Conclusion: John Henry, Efficiency, and Community

Author(s):  
Bryan T. McNeil

This chapter discusses the origin of the John Henry legend and how it has been attributed to West Virginia around the time railroads expanded into the new frontier, seeking the region's rich raw materials. Though there are many interpretations of the legend, John Henry still serves as a parable for the shift to modern industrial society and its ramifications. The social struggles represented by the conflict over mountaintop removal belong not to John Henry's era, but to a subsequent social shift that West Virginians and Americans in general struggled with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the relationships between corporate efficiency and community bonds are similar enough to warrant revisiting the parable.

Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.


2006 ◽  

A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. This book examines the underlying problems that pose the greatest threat to British society in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Joseph D. Witt

This chapter examines the historical development of anti-mountaintop removal activism in Appalachia in the early twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how twenty-first-century groups such as Mountain Justice emerged out of decades of localized activism against strip mining in the area. It then outlines the theoretical influences from Appalachian studies and religious studies that have shaped this discussion of religion and place in Appalachia, including studies of Appalachian history and development, critical regionalism, and approaches to “lived religion.” Based on these theoretical concepts, the remainder of the book explores multiple religious threads in the re-imagining of Appalachian place by anti-mountaintop removal activists in light of a physically transformed topography.


Author(s):  
Martha E. Gimenez

This entry will look at Marx’s theoretical contributions to social reproduction in relationship to critical assessments of his alleged “neglect” of reproduction and to the development of the social sciences, particularly the “radical” social sciences that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continued to develop ever since. Marx, as well as Engels, offered important insights for understanding social reproduction as an abstract feature of human societies that, however, can only be fully understood in its historically specific context (i.e., in the context of the interface between modes of production and social formations). Social reproduction in the twenty-first century is capitalist social reproduction, inherently contradictory, as successful struggles for the reproduction of the working classes, for example, do not necessarily challenge capitalism. Finally, this article argues that radical social scientists, because they identify the capitalist foundations of the social phenomena they study, have made important contributions to the study of capitalist reproduction.


1961 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Edward R. Tannenbaum

The Action Française was the most notorious reactionary movement in twentieth-century France. From the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of the Vichy Regime it carried on its campaign against “the principles of 789”, which many Frenchmen (and other Western Europeans) mistakenly blamed for the “evils” of modern industrial society. But it represented neither the frustrated lower-middle classes that were attracted to fascism, nor the genteel bien-pensants who pined for the good old days” under Louis XVI or Charles X. Its leaders were café intellectuals who flaunted their newly acquired devotion to the monarchy and the church. They were professional nativists clamoring or a return to the traditional virtues of a golden age that never insisted. Their utopia was a highly intellectualized daydream invented by charles Maurras.


Author(s):  
Bridget Escolme

This chapter discusses the relationship between actor and scenography in twentieth and twenty-first century productions of Hamlet and King Lear, particularly the common theatrical trope of realist acting on abstract stage sets. It argues that whilst in some productions the notion of tragic hero as common man reduces the plays to a set of psychological problems, in others, contrasts and tensions between acting style and scenography or theatre architecture have created what the author calls a ‘politics of intimacy’. These productions have made it possible for detailed, realist acting on non-naturalistic stage sets to pose potent questions about the social and political meanings of human relations in the plays. They have allowed for an audience experience that involves both psychological intimacy and ideological critique.


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