Harsh Life Research Articles

Buried in mud, digging for gold.

CAPTURED IN THIS DRAMATIC 1986 photograph, some 50 000 workers toil in the Serra Pelada open-top gold mine in the Amazon region of Brazil. The garimpeiros, or diggers, scratch through the soil at the bottom of the open pit, fill it into sacks each weighing between 65 and 130 pounds, and then carry the sacks up some 1300 feet of wood and rope ladders to the top of the mine, where it is sifted for gold. Because they work in mud, the gold diggers are called “mud hogs.”1(19) The workers are paid an average of 20 cents for digging and carrying each sack of soil—with a bonus if gold is discovered. As recently as 1994, there were an estimated 400 000 garimpeiros working in some 2000 active garimpos (artisanal mines) in Brazil, which has been a leading producer of gold and diamonds since the early 18th century.2 The average annual income of the garimpeiros is $2000. Because of high unemployment rates for unskilled labor, the supply of workers is unending. The photographer, Sebastiao Salgado, was born in Brazil in 1944. He studied economics in Sao Paulo and Paris and, after earning his PhD in 1968, worked as an economist trying to aid development in the Third World. During a trip to Africa, he decided that he could convey the harsh lives and human courage of the people more vividly by photographs than through his economic reports. He became a photographer, and has since won more than 50 international awards for his work. This image was part of a large project to document manual labor throughout the world. Salgado insists that his photographs are to be regarded as journalism, not art. His “militant photography” compellingly, and with a sad tenderness, depicts human and economic injustice while always respecting the innate dignity of the workers.3

Marriage, well-being, and agency among women

In a slum in Delhi, married women's sense of well-being is based on their everyday experience of sexuality, motherhood, and work. While they may not be deliriously happy or content in their lives as married women, they attain respectablility and status through marriage and childbearing, and exercise agency in speaking out against the oppressive conditions or abuse they may experience in their marriage. Marriage is essential to their sense of self-worth, and having a fully functioning body is essential to their role as wife and mother. Although women take control over their reproductive and related health, often against the advice of their husbands, they are unable to challenge patriarchal control over their sexuality. Woman's embodiment is rarely experienced for pleasure or joy; the body is an instrument for survival. Women's bodies are weapons used to survive a harsh everyday life in a world that is ordered by relations of gender inequality and economic necessity.

Recovering the voice of the oppressed: Master, slave, and serf in the Baltic provinces

Historians writing about the Baltic provinces allude to the harsh life of the peasants, but since the peasants did not leave their own historical records, their voice has been absent from scholars' accounts of the 700-years period of German domination. The elusive voice of the peasants may be found in the Latvian folk songs or dainas. The dainas inform us of the modes of oppression the peasants suffered and the modes of resistance they employed. They thereby contradict the widely held beliefs that the peasants had accepted their status and that the dainas do not depict concrete reality. This peasant poetry provides a window into their experience of slavery and thereby enables us to ground the history of the colonial period in that experience.

Children in Our Midst: Voices of Farmworkers' Children

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 2 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children in Our Midst: Voices of Farmworkers' Children McCartney, Irene (2000). Harare: Save The Children (UK)/Weaver Press; 160 pages. $14.95. ISBN 0797420754. In our efforts to understand the contested world of child labor, it is refreshing to be able to take a close look at the lives of working children in particular contexts, and to hear what the children have to say about their work. In these two new books from Zimbabwe, Earning a Life: Working Children in Zimbabwe and Children in Our Midst: Voices of Farmworkers’ Children, Weaver Press (in association with Save The Children UK and Redd Barna) has done an admirable job of bringing together child-centered research and even-handed analysis of the issues. Children in Our Midst is a rich ethnographic resource, beautifully organized and designed. Over 850 children from several farm working community schools in rural Zimbabwe participated in there search project to speak on a range of issues that affect them. Statements from the children are edited and arranged under thematic headings, with editor’s notes in the margins drawing the reader’s attention to key points in the children’s comments. The chapters, composed entirely of the children’s written or recorded statements, cover many aspects of the children’s lives, including their sense of self (“I am a child”), families, homes, work experience, school, customs and play (“Sometimes we have fun”). While the text is balanced with the voices of several optimistic and resilient kids, many of the testimonies describe a very harsh life, with difficult labor, unwanted pregnancies, the death of loved ones from AIDS, hunger and beatings for common transgressions such as stealing food. The words of the orphans are heartbreaking, such as this comment from Vengai Madya, age 189 14: “I sometimes think that if my mother was alive, I would be happy and I would have clothes” (McCartney, 32). The reflective introductory essay by SCF Zimbabwe Director Chris McIvor offers candid criticism of development practice that pays insufficient attention to children’s agency. He makes a strong case for children’s participation, describing the ways that charitable project soften proceed without sufficiently consulting with the beneficiaries of aid, resulting in negative impacts on communities. He raises yet again questions asked by advocates of participatory research for several years now, which bear repeating: “How did we interact with the people in these villages? How many of our project staff understood the language of the communities in which we were located? Did we take time to listen to their perceptions and views?” (McCartney, xiii). If working children were more visible and respected as workers, then forestry officers might speak to groups of children who have the job of collecting firewood, and water engineers might consult with the young people who collect the household water to ask where they should site a well or what type of equipment would be best. Agricultural advisors would focus agro-ecological education efforts on children and adolescents as well as their parents. Unfortunately that is rarely the case in East Africa, although it is more common is other contexts such as in Latin America. This is not simply a book that publishes the opinions of working children. It is a book that challenges our Western assumptions about healthy childhood. It paints vivid pictures of what it is like to grow up on commercial farms in Zimbabwe, with work responsibilities from a very young age integrated into education and upbringing, as a legitimate aspect of the local traditions. “The concept of childhood, “suggests McIvor, “is not only a luxury that few other cultures can afford, but is also something that local tradition implicitly rejects”(McCartney, xvi). In Earning a Life, Michael Bourdillon also takes up this theme. Speaking to those who would promote the Western concept of 190 work-free childhood as universal, he suggests that “perhaps it is time to turn the argument on its head and say openly that a ban on child labour [sic] inhibits the proper socialization of children”(Bourdillon, 7). In this useful collection of research papers, editor Bourdillon establishes a balanced, child-centered perspective, demonstrating...

25 Favorite Contemporary Memoirs

Book Reviews227 other, that could make apparent what is never quite said in one, never quite said in the other, but said only in their fragüe overlapping." So what is the story told not in either ofthe texts but in their interplay? Perhaps it is the story ofPerec's search for memory, his search for himselfas a victim of Nazism, a search for his childhood, of which, he teUs us, he has no recoUection (just before he goes on to show his recoUections in their fragmentary, fllusory forms; before he footnotes his memories to correct them, to cast doubt and play with the idea of memory). The juxtaposition ofthe texts suggests to me that Perec is trying to understand and undermine the Nazi mindset by extrapolating it, surprising readers with perspective shifts that view the same situation in different ways, that give further information that has been withheld previously. He takesAryanism to its only logical conclusion—a conclusion the Nazis may not have minded, but which the rest of the world is horrified at—that of complete destruction of most of humanity in favor of a privileged few. The interplay of the two texts aUows Perec to mirror his own childhood growth in the understandings of the fictional narrator. It also suggests that Perec may never find himself. Also from the fictional narrator's first page of writings we have that "For years I sought out traces of my history looking up maps and directories and piles of archives. I found nothing, and it sometimes seemed as though I had dreamt, that there had been only an unforgettable nightmare."This seems to me a map of what Perec is doing with his book. Mimi Schwartz 25 Favorite Contemporary Memoirs Good contemporary memoir invites the reader into a whole world, notjust a single fife. Here are 25 worlds that I, and my students, have loved entering . I could add 15 more easily, but these should appeal to a cross-section of interests: 1.Andre Aciman, Out ofEgypt—the author, now an American, grows up in a hflarious Jewish family living in exfle in twentieth-century Egypt. 2.Max Apple, Roommates—a wise, curmudgeon of a grandfather shares the author's room, physicaUy and spirituaUy, for 104 years, and beyond. 3.RusseU Baker, Growing Up—a wonderfuUy funny and poignant account of growing up during the Depression as a lazy boy with a pushy single mother who insists he "make something of himself." 228Fourth Genre 4.Kim Barnes, In the Wilderness—a coming-of-age memoir about a daughter's struggle to find herselfin a Pentecostal household in Idaho— and what it takes to leave that life. 5.Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate—a New Jersey boy grows up in the silences of his family's memories of the Armenian Holocaust—and sets out to uncover what happened. 6.Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China—a book that spans three generations of women in one Chinese family: the first, a concubine ; the second, an ardent Maoist; the third, who is the author, leaves China for England. 7.Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai—One woman's struggle to survive the Cultural Revolution in China with dignity and still save herself and her family. Wonderful insights into the history of those times. 8.Jill Ker Con-way The Roadfrom Coorain—a moving account of a childhood in the Australian outback and how a family, intent on doing everything right, struggles unsuccessfuUy to make it in the harsh life. 9.Cathy N. Davidson, Thirty-six Views ofMount Fuji—an American goes to Japan to teach English for a year. Offers wonderful cross-cultural insights. 10.Magda Denes, Castles Burning—a Hungarian family survives the Holocaust in hiding and then spends two years as DP's (Displaced Persons) in postwar Europe. 11.Helen Epstein, Where She Came From—a look at three generations of Jewish women from Eastern Europe and their legacy to theirAmericanborn descendent. A wonderful mix of memoir and historic research. 12.Lucy Grealy, Autobiography ofa Face—a book of courage about coming to terms with issues ofbeauty when you've had cancer of the jaw as an...

The performing genome: Genetics and the rearticulation of the human

This essay argues for the reconception of the human genome as performative inasmuch as the articulation of the genome does not merely describe or represent the body, but actually brings the body into being. Such a reconception suggests that human bodies and, by extension, human subjects are produced in acts of articulation and are therefore open to potential re-articulations, a suggestion with important aesthetic and political implications. After considering the act of cloning itself as a performative act, the argument shifts to a consideration of performance artist Ron Athey's 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life and Peter Greenaway's film The Pillow Book, arguing that the "articulated" subject figured by the clone may give rise to the "re-articulated" subjects figured by Athey and Greenaway. In this view, bodies become contested sites for the variable constitution of subjectivity itself.

"That All May Be One"

"That All May Be One"

An Epic for the Ladies: Contextualizing Samuel Butler's Theory of Odyssey Authorship

The issue of the personal voice in a literary or critical text raises a number of questions: does a written text contain more useful information if we know about the background of the writer? Is a reader better able to assess information or interpret a text if that reader knows where the text originates, what physical body or social identity or individual personality has created and shaped it? I came to the panel on personal voice at the 1996 meeting of the American Philological Association because these questions have vexed me on both a personal and professional level. I have come to understand the personal voice as a rhetorical posture that gains meaning according to its context and the motivations of its speaker or writer. In this paper, I will discuss my interpretation of Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey in the context of my own graduate school experiences. I will demonstrate the varieties of the “personal” as they are opposed to the “professional” in Butler’s work, specifically how the “personal” is allied with the feminine voice. I will then discuss the personal voice as a mode of discourse in the culture of professional training in graduate school and my own experience with this. In conclusion, I suggest that responsible pedagogy must engage with the issue of personal voice at all levels in order to deepen and enrich the imaginative and expressive lives of students and to aid their critical faculties as readers. The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) was written by Samuel Butler (1835‐1902), a Victorian amateur scholar and satirist who, after enduring the harsh life of a clergyman’s son, amassed a fortune in New Zealand and went on to write Erewhon (1872), a satire of English social and economic

Sir Ernest Gordon Cox, K.B.E. 24 April 1906 — 23 June 1996

Gordon Cox, who died in 1996 at the age of 90, had two distinct careers. The first, as a crystallographer and structural chemist, lasted from 1927, when he joined Sir William Bragg's group at the Royal Institution, to 1960, when he left the University of Leeds. He was a pioneer of three-dimensional methods in X-ray structure analysis. From 1960 to 1971 he was the highly regarded secretary of the Agricultural Research Council.Cox was born on 24 April 1906 at Pretoria Cottage, Southdown, Twerton, in Somerset, where his father was a market gardener. Three years later his sister Christine was born. A third child, Kenneth, died in infancy. His father, Ernest Henry Cox, was born in 1884. He outlived two wives, married a third in 1941 and died in 1987 at the age of 103. Gordon's mother, Rosina Ring, was twelve years older than his father. They had married at Claverton, near Bath, on 29 April 1905. Rosina, one of many children of a chef, had been sent with two of her siblings to Canada to work on a farm in Ontario in the 1880s. She returned in 1895, and her son Herbert Moffat was born on her return to England. Gordon's family consisted of this elder half-brother, whom he worshipped, and the younger sister, with whom he often quarrelled. His mother often told him of the harsh life in Canada but she had also had some enjoyment there. She died in 1931.

Resilient Response to Battering

Spouse abuse remains an important social problem. Recent research has begun to explore resiliency in a variety of areas: Why, despite harsh life circumstances, do some people survive and later thrive after experiencing trauma? What are the processes associated with a successful departure from abuse? The authors worked with a local shelter to identify three groups of women: (a) those currently at the shelter; (b) those who had been away from an abusive relationship for at least one year; and (c) those who were identified by shelter staff as having demonstrated a resilient response to battering, and compared experiences and recommendations between groups and discuss clinical and service implications.

A Fragmented Self Expressed in Animals: Maria Beig's Neomedieval Bestiary Hermine. Ein Tierleben

Maria Beig, born in 1920, took up writing fiction at the age of sixty and published her first novel at the age of sixty‐two. Beig's books describe the harsh lives that country women, especially farm women, had to endure until very recently. While critics were almost unanimous in praising Beig's first two books for their authenticity and stark realism, the reception of her third book, Hermine. Ein Tierleben (1984), was more ambivalent. Critics did not know how to evaluate this text. This article shows that Hermine. Ein Tierleben is composed according to aesthetic principles that lie strangely outside of our contemporary world. Writing in her own sixty‐fourth year, Beig uses the medieval form of the bestiary to represent in sixty‐four animals a woman's (almost) impossible search for self, individuality, and identity on a Catholic farm before 1950. The animals allegorically stand for Hermine's inner defeats. They die, become crippled, are slaughtered, are shot, or are eaten by other animals. I argue that in Hermine. Ein Tierleben, allegory both has and has not yet moved from the world around us to the world inside us (Benjamin). In Hermine we have a figure who attempts to find some fragments of a self by literally contrasting herself to animals.

South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan

The tales included here represent all of Yunnan Province's officially designated ethnic minorities, and include creation myths, romances, historical legends, tales explaining natural phenomena, ghost stories, and festival tales. The tales are peopled by memorable characters, such as the Tibetan mother who, reborn as a cow, comforts and helps her daughter into her harsh life as a slave girl; the two Kucong sisters who marry snakes; and the bodiless Lahu head-baby who grows up to win one of the earth-god Poyana's daughters in marriage. Chosen for their representativeness, aesthetic appeal, and variety, the stories provide rich examples of the folk traditions of Southwest China. South of the Clouds includes introductions and an appendix which describe the places and people of Yunnan, analyzethe literary and psychological characteristics of their stories, give the sources of the tales, and explain the methodolgy of collecting folk literature in China.

Iona: the living memory of a crofting community, 1750-1914

The Hebridean island of Iona has attracted outside interest for hundreds of years, from St Columba in the 6th century to the thousands of modern-day visitors. Yet very little has been written about the people who have lived and worked on the island. This book describes the economic and social history of the island folk from the mid 18th to the early 20th centuries, giving a full picture of their often harsh lives. It outlines the transfer from communal landholding to a crofting system in 1802, describes the dramatic effects of the 1846 potato blight, and the tensions between tenants and Estate which continued until the passing of the 1886 Crofters' Act. The distinctive traditions and culture which bound the islanders together, their parish church and school life, as well as the trades, crafts and growing tourist industry which supported them, are all looked at in this vivid picture of Iona's past.

Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820-1930

This book does not quite live up to its suggestive main title, but does live up to its subtitle. It is an engaging account of the economic, social, and political history of the British experience with addictive drugs. The major orientation is to opium, with two chapters on its alkaloid, morphine, occasional references to cocaine, and a mention of heroin. There is an enlightening discussion of reasons for the initial acceptance and then rejection of such drugs by Victorian Britain. Opium was a cheap and readily available antidote for the harsh life of the time and more effective than the traditional massive dosing by physicians. Its addictive nature gradually became apparent, and nonaddictive pain relievers such as aspirin became available. The nature of addiction is not discussed in any detail, aside from the author's definition of it as a physical discomfort and craving on withdrawal. The fact that cocaine is

Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade

From his looting of farmhouses during the Gettysburg campaign and robbing of fallen Union soldiers as opportunity allowed to his five arrests for infractions of military discipline and numerous unapproved leaves, John O. Casler’s actions during the Civil War made him as much a rogue as a Rebel. Though he was no model soldier, his forthright confessions of his service years in the Army of Northern Virginia stand among the most sought after and cited accounts by a Confederate soldier. First published in 1893 and significantly revised and expanded in 1906, Casler’s Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade recounts the truths of camp life, marches, and combat. Moreover, Casler’s recollections provide an unapologetic view of the effects of the harsh life in Stonewall’s ranks on an average foot soldier and his fellows. A native of Gainesboro, Virginia, with an inherent wanderlust and thirst for adventure, Casler enlisted in June 1861 in what became Company A, 33rd Virginia Infantry, and participated in major campaigns throughout the conflict, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Captured in February 1865, he spent the final months of the war as a prisoner at Fort McHenry, Maryland. His postwar narrative recalls the realities of warfare for the private soldier, the moral ambiguities of thievery and survival at the front, and the deliberate cruelties of capture and imprisonment with the vivid detail, straightforward candor, and irreverent flair for storytelling that have earned Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade its place in the first rank of primary literature of the Confederacy. This edition features a new introduction by Robert K. Krick chronicling Casler’s origins and his careers after the war as a writer and organizer of Confederate veterans groups.

Greek Biography Before Plutarch

The desire to celebrate the lives of famous men has no doubt been a fundamental characteristic of human nature since the beginning of time. The picture of ‘primitive’ man, squatting at night by a fire in the smoky cave, which served him for a home, relating his brief, rude, ancestral tales to an appreciative audience of two or three, rapt and forgetful (for a moment) of the harsh life outside, is neither unplausible nor improbable.It is perhaps possible (on the principle of ex pede Herculem) to disentangle some of the elements which contributed to the experience afforded by the relation of such stories. In an uncivilized community the dead exact a tyrannical homage from the living in order that the consequences of their imagined wrath may be averted. Hence they are to be placated by all means, and their memory is to be revered by the enumeration of the glorious exploits which they performed whilfe living. For, in the ‘next world’, whither they have been translated—call it the Elysian Fields, or what you will—they are conceived of as taking joy in the celebration of their valour and the recital of their achievements.Again, the tribe or race must be preserved, and there is no more suitable medium for the crystallization of tribal or racial virtues than oral tradition. The young men, as they listen to the deeds of their forefathers, are stirred by ‘this constant renewal of the good report of brave men’ and are themselves fired with the desire for an immortal name.