Prelude to Ava

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Aung-Thwin
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Blue Print

The immediate cause for the rise of Ava was the decline of the kingdom of Pagan. Yet, decline in this case only meant dis-integration as a kingdom—it only lost its integrative power. Neither the conceptual system and its principles, nor the human and material resources that had made it, disappeared. In fact, these components remained intact to provide the ideological and material wherewithal for the reconstituting of Ava. Hence, by the second half of the fourteenth century, the dis-integrated parts that had earlier made up Pagan were re-integrated as the kingdom of Ava. And because Pagan provided the “blue print” for Ava, it insured that the “classical tradition” continued for another two hundred years. That tradition was characterized by: an agrarian economy, a conceptual system comprised of indigenized Theravada Buddhism, a patron-client political and social structure, and a population led and dominated by Burmese speakers.

Theravada Buddhism and Village Economic Behavior: A Burmese and Thai Comparison

1962 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Pfanner ◽  
Jasper Ingersoll
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Economic Behavior ◽  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
Comparable Data ◽  
Peasant Communities ◽  
Original Plan

The following two articles constitute the partial results of a project in comparative coordinated research in Southeast Asia. Prior to undertaking field research in Burma and Thailand in 1959–60, the authors developed a research design to ensure the collection of comparable data for description and analysis in the areas of social structure and economics. The original plan was modified in the field during an exchange of visits to the Burmese and Thai peasant communities eventually selected for study.

II. Plague and Economic Decline in England in The Later Middle Ages

1941 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Saltmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Material Resources

As I see it, the course of English economic history in the later Middle Ages is as follows. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries medieval civilization had reached a climax of material prosperity and spiritual confidence which it was never to surpass. A cessation of economic advance in the first half of the fourteenth century was followed by a positive decline in the second half, continuing and deepening in the century following, to reach its lowest point between 1450 and 1470. Recovery first started in the last twenty or twenty-five years of the fifteenth century, leading directly to the great economic renaissance which came to flowering in Tudor England. Then began that ‘cumulative crescendo’ which was to lead, at an ever-increasing pace, through the Industrial Revolution, to the command over Nature and the vast material resources of our own day.

Models of Peasant Differentiation and Aspects of Agrarian Economy in Colonial India

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shri Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Peasant Society ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Given their sheer numbers, it is hardly surprising that the fate of peasants during British Rule in India should have become a principal index for evaluating its successes and failures. Since the Raj was much more than another effete political superimposition on supposedly timeless villages, the question of agrarian growth or stagnation during its currency is intertwined with more general issues. In so far as colonialism meant a sizable expansion of trade to and from the rural areas, its impact on village social structure in India bears comparison with that of a modern market on peasantries in other parts of the world. Perhaps, the classic case of a peasantry coming face to face with a growing market happened in Russia between 1860 and 1930. The history of that period has generated conceptual discussion about the dynamics of peasant society. The possibility of some of those ideas shedding light on the situation in India has prompted Indo-Russian contrasts and comparisons in agrarian history on more than one occasion (Charlesworth: 1979; Stein: 1984). As a sequel to these writings the Russian debate is considered here briefly in order to suggest some ways in which it might be useful in the Indian context.

scholarly journals The performativity of objects

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (3–4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Keynote Lecture ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Cultural Turn ◽  
Cultural Concept

This essay, a revised version of the keynote lecture prepared for Sociologidagarna 18–20 March 2020 in Stockholm, introduces a new, cultural-sociological theory of materiality. Sociology did not metabolize the cultural turn until the 1980s. Even when cultural sociology finally did emerge, moreover, there were powerful pushbacks against it. Neo-Marxism, neo-Pragmatism, neo-institutionalism incorporated this or that cultural concept but resisted the culture turn more broadly, tying meaning to social structure and practice rather than recognizing its autonomy. Cultural sociology has flourished in recent decades, but so have new backlash movements. None has been more persistent than the turn toward the object and its reduction to materiality. Icon theory positions itself again this turn, suggesting that, in society, materiality is invested with imagination and enlivened by performativity. The surface of objects is aesthetically formed, and the meaning of such sensuous experience of outer form is structured by invisibly discursive depth. Durkheim’s sacred and profane must be complemented by Burke’s beautiful and sublime. Informed by background representations, such aesthetic-cum-moral objects are designed by artists and craft-persons; produced by creators with access to material resources; put into the scene by advertisers and PR specialists; and mediated by criticism – before they are embraced or rejected by audiences.

Some Thoughts on ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Proprietary’ Rights in Land under Customary Law in Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century England

1983 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
Customary Land ◽  
Rural England

A recent polemical essay by Alan Macfarlane constructed a picture of the social structure of medieval rural England premised on the notion that there was little difference in the nature of family attachment to land between freeholders and those who held their property ‘according to the customs of the manor.’ This essay has received severe criticism from R. H. Hilton, who argues that it ‘ignores the implications of the considerable predominance in many areas of customary land held in villein (i.e. servile) tenure, attempting to assimilate it to freehold as though it were equivalent to sixteenth century copyhold.’ The scale of the difference between these two positions may be attributed to the current state of research into the operation of customary law and its tribunals.

Myanmar in the Fifteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Aung-Thwin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Classical State ◽  
Historical Pattern ◽  
Two Kingdoms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

When the kingdom of Pagan—representing the “classical state” and “golden age” of Myanmar—declined politically by the early fourteenth century, Upper Myanmar reconstituted itself into three smaller centers of power, each controlled by a minister of the old court, while Lower Myanmar, finally freed from Upper Myanmar’s hegemony, began the process of state formation for the first time. This transitional situation continued for the next half century until two new kingdoms emerged. In Upper Myanmar, it was the First Ava Dynasty and Kingdom in 1364 and in Lower Myanmar, the First Pegu Dynasty and Kingdom in 1349. BoThattained their pinnacles by the fifteenth century, and both had declined before the first half of the sixteenth century was over. That period of nearly 200 years is the only gap left in the mainstream historiography of Myanmar, which this book seeks to fill, by reconstructing the origins, development, and decline of each kingdom separately, and then examining the impact of that history on their relationship. The study shows that whereas in-land agrarian Ava continued the classical tradition of Pagan, maritime commercial Pegu was an entirely new kingdom, the first in Lower Myanmar. The situation generated a symbiotic and dualistic geo-political “upstream-downstream” relationship between the two kingdoms that became, thereafter, a recurring historical pattern until today, currently represented by in-land Naypyidaw and “coastal” Yangon.

Analyzing Women’s Exploitation in Agrarian Society: A Case of Musahar Community in Bihar

2021 ◽  
pp. 230-234
Author(s):  
Priti Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Wage System ◽  
Loan System ◽  
Working Hour

The exploitation of Musahars women has been closely linked with the question of land and it exposes three different systems of women's exploitation within the agrarian economy – The wage system, the loan system, and the working hour monopoly. This paper analyzes these three systems of women's exploitation, the semi-feudal and the semi-capitalist social structure in reference to the case of Kuria village of Bihar. Using a case study as a method, the paper has a key objective to find out the pattern of Musahars exploitation by looking at different aspects of existing social conditions. The caste system, in this, will be treated as the primary force of exploitation in the agrarian community.

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