Center Of Social Life Research Articles

日本植民地時代における台湾林本源庭園の社交的役割に関する考察

According to the owner of a garden, it will present very different garden culture. Lin Family Garden, in Banchou built from 1888 to 1893, is the representative traditional merchant garden of Taiwan. It is also the most conserved completely garden among the 48 traditional gardens of Taiwan. The purpose of this study is to make clear the social functions of this garden as a merchant garden during the Japanese Colonization. The events held in this garden during the Japanese Colonization were distilled from the newspapers published from 1898 to 1944. And the purpose, organizer, participant, progress, and place of events held in this garden were analyzed. The results revealed that garden parties, meetings, banquets, and poem salons were held in this garden for building the affiliation with the colonization government, for supporting the local events, and for the personal companionship. Moreover, it was open for the public from 1927, it was helpful for enhancing the reputation of Lin Family. Dinchin Hall zone is the center of social life in this garden because it was the most frequently used among seven zones of this garden. It was expected that the findings of this study can realize one part of garden culture of Taiwan.

« Apocalypse, éthique et liturgie (2 ApJn). Édification religieuse du lien social, construction didactique et théophanique du sujet »

In 1914, F. Nau edited and translated the « Second Greek Apocalypse of John ». Since then, some scholars have classified it among the pseudo-chrysostomica. This article leaves aside the philological debate and concentrates on the historical relevance of the text used here to understand the social and pragmatic function of religious discourse. It shows an essential link between apocalyptic and liturgy. Such a text helps to elaborate didactic coherence between moral teaching about everyday life and Christian ritual. The practical function of the liturgy is placed at the centre of social life where every Christian has to practise fraternal love. The Christian understanding of time depends on a construction which organizes life on earth as in heaven.

Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design by David Gartman

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 377 xenophobic anxieties and growing sense of nationalism to their need to find comfort in a rapidly changing world by softening the hard edges of technology. Changing and conflicting values inherent in this tension between the old and the new are an underlying theme of the book. As the home eroded as the center of social life and cultural development during this period, the meanings behind domestic objects subtly shifted and, in fact, the very purpose of the home was brought into question. Women’s roles altered dramatically and, since it was usu­ ally their artistic expression that was most evident in the home, wom­ en’s values and attitudes are central to this story. The Arts in the American Home adds new insight and scholarship to the study of family life and domestic material culture in the early 20th century. Combining primary source documentation with mate­ rial culture evidence, the authors consistently discuss not only the changes that occurred but the reasons behind these changes and how people of the time responded to them. Donna R. Braden Ms. Braden is a curator at Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and has published widely on topics relating to domestic life and leisure history. She spoke on family pastimes at the 1989 McFaddin-Ward conference. Auto Opium: A Social History ofAutomobile Design. By David Gartman. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xvi+264; illustra­ tions, notes, index. $17.95. The automotive industry’s annual model changes provided late summer excitement during the 1950s. We always enjoyed being the first in our Detroit neighborhood to have pictures that Dad brought home of Ford’s new models. I did not question then this show of chrome and paint any more than I questioned the Mickey Mouse Club. It was fun to watch both pageants and to identify the stars— whether Mouseketeers or car models; it seemed that this all danced before us without pain or harm to anyone. Since then, many of us have questioned, sometimes bitterly, the many costs of those promotional entertainments. David Gartman, too, could identify all car models in the fifties; now in Auto Opium he asks why that once seemed so important. In analyzing the pageant and its underlying causes, Gartman focuses on how and why automo­ bile aesthetics evolved as they did, correctly recognizing their cen­ trality to the dynamics of making and marketing automobiles in the United States. Gartman finds the root cause in the relations ofproduction: Amer­ ican workers have been so degraded and depressed by their labors 378 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE that they turned to “the individual palliative of consumer goods like autos” (p. xiv), while producers designed to sell enough volume to profit from their mass-production technologies. Not at all passive victims in this, consumers “actively struck the best deal possible” (p. xiv), seeking excitement, identity, and power from their cars, based on the allurements that marketers learned to provide. The opiate of automobile design masked workers’ pain with an aesthetic that “concealed rather than revealed the marks of the production process, allowing them to temporarily forget the demands ofwork” (p. 61). To show how automobile designers tried to meet this “demand for obscuring aesthetics” (p. 62), Gartman interweaves accounts of technological capabilities, such as sheet-metal fabrication and fin­ ishing, with those of economic considerations, such as decisions to share a chassis among many models, with discussion of institutional politics, such as the constant power plays between stylists and engi­ neers. He analyzes design aesthetics by attending both to producers’ intentions, such as creating the Mustang to be a “youth wrapper” around existing components (p. 197), and to his own sense of con­ sumers’ symbolic interpretation of designs, such as streamlining’s “illusion of progress, unity, and hygiene” (p. 103). Untangling the complex interactions of engineers, designers, and marketers on one hand, and consumers on the other, is no small task. Gartman’s thesis that “automobile design was fundamentally shaped by the dual exigencies of capitalist competition and class con­ flict” (p. 12) sometimes furthers his task and at other times overpow­ ers it. For instance, blaming Fordism for all the ills of...

Social organization in a wild population ofCallithrix jacchus: II. Intragroup social behavior

The social behavior of the common marmoset has been well studied in captivity, but little is known about the social dynamics of this species in its natural habitat. Social relationships were studied in three polygynous groups of common marmosets,Callithrix jacchus, in northeastern Brazil. Breeding adults appeared to be the center of social life and were the most frequent grooming partners or nearest neighbors for most adult group members. The observations of unidirectional agonistic interactions suggest that breeding adults were also dominant over all other group members, but that neither sex was dominant over the other. The dynamics of within-group social relationships are likely to be important determinants in the reproductive strategies employed by marmoset females.

Gay Bars

The gay bar is the centre of social life for many homosexuals. Since drinking problems are reported to be greater among the homosexual population than the general public, a description of the gay bars is provided as a possible starting point for studying the problem. Using the available literature, an international and a North American gay bar guide, and ten years participant observation, we describe the bars and the drinking and other behaviours of their clientele.

The English Experience: Playwrights in Politics

In the previous article, Director Marion Andre argued that theatre in Canada—and in most western countries—“is still lacking sufficient strength to move from the periphery to the very centre of social life.” The implication, of course, is that theatre could be and should be a political force within a society. During the 70’s, many playwrights in England did, in fact, politicize as never before. What caused this change in perspective? What will its legacy be in the 80’s? The following report on these questions was prepared for CTR by English theatre critic Catherine Itzin.

Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns.

Four of the papers in the collection are by young researchers and grew out of a seminar held at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1964-1965. There is also a reprint of an earlier paper by A. L. Epstein, plus a short new contribution by him, another reprint of an article by J. A. Barnes, and the whole is nicely introduced in a chapter by the editor. This is an exciting group of papers on network analysis. It represents work in progress directly in line with the experience and research interests of scholars at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (now the Institute for Social Relations, University of Zambia) and at Manchester University. Network analysis, as presented here, is not a systematic theory of urban society, but a series of techniques used to arrive at an understanding and an explanation of urban social relations. It has grown up out of a dissatisfaction with the use of traditional structural-functional analysis in urban Africa, where norms are highly variable, well-organized corporate groups are rarely the center of social life, where there are fluctuating social ties, and where new social relationships frequently develop. In delineating this approach an unfortunate image arises that social relationships in rural traditional African societies have been tightly defined by norms, corporate structures, and multiplex ties. While this is probably truer than in urban situations, it is also likely that rural Africa has appeared to have these characteristics because of the manner in which they were studied. If these societies had been analyzed using networks, I suspect that a greater degree of openness, change, and norm variation probably would have emerged, particularly when the consequences of state formation, warfare, slave trading, and population movements are considered. One suspects that the network analysts have created an illusion of differences: after all the African moving to the city does not simply shift from a corporategroup structural-functional situation to a network style of social relationships, and multiplex ties are important in the urban milieu as are some choices, decision making, and interethnic ties in the more traditional

Making a High School a Center of Social Life

The boys and girls who come to high school are just about the age when they begin to realize that there is such a thing as a social world and that there is a place in it for them. I liold it to be within the field of school work to help them find that place and to fill it to the best of their ability. Association with peoile is counted as one of the most valuable gains in any educational world; in college, I think we shall all agree that the people we met, the different types of minds and characters we were thrown with, the men and women with whom we came in contact, sometimes forcibly, and not always enjoyably, gave us a broader and more valuable education than that we gained from books. In the same way, although in a less degree, is this true of highschool life, and the student should have the opportunity of meeting socially those whom he sees every day in his classrooms. The boy or girl who simply comes to school and studies, and goes home, misses much that he or she needs. Another reason for emphasizing the social side of school life is the happiness it brings, and it surely is within our mission as teachers to do all in our power to make our boys and girls happy. Thrre is nothing which brings more joy if you love the children, as 1 believe every real teacher must, than to see a group of schoolboys and schoolgirls having a genuinely good time. They ought to be happy and have all the good times it is within our power to give them. Give them some good times right in the place where they work, and the memory of the pleasures will put a certain glamor over the prosiest of school-rooms. The only room in my own high school that I remember loving was the twelfth grade, for it was not until the fourth year, as we met to prepare for graduation, that our class came together in any social way. 634