ceremonies. This article seeks to highlight such change but argues that the continuing centrality of religion, kinship and economic inter-dependencies, marked by rural social organisation, remains evident in how these rituals and ceremonies are conducted. After discussing the social meanings of such rituals and ceremonies in rural Pakistan, the article demonstrates through detailed ethnographic study certain modifications in exchange relations as a consequence of recent socioeconomic change.

The social context of herding contracts in the Far North Region of Cameroon

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Moritz ◽  
Kristen Ritchey ◽  
Saïdou Kari
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Sustainable Livelihoods ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Rangeland Management ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Pastoral System ◽  
Far North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Livestock Ownership

ABSTRACTDroughts across Africa have led to a shift in livestock ownership from impoverished pastoralists to absentee owners who contract hired herders to manage their animals. The assumption has been that these contracts are exploitative and negatively affect herd and rangeland management. We conducted an ethnographic study of a mobile pastoral system in the Far North Region of Cameroon to examine whether herding contracts provide sustainable livelihoods and allow herders to rebuild their herds. We found considerable variation in contracts and livelihoods, and argue that the social organisation of herding contracts may explain why they have no negative impact on herd and rangeland management.

‘Don’t even [θ/f/h]ink aboot it’

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Lexical Effects ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Using Data

As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this article addresses this gap in the literature by considering how TH-fronting is patterned across three all-male, working-class, adolescent Communities of Practice, and how this innovative variant is integrated within a system of the more established variants [θ] and [h]. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning, the article also explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’, and suggests how these meanings are utilised in speakers’ construction of social identity.

Music and Gift-Exchange: Steps to the Inculturation of the Gospel

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-429
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Gittins
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Vital Component ◽  
Local Congregations ◽  
Cultural Components

Music is a mirror reflecting a community's life and a medium of exchange; not just entertainment but a vital component of culture, a locus of social meanings and values. Cultures are never static. Music is a vehicle for modification and variation of cultural meanings. Strangers, too, are a means whereby cultures may be infiltrated and enriched. This article considers the various cultural components—music, gift-exchange, strangers, and social change—as the social fabric out of which the inculturation of the gospel must be woven. And it is a cross-cultural parable containing lessons for local congregations and communities.

Prophètes, Missionnaires et Mariages au Kenya

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Barbara Morovich
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Structure Sociale ◽  
Husband And Wife

AbstractHow can one be Christian whilst remaining Kikuyu and reproduce in a socially legitimate manner? Focusing on akurinu Prophetic Churches in Kenya, this article analyses the diff erent stages of akurinu marriage in order to understand its individual, moral and social meanings. Akurinu marriage is seen as a new set of rules, organised and managed by the religious community. One of its most striking features is that the wedding is not paid for by the families of the husband and wife. is is an important change in the social structure of the Kikuyu and it shows that Prophetic Churches can be seen as groups which adapt to social change within Kenyan urban society. Moreover, the hope of finding a spouse is one of the reasons for changing to this type of religious community. Comment être chrétien, demeurer Kikuyu et se reproduire légitimement ? En se penchant sur le cas des Eglises prophétiques akurinu au Kenya, cet article retrace les étapes du mariage akurinu afi n d'en comprendre les enjeux individuels, moraux et sociaux. Le mariage akurinu est analysé comme un nouvel ensemble de règles, organisé et géré par la communauté religieuse. Un des points les plus remarquables est que les frais des cérémonies de mariage n'incombent plus aux familles des époux, ce qui introduit un bouleversement fondamental dans la structure sociale kikuyu, et permet de considérer les Eglises prophétiques comme des groupes qui répondent aux changements sociaux de la société urbaine en cours au Kenya. De plus, l'espoir de trouver un conjoint demeure une des raisons de la conversion à ce type de communauté.

Cross-space Consumption among Undocumented Chinese Immigrants in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Zhou ◽  
Xiangyi Li
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Currency Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Migrants

We consider cross-space consumption as a form of transnational practice among international migrants. In this paper, we develop the idea of the social value of consumption and use it to explain this particular form of transnationalism. We consider the act of consumption to have not only functional value that satisfies material needs but also a set of nonfunctional values, social value included, that confer symbolic meanings and social status. We argue that cross-space consumption enables international migrants to take advantage of differences in economic development, currency exchange rates, and social structures between countries of destination and origin to maximize their expression of social status and to perform or regain social status. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic study of consumption patterns in migrant hometowns in Fuzhou, China, and in-depth interviews with undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York and their left-behind family members, we find that, despite the vulnerabilities and precarious circumstances associated with the lack of citizenship rights in the host society, undocumented immigrants manage to realize the social value of consumption across national borders and do so through conspicuous consumption, reciprocal consumption, and vicarious consumption in their hometowns even without being physically present there. We conclude that, while cross-space consumption benefits individual migrants, left-behind families, and their hometowns, it serves to revive tradition in ways that fuel extravagant rituals, drive up costs of living, reinforce existing social inequality, and create pressure for continual emigration.

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Germana
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Dynamic Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Racial History ◽  
The Face

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison’s body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author’s philosophy of temporality—a philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Taking the view that time is a multiplicity of dynamic processes, rather than a static container for the events of our lives, and an integral force of becoming, rather than a linear groove in which events take place, Ellison articulates a theory of temporality and social change throughout his corpus that flies in the face of all forms of linear causality and historical determinism. Integral to this theory is Ellison’s observation that the social, cultural, and legal processes constitutive of racial formation are embedded in static temporalities reiterated by historians and sociologists. In other words, Ellison’s critique of US racial history is, at bottom, a matter of time. This book reveals how, in his fiction, criticism, and photography, Ellison reclaims technologies through which static time and linear history are formalized in order to reveal intensities implicit in the present that, if actualized, could help us achieve Nietzsche’s goal of acting un-historically. The result is a wholesale reinterpretation of Ellison’s oeuvre, as well as an extension of Ellison’s ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future. It, like Ellison’s texts, affirms the chaos of possibility lurking beneath the patterns of living we mistake for enduring certainties.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literate Society

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.

Embodied Spatial Practices and the Power to Care

2019 ◽  
pp. 360-377
Author(s):  
Elise Paradis ◽  
Warren Mark Liew ◽  
Myles Leslie
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Critical Care ◽  
Health Care Delivery ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Critical Care Units ◽  
Interprofessional Care ◽  
The Social

Drawing on an ethnographic study of teamwork in critical care units (CCUs), this chapter applies Henri Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) theoretical insights to an analysis of clinicians’ and patients’ embodied spatial practices. Lefebvre’s triadic framework of conceived, lived, and perceived spaces draws attention to the role of bodies in the production and negotiation of power relations among nurses, physicians, and patients within the CCU. Three ethnographic vignettes—“The Fight,” “The Parade,” and “The Plan”—explore how embodied spatial practices underlie the complexities of health care delivery, making visible the hidden narratives of conformity and resistance that characterize interprofessional care hierarchies. The social orderings of bodies in space are consequential: seeing them is the first step in redressing them.

Rescuing Migrants in the Central Mediterranean: The Emergence of a New Civil Humanitarianism at the Maritime Border

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-455
Author(s):  
Marta Esperti
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Search And Rescue ◽  
International Organization ◽  
Central Mediterranean ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Humanitarian Space ◽  
First Arrival

The Central Mediterranean is the most deadly body of water in the Mediterranean Sea with at least 15,062 fatalities recorded by International Organization of Migration between 2014 and 2018. This article aims at highlighting the rise of a variety of new civil society actors engaged in the rescue of people undertaking dangerous journeys across the sea in the attempt of reaching the southern European shores. The peculiarity of the humanitarian space at sea and its political relevance are pointed out to illustrate the unfolding of the maritime border management on the Central Mediterranean route and its relation with the activity of the civil society rescue vessels. The theoretical aspiration of the article is to question the role of a proactive civil humanitarianism at sea, discussing the emergence of different political and social meanings around humanitarianism at the EU’s southern maritime border. In recent years, the increasing presence of new citizens-based organizations at sea challenges the nexus between humanitarian and emergency approaches adopted to implement security-oriented policies. This essay draws on the findings of a broader comparative work on a variety of civil society actors engaged in the search and rescue operations on the maritime route between Libya and Europe, focusing in particular on Italy as country of first arrival. The fieldwork covers a period of time going between 2016 and 2018. The research methodology is built on a multisited ethnography, the conduct of semidirective and informal interviews with both state and nonstate actors, and the analysis of various reports unraveling the social and political tensions around rescue at sea on the Central Mediterranean route.

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