Author: Sylvia Yanagisako
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766835
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
This book is at once a cultural history of Japanese American kinship and a contribution to the study of the contemporary kinship system of the United States. It brings to the analysis of American kinship a theoretical perspective that attends to the historically situated, symbolic processes through which people interpret and thereby transform their kinship relations. By examining kinship change among Japanese Americans, I elucidate a particular case of a general process I take as having been central to the development of contemporary American kinship. For, while Japanese Americans have a unique and rich cultural heritage and a distinctive and troubled social history, the process of kinship change they have undergone since the turn of the century has been shared by many other Americans. I begin with the premise that kinship relations are structured by symbolic relations and serve symbolic functions as well as social ones. It follows from this that kinship change involves symbolic processes, and that a study of it must attend to the manner in which relations among symbols, meanings, and actions have shaped relations among people. My second premise is that we can comprehend the system of symbols and meanings structuring people's kinship relations in the present only if we know their kinship relations in the past. If symbolic systems help people answer the questions and cope with the problems of meaning they confront in their everyday lives, symbolic analysis can only be enriched by a knowledge of the social history that has given rise to these questions and problems. Conversely, we can comprehend that social history only if we comprehend the system of symbols and meanings through which people interpret and thereby transform the past. In this study I treat the oral kinship autobiographies I elicited from first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in Seattle, Washington, both as cultural tales and as accounts with a good degree of historical veracity. Because people's recollections of the past are reasonably accurate and do not obliterate facts so much as reinterpret them, they can be mined to reconstruct a social history of events and actions. At the same time they can be used, along with what people say about the present, as material for a symbolic analysis. Unlike most Japanese Americans, and most of those who have studied them, I do not uncritically assume a timeless past of "Japanese tradition" in which stem-family households were endlessly reproduced by people who obeyed the "rules of the Japanese family system." Instead, on the one hand, I reconstruct kinship relations in Japan from immigrants' accounts of their kinship biographies and, on the other, regard the Japanese past and the American present that figure so centrally in these accounts as complex symbols whose meanings must be explicated. The analytic strategy I have formulated for this study is one I think can be usefully applied to groups besides Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups whose conceptions of their particular cultural traditions and experiences as immigrants are similarly prominent in their discourse on kinship relations. It can help us better understand the social and symbolic processes shaping kinship even among those sectors of our society whose ethnicity has been made invisible by hegemonic processes that cast a particular cultural system as a generalized American one. For whether they view themselves as having an ethnic past that is Polish, Italian, African, English, or, in the case of "just plain American," one supposedly unmarked by ethnicity, all these folk commonly speak of a "traditional" past in opposition to the "modern" present. Like Japanese Americans, they too construct tradition by reconceptualizing the past in relation to the meaning of their actions in the present, thereby transforming past and present in a dialectic of interpretation.
Author: Gruia Bădescu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303076401X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
Heritage became a target during the Yugoslav Wars as part of ethnic cleansing and urbicide. Out of the ashes of war, pasts were remodelled, places took on new layers of meaning, and a wave of new memorialization took hold. Three decades since the fall of Vukovar and the end of the siege of Sarajevo, and more than a decade since Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence, conflict has shifted from armed confrontations to battles about the past. The former Yugoslavia has been described on the one hand as a bastion of plurality and multiculturalism, and on the other, as a territory of antagonism and radical nationalisms, echoing imaginaries and narratives relevant to Europe as a whole. With Croatia having entered the EU in 2013 and the continuous political contestation in the region, wounds in the memory fabric of the former Yugoslavia have once more come to the world’s attention. Thus, there is the question what will happen when the former republics are ‘reunited’ once more under the EU umbrella, itself beset by increasing populisms, nationalisms, and the looming prospects of territorial fragmentation. This collection scrutinizes the role of heritage in ‘conflict-time’, inquires what role the past might have in creating new identities at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, and investigates the dynamics of heritage as a process.
Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.
Author: Russell Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780276427510
Category : Curiosities and wonders
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This volume offers the reader information on scientific discoveries from early man to World War II, offering a view of world events.
Author: Michelle A. Purdy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469643502
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history. Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.
Author: David S. Derezotes
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1412996155
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
"Today there is evidence that most minority groups in the United States suffer from symptoms related to intergenerational transmission of collective historical trauma. For those with additional mental health issues, treatment can become complicated unless underlying historical hostilities are addressed. This practical text, by David S. Derezotes, helps readers understand the causes and treatment of historical trauma at an individual, group, and community level and demonstrates how a participatory, strengths-based approach can work effectively in its treatment."--Publisher's website.
Author: Jürgen Osterhammel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691169802
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1192
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Book Description
A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.
Author: Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 594
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Book Description
A volume of essays by Japan’s leading female scholars and activists exploring their country’s recent progressive cultural shift. When the feminist movement finally arrived in Japan in the 1990s, no one could have foreseen the wide-ranging changes it would bring to the country. Nearly every aspect of contemporary life has been impacted, from marital status to workplace equality, education, politics, and sexuality. Now more than ever, the Japanese myth of a homogenous population living within traditional gender roles is being challenged. The LGBTQ population is coming out of the closet, ever-present minorities are mobilizing for change, single mothers are a growing population, and women are becoming political leaders. In Transforming Japan, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow has gathered the most comprehensive collection of essays written by Japanese educators and researchers on the ways in which present-day Japan confronts issues of gender, sexuality, race, discrimination, power, and human rights.
Author: Charis Psaltis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319546813
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume discusses the effects, models and implications of history teaching in relation to conflict transformation and reconciliation from a social-psychological perspective. Bringing together a mix of established and young researchers and academics, from the fields of psychology, education, and history, the book provides an in-depth exploration of the role of historical narratives, history teaching, history textbooks and the work of civil society organizations in post-conflict societies undergoing reconciliation processes, and reflects on the state of the art at both the international and regional level. As well as dealing with the question of the ‘perpetrator-victim’ dynamic, the book also focuses on the particular context of transition in and out of cold war in Eastern Europe and the post-conflict settings of Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine and Cyprus. It is also exploring the pedagogical classroom practices of history teaching and a critical comparison of various possible approaches taken in educational praxis. The book will make compelling reading for students and researchers of education, history, sociology, peace and conflict studies and psychology.
Author: Stephanie Wössner
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640471571
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 6
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Book Description
Literature Review from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: B, San Francisco State University (Ethnic Studies), course: AAS 833 Asian American Family and Identity, language: English, abstract: In her book Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship Among Japanese Americans, Sylvia Junko Yanagisako argues that Japanese American kinship is the outcome of a process of negotiation between Issei and Nisei, between the past and the present, between Japanese and American culture. The Nisei use the same words and concepts as their Issei parents to evaluate the real world, they attribute, however, a different meaning to these words and concepts. In order to make sense of their world, they interpret the mass culture they are exposed to on the basis of their own folk history. Like any other work, Transforming the Past has both strengths and weaknesses, some of them more important than others. In this essay, I want to point out those strengths and weaknesses that I believe to be most important. As far as the structure is concerned, Transforming the Past is a quite well organized book. It looks at the three aspects of marriage, filial relations, and siblinghood and kinship in a very organized way, namely by first describing the Issei views, followed by the opinion of the Nisei.
