Blood Kin Research Articles

Blood-Red Relations In and Out of Place: Women’s Self-Harm and Supernatural Crime in The Moth Diaries

ABSTRACT In Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (a Canadian/American/Irish co-production), exploring adolescent girls’ friendships and self-harm in a boarding school setting, blood is out of place. It drips from the protagonist’s father’s wrist artery, willingly shed in suicide; involuntarily tarnishes her nightgown as menstrual blood; falls on the school director’s china figurines as nosebleed; and pours in the school library as a vampire-invoked rain. Moth uses blood to manifest the suicide contagion that Rebecca fears she has inherited from her artist father. Blood also signifies her resistance and recovery, enabled by her difficult relationship with her schoolmates, erstwhile best friend Lucy, and vampire Ernessa. Blood functions as a material marker of transition from girls’ childhood relationships that mainstream Anglo-American films often render passive and vulnerable, and marks same-sex attractions of different types of friendship and love. It symbolizes and draws attention to harms and crimes in interpersonal violence, paternal abandonment, and self-damage. Our focus on relationships between so called “blood kin” and the idea of blood relations weaves into our discussion of female agency, woman identification, and queer affinities through Moth’s out-of-place ontologies for blood as not only conventionally abject, but also a sacralized substance and symbol.

Babur: Salt, Social Closeness and Friendship

This article explores whether the concept of ‘friendship’ is a useful and basic category for the analysis of South Asian history. It begins with a variety of characteristics of relationships that social science has identified as friendship. It then explores the Baburnama, focusing on the social closeness or social distance of several groups and individuals, such as queens, allied leaders, blood kin, clerics and recruits. None were socially close enough to Babur to merit the term friendship. In contrast to these more distant relations, some of the men in proximity to Babur were, indeed, very close. Babur uses two Turkish terms to describe these men. The first term is Içki, which translates as ‘Inner men’, that is, the small group of men (perhaps fifteen in number) who fought next to Babur in battle and often ate with him. They formed his guard at night. The second term is kukäldash, which translates as ‘breast brother’, meaning the few men who shared the same wet nurse as Babur. These men grew up with Babur and were his closest friends. He mourned bitterly when one was killed. Overall, Babur did have friends and companions who were loyal through thick and thin. They formed the very centre of his household troops and the centre of his army.

Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian returnee movement: Demographics, life stories and the question of slavery

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Brazil's century return to Africa movement from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, identifying three main stages. The largest single wave of voyages came after an 1835 slave uprising in the province of Bahia, when around 200 freed Africans were deported and roughly a thousand others left voluntarily, fleeing anti-African legislation. In the 1840s, smaller numbers of Africans also traveled to the continent of their birth, many as employees on slave vessels. A new phase of migrations came after 1850, with the end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil and the British seizure of Lagos a year later. Previous estimates of the volume of travelers are examined in combination with demographic data on passport recipients, in order to frame micro-historical analysis of individual travelers. In the first and third stages, Africans often traveled with their households, comprising not only blood kin but also their slaves and former slaves, while in the second phase many of those who left for Africa were men travelling alone who later returned to Brazil. The resulting portrait of changes over time offers insights into the varying reasons that led freed Africans to leave Brazil, also raising questions about the continued presence of the institution of slavery in their lives.

June Homecoming at Cades Cove

June Homecoming at Cades Cove Sue Weaver Dunlap (bio) And they came, each one close to these stones, aged and chipped little lambs watching nesting places for Cove babies in early June. Sprigs of still stemmed roses, mums, iris, and daffodils unpacked ceremoniously from their resting tubs, divvied among twenty or so folks fashioning homecoming decoration for a lost Cove community. We attended blood kin first. With the same attention we adorned all the names, each rowed up the same today as yesterday and the day they were first dug. Dying stopped in the Cove when Roosevelt took it. The crying didn’t even now when tourist clothes mingle among our kin’s finest this first Sunday homecoming in June. [End Page 77] Sue Weaver Dunlap Sue Weaver Dunlap is a retired English teacher who raises Black Angus cattle and lives in Walland, Tennessee. She has a poetry chapbook under consideration and is working on a novel. Copyright © 2013 Berea College

South African Literary Cartographies: A Post-transitional Palimpsest

This article investigates three South African novels in an attempt to map the movement between transitional cultural production and post-transitional literature of the present. I briefly outline Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) as a formative text of the South African transitional period before discussing Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006) and Ceridwen Dovey’s Blood Kin (2007) as post-transitional texts. These novels all circle around issues of place and space, while also revealing the shifts in South African cultural history, as they comprise a set of related perspectives that inscribe meaning across times and spaces. I argue that a palimpsestic reading of this fiction opens up the possibility of reconceptualizing the relationship between space, place, and transnational connectivity. Each of the three texts under discussion writes the space of the city as a type of situated transnationalism where the local and the global exist as coeval discourses of signification. The fecundity of a palimpsestic reading lies in the revelation of how one transitional experience is already present in another. By inscribing one discursive act over another, the ruptures and continuities between textualizations reveal a wealth of imaginaries that, I argue, define the idea of post-transitional South African literature. But perhaps most importantly, the post-transitional can be read as a palimpsestic concept itself, much like the fiction explored in this article, in that it enables a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it. Rather than moving in a temporal linear fashion, post-transitional literature creates a palimpsest in which we can read the imaginaries circulating through and shaping South African cultural formations today.

Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (review)

Reviewed by: Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South Frank Towers (bio) Keywords Slavery, Slave families, Upper South, Free blacks Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South. By Calvin Schermerhorn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. 296. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $30.00.) In this valuable study, Calvin Schermerhorn argues that slaves in the Chesapeake region put the preservation of family ties above formal freedom and relied on interpersonal networks to advance their cause. Economic modernization drove these strategies by pressuring enslaved families with the threats of sale westward and local migration for seasonal and industrial labor. [End Page 533] Money over Mastery addresses a vital question in rethinking antebellum southern history: If early republic slavery was part and parcel of modernity, how did slaves engage that process? Where earlier scholarship emphasized broad commonalities among the enslaved—the most important of which was a community imbued with the premodern values of peasant economies—more recent studies have emphasized slaves’ diversity of experience and their involvement in markets. Firmly aligned with the latter priorities, Schermerhorn argues that the enslaved used modernization opportunistically to build networks that would preserve their families. “As the modernity of slavery worked remorselessly through an intensifying market hungry for bodies and labor of slaves,” he writes, “enslaved people sought to defend blood kin from the worst aspects of the market by participating in it” (20–21). The book looks at a range of slave networks, which Schermerhorn defines rather broadly as “strategic ties and sets of exchanges” that gave access to “human and material resources as well as information” (24). White patrons were critical links in these chains of association, and their presence blurred the “axes of conflict” that ran along the lines of race, class, and legal standing. Although at a power disadvantage in negotiating with white patrons, enslaved African Americans could manipulate these relationships to “mitigate violence, improve working conditions, and establish status” (24). Ties to patrons that protected the enslaved from the worst abuses of the system also put them in conflict with other slaves. Schermerhorn tells this history through a series of individual case studies beginning with Charles Ball and with Solomon and Thamar Bayley, an enslaved couple in post-Revolutionary Maryland and Delaware who used networks of fellow slaves, racially mixed church congregations, politically connected employers, and even their own masters to battle kidnappers bent on selling them and their offspring in the slave market. The pull of family held Ball and the Bayleys in the South despite opportunities for escape. Only when kidnappers eventually succeeded in carrying off their families did they take flight. Networking strategies differed according to the varied roles created by economic modernization. Maritime workers used the mobility and occasional wages afforded by their jobs to develop long-distance networks. In the case of Moses Grandy, networking enabled him to buy his freedom and that of his family. But these networks were inherently fragile, as Wilmington tugboat hand Peter Robinson learned when he was [End Page 534] kidnapped and sold on return from a daring sojourn in the California goldfields. Enslaved domestic servants lacked the interstate mobility of watermen. In its place they used the bonds of the household to protect kin. The alliances forged sometimes involved sexual relationships with slaveholders that complicated ties to fellow slaves. For example, Corinna Hinton, the enslaved domestic partner of Richmond slave trader Silas Omohundro, helped manage his business by tending prisoners awaiting sale. Treated like a free woman, as were her children, Corinna’s actions did not constitute betrayal because “the idea of slave solidarity or a slave community born out of the shared experience of slavery was not a part of her horizon of understanding” (112). This fragmentation of slave experience is further explored in discussions of factory and railroad workers. Henry Brown, an enslaved cigar maker, used pay earned by exceeding his factory quota to lease his wife Nancy from her master and rent a house where they could live together. When owners imposed new profit-making strategies—factory work, slave leasing, and remote labor camps—the enslaved countered with new tactics, like exploiting slaveholders’ profit motive to...

Trust discrimination tendency of trust circles in the positive and negative information-sharing/disclosing domains and cultural differences between Canada and China.

The purpose of the study was to explore how the size and composition of a trust circle discriminate in both positive and negative personal/social information-domains in Canada and China. A total of 202 Canadians (102) and Chinese (100, living in China) participated in the study. A set of self-developed questionnaires was used in the survey. The results showed that the trust discrimination tendency (TDT) in the trust circle size and trust circle composition is induced by the nature and levels of the shared personal/social information and culture. Specifically, people tend to trust more others in sharing their positive than in disclosing negative personal/social information. Chinese tend to trust fewer others than Canadians do in sharing/disclosing both negative and positive personal/social information. People are more likely to trust their spouse/partner and blood kin in the positive information-sharing domain; in the negative informationdisclosing domain, the trust rank of blood kin decreased the most, and spouse/partner decreased least. Canadians also always trust their spouse/partner more than Chinese do, and preserve more stable top core trustee ranks than Chinese do in both domains. To summarize the relationship between trustee ranks and the levels of information, one could say “how bad matters, but how good doesn’t.”

Mark Powell's Auspicious Entry Into the Regional Literary Scene

Mark Powell's Auspicious Entry Into the Regional Literary Scene George Brosi Mark Powell's first two novels have established him as a formidable force in Appalachian literature, and, with two more novels slated for 2012, his reputation is likely to grow. Powell's work elicits feelings of stark recognition for its verisimilitude to sometimes harsh realities. It has a strong sense of place and great narrative force. Mark Powell was born in 1976 and raised, with an older sister and two younger brothers, in Oconee County, South Carolina. His family moved three times before he was nine-years-old, and then settled on a small farm near West Union, South Carolina. His father is a realtor, and his grandfather ran a sawmill and later a general store and lived on another farm about a quarter of a mile away. Both sides of his family have lived in Oconee County at least back into the 1830s, and Mark Powell was raised in what he describes as "a very conservative and loving" Wesleyan Church cofounded by his paternal great-grandfather. He says he believes his "life will always be a response, both positively and negatively, to the place [he] was raised and the religion [he] imbibed there." At Walhalla High he was class president for four years, played basketball, ran track, and was all-state in cross country. He also got to know Denise Frasier whose father ran a general store serving trout fishermen heading up into the mountains. Powell's family is known for its strong military ties, so The Citadel, South Carolina's military college, was a natural choice for him. There, Powell ran track and cross country, "cast organized religion aside," and graduated with an English major in 1997. After graduation, Powell moved to Columbia, South Carolina, mainly because Denise Frasier was finishing up her undergraduate work there, and got a job at The Book Dispensary, a used book store. The next year he started an MFA program at the University of South Carolina. In 1999 Mark Powell married Denise Frasier, and the following year they purchased an empty cabin on Lake Beckey near Mountain Rest, in the mountains above their hometown. They fixed it up and have gravitated to it ever since during summer and vacation breaks and at times between jobs. An avid outdoorsman, Powell occasionally hunts and fishes, but mostly enjoys hiking and camping and running in [End Page 30] the woods with his yellow lab, Buddy, particularly in the Chattooga River watershed and especially Licklog Falls. Before Powell graduated from the USC MFA Program in 2011, his senior thesis novel, Prodigals, was declared the runner-up for the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel. For the 2001-2002 school year, Powell taught at Tri-County Technical College near Clemson and at nearby Anderson College. The University of Tennessee Press published Prodigals in 2002, and the next year Powell taught at the University of South Carolina and began work on Blood Kin. The following year he taught at Clemson. In 2004 Powell, garnering fellowships from both the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he taught at the College of Charleston. The next summer Powell received a play-writing fellowship to study for a month in Prague, and the NEA grant allowed Powell and his wife to remain in Europe into the fall of 2005. He then taught at Young Harris College in North Georgia. The next year, his novel, Blood Kin, won the Peter Taylor Prize, judged by distinguished novelist, Jill McCorkle, and he was invited, for the first time, to teach at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School in Eastern Kentucky. Powell credits Silas House and Ron Rash, fellow Hindman faculty, as mentors who have ably assisted his literary career. Powell characterizes his spiritual quest as "an attempt to replace the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount." Although he recognizes that "every step I take towards being a better person is inevitably accompanied by two steps back into selfishness," he has "come to agree fully with Arthur Miller that 'the Bible means justice or it means nothing at all,' and with Dostoevsky who...

19世紀中期の東蝦夷地三石場所におけるアイヌ集落の存続期間と血縁親族関係

定住性が高い狩猟採集社会である1864∼1869（元治元∼明治2）年の東蝦夷地三石場所のアイヌ集落を対象として，定住性の程度と集落の血縁率の関係を分析した。その結果，「集落の存続期間が長くなると血縁率は低くなる」という傾向はとくに認められなかった。また「家の同一集落内滞在期間が長くなると血縁率は低くなる」という傾向もとくに認められなかった。集団の空間的流動性の程度と集落の血縁率の関係を分析した結果，分裂・結合の流動性の程度と集落の血縁率の間にもとくに関係はなかった。これは集団の空間的流動性が，移動する家のみで形成されるのではなく，集落内に定住する家と移動する家の組み合わせで生じており，集団の空間的流動性には血縁共住機能があり集落の血縁率が維持されているためと考えられる。集落の血縁率の変動率（絶対値）は平均24.9%と大きく，その変動は主に集団の空間的流動性に起因していた。多くの場合に集落の血縁率は50%以上に保たれており，血縁率は平均73.6%である。この結果は，三石場所のアイヌ集落においては，移動性（あるいは定住性）の程度に関わりなく，集団の空間的流動性によって集落の血縁率は低下しない可能性，つまり国家という枠組みのなかに組み込まれながらも「血縁から地縁へ」という変化は生じない可能性があることを示唆する。

Alternative Families: From the Hebrew Bible to Early Judaisms

It has become a convention to define the b?t ?b, house of the - in which blood kin and social others / orders of two to three vertical generations function, usually within a limited territorial location (homestead), under a dominant male figure, usually the father - as the smallest and most common family unit in the Hebrew Bible. Such units are defined as organised around two basic principles: production, for subsistence and further economical ends; and reproduction, for human perpetuation. This concept is undoubtedly influenced by biblical presentations of humanity as emanating from a single couple and developing into clearly genealogies. The patriarchal generalisation may be valid; however, it does not cover all the structural or actual social formations that, in current terms, qualify as families. In this presentation I will explore several other formations, taking into account differences in ideologies, interest and aim that influence biblical and early Judaic descriptions of social relations, as well as differences of text chronology, class and geography. Among these formations, the b?t ?m (house of the mother) will be explored anew, for the biblical periods and especially the late ones. Other social units to be examined are same-sex, non-heterosexual and non-productive formations, such as the Essenes and early Jewish and rabbinic arrangements in the late Hellenistic and early Roman times.

A Tribute to Danny L. Miller

A Tribute to Danny L. Miller Sharon Hatfield (bio) Appalachian Literature lost a dear friend and advocate on November 9 with the passing of Danny Miller, chair of the English Department at Northern Kentucky University. The enormous respect and esteem in which he was held by his colleagues and students was evident at the memorial service held on campus November 15. Against a photographic backdrop of Danny in his prime as an academic and as a toddler in his rural Appalachian home, mourners paid tribute to their fallen friend through performances of original poetry, modern dance, a bluegrass hymn, a Rachmaninoff concerto, and his favorite song from Phantom of the Opera. The event seemed to reflect perfectly the many facets of Danny’s catholic nature, from his deep attachment to home, kinfolk, and friends back in Ashe County, North Carolina, to his love for the fine arts and the urban life of Cincinnati, where he had made his home for many years. My own connection with Danny was both personal and professional. It all began several years ago at an Appalachian Studies Conference in Helen, Georgia, where I was introduced to him over dinner. He immediately asked me where I was from and what my mother’s maiden name was. By the end of the meal, using his vast genealogical knowledge of Appalachian families and a napkin as his notepad, he had established that we were indeed distant cousins. It was a scene I was to see repeated many times over the next several years, as Danny would delve into the family tree of a perfect stranger with abandon. He was particularly enthusiastic to meet those with associations to his undergraduate Alma Mater, Berea College, and to the University of Cincinnati, where he received his doctorate. The point is, Danny was inclusive. He felt a sense of connection to many people throughout the mountains, and even if you were not his blood kin, he would surely claim you as a kindred spirit. A few years later I gained an appreciation of Danny’s scholarship while serving with him and Gurney Norman as a coeditor of An American Vein, a collection of critical essays on Appalachian literature. [End Page 6] Danny’s book about female characters in Appalachian fiction, Wingless Flights, had been published in 1996, and by 2000 he had helped set into motion this significant venture—creating a foundational volume that would tie together all the critical work that had been done over the decades of the Appalachian literary renaissance. His knowledge of Appalachian writing was encyclopedic, and beneath his sunny exterior burned the conviction that literature was not just something for academics or librarians to peruse, but a tool by which activists could, in his words, “offer resistance.” Over the four years we worked on the book, meeting in both Ohio and Kentucky, I came to realize that Danny, through his keen intellect and unpretentious style, had fashioned a charmed circle of friends and colleagues that was constantly widening. Always juggling several projects in addition to his job, Danny was never too busy to take your hand, pull you aside, and demand to hear your news. At the time of his death from a stroke at age 59, Danny had nearly completed his tenure as chair of his department, having overseen the creation of a master’s degree program in English and an enormous growth in the number of faculty. He was looking forward to stepping down to a quieter life within the academy. There were things he had left to do, and we as the Appalachian community are the poorer for his absence. But in thinking of all he did accomplish in six short decades, I am reminded of a passage from Jesse Stuart that was quoted at Danny’s memorial: “And I am firm in my belief that a teacher lives on and on through his students. I will live if my teaching is inspirational, good, and stands firm for good values and character training. Tell me how can good teaching ever die? Good teaching is forever and the teacher is immortal.” Having heard the notes of praise and laughter rising to the ceiling of the...

Inclusive Fitness Theory from Darwin to Hamilton

ONE of the central dogmas of modern behavioral ecology is that blood kinship plays a critical role in understanding the evolution of social behavior, particularly of costly social behavior such as altruism and cooperation. But it was not always so, and what I would like to do in this Perspectives is provide some historical context that led up to William Hamilton's seminal work developing inclusive fitness theory. The story begins, not surprisingly, with Charles Darwin. The worker bees that sacrifice themselves to protect their hives—the ultimate example of animal altruism—were deeply troubling to Darwin. If increased reproduction is the currency of natural selection, then altruists should disappear—and fast. But they did not disappear, and Darwin was so puzzled by this that he spoke of altruism as a problem that he feared was “one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me to be insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole theory” (Darwin 1859, p. 236). Eventually, however, Darwin came up with an explanation. Since sterile worker bees were helping their blood relatives—especially the queen—Darwin hypothesized that natural selection might favor altruism at the level of blood kin. In a section of On the Origin of Species entitled “Objections to the theory of natural selection and instinct: neuter and sterile insects,” Darwin proposes that the problem of natural selection producing sterile castes that often risk their lives to protect others “disappears when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as the individual and may thus gain the desired end” (Darwin 1859, p. 204). Blood kinship, and interactions among relatives, it turned out, was the key to solving Darwin's problems with both social insect sterility and altruism. One hundred and four years later, biologist William Hamilton would formalize Darwin's idea, but the path from Darwin to Hamilton was not smooth (Dugatkin 2006). That fact that it was not is not surprising. The nature of altruism makes it all too easy to drift from a scientific to a political, philosophical, and even a religious approach to this subject. Studying the structure of an atom is not personal, and neither is studying, for example, night vision in mammals. Studying altruism can be personal, however, because we all want to understand the origins of goodness. And it certainly was personal for the next two figures in the story of blood kinship and altruism—Thomas Henry Huxley and Peter Kropotkin (Woodcock and Avakumovic 1950; Desmond 1994).

Blood Kin by Mark Powell (review)

Blood Kin by Mark Powell (review)

The After Life (review)

Reviewed by: The After Life Deborah Stevenson Ehrenhaft, Daniel The After Life. Razorbill, 2006 [272p] Paper ed. ISBN 1-59514-080-8$8.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 Will Shepherd has not exactly been close to his wealthy father, who left Will's mother shortly after Will's birth, and he's only just met Kyle and Liz, his seventeen-year-old younger half-siblings, whose school Will has recently started attending. He's nonetheless shocked when his father dies of a heart attack (doubtless encouraged by Shepherd Senior's recreational drug use), so he turns up in Miami, relying as usual on regular infusions of drugs and alcohol, for his father's funeral. Mr. Shepherd wills Kyle and Liz each twenty million but Will a paltry two mil, dependent on Will's driving his father's old Volvo back from Miami to New York (Mr. Shepherd had always sneered at Will's inability to drive). Convinced that Will plans to try for a bigger share, Kyle insists that he and Liz fulfill the driving duties and that the trio take the long ride together, but the experience isn't what any of them expect. Ehrenhaft writes with a cool, heedless humor and a matter-of-fact absurdity, making this an enjoyably edgy narrative that mines comedy even from its darkest elements. The strongest portraits are those of Kyle, a "web-based crook" and wheeler-dealer convinced everybody's working an angle, and Will, trying to keep his life from tanking entirely as he struggles to come to terms with the death, possibly by suicide, of his beloved uncle; Liz is less credible, especially in her attraction to Will's shambling character, but the plot gets a lot of entertainment value out of the romantic sparks between the half-sibs (an overexplanatory wrapup conveniently explains that Will and Liz aren't actually blood kin, thus greenlighting their relationship). [End Page 166] The youthfully jaundiced satire on material ranging from preppies (the kids' school is the motherlode) to hippies (Shepherd Senior was a wannabe) combines with genuinely emotional undercurrents to make this an offbeat but compelling literary road trip. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Creating New Families: The History of Adoption in the United States

The two works under discussion rely on different definitions of adoption and thus present discussions with very different scopes. Strangers and Kin is the more restricted in chronological coverage, but is also the more detailed analysis of the process of adoption in the United States and the varied meanings attached to it during the twentieth century. While the two works are disparate in form and coverage, they nevertheless complement each other. There is some overlap; Melosh has a chapter in Adoption in America, and she acknowledges Wayne Carp in her introduction. For the most part, however, the two books approach adoption in different ways so that together they provide a fuller understanding of the process as a whole. Because of a strong concern for the transmission of property to legitimate blood kin there was no legal recognition of adoption in England before the twentieth century; adoption did not become legal until 1926. The practice in the colonies in British North America diverged from the prohibitions in the mother country. Placing children in other families on a permanent basis was common in Colonial America, especially in New England. These placements could be formal such as apprenticeship and indenture which were temporary contractual arrangements or informal. In either case children from one family might be lodged in another household. There they would be members of that household-though not necessarily members of the family. They would receive their keep (room, board, and some skill or start in life) in exchange for a lengthy term of labor. Although treated in the same way as family members, apprentices and indentured servants were not regarded as kin and they were not entitled to any form of inheritance. Local authorities used apprenticeship and indenture as a way of placing orphaned, neglected, abandoned, or abused children in foster homes. According to Carp in his

"That's My Place!": Negotiating Racial, Sexual, and Gender Politics in San Francisco's Gay Latino Alliance, 1975-1983

IN 1975, AT AGE TWENTY-TWO and deeply involved in the Chicano politics of the period, butch Chicana lesbian Diane Felix left her native Stockton, California, home for San Francisco. Though not pushed out by her blood kin, she could not imagine staying permanently in agrarian Stockton, with its few opportunities for financial and social well-being. Just ninety miles away from Stockton beckoned the "free city" of San Francisco, where the social movements and visions of the counterculture of [End Page 224] the late 1960s still generated excitement. To attend school and be closer to San Francisco, Diane moved first to San Jose, but soon a small ad in a popular gay newspaper of the day, the Bay Area Reporter, called her to San Francisco proper. The ad revealed that other gay Raza—Chicanos and Chicanas and Latinos generally—were organizing. Her trip to San Francisco to attend the second meeting of what was to become the Gay Latino Alliance resulted in a permanent move, one that was both personal and political. She decided to help build a collective vision.

A Good Boy, Bradley

FICTION A Good Boy, Bradley Laura Weddle It was the first day ofJuly and hotter than blazes. Nellie Grimes sat on her front porch, rocking, and breaking the last of the summer's beans. Her knotted little claw-like hands worked with mechanical precision, almost independently of her mind and body. As she worked, her eyes darted around the yard, taking in the sagging front gate, the broken bottom porch step, and the weather-beaten mailbox leaning drunkenly to one side. She could count at least six things that needed fixing in the front yard alone, never mind the back yard and the barn. She was trying to figure out a way to get her nephew Bradley to come up and do some work for her. He was just fifteen, but big and strapping like his daddy, and a good hard worker. Not too smart, as far as she could tell. Had a faraway, meandering look about his eyes that sometimes made her wonder if there was anybody home. Nellie was alone, and had been for so long she hardly even noticed it anymore. Mr. Ben had let her stay on in the tenant house after Spencer died ten years ago. Then when his granddaughter, Nora, inherited the farm, she had never asked Nellie to move either, and all they ever expected was for her to keep things up in reasonably good repair. That never had been a problem until just the last couple of years. Hard work was as natural as walking or breathing, but lately the pains in her hip joint made it hard to get up when she was down, much less fix a broken gate or plant a mailbox post. So she sat there and plotted and schemed about how to get Bradley to come and do the chores, without having to pay him an arm and a leg. It was ridiculous. The boy wanted five dollars for every day's work he did around the place, and him her blood kin. Nellie had a good view of the road and fields around the farm, situated as she was on a little rise, and her porch another ten feet off the ground. A dark green line of trees over to the right stood like sentinels between her house and the rocky banks of Harrison Lake. Laura Weddle, Somerset, Kentucky, is a retired Pikeville College professor, andfreelance writer. 38 The county road ran by in front of her house, and most weekends during the summer, a stream of cars pulling boats or trailers would head for the cool shelter of camping and fishing sites on the lake. She had almost finished breaking the beans when she saw dust rising, a long way down the road. She watched idly as the cloud came closer to her gate, and when it moved past, she saw that it had been raised by a big black car she'd never seen before. Nellie squinted to try to get a better view. She set the pan of beans aside and eased up to walk over to the porch railing. "Ohhh," she breathed, and rubbed her hip. She held on to the back of the rocker, and stretched out her other arm to catch the rail. Above all things she dreaded the thought of falling, alone as she was out there. The car had passed her gate and gone on down the road, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere. Nellie was about to turn around to get her beans and take them into the kitchen, when she saw the car stop in the road and two men in dark suits get out. Now what on earth are they stopping out here for? she wondered. They sure weren't fishermen, and there wasn't much to see around here, at least nothing worth stopping a car for. She was puzzling it over when a curious thing happened. The two men looked up toward her house, then turned to face each other. From where she stood, they appeared to be arguing, and although she could not hear words from that distance, she had the impression that the discussion was heated. While she stood peering...

Undermining Ancient Patriarchy: The Apostle Paul's Vision of a Society of Siblings

The closest family tie in the ancient Mediterranean society was experienced among siblings. Paul of Tarsus followed the historical Jesus in his attempts 1) to undermine the authority and social cohesiveness of the blood kin group and patriarchal family, 2) to offer an alternative family structure made up of surrogate “brothers and sisters, ” and 3) to make viable a first-century Mediterranean person's choosing to live in such an alternative, trust-based form of social relations by means of a profound redefining of the competitive honor code into which all males had been socialized. Paul's goal was not the creation of an egalitarian community in the political sense, but a well-functioning family in the kinship sense, a family without fathers in which the “strong” would use their strength not for themselves but to empower the “weak.”

Kinship, Life Cycle, and Education in Lusaka

Kinship relaions of educated and uneducated women change in the passage from childhood to adolescene, young adulthood, and maturity. Socioeconomic and demographic changes have caused a widening of kinship networks and individualizing the uses to which the kinship network is put in contemporary life. Women who achieve conomic autonomy change from childhood dependence to early adult independence to mature interdependene. Economically dependent women, overwhelmingly the poor and uneducated, remain lifelong dependents on blood kin. Brittle marriages and the absence of state welfare benefits ensure the survival of blood kin ties as the major form of social security for both educated and uneducated women.

"I Give the Best Part of My Life to the Mill": An Oral History of Icy Norman

Bounded by the fall line and the coastal plain on the southeast and the Appalachian Mountains on the northwest lies the southern Piedmont, the first part of the South to undergo industrialization. By 1880, southern farmers were leaving the land for the textile, tobacco, and furniture factories springing up on the banks of the region's rivers and the outskirts of dusty market towns. By the eve of World War II, the country's tobacco and textile industries had concentrated in the South, and southern workers looked more often to the factory than the farm for their livelihood. The timing of southern industrialization presented a unique opportunity to record the experiences of and women who left behind the working rhythms of sun and seasons to live by the mill bell and the time clock. In 1978, the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the industrialization of the Piedmont. At the end of two years, approximately 250 interviews had been conducted with tobacco, furniture, cotton, hosiery, and glove workers in five core communities in North and South Carolina.' Icy Norman was one of those workers; she lived in Alamance County, North Carolina, in the Piedmont Heights mill village of the town of Burlington. Alamance County was the site of some of the South 's pioneer cotton mills, the earliest built in 1837. Nearly a century later, Alamance witnessed the birth of Burlington Industries, now the world's largest textile company. Alamance County textile workers not only knew the shift from farm to factory, but they also suffered the transformation that took place on the shop floor when water-driven, familyowned mills gave way to corporate-controlled factories that stressed scientific management and employed technologies that stretched the endurance of mill workers. J. Spencer Love, who founded Burlington Industries in 1923, was the prototype of the new mill men who emerged after World War I, leading the southern textile industry in rationalized mill management.2 When Icy Norman retired from Burlington Industries in 1976, she had worked for the company longer than any other employee, nearly fifty years. She was unusual in remaining at one mill for so long; the southern textile labor force as a whole was highly mobile. But Icy had the common experience of moving from farm to factory, and she lived through the technological and managerial revolutions of the twentieth-century textile industry. Icy never married, and her brothers and sister left Burlington. She lives alone in a small, neat mill house, but Icy-by no means-considers herself lonely. She uses the simile, like a family, to describe her relationship with her fellow workers and bosses. The phrase, like a family, cropped up in dozens of interviews. Workers used this image not to invoke a picture of Norman Rockwell family life, but to encompass the complexity and density of the family dynamic that pervaded mill life. In many cases, family was literal. Southern mills encouraged the migration of whole families to mill villages. Mothers taught daughters how to spin, fathers and sons worked side by side. But the bonds offamily extended beyond blood kin. Interdependence, warmth, and tolerance, as well as arbitrary authority, competition, and disagreements, knit together the men, women, and children who peopled the South 's mills and mill villages. Icy Norman 's story is, in more than one way, a family history.