scholarly journals Grimy Heritage: Organic Bar Streets in Shanghai and Tokyo

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 76-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Farrer
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Social Functions

Abstract Every city has built environments that are largely regarded as eyesores, for aesthetic, social, or moral reasons. Urban nightlife streets are examples of such ‘grimy heritage’. Not only shabby and disorderly, they harbour forms of commercial sex, drinking cultures, and ephemeral nightlife cultures that many city residents and government officials consider undesirable. Sometimes their built forms are regarded as the enemy of genuine heritage architecture, since they obscure more solid, carefully designed structures around them. However, in many cities, organic nightlife streets—developing in such spaces precisely because they were derelict or poorly regulated—serve important social functions as spaces of creativity and community formation. This paper examines the ways that such ‘grimy heritage’ has developed in Shanghai and Tokyo, using examples from ethnographic research and historical sources, and addressing the question of the contribution of the ‘grimy heritage’ to authentic, urban social life.

Going North, coming South: Guatemalan migratory flows

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164
Author(s):  
Michelle J. Moran-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
International Migration ◽  
Return Migration ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
New Ideas

Understanding the return aspect of international migration is vital because returnees replete with new ideas, perceptions on life, and monies affect every dimension of social life in migrants’ places of origin.  Yet, return migration remains uneven and an understudied aspect of migratory flows because migration scholars have privileged why individuals migrate, the underlying motivations for their moves abroad, and how migrants assimilate and succeed in their destinations abroad. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article addresses the migratory flows of Ladino and Mayan Guatemalans:  those who go North, but in particular, those who come South. And in doing so, it highlights their similar and divergent responses towards migration processes.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE AMARNA LETTERS TOWARDS A STUDY OF SYRO-PALESTINIAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE (1). TERMINOLOGY FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 788-832
Author(s):  
Lukas M. Muntingh
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Social ◽  
Amarna Letters ◽  
Free People ◽  
Shed Light

Egyptian domination under the 18th and 19th Dynasties deeply influenced political and social life in Syria and Palestine. The correspondence between Egypt and her vassals in Syria and Palestine in the Amarna age, first half of the fourteenth century B.C., preserved for us in the Amarna letters, written in cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in 1887, offer several terms that can shed light on the social structure during the Late Bronze Age. In the social stratification of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian rule according to the Amarna letters, three classes are discernible:1) government officials and military personnel, 2) free people, and 3) half-free people and slaves. In this study, I shall limit myself to the first, the upper class. This article deals with terminology for government officials.

scholarly journals Physical activity, sport and transnational migrant spaces in Shanghai, China: (Re)crafting contours of a metropolitan cityscape

2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110094
Author(s):  
Geoffery Zain Kohe ◽  
Daniel Nehring ◽  
Mengwei Tu
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Highly Skilled Migrants ◽  
Highly Skilled ◽  
Globally Attractive ◽  
Skilled Migrant

This study examines associations between sport/physical activity space, community formation and social life among Shanghai’s highly skilled migrant demographic. There is limited illustration of the roles sport and physical exercise provision and spaces play in this migrant cohort’s lives, community formation and participation in their host societies. Yet, such evidence is of value in determining social policy, urban development and community engagement initiatives. Using a mixed-methods approach involving public policy critique, cultural and spatial analysis and virtual community investigation, this article provides a conceptual exploration of ways sport and physical activity frame individual and collective migrant experiences, and how such experiences enmesh with wider geo-spatial, political and domestic context. Amid Shanghai’s presentation as a globally attractive space, we reveal some of the complexities of the cityscape as an emblematic location for highly mobile, highly skilled migrants. A confluence of ideals about urban citizenship, social participation and localised physical activity/sport-based (inter)action, we note, articulate Shanghai anew, and contribute to debates on highly skilled transnational mobility and community formation.

Playing through the Apocalypse: Preparing Children for Mass Disasters in Japan and Chile

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-259
Author(s):  
Chika Watanabe
Keyword(s):  
Disaster Preparedness ◽  
Nonprofit Organization ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Mass Disasters ◽  
As If

Abstract There is a growing trend to prepare children for future disasters. A Japanese nonprofit organization has developed an event called Iza! Kaeru Caravan, which includes games that teach children and their families how to survive disasters, from earthquakes to floods. Many disaster experts and government officials from other countries have now implemented the Caravan in their own contexts. Based on ethnographic research in Japan and Chile, this article shows how playful methods in disaster preparedness orient children, and by proxy their families, to accept an apocalyptic future, helping the neoliberal state buy time. Advocates of disaster preparedness in Japan and Chile accept that state actors will not come immediately to the rescue. Playful methods mobilize children and their families to take responsibility for their own survival through the subjunctive work of the “as if.” Ambiguously positioned between fun and education, playful methods of preparedness command attention from children and adults—what I call “attentive play”—as they frame and reframe the games to figure out, “Is this play?” Ultimately, the article shows that attentive play buys time for the state to temporarily defer its responsibilities to citizens, but the ambiguity of play can also exceed its ideological effects.

scholarly journals The Social Life of the “Forever Chemical”

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Daniel Renfrew ◽  
Thomas W. Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Toxic Event ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Polyfluoroalkyl Substances

This article examines the social life of PFAS contamination (a class of several thousand synthetic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and maps the growing research in the social sciences on the unique conundrums and complex travels of the “forever chemical.” We explore social, political, and cultural dimensions of PFAS toxicity, especially how PFAS move from unseen sites into individual bodies and into the public eye in late industrial contexts; how toxicity is comprehended, experienced, and imagined; the factors shaping regulatory action and ignorance; and how PFAS have been the subject of competing forms of knowledge production. Lastly, we highlight how people mobilize collectively, or become demobilized, in response to PFAS pollution/ toxicity. We argue that PFAS exposure experiences, perceptions, and responses move dynamically through a “toxicity continuum” spanning invisibility, suffering, resignation, and refusal. We off er the concept of the “toxic event” as a way to make sense of the contexts and conditions by which otherwise invisible pollution/toxicity turns into public, mass-mediated, and political episodes. We ground our review in our ongoing multisited ethnographic research on the PFAS exposure experience.

The Manufactured Map, 1790–1830

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Brückner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time Map ◽  
Diverse Audience

The symbolic and social value of maps changed irreversibly at the turn of the nineteenth century when Mathew Carey and John Melish introduced the business model of the manufactured map. During the decades spanning the 1790s and 1810s respectively, Carey and Melish revised the artisanal approach to mapmaking by assuming the role of the full-time map publisher who not only collected data from land surveyors and government officials but managed the labor of engravers, printers, plate suppliers, paper makers, map painters, shopkeepers, and itinerant salesmen. As professional map publishers, they adapted a sophisticated business model familiar in Europe but untested in America. This chapter documents the process of economic centralization and business integration critical to the social life of preindustrial maps and responsible for jump-starting a domestic map industry that catered to a growing and increasingly diverse audience.

Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajantha Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Embeddedness ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Institutes Of Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Capital

AbstractThe politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. I argue that the IIT graduate's status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital. Analysis of this process calls for a relational approach to merit. My ethnographic research on the southeastern state of Tamilnadu, and on IIT Madras located in the state capital of Chennai, illuminates claims to merit, not simply as the transformation of capital but also as responses to subaltern assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of such claims: at one moment, they are articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. This marking and unmarking of caste suggests a rethinking of meritocracy, typically assumed to be a modernist ideal that disclaims social embeddedness and disdains the particularisms of caste and race. I show instead that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper-casteness.

The Gay South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Watkins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Gay History ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Cold War

Regional variation, race, gender presentation, and class differences mean that there are many “Gay Souths.” Same-sex desire has been a feature of the human experience since the beginning, but the meanings, expressions, and ability to organize one’s life around desire have shifted profoundly since the invention of sexuality in the mid-19th century. World War II represented a key transition in gay history, as it gave many people a language for their desires. During the Cold War, government officials elided sex, race, and gender transgression with subversion and punished accordingly by state committees. These forces profoundly shaped gay social life, and rather than a straight line from closet to liberation, gays in the South have meandered. Movement rather than stasis, circulation rather than congregation, and the local rather than the stranger as well as creative uses of space and place mean that the gay South is distinctive, though not wholly unique, from the rest of the country.

Kinship and Conflict in a Yombe Village: a Genealogical Dispute

Africa ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Clement Bond
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Local Group ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Active Force ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphIn Myth in Primitive Psychology Malinowski saw in myth an active force which safeguarded and enforced morality and contained precedent, law, and practical rules for the guidance of man (1948, 101). It expressed, enhanced, and codified belief. For Malinowski myth was dominant and he thought that it still ruled Trobriand social life (1948, 126). Myth was an important integrating force and one of its social functions in Trobriand society was to convey, express, and strengthen the unity of the local group and that of the group of people descended from a common ancestress (1948, 116). In a Durkheimian sense, it was a social fact, external to the individual, generalized in society, and imposing constraints on human behaviour (Durkheim, 1958, 3).

scholarly journals Methodological aspects around the reconstruction of surname sub-sets in bimodal networks

AWARI ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Bimodal Networks ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Methodological Aspects ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Relational Treatment

This article addresses the methodological aspects surrounding the transformation of a cadastral land registry from the end of the 19th century belonging to the department of Humahuacua, Jujuy province (Argentina), in a series of bimodal matrices and networks. The idea that has guided the relational treatment of the data towards said historical sources, starts from the premise that certain individuals carrying a discrete set of surnames, and who have shared similar monetary amounts of appraisal declared in the said land cadastre, were more likely to link with each other in different areas of social life, such as the limited political and regional power circle of the late nineteenth century in Jujuy. The results obtained show the possibility of delimiting and reconstructing sub-sets of surnames that are linked less and/or more frequently to each other, according to four pre-constructed appraisal categories based on a segmentation of the registered monetary valuations in the land registry. Likewise, and as a product of this new grouping of information arising from the application of Social Network Analysis (ARS), it is feasible to limit the study to the qualitative aspects (age, residence, descent, nuptial ties, baptismal sponsorships) of individuals that formed part of these resulting sub-sets, through the focused search of ecclesiastical acts recorded within the same historical period.

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