The Two Faces of Debt

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Stefan Nygård
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North

This introductory chapter surveys the notoriously ambivalent concept of debt. It connects different approaches to debt in social theory and anthropology to the book’s focus on how past debts are mobilised in political debates in the present, and how the ‘North’ has been portrayed as indebted to the ‘South’ for its development, and vice versa. Both questions are framed by the way in which understandings of debt tend to gravitate towards reciprocity or domination. In view of its fundamental ambiguity, debt thus underpins both social cohesion and fragmentation. While it has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. A tension between debt as the glue of social bonds and debt as hierarchy consequently runs through the social history of the concept. Applied to regional and global North-South relations, discussions on debt have often centred on the question of retribution, involving difficult disputes over possible ways of settling debts in the present for injustices incurred in the past.

The Politics of Debt and Europe's Relations with the 'South'

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
The South ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Past Injustice ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Individual ◽  
North And South

While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.

Project Report on the "Investigation of the Present Situation and Development of Ethnic Minorities in China"

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
Hao Shiyuan
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Warring States Period ◽  
Warring States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spring And Autumn Period ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shi Ji

When viewed from the perspective of history, China has not had a flourishing anthropology and ethnology. However, China's traditions of ethnographic-like perspectives have flourished for a long time. Since the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC) and Warring States Period (475-221 BC), multiethnic structure and social relations have been recorded in China's history. Ever since Sima Qian's Shi Ji (the Historical Records), the first general history of China compiled around 100 BC, the social history and cultural customs of ethnic minorities had been covered in each dynasty's history. Moreover, some special chapters had been dedicated to keeping the records of ethnic minorities. Of course such records were not completely unbiased.

The Social History of confession in the Age of the Reformation

1975 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Individual

When I offered to read a paper on this subject, I had a particular hypothesis in mind. I thought—perhaps it would be more honest to say, I hoped—it would be possible to show that, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, the practice of the sacrament of penance in the traditional church had undergone a change which was important in itself and of general historical interest. The change, I thought, could roughly be described as a shift from the social to the personal. To be more precise, I thought it possible that, for the average layman, and notably for the average rural layman in the pre-reformation church, the emphasis of the sacrament lay in its providing part of a machinery for the regulation and resolution of offences and conflicts otherwise likely to disturb the peace of a community. The effect of the Counter-Reformation (or whatever one calls it) was, I suspected, to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual. The hypothesis may be thought an arbitrary one: we can but see. I think it will be admitted that, supposing it turned out to be correct, we should have learnt something worth knowing about the difference between the medieval and the counter-reformation church, and something about the difference between pre- and post-reformation European society. If if did not turn out to be correct, we might nevertheless expect to pick up some useful knowledge about something which is scarcely a staple of current historical discourse, though it threatens to become so.

Europe's 1948 and America's Essential Lie

2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Charles Lemert
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The North Atlantic

The crucial year 1948 is taken as a turning point in the divergent relations of Europe and America. The economic and social history of the time is discussed to establish the odd cultural differences between the North Atlantic partner-nations on the question of distortion and misrepresentation of alleged social realities. Implications for social theory are discussed.

Childhood and Adolescence

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alysa Levene
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Histories ◽  
Future Work

Childhood and youth have undergone a period of much more intensive scrutiny within the social history of medicine in the past few decades. This article discusses the significance of health and well-being of the younger generation as it reflects a variety of wider societal concerns about national efficiency, confidence in medical practice, a healthy and well-balanced population, and the quality of social relations. It discusses more insightful discoveries about the nature of child patients and disease by studying how they are treated compared with others experiencing similar impairment. It also deals with the second theme to emerge in recent medical histories of childhood and youth focusing on the boundaries of normal life experiences. The history of child health is moving from the margins of welfare and employment into its own field, and it is hoped that future work will continue to build up a more convincing set of theoretical reference points.

scholarly journals Class Structure and Social Mobility in the Chinese Community in Singapore and Malaya 1800–1911

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen Ching-Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Class Status

The social history of the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be fully understood if aspects of class structure and social mobility are not examined. Of course, the social relations of the Chinese were principally determined by kinship and dialect ties, but they were also affected by class affiliations. Class status, like kinship and dialect relations distanted Chinese immigrants from one another. This paper seeks to examine the nature and structure of Chinese classes, class relations and the channels of social mobility in the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya during the period between 1800 and 1911. The findings of this paper may be applicable to other overseas Chinese communities in the same period outside this region.

scholarly journals Epidemiology, social history, and the beginnings of medical anthropology in the highlands of New Guinea

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Warwick Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Medical Anthropology ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Global Epidemic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epidemic Intelligence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Concurrent Development ◽  
Social History Of Medicine

Shirley Lindenbaum’s study in the early 1960s of the origins and transmission of kuru among the Fore people of the eastern highlands of New Guinea is one of the earliest examples of an explicitly medical anthropology. Lindenbaum later described her investigations as assembling ‘an epidemiology of social relations’. How might the emergence of medical anthropology, then, be related to the concurrent development of the social history of medicine and global epidemic intelligence? Are these alternative genealogies for medical anthropology?

scholarly journals Estate, Class, and Community: Urbanization and Revolution in Late Tsarist Russia

1983 ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Brower
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
History Of

In what ways did the development of cities in late tsarist Russiaalter the character of social relations and conflicts in that keyperiod? At first glance, the question may appear poorly posed. It has long been customary to assess the history of Russian society in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries in terms of estate and class, to evaluate change by class differentiation, and to look for the sources of social conflict in the strains engendered by the transformation (to the extent it occurred) of a "society of estates" into a "society of classes." The urban centers of the country fran this point of view provided merely the setting in which key segments of the population experienced and reacted to new economic forces and politicalpressures. Recent books in the social history of the time havesubstantially enlarged and enriched our understanding of the changes under way among the urban population.

scholarly journals Hidden Riot: Investigating the Impact of Rural–Urban Gap in Afghanistan’s Political Changes

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Mohammad Dawood Erfan
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Tribal Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Afghanistan, with major rural population is of the countries that face varieties of problems for transformation from tradition to modernity (underdevelopment). Nowadays various social gaps in this geographical area have crystalized in ethnic cleft; has been originated from another background that the most important is the rural-urban gap. This hidden gap has shown itself in different forms in the social history of Afghanistan. Sometimes with a cover of Tribe, sometimes in the form of wealth and poverty and sometimes it rises with a cover over modernity and tradition. Development experts concentrate on other gaps and they didn’t pay enough attention to this important gap. The question is: What has been the role of rural-urban gap in underdevelopment and political changes in Afghanistan? In a country where social relations are generated from rural areas and political changes rise by using violent tools in different forms, necessitate deep socialistic investigations on ruling relations in rural communities that constitute the most population of the country. It seems inattention to rural people needs and problems led to the profound gap which shaped violent changes in the history of Afghanistan. Meaningful rural relations, nomadism and tribal culture, have led to many partitions in the process of development.

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