Human Values and the Market

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviana A. Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Insurance ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
A Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dollar Amount

This chapter uses data on the diffusion of life insurance in nineteenth-century America as a testing ground to explore the larger theoretical problem of establishing monetary equivalences for sacred things. It hypothesizes that cultural resistance to including certain items in the social order—namely, those related to human life, death, and emotions—into a market-type of exchange introduces structural sources of strain and ambivalence into their marketing. Life insurance raises the issue in its sharpest terms by posing the question of how one establishes a fixed-dollar amount for any individual death. The chapter argues that resistance to life insurance during the earlier part of the nineteenth century was largely the result of a value system that condemned the materialistic assessment of death, and of the power of magical beliefs and superstitions that viewed with apprehension any commercial pacts dependent on death for their fulfillment.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

Re-imagining the Social Order

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The State ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.

‘No condition is permanent’: ethnic construction and the use of history in Akuapem

Africa ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Law Courts

AbstractThis article concerns a recent political crisis which led to the fragmentation, in the main along ethnic lines, of the small Ghanaian kingdom of Akuapem. The situation is complex, though one may choose to frame it too simply in terms of hegemony (Akan vis-à-vis Guan) or even as a double hegemony in the sense that arguments on both sides appeal to ‘modern’ notions, to law courts, the constitution and ‘freedom’, and to newspapers in order to propagandise a position rather than to appeal to the authority of ‘traditional’ arbitration, destoolment, ancestral shrines and gods. Ethnicity and identity are notions with many and ill-defined meanings that fragment when separated from the specific situations in which they are used or constructed. To examine ethnicity one must see how ethnicities are ‘entangled’ and relate to each other; one needs, too, an historical perspective, for, whatever selfhood was in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, it is obviously different today. The dense historical and ethnographic details in the article are essential to point to the shape of the social order and to reveal in all their complexity the factors behind the recent fighting and continuing tension in the kingdom.

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