Population Planning for a Global Middle Class

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Alison Bashford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Population Planning ◽  
Global Middle Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

This chapter shows how, in the twentieth century, states aimed to implement new ideas of population planning in order to foster the emergence of stable middle classes. The control of fertility thus became an integral part of the global history of the middle classes. Because the nuclear family was at the core of middle-class lifestyle and a prerequisite for its reproduction and economic capacity, states across the globe resorted to population planning after the early twentieth century. For economic and political planners immersed in adapted Malthusian arguments, limiting fertility was a means by which widespread poverty could be mitigated and standards of living raised at a population level to allow everyone to afford middle-class lifestyles. Population control was thus part of the dream of, and for, a global middle class.

Some Moments in History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ester Gallo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
History Of

Chapter one sets the historical context in which both nationalist and middle-class reformist movements developed in colonial Kerala and India across caste, class, gender, and religious diversity. It focuses on the reformist movements known as the Yoga Kshema Sabha (henceforth YKS) and Nambudiri Yuva Jana Sangham (YJS) which developed at the beginning of the twentieth century to voice the class ambitions of young Nambudiri Brahmins. The YKS and YJS ethos will be discussed in relation to the colonial de-legitimation of indigenous kinship and to the broader history of gender reform that has marked the middle classes in Kerala. An analysis of YKS documents will highlight how the debate on kinship expressed the aim of drawing a ‘divine elite’ into the arena of inter-community competition and the place of reformed domesticity in this process.

Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Burke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Consumer Agency ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.

scholarly journals A Place Called Supermarket

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The City

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Health Campaigns ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Mass Immunization ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Concepts Of Disease ◽  
The Individual ◽  
A Site

This introductory chapter provides a background of how mass immunization programs made vaccination a cornerstone of Chinese public health and China a site of consummate biopower, or power over life. Over the twentieth century, through processes of increasing force, vaccines became medical technologies of governance that bound together the individual and the collective, authorities and citizens, and experts and the uneducated. These programs did not just transform public health in China—they helped shape the history of global health. The material and administrative systems of mass immunization on which these health campaigns relied had a longer history than the People's Republic of China itself. The Chinese Communist Party championed as its own invention and dramatically expanded immunization systems that largely predated 1949 and had originated with public health programs developed in southwestern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. The nationwide implementation of these systems in the 1950s relied on transformations in research, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and concepts of disease that had begun in the first decades of the twentieth century. These processes spanned multiple regime changes, decades of war, and diverse forms of foreign intervention. Most important, they brought with them new ideas about what it meant to be a citizen of China.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Laura Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Artist

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

Changing Student Populations in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Neville Bonner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medical Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
University Education ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
Professional Class

By the turn of the twentieth century, the drive to make medicine more scientific and comprehensive and to limit its ranks to the well prepared had had a profound effect on student populations. Almost universally, students were now older, better educated, more schooled in science, less rowdy, and able to spend larger amounts of time and money in study than their counterparts in 1850 had been. Their ranks, now including a growing number of women, were also likely to include fewer representatives of working- and lower-middle-class families, especially in Britain and America, than a half-century before. Nations still differed, sometimes sharply, in their openness to students from different social classes. The relative openness of the German universities to the broad middle classes, as well as their inclusion of a small representation of “peasantry and artisans,” wrote Lord Bryce in 1885, was a sharp contrast with “the English failure to reach and serve all classes.” The burgeoning German enrollments, he noted, were owing to “a growing disposition on the part of mercantile men, and what may be called the lower professional class, to give their sons a university education.” More students by far from the farm and working classes of Germany, which accounted for nearly 14 percent of medical enrollment, he observed, were able to get an advanced education than were such students in England. A historic transformation in the social makeup of universities, according to historian Konrad Jarausch—from “traditional elite” to a “modern middle-class system”—was taking place in the latter nineteenth century. In France, rising standards in education, together with the abolition of the rank of officiers de santé—which for a century had opened medical training to the less affluent—were forcing medical education into a middle- class mold. In the United States, the steeply rising requirements in medicine, along with the closing of the least expensive schools, narrowed the social differences among medical students and brought sharp complaints from the less advantaged. The costs of medical education in some countries threatened to drive all but the most thriving of the middle classes from a chance to learn medicine.

Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Lentz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Global South ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Comparative

AbstractLike many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a catchword in political discourse, and it became one long before scholars defined it in any systematic fashion. Once it became a more or less well-established conceptual tool of research, however, it began to take on an academic life of its own, with scholars also using it to describe people who did not invoke this category for their own self-description. But scholarly terms could – and indeed did – also feed back into folk understandings of social stratification. In particular, the recent global popularity of the term ‘middle class’ seems to be at least in part a result of the appropriation of academic categories by policymakers. This article contributes to the discussion on African middle classes by tracing the genealogy of theoretical perspectives on class and by outlining some findings from studies of the history of European and American middle classes as well as recent research on middle classes in the global South. I discuss both the history of scholarly debates on the middle classes and what empirical studies tell us about people's contested self-categorizations, and how their understandings and practices of being middle-class have changed over time. The article argues that future research on the dynamics of African social stratification has much to gain from a regional and historical comparative perspective.

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