Communal Attachments Research Articles

Hausa vernacular architectural style of early Mosque buildings: A case stuy of Yandoka Street Moswue, JOS

This paper investigates the impact of modern and contemporary trends on an eighty-seven years’ old mosque in Jos built in the typical Hausa Vernacular Architectural style, as well as the extent to which its vernacular features have been lost and/or retained. The study focused on selected architectural features which do not essentially affects the performance of the primary mosque's functions. A qualitative survey was adopted using case study approach and complemented with content analysis of related literature reviewed to extract information on the challenges of restoration and preservation or conservation of the key features of traditional Hausa Architecture on the Mosque buildings in the study area of Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria from the randomly selected traditional/indigenous builders and practicing architects. The Yandoka Street Mosque was purposively selected as a case study, because of its historical antecedence, religious and communal attachment, as well as its socio-political and cultural relevance in the study area. Information was collected using the unobtrusive observation method and were descriptively presented in the form of layout plan, material deduction, construction techniques and technology adopted for the mosque’s construction. Findings shows that, the influence of the identified key factors have become a threatening phenomenon to the survival of the preservation and conservation historical values and heritages of Hausa mosque architectural style. The paper advocates preservation and conservation of the original mosque architectural style from the point of view of sustainability and made recommendations towards the preservation, development and execution of strategies for branding, national identity and protection of value systems for the public good

Custom, conflict and the construction of heritage: European huts on the Tasmanian Central Plateau

ABSTRACT This paper uses historical and ethnographic information to examine how local communities have turned huts on the Central Plateau, Tasmania into heritage. The Central Plateau was subject to increased environmental regulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s following the inscription of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. These regulations disrupted a range of community practices that maintained communal attachment to and ‘ownership’ of the land. Some locals responded by using the huts on the Plateau to memorialize their attachments to the mountain, creating a new status for the huts as heritage. Consequently, the government and community agreed that these buildings now required conservation management. This marks a fundamental shift in community attachment from practices (intangible heritage) to material hut preservation (tangible heritage), that has required community to accept the regulatory framework that disrupted their prior cultural practices that formed the basis of their traditional ‘communal’ ownership of the land.

Communitarianism, Properly Understood

AbstractCommunitarianism has been misunderstood. According to some of its proponents, it supports the ‘Asian values’ argument that rights are incompatible with communitarian Asia because it prioritises the collective interest over individual rights and interests. Similarly, its critics are sceptical of its normative appeal because they believe that communitarianism upholds the community’s wants and values at all costs. I dispel this misconception by providing an account of communitarianism, properly understood. It is premised on the idea that we are partially constituted by our communal attachments, or constitutive communities, which are a source of value to our lives. Given the partially constituted self, communitarianism advances the thin common good of inclusion. In this light, communitarianism, properly understood, is wholly compatible with rights, and is a potent source of solutions to controversial issues that plague liberal societies, such as the right of a religious minority to wear its religious garment in public.

The Aesthetic of Acclimatization

Singapore’s global aspirations have, since the turn of the 21st century, led to the consolidation of a range of new institutions—arts research centers, degree granting programs in universities, museums, festivals— with affiliated experts, to prepare the ground for an emergent arts scene that is aligned with the norms of contemporary western art practice. As neoliberal instrumentation competes with the communitarian logic of the traditional arts, dance forms such as Indian classical, Javanese court and Malay folk dances, which once sought to link the ancient past and perpetuity for ethnic communities of spectatorship, are constricted within narrowly defined categories of the regional performing arts market. To avoid becoming mere touristic spectacles, a new generation of traditionally trained artists reinvent their respective forms to accommodate the near future of contemporary culture in Singapore. Such adaptations unsettle the once cohesive universe of traditional dance, resulting in unfinished and unsettling works that betray, to quote Nicholas Bourriard, “countless forms of melancholy”, This paper looks at two recent works of contemporary dance staged in Singapore—January Low’s Reclaim (2019), Raka Maitra’s Pallavi Series (2015-2018). I consider dance emerging from this latter discourse as articulating an aesthetic of acclimatization, sustained by political, communal and institutional attachments that emerge in a climate of overwhelming crises and adjustment. As the traditional dance world in Singapore enters a state of slow death, I identify projects that embark on experiments of partial recuperation, which “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Harraway suggests, making-with and getting-on with what remains of traditional dance and its embodied practices. I suggest that these projects extend the life of traditional dance as a minor, mutated species in an early evolutionary stage that nevertheless transforms the ecology they acclimate to. In remaining selectively porous to neoliberal and biopolitical operations, and receptive to novel artistic regimes, can the aesthetic of acclimatization allow traditional dance to escape its totalization within neoliberal calculations?

Beyond empowerment and inspiration: towards a critical program for multicultural youth leadership

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which multicultural youth leadership programs reflect a model of participatory citizenship and individual empowerment that risks affirming white institutional worlds. Drawing on data from a national study of migrant and refugee youth in Australia, it suggests that while these activities offer useful forms of civic and vocational training for its participants, leadership programs can burden migrant youth with forms of cultural labor that other young people are not expected to perform. Programs of multicultural youth leadership make young migrants responsible for their communities, while also obscuring these communal attachments and responsibilities via an emphasis on individual achievement. It is argued that such programs form part of a wider discourse of neoliberal nationhood and youth futurity, where ideas about the productive potential of migrant youth are shaped by normative ideas about what the nation should be. These programs could instead be reoriented to emphasize the critical and creative capacities of migrant youth. Strategies of co-production can enable young people to take up a more flexible range of positions through which they share their expertise, and contribute to collective forms of cultural citizenship that can challenge, rather than affirm, the white institutional worlds through which they are governed.

On Writing and Routing Rights

On Writing and Routing Rights James B. Loeffler (bio) The history of human rights is often told either as a timeless myth of Judeo-Christian religious principles or a modern fable about Holocaust-inspired universal justice. Individual Jews figure prominently in these metanarratives, as do casual claims about Jewish ethics, but Jewishness, in the form of specific Jewish political commitments, communal attachments, and collective identities, is alternately taken for granted or passed over in silence. In Rooted Cosmopolitans, I went hunting for these missing Jewish contexts and backstories in human-rights history. The result is a different account of the origins of international human rights and the Jewish roles within that story. Shifting the focus from the United Nations immediately after World War II to prewar Eastern Europe, I trace a rising generation of Jewish legal activists who pioneered many of the legal principles and advocacy techniques that turned human rights from a philosophical ideal into a concrete project of international law. Contrary to popular perceptions today, I argue that what mattered most in their Jewish pathways into human-rights activism was neither their shared marginality nor their universalist sensibilities but a conscious engagement with Jewish politics. This transnational Jewish network spread outward from World War I–era Eastern Europe to encompass the length and breadth of the twentieth-century Jewish world. For that reason, I am very grateful to the editors of Shofar for assembling such a wonderful cohort of scholars to interpret my book from such a variety of geographical and methodological vantage points. These expert commentaries, at once attuned to key historical moments evoked in my narrative and larger historiographical questions, present an embarrassment of riches for my author's response. I cannot do them all the justice that they deserve here. Instead, I offer some brief thoughts, organized roughly by chronology, on the questions they raise about the points of intersection between Jews and human-rights history. [End Page 192] That history has its own history, Arie Dubnov reminds us, beginning with the earlier work of scholars who charted the career of international minorities' protection from the second half of the nineteenth century through the fracture point of World War I and the rise of the League of Nations. He reads my narrative against that historiographical backdrop and observes some key differences in my choice of historical actors and causal claims. He applauds my determination to push past the contemporary false dichotomy that divides Jewish nationalism from international human rights but wonders whether in my quest to de-essentialize human-rights history, I also risk reifying Zionism as the normative paradigm for early Jewish international legal advocacy. More specifically, he asks, do not non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish rights-defenders deserve a larger place in the interwar story of Jewish minority-rights activism? This is a crucial question with implications for the entire field of Jewish human-rights history, especially in light of contemporary extracurricular political debates. Emphasizing the conspicuous Zionist presence in the ranks of human-rights activism certainly carries the risk of methodological side-shadowing, obscuring other contemporaneous Jewish voices and historical actors. But in my estimation, the greater danger remains historiographical back-shadowing, that we project back into the past our contemporary assumptions and anxieties about Zionism and Jewish internationalism. The biography of Lucien Wolf is actually a good example of this problem. His diaries and his publicistic work suggest a crucial figure in interwar international rights protection. Yet a closer look reveals a role overinflated in posterity. To be sure, his story is an important one—and a fascinating one at that. But ultimately it belongs more to the equally crucial history of pre-1920s international liberalism rather than to that of interwar legal thought and Jewish minority-rights advocacy. The same is true of the Austro-Marxists and their East European Jewish followers. For all of the ways in which we might imagine that Bundist national-cultural autonomy must have birthed international minority rights, there is little evidence of that connection. The reasons [End Page 193] are simple. Both Western Jewish liberals and East European Bundists professed a fundamental ambivalence about global Jewish peoplehood. Nonnationalist liberals wished to protect their...

The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine

The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine Atene Mendelyte (bio) The still, sad music of humanity,Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power —William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey This essay was inspired by Ronald Bogue's pioneering Deleuzian reading of the three types of metal music—death, doom, and black. The scholar avoids the traps of oversimplification obvious in previous (mostly sociological) studies of such music that tend to concentrate on the threat of inducing violent behaviour. Such a stance by now has become a cliché and has little analytical value. I see a great potential in further developing this type of Deleuzian listening as it can offer a better understanding of metal music. It needs to be mentioned that there have been other analyses hinting at a more positive potential of metal music, such as musicologist Robert Walser's against the grain observation that metal music "creates communal attachments, enacts collective empowerment, and works to assuage entirely reasonable anxieties"1 or Nicola Masciandaro's experimental attempt to merge the discourses of black metal and theory.2 The essay collection edited by Niall W. R. Scott and Imke Von Helden The Metal Void: First Gatherings (2010)3 includes many varied explorations of metal music. The journal Glossator has a number of interesting articles on black metal, and another online journal Helvete is entirely dedicated to black metal theory. But such a surge of analytical readings tends to cluster around black and death metal while doom metal remains on the outskirts of scholarly interest. What is then lacking, I suggest, is a close(r) attention paid to individual doom metal practices. This is where my approach differs from Bogue's, since, unlike him, I think that each type of metal practice has to be understood on its own terms instead of comparing them based on a more transcendental or general basis. The practice that will be scrutinized in this essay is that of the [End Page 469] legendary British doom metal band My Dying Bride since, as mentioned above, doom metal, in comparison to death and black metal, has received by far the least interest in academia and non-academia alike. Even in Bogue's illuminating essay it remains the least explored subgenre, which is a direct consequence of the basis chosen for comparison; if one specifically discusses musical intensities and avoids focusing on the connection between lyrics and voice, one is bound to conclude that doom metal is both less technical, less virtuoso than death metal and less visceral than black metal. The lack of interest and doom metal's underdog status follow from that. But the center of gravity in doom metal is precisely the relation between lyrics, vocal modalities, and musical accompaniment, which makes it an entirely different kind of assemblage from the other types of metal. Moreover, I wish to argue, it is exactly where the greatest and most interesting musical thought potential lies. The machinic assemblage produced by My Dying Bride's practice is of a peculiar sort. I shall be referring to it as "the romanticizing machine" because it brings to fruition the principal logic of British Romantic poetry and European Romantic music. The processual aspect of the given title is pivotal as well, since the machine works by combining musical, textual, conceptual, affective, temporal, dramatic, and other elements and repurposing them for the sake of drawing its own plane of immanence and consistency, engaging in its musical world-making. Musical Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization My Dying Bride strives to create a total poetic experience. The band provides atmospheric musical plateaus that work to produce a mood, an affective space rather than a metric, rhythmic, musically progressive experience. The lyrics are highly poetic, often spoken in a narrative voice. Vocal delivery is used in a multiplicity of its modalities: sung vocals, death metal grunts, spoken word, whispers. Speech itself is modulated; it can either be a narrative voice, as in the closing lines of "Hail Odysseus," or a more poetically expressive voice, as in most songs on A Map of All Our Failures (Peaceville Records, 2012). The voice is made to exude despair, sadness, and other strong feelings via emphatic intonation...

How do Catholic adolescents respond to Church structures, teaching, regulations, and practices they cannot change?

Catholic schools are well-subscribed institutions that serve Catholics, non-Catholics, and non-Christians. Given that sociological data shows significant non-reception of some Church teachings, however, it is apparent that some Catholic students in these schools bring meaningful disagreements with them. Since it is also apparent that not all disagreeing Catholics leave the Church, the question of how adolescent Catholics disagree while remaining is of interest to Catholic educators. This paper presents the perspectives of three Catholic adolescents who each hold strong spiritual and communal attachment to their faith, while simultaneously holding disagreements about ordination. A fourth adolescent demonstrates a meta-understanding of how one can disagree with Church teaching on same-sex marriage and remain Catholic. I interpret their views using Avery Dulles' Models of the Church, which shows these students coordinate their disagreement with sustained participation by maintaining a strong personal spirituality and not reducing their Catholic experience to doctrinal adherence.

Extraneare: Pain, Loneliness, and the Incarcerated Female Body

The aim of this article is to understand the affect of estrangement expressed as pain and loneliness within spaces of incarceration. The article will tease out the dissonances and the tensions of both the loneliness of pain and pain as loneliness expressed in the narratives of older women lifers in prison and former political prisoners. Specifically, pain will be looked at as heartache, not feeling physical pain, and one's own pain and shame at being strip-searched being amplified through sensing the pain of another or the silencing of the pain event. We demonstrate through the voices of the women that theirs are real bodies, fleshy, sensate, that experience a cycle of pain as both affective and physical which results in punishment. This cycle results in pain's performative production of the punished through its peculiar individualizations of the body. This also means that pain is amplified through fear of its own possibility of visitation on and in the individual body from which communal attachments are erased so that succour cannot be sought but the pain of the other increases pain as fear. It is this cycle of psychic and physical pain which leads to estrangement experienced paradoxically both as part of the punishment regime of incarceration and as a coping strategy, the only possible location for agency. Agency here emerges as women make the prison environment and categories “stripped searched” or “lifer” stranger to the self, “the real me” or the wounded body stranger, removed from the self which does not feel during the pain event and in its afterlife. These women's bodies are not simply given but also interpreted, mediated, and constituted in social and cultural meanings of incarceration, punishment, and freedom. This allows us to show how thinking through pain as both repressive and productive of identities means that the space of bodily estrangement can be a location of agency as the body does not cease to be both a generator and receptor of meanings in total institutions.

Disability identity: Exploring narrative accounts of disability.

To review a type of narrative identity, disability identity, which is a potentially important topic concerning the social psychology of disability. Disability identity entails a positive sense of self, feelings of connection to, or solidarity with, the disability community. A coherent disability identity is believed to help individuals adapt to disability, including navigating related social stresses and daily hassles. Attention to disability narratives will enable rehabilitation psychologists to develop detailed theories and plan empirical investigations aimed at exploring the psychosocial applications of disability identity. We examined six narratives (e.g., articles, chapters, books, blogs) written by people with disabilities in order to identify excerpts illustrating disability identity. Using themes drawn from disability-identity research (i.e., communal attachment, affirmation of disability, self-worth, pride, discrimination, personal meaning), we categorized excerpts from the narratives. By highlighting positive aspects of disability identity, the study of disability narratives can inform persons with and without disabilities about how individuals live with disabilities. We discuss reasons rehabilitation researchers and practitioners should consider disability identity and narratives in their respective efforts.

The jealous god: A problem in the definition of nationalism

Scholarly definitions of nationalism often characterize the nation as the supreme object of loyalty (a ‘jealous god’). Such restrictive definitions are unwise because they needlessly exclude a wide range of pro-national beliefs and practices. Demonstrating this, however, is harder than often thought, because the close linkage between nation and jurisdiction seems to entail a prioritization of national attachment over other identities. More pluralist accounts of nationhood, such as those of Margaret Moore or Charles Taylor, only partially resolve this dilemma, which requires consideration of the ultimate sacrifices entailed by war and conscription. Yet these cases of ultimate sacrifice should be understood not as endemic to nationhood alone but to all forms of strong communal attachment, when faced with existential threat. As it is this threat, rather than nationhood per se, that drives nationalism to take absolute forms, restrictive definitions may justifiably be rejected.

The ‘Arab Spring’ in the historical perspectives of Middle East politics

The events of the ‘Arab Spring’ appeared to be animated by slogans and objectives of universalist orientations to liberty, dignity and social justice, a departure from the ethno-religious nationalisms that dominated the politics of the region. They raised questions regarding the ‘exceptionalism’ of Arabs and Muslims, whom many observers and commentators considered to be tied to sentiments and solidarities of patrimonialism, tribe and religion. Yet, the forces that seemed to benefit from the transformations in Egypt and elsewhere were not those that made the ‘revolution’ but precisely religious and patriarchal parties which benefited from popular constituencies in elections. A consideration of the political history of the main countries concerned can throw some light on these transformations. The nationalist, often military, regimes which emerged from the independence struggles of mid-twentieth century headed ideological, populist, nationalist and ‘socialist’ movements and parties and authoritarian regimes which eliminated oppositional politics and social autonomies in favour of a corporatist welfare state. These regimes, facing economic and geo-political contingencies of the later decades were transformed into dynastic oligarchies and crony capitalism which broke the compact of welfare and subsidies leading to intensified impoverishment and repression of their populations. Popular strata were driven ever more into reliance on ‘survival units’ of kin and community, reinforcing communal and religious attachments at the expense of civic and associational life. These ties and sentiments come to the fore when the ruling dynasties are displaced, as in Iraq after the 2003 invasion or Egypt after the removal of Mubarak. The ideological and universalist politics of the revolutionaries appear to be swamped by those conservative affiliations.

Nationalism and the moral psychology of community

is one of modern history's great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community - and especially the moral psychology that animates it - that has made this question so difficult to answer. Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments. A brilliant and compelling book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

The Structural Injustice of Forced Migration and the Failings of Normative Theory

AbstractI propose to criticize two strands of argument—contractarian and utilitarian—that liberals have put forth in defense of economic coercion, based on the notion of justifiable paternalism. To illustrate my argument, I appeal to the example of forced labor migration, driven by the exigencies of market forces. In particular, the forced migration of a special subset of unemployed workers lacking other means of subsistence (economic refugees) cannot be redeemed paternalistically as freedom or welfare enhancing in the long run. Further, contractarian and utilitarian approaches are normatively incapable of appreciating this fact because the kinds of reasons that they adduce for justifying the long-term freedom-enhancing consequences of forced migration are not ones that would be acceptable to the migrants themselves. I conclude that only a discourse ethical approach, which mandates direct, empathetic communication between would-be migrants and members of potential host communities, captures the full range of reasons that would be acceptable to both migrants and members of these communities. These reasons—appealing both to agency-enhancing communal attachments as well as to agency-enhancing freedom of choice—fully reveals the extent to which a global capitalist system composed of relatively closed national communities coerces the world’s poorest migrants.

The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations (review)

Reviewed by: The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations James Murray The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations. By Henry A. Jefferies.(Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distrib. by ISBS, Portland, OR. 2010. Pp. 302. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-846-82050-2.). Henry Jefferies's aim in his new book is "to put religion back at the heart of the on-going debate on the Reformation in Ireland" (p. 12). This is a laudable [End Page 794] objective, and he deserves commendation for reminding us that Ireland's Reformation experience is unintelligible unless due consideration is given to the religious convictions of its sixteenth-century inhabitants. It is disappointing, then, to discover that his own treatment of religion is self-consciously regressive and that ultimately he presents an account of the religious developments of the period that closely resembles the traditional and, prior to the 1970s, predominant Catholic-nationalist narrative of the failure of the Reformation in Ireland. Given the rhetorical method employed, this outcome is inevitable. Jefferies pits himself against the "revisionist successors" of the older generation of Irish Catholic/nationalist historians, who, he argues, have "tended to project their own secularist mentalities onto the past and deny religion its significance as an important influence in Tudor times"(p. 11). As a remedy, he elects throughout his book to set those modes of inquiry and argument that do not focus specifically on religion in opposition to those that do, suggesting, repeatedly, that the former are necessarily inferior when they are utilized to explore any aspect of the history of the Reformation in Ireland. This uncompromisingly dualistic approach is particularly marked in the final chapters of the book, where the author offers an analysis of the series of rebellions that erupted in Ireland from the late 1570s. Here, the historians who have advanced political, constitutional, or economic explanations for the outbreak of the rebellions are successively dismissed, generally because they are adjudged to have "played down," or "failed to appreciate" the religious dimensions of the revolts (pp. 208, 278). Jefferies's implicit rejection of the possibility that secular modes of inquiry may offer useful perspectives on the religious history of Tudor Ireland is symptomatic of a more general tendency to simplify or reduce any argument, and the supporting evidence, that complicates that history. Consequently, far from putting religion back at the center of the debate on Ireland's Reformation, he merely reframes that debate as a closed and problemless entity, which enables him to create a clear, untroubled space in which to establish his own narrative. That narrative is ultimately revealed in the final part of the book in a committed and lengthy description of pan-Irish resistance to the Elizabethan settlement. Familiar motifs emerge as this narrative unfolds: a steadfast Irish communal attachment to traditional Catholicism, the buttressing effect of a steadily emerging Counter-Reformation Church, and the ineffectiveness of a weak and corrupt Church of Ireland. His conclusion—that these factors led inexorably to the failure of the Reformation—is reminiscent of historians such as M.V. Ronan and Robin Dudley Edwards not only in terms of the final judgment but also in regard to the evidence used to support it, namely, the series of despatches preserved in the Irish State Papers in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, which were penned by ecclesiastical and state officials and which lament the obdurate nature of Irish religious conservatism. [End Page 795] This approach is unsatisfying because it not only accepts uncritically the evidence for the existence of an undifferentiated, communal attachment to Catholicism but also endeavors to construct a late-medieval wellspring for the phenomenon built on an equally questionable evidential base. In the opening section of the book, the Irish Church is portrayed as a healthier and more coherent, island-wide entity than many contemporaries were prepared to admit, on the basis of a dubious simplification of the island's complex politics, culture, geography,and economy; through his avoidance of contemporary evidence detailing the widespread lay despoliation of ecclesiastical property; and through some extravagant claims made for a relatively modest renewal of the late-medieval Church's physical infrastructure. Although Jefferies's account certainly challenges the old...

Paradigm Shift: New Religious Movements and Quests for Meaning and Community in Contemporary Israel

Since the 1970s a growing number of Israelis have moved to seek spiritual fulfillment and communal attachments in new religious movements. The crisis of secular modernist Zionist Israel, which started after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, allowed new religious movements to find a fruitful ground for their activities. Many of these new groups developed within the Jewish tradition, often attracting followers based on different ethnic, political and gender sensitivities. Non-Jewish religious movements have also competed in an increasingly open market of spiritual and communal choices in Israeli society. The groups that have done particularly well are those that do not present "foreign deities" as part of their messages. New religious movements have helped Westernize and democratize Israeli society, turning Israel into a nation where individuals have the freedom to join or create new spiritual communities based on their preferences.

A feeling as much as a place: leisure, deaf clubs and the British deaf community

A distinct and identifiable ‘deaf community’, comprised of people who view themselves as members of a social, cultural and linguistic minority, has been recognised for many years. One of the main ways in which deaf people joined together was as members of their local deaf clubs, where they shared their leisure time with others with similar experiences, interests and outlooks. These deaf clubs served as the social and cultural hubs for the deaf community, allowing deaf people to form personal and communal attachments that extended far beyond the physical spaces the clubs inhabited. The clubs allowed the transmission of shared culture, language, tradition and history amongst deaf people, and in doing so provided their members with emotional rewards that exceeded those of merely filling leisure time. A brief analysis of the activities and motivations of deaf club members will be offered to support the contention that engagement in the leisure opportunities provided by deaf clubs provided emotional and psychological attachment to a community as well as a physical space for these activities to take place. The term ‘deaf club’ was as important for the sense of community and belonging it engendered as it was as a place to spend leisure time.

What really matters in the social network-mortality association? A multivariate examination among older Jewish-Israelis.

The aim of the inquiry was to examine the social network-mortality association within a wider multivariate context that accounts for the effects of background framing forces and psychobiological pathways. The inquiry was based upon the Berkman et al. (2000) conceptual model of the determinants of health. Its main purpose was to identify the salient network correlates of 7-year all cause mortality among Jewish men and women, aged 70 and over, in Israel (n=1,811). The investigation utilized baseline data from a national household survey of older adults from 1997 that was linked to records from the National Death Registry, updated through 2004. At the time of the study, 38% of the sample had died. Multivariate Cox hazard regressions identified two main network-related components as predictors of survival: contact with friends, a social network interaction variable, and attendance at a synagogue, a social engagement variable. Friendship ties are seen to uniquely reduce mortality risk because they are based on choice in nature, and reflect a sense of personal control. Synagogue attendance is seen to promote survival mainly through its function as a source of communal attachment and, perhaps, as a reflection of spirituality as well. Other possibly network-related correlates of mortality were also noted in the current analysis-the receipt of instrumental support and the state of childlessness.

Place, Class and Local Circuits of Reproduction: Exploring the Social Geography of Middle-class Childcare in London

In a recent revival of the older tradition of community studies, sociologists and geographers have begun to address the changing nature of attachment to locality in contemporary cities in advanced industrial societies. Challenging older definitions of attachment to place, a new form of communal attachment has recently been identified, termed 'elective belonging'. This sense of place is particularly important among the middle classes and is, it is argued, closely associated with the growing significance of reproduction, especially access to schooling, as a key part of the reasons for choosing to live in a particular urban neighbourhood. Sociologists of education have also argued that school choice is important. A recent paper has suggested that pre-school childcare also figures in locational choices and in urban differentiation, leading to different traditions of caring/mothering in different neighbourhoods in London. This paper critically assesses these arguments about school and childcare choices and the associated development of place-based middle-class cultures. Based on an empirical study in three London neighbourhoods, it explores the extent to which occupational position and sector of employment-class-based factors-as well as place-based factors continue to play a key role in the types of opportunities and choices that middle-class households make about childcare.

"The Other": Precursory African Conceptions of Democracy

Democracy is a configuration of governance molded by the general values, biases, prejudices, and nuances of a given culture. Individuals in Western countries typically identify with the state as reflecting the desires of the body politic. However, in the African world, including Northeastern Africa (or the Middle East as it is labeled in Western literature), identity is primarily reflected in one's ethnicity, religion, and communal adaptations and traditions. That is, the state's conception of governance is not always congruent with the heterogeneous peoples of a particular nation-state. As a result, ways of governance and perceptions of the “good” life are often conflicting at the local, state, and national levels. These clashing ideas are viewed with incertitude and trepidation in the Western world of democracies. Thus, Western democracies label non-Western democratic experiments as “the other.” Hence, without a more holistic understanding of why ethnicity, religion, and communal attachments are so salient in non-Western societies, Western democracies limit the “democratic playing field” as well as circumscribe cooperative, enduring relationships with “the other.” A reappraisal of democracy as a form of governance is needed to find a paradigm that is more suitable to the context in which various African nation-states exist. That is, one size does not and should not fit all.