scholarly journals Social Solidarity, Collective Identity, Resilient Communities: Two Case Studies from the Rural U.S. and Uruguay

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Braden Leap ◽  
Diego Thompson

Worldwide, communities face disruptions driven by phenomena such as climate change and globalization. Socio-ecological resilience theorists have called for greater attention to the social dynamics that inform whether and how communities are reorganized and sustained in response to such challenges. Scholars increasingly stress that social heterogeneities provide resources that communities can mobilize to adapt and sustain themselves in response to disruptions. Utilizing the sociological literature that emphasizes that social solidarities and collective identities are centrally important to community responses to socio-ecological disruptions, we argue that solidarities grounded in collective identities can act as important mediators between social heterogeneity and resilience. Drawing on qualitative data from rural communities in the central United States and southwestern Uruguay, we explore how group solidarity enabled individuals to more effectively draw on their diverse knowledges, skills, and resources to sustain their communities. Linked by a collective identity grounded in rurality, in each setting, individuals effectively worked together to adapt to emerging socio-ecological disruptions. These results suggest that we can better understand how social heterogeneities inform resilience by considering how solidarities grounded in collective identities influence whether and how individuals can successfully cooperate to rearrange and sustain their communities. When working with rural communities, specifically, it will be especially important to account for solidarities and collective identities tied to rurality.

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 420-420
Author(s):  
Jennifer Crittenden ◽  
Laura Lee ◽  
Patricia Oh

Abstract Maine has a growing number of age-friendly community initiatives (AFCIs); 116 communities are actively working to adapt the social, service, and built environments for aging and 71 have formally joined the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities. During COVID, rural municipalities were faced with dynamic changes that limited older resident’s access to services and social engagement. To overcome these limitations, it is critical for emergent AFCIs to have tools and strategies to maintain and further enhance healthy environments and resilient communities. This study uses group interviews with 6 leaders of established AFCIs and 6 leaders of emergent AFCIs to explore how the Lifelong Fellows Program, a peer mentoring model that matches experienced leaders with newly formed initiatives, was able to spur development of new strategies to build community resilience. Prominent themes were (1) engaging new local and regional partners; (2) intergenerational volunteerism; (3) fun and flexibility; and (4) relationship-building.


Author(s):  
Catherine Lejeune ◽  
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui ◽  
Camille Schmoll ◽  
Hélène Thiollet

AbstractGlobalization and migration have generated acute and often contradictory changes: they have increased social diversity while inducing global homogenization; they have sharpened differentiation of spaces and statuses while accelerating and amplifying communication and circulations; they have induced more complex social stratification while enriching individual and collective identities. These changes happen to be strikingly visible in cities. Urban contexts, indeed, offer privileged sites of inquiry to understanding the social dynamics of globalization, informal belonging and local citizenships, transient and multi-layered identities, symbolic orders and exclusionary practices. But cities are also material sites and they create multisensorial scapes that shape experiences of globalization and social change. They operate through multiple scales, connecting horizontal extensions and vertical layers of the city with generic, landmark, interstitial and neglected places. Far from being mere contexts, cities are both changing and being changed by migration and globalization.


Author(s):  
Ruslan Braslavskiy ◽  
Vladimir Kozlovskiy

The civilizational approach in contemporary sociology aims at clarifying the relationships between social structure and culture, and institutions and actors. The civilizational dimension of the structuring of societies focuses on uncovering the complex interactions between the civilizational pattern and social structure. The focus is on a historically-defined combination of interpretive models and institutional frameworks in which the social dynamics of society unfolds. The fundamental premise of civilizational analysis in sociology is the rejection of social or cultural reductionist determinism. The key moments are distinction and autonomy, and are contingent on the interweaving of the structural, institutional, and cultural aspects of social interaction. The basic concepts of the civilizational dimension of structuring societies are (a) the determination of the method of differentiation and integration of the spheres of social life; (b) the establishment of basic norms and “debentures” for the main institutional sectors; (c) the building a social center and establishing its relationship with the periphery; (d) the construction of collective identities; (e) giving order to the formation of social stratification and the social division of labor; and (f) a self-representation and the strategies of sociopolitical elites, and their management practices. The key aspects of the civilizational structuring of social formations are highlighted and considered in the examples of the Imperial and the Soviet periods in the history of Russian society. Contemporary societies in the civilizational dimension are a combination of (a) inherited local civilizational traditions (often with their own anticipations of modernity), then (b) perceived in the course of inter-civilizational encounters with cultural and institutional influences of “other” traditions and reactions to them, and then (c) develop, inherit their own, borrow, or take on imposed-from-the-outside articulations and visions of the problems of modernity civilization, including models of modernity which receive universal meaning and value.


Author(s):  
Ellen F. Davis

This article outlines an eco-agrarian perspective on the Hebrew Bible. Countless passages treat the multifaceted interdependency of arable land, animals, and human communities, as well as the social dynamics of force, which deprived small farmers of land tenancy or control throughout the biblical period. Works by Walter Brueggemann, Wendell Berry, and Edward Said take account of the social and material knowledge and experience of rural communities in modern North America and Africa as well as ancient Israel. Elements of a “prophetic ecology,” drawn from Former and Latter Prophets, suggest that the flourishing of the land, the possibility of shalom, and even the status of the land of Canaan as holy are all connected to attention to the land by small farmers. From both biblical and modern perspectives, agriculture that sustains local communities is the only alternative to war.


1993 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-980
Author(s):  
Paula L. Gori

Abstract The central United States and the nation experienced the effects of a false, pseudoscientific, unofficial prediction in 1990. The lack of a timely, public rebuttal of the Iben Browning earthquake prediction led to tremendous unnecessary efforts by local, state, and federal governments to respond to the public's demand for information about the validity of the prediction and how to prepare for the predicted earthquake. The effort was costly both in terms of money and diversion of staff from other necessary services. Although the prediction may have increased the level of earthquake awareness and preparedness in the central U.S., that awareness and preparedness may have been forged at the expense of scientific and government credibility.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-406
Author(s):  
Sinisa Malesevic

Ibn Khaldun and Ernest Gellner have both developed comprehensive yet very different theories of social cohesion. Whereas Ibn Khaldun traces the development of intense group solidarity to the ascetic lifestyles of nomadic warriors, for Gellner social cohesion is a product of different material conditions. In contrast to Ibn Khaldun?s theory, where all social ties are generated through similar social processes, in Gellner?s model the patterns of collective solidarity change through time, that is, different societies produce different forms of social cohesion. While Ibn Khaldun argues that asbiyyah is the backbone of group unity in all social orders, Gellner insists that modern societies are underpinned by very different type of collective solidarity than their premodern counterparts. In this paper I offer a critique of Ibn Khaldun?s and Gellner?s theories of social cohesion and develop an alternative explanation, which situates the social dynamics of group solidarity in the organisational and ideological legacies of warfare.


Author(s):  
Carlos Alberto De Souza Mascarenhas

STATE POLICIES IN AMAZON AGRICULTURAL SPACE: construction of the Açailândia (MA) – Barcarena (PA) railroad in the quilombo of Africa and Laranjituba in Moju (PA)POLÍTICAS DE ESTADO EN EL ESPACIO AGRARIO AMAZÓNICO: la construcción del Ferrocarril Acailândia (MA) – Barcarena (PA) en el quilombo de África y Laranjituba en Moju (PA)Focalizamos uma situação empírica, o quilombo de África e Laranjituba no município de Moju (PA), para expor tensões e resistências entre a política concebida no Programa de Investimento em Logística (PIL) e o vivido das comunidades do quilombo. Trata-se de um programa que anuncia, no plano da psicoesfera e da representação, a construção da Ferrovia Açailândia (MA) – Barcarena (PA) que, embora não tenha ganhado forma espacial, já tensiona o lugar. Pretendemos, com isso, refletir sobre a relação entre espaço e política, isto é, a respeito do projeto de logística de transporte, sob forte influência do Estado, e seus efeitos entre as comunidades rurais quilombolas ao lançar o discurso da integração espacial, do desenvolvimento e da inclusão social a partir da interligação de um território com grande potencial mineral. A metodologia analítica adotada considera a existência de uma situação geográfica onde paisagem, configuração territorial e a dinâmica social das populações rurais quilombolas estão interligadas à perspectiva de construção da ferrovia, produzindo dialeticamente estratégias territoriais de resistência. Concluímos que o PIL tem como pressuposto a Amazônia como espaço areal ou vazio, uma vez que, desconsidera a dinâmica do meio ecológico e o território usado pelos gêneros de vida das populações tradicionais e que os povos quilombolas amazônicos, em especial, os de África e Laranjituba, cientes dessa condição, têm encontrado formas criativas de resistir e recriar suas estratégias de produção territorial.Palavras-chave: Tensões Territoriais; Quilombos Amazônicos; Ferrovia; Políticas de Estado.ABSTRACTWe focus on an empirical situation, the quilombo of Africa and Laranjituba in the municipality of Moju (PA), to expose tensions and resistances between the policy conceived in the Program of Investment in Logistics (PIL) and the lived one of the communities of the quilombo. It is a program that announces the construction of the Açailândia (MA) - Barcarena (PA) railroad in the area of the psychosphere and representation, which, although it has not gained a spatial form, already stresses the place. We intend, therefore, to reflect on the relationship between space and politics, that is, about the transport logistic project, under strong influence of the State, and its effects among the quilombola rural communities when launching the discourse of spatial integration, development And social inclusion through the interconnection of a territory with great mineral potential. The analytical methodology adopted considers the existence of a geographical situation where landscape, territorial configuration and the social dynamics of quilombola rural populations are interconnected the perspective of construction of the railroad producing dialectically territorial strategies of resistance. We conclude that the PIL assumes the Amazon as an empty or empty space, since it disregards the dynamics of the ecological environment and the territory used by the traditional populations' livelihoods, and that the Amazonian quilombola peoples, especially those in Africa and Laranjituba, aware of this condition, has found creative ways to resist and recreate its territorial production strategies.Keywords: Territorial Tensions; Amazonian Quilombos; Railroad; State Policies.RESUMENEnfocamos una situación empírica, el quilombo de África y Laranjituba en el municipio de Moju (PA), para exponer tensiones y resistencias entre la política concebida en el Programa de Inversión en Logística (PIL) y el vivido de las comunidades del quilombo. Se trata de un programa que anuncia, en el plano de la psicoesfera y de la representación, la construcción del Ferrocarril Açailândia (MA) - Barcarena (PA) que, aunque no hay aganado forma espacial, ya tensiona el lugar. Pretendemos, con ello, reflexionar sobre la relación entre espacio y política, es decir, acerca del proyecto de logística de transporte, bajo fuerte influencia del Estado, y sus efectos entre las comunidades rurales quilombolas al lanzar el discurso de la integración espacial, del desarrollo y de la inclusión social a partir de la interconexión de un territorio con gran potencial mineral. La metodología analítica adoptada considera la existencia de una situación geográfica donde paisaje, configuración territorial y la dinámica social de las poblaciones rurales quilombolas están interconectadas con la perspectiva de construcción del ferrocarril produciendo dialécticamente estrategias territoriales de resistencia. Concluimos que el PIL tiene como presupuesto la Amazonia como espacio arenal o vacío, ya que, desconsidera la dinámica del medio ecológico y el territorio usado por los géneros de vida de las poblaciones tradicionales y que los pueblos quilombolas amazónicos, en especial los de África y Laranjituba, conscientes de esa condición, ha encontrado formas creativas de resistir y recrear sus estrategias de producción territorial.Palabras clave: Tensiones Territoriales; Quilombos Amazónicos; Ferrocarril; Políticas de Estado.


1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (11) ◽  
pp. 1046-1046
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated

Asian Survey ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 336-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry M. Raulet ◽  
Jogindar S. Uppal

Author(s):  
Volodymyr Reznik

The article discusses the conceptual foundations of the development of the general sociological theory of J.G.Turner. These foundations are metatheoretical ideas, basic concepts and an analytical scheme. Turner began to develop a general sociological theory with a synthesis of metatheoretical ideas of social forces and social selection. He formulated a synthetic metatheoretical statement: social forces cause selection pressures on individuals and force them to change the patterns of their social organization and create new types of sociocultural formations to survive under these pressures. Turner systematized the basic concepts of his theorizing with the allocation of micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social reality. On this basis, he substantiated a simple conceptual scheme of social dynamics. According to this scheme, the forces of macrosocial dynamics of the population, production, distribution, regulation and reproduction cause social evolution. These forces force individual and corporate actors to structurally adapt their communities in altered circumstances. Such adaptation helps to overcome or avoid the disintegration consequences of these forces. The initial stage of Turner's general theorizing is a kind of audit, modification, modernization and systematization of the conceptual apparatus of sociology. The initial results obtained became the basis for the development of his conception of the dynamics of functional selection in the social world.


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