scholarly journals “Marrying Out” for Love: Women’s Narratives of Polygyny and Alternative Marriage Choices in Contemporary Senegal

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Family Narratives ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Youth Experiences ◽  
Companionate Marriage

Abstract:This article examines the ways in which childhood and youth experiences of living in polygynous households shape the aspirations of middle-class Muslim Senegalese women to companionate marriage. Increasingly, such aspirations are fulfilled through marriage with European men. In contrast to an enduring popular discourse according to which women live happily with polygyny throughout the Senegambian region, this article shows how some middle-class women’s choice to “marry out” is explicitly linked to family narratives and personal experiences of suffering. In a context in which many of these women face strong familial opposition to marriage with non-Muslim European men, this article suggests that the women’s narratives provide moral legitimacy to their “alternative” choices.

Class Structure in the Old and New South

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Ruef
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New South ◽  
Wealth Distribution ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
The South ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
The Social ◽  
Planter Class

This chapter assesses whether the class structure of the South changed in the postbellum era and whether different individual and locational attributes predicted who would come to occupy preferred social positions. It suggests another source of categorical uncertainty during Reconstruction and beyond. While many Southern journalists and politicians celebrated the expansion of an entrepreneurial middle class at the time, this class actually declined numerically in the proverbial New South. Moreover, the “decaying” planter class was remarkably persistent, both in its dominance of the top of the wealth distribution and its involvement in the postwar industrialization of the region. The social categories of planters and middling Southerners that were deployed in popular discourse—and within the “New South Creed”—thus had little in common with the reality of class structure following the Civil War.

scholarly journals Engaging Brazilian Street Children in Play: Observations of Their Family Narratives

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Leticia Castrechini Fernandes Franieck ◽  
Michael Günter ◽  
Timothy Page
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
Street Children ◽  
The Other ◽  
School Age ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Vulnerable Children ◽  
Family Narratives ◽  
Family Based

Story stem assessments allow children to create narratives in response to brief portrayals of family-based relational challenges. These methods can provide insights into children’s perceptions of close relationships, which is particularly useful for vulnerable children. We conducted a feasibility study of story stem assessments with school-age street children—a previously unstudied population—to explore whether they would understand family-based story scenarios similarly to children in more stable families. Comparisons to children in low income and middle-class conditions were made on the basis of performance characteristics and “narrative coherence.” Street children demonstrated capacities to elaborate family narratives nearly as proficiently as children in the other groups, yet they also displayed unique vulnerabilities. Implications for research with this population are discussed.

scholarly journals The ‘Other’ Here and the ‘Other’ There:

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
Mark T. S. Currie
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
South African ◽  
Class Action ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
School Teaching ◽  
Family Narratives ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
First Time ◽  
African Canadian

Through examining key family narratives and selected personal experiences in this article, I reflect on how I began to rethink and (re)frame the representation of my racialized and (trans)national identities as a hyphenated, South African-Canadian citizen. The article summarizes my experiences of visiting Cape Town, South Africa (for the first time), when I engaged in a semester-long, secondary school teaching internship, conducting in-class action research while teaching Grades 9 and 10 History and English. I was sure that I was not just going to teach—I was going to discover myself. To borrow Derrida’s term, the “edges” of my identity continue to become blurred in relation to the shifting social and economic contexts.

The Anthropologist as Welfare Recipient: Views from the Inside

1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Modica
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Human Resource ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Public Assistance ◽  
Long Island ◽  
Welfare Recipient ◽  
Value System ◽  
A Value ◽  
Personal Experiences

As anthrologist on welfare, I am in a position to comment directly on the deplorable conditions and procedures involved in receiving public assistance. My recommendations for alternate approaches to managing recipients are based upon my personal experiences at the Long Island City Human Resource Administration (HRA). They include serious changes in procedure and attitude. The latter is always the harder to change, especially when social workers come from a value system that reflects middle-class sensibilities and the work ethic.

scholarly journals Reflected Bodies: Women’s Perspectives on the Marital Experience and the Transformation of the Maternal Body. A Case Study of Middle-Class Women in Suburban Romania

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Silvia Butean
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
Middle Class Families ◽  
Suburban Neighbourhood

Abstract Even if concepts of marriage and motherhood are subject to continuous changes and reinterpretations, women and men still marry and have children following more traditional or more unconventional patterns. My major interest in this research was to unveil Romanian middle-class women’s narratives regarding their perceptions over their own bodies and identities, by focusing my analysis on lived experiences, intimate scenes, daily practices and activities within marriage and motherhood. Qualitative empirical work was conducted in 2012 and 2015 in a post-socialist suburban neighbourhood, known as a place mostly inhabited by young, middle-class families. The analysis unfolds women’s class affinities and dispositions, their perception of the marital experience, identity and corporeal transformations, and their reflections on maternity as a transformative stage in terms of subjectivity, agency and body.

Giving the Sign

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
David Trotter
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Stranger

This chapter extends the emphasis on signal and interface developed in Chapters 1 and 2 to the work of a writer usually positioned between colonial, anti-colonial, and decolonized perspectives. Mansfield’s interest in methods of telecommunication crystallized in stories about modern urban (mostly London) middle-class existence. But it did not diminish when she began in the final years of her life to draw increasingly on memories of her childhood and youth in New Zealand. Detailed analysis of the narrative structure of some of her best-known stories shows how signalling practices act as the catalyst for expressions of gendered and sexual identity. The late Auckland-set ‘The Stranger’ is compared to James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. The chapter begins with an account of turn-of-the-century views of Englishness; and concludes with a discussion of Waterway (1938), by the Australian novelist Eleanor Dark.

scholarly journals Islam in Provincial Indonesia: Middle Class, Lifestyle, and Democracy

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noorhaidi Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Form

Islamic symbols have flourished in the public spaces of Indonesian provincial towns after Suharto. This phenomenon has occurred in parallel with the  significant shifts in the social, economic and political fields, which is tied to the mounting impact of Islamization, social mobility, economic growth, and democratization occurring among town people. It is as if we see a parallel move between Islamization, modernization, globalization and democratization. Key concepts associated with these trends are appropriated with those rooted in tradition and local culture to inform the whole dynamics of Indonesian provincial towns today. The key player in this process is the new middle class, who look to Islam for inspiration both to claim distinction and social status and to legitimize their consumptive lifestyle. They are newly pious who act as active negotiators between the global and the local as well as the cosmopolitan centre and the hinterland. They also play a pivotal role as an agency that liberalizes religion from its traditionally subservient, passive and docile posture by turning it into a source of moral legitimacy and distinction to represent a modern form of life. Given its intimate relationship with locality, tradition, modernity as well as globalization, Islam has increasingly assumed a greater importance for local politics. Political elites have used Islamic symbols for the instrumental purpose of extending their political legitimacy and mobilizing constituency support, in a political environment of open competition and increased public participation in decision making. In this process religious symbols have irrefutably been distanced from their religious moorings and narrow, Islamist understandings, in favor of pragmatic political purposes.

Value Conflicts in Law Enforcement

1965 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Chwast
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Value Conflicts ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Police Encounters ◽  
Class Status

In law enforcement, goal-oriented guides for behavior must be made explicit. Unclarified value conflicts result in irrelevant or inappropriate outcomes in police encounters. The sources of values are both personal and social. The former are largely derived from early personal experiences; the latter from the outside community (the middle class) and from formal and in formal demands within the police apparatus. The middle-class status of most police officers causes them to emphasize prompt ness, cleanliness, propriety, and orderliness. These values differ somewhat from those of lower-class society, where life may be a battle for survival. The police officer, usually poorly prepared for understanding persons from different backgrounds, finds it hard to cope with the conflict in values. Already alienated in an authoritarian police bureaucracy, he also feels alienated in the neighborhood in which he works. This increases his own sus picion and fear and conversely that of the lower-class persons whom he encounters.

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