scholarly journals Baby care: practices, texts and cultural conflicts

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-269
Author(s):  
Alexandra Pletneva

To create the social history of Russia and the history of everyday life, one needs a description of local everyday practices. This article focuses on the everyday practices associated with the birth of a baby and care for it. The author proceeds from the fact that the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia saw the coexistence of two cultures and two household traditions – the culture of the educated classes and the peasant culture. At the level of everyday practices, they made a certain influence on each other. On the one hand, ethnographic materials were used as sources, and on the other hand – popular medical literature of the 19th century. The article analyzes the practices themselves and the mechanisms of their influence on each other, while it appears that the effect of the practices of educated social groups on people’s life was a conscious Kulturtraeger activity. The influence of peasant household traditions on the lifestyle of educated classes was carried out primarily through direct impact. The ubiquity of nurses who belonged to a different social group than the child’s parents, led to the fact that, despite the parents’ resistance, peasant childcare practices (baby-rocking, pacifier, sleeping together, etc.) were used quite actively.

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Werner Bahner

Summary The Renaissance constitutes a new phase in the history of linguistics. The study of modern languages in particular contributed to enlarge the scope of philological concern as scholars try to promote and to codify a young national language. During this time philologists give particular attention to the origin of these vernaculars, distinguishing the different stages in their evolution and developing an especial awareness of chronology. For the representatives of a national philology, Latin is the starting point, the mould according to which the vernaculars are described and classified. Soon, however, more and more traits are recognized which are particular to these living languages, and which do not agree with the traditions of Latin grammar. On the one hand, modifications on the theoretical level are called for, and, on the other, there is a good opportunity to demonstrate the particularity of a given vernacular. All these tendencies can be found for the first time in the writings on Cas-tillian by the great philologist Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522). Nebrija recognized a series of phonetic correspondences which, much later in the 19th century, are transformed into ‘phonetic laws’ by a rigorous methodology. In so doing the elaboration of orthographic principles had been for him a stimulus for his explications. In his “Diálogo de la lengua”, Juan de Valdés (devoted himself more extensively to the social aspects of Castillian, to linguistic changes, and to the historical causes for the distribution of Romance languages on the Iberian peninsula, stressing expecially the role of the ‘Reconquista’. The work of Bernardo José de Aldrete (1560–1641) offers a synthesis of all these efforts concerning the evolution of Castillian. He discusses all the substrata and superstrata of the language, sketches the different stages of development of his native tongue, examines Old Castillian with the help of medieval texts, and exploits what Nebrija had noted about the phonetic correspondences. In terms of scholarship, Aldrete’s work constitutes the culmination point in the movement engaged in supporting the rights of the Castillian language et in documenting its sovereignity vis-à-vis the Latin tradition.


2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Vojin Nedeljković

The author examines the scope and interrelation of two traditional notions concerning non-literary Latin: sermo uulgaris, or plebeius, and sermo familiaris, or cotidianus. While these are really disparate terms, the one designating a sociolect and the other a language register, the author maintains that the old confusion between Colloquial and Vulgar Latin is not merely due to flawed reasoning within an insufficient model of linguistic variation, but rather reflects a fundamental development that took place in the social history of Latin.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 246-262
Author(s):  
Aistis Žalnora

There issue of Psychiatry in Vilnius is unexplored field especially in a terms of its social aspects. Most of the former papers devoted to psychiatry in Vilnius were written in descriptive manner or they were uncritical case studies of one or another hospital. One of the first successful studies that was constructed by using modern methodology was a monograph of Dr. Tomas Vaisėta that described a social features of Vilnius psychiatry. However, the study is devoted to a late period – Soviet psychiatry only. Therefore the modern analysis of earlier periods and other Vilnius hospitals was still missing. In our article, we set us a goal, namely, to find the most important features, the so‑called paradigm fractures in the social history of Vilnius psychiatry. The main tendency which should be emphasized was uneven development of Vilnius psychiatry, especially in a terms of attitude towards the patient. In most cases that could be interpreted in a light of a broader Global context. In Vilnius hospitals just like in other countries mentally ill were discriminated because of their unclear social and economic status. In the earliest period the mentally ill as an outcast of society is being locked in a jail‑like mental hospitals or fall into complete favor of the monastery hospices. The 19th century positivism at least theoretically brought humane paradigm to Lithuanian psychiatry. However, because of the limited medical measures as well as economic reasons the later period was marked by the realism or even negativism of semi‑modern interwar psychiatry. Mentally ill again falls into a status of outcast or a burden to the society. The question of responsibility towards mentally ill is avoided by the community as well as by state. Nevertheless, some original solutions were found in Vilnius district. The mentally ill were employed in local farms that at‑least partly solved the issues of economic burden. Moreover, there were some more tendencies that do not fit in the global narrative. Despite the technical advance in treatment that gradually enabled the psychiatrists to help the patient, in the Soviet period we observe the opposite tendency that was to restrain and harm the mentally ill patient. In many cases even totally healthy people were misdiagnosed to be mentally ill and received harsh chemical treatment and isolation because of their personal criticism towards totalitarian Soviet system.


1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Jaffe

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.


AJS Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Horowitz

Although religious history has traditionally concerned itself with the transcendent dimension in human life, and social history with the mundane, the latter approach can also be used to illuminate the ways in which religion works itself out on the social plane. In fact, it might be argued that inquiries of this sort should occupy a prominent place on the agenda of any social and religious history of the Jews. Among historians of the Annales school, for whom the study of material life was long considered the backbone of historical inquiry, there has been a discernible move in recent years toward the study of religious life, especially in its popular forms. Whereas, for example, previous volumes in the valuable Johns Hopkins series of “Selections from the Annales” were devoted to such topics as food and drink in history, the one published in 1982 was entitled, significantly, Ritual, Religion and the Sacred.


2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 37-62
Author(s):  
Arnd Bauerkämper

This article focuses on the evolution of social history in pre- 1989 West Germany and the GDR and, on the basis of this overview, identifies new, innovative historiographical trends on (re-)writing social history in unified Germany. It is argued that, for many decades, West German historiography had been characterized by sharp debates between the more established advocates of investigations into social structures and processes, on the one hand, and the grass-roots historians of everyday life, on the other. Since the early 1990s, however, this antagonism has considerably receded in favour of synthetic perspectives. At the same time, interest in the history of East European states and regions has considerably increased. This article highlights these new analytical trends in recent German historiography by taking as example studies of the social history of the GDR. In the unified Germany, the history of the GDR has received particular attention. Access to new sources has also enabled historians to link the histories of Eastern and Western Europe, either by employing comparative perspectives or investigating cross-border entanglements.


2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cooter

The ‘death’ of the social history of medicine was predicated on two insights from postmodern thinking: first, that ‘the social’ was an essentialist category strategically fashioned in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and second, that the disciplines of medicine and history-writing grew up together, the one (medicine) seeking to objectify the body, the other (history-writing) seeking to objectify the past. Not surprisingly, in the face of these revelations, historians of medicine retreated from the critical and ‘big-picture’ perspectives they entertained in the 1970s and 1980s. Their political flame went out, and doing the same old thing increasingly looked more like an apology for, than a critical inquiry into, medicine and its humanist project. Unable to face the present, let alone the future, they retreated from both, suffering the same paralysis of will as other historians stymied by the intellectual movement of postmodernism. Ironically, this occurred (occurs) at a moment when ‘medicine’ – writ large to include the biosciences and biotechnology – could easily be said to be the most relevant and compelling subject for understanding contemporary life and politics (global, local, and individual) and, as such, the place to justify the practice of history-writing as a whole. God knows, legitimacy has never been more urgent. But how can this be effected? Political action seems more likely than prayer. But let us begin by reviewing the nature of the problem that demands this response.


1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. W. Kostal

The historiography of work-related accidents in nineteenth-century Ontario is a product of two complementary but as yet unsynthesized lines of inquiry. On the one hand, legal historians have focused on the genesis of judge-made and statutory law respecting the liability of employers for the work-related accidents of their hired labor. Considerable light has been shed on political and ideological as well as formally “legal” factors that shaped judicial and legislative decision making concerning personal injuries at work. However, the legal historiography of the Victorian Ontario workplace pertains mainly to the law and those who made the law, rather than those subject to it. These studies of the dynamics of legal change, important as they are, lack a firm basis in tangible sociohistorical experience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4-2021) ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
I. A. Razumova ◽  
◽  
A. G. Samorukova ◽  

The autobiographical tale of geologists, the Negrutsa spouses, “The Path of Love” (2002) is an informative source on the history of Russian geology, the everyday life of field researchers, and the social history of the family. The main significance of the book is that it is a socio-anthropologically valuable autodescription of a married family belonging to the scientific intelligentsia and to a certain professional group. The work contributes to the study and understanding of the processes of the formation of Soviet urban families in the second half of the twentieth century. The content of the book is considere in the context of the problems of marriage choice, matrimonial relations, the organization of extended kinship communities, family crises and conflicts, the relationship between professional and family aspects of life. The Negrutsa family belonged to the type of married families, whose unity is based on the personal interaction of husband and wife and is supported by immanent values. At the same time, the married family is influenced by the traditions of parental families, which in this case differed significantly in socio-cultural properties.


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