Risking Debt for Honor

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Cash

Research on godparenthood has traditionally emphasized its stabilizing effect on social structure. This article, however, focuses attention on how the practices and discourses associated with marital sponsorship in the Republic of Moldova ascribe value to the risks and uncertainties of social life. Moldova has experienced substantial economic, social, and political upheaval during the past two decades of postsocialism, following a longer period of Soviet-era modernization, secularization, and rural–urban migration. In this context, godparenthood has not contributed to the long-term stability of class structure or social relations, but people continue to seek honor and social respect by taking the social and economic risks involved in sponsoring new marriages.

1992 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.P. Singh

Migration in India has received increased scholarly attention in the past forty years, assisted by additional categories of data collected through the National Census. Considering the volume of both internal and international migration, the Indian population is relatively immobile. Most movements occur locally; 60 percent of internal migration is rural-rural on an intra-district level, consisting primarily of women moving with their husbands after marriage. Next in importance is the rural-urban migration of males seeking economic gain. The few studies done on migrants' characteristics show migration to be highly selective of age, sex, marital status, education, occupation and caste. The specific role of poverty in causing migration is still under debate. Key areas for further research include a greater focus on immobility; the social and demographic consequences of migration on sending and receiving communities; and the social, economic and demographic behavior of the migrants.


2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Ray

Globalization theorists frequently claim that the disembedding of social relations across various dimensions renders obsolete the former object of sociology, namely ‘society’. The exceptional change to social life arising from globalization demands that sociality is viewed in more fluid and complex ways than in the past. A closer examination of classical concepts of the social would reveal more nuanced and multidimensional concepts. I suggest that globalization does not entail the stretching of social relations beyond recognition, but reconfigures spaces and identities according to powerful dynamics. Classical theory emphasizes the embeddedness of exchanges and flows in social and cultural relations. This will be exemplified with reference to migration, which both epitomizes globalizing tendencies and illustrates its limitations. Along with mobile subjects there are immobile subjects (racialized migrants) policed by actual and threatened violence, who have been underplayed in globalization theory. The paper concludes that concepts of the ‘social’ may need rethinking but central to this should be an understanding of the interlocking of mobility with the circulation of capital, commodities and cultural practices.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (06) ◽  
pp. 674-682
Author(s):  
Asma Seemi Malik

Movement towards the urban centers of a country has been found to be acommon element in regards to the population dynamics. These dynamics however have asignificant economic, cultural, political and social impact on the lives of not only the migrantsbut also the place of destination. Through this research, it has been studied as to how therural urban movement in Pakistan impacts the social and cultural dimensions of the place ofdestination as well as those of the migrant. Furthermore, this research focused on findings themeasures taken by the government to curb the issues, however has found that the governmentof Pakistan is not taking any notice at all of the issues that exist. There is no long term vision orpolicy, a plan or implementation that would help in keeping the society and cultural of urbanand rural centers segregated.


Author(s):  
Jonas Raninen ◽  
Peter Larm ◽  
Johan Svensson ◽  
Michael Livingston ◽  
Lars Sjödin ◽  
...  

Alcohol consumption is a major contributor to the disease burden among adolescents. The adolescent alcohol abstainer is still often depicted as problematic in the research literature and in prominent theoretical frameworks. However, over the past two decades, there has been a marked trend of declining youth drinking in Sweden. The declining trend has led to a shift in the majority behaviour of youth, from drinking to non-drinking. It is plausible that this trend has also shifted the position of non-drinkers. This paper examines the position of non-drinkers in a nationally representative sample of Swedish adolescents. A survey was carried out in 2017 in 500 randomly selected schools. A total of 5549 respondents (15–16-year-olds) agreed to participate and answered the questionnaire. A minority (42.8%) had consumed alcohol during their lifetime. The results show that non-drinkers had better health and school performance when compared to drinkers. The results also showed that there were no differences in the social position between non-drinkers and drinkers. These findings are new and indicate a changed position of non-drinkers among Swedish adolescents. With non-drinking being the majority behaviour among Swedish adolescents this seems to have shifted the position of non-drinkers. There is a need for research on the long-term importance of not drinking during adolescence.


Author(s):  
Ryan Gingeras

In the first years after its founding, the Republic of Turkey was widely praised as a model state governed by an enlightened elite. In contrast to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Turkey was viewed as politically moderate, stable, and friendly to the West. It instead appeared to be a state that had radically transformed itself into a strong, united, and progressive nation unburdened by its past. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was held to be the chief architect and engineer of this feat and was placed by many among the greatest reforming statesmen in world history. These perceptions of Atatürk and his revolutionary rule have endured to this day. As a study grounded in untapped archival and scholarly sources, Eternal Dawn presents a definitive look inside the development and evolution of Atatürk’s Turkey. Ryan Gingeras presents Turkey’s early years as the culmination of a variety of social and political forces dating back to the late Ottoman Empire. Eternal Dawn presses beyond the reigning mythology that still envelops this period and challenges many of the standing assumptions about the limits, successes, and consequences of the reforms of Mustafa Kemal. Through a detailed survey of the social and political conditions that defined life in Turkey’s diverse provinces, Ryan Gingeras lays bare many of the harsh realities and bitter legacies of the republic’s founding. Atatürk’s revolution destroyed as much as it built and established precedents that strengthened and undermined the country’s long-term stability.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 567
Author(s):  
Feng Qu

The case study in this paper is on the Daur (as well as the Evenki, Buriat, and Bargu Mongols) in Hulun Buir, Northeast China. The aim of this research is to examine how shamanic rituals function as a conduit to actualize communications between the clan members and their shaman ancestors. Through examinations and observations of Daur and other Indigenous shamanic rituals in Northeast China, this paper argues that the human construction of the shamanic landscape brings humans, other-than-humans, and things together into social relations in shamanic ontologies. Inter-human metamorphosis is crucial to Indigenous self-conceptualization and identity. Through rituals, ancestor spirits are active actors involved in almost every aspect of modern human social life among these Indigenous peoples.


1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brow

An adequate understanding of the complex connections between changes in the social relations of production and changes in the bases of group formation demands an historical approach in which consciousness and its ideological products are viewed dynamically, not as the mechanically determined superstructural reflections of material relations but as an active and constituent components of everyday social life. The concepts required for such an analysis are developed here, drawing on the seminal work of both Marx and Weber, as well as on more recent scholarship, and are applied to recent changes in agrarian relations and ideological practice in Anuradhapura District, Sri Lanka.


Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.


Author(s):  
Hanne Veber

“Society” appears a difficult notion. We use it all the time. But is it any good as an analytical concept? Sociologists seem to agree it is not. Few societies have the empirical characteristics of the bounded entity that structural-functionalist theory assumed. Constructivist notions of society as “imagined community” appear to be tied up with the existence of the State or with the spread of information technology. This leaves contemporary anthropology with “society” as a residue, the left-over from culture’s gluttonous theoretical supper. Still, social science aims to explain or understand social relations, interactions, and the processes by which structures and functions are worked into social systems as implied by the notion of society. The notion of society allows us to assume the existence of objective structures of order in the social life of people. Unlike the notion of culture, however, the notion of society has not been critically scrutinized by anthropologists. In contemporary Danish anthropology with its focus on culture and cultural representations, writers tend to simply take society for granted as the intrinsic empirical context of culture. From the perspective of Durkheimian notions of “the social”, the paper provides a brief review of interpretations that retrospectively have appeared analytical dead-ends. The author goes on to suggest that the notion of “symbolically generalized media of communication” may offer a productive opening that embraces both sides of the culture/society dichotomy in the search for structured systems of social existence whether subjectively or objectively conceived. The idea of “symbolically generalized media or communication” was originally formulated by Talcott Parsons and subsequently reworked by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Rather than an interrelated series of parts that make up a whole plus something else in the classic Durkheimian sense, society from this perspective appears in the form of structured sets of actions oriented by a horizon of possibilities and expectations, symbolically constituted, yet always provisional and emergent. Inspired by analyses of two different cases in Amazonian research the paper offers a brief hint at how the notion may be employed in anthropology.


Author(s):  
T.M. Bohn ◽  
◽  
S.Yu. Malysheva ◽  
A.A. Salnikova ◽  
◽  
...  

Based on the example of Kazan in the 1920s, the difficulties and problems of implementing the Soviet policy of urbanization and “socialist city” construction in cities with a nationally and religiously heterogeneous population are shown. This policy and the related processes of rural-urban migration, “indigenization”, “apartment redistribution”, and development of the urban outskirts at the expense of the former “bourgeois” center destroyed, deliberately and purposefully, the urban culture that had previously prevailed here and changed the social and national composition of the urban population. Therefore, they can be regarded as the tools of “positive discrimination”. The “positive discrimination” of the formerly dominant urban Russian culture in favor of the developing Tatar culture, mostly in its rural variant, manifested itself very clearly in education, namely in the content and design of the Soviet Tatar alphabet (alifba). However, the practice of granting preferences to the previously discriminated strata turned out to be short-term, tooled for the tasks of immediate strengthening of the social base of the Soviet power, and designed to destroy the former society and culture. These practices of dealing with multiculturalism became less popular by the late 1920s–early 1930s, as the Bolshevik power stabilized and “state-oriented” and unifying tendencies in the power policy increased.


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