An Experiential Study of ‘Conditional Agency’ of Bengali Widows with Reference to the Autobiographies of Saradasundari Devi and Rassundari Devi

Ensemble ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Ananya Chatterjee ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Bare Minimum

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal emerged a new batch of educated widows who were distinguishable from the traditional Bengali Hindu widows because of their remarkable self-consciousness about their peripherality within the social order. The intention of my article is that of disputing the prevalent assumption of the homogeneity of the widowed experience in Bengal society by drawing attention to the heterogeneous individualities resulting from stratifications within these emergent widow populations, owing to different lifestyles, varying degree of access to education, diverse social standings, and various forms of suppression. Rassundari Devi’s Amar Jibon (1876) and Saradasundari Devi’s Atmakatha (1913) are accounts of the experience of widows who were marginalized by society, handed the bare minimum necessities for their existence, and deprived of the pleasures of the traditional experiences of motherhood. I propose the term ‘New Widows’ to highlight how the effects of education modified their individuality in unconventional directions, as reflected in the fictional narratives by Rabindranath Tagore and others. Close attention to the texts shows that the disparity between the aspirations of the New Widow, and her limited reach and frustration results in an acute self-awareness.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Literary Celebrity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Lecture Tour

The Introduction to this book provides a framework for analyzing both the “lecture” and the “tour.” The first half presents the lecture as a pervasive yet unexamined authorial practice. It draws on current theories of literary celebrity to demonstrate how lecturing is primarily concerned with the construction of an author’s “personality.” However, it also shows how an analysis of lecturing demands a close attention to live, embodied performance generally lacking among the scholarship in this area. The second half of the Introduction then looks at the social and historical contexts surrounding the US lecture tour. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it highlights two institutions—the lyceum and the Chautauqua—that were crucial in connecting the practice of lecturing to a larger traveling-show culture that hovered between public education and popular entertainment. Detailing this context underscores how the US lecture tour injected modernist authors into an environment of great social variety where they had to learn how to vary the presentation and performance of their own authorship.

India–China ‘Connectedness’

2021 ◽  
pp. 155-185
Author(s):  
Kamal Sheel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Native Language ◽  
North India ◽  
Asian Values ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Alternative Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Source Materials ◽  
Popular Books

Native-language source materials shed much light on the nature of modern subaltern perception of India–China ‘connectedness’. They have, however, remained scantily used. In this context, this chapter provides an overview of ‘native voices’ available in Hindi and other languages in burgeoning local print media in the late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century north India. Published in popular books, journals, and newspapers, they present an alternative discourse and open up new vista in our comprehension of areas of India–China interactions. Examples of this may be seen in books in Hindi on China by Thakur Gadadhar Singh and Dr Mahendulal Garg, or in editorials and independent commentaries on various events in China by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Rabindranath Tagore, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, and many other contemporary native intellectuals. Demonstrating yearnings for unity and harmony, these writings provide context to explore various vicissitudes of ‘connectedness’ as well as sources to the contemporary invocations of common ideas of ‘Asian values’ and pan-Asianism.

‘Our Greatest Riches’: Horses at the Intersection of Settler and Kazakh Society in the Late Imperial Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-228
Author(s):  
Sean McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seasonal Migration ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migration Routes ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines interactions between Slavic peasant migrants and mobile pastoralist Kazakhs within the setting of the Kazakh Steppe during the period of heaviest resettlement to the region beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. It considers how the importance of horses to both settlers and Kazakhs alike dictated these interactions and how the sedentary world of the settlers disrupted the seasonal migration routes of Kazakh horse herders. Particularly with concern to the greatly expanded horse market, issues regarding land use, and increased instances of horse theft throughout the region, the Russian state’s encroachment into the steppe forever altered the social and economic makeup of the region.

scholarly journals Introduction: Moving Targets Risk, Security, and the Social in Twentieth-Century Europe

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Moses ◽  
Eve Rosenhaft
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anthony Giddens ◽  
Agent Of Change

According to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the future and safety and have mobilized themselves in order to manage systematically what they have perceived as “risks” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). This special section investigates how conceptions of risk evolved in Europe over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the creation and evolution of social policy. The language of risk has, in the past twenty years, become a matter of course in conversations about social policy (Kemshall 2002). We seek to trace how “risk” has served as aheuristic toolfor understanding and treating “social problems.” A key aim of this collection is to explore the character of social policy (in the broadest sense) as an instrument (or technology) that both constructs its own objects as the consequences of “risks” and generates new “risks” in the process (Lupton 2004: 33). In this way, social policy typifies the paradox of security: by attempting literally to making one “carefree,” orsē(without)curitās(care), acts of (social) security spur new insecurities about what remains unprotected (Hamilton 2013: 3–5, 25–26). Against this semantic and philological context, we suggest that social policy poses an inherent dilemma: in aiming to stabilize or improve the existing social order, it also acts as an agent of change. This characteristic of social policy is what makes particularly valuable studies that allow for comparisons across time, place, and types of political regime. By examining a range of cases from across Europe over the course of the twentieth century, this collection seeks to pose new questions about the role of the state; ideas about risk and security; and conceptions of the “social” in its various forms.

The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Rossinow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Social Order

AbstractA vigorous Protestant left existed throughout the first half of the twentieth-century in the United States. That Protestant left was the left wing of the social gospel movement, which many historians restrict to the pre-1920 period and whose radical content is often underestimated. This article examines the career of one representative figure from this Protestant left, the Reverend Harry F. Ward, as a means of describing the evolving nature and limits of social gospel radicalism during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Ward, the main author of the 1908 Social Creed of the Churches, a longtime professor at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, and a dogged activist on behalf of labor and political prisoners through his leadership of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, sought a new social order from the early years of the century through the Great Depression of the 1930s. This new order would be the Kingdom of God on earth, and, in Ward's view, it would transcend the competitive and exploitative capitalism that dominated American society in his time. Before World War I, Ward worked to bring together labor activists and church people, and, after the war, he shifted his work toward less expressly religious efforts, while continuing to mentor clerical protégés through his teaching. Ward's leftward trajectory and ever-stronger Communist associations would eventually bring about his political downfall, but, in the mid- 1930s, he remained a respected figure, if one more radical than most, among American Protestant clergy. Organic links tied him and his politics to the broader terrain of social gospel reform, despite the politically driven historical amnesia that later would all but erase Ward from historical memory.

scholarly journals The “false” debate between positivism and Verstehen in the origins of sociology

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ullan de la Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractThe article revisits the debate between the positivists and non-positivists currents in sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, concluding that it is actually a false debate, due to the fact that, beyond their differences, both shared some of the basic principles of the paradigm of modernity. From this historical analysis the article seeks to draw lessons for the social sciences in the present, at a time when these seem to have reached a certain synthesis between the modern and postmodern epistemologies. The article shows us that such a synthesis was already prefigured in the writing of classical theorists as it is, in fact, an ineluctable structural law of science itself if it wants to escape from the trap of skepticism and epistemological nihilism. The article also explores how, as a consequence of the pervasiveness of the modern paradigm, a common ethnocentric bias can be traced in all the fathers of sociology and wonders whether sociology today has actually got rid of this problem.

scholarly journals Images of Time in the Romanian Folk Chronotope

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 236-251
Author(s):  
Eleonora Sava ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Peasant Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romanian Folklore ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Traditional Norms ◽  
Tuesday Evening

This study proposes an analysis of the imagery of time in Romanian folklore, as it is outlined in a series of mythological narratives and beliefs recorded by ethnographers in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The concept of chronotope is used as an analytical tool for understanding the imaginary universe of Romanian folklore. The analysed narratives encapsulate a set of ideas and representations regarding the social norms of the peasant communities in which the figures of weekly time – Saint Wednesday, Saint Friday, Marțolea (Tuesday-Evening), Joimărița (Thursday-Night), etc. – play a central role. Analysing these figures of time, the study reveals their function as guardians of compliance with traditional norms referring to conduct, work and food. The study also highlights the fact that chronotopes perform the role of cognitive schemes of the Romanian folklore imaginary.

scholarly journals Ontario Retailers in the Early Twentieth Century: Dismantling the Social Bridge

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-227
Author(s):  
David Monod
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article explores the theory that late-nineteenth century and eary-twentieth century retailing served as an avenue to upward mobility. An examination of retailing in Ontario suggests two things: first, that shopkeeping was a deeply stratified occupation in which the poor remained marginalized at the bottom: and second, that over the course of the early twentieth century interest in retailing declined among working people as the business of storekeeping “professionalized”.

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