Fathering, mothering and making sense of ntamoba: reflections on the economy of child-rearing in colonial Asante

Africa ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Allman

AbstractThis article explores the changing dynamics of child-rearing in Asante (Ghana) through the problematic concept of ntamoba. In the historical record, and in popular memory, ntamoba has survived in a number of forms—as a marriage payment, as a rite connected with birthing and naming and as an indemnification paid to a father by a child's matrikin to signify the termination of a father's rights in that child. This article seeks to historicise and explain the multiplicity of meanings and the eventual disappearance of ntamoba by examining the ways in which a father's rights of use in his children were transformed into rights of ownership. It foregrounds time and social place/status as key variables in its investigation, demonstrating how the disappearance of ntamoba was connected with the conflation of subordinate social categories in twentieth-century Asante.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley ◽  
Paul Christian ◽  
Susan Ledger ◽  
Jan Walmsley

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.


Author(s):  
Nimisha Barton

In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. This book argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight — the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. This compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, the book shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women — mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. The book concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing — in short, through families and family-making — which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-427
Author(s):  
Emily McCaffrey

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.


1995 ◽  
Vol 177 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas R. Powell ◽  
Karen E. Diamond

The nature of parent-teacher relationships in early childhood programs, including interventions for children with disabilities, is examined within a sociopolitical context across five eras of the twentieth century. Two general approaches are discerned: practices that view parents as learners in need of expert information and advice about child rearing, prevalent through the 1950s, and strategies involving parents as partners with educators in program decision-making, which began to surface in the 1960s. Attention is given to the influence of the Parent Teacher Association in the early 1900s as a response to societal changes stemming from the Industrial Revolution; contributions of the child study movement of the 1920s to parent education activities; effects of the Great Depression on ideas and practices related to individuals with disabilities; the growth of parent advocacy on behalf of children with disabilities; and the influence of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and widespread demographic changes of the 1970s on parent-teacher relationships. Current issues in forming and sustaining parent-teacher partnerships in early childhood programs are identified.


Author(s):  
Kevin E. Davis

This chapter traces the development of modern transnational bribery law in the United States. After a brief discussion of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Oscanyan v. Arms Co., it traces the evolution of domestic anti-bribery law in the United States through the twentieth century. It then discusses the Watergate investigation and scandals involving companies such as Lockheed and United Brands that led to enactment of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. The historical record sheds light on the moral and economic motivations behind this landmark legislation. Subsequent amendments to the FCPA and related statutes, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are also discussed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (10) ◽  
pp. 2243-2259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan E. Truchelut ◽  
Robert E. Hart ◽  
Briana Luthman

AbstractPrior to the satellite era, limited synoptic observation networks led to an indefinite number of tropical cyclones (TCs) remaining undetected. This period of decreased confidence in the TC climatological record includes the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. While prior studies found that this undersampling exists, disagreement regarding its magnitude has caused difficulties in interpreting multidecadal changes in TC activity. Previous research also demonstrated that reanalyses can be used to extend TC climatology, utilizing the NOAA/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Twentieth-Century Reanalysis to manually identify previously unknown Atlantic Ocean basin potential TCs. This study expands the spatiotemporal scope of the earlier work by presenting a filtering algorithm that dramatically improves the efficiency with which candidate events are identified in the reanalysis. This algorithm was applied to all tropical basins for the years 1871–1979, resulting in the first quantitative and objective global TC candidate event counts for the decades prior to formal recordkeeping. Observational verification performed on a subset of these events indicates that the algorithm identifies potential missing TCs at a success rate approximating that of earlier work with a significant decrease in the amount of time required. Extrapolating these proportions to all of the candidate events identified suggests that this method may help to locate hundreds of previously unknown TCs worldwide for future study and cataloging. As such, the dataset produced by this research is a source of independent guidance for use in ongoing and future TC climatology revision efforts to produce a more complete historical record more quickly than with current methods.


2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Cochrane

As concepts of nationhood and national identity become increasingly slippery, so the theatre historian attempting to recover neglected histories submerged within the dominant discourse of the nation state needs to be wary of imposing an ideologically pre-determined reading on the surviving evidence of performance practice and audience response. It is also important to acknowledge that theatre practice which represents the majority experience of national audiences does not necessarily conform to the subjective value judgements of the critic-historians who have tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record. In attempting to re/write the history of twentieth-century British theatre Claire Cochrane has researched the hitherto neglected area of amateur theatre which was a widespread phenomenon across the component nations. Focusing in this article on the cultural importance of amateur theatre in Welsh communities before the Second World War, she explores the religious, socio-political, and topographical roots of its rapid expansion, and the complex national identities played out in the collaboration between actors and audience. Claire Cochrane lectures in drama and performance studies at University College Worcester. Her most recent book is Birmingham Rep: a City's Theatre, 1962–2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). She is currently working on a history of twentieth-century British theatre practice for Cambridge University Press.


Author(s):  
Lars-Christer Hydén

This chapter provides information on the social and cultural background of dementia from the early twentieth century into the early twenty-first century. The chapter presents an overview of the discussions about dementia, self, and identity, with a particular emphasis on research on narrative and dementia. The ideas around identity in dementia, from Kitwood to Sabat and Kontos, are discussed, together with research on storytelling in dementia. A general conclusion from this chapter is that although persons with dementia over time will become increasingly challenged as storytellers, they are still active meaning-makers. They are obviously still engaged in the never-ending activity of making sense of their social as well as physical world—events in the world, as well as what people are saying and doing. Telling stories is central to this endeavor, which entails “world-making” as well as “self-making” through constructing, presenting, and negotiating a sense of self and identity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document