Silence is Not an Option: Oral History of Race in Youth Development Through the Words of Esteemed Black Scholars

The study of race has been silenced in many areas of science including youth development research. We present this commentary in response to an invitation to address the impact of racism on the field of youth development for the Journal of Youth Development. Through oral history narratives, the paper synthesizes an antiracist agenda from the perspectives of 6 Black scholars: Tabbye Chavous, Michael Cunningham, Davido Dupree, Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Stephanie Rowley, and Robert Sellers. The narratives depict each scholar’s perspective on race research that informs youth-serving programs and the study of race in research of children and adolescents, particularly Black children. We selected scholars based on their commitment to supporting research that helps children of color thrive, and who have in-depth knowledge about racist ideologies and practices that have persisted since the inception of the science of youth development. Each scholar offered thoughtful critiques regarding racially biased measures and methodologies, the problematic use of deficit-oriented language, and the challenges that scholars of color encounter with advancing in the field. While the scholars expressed a consensus that the field has struggled to name racism in research and practice, they share hope in the complexity of future race research and practice that centers culture and context in youth development studies and programs.

Linkages Between Indigenous Cultural Generativity and Sobriety to Promote Successful Aging Among Alaska Natives

This article builds on the People Awakening Project, which explored an AlaskaNative understanding of the recovery process from alcohol use disorder and sobriety. The presentation will explore motivating and maintenance factors for sobriety among older AN adult participants (age 50+) from across Alaska. Ten life history narratives of Alaska Native older adults, representing Alutiiq, Athabascan, Tlingit, Yup’ik/Cup’ik Eskimos, from the PA sample were explored using thematic analysis. AN older adults are motivated to abstain from, or to quit drinking alcohol through spirituality, family influence, role socialization and others’ role modeling, and a desire to engage in indigenous cultural generative activities with their family and community. A desire to pass on their accumulated wisdom to a younger generation through engagement and sharing of culturally grounded activities and values, or indigenous cultural generativity, is a central unifying motivational and maintenance factor for sobriety. The implications of this research indicates that family, role expectations and socialization, desire for community and culture engagement, and spirituality are central features to both Alaska Native Elders’ understanding of sobriety, and more broadly, to their successful aging. Sobriety can put older Alaska Native adults on a pathway to successful aging, in positions to serve as role models for their family and community, where they are provided opportunities to engage in meaningful indigenous cultural generative acts.

People’s Relational Agency in Confronting Exclusion in Rural South India

Social exclusion is considered critical for understanding poverty, livelihoods, inequality and political participation in rural India. Studies show how exclusion is produced through relations of power associated with gender, caste, religion and ethnicity. Studies also document how people confront their exclusion. We use insights from these studies – alongside science and technology studies – and rely on life history narratives of ‘excluded’ people from rural Tamil Nadu, to develop a new approach to agency as constituted by two contrasting ways of relating: control and care. These ways of relating are at once social and material. They entangle humans with each other and with material worlds of nature and technology, while being mediated by structures such as social norms and cultural values. Relations of control play a central role in constituting exclusionary forms of agency. In contrast, relations of care are central to the agency of resistance against exclusion and of livelihood-building by the ‘excluded’. Relations can be transformed through agency in uncertain ways that are highly sensitive to trans-local contexts. We offer examples of policy-relevant questions that our approach can help to address for apprehending social exclusion in rural India and elsewhere.

Assessing Issues of Caste and Selfhood in Rural Society: Some Reflections

Based on a field study of Tandawa village located in east Uttar Pradesh, the article examines the pattern of caste cohesion in a rural society and studies how divisions and hierarchy still surface and remain a reality. This ethnographic study shows that though many socio-cultural traditions are practiced in northern India, some are undergoing subtle changes. The younger generation, especially its leaders, the yuva neta, have been taking initiatives over the last two decades to bring about a change in thinking. This study examines these new changes and challenges, and also tries to explore how these yuva neta have taken some initiatives to resolve internal caste-based hierarchical divisions and social contradictions. Using interviews, oral history, narratives and participant observation techniques, an ethnographic account of a small village has been put together. The research article also revisits a few significant studies to understand the debate on the caste system and how deeply it is entrenched in the day-to-day life of rural India.

Oka Day as an institution of power: kingship, chieftaincy and the community day in contemporary Yorubaland

This article provides a case study of a Nigerian community day celebration as a constellation of power dynamics in which kingship, chieftaincy and local politics are intertwined. Complementing the interpretations of the community day as a festival and a community development initiative, this research approaches Oka Day as an institution of powers that is invoked by the king but also incorporates chiefs, social groups, invited guests from beyond Oka and local audiences. Indebted to geographies of powers, we take nuanced power practices seriously, illustrated as twisted spatialities of powers embodied in architecture, rituals and oral history narratives. The new framing of powers makes two contributions to the existing interpretations of chieftaincy in Africa: it sheds light on chiefs’ subtle and strategic practices in response to the ‘powers of reach’ exercised by the king and through the organizational institution of Oka Day; and it also demonstrates how actors beyond the locality, including politicians, social clubs and diasporic groups, are drawn into the institution of Oka Day while mediating the powers of reach. Drawing from an analysis of spatialities of powers, we suggest that a spatial thinking facilitates our understandings of the ‘microphysics’ of kingship and chieftaincy in contemporary Yorubaland.

WEIRD People and The Western Church: who made who?

Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World explains how the West came to be psychologically and culturally WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), and the economic and social effects this has had on the last two thousand years of human history. One of the many strengths of WEIRDest People in the World is that it synthesizes evidence from psychology, economics, anthropology, and history into an integrated, compelling, and coherent theoretical framework. In this book, kinship is positioned at the forefront of narratives about the evolution of human societies – something that has long been recognized within anthropology but often missing from grand history narratives (Diamond, 1999; Harari, 2014). This work is highly readable while still making clear, empirically testable causal hypotheses. A central hypothesis of Henrich (2020) is that the Western Christian Church’s Marriage and Family Program (MFP) caused changes in European kinship systems. Here we evaluate the evidence presented in support of this hypothesis by reviewing the available information on pre-MFP kinship systems in Europe and re-analyzing cross-national associations between MFP and kinship structures using phylogenetic comparative methods. We raise alternative hypotheses about the relationships between the Western Christian Church and kinship structures and suggest that further research is needed to arbitrate these hypotheses.

Who is a Refugee? Understanding the Figure of the Refugee against the Backdrop of the Bengal Partition (1947-1970)

The paper intends to study the figure of the refugee in post-Partition West Bengal by critically examining the oral history narratives of individuals who migrated from East Pakistan in the wake of the 1947 Partition. It underscores the value and relevance of narrativity in the representation of factual history, the motivation and manifestation of which make history subjective, interpretive and contingent on the refugee’s narrative. The narrative act presents the refugees’ transition from, what may be called, figurative to socio-material subjects who interrupt and derange the nationalising exercise of the nation-state. The multivalent understanding of refugees makes the nation-state suffer from an anxiety of incompleteness (Appadurai 2006). The paper extends the idea of incompleteness by showing that however much the nation-state attempts to frame a particular brand of nationalism, variants of ethnocultural nationalism do exist, demonstrating the diverse subjectivities embodied by the refugees/narrators. Such ethnocultural nationalism can be read as alternative forms of self-assertion deeply etched in the social memory of the refugees.

Ancestry.com’s Race Stories

The popularity of genealogical research is linked to the growth of online genealogy services such as Ancestry.com, which, as of 2020, has over three million paid subscribers. Another 18 million people have taken genetic ancestry tests through the company’s subsidiary, AncestryDNA. This article interrogates how Ancestry presents information on race and ethnicity to users, asking if it is possible for researchers to build a critical racial identity using Ancestry’s services. Applying an understanding of whiteness that comes from critical race studies, the article examines the way race, and whiteness in particular, is presented in the business’s marketing, web features, and products such as AncestryDNA. These examinations reveal a company selling customers family history narratives that comport with the mythology of American egalitarianism, while at the same time essentializing race and ethnicity. The implications of these findings are significant for information professionals because Ancestry relies on partnerships with libraries and archives to supply material for the website’s research database. These partnerships compel archivists and librarians to scrutinize Ancestry’s information ethics. The article calls for further discussion and research into how information professionals can be agents for change in how race and ethnicity are treated in online genealogy spaces.

Reconstructing cranial evolution in an extinct hominin

Homo erectus is the first hominin species with a truly cosmopolitan distribution and resembles recent humans in its broad spatial distribution. The microevolutionary events associated with dispersal and local adaptation may have produced similar population structure in both species. Understanding the evolutionary population dynamics of H. erectus has larger implications for the emergence of later Homo lineages in the Middle Pleistocene. Quantitative genetics models provide a means of interrogating aspects of long-standing H. erectus population history narratives. For the current study, cranial fossils were sorted into six major palaeodemes from sites across Africa and Asia spanning 1.8–0.1 Ma. Three-dimensional shape data from the occipital and frontal bones were used to compare intraspecific variation and test evolutionary hypotheses. Results indicate that H. erectus had higher individual and group variation than Homo sapiens , probably reflecting different levels of genetic diversity and population history in these spatially disperse species. This study also revealed distinct evolutionary histories for frontal and occipital bone shape in H. erectus , with a larger role for natural selection in the former. One scenario consistent with these findings is climate-driven facial adaptation in H. erectus , which is reflected in the frontal bone through integration with the orbits.