“I Want to Go Home”: The Representation of Dual Homecoming in Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller

The aim of the article is to discuss Dorothy Allison’s novel Cavedweller (1998) in terms of the narrative strategies of doubling. The novel features Delia, a woman who returns to the South with her daughter, Cissy, to reconnect with the rest of her family. While Delia’s return to her hometown meets with social ostracism, her daughter manages to find a sense of identity and belonging in the underground caves in Georgia. The two parallel stories of homecoming are presented by Allison through the images of doubling, which help her to confront regional traumas and tensions of the South.

Culture, Gender and Inequality: Narratives from a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group in Odisha, India

This ethnographic paper explores gender inequality in tribal societies vis-à-vis customary practices and challenges the notion of egalitarianism of tribal society by taking Chuktia Bhunjia tribe of Odisha, India as an analytical category. In the light of a discussion on women specific taboos and restrictions, captured through formal interview, narrative and lived experience approach, the paper explicates the deeply embedded nature of the taboos in Chuktia Bhunjia society and unravels how prohibiting women from socio-economic and religious space, backed by purity-pollution philosophy, perpetuate the gender inequality among them. It was found that although economic division of labour is indistinct; women are perceived being portrayal of misfortunes during perceived pollution periods and are prohibited to enter into sacred places – kitchen room, cowshed, sacred groves and forest – and take part in community festivals and other auspicious occasions. The existing material culture, especially kitchen room, alongside economic structure, self-notion of ‘outsiders’ and apparently fixed customary laws have direct influence on the position of women in this society. It is found that the customary laws are not mere symbolic expressions in perpetuating the gender asymmetry, but have become a powerful tool to patriarchal controls not only over women’s education, health, properties and knowledge, but also over individual’s choice, freedom, decision-making and sexuality. However, internal challenges are reported against customary laws and taboos, the fear of social ostracism, the obligation to restore the purity of cultural entity and anxiety reinforce people to be always submissive to those practices. Therefore, unless there is transformation alongside their culture, it is fruitless to think of gender equality.

The Relationship Between Social Ignore and Social Media Addiction Among Adolescents: Mediator Effect of Satisfaction With Family Life

This study investigated the mediator effect of satisfaction with family life in the relationship between social ignore and social media addiction among adolescents. The research was conducted on 456 high school students studying in the 2019 academic year. Ages of the students vary between 14 and 16 years old. Social Media Addiction Scale, Social Ostracism Scale, and Satisfaction with Family Life Scale were used to collect data. SPSS 25 software package and PROCESS software package developed by Hayes as an add-on to SPSS were used in the data analysis. It was found that social ignore predicted social media addiction positive significantly and satisfaction with family life negatively. It was observed that satisfaction with family life predicted social media addiction negative significantly. It was also found that satisfaction with family life mediated the relationship between social ignore and social media addiction.

Cultural values, but not nationality, predict social inclusion of robots

Research highlighted that Western and Eastern cultures differ in socio-cognitive mechanisms, such as social inclusion. Interestingly, social inclusion is a phe-nomenon that might transfer from human-human to human-robot relationships. Although the literature has shown that individual attitudes towards robots are shaped by cultural background, little research has investigated the role of cul-tural differences in the social inclusion of robots. In the present experiment, we investigated how cultural differences, in terms of nationality and individual cul-tural stance, influence social inclusion of the humanoid robot iCub, in a modi-fied version of the Cyberball game, a classical experimental paradigm measur-ing social ostracism and exclusion mechanisms. Moreover, we investigated whether the individual tendency to attribute intentionality towards robots mod-ulates the degree of inclusion of the iCub robot during the Cyberball game. Re-sults suggested that the individuals’ stance towards collectivism and tendency to attribute a mind to robots both predicted the level of social inclusion of the iCub robot in our version of the Cyberball game.

Mixing Misery and Gin: The Effect of Alcohol Administration on Ostracism Response

Williams’s need-threat model proposes that ostracism responses are reflexive and, because of their evolutionary significance, difficult to diminish. Alcohol is widely consumed in social contexts and for reasons of coping with social stress, and major theories of alcohol propose that intoxication disrupts cognitive appraisal of environmental threats, leading to stress relief. Surprisingly, though, no well-powered experimental research has examined the impact of alcohol intoxication on distress from social ostracism. In three studies across two independent laboratories ( N = 438), participants were randomly assigned to receive either an alcoholic or nonalcoholic (i.e., no-alcohol control or placebo) beverage and were exposed to an ostracism (or social inclusion) manipulation. Results, which emerged as remarkably consistent across all studies, indicated strong and consistent effects of ostracism on mood and needs satisfaction among both intoxicated and sober participants. Findings have important implications for ostracism theory and speak to boundary conditions for alcohol’s ability to relieve stress.

Psychological Maltreatment and Loneliness in Adolescents: Social Ostracism and Affective Experiences

Psychological maltreatment is an important public health concern that has been linked with a variety of negative psychosocial consequences and adjustment problems in childhood to adulthood. The purpose of the current study sought to explore the direct and indirect associations between psychological maltreatment, social ostracism, affective experiences, and loneliness among high school Turkish adolescents. Participants were comprised of 791 adolescents attending three public high schools in Turkey. Students were mostly male with a mean age of 16.35 ( SD = 1.09) years. Findings from the analyses indicated that social ostracism mediated the relationship between psychological maltreatment and both positive and negative affective experiences. Social ostracism and affective experiences mediated the effect of psychological maltreatment on adolescent feelings of loneliness. Results of the present study suggest that social ostracism and affective experiences are important mechanisms that may help to understand the impacts of psychological maltreatment on adolescent feelings of loneliness.

Exploring Challenges Faced by Rural Zimbabwean School-Going Single Mothers in Nurturing Children: A Literature Perspective

In sub-Saharan African countries, school-going single mothers are a rapidly growing new form of family. However, this pervasive phenomenon and its influence on child development have caught miniature thought. It is in this context that this paper sought to gain insights from a literature perspective on challenges confronted by rural Zimbabwean school-going single mothers in child nurturing. This is a documentary review of information considered relevant to the issue under investigation. In this context, the literature method was used in generating, data from purposively sampled sources. Against this background, the analysis revealed that school-going single mothers encounter numerous challenges, such as the difficulty to maintain discipline and authority in their ‘new’ family setting, social ostracism through school-going single mothers, and their children's experience of adverse stances in social, emotional and economic obstacles. Thus, single mothers in these rural societies take on all the chores, child upkeep and in most cases are susceptible to social separation, which forms a situation, which does not bring up children’s social and cognitive development. In this context, it can therefore be concluded that these detected challenges influence how school-going single mothers in the rural Zimbabwe context nurture their children. It is against this background that we recommend that school-going single mothers are encouraged to find means of exercising positive parenting that ensures that their children are well-groomed and provided for. Received: 11 February 2021 / Accepted: 20 April 2021 / Published: 17 May 2021

Economics of the Sacramental Bread Ordeal in the Russian Princedoms Period

The paper analyses the economics behind the ordeal by sacramental bread — a method of criminal dispute resolution in the Russian Princedoms period. Contributing to the framework advanced by Leeson (2011, 2012a, 2012b) [Trial by battle. Journal of Legal Analysis, 3(1), 341–375; An Austrian approach to law and economics, with special reference to superstition. The Review of Austrian Economics, 25(3), 185–198; Ordeals. The Journal of Law and Economics, 55(3), 691–714], this paper advances a hypothesis that the ordeal could have been designed as a ‘pressure valve’ to reduce scepticism in relation to other ordeals. To prove this, a model is constructed showing that when high scepticism causes fixed-outcome ordeals to become costly, the clergy could resort to creating an ordeal, the verdicts of which would not be argued against through a careful manipulation of its costs and benefits. In this ordeal, guilt was determined by the proband’s inability to swallow the bread due to stress and thus relied on a biological reaction instead of a predetermined outcome. Investigations showed that even if the ordeal delivered false verdicts, appealing the verdict was not beneficial to the proband. This was achieved by only employing the ordeal in resolution of petty theft, which made the potential losses from a false verdict very minimal. Further, the ordeal was staged as a confession, which reduced the possibility of a proband facing social ostracism.

Perceptions of the appropriate response to norm violation in 57 societies

Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.