The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940

Urbanism and Kinship Bonds: A Test of Four Generalizations

The narrow delta of the Natui and its distributaries provides an area of level, well watered land on which many small agricultural villages are situated. Under the hills is this village of Kitakabeya. Located only 8km east of Taira, a city of over 50, 000 people, the village has a traditional regime. Slightly more than 250 people lived in Kitakabeya and its environs in 1965. The population of the village has not varied between more than 210 and less than 300 over a period of 100 years. The horse and cow have not varied between more than 22 and less than 40. The chief loss of the households during the 1780's was due to many of the lower class seeking employment in other towns. There are four groups each united in the bond of kinship in this village. The bond of kinships are arranged along the small valley. A majority of the villages are engaged in agriculture. The total land area associated with the village of Kitakabeya is about 56 ha.. Every house of this village has three rooms. They are the room to the guest, to the family and the festival. The room to the festival is situated between the guest room and family room, and is festival place of kinships and families. Many traditional things of the year's regular functions take place at this room. This is the only room that families and kinships eat or drink together with the God. In this village the branch family with the following are not located, but only branch family with the kinship located, because of the small expanse of the paddy fields. As in every house the festival place is the centre room, so in this village is the temple and shrine. In this village originally the shrine is not always nucleus, and every bond of kinship has a small or large shrine in this settlement. Anyhow villagers eat and drink together in this temple or the shrine, as a necessary consequence there are ways, custom and orders. Especially we can see them in the graneyard of this village. It is significant to note that we can review the former village through the orders and site of every grave.

Social networks and undocumented Mozambican migration to South Africa

This study investigated provider role strain and adaptive cultural resources as predictors of global family satisfaction in a national sample of Black husband-fathers (N = 372). Multiple classification analysis revealed that provider role strain predictors had a significant negative effect on family satisfaction, with the harmful effect of objective difficulty being exacerbated by subjective reactions. In line with a role strain-adaptation model, cultural resources had offsetting positive effects with kinship bond and religious belief emerging as especially powerful predictors. In support of a buffering hypothesis, kinship bond eliminated harmful effects of both husband and father role discouragement. However, kinship bond failed to mitigate the harmful effect of objective employment difficulty. Findings not only provide important insight into the social psychology of role strain and adaptation, but also have relevance for clinical practice and public policy.

In this paper we analyse the ways in which egg donors from a private infertility clinic in Barcelona try to render their new experience meaningful. Donors are striving to see their action as a contribution to the creation of a particular kinship bond – motherhood in another woman – by means of the abrogation of a bond that also looks very much like kinship, which links them to the individuals that will be born thanks to their eggs. The specific meaning that egg donation has for each donor varies according to her particular circumstances, but the language constructed in order to convey this meaning emerges from the creative expression of several cultural paradoxes and dichotomies that constitute, in themselves, an original and highly significant cultural grammar.

This chapter studies the relationship between friendship and kinship. The difference between friendship and kinship was that relations of friendship were most often contracted willingly, unlike bonds of kinship that were established at birth. However, because of all the overlapping of family relationships and the limited support kin could give most people in conflicts, kinship took a back seat to friendship, except among the chieftain families. Indeed, there was no automatic support merely from bonds of kinship. Rather, these bonds had to be built up before one could expect any consideration. In other words, reciprocity is equally important in the relationships between kin as it was in friendships.

A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850 would be a very good thing to have, but this book is not quite that. Rather, it starts with a testing point in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and then discusses various writers who might be seen to respond to it—principally Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and the French translator of Smith. The point is the celebrated passage in Moral Sentiments where Smith discusses how we can never really participate in someone else's experience. We are always required to imagine it “in some measure,” he says, even if the experience in question is extreme and proximate, “though our brother is upon the rack.” Britton understands “in some measure” as articulating a limit to sympathy, making sympathy depend “figurative or literally, on the bonds of kinship,” a view apparently confirmed by Smith's remark, later in the book, that people find it difficult to respond spontaneously to the reported troubles of faraway peoples. How much did Smith intend his example to invoke the idea of a “familial bond”? To speak of “our brother” could be as much generic as familial (he is happy to strike the more personal note of “my friends” elsewhere in the book), and I have always thought Smith's sense of fraternity was the product of the effort of sympathy rather than its precondition. Anyhow, it is clear that he is moved by the difficulty of sympathizing with absent strangers, and Britton resourcefully explores the ways in which her novelists imagine characters rising to the same sort of challenge by telling stories from a different point of view. The books she discusses are full of frame stories, embedded tales, quoted letters, and reports, all of which work, as she says, to shift around narrative perspectives and raise at least the possibility of identifying with someone else. Whether “identifying” with someone else is indeed the basis of the moral life is no doubt another matter: “A man only is interested in anything when he identifies himself with it,” Whitman once said—a claim not without its problems.

The United States (US) historically has been short on international understanding. We are a people of immigrants, but earlier immigrants came here to participate in a dream of freedom and economic security. Those new to this land often lived in ethnic enclaves, but quickly became assimilated into the larger society by necessity and choice. For many, coming to the US represented a complete break with their roots, or the beginning of the effort to reunite with part of their family already in a new country. Air travel and the advances of modern communication have changed that perspective. For today's immigrants, the bonds of kinship and the memories of their native land persist and co-exist with the qualities of this new country, hopefully bringing out the best of both. As the world has grown smaller, there has been a shifting of our attention towards nursing in the rest of the world. The development of nursing and nursing education in the US has proceeded, more or less, as directed by the U. S. nursing profession over the past 150 years. Though slow and often arduous, there has been growth and success which far out-paced development in many other lands. In turn, many international leaders were educated here, and took home the U.S. ways. Sometimes these close attachments have left us blind to the uniqueness of nursing from country-to-country. Of necessity, nursing must take-on the qualities that are unique to each culture, including our own, and those qualities are not easily learned through an orientation program. This message comes through in several of the articles in this issue of OJIN. The expediency which foreign-educated nurses have represented to offset the U. S. nursing shortage is an ill-conceived gain, a gain without an appreciation that those who serve in other lands may bring a different philosophy of care. There is much we in the US can learn from them, but we must remain sovereign over our own context of care. You will find five informative and enlightening articles in this issue of OJIN. Collectively, they portray in a realistic manner the political and cultural landscape of international nursing. You have to read between the lines and listen with that fine-tuned third ear so common to nurses, but the obstacles and opportunities to international recruitment, exchange, and partnership are laid out before us. Let me correct one misconception, not deriving from these articles, but commonly held. The US, until very recently, was out-paced by the United Kingdom in the numbers of internationally educated nurses that it recruited. That situation corrected itself when the United Kingdom's National Health Service placed a moratorium on hiring as a partial solution to escalating costs. The United Kingdom had been liberal and welcoming to internationally educated nurses, accepting documents at face value and requiring that immigrant nurses participate, by law, in an adaptation program, which is much a counterpart to preceptor programs as we know them. The accusations of brain drain are discussed in the Kingma article, and observations made that migration is becoming more and more of a temporary arrangement with eventual return to the sending country. In that case, the nurse returns more accomplished than when (s)he left, bringing knowledge of new techniques and strategies for care. And conversely, the international nurse adds richness to nursing practice that is noteworthy for patients in our multicultural society. They should be with us to enrich the caring experience, and not to correct shortages resulting from poor working conditions, the major offender in the nursing shortage in the US. Many of our health systems invest wisely in programs to help the international nurse assimilate into the U.S. culture, yet other health systems just assume that being far from home, and eager to make a salary perhaps fifteen times what they could earn in their sending country, they will tolerate sub-standard conditions. …

The residents of Caxambu, a squatter neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, live in a state of insecurity as they face urban violence. Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela examines how inequality, racism, drug trafficking, police brutality, and gang activities affect the daily lives of the people of Caxambu. Some Brazilians see these communities, known as favelas , as centers of drug trafficking that exist beyond the control of the state and threaten the rest of the city. For other Brazilians, favelas are symbols of economic inequality and racial exclusion. Ben Penglase’s ethnography goes beyond these perspectives to look at how the people of Caxambu themselves experience violence. Although the favela is often seen as a war zone, the residents are linked to each other through bonds of kinship and friendship. In addition, residents often take pride in homes and public spaces that they have built and used over generations. Penglase notes that despite poverty, their lives are not completely defined by illegal violence or deprivation. He argues that urban violence and a larger context of inequality create a social world that is deeply contradictory and ambivalent. The unpredictability and instability of daily experiences result in disagreements and tensions, but the residents also experience their neighborhood as a place of social intimacy. As a result, the social world of the neighborhood is both a place of danger and safety.

Reviewed by: Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Death and Burial in New York by Allan Amanik Sue Fawn Chung Allan Amanik. Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Death and Burial in New York. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 276. Cloth $40. ISBN: 9781479800803 In the Goldstein-Goran Series in American Jewish History. Death is inevitable and a proper burial is very important to the majority of people in the world. It is not surprising that from the mid-seventeenth century until the present, Jews were concerned about death and burials. Separation in death, which was common among most American immigrants, was vital, so that even when a general cemetery was used, the Jewish section was separated into its own space. Using a tremendous amount of Jewish archival materials, some very difficult to access, including records from different synagogues, temples, fraternal societies, other welfare groups, and private funeral companies, as well as newspapers and a rich variety of other materials, Allan Amanik has written an excellent book on the history and evolution of Jewish concerns about death and burial practices in New York from the mid-seventeenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In a chronological presentation, “this book charts the ways in which funerary provisions served as an engine of changing communal life, as family, financial security, and consumerism grew in importance in shaping Jewish approaches to death and burial over time” (8). The history and religious concerns that the Jewish leaders faced resonate not only with the development of Jewish cemeteries in the United States but also with other minority groups that experienced similar struggles in a changing American society. Chapter one focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when small boards of synagogue elites dominated and dictated burial practices in [End Page 247] an atmosphere of clients wanting to move away from communal, chronological (buried by date of death) burials to family plots with an emphasis on kinship ties. Problems, such as how to deal with interfaith marriages, widows, and orphans, what to do about increasing expenses and endowments, limited cemetery space, and the arrival of European-ordained rabbis with different practices, added to the controversies. Chapter two discusses the solution by Jewish burial societies to allow family burials and add welfare services for surviving dependents, thus breaking the synagogue’s monopoly over charity and communal organizations in the nineteenth century. Reform Judaism (originating in nineteenth-century Germany), as seen in the activities of Dr. Max Lilienthal (1815–1882) and temples like Emanu-El, led to greater changes that promoted egalitarianism and eschewed Orthodox strict ritualistic practices, dietary laws, separation of men and women, funerary paraphernalia, and inclusion of hereditary caste or gender preferences. The Reform directors added to their concern women, widows, and orphans, the poor, those who converted to Judaism, and those whose spouses were not Jewish. Due to eminent domain and prohibition of cemeteries in the cities like New York, exhumations that were prohibited in Jewish law had to take place, and new cemeteries along with new synagogues were established in rural areas (Rural Cemetery Movement) as the suburbs grew with the growing industrialization and the growth of the middle class. Chapters three focuses on women and working men. By giving voice to the problems of Jewish women, widows, and non-Jewish spouses, Amanik has shed new light on a topic that is usually touched upon lightly, if at all, in other cemetery studies. The plight of women was especially interesting. Chapter four to the epilogue covers funeral practices from 1890 to the present as private, professional funeral establishments took over the industry at the turn of the century and often had all-inclusive burial packages and state of the art “garden” cemeteries. The price in 1913 for a package that included modern chapels, ritual washing, embalming, shrouds, funeral processions and transportation, and the grave site was a mere $35. Fraudulent practices and other problems persuaded the synagogue elders to fight back and regain their oversight of death rituals. In 1963 and 1965 the United Synagogue codified funeral standards and the bonds of kinship in death was a part of it. A revival of the...

One of Durkheim's great 'unwritten books' was on the family. And one of the consequences has been insufficient attention to the issue's centrality in his work, and to the radical implications in the case of modern society. This essay is based on his lectures and articles on the family, but together with his many reviews on the subject in the Année sociologique. Given his evolutionary approach, a start is made with his interest in the origins and development of the family. But this helps to underline the far-reaching implications of his view that the modern family has narrowed down to the conjugal family. In a way the individual is emancipated from the bonds of kinship. But it is in a transformation of inheritance into an essentially private affair. Solidarity requires a rebuilding of links across the generations, while justice require a re-collectivization of inherited wealth, through new occupational groups.

How do we understand differences and disputes among various branches of Islam? This book places intimacies, rather than radical incompatibilities, at the centre of its in-depth ethnographic account of mass-publicized theological polemics among Sunni Muslims in the south Indian state of Kerala. What unites Muslims of different Sunni groups also divides them and incites polemics—Islam as a shared system of knowledge and practices, bonds of kinship and other social relations, and the common condition of being a beleaguered religious minority in a Hindu majoritarian democracy. Diverging from works that have focused on how Islamic practices like ritual prayers facilitate the fashioning of theologically grounded pious selves, the book argues that intra-Muslim polemics marginalize theology and have little to do with cultivating piety. Instead, polemics constitute inter- and intra-religious socialities, enable Muslims to articulate their connections to India and other imaginaries, and produce Islam as a public religion in a secular nation-state.

This article critically interrogates the nature of facial wounds themselves, their visceral, dehumanising quality, visibility, and social meaning. Little attention has been paid to the cultural ramifications and difficult questions concerning the futures of facially injured soldiers that Britain had to address in the post-war era. Focusing on photograph albums as socially salient objects, this article challenges medical photographic archives. Building on unexplored family archives, it revises understandings of the difficulties of veterans' homecoming, and how they achieved a level of emotional recovery as they tried to find a place in the post-war social fabric. The article argues that family photographic collections show the less obvious way that the war lived on for veterans and families, its damage and how it was passed on. These private collections offer new revelations on the success or failure of the surgical interventions in their aesthetic aims.

Chapter 9. Karma and the Bonds of Kinship in Medieval Daoism: Reconciling the Irreconcilable

The Almighty Allah created the universe to express His existence and greatness. After adorning the earth with colorful blessings, He settled it with humanity. He connected human beings in the bonds of kinship and revered them in tribes and clans for recognition. They found themselves linked in the necessities of life to each other, hence He gave them a system of rights and duties, through the Prophets and Revealed Books of divine guidance that would take them to the fulfillment of the needs of their body, as well as man would not be in a state of spiritual confusion. These matters make it clear that the humen are interconnected and there are some distances between them too. Man, in his private and personal life, is somewhat independent as well as bound by social relations. If this balance of private and social life is maintained, then the atmosphere of home and society presents a view of heaven and if the balance is disturbed, it becomes a part of hell. The study evolves the analytical perspective of Marriage and Khul’a.