scholarly journals Weddings in the Town Square: Young Russian Israelis Protest the Religious Control of Marriage in Tel–Aviv

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Prashizky ◽  
Larissa Remennick

The article discusses alternative wedding ceremonies staged in urban spaces as a statement of protest among immigrant couples that cannot marry in rabbinical courts, because they are not recognized as Jews. These public weddings are organized and sponsored by the Fishka association of young Israeli adults of Russian origin. Our field–work at Fishka included participant observation of its various events during 2013–2014, as well as in–depth interviews with the key informants, promotional materials, and video recordings of their public wedding ceremonies held in the streets of Tel–Aviv in 2009–2011. Embedded in the social history of the city and framed in the concepts of urban diversity and the politics of belonging, our ethnographic data juxtapose “Russian” street weddings with other public festivals sponsored by Fishka and other protest actions by minority groups. Alternative, civil weddings emerge as a form of active and critical citizenship among young Russian immigrants, seeking solidarity of other Israelis in the joint effort to reform the status quo and enable civil alternatives to Orthodox marriage. The active political stance and cultural activism of Fishka members challenge native Israelis’ monopoly on communal public space; young immigrants are thus carving a place for themselves in the iconic sites of the city's public cultural sphere.

Kick It ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Matt Brennan

This chapter explains the motivations for researching the social history of the drum kit. It traces the history of drummer jokes and outlines the structure of the chapters to follow. Chapter 1 traces the racist roots of linking drummers to primitive stereotypes and contrasts this against the cleverness of drummers that culminated in the invention of the drum. Chapter 2 shows how drummers in fact contributed to redefining the boundaries between noise and music. Chapter 3 reveals how drummers developed new conventions of literacy while standardizing both the components and performance practice of their instrument. Chapter 4 examines the development of the status of drummers as creative artists. Chapter 5 looks at drumming as a form of musical labour. Chapter 6 considers attempts to replace the drum kit and drummers with new technologies, and how such efforts ultimately underscored the centrality of the drum kit as part of the contemporary soundscape.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Barber

AbstractThis article recreates the lives of two settlers in Antigua between the years 1690 and 1740. As such, it is a key addition to the paltry number of studies of the island of Antigua and the other Leeward Islands of the West Indies. It takes as its base point the study of the Antigua settler elite identified by Richard Sheridan in his article, now forty years old, which constructed the institutional systems of landholding, taxation, customs and the Slave Trade which produced so-called Plantation Society. In the years preceding this, however, life for everyone concerned in the West Indies was uncertain and insecure. is was as much the case for those at the top of the socio-political ladder, such as island governors and Crown viceroys, as for relatively modest settlers, such as the subjects of this essay, Lawrence and Sarah Crabb. For all of those who were incorporated into the 18thcentury Plantocracy, many more were sacrificed in the struggles of early capitalism, buoyed up not by the level of 'credit' that they were accorded, but by the levels of debt they carried. The construction of a social history of modest settlers is made possible through the survival of documents which were kept by the Crabb's agent, George Moore, and which he would subsequently use in a Chancery case against his late friend's widow. These manuscripts have not been used before, except for occasional references to the legal precedents established by the case, Moore v. Meynell, and, given the paucity and patchiness of manuscript survivals for the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, show what can be reconstructed from otherwise overlooked sources. The result is a study of the measurement of a person's worth, and the increasing elision of God and Mammon in gauging credit, value and trust. In the case of the Crabbs, particularly because Lawrence was himself a man of little initial wealth who clawed his way up through his own ingenuity and his wife's family's West Indian estates, we are able to demonstrate how the language of credit and worthiness applied not only to men of business and politics but also to women.


Author(s):  
Hirut Woldemariam ◽  
Elizabeth Lanza

AbstractThe issue of language contact in the linguistic landscape has been rarely addressed, especially in regards to issues of agency and power in this domain of multilingual practices. The linguistic landscape provides an arena for investigating agency as related to literacy, language rights and identity. In this article, we explore the linguistic landscape of two different regions in Ethiopia to provide an analysis of language contact that takes place between regional languages, which only recently have made the transition to literacy in the country as the result of a new language policy, and Amharic, the federal working language, which has a long and established history of literacy. The study is based on data collected through field work and participant observation from two federal regions in the country – Tigray and Oromia – two regions that have fought for the recognition of language rights, for Tigrinya and Oromo, the former a Semitic language like Amharic and the latter a Cushitic language. Results indicate ways in which speakers of the regional languages draw on their multilingual resources to create a new arena for language use and thereby assert their agency in developing new literacy practices.


2021 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
С.А. АЙЛАРОВА

Статья посвящена одному из аспектов истории образования в Осетии конца XIX – начала XX в. – самосознанию социопрофессиональной группы – осетинского учительства. Формирование профессиональных групп было выражением модернизации социальной структуры пореформенного осетинского общества. Ввиду особенностей истории образования в Осетии главным представителем этой группы являлись учителя церковно-приходских школ – основного типа начальной школы в крае. Осознание профессиональных интересов, общественного статуса и материального положения народного учителя было проявлением оформления этого социального сообщества. В центре внимания педагогической публицистики – учительская повседневность, размеры жалования, проблема пенсий, жилье, питание, взаимоотношения учителя с школьной и сельской администрацией, представителями сельского общества, статус и перспективы педагогического труда. Обсуждение многих проблем носило полемический характер; участники дискуссии высказывали противоположные суждения о материальной обеспеченности народного учителя, качестве жилья, возможности подсобного хозяйства, будущего образования детей учителя. Освещалась запутанность ситуации с учительскими пенсиями, которые в реальности не выплачивались. В актуальной публицистике освещены не все проблемы учительской повседневности, а только социально значимые, волновавшие демократическую интеллигенцию. Изучение субкультуры и самосознания осетинского учительства актуально в русле методологических поисков отечественной «новой социальной истории», а также «историко-антропологического» подхода, дающих возможность реконструкции поведенческих стратегий этой группы интеллигенции. «Интеллектуальная история» Осетии дореволюционного периода формировалась во многом представителями этой образовательной общности, развивавшей общественную мысль на протяжении десятилетий. Публицистическая подборка, составившая основу статьи, информативна и свидетельствует о перспективности изучения такой социопрофессиональной и культурной группы, как осетинское учительство. The article considers one of the aspects of the history of education in Ossetia in the end of XIX – early XX century – the self-awareness of the Ossetian teachers as socio-professional group. The formation of professional groups was an expression of the modernization of the social structure of the post-reform Ossetian society. In view of the peculiarities of the history of education in Ossetia, the main representative of this group was the teachers of parish schools, the main type of elementary school in the region. Awareness of the professional interests, social status and material situation of the people's teacher was a manifestation of the formation of this social community. The focus of pedagogical journalism is on teachers' everyday life, salaries, the problem of pensions, housing, food, the teacher's relationship with the school and rural administration, representatives of rural society, the status and prospects of pedagogical work. Discussion of many problems was polemical in nature; the participants in the discussion expressed opposite opinions about the material security of a people's teacher, the quality of housing, the possibility of subsidiary farming, and the future education of the teacher's children. The confusion of the situation with teachers' pensions, which in reality were not paid, was highlighted. In actual journalism, not all problems of teachers' everyday life are highlighted, but only socially significant ones that worried the democratic intelligentsia. The study of the subculture and self-consciousness of the Ossetian teachers is relevant in line with the methodological searches of the national “new social history”, as well as the “historical-anthropological” approach, which makes it possible to reconstruct the behavioral strategies of this group of intelligentsia. The "intellectual history" of Ossetia in the pre-revolutionary period was formed in many respects by representatives of this educational community, which had been developing public thought for decades. This journalistic selection is informative and testifies to the prospects of studying such a socio-professional and cultural group as the Ossetian teachers.


Author(s):  
Gunnel Cederlöf

Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people’s access to nature in forests and hill tracts. This major interdisciplinary study is thus concerned with the social history of legal processes and the making of law, being as relevant today as it was when first published a decade ago. The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims for access to land and resources, and the complex ways in which customary rights are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule. Basing her archival and field work on the Nilgiri Hills in South India, Gunnel Cederlöf explores conflicting perceptions of nature and political visions that are projected onto landscapes and people. She traces debates on property and land rights, and how the empirical sciences merge with the legal claims justifying land acquisition. Popular resistance strategies to such exploitation are analysed, and a cross-cultural comparison made between early legal processes and social history in India, New Zealand, and North America.


1988 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Thomas

In the last few years, work in social history and the history of women has centred on the transition to capitalism and the great bourgeois political revolutions—also variously described as industrialization, urbanisation, and modernisation. Throughout this work runs a steady debate about the improvement or deterioration brought about by these changes in the lives of women and working people. On the whole, sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s and many recent historians have been optimistic about the changes in women's position, while feminist and Marxist scholars have taken a much more gloomy view.1 There has been little debate between the two sides, yet the same opposed arguments about the impact of capitalism on the status of women crop up not only in accounts of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also in work on women in the Third World, and cry out for critical assessment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Gunasekaran S

This essay is an attempt to write the social history of the Chakkiliyar community of South India, often classified in the colonial records as a caste occupying the lowest position in the caste hierarchy. This paper argues that the colonial period was marked by lowering opportunities for economic and social mobility for the community. Traditionally involved in the manufacture of leather goods that were central to irrigation, the Chakkiliyars had relatively better opportunities and some even occupied the status of petty landowners. But the advent of pumpsets and the mechanization of leather processing during the colonial period severely affected their economic opportunities. Adding to this, the colonial and missionary records, inflated with the prejudices of their upper caste informers, repeatedly portrayed their low social existence. Therefore, despite certain genuine motives and formidable social reforms, the colonial and missionary documentation of the caste in fact further strengthened the existing social stereotypes and thus added yet another layer into its history of discrimination. Besides recovering the various ways in which Chakkiliyars were described in the documents of colonial officials and Christian missionaries, this paper also analyzes the recent attempts by the members of the community to produce a counter narrative to the stereotypical representations of their caste.


Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 518-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Mourre

AbstractThis article is an attempt to reconsider the representations that, in Senegal in the 2000s, linked the social history of thetirailleurs(African colonial soldiers) with the practical and symbolic processes at the heart of a number of migratory projects, especially among young people. The history of this social military body was rooted in almost a century of colonial domination, from 1857 to 1962. Thetirailleursplayed a part in all the battles of the French army and generated different kinds of social imaginaries that were woven between France and Africa. In the late 1950s, another figure, another ideal type, became established in the Senegalese public space: the migrant. After tracing the history of the way in which these two figures were constructed, I trace how, more recently, the younger generation has been able to mobilize the dominant memory of thetirailleurin its own aspirations of exile. Some preliminary methodological proposals will be needed to account for these migratory imaginaries.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 295
Author(s):  
Nanang Hasan Susanto

This study was aimed to determine the history of social movements of Banjaranyar farmers, examined political economy theories of Popkin (1979) in The Rational Peasant: The Politics Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam that the resistance movement of farmers occurred when most people feel disadvantaged, and examined the theory of Scott (1976)about the concept of leadership and social structure. Through a historical approach, with the observation method of participation (participant observation) on the field, the study concluded, that the history of the struggle of Banjaranyar Farmers had a genuine dynamic, and the political economy theory of Popkin (1979), the theory of Scot (1976) manifested in social history that took place in the village of Banjaranyar.


1972 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Cruikshank

Thanks to Clifford Geertz, the terms and concepts of abangan, santri, and prijaji have become familiar and frequently used by students of Javanese history, politics, and society. While he did not invent them, Geertz is responsible for their earliest and most thorough development as explicit and interrelated concepts, as seen most notably in his The Religion of Java and The Social History of An Indonesian Town. These studies are based upon his academic work as an anthropologist and his intermittent field work in “Modjokuto”, Java, from May 1953 to September 1964.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document