Toward an Historical Anthropology of the ‘Ethical State’: Articulations among Gender, Class and Education in an Irish Parish, 1860–1910

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Marilyn Cohen

The cultural formation of citizens and the hegemony of the ‘ethical state’ in England emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when capitalist social relations were consolidating, operating through the processes of bourgeois institutional differentiation and the regulation of culture and social space from above. This paper employs the methods of historical ethnography to address the historical vertities of these cultural processes in colonial Ireland. It focuses on one institution—education—in one north of Ireland parish to explore how class and gender mediated the process and experience of the institutional separation of education in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigid ‘culture of control’ orchestrating gender roles and material survival in working-class households framed distinctions in the attainment of schooled knowledges and created divergent uses and functions for such knowledge in the broader social context.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.


2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thuc-Doan T. Nguyen ◽  
Russell Belk

This article examines the historical role of marriage and wedding rituals in Vietnam, and how they have changed during Vietnam’s transition to the market. The authors focus on how changes reflect the society’s increasing dependence on the market, how this dependence impacts consumer well-being, and the resulting implications for public policy. Changes in the meanings, function, and structure of wedding ritual consumption are examined. These changes echo shifts in the national economy, social values, social relations, and gender roles in Vietnamese society during the transition. The major findings show that Vietnamese weddings are reflections of (1) the roles of wedding rituals as both antecedents and outcomes of social changes, (2) the nation’s perception and imagination of its condition relative to “modernity,” and (3) the role of China as a threatening “other” seen as impeding Vietnam’s progress toward “modernization.”


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Caterina Novák

The aim of this article is to explore the parallels between two late-nineteenth-century utopias,William Henry Hudsons A Crystal Age (1882) and William Morriss News from Nowhere (1891). Itaims to explore how these two works respond to the transition from a kinetic to a static conception ofutopia that under pressure from evolutionary and feminist discourses took place during the period.Particular focus lies on the way in which this is negotiated through the depiction of evolution, sexuality,and gender roles in the respective novels, and how the depiction of these disruptive elements may workas a means of ensuring the readers active engagement in political, intellectual and emotional terms.


2020 ◽  
pp. 221-226
Author(s):  
Sara E. Lampert

The conclusion returns to actress Josephine Clifton, whose legacy underscores starring women’s negotiation of new entertainment opportunities in U.S. theater, celebrity culture, and gender roles in the early nineteenth century chronicled in this book. Neither their marginalized social status nor their cultural power liberated women stars from the patriarchal expectations governing family and entertainment. Navigating the shifting publics and address of American theater required the appearance of conformity to gendered scripts, as well as sometimes a disavowal of the very real cultural power and, in rare cases, personal autonomy that some achieved.


2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-229
Author(s):  
John Dolis

In 1835, Alexis de Tocquevdle (1805-1859) published Volume One of his Democracy in America in France; Volume Two followed in 1840. Translated into English, the work received critical acclaim in the States, and substantial passages were printed in American schoolbooks of the period. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) published Tittle Women, a sentimental novel exploring feminist dimensions of both subject and citizen identity in light of family relationships and gender roles as each of the four March daughters— Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—strives, in her own way, to meet parental and societal expectations regarding the duties of mothers, sisters, wives, and citizens. The récit centers around Jo (Josephine) March, a bold, frank, and passionate tomboy, whose ardor for writing situates her at troublesome odds with the constraints that nineteenth-century American society placed on women. Excluded from fighting as a soldier (during the Civil War) and attending college, Jo tenaciously rebels against familial and societal pressures to find a suitable husband and settle down.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS MANIAS

The German ethnologist Gustav Klemm (1802–67) occupies a rather problematic position in the history of ideas, alternately hailed as a seminal figure in the development of concepts of race and culture, or belittled as a rather derivative marginal thinker. This article seeks to clarify Klemm's significance by rooting his theories in their contemporary intellectual and social context. It argues that his system, a linear model of human development driven by the interworkings of race and culture, grew from an attempt to synthesize Enlightenment notions of universal progress with major shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, including experiences of dramatic social, political and technological change, commitments to constitutional liberalism, and changes in contemporary ethnology and museology. His works therefore illustrate the complex manners in which ideas of heredity, environment, civilization, development and gender could be blended in this often neglected period, and how their meanings and implications altered as syntheses were built.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Martha Wanjiru Muraya

This paper generates qualitative information on how the Mau Mau war transformed the Agikuyu female circumcision and its implications on women’s roles, value and gender relations among the Agikuyu in Kiambu. The Agikuyu people of Kiambu believed that, in the traditional set up, female circumcision defined gender roles and women’s power to negotiate space with men. During the Mau Mau war, the practice experienced a considerable changes but it persisted with minimal training and ceremonies. The paper uses a descriptive research design which gives a narrative description of the state of affairs as it exists. The source of information is mainly Oral interviews, Archival information, and cross-checked information from written documents. The transformation that took place in the Agikuyu female circumcision rite during the Mau Mau war is analysed within the concept of gender which gives the study a comprehensive relational platform through which gender roles and relations are interrogated. The study concludes that the persistence of the practice during the Mau Mau war was due to deeply rooted cultural identification, and the need for the Agikuyu women and men to negotiate social space and relations. It is evident in this study that during the Mau Mau war the Agikuyu men and women feared to be victimized and to be rejected by the society and therefore they practiced female circumcision for social-cultural approval and affirmation. Also the practice assisted men to preserve their superior values and dominance role during the period of political uprising.


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