scholarly journals Seeing like an Inuit family: The relationship between house form and culture in northern Canada

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Dawson

AbstractIn his classic essaySeasonal Variations of the Eskimo, Marcel Mauss argued that a strong relationship exists between the spatial organisation of traditional Inuit house forms and the social morphology of the families they shelter. These observations anticipate later works in anthropology that examine how cultural processes are reflected in, and sustained by, the built environment. Such ideas are important when considering the effects of post-war housing programs on Inuit families in the Canadian Arctic. During the 1960s, attempts were made to restructure the routines of Inuit families through Euro-Canadian architecture and home economics classes. Recent ethnographic observations of Inuit households in operation, however, reveal that many continue to use their houses in traditional ways. By doing so, Inuit families are attempting to adapt to dwellings designed around another culture’s concept of homemaking and family life. Mauss’s ideas are therefore a poignant reminder of the need to take cultural factors into account when developing aboriginal housing policy.

Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.


Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

Takis Zenetos was enthusiastic about the idea of working from home, and believed that both architecture and urban planning should be reshaped in order to respond to this. He supported the design of special public spaces in residential units, aiming to accommodate the inhabitants during working hours. This article argues that Zenetos’s design for “Electronic Urbanism” was more prophetic, and more pragmatic, than his peers such as Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys. Despite the fact that they shared an optimism towards technological developments and megastructure, a main difference between Zenetos’s view and the perspectives of his peers is his rejection of a generalised enthusiasm concerning increasing mobility of people. In opposition with Archigram, Zenetos insisted in minimizing citizens’ mobility and supported the replacement of daily transport with the use advanced information technologies, using terms such as “tele-activity”. Zenetos was convinced that “Electronic Urbanism” would help citizens save the time that they normally used to commute to work, and would allow them to spend this time on more creative activities, at or near their homes. The main interest of “Electronic Urbanism” lies in the fact that it not only constitutes an artistic contribution to experimental architecture, but is also characterized by a new social vision, promising to resynchronize practices of daily life. An aspect that is also examined is the relationship of Zenetos’s ideas and those of the so-called Metabolists in the 1960s in Japan, including Kenzo Tange’s conception of megastructures. Zenetos’s thought is very topical considering the ongoing debates about the advanced information society, especially regarding the social concerns of surveillance, governance, and sovereignty within the context of Big Data. His conception of “tele-activities” provides a fertile terrain for reflecting on potential implications and insights concerning home-office conditions not only within the context of the current pandemic situation but beyond it as well.


1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-368
Author(s):  
Paul R. Abramson

The strong relationship between social class and partisan choice is one of the most extensively documented facts of British political life; but that relationship declined markedly during the 1960s, as Butler and Stokes have shown. Their lucid documentation of the declining class–party nexus is among the major findings of the second edition of their book, and, as class-based partisanship is particularly low among the young, many might conclude that the relationship between class and party will continue to decline in future. It would, however, be premature to reach this conclusion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Julia Stępniewska ◽  
Piotr Zańko ◽  
Adam Fijałkowski

In this text, we ask about the relationship between sexual education in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s with the cultural contestation and the moral (including sexual) revolution in the West as seen through the eyes of Prof. Andrzej Jaczewski (1929–2020) – educationalist, who for many years in 1970s and 1980s conducted seminars at the University of Cologne, pediatrician, sexologist, one of the pioneers of sexual education in Poland. The movie “Sztuka kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej” (“The Art of Love. The Story of Michalina Wisłocka” [1921–2005]), directed in 2017 by Maria Sadowska, was the impulse for our interview. After watching it, we discovered that the counter-cultural background of the West in the 1960s and 1970s was completely absent both in the aforementioned film and in the discourse of Polish sex education at that time. Moreover, Andrzej Jaczewski’s statement (July 2020) indicates that the Polish concept of sexual education in the 1960s and 1970s did not arise under the influence of the social and moral revolution in the West at the same time, and its originality lay in the fact that it was dealt with by professional doctors-specialists. We put Andrzej Jaczewski’s voice in the spotlight. Our voice is usually muted in this text, it is more of an auxiliary function (Chase, 2009). Each of the readers may impose their own interpretative filter on the story presented here.


Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.


2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Harvey ◽  
Maurice Lévesque ◽  
Peter Donnelly

This study focuses on the relationship between sport volunteerism and social capital, defined here as a resource that stems from participation in certain social networks. A position generator and a resources generator were used to measure the social capital of respondents. Results from this pilot study survey, exploring several aspects of volunteerism in sport in two Canadian communities (one in Québec, the other in Ontario), show a strong relationship between volunteerism in sport and social capital but do not allow a precise measure of the direction of this relationship. Results also show stronger relationships between sport volunteerism and social capital when we control for gender, language, and age.


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Drėmaitė

This paper discusses the social, political and especially the technological aspect of the post-war Soviet industrialisation of housing, focusing on the relation to Western planning and technology. The chronological scope of the paper covers the thaw in Soviet architecture and construction that began in 1954 after the well-known meeting of Soviet architects and builders initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. This study presents Soviet architects’ study trips to the West, which became crucial in changing the entire urban planning and mass housing production system in the USSR. The text examines how pan-Union mass housing industrialisation policy and practice were carried out in the 1960s in the Western periphery of the USSR, namely Soviet Lithuania, which became the leader in mass housing urban design because of the Western-oriented ambitions of Baltic architects. Thus, in the paper the modern Soviet mass housing programme is researched from the perspective of (mutations in) modernist urban planning.


Author(s):  
Julian M. Simpson

This chapter explores the relationship between South Asian doctors and what has been termed the ‘renaissance’ of general practice in the post- war years. Changes in British General practice from the 1960s onwards coincided with the entry into the field of substantial numbers of South Asian doctors. These two historical processes should be seen as interconnected.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 228-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Castleton

This article discusses the relationship between technology and Inuit identity. Using interviews, it explores how a group of students from the Arctic College located in the community of Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, use the social network Facebook. It was found that in addition to an expected use of the social network associated with the script promoted by the technology, Inuit youth used Facebook to access content related to their identity in various groups, discuss sociocultural issues, and remember traditions. This article argues that Inuit identity is an example of how indigenous cultures have to be understood as something dynamic, constantly changing, for which information and communication technologies are fundamental. Furthermore, this article claims that rather than understanding Facebook as a tool that is adopted by Indigenous people—as previous literature tends to hold—the use of digital media should be conceived as part and parcel of identity.


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