Domains Of Social Life Research Articles

Einstein and Soviet ideology

This book traces the historical trajectory of one of the most momentous confrontations in the intellectual life of the Soviet Union--the conflict between Einstein's theory of relativity and official Soviet ideology embodied in dialectical materialism. Soviet attitudes toward Einstein's scientific and philosophical thought passed through several stages. During the pre-Stalin era, Marxist philosophers clashed over the problem of defining dialectical materialism in relation to the ongoing revolution in science. This controversy produced a full spectrum of Marxist attitudes toward the theory of relativity, ranging from complete acceptance to total rejection. Disunity also prevented Marxist writers from interfering with the work of those Soviet physicists who produced a rich literature extolling the theory of relativity. During the Stalin era (1929-1953), conflicting forces in Marxist thinking were eliminated, and complete unity was established and firmly guarded by the state. Marxist theorists declared war on principles built into Einstein's scientific work. State harassment of leading physicists accused of idealistic digressions persisted throughout the Stalinist era. Several leading proponents of Einstein's ideas perished in political prisons. Despite all these pressures, some leading physicists used every opportunity to reaffirm their fundamental agreement with the theory of relativity as one of the fundamental contributions to twentieth-century scientific thought. The post-Stalinist period (1953-1985) gradually evolved into a profound transformation of every domain of social and cultural life, and Einstein's scientific and philosophical legacy was no exception. Whereas Stalinist writers tried to reformulate Einstein's principles to accommodate dialectical materialism, post-Stalinist thinkers, much more familiar with modern physics than their predecessors, attempted to make Marxist philosophy sufficiently flexible to absorb the guiding principles of the theory of relativity. A wide range of Einstein's ideas, previously regarded as symptoms of bourgeois decadence, was now hailed as a cornerstone of the Marxist philosophy of science. The post-Stalinist era also produced an extensive and appreciative literature on the humanistic aspect of Einstein's thought. The short-lived period of perestroika (1985-1991) accelerated the de-Stalinization process, post-Stalinist gains were solidified, and the theory of relativity was increasingly shorn of ideological burdens, thus removing one of the last remnants of the Stalinist war on science.

Changes in Family and Marriage in a Yangzi Delta Farming Community, 1930-1990

This article explores how marriage patterns and practices changed over the course of 60 years in Willow Pond Village (a pseudonym), a rice-farming community on the Yangzi Delta, 50 km west of Shanghai. Data gathered during eight months of fieldwork in 1990 reveal the intimate relationship between marriage and changes in the local political climate and illustrate the ways in which marriage reflects and reproduces the local social hierarchy. (Marriage, family, kinship, social stratification, China) ********** By late imperial times, China's highly elaborate system of stratification had developed an extraordinary degree of social mobility (Ho 1962; Fei and Chang 1945; Yang 1945; Hsu 1948), owing in part to the virtual absence of legal restrictions on intermarriage or movement between strata. Ironically, the permeability of the strata may have allowed the system of stratification to persist. As long as upward mobility remained a possibility, albeit requiring several generations, and as long as a few families served as examples of mobility, non-elite strata were likely to accept the legitimacy of their positions. The social order itself was a process of anfractuous reconstruction whose shape is described by the calculus of families striving for material and symbolic benefit. And in no domain of rural Chinese social life is this calculus more apparent and more determinative of the social order than in the decisions surrounding marriage. These decisions, as Bourdieu (1977:70) points out, belong to the system of reproduction strategies.... [E]very marriage tends to reproduce the conditions which have made it possible. PREREVOLUTIONARY WILLOW POND On the eve of the Communist victory in 1949, what is now the administrative village of Willow Pond was the site of two villages with a combined population of roughly 245. On small plots of generally fertile land, some 60 households cultivated a main crop of summer paddy rice and some winter wheat or barley. Although all families worked in the fields, marked social differences are evident in older informants' descriptions of village life during the 1930s and 1940s. About 60 percent of families lived at the margins of subsistence, with half their crop extracted as rent by absentee landlords. Most owned no draft animals or only a share in one, and either rented the pumps of wealthier neighbors or paid for itinerant pump-boat operators to irrigate their fields. They frequently hired out themselves or their older children as laborers to others. Another 20 per cent of village families fared little better. They were driven less frequently to sell their labor to others, but they controlled no surplus land, and could not afford the tools and means to maximize yields. The top strata of village society, perhaps 20 per cent, had landholdings that exceeded their own subsistence needs, derived a significant portion of their income by renting this surplus to others, but worked in the fields themselves, also employing one or more long-term laborers. The very wealthiest families derived most income from renting land, and owned one or more oxen and perhaps a windmill for irrigation; although their primary business was agriculture, some of their children were involved in nonfarm pursuits, like extended education or apprenticeship to a skilled craftsman. One family briefly owned a rice mill until it was lost to fire in 1946. Wealthier families were far more likely than others to have reserves of capital that allowed them to buy land, goods, and services when the prices were at their lowest, and to acquire some of the trappings of the elite lifestyle they tried to emulate. Thus, land, labor, capital, and access to irrigation, tools, and agricultural inputs--the means of production--were one dimension along which village families were stratified. The social relations of production comprised another dimension and included the division of labor within the production unit (the family), the network of alliances a family could depend on for support, and its accumulated symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977). …

The good death: reaching an inductive understanding.

The study examines descriptions by twenty-six elderly Israelis of a good death. The transcripts of personal interviews were analyzed using phenomenological methods to determine general and essential essences of the good death phenomenon. The good death was perceived as a multidimensional phenomenon based on eighteen general essences that were condensed into five essential essences that included the physiological, personal, interpersonal, social and cultural domains of life. The good death description further involved a critical component toward the ways in which death and dying are currently occurring in Israel. The research results call for Israeli policy-makers to more forcefully acknowledge and accommodate the different secular perspectives of the good death into law and to allow individuals more freedom and control over the dying processes and rituals following one's death.

Neanderthals: A History of Interpretation

This paper investigates the history of Neanderthal construction in different domains of social life and media. It establishes three broad tendencies within Neanderthal reconstructions: following the expulsion of Neanderthals from ‘humanity’ in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, the 1950s are characterized by a shift in this perception. From then, Neanderthals appear as essentially human creatures trapped in archaic bodies. Following this initial ideological oscillation the recent decades represent a parallel existence of both paradigms as well as a widening of conceptualizations. This paper argues that these ideological constructs remain operative, continuing to inform and form our perceptions of what Neanderthals are/are not.

Vocal recognition in the spotted hyaena and its possible implications regarding the evolution of intelligence

Spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta, are gregarious carnivores whose social lives share much in common with those of cercopithecine primates. We conducted playback experiments to determine whether free-living hyaenas are capable of identifying individual conspecifics on the basis of their long-distance vocalization, the ‘whoop’. When prerecorded cub whoops were played to mothers and other breeding females (controls), mothers responded significantly more vigorously to whoops of their own cubs than did controls. We also tested the hypothesis that specific vocal recognition abilities are based on kinship in this species. Listeners that were related to the whooping cub responded more vigorously to recorded vocalizations than did unrelated individuals, with response intensity in some cases increasing directly with the size of the coefficient of relatedness (r). Our final goal was to determine whether control animals in these experiments can recognize third-party social relationships among other group members, an ability demonstrated by vervet monkeys, Cercopithecus aethiops, in similar playback experiments conducted by earlier investigators. In contrast to vervets, control females in the present experiments were no more likely to look at the mother of the whooping cub than at other control females after playback. This suggests that hyaenas may accomplish many of the same social feats as do vervets without possessing the ability to recognize third-party relationships. If confirmed in other domains of hyaena social life, our findings have important implications regarding selection pressures favouring the evolution of intelligence.

Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast

This article explores transformations in gender relations along the Swahili Coast of East Africa through an historical examination of four domains of social life: politics kinship economics and musical performance. By examining data about the relative social positions of women and men across a span of five centuries I seek to counteract widespread tendencies to project assumptions of male dominance onto the past and to uncritically attribute current practices of gender segregation to the presence of Islam. Islam penetrated the Swahili Coast as early as the ninth century yet gender segregation is a quite recent phenomenon dating back only to the last century. The data presented here cumulatively indicate: 1) that there have been shifts in Swahili society from a time when women occupied positions of greater power prestige wealth and opportunity than is available to them today; 2) that this has entailed the cultural elaboration of an opposition between “African” and “Arab” designations; 3) that this opposition has a strongly gendered dimension; and 4) that musical practices play a central role in these historical and cultural processes. (authors)

Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast

This article explores transformations in gender relations along the Swahili Coast of East Africa through an historical examination of four domains of social life: politics, kinship, economics, and musical performance. By examining data about the relative social positions of women and men across a span of five centuries, I seek to counteract widespread tendencies to project assumptions of male dominance onto the past and to uncritically attribute current practices of gender segregation to the presence of Islam. Islam penetrated the Swahili Coast as early as the ninth century, yet gender segregation is a quite recent phenomenon dating back only to the last century. The data presented here cumulatively indicate: 1) that there have been shifts in Swahili society from a time when women occupied positions of greater power, prestige, wealth, and opportunity than is available to them today; 2) that this has entailed the cultural elaboration of an opposition between "African" and "Arab" designations; 3) that this opposition has a strongly gendered dimension; and 4) that musical practices play a central role in these historical and cultural processes.

The social environment and health in rheumatoid arthritis: marital quality predicts individual variability in pain severity.

To examine prospective relations between a wide array of measures of social functioning and pain, while controlling for disease duration and activity and functional grade. As part of a larger study on health care utilization, longitudinal data were collected from 136 Dutch and 98 German outpatients on clinical status and pain. Social data included information on sexual handicap, spouse behavior, loneliness, daily emotional support, and the maintenance of pleasurable life domains. Pain severity was assessed at baseline and 12 months later with standard measures of pain and analyzed with hierarchical regressions. Social measures obtained at baseline were consistently associated with pain at followup. Depression was a moderate correlate of pain in the Dutch and German samples. The regressions revealed that patient reports of negative spouse behavior (such as avoidance and critical remarks) and baseline depression predicted worse pain outcome, and this association remained significant in analyses controlling for baseline pain. The level of formal education was a weak correlate of disability, emotional support, and pain. Daily emotional support and social life domains associated with positive affect had an indirect influence on outcome. The absence of strong rather than weak social ties was the component of the loneliness construct linked to pain. These associations between social prognostic factors and pain severity, however, were mediated by psychological functioning at baseline. The social environment was found to operate on the core health outcome, pain severity, via several pathways. Social functioning may be affected by rheumatoid arthritis (RA) progression, but it also appears to form a determinant of future health outcome. Not only the status of being married but also the quality of the relationship in terms of long-term stress and emotional support may be useful prognostic factors in RA.

SOCIAL LOAFING AND SELF-BELIEFS: PEOPLE'S COLLECTIVE EFFORT DEPENDS ON THE EXTENT TO WHICH THEY DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES AS BETTER THAN OTHERS

An experiment tested whether the belief that one is better than others on performance aspects of the self moderates social loafing, the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually. French students performed an easy task either coactively or collectively. They were then asked to rate how they individuate themselves from others on personal abilities within various domains of social life. The loafing effect was especially strong in participants who perceived themselves as better than others, suggesting that self-beliefs related to one's feeling of uniqueness is a significant component of social loafing. This finding is discussed from the perspective of Karau and Williams' (1993) Collective Effort Model.

Young children's post tantrum affiliation with their parents

In our database of 331 parental narratives of tantrums had by children 18–60 months old, 29% of the tantrums were followed by child-initiated affiliation with parents. Four variables increased the probability of children's post tantrum affiliation (PTA): age, prolonged screaming, physiological stress, and parent-initiated separation from the child during the tantrum. The age effect may be due to increasing post tantrum persistence of negative affect, to the emergence of shame, guilt, and embarrassment over this developmental period, and/or to increasing cognitive ability, empathic capacity, or socialization. Screaming, which may be analogous to the defensive vocalizations of nonhuman primates, increases PTA when prolonged for 6 min or more. Physiological stress (indicated by autonomic activation or respiratory distress) appears linked to prolonged screaming and may mediate its effects by increasing the child's dysphoria and need for consolation. Separation (parents' departure from the scene of the tantrum or their imposition of a time out) also appears linked to prolonged screaming and may reflect parents' response to an aversive auditory stimulus. There was no evidence that PTA was associated with the presence or degree of physically expressed anger in the tantrum. PTA may be associated with distress during the tantrum. The post conflict reconciliation which occurs in several domains of human social life may be first experienced by children in the aftermath of their tantrums. Aggr. Behav. 23:329–341, 1997. © 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Young children's post tantrum affiliation with their parents

In our database of 331 parental narratives of tantrums had by children 18-60 months old, 29% of the tantrums were followed by child-initiated affiliation with parents. Four variables increased the probability of children's post tantrum affiliation (PTA): age, prolonged screaming, physiological stress, and parent-initiated separation from the child during the tantrum. The age effect may he due to increasing post tantrum persistence of negative affect, to the emergence of shame, guilt, and embarrassment over this developmental period, and/or to increasing cognitive ability, empathic capacity, or socialization. Screaming, which may be analogous to the defensive vocalizations of nonhuman primates, increases PTA when prolonged for 6 min or more. Physiological stress (indicated by autonomic activation or respiratory distress) appears linked to prolonged screaming and may mediate its effects by increasing the child's dysphoria and need for consolation. Separation (parents' departure from the scene of the tantrum or their imposition of a time out) also appears linked to prolonged screaming and may reflect parents' response to an aversive auditory stimulus. There was no evidence that PTA was associated with the presence or degree of physically expressed anger in the tantrum. PTA may be associated with distress during the tantrum. The post conflict reconciliation which occurs in several domains of human social life may be first experienced by children in the aftermath of their tantrums.

Contract ethics: evolutionary biology and the moral sentiments

Recent theorists have suggested that human altruism toward non-family members evolved because of the tremendous benefits of reciprocity. Developing further the notion that evolutionary theory can help to explain moral sentiments, Howard Kahane proposes that a sense of fair play is essential to ethics and argues that moral obligation, too narrowly construed, prevents us from living rationally. He brings his account of fair play to bear on the ethics of various domains of social life including friendship, taxes, civil rights, and nation states.

Marital Quality Over the Life Course

Much prior research in social psychology indicates that in many domains of social life, individuals' well-being improves in the latter half of the life course. The reason for this pattern is not well understood, however. We argue that objective changes in family composition and in social and economic conditions in middle and later life may explain the later-life increase in well-being. To test this argument we focus on one domain, marital well-being, and examine the curvilinear relationship between marital duration and marital quality, with emphasis on the latter half of the marital life course. Our results show that reduced work and parental responsibilities in later life explain much of the later-life increase in marital satisfaction but do not account for the decrease in thoughts of divorce. Longitudinal research is needed to confirm our results, which are necessarily confined to cross-sectional data.

Development and testing of a quality of life model for long-term female cancer survivors.

This research resulted in the evolution of a model depicting the quality of life of long-term female cancer survivors. The foundation for this model's development was Ferrell's (1993) breast cancer model, which incorporates physical, social, psychological and spiritual domains of life. The Ferrell model was adapted following focus-group discussions with 11 long-term female cancer survivors. The adjusted model included new categories, within each of Ferrell's initial domains, that were specific to the focus group participants. Administration of a new instrument, the Long-Term Quality of Life (LTQL), to 187 long-term female cancer survivors produced a final model that included the interaction of all four domains in six major concepts of quality of life. This new model, which reflects the complexity of life in long-term female cancer survivors, may be useful to health professionals in designing interventions to meet the unique needs of these women.

Draw the Line Between Learning Advanced Things from the West and Worshiping Things Foreign

Since the Third Plenary Session of the Party's Eleventh Congress, by opening up to the outside, we have learned and drawn upon the advanced science and technology and advanced business methods and management experience of the Western nations, enhanced foreign economic and cultural exchanges, promoted China's economic prosperity, and raised the people's material, cultural, and living standards. At the same time, however, Western capitalism's decadent ideology and culture have taken advantage of this opportunity to stream in, and the "worship-things-foreign mentality" and "worship-things-foreign phenomenon" have quietly developed and spread in some people's minds and in many domains of social life. In order to draw a line between learning advanced things from the West and worshiping things foreign, we must clarify such issues as why we should learn from the West, what we should learn from the West, and how to learn from the West in a truly enterprising fashion, drawing upon, and making use of Western advances without unduly underrating ourselves and blindly worshiping things foreign.

Is Language a Game?

Recent developments in game theory have shown that the mathematical models of action so widely admired in the study of economics are in fact only particular instantiations of a more general theoretical framework. In the same way that Aristotelian logic was ‘translated’ into the more general and expressive language of predicate logic, the basic action theoretic underpinnings of modern economics have now been articulated within the more comprehensive language of game theory. But precisely because of its greater generality and expressive power, game theory has again revived the temptation to apply formal models of action to every domain of social life. This movement has been fuelled by some notable successes. Game theory has provided useful insights into the logic of collective action in the theory of public goods, and strategic models of voting have illustrated important aspects of institutional decision-making. But this extension of formal models into every area of social interaction has also encountered significant difficulties, despite the fact that contemporary decision theory has weakened its basic assumptions to the point where it teeters constantly on the brink of vacuity.

Market and non-market determinants of private consumption and their impacts on the environment

The view of consumption as an activity combining market and non-market elements with the aim of attaining life-enjoyment targets allows one to focus on the social and institutional determinants of the border between market and non-market components of the consumption process and to consider the interrelations of market and non-market domains of social life as a possible source of the environmental degradation which derives from consumption activities. In this paper, an analytical framework is proposed in which the view of consumption as a social process and the neo-Ricardian theory of prices and profits are combined to yield an evaluation of consumer efficiency and of its environmental effects. The paper argues that the social and institutional framework in which consumption is embedded significantly determines the impact of human activities on the natural environment and that environmental degradation is intimately connected with a distortion in the consumption process towards a predominance of market relations and an excess of labour in industrial society. Two examples (household energy conservation and private transportation) illustrate the analytical framework and suggest the importance of redrawing the border between market and non-market domains of social life in environmental policy.

The politics of space: changing discourses on Chinese burial grounds in post-war Singapore

In order to elaborate on the view that space is a heavily contested domain of social life, we examine two closely juxtaposed discourses on Chinese burial grounds in postwar Singapore. State-constructed discourse not only highlighted the insanitary nature of burial grounds, but adopted a utilitarian view of burial space. In the context of the need to reconstruct a war-torn country in the 1950s and later the pressing demands of nation-building in the 1960s, the “problem” of Chinese burial grounds was constructed as the need to release “sterilized” land for “development” within planning discourse. In contrast, the Chinese community under colonial rule advanced the view that their burial grounds were “sacred” spaces situated within the discourse of geomancy and ancestor worship and as such “immune” from state intervention. With independence, the status of the Chinese as a citizen in a nation-state with accompanying obligations made it more difficult for the community to maintain a separate distinctly Chinese discourse on burial space. Consequently, new discourses which stressed the rights of the Chinese as citizens emerged as instruments of negotiation. Our aim is to show that both discourses were embedded in a field of power relations: both are strategic, set up in opposition to each other, and drew on the existing power relations between the state and the people. Discourses also changed with the broader context, in tandem with shifting power relations engendered by the transition from colony to nation-state.

Power and the Ritual Genres: American Rodeo

Among most significant developments in scholarship of late twentieth century is liberation of concept of power from strictly political to research in all domains of social life. In this we are especially indebted to Michel Foucault who conceived of power as something that circulates, and of individuals as vehicles through whom power passes. He argued for ascending analyses of power that would start from regional and local forms and institutions, focusing on power at its extremities, studying the myriad of bodies which are constituted as peripheral subjects as a result of effects of (Foucault 1986:229-235) Having turned attention to practices of power, these perspectives have brought new attention to subject of ritual or ritual genres. Although power of ritual to produce transformations in both lives of individuals and in political systems has long been recognized, studies of ritual have now made explicit its relationship to power. Formal ritual, festival, celebration, fair, spectacle, and their many variants all provide a home to and a stage for exercise of power. Moreover, studies have also demonstrated that power of ritual is accessible to both reactionaries and revolutionaries for their various political purposes.' While this new body of theory influenced by knowledge of power and power of knowledge has led to some stimulating new approaches, ritual genres remain complex events that utilize symbols and rest upon a range of persuasive devices, and each of genres

Pedagogy and educational democratization: The problem of alienation

Education is viewed as not merely a particular domain of social life. It is more a universal process than a mere learning of sciences and arts; it is richer than an individual's socialization. The educational democratization turns out to be a prerequisite of humanization of the entire social life. The orientation at the supreme humane values as a strategic direction of democratic evolution of education is opposed to the authoritarian tendencies as an “antivalue” of pedagogical relations. Being a significant step towards a genuinely humane society, democratization is unable, however, to resolve the fundamental problem of human formation: that of alienation. The opportunity to resolve it is dependent upon proper conditions for a free self-determination of a personality in culture.