scholarly journals Mortality in Belgium from nineteenth century to today

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Eggerickx ◽  
Jean-Paul Sanderson ◽  
Christophe Vandeschrick

Résumé Cet article dresse une synthèse de l’évolution de la mortalité en Belgique du 19ème siècle à nos jours en mettant l’accent sur les inégalités socio-démographiques et spatiales. Il se base sur une revue de la littérature et exploite les données de la Human Mortality Database (HMD) pour les analyses consacrées à l’évolution de la mortalité selon l’âge et le sexe depuis le début du 19ème siècle. L’appariement des données du Registre national, des recensements de la population et des bulletins de décès de l’état-civil est mobilisé pour les analyses plus récentes (1991-2015). En Belgique, la durée moyenne de vie dépasse aujourd’hui 80 ans, soit deux fois plus qu’il y a 170 ans. Mais, comme dans d’autres pays occidentaux, des inégalités subsistent et parfois même se renforcent. Ainsi, les inégalités entre groupes sociaux face à la mort sont importantes et elles se sont accentuées depuis le début des années 1990, au moins. Ces différences sociales s’observent pour toutes les causes de décès et à tous les âges, chez les femmes comme chez les hommes. Les disparités spatiales de mortalité, à l’échelle des régions, des arrondissements et des milieux de résidence se sont également accrues depuis au moins un quart de siècle. De plus, à même groupe social, les disparités spatiales de mortalité persistent. Cela signifie que des facteurs environnementaux, culturels, comportementaux agissent de la même manière sur la mortalité pour chacun des groupes sociaux. Abstract This article offers an overview of shifts in mortality in Belgium from the nineteenth century to the present, particularly in terms of sociodemographic and spatial disparities. It analyzes these shifts in mortality according to age and sex since the early nineteenth century, drawing from a review of the literature and using data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD). For the more recent analyses (1991-2015), data from the National Register, population censuses and official death records were matched up. In Belgium, the average life expectancy is now 80 years, twice as long as 170 years ago. As in other Western countries, however, disparities persist and sometimes even widen. There are thus major inequalities between social groups in regards to death, and these have been worsening since at least the early 1990s. These inequalities are apparent for each cause of death and ages at death, for women and for men. Spatial inequalities in mortality by region, district and residential area have also widened over at least the past quarter century. Even within similar social groups there are spatial disparities in mortality, indicating that environmental, cultural and behavioural factors affect mortality in the same way for each social group.

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422097612
Author(s):  
Gloria Araceli Rodriguez-Lorenzo

This article analyses the interplay between sound and urban spaces in Spain, from the end of nineteenth century until 1936. Free outdoor concerts performed by bands in public urban spaces offered a new aural experience audience from across an increasing range of very diverse social groups, almost ritualizing both the practice of listening to music and the spaces in which that music was heard—all at a time when those very spaces were changing, in a way which mirrored the wider reconfiguration and modernization of Spanish cities. Case studies focusing on political, social, and cultural changes in urban spaces are analyzed, in order to understand how cities developed new spaces for social interaction, the modern sonic environment, and the ways in which those cities have appropriated culture for their citizens, as a symbol of urban modernity.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Moon

Prospects for democracy in Iraq should be assessed in light of the historical precedents of nations with comparable political experiences. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusually extreme autocracy, which lasted an unusually long time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty nations have experienced an autocracy as extreme as Iraq's for a period exceeding two decades. The subsequent political experience of those nations offers a pessimistic forecast for Iraq and similar nations. Only seven of the thirty are now democratic, and only two of them have become established democracies; the democratic experiments in the other five are still in progress. Among the seven, the average time required to transit the path from extreme autocracy to coherent, albeit precarious, democracy has been fifty years, and only two have managed this transition in fewer than twenty-five years. Even this sober assessment is probably too optimistic, because Iraq lacks the structural conditions that theory and evidence indicate have been necessary for successful democratic transitions in the past. Thus, the odds of Iraq achieving democracy in the next quarter century are close to zero, at best about two in thirty, but probably far less.


2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (suppl 2) ◽  
pp. s298-s308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Antonio Chaves Viana ◽  
Maria da Conceição Nascimento Costa ◽  
Jairnilson Silva Paim ◽  
Ligia Maria Vieira-da-Silva

An ecological study was carried out using information zones as units of analysis in order to assess the evolution of socio-spatial inequalities in mortality due to external causes and homicides in Salvador, Bahia State, Brazil, in 2000 and 2006. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE) and the City Health Department (Secretaria Municipal de Saúde) provided the data sources, and causes of death were reviewed and reclassified based on reports from the Institute of Legal Medicine (Instituto Médico Legal). The information zones were classified into four social strata according to income and schooling. The ratio between mortality rates (inequality ratio) was calculated and confirmed a rise of 98.5% in the homicide rate. In 2000, the risk of death due to external causes and murders in the stratum with the worst living conditions was respectively 1.40 and 1.94 times greater than in the reference stratum. In 2006 these figures were 2.02 and 2.24. The authors discuss the implications for inter-sectoral public policies, based on evidence from the study's findings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 755-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cherry

Birding has long been associated with environmental activism, from its origins as a scientific hobby in the nineteenth century to today’s citizen scientist birders. My research with birders shows that despite their political activism, personal actions, and ecological beliefs, many disidentify as activists or environmentalists. Using data from 30 in-depth interviews and three years of ethnographic research with birders, I argue their disidentification comes from two interrelated sources. First, these birders followed the Audubon Society’s approach of strategic centrism, espousing a centrist identity and strategy of conservation. Second, these birders disidentified with the identity of “environmental activist” because of negative cultural stereotypes about environmental activists, which was bolstered by the Audubon Society’s strategic centrism. These mutually reinforcing phenomena create a situation that doubly discourages these birders from identifying as environmental activists. This paper contributes to sociological understandings of the interplay between culture, identity, and environmental activism.


Author(s):  
David A. Rennie

This chapter addresses the war’s multifaceted effect, not only on different areas of society but in terms of the competing interpretations that existed within various social groups. David Rennie suggests that authors, too, could demonstrate shifting, sophisticated, and even contradictory reactions to the war in their fictional and non-fictional outputs. The machinations of the publishing industry, advertising, Hollywood, and authors’ artistic and personal development meant that writers’ reactions to the war were complex, provisional, and subject to change in relation to intrapersonal and interpersonal variables. Rennie also proposes, contrary to the findings of Paul Fussell, that American writers did draw on native historical and literary examples to express contrast—but also some elements of continuity—between modern war and nineteenth-century notions of heroism.


Author(s):  
Alex Stevens

This chapter analyses the development of British policy on illicit drugs from the late nineteenth century until 2016. It shows how this is characterized by contestation between social groups who have an interest in the control and regulation of some drugs and their users. It argues that there is a ‘medico-penal constellation’ of powerful organizations that produce British drug policy in accordance with their own ideas and interest. There have been clashes between the different principles held by people within these organizations but these have often been dealt with through the creation of pragmatic compromises. Recent examples include policies towards ‘recovery’ in drug treatment and new psychoactive substances whilst heroin-related deaths are used to explain why, so far, these pragmatic compromises have not ended the prohibition upon which British drug policy is based.


2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard N. Langlois

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The Visible Hand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, “Chandlerian” corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearly a century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler's own, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalist account of the rise of that organizational form: the large, vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of its inherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized, market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later, however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape. It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-like forms that often resemble some of the “inferior” nineteenth-century structures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.


Author(s):  
Aaron W. Hughes

Chapter 3 deals with the decades immediately following the death of Muhammad and examines an inchoate set of overlapping Islams that use a number of Jewish themes and motifs (e.g., messianism) without attribution or even awareness. Such Islamically underdefined social groups paradoxically created a number of diverse and equally underdefined Jewish responses that run the gamut from the apocalyptic to what would only later emerge as normative. This is a far cry from the regnant narrative that imagines a normative and a stable Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula in the late antique period. This does not rule out that a normative Judaism was being developed in the workshops associated with the rabbis in Babylonia. What it does mean is that many scholars from the nineteenth century onward have assumed that what was happening in Babylonia was simply and straightforwardly representative of the entire Jewish world.


Societies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Turner

Instances where men were the victims of female violence in the past are very difficult to explore, especially when the violence took place in a domestic setting. There is now a notable body of work on violence in the nineteenth century but none that looks specifically at male victims of violence where there was a female perpetrator, and their treatment by the courts. This article goes some way in filling that gap by using data collected in researching female offenders at the end of the nineteenth century in Stafford. It argues that, as with violence where there was a female victim and female perpetrator, the courts and the press were similarly unconcerned and somewhat dismissive of female violence towards men in a domestic setting, thus being unsympathetic towards male victims of female violence.


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