Family Hierarchy Research Articles

Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Lineage: The Cultural Biography of a Colonial Massachusetts Parcel of Land

This cultural biography traces the multiple meanings of a large parcel of land in colonial Dunstable, Massachusetts, for members of the Tyng family between the late 17th and the end of the 18th centuries by examining the representation of the land in the documentary record of deeds and probate documents. The land and the deeds employed to transform new territory into a bounded and saleable item were artifacts used in the definition of the Tyngs’ ethnicity (Anglo-American), particularly in the context of 17th-century interactions with the Native Americans. The land was also tied to the expression of independent masculinity and the ability to provide a competence for sons. The role that the land played in the construction of their identities, however, could never be reduced to simply one of these factors since both land ownership and the idea of Englishness and masculinity were tied to concepts of status, family hierarchy, and profession. Finally, an analysis Sarah Tyng’s land transactions at the end of the 18th century demonstrates the ways in which women could also use land to make statements of power and about lineage.

Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy (review)

Yael Manes. Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy. Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. ix +148. $89.95. The question of patriarchal ideology dominating medieval and Renaissance society has been subject of intense scholarly interest in the last half century. Scholars have identified and discussed evidence of cultural male dominance, calling attention to the dismal place women occupied both within the realm of the family and in society. Literary critics have drawn on all sorts of available testimonia, including private letters, treatises, government ordinances, religious sermons, and, of course, literary texts. Their stated purpose has been not so much to reiterate the prevalence of an entrenched patriarchal ideology as to underscore its dismissal of woman's relevance. Man viewed woman as lower human species incapable of thinking for herself and hardly adept at making sound decisions. But, whereas evidence based on sermons, ordinances, or statistical data simply reflected or stressed the general perception of woman's inferior status, literary works often dramatized the issue, highlighting women's complaints about their deplorable condition. It was not unusual for female character in prose narrative or on the dramatic stage to lament that nothing makes her more unhappy than being woman, I esser donna. In some ways, literary texts often served as commentary on the prejudicial dominance of patriarchal ideology, thus bringing up the issue for thoughtful consideration and public debate. In this sense, many authors used their writings not only as mirror of reality (or society), but also as a with which to shape it, as Brecht is quoted as saying. The hammer metaphor is particularly relevant in Manes's Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities, for Renaissance writers contributed considerably to the growing debate on womanhood, known as the querelle des femmes. She evokes the debate by focusing on the ideology of gender identity informing the theater of the Italian Renaissance. Using the notion of motherhood as her analytical focus, she exposes the inadequacies of the patriarchal assumptions that relegated women to lower standing. She proceeds to examine the three essential aspects of patriarchy, namely, power, authority, and virtu, noting that patriarchal figures (of the stage) often fail to live up to their presumed roles as patres familias with respect to both their children and their wives. In most instances, it is the mother who fills in for the father's inadequacies, thus revealing the dramatist's intent to call for reassessment of masculine ideology. Manes limits her discussion to four plays, all based on plots dealing with specific aspects of the family. In Machiavelli's Mandragola, the focus of the first of the book's four chapters, Manes deals with the failures of the play's men, especially Nicia's lack of authority and virtu. Making up for the men's shortcomings are the play's women, Lucrezia and Sostrata. Lucrezia emasculates both Nicia and Callimaco in that by the end of the play she rules over the first and possesses the latter by having sex with him. Sostrata, in her role as concerned and practical mother, comes through as Machiavellian virtuosa, for not only does she foresee her daughter's predicament, namely, the risk of becoming childless widow, she also helps to move the action to her desired end. Another woman, Clizia's Sofronia, the subject of the second chapter, is also viewed as mother and wife endowed with patriarchal qualities. As her husband falls head over heels for the young ward Clizia, Sofronia takes his place in the family hierarchy and moves to protect the family reputation from major scandal. Her sense of motherhood (she considers the foundling her own daughter) drives her to scheme against Nicomaco's plans to bed the young girl. She succeeds to foil the depraved plan that would have jeopardized the girl's future and soiled the family name. …

House-to-House Migration:The Hadrami Experience in Kuwait

Ethnographic research among Hadrami immigrants in Kuwait showed significant relationships that emerged between affluent Kuwaiti families and waves of labourers at the beginning of state formation. It is suggested that those relationships had worked as a model for the state and for how ordinary Kuwaitis categorised and interacted with different populations of immigrants. In the 1950s, the first Hadrami immigrants in Kuwait were children and young males who specialised in domestic work for Kuwaiti households. Unlike other Hadramis abroad or Arab immigrants in Kuwait, the Hadramis of Kuwait serve no significant economic objectives in Kuwait's current migration economy. Despite this, Kuwaitis, particularly the well-off, continue to sponsor Hadramis mainly because they symbolise a pre-oil era's values of family hierarchy and the immigrants' dependency on locals. The paper illustrates how socio-historical conditions in both Hadramawt and Kuwait have equally shaped the character of this migration.

Impacts of parasites in early life: contrasting effects on juvenile growth for different family members.

Parasitism experienced early in ontogeny can have a major impact on host growth, development and future fitness, but whether siblings are affected equally by parasitism is poorly understood. In birds, hatching asynchrony induced by hormonal or behavioural mechanisms largely under parental control might predispose young to respond to infection in different ways. Here we show that parasites can have different consequences for offspring depending on their position in the family hierarchy. We experimentally treated European Shag (Phalacrocorax aristoteli) nestlings with the broad-spectrum anti-parasite drug ivermectin and compared their growth rates with nestlings from control broods. Average growth rates measured over the period of linear growth (10 days to 30 days of age) and survival did not differ for nestlings from treated and control broods. However, when considering individuals within broods, parasite treatment reversed the patterns of growth for individual family members: last-hatched nestlings grew significantly slower than their siblings in control nests but grew faster in treated nests. This was at the expense of their earlier-hatched brood-mates, who showed an overall growth rate reduction relative to last-hatched nestlings in treated nests. These results highlight the importance of exploring individual variation in the costs of infection and suggest that parasites could be a key factor modulating within-family dynamics, sibling competition and developmental trajectories from an early age.

That Fierce Edge: Sibling Conflict and Politics in Georgian England.

[[siblingsbrotherssistersEnglandbirth ordermarital status ]] Using a combination of brief case studies and statistical analysis of probate disputes in eighteenth-century England, this article argues for an expanded interpretation of Georgian family life—an interpretation that understands the tugs and pulls of siblinghood. In the eighteenth century, emerging ideas about social equality based on idealized siblinghood tangled with engrained family hierarchies to produce messy, constantly shifting, sibling politics. Confronting competing social expectations that classified them as equals yet ranked them hierarchically by gender, birth order, and marital status, Georgian sisters and brothers fiercely wrestled over material and emotional investments from their parents and from one another. Sibling conflict was most common when reality sharply diverged from expectations of equality, such as between older sisters and younger brothers or between men and their brothers' widows.

On Subregular Selection Languages in Internal Contextual Grammars.

In this paper, we study the power of internal contextual grammars with selection languages from subfamilies of the family of regular languages. If we consider families ${\cal F}_n$ which are obtained by restriction to $n$ states, nonterminals, productions, or symbols to accept or to generate a regular language, we obtain four infinite hierarchies of the corresponding families of languages generated by internal contextual grammars with selection languages in ${\cal F}_n$. Moreover, we present some results on the power of internal contextual grammars with finite, monoidal, nilpotent, combinational, definite, ordered, regular commutative, regular circular, regular suffix-closed, and union-free selection languages.

News items

News items

Engendering the Feminine Power: Identity, Prescience and Anticipation in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and The Good Terrorist

The story of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and The Good Terrorist goes around two characters that may seem quite different at the first sight. Mary Turner and Alice Mellings come from different cultures and live in different historical contexts. Yet, both share oppression and exploitation in economic and sexual terms. While Mary has to enter a family that mirrors the prevalent oppressive relations in the society Alice enters a family-like circle in which oppressive relations are dominant and overwhelming. The former is oppressed and exploited under the patriarchal conduct of her husband while the latter has to suffer a lot being bound to an abusive boyfriend and exploitative squat. But oppression and exploitation are not the only things these two share. A strong sense of anticipation and prescience are the qualities that shape these characters’ identities. Reading these two novels from a socialist feminist point of view we argue that Lessing introduces anticipation and prescience as crucial characteristics for her protagonists. Considering the emphasis that Lessing puts on anticipation and prescience we believe that she takes these qualities as subversive power in the hand of women who struggle to change and revolutionize oppressive relations in capitalist and patriarchal structures. While women are always bombarded by ideological messages that advocate their inferior position in the hierarchy of family and society, we argue that Lessing’s prescient characters can be good examples of New Women who can be powerful agents trespassing false identities and ideologies of patriarchal capitalist circles and societies. Key words: Doris Lessing; Prescience; Anticipation; Socialist Feminism

Behavioral Change Starts in the Family: The Role of Family Communication and Implications for Social Marketing

This article investigates reciprocal consumer socialization in families, with a particular focus on the influence young adults above age 18 living at home have over their parents. A dyadic method of analysis was used to determine the level of influence young people have on the decision making of their parents with regard to the consumption of environmentally sustainable products. Our research shows that parents are not only influenced by their adolescent children, but that they are much more likely to take their children's advice when the family foster open issue-based communication patterns with respect for others. Our findings show that when the parents initially encourage their children to develop their own opinions and at the same time uphold the family hierarchy, they are much more likely to take their children's advice as well. For social marketers seeking to address issues of sustainable consumption, these are important findings.

Collation and data-mining of literature bioactivity data for drug discovery

The challenge of translating the huge amount of genomic and biochemical data into new drugs is a costly and challenging task. Historically, there has been comparatively little focus on linking the biochemical and chemical worlds. To address this need, we have developed ChEMBL, an online resource of small-molecule SAR (structure-activity relationship) data, which can be used to support chemical biology, lead discovery and target selection in drug discovery. The database contains the abstracted structures, properties and biological activities for over 700000 distinct compounds and in excess of more than 3 million bioactivity records abstracted from over 40000 publications. Additional public domain resources can be readily integrated into the same data model (e.g. PubChem BioAssay data). The compounds in ChEMBL are largely extracted from the primary medicinal chemistry literature, and are therefore usually 'drug-like' or 'lead-like' small molecules with full experimental context. The data cover a significant fraction of the discovery of modern drugs, and are useful in a wide range of drug design and discovery tasks. In addition to the compound data, ChEMBL also contains information for over 8000 protein, cell line and whole-organism 'targets', with over 4000 of those being proteins linked to their underlying genes. The database is searchable both chemically, using an interactive compound sketch tool, protein sequences, family hierarchies, SMILES strings, compound research codes and key words, and biologically, using a variety of gene identifiers, protein sequence similarity and protein families. The information retrieved can then be readily filtered and downloaded into various formats. ChEMBL can be accessed online at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembldb.

A geometric approach to complexity

We develop a geometric approach to complexity based on the principle that complexity requires interactions at different scales of description. Complex systems are more than the sum of their parts of any size and not just more than the sum of their elements. Using information geometry, we therefore analyze the decomposition of a system in terms of an interaction hierarchy. In mathematical terms, we present a theory of complexity measures for finite random fields using the geometric framework of hierarchies of exponential families. Within our framework, previously proposed complexity measures find their natural place and gain a new interpretation.

Nonterminal complexity of tree controlled grammars

This paper studies the nonterminal complexity of tree controlled grammars. It is proved that the number of nonterminals in tree controlled grammars without erasing rules leads to an infinite hierarchy of families of tree controlled languages, while every recursively enumerable language can be generated by a tree controlled grammar with erasing rules and at most nine nonterminals.

Knowledge and attitude of young Asians towards injury prevention in New Zealand: a qualitative analysis

PurposeInjuries are influenced by individual attitudes and risk‐taking behaviours and the identification of these factors is vital for the development of effective injury prevention strategies. This paper aims to examine the injury risk behaviours and attitudes towards injury prevention among young Asians in Auckland, New Zealand and their willingness to modify behaviours and attitudes.Design/methodology/approachA total of four focus group discussions with Asian tertiary students were conducted to discuss injury‐related issues and their preventions. Analysis used statements drawn from the focus group discussions and were summarised to draw conclusions.FindingsInjuries related to sports were the most frequently occurring, followed by domestic, workplace and traffic injuries. Cultural identity and family values were thought to have an influence on students' risk behaviours. Family convictism and positive peer pressure protects students from participating in risky sports and using recreational drugs. International students were vulnerable to risky behaviours due to isolation and were less likely to engage in health promotion and prevention activities. Family hierarchy and cultural orientations prevented some Asian students from discussing personal issues with parents and impeded gathering injury prevention skills.Research limitations/implicationsPrioritisation of domestic injuries with suspected under‐reporting, marginalisation and social isolation discourages sections of Asian youths from reporting injuries or seeking help. There is a paucity of knowledge about the mental health and suicidal behaviours of Asian students, which requires further investigation. More social research is warranted to understand the injury risk behaviours of Asian youths in order to develop an effective prevention strategy.Originality/valueThis study demonstrates how family values generate protective attitudes against injury risk behaviours among young Asians.

The fathers teachings as a factor of family education in the orthodox pedagogical culture

Studying the problems of the modern Russian family, the author of the article pays attention to the traditions and experience of family education in the orthodox pedagogical culture. The status of the father in the hierarchy of the Russian orthodox family, where he was the head and the teacher, made him responsible for the spiritual and moral state of his household. For this reason the genre of the fathers will or the fathers teachings, through which fathers tried to convey to their children and to inspire them with the lofty Christian ideal of education, emerged in the orthodox pedagogical culture.

Drug safety surveillance using de-identified EMR and claims data: issues and challenges

The author discusses the challenges of pharmacovigilance using electronic medical record and claims data. Use of ICD-9 encoded data has low sensitivity for detection of adverse drug events (ADEs), because it requires that an ADE escalate to major-complaint level before it can be identified, and because clinical symptomatology is relatively under-represented in ICD-9. A more appropriate vocabulary for ADE identification, SNOMED CT, awaits wider deployment. The narrative-text record of progress notes can potentially be used for more sensitive ADE detection. More effective surveillance will require the ability to grade ADEs by severity. Finally, access to online drug information that includes both a reliable hierarchy of drug families as well as structured information on existing ADEs can improve the focus and predictive ability of surveillance efforts.

Romeo and Juliet

Reviewed by: Romeo and Juliet Thomas Larque Romeo and Juliet Presented by Ruby in the Dust at the Leicester Square Theatre, London. June 1–July 11, 2010. Directed by Linnie Reedman. Music by Joe Evans. Designed by Christopher Hone. Lighting by Seth Rook Williams. Fights by Jessica Hrabowsky. Choreography by Luisa Hinchliff. Musical direction by Kate Marlais. Supporting direction by James Lloyd Pegg. Costumes by Christopher Baumber. Video graphics by Alison Alexander. With Chris Gee (Capulet), Christos Lawton (Mercutio, Apothecary), Dan Moore (Paris), Daniel Finn (Romeo), David Laughton (Benvolio, Laurence), Imogen Vinden-North (Nurse), Martin Dickinson (Tybalt, Balthasar), and Olivia Vinall (Juliet). Performed in the tiny fifty-seat basement studio of Leicester Square Theatre, with a cast of eight playing just eleven roles, and with the entire performance exactly "two hours' traffic of our stage" (including a fifteen minute interval, although the Prologue was among the many lines omitted), Ruby in the Dust's Romeo and Juliet took full advantage of its small scale, which allowed emotionally powerful and naturalistic performances, constantly in close-up, without the need for acting to the gods. [End Page 521] Key to the production was director Linnie Reedman's skillfully and heavily cut and rearranged text, which served the dual purpose of fitting the script to its small cast and supporting the relocation of the play to the Verona of 1938, when Mussolini's race laws first banned the intermarriage of "Aryan" Italians and Jews. With only occasional interpolations ("the day is hot, the Blackshirts are abroad," "consort'st with Romeo, a Jew," "and that Il Duce must give") and three original songs to help set the scene, this was a radical abridgement rather than an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, and Reedman's text was mostly coherent and consistent within its new period setting. The historical Blackshirts routinely carried knives and celebrated the heroism of hand-to-hand combat, so the absence of guns in fight scenes made sense. Anti-Semitism was less dominant in Italian fascism than in Germany, so it seemed reasonable that the affable, old-school "Count" Capulet might accept Romeo's presence, rather than spark murder and mayhem amongst his guests, while the Blackshirted Tybalt and Paris—previously seen threatening sexual violence against the Jewish Montagues (taking the servants' lines from 1.1)—were more hard-line Jew-baiting, Nazi-influenced thugs. The problem of Shakespeare's neutral prince was dealt with very effectively, by simply cutting most of his lines, and reassigning those that were still needed to Capulet or Paris. Whenever Shakespeare's characters would have spoken of the offstage Escalus, they referred instead to Il Duce. The fascist scenario served to give freshness and meaning to some of Shakespeare's lines at moments that would have been lost in a more traditional modern-dress production. The Nurse's claim to "speak no treason" became full of danger in a dictatorship where treason was punishable with death, and Mercutio's "I'll be hang'd, sir, if he wear your livery" was significant when addressed to a Tybalt in full uniform. Capulet's ambivalent relationship with his daughter was well established by an introductory scene that showed Juliet, attending a Capulet rally in the uniform of the Piccole Italiane (the Italian equivalent of the Hitler Youth), performing an athletic display with a hoop. Clearly drilled, concentrating on every move, and finishing with a fascist salute, this Juliet was initially a puppet of the adults around her, underlining the restrictions that she would later try to escape. Her father's attitude in subsequent scenes, shifting between tender consideration and condescension, fatherly pride and violent domination, seemed to spring from this bifurcated fascist attitude towards youth, which considered young people something to be celebrated for their purity, innocence, and potential (as future mothers and warriors in the brave new world of fascism), but at the same time demanded their total obedience to the hierarchy of family and state. [End Page 522] Chris Gee's imposing Capulet was the most significant beneficiary of Reedman's textual revision and direction, which made his relationship with Juliet the second most important in the play. After his introduction at the head of the...

Striking Family Hierarchies: Luke 12:35–48, Gender and Slavery

In this article I use the parable in Luke 12:35-48 think with. The parable talks about a master who leaves his house, after which the trusted slave misuses his privileged position and starts beating his subordinates in the household. According to Luke, Jesus tells the disciples this parable in order to teach them to be prepared. The terminology opens up a variety of scenarios: either the trusted slave strikes his fellow slaves, both male and female, or he strikes boys and girls. Such physical punishment was probably common in ancient families, where slave bodies were part of their owner's property, and where children had to obey their parents. Luke constructs theology and ideal virtues by use of violence and abuse, according to power structures in which class, gender and age intersect. This article will address some of these intersections, highlighting issues of slavery, family and gender. I develop an intersectional critique of memory theory in order to reflect on how interpreters are confronted with several challenges when New Testament texts are used as models for family life.

The Women's Movement and the Transformation of the Family Law in South Korea. Interactions Between Local, National and Global Structures

AbstractThis paper examines the revision of the family law and the abolition of the head-of-family system in South Korea in 2005. Although the 1948 constitution guaranteed gender equality and women's suffrage, the family law remained male-oriented and discriminatory. Fifty years of struggle for the revision of the family law show that the patrilineal familial hierarchy is not merely a product of 'outdated' values, but deeply rooted and continually practised in Korean society. The landmark reform of the family law will be analysed in connection with the local women's movement, national politics and international organisations. In the beginning, the women's movement was led by pioneer feminists who established local women's organisations and submitted petitions to national lawmakers. In the early 1970s, feminist groups began to continuously mobilise the grassroots. After the transition to democracy in the late 1980s, public approval for the abolition of the head-of-family system began to grow at the local level. At the same time, the government increasingly signed up to international treaties and adjusted to global norms. With expanding political opportunities locally and globally, the women's movement was able to increase the pressure on the national government. Finally, the National Assembly voted for the abolition of the head-of-family system.

Acting out Crusoe: Pedagogy and Performance in Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

Acting out Crusoe:Pedagogy and Performance in Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature Andrew O'Malley (bio) Well before Robinson Crusoe and the robinsonade became dominant features of the children's fiction landscape in the Victorian period, eighteenth-century writers for children explored the pedagogical utility of Defoe's most famous novel with a mix of enthusiasm and caution. Victorian robinsonades were, as many critics have remarked, primarily boys' adventure tales, championing empire, colonial expansion, and the masculine ideal of rugged, self-sufficient individualism.1 Eighteenth-century pedagogical writers tended to consider Robinson Crusoe in terms of its value to the promotion of the emerging middle classes' ideals, singling out in the novel the moral qualities they thought most necessary to inculcate in the rising generation: thrift, perseverance, industry, and piety, for instance. Many of these authors, however, expressed reservations about the kinds of impressions the soft wax of the child's mind might take from a story of sea-faring adventure. Eighteenth-century pedagogues regarded Crusoe as admirably independent, yet the children whom they would have become like him had paradoxically to be dissuaded from aspiring to an independence that threatened parental authority and social order. Sarah Trimmer's somewhat mixed feelings about Robinson Crusoe were undoubtedly shared by many of her contemporaries. Reviewing the book for her Guardian of Education, Trimmer praised it for "shewing what ingenuity and industry can effect, under the divine blessing" and for acting as "a stimulus to mental and bodily exertion, and patient perseverance" (298). It was a book, however, that required parental supervision or at least a child reader with a "mind and temper [that] have been properly regulated," in other words, one who had already been successfully interpellated as the type of self-regulating subject that much eighteenth-century pedagogy [End Page 131] was geared toward producing. Trimmer's famous anecdote of the two boys who "in consequence of reading the History of Robinson Crusoe, set off together from their parents' houses, in order to embark on some ship, with the hope of being cast on an uninhabited island" demonstrates the period's anxiety over the child's insufficiently mediated consumption of Defoe's narrative (298). The mother of one of these boys dies from the "anxiety of mind" his departure causes in her. While Defoe's novel rightly demonstrates "the misery that follows the breach of filial duty," this valuable lesson, it seems, is "commonly overlooked, when the curiosity of the mind is strongly excited, and the feelings powerfully engaged, by the circumstances of the story" (298–99). The concerns Trimmer expresses in her review of Robinson Crusoe are revealing on a number of counts, and point to two issues that were central to didactic writing in the late eighteenth century. The first has to do with a kind of experiential, and I would suggest theatrical, exemplarity: a preferred didactic method in the period, but one that presented certain challenges to educators. Behavioral and textual models for children needed to excite a desire for emulation, but emulation could easily go astray if not properly moderated. The second issue concerns the lessons children were expected to learn from stories such as Robinson Crusoe, specifically how to negotiate between the desirable individualism and independence exhibited by a solitary man on an island and the potentially radical rejection of authority and proper subordination this figure could imply. This concern had particular urgency for readers in the necessarily dependent state of childhood, and required that children's adaptations render the story compatible with the dictates of social and familial hierarchy. Such eighteenth-century adaptations of Defoe's novel as Joachim Campe's The New Robinson Crusoe and Madame de Genlis's "The Children's Island" both employ performance in their versions of Crusoe's story, which strengthens its pedagogical effects, while yoking the story's individualism and independence to social and familial well-being. In so doing, they provide insights into why and how their source novel became so successful as to generate the countless adaptations and robinsonades that would claim a central place in the canon of children's literature.2 Trimmer expresses in her review a desire, on the one hand, to see...

Hierarchy of periodic solutions families of spatial Hill’s problem

Many modern space projects require the knowledge of orbits with certain properties. Most of these projects assume the motion of a space vehicle in the neighborhood of a celestial body, which in turn moves in the field of the Sun or another massive celestial body. A good approximation of this situation is Hill’s problem. This paper is devoted to the investigation of the families of spatial periodic solutions to the three-dimensional Hill’s problem. This problem is nonintegrable; therefore, periodic solutions are studied numerically. The Poincare theory of periodic solutions of the second kind is applied; either planar or vertical impact orbits are used as generating solutions.