Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Trais Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Direct Interaction ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Unnatural Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
Imperial Power

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the major themes of this book. It argues that the investigation of unnatural death was an early—and unlikely—site of direct interaction between the state and its subjects. Furthermore, the chapter illustrates how the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn of the twentieth century offered a troubling rebuke to the master narrative of modern Thai historiography: namely, the doctrine of Siamese/Thai exceptionalism. Thailand's status as the only nation-state in Southeast Asia to avoid direct control by European imperial power marks it as a singular state with an exceptional past. And it is within this context that the chapter addresses certain morbid subjects—alluding not merely to death but also to the social, cultural, and political lives of the dead.

D?r al-?arb as the Motherland? The Muslim Tatars of (the Grand Duchy of) Lithuania and Social Contract

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Muslim Minority ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Grand Duchy

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Korean War ◽  
State System ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
The Korean War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book tells a story of the changing script of warfare in the mid-twentieth century through the Korean War. At stake in this conflict was not simply the usual question of territorial sovereignty and the nation-state. The heart of the struggles revolved around the question of political recognition, the key relational dynamic that formed the foundation for the post-1945 nation-state system. This book argues that in order to understand how the act of recognition became the essential terrain of war, one must step away from the traditional landscape of warfare—the battlefield—and into the interrogation room.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Roger Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
High Court ◽  
The Social ◽  
Witness Statements

The introductory chapter fulfils three objectives. First, it locates this study within the existing, somewhat disparate, historiography relating to sexuality and sexual practices in twentieth-century Scotland and summarises the aims of the book. Secondly, it explores the strengths and weaknesses of Scottish High Court and Crown Office records as a source for the social historian. In particular, it examines the importance of precognitions − witness statements, including testimony from medicsl experts and the police compiled by the Procurator Fiscal prior to any prosecution. Thirdly, it provides an overview of the structure and contents of the study.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scott Parrish
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
Environmental Causes ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter discusses the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It argues that although historians have uncovered the details of what caused the flood to unfold the way it did, less work has been done to explain how, what was arguably the most publicly consuming environmental catastrophe of the twentieth century in the United States, assumed public meaning. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore how this disaster took on form and meaning as it was nationally and internationally represented across multiple media platforms, both while the flood moved inexorably southward and, subsequently, over the next two decades. The book begins by looking at the social and environmental causes of the disaster, and by briefly describing the sociological certitudes of the 1920s into which it broke. It then investigates how this disaster went public, and made publics, as it was mediated through newspapers, radio, blues songs, and theater benefits. Finally, it looks at how the flood comprises an important chapter in the history of literary modernism.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
J. Pierre Loebel ◽  
Julian Savulescu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Treatment Plan ◽  
Venn Diagram ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Growing Body

This introductory chapter discusses the lack of a unifying theory in psychiatry. No generally accepted theory of mental illness exists, in part because there is little agreement on what the concepts ‘mental’ and ‘illness’ entail. Lacking such a theory, the profession has experienced internal divisiveness, uncertainty among applicants for training, and attacks from outside. Since the decline of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paradigms such as psychoanalysis and behaviourism, psychiatrists have been in search of one that acknowledges what is universally recognized, that is, that human beings function in a nexus comprising the psyche, the soma, and the social surround, and that each domain requires consideration when drawing up a psychiatric formulation and treatment plan. Thus, the biopsychosocial (BPS) paradigm proposed by George L. Engel in 1977 was adopted without much enquiry into details. This book presents a nascent, stronger version of the concept based on a growing body of genetic, epigenetic, and other evidence that encompasses a central, overlapping component to the Venn diagram description of the BPS conceptualization.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Informal Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Labor Patterns

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the less-familiar aspects of informal black women's work during the first three decades of the twentieth century—the labor patterns and economic activities of those that were part of the city's profitable yet illegal sexual economy, gambling enterprise, and supernatural consulting business. In doing so the chapter also tackles the problems of documenting informal labor and maps out a multidisciplinary approach for piecing together the oft-neglected lives of informal black female laborers. Finally, the chapter sets the scope of this study within New York City and describes the city's informal labor sector in order to set the social and economic backdrop within which these workers operate.

scholarly journals Kristin Stapleton (2016). Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Ronald Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Chinese Literary Criticism ◽  
The City

There are few resources amongst contemporary Chinese literary criticism that manage to weave such insightful literary readings and incisive historical research as Kristin Stapleton’s Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. The book accomplishes three feats, as set out by Stapleton in her introductory chapter, simultaneously incorporating a history of twentieth-century Chengdu (and its relevance to the developments in China during this period, more broadly) alongside the author’s biography of Ba Jin’s formative years in the city and the historiographical context of his novel Family. Such an undertaking by a less skilled author would have, perhaps, produced a work which simplifies the rich historical underpinnings of Ba Jin’s Family to supplementary readings of the novel, coupled with incidental evidence of the political and social machinations of the city in which its author grew up. Not so under Stapleton’s careful guidance. By reading the social and economic development of early twentieth-century Chengdu as much as its fictional counterpart in Ba Jin’s Turbulent Stream trilogy, Stapleton provides a perceptive reading of Family which invites the reader to consider how fiction can enrich and enliven our understanding of history.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Felicity Aulino
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Home Care ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Home Visits ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Conference Presentations

This introductory chapter provides an overview of care in Thailand. Thailand, this relatively small nation of sixty-six million people in mainland Southeast Asia, faces struggles similar to many other places in the world, including a rapidly aging population, the exploitation of the working and middle classes, and economic and authoritarian roadblocks to political participation. People care for the sick and provide for their communities amid such conditions, and much of what they do can be described—using familiar analytic concepts—as reflecting and resisting a variety of social pressures. However, Thailand is also predominantly Buddhist, one of many indications of the powerful influence of centuries-old practice and philosophical lineages, distinct from European traditions. Close attention to mundane affairs—from home-care routines to friendly social interactions, from volunteer home visits to professional conference presentations—invites an appreciation of the subtle logics of engagement from which lived experience here stems. This book thus highlights the habituated ways people provide for one another. This focus illustrates that care is not universally parsed as a matter of concern and assistance, but rather is a function of the ways people's attention is trained by the social world to perceive and prioritize what needs to be done, and for whom, and in what ways.

Weavers of Dreams, Unite!

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean P. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Hierarchy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Historical Moment

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which to explore the efforts of American actors to define what it meant to earn a living on the stage at a historical moment when the cultural landscape of the United States was undergoing seismic changes. In so doing, it sheds light on a number of larger issues: the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century; languages of class and their role in the construction of cultural hierarchy; and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the commercial entertainment industry. The book focuses on that section of the American acting community that earned its living in the so-called legitimate theater, a cultural category that by the early twentieth century had come to be defined, at least in a metropolitan context, less by a particular set of performance traditions than by the social identity of its audience. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

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