Fate, Honor, Family and Village

Fate, Honor, Family and Village PDF Author: Rudolph M. Bell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351520156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In Fate and Honor, Family and Village, Rudolph Bell argues against this characterization by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture more accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant's life: Fortuna (fate), onore (honor, dignity), famiglia (family), and campanilismo (village).Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the worldview from which all social life flows. The concept of Fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, Fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a post-modern world.

Fate, Honor, Family and Village

Fate, Honor, Family and Village PDF Author: Rudolph M. Bell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351520156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In Fate and Honor, Family and Village, Rudolph Bell argues against this characterization by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture more accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant's life: Fortuna (fate), onore (honor, dignity), famiglia (family), and campanilismo (village).Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the worldview from which all social life flows. The concept of Fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, Fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a post-modern world.

The Nazi Impact on a German Village

The Nazi Impact on a German Village PDF Author: Walter Rinderle
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813182778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
“A vivid & sensitive portrait of a small, tradition-bound community coming to terms with modernity under the most adverse of conditions.” —Observer Review Many scholars have tried to assess Adolf Hitler’s influence on the German people, usually focusing on university towns and industrial communities, most of them predominately Protestant or religiously mixed. This work by Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling, however, deals with the impact of the Nazis on Oberschopfheim, a small, rural, overwhelmingly Catholic village in Baden-Wuerttemberg in southwestern Germany. This incisively written book raises fundamental questions about the nature of the Third Reich. The authors portray the Nazi regime as considerably less “totalitarian” than is commonly assumed, hardly an exemplar of the efficiency for which Germany is known, and neither revered nor condemned by most of its inhabitants. The authors suggest that Oberschopfheim merely accepted Nazi rule with the same resignation with which so many ordinary people have regarded their governments throughout history. Based on village and county records and on the direct testimony of Oberschopfheimers, this book will interest anyone concerned with contemporary Germany as a growing economic power and will appeal to the descendants of German immigrants to the United States because of its depiction of several generations of life in a German village. “An excellent study. Describes in rich detail the political, economic, and social structures of a village in southwestern Germany from the turn of the century to the present.” —Publishers Weekly “A lively, informative treatise that puts a human face on history.” —South Bend Tribune “This very readable story emphasizes continuities within change in German historical development during the twentieth century.” —American Historical Review

Local Autonomy as a Human Right

Local Autonomy as a Human Right PDF Author: Joshua B. Forrest
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153815451X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
Local Autonomy as a Human Right contends that local communities struggle to preserve their territorial autonomy over time despite changes to the broader political and geographic contexts within which they are embedded. Forrest argues that this both reflects and is evidence of a worldwide embrace of local control as a key political and social value, indeed, of such importance that it should be embraced and codified as a human right. This study weaves together evidence grounded in a variety of disciplines - history, geography, comparative politics, sociology, public policy, anthropology, international jurisprudence, rural studies, urban studies -- to make clear that a presumed, inherent moral right to local self-determination has been manifested in many different historical and social contexts. This book constructs a compelling argument favoring a human right to local autonomy. It identifies practical factors that help to account for the relative success of communities that are able to assert local control over time. Here, particular attention is paid to whether localities are able to generate policy and organizational capacity. Forrest suggests that a focus on local policy and organizational capacity can help to explain why some communities attempting to assert greater local control are more successful than others. Local Autonomy as a Human Right contributes to scholarly debates regarding the varied impacts of globalization, with the place-based perspective and moral emphasis on territorial-centered rights put forth herein offering a necessary counter-narrative to the often-presumed predominance of global forces.

Family Connections

Family Connections PDF Author: Judith E. Smith
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873959643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Family Connections examines the dimensions of daily survival strategies for newcomers in an uncertain urban environment. Focusing on the history of Italian and Jewish immigrant families in Providence, Rhode Island, the book assesses the links between familial and ethnic culture and broader allegiances of solidarity, and suggests some of the differences between male and female experience within a shared identity as a family. Contains four maps, 25 photos.

House Life

House Life PDF Author: Donna Birdwell-Pheasant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000210936
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book, which fills a gap on the materiality of lived relations, examines households within the context of their immediate physical surroundings of home and shows how human interactions are reflected in built forms. Houses are dynamic participants in family life in many ways. They often pre-date the origins and outlast the life spans of their inhabitants, but they can exert a powerful influence on the organization of behaviors and the values of family members, as well as on the forms and flows of family life across the generations. Constituting wealth, investment, security and inheritance, they are an objective in and of themselves in many domestic strategies. Drawing on developments within anthropology, archaeology, architecture and social history, the authors demonstrate, through detailed case studies, how household or family relations can usefully be mined to re-situate social theory in both space and time. Space, boundaries, family cycles, historic changes, migration patterns, ethnicity, memory and gender are all interrogated for the light they shed on how people interact with the physical world around them and what this means culturally and symbolically. Europe is an especially rich focus for this kind of analysis because it is distinguished by its long, well-documented history and a recent period of intense change.

The Peasants of the Montes

The Peasants of the Montes PDF Author: Michael R. Weisser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226891583
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Italy and the Wider World

Italy and the Wider World PDF Author: R.J.B. Bosworth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134780885
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Richard Bosworth's overview of Italy's role in European and world politics from 1860 to 1960 is lively and iconclastic. Based on a combination of primary research and secondary material he examines Italian diplomacy, military power, commerce, culture, tourism and ideology. His account challenges many aspects of current Italian historiography and offers an original vision of the place of Italy in modern history.

Michal's Moral Dilemma

Michal's Moral Dilemma PDF Author: Jonathan Y. Rowe
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 056727179X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Uses anthropology to investigate the moral dilemma facing Saul's daughter in 1 Samuel 19, concluding that her choice of David (over Saul) is counter-cultural.

Law, Sexuality, and Society

Law, Sexuality, and Society PDF Author: David Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Examines the regulation of sexuality, the family and unorthodox religious beliefs in classical Athens, by placing the question in a larger comparative and theoretical framework.

Women and Suicide in Iran

Women and Suicide in Iran PDF Author: S. Behnaz Hosseini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000457575
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Drawing on feminist theory, as well as theory surrounding the correlation between poverty and suicide, this study explores the increased rate of suicide among women in western Iran. Based on empirical research, including interviews with women from the Kurdish region of the country, the author considers the marginalisation of Kurdish populations in Iran, the suppression of their rights, and violence against women in its various forms. With attention to family violence, such as direct physical or sexual assault, psychological bullying or through practices such as forced marriage or honour killings, the author also considers the political nature of such violence, as certain violent practices are enshrined in the Iranian constitution and legitimised in jurisprudential practice. A study of gendered violence and its effects, Women and Suicide in Iran will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Sociology, Criminology and Middle Eastern Studies with interests in violence, gender and suicide.