Intimate Ties Research Articles

Couples' Social Careers in Assisted Living: Reconciling Individual and Shared Situations.

Despite important connections between relationships, health, and well-being, little is known about later-life couples' daily lives and experiences, especially those who are frail. Our aim was to advance knowledge by gaining an in-depth understanding of married and unmarried couples' intimate and social relationships in assisted living (AL) and by generating an explanatory theory. Using Grounded Theory Methods, we build on past research and analyze qualitative data from a 3-year mixed-methods study set in eight diverse AL settings located in the state of Georgia. Data collection included participant observation and informal and formal interviews yielding information on 29 couples, 26 married and 3 unmarried. Defined by their relationships with one another and those around them, couples' experiences were variable and involved a process of reconciling individual and shared situations. Analysis affirms and expands an existing typology of couples in AL. Our conceptual model illustrates the multilevel factors influencing the reconciliation process and leading to variation. Findings highlight the strengths and burdens of late-life couplehood and have implications for understanding these intimate ties beyond AL. Intimate and social relationships remain significant in later life. Strategies aimed at supporting couples should focus on individual and shared situations, particularly as couples' experience physical and cognitive decline across time.

Susanah Shaw Romney. New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America.

Susanah Shaw Romney. New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America.

Exchange and Intimacy in the Inner City

Drawing on three years of fieldwork among a group of young men and women from a poor urban community in Northeastern United States, I explore the salience of sibling ties in the lives of poor urban youth. Observations reveal that siblings provide crucial support in navigating institutions such as school, work, and criminal justice system. Proximity in age combined with familial piety and exposure to almost identical family, school, and neighborhood often means that sibling ties have unique implications for survival against poverty. However, I also point out several negative effects of influence through intimacy. While scholars have long grappled with the issue of survival through kinship ties, as well as its role in limiting upward mobility for the poor, I illustrate the cost of exchange on intimate ties. Obligatory exchange under the constraints of poverty often blur the line between exchange and unconditional love. Those who provide resources desire obedience or make decisions for those they provide for, and dependency makes relationships fraught with hostility.

New Netherland Connections. Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America by Susanah Shaw Romney

New Netherland Connections. Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America by Susanah Shaw Romney

New Netherland connections: intimate networks and Atlantic ties in seventeenth-century America

New Netherland connections: intimate networks and Atlantic ties in seventeenth-century America

The Morbid Nexus: Reciprocity and Sorcery in Rural East Java

For the past few decades, the idea that witchcraft and sorcery are closely linked with the experience of capitalism has proven captivating. Leading international anthropologists, such as the Comaroffs, Geschiere, Ong and Taussig have argued for the modernity of the supernatural. They have demonstrated that, instead of declining in the modern period, beliefs and practices associated with evil spirits and magic are regularly invoked to explain the experience of capitalism. As useful as this approach is, focusing on capitalism's connection with evil spirits and magic does not necessarily imply a break from the classical anthropological accounts of reciprocity. In Banyuwangi, a district of Java, Indonesia, harmful magic is deeply embedded in reciprocity and local relationships as much as in relationships of capitalism. In other words, these classical accounts of intimate ties between harmful magic and reciprocity can be usefully married with the ideas of the modernity of the supernatural.

Leave Taking: Materialities of Moving Over Land

Drawing on recent theories of materiality and non-human agency, this article examines the aftermath of a compelling episode in American history, the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. In particular, I focus on certain ‘extensions’ of the massacre victims, as they encounter and become entangled with other material traces and embodied remembrances over the course of the twentieth century. An initial illustration of this process is drawn from the life history of an Arkansas native whose movements to and from his homeland have entangled him in the vast assemblage brought together by the events at Mountain Meadows. I then turn to the rupture in this assemblage that was triggered in 1999 by the exposure of human bones at the massacre site. Materiality theory highlights the ways in which some objects (or their parts) persist and remain inalienable, while others circulate with varying degrees of freedom. Patterns of persistence and circulation are analysed here by focusing on two kinds of objects with intimate ties to the massacre victims: the bodies of the 17 surviving children, and six buttons made of glass and metal.

Postdiagnosis social networks and lifestyle and treatment mechanisms in the Ater Breast Cancer Pooling Project (ABCPP).

115 Background: Larger social networks have been associated with better breast cancer survival. To investigate potential mediators, we evaluated associations of social network size and diversity with lifestyle and treatment factors associated with prognosis. Methods: We included 9,331 women from the After Breast Cancer Pooling Project who provided data on social networks within two years following diagnosis. A social network index was derived from information about the presence of a spouse or intimate partner, religious ties, community participation, friendship ties, and numbers of relatives. Diversity was assessed as variety of ties, independent of size. We used logistic regression to evaluate associations with outcomes and evaluated whether effect estimates differed using meta-analytic techniques. Results: Associations of social networks and outcomes generally did not differ by cohort. Because of the low prevalence of smoking and alcohol consumption in the Shanghai cohort, however, analyses of smoking and alcohol included US cohorts only. Women who were socially isolated (small networks) were more likely to be obese (body mass index>30 kg/m2, OR=1.21, 95% CI:1.03-1.42) and have low physical activity (<10 MET-h/wk, OR=1.53, 95% CI:1.34-1.75) compared to socially integrated women. Women with low network diversity were more likely to be current smokers (OR=3.68, 95% CI:2.19-6.19) and have high alcohol consumption (>15 g/d alcohol, OR=2.43, 95% CI:1.60-3.69). Among node positive cases, socially isolated women were more likely not to receive chemotherapy (OR=1.52, 95% CI:1.03-2.25). By contrast, low network diversity, but not social network size, was associated with greater odds of not receiving adjuvant hormonal therapy (OR=1.52, 95% CI:1.03-2.23). Associations with surgery were nonsignificant. Conclusions: In a large pooled cohort, small, less diverse social networks measured post-diagnosis were associated with more adverse lifestyle factors and less intensive cancer treatment, which may help to explain poorer breast cancer prognosis in socially isolated women.

Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography

Acknowledgments I Parenting and Fieldwork: Introduction 1. Work and Home (Im)Balance: Finding Synergy through Ethnographic Fieldwork * Joanna Dreby and Tamara Mose Brown 2. Theorizing the Field: Beyond Blurred Boundaries and into the Thick of Things * Barbara Katz Rothman II Experiences of the Expecting 3. Sociological Pregnancy: On Gestating Research, Writing, and Offspring * Erynn Masi de Casanova 4. Emerging Breasts, Bellies, and Bodies of Knowledge: How Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Matter in Fieldwork * Jennifer A. Reich III Managing Mothers 5. The Intimate Ties between Work and Home * Joanna Dreby 6. Motherhood and Transformation in the Field: Reflections on Positionality, Meaning, and Trust * Leah Schmalzbauer 7. Parents and Children, Research and Family, Life and Loss: Living the Questions of Doing Ethnography * Chris Bobel IV Tentative Fathering 8. Passing as a Parent: Playground Fieldwork in the Shadow of the World Trade Center * Gregory Smithsimon 9. Making Up for Lost Time: My Son, My Fieldwork, My Life * Randol Contreras 10. Kids Change Everything: How Becoming a Dad Transformed My Fieldwork (and Findings) * Charles Aiden Downy V Challenging Children 11. Fourteen Months, Four Countries, and Three Kids: Tales from the Field * Tanya Golash-Boza with Raymi Boza, Soraya Boza, and Tatiana Boza 12. Reflections on Ethnographic Childhoods * Steven J. Gold 13. Just Don't Take Notes at Any of My Games or Do Anything Weird: Ethnography and Mothering across Adolescence * Sherri Grasmuck Contributors Index

The Socio-emotional Loneliness and Communication Skills of Preschool Teacher Trainees

During the past decade, loneliness has begun to garner more attention-so much that two separate types and perspectives of loneliness have emerged: emotional loneliness and social loneliness. Emotional loneliness results from the absence of close or intimate ties (usually with a spouse, lover, parent, or child), whereas social loneliness results from a lack of involvement with a network of peers, fellow workers, neighbors, or friends. Several events can cause socioemotional loneliness in the daily life of an individual. One of the most important problems that lead to socio-emotional loneliness is the need to communicate with a social environment. Communication skills may affect our socio-emotional skills and social relationships. This study focuses on the relationship between the socio-emotional loneliness and communication skills of preschool teacher trainees. Two hundred and forty-four university students attending early childhood programs took part in this study. The Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults-Short Form (SELSA-S) and Communication Skills Evaluation Scale (CSES) were used to collect data. The findings showed that loneliness and communication skills were relative factors.

The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle by Bernhard Rieger (review)

Reviewed by: The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle by Bernhard Rieger Brian Ladd (bio) The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle. By Bernhard Rieger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 416. $28.95. As an innovative machine that became a cultural icon, the Volkswagen Beetle demands a blend of technological and cultural history. The People’s Car delivers both. Fundamentally, however, this book is a business history, tracing the emergence of the firm that grew up around its main product, while adding substantial material on the car’s reception among consumers. The topic requires a scholar who is well-versed in the history of the automobile as well as that of Nazi and postwar Germany. Fortunately, Bernhard Rieger proves to be both. After an introductory survey of early automotive history, the book’s second chapter explains the Beetle’s Third Reich origins. The ambitious engineer Ferdinand Porsche exploited Hitler’s desire to promote mass motorization in order to produce a sophisticated design (more robust than the rival Citroën 2CV and Fiat 500) and an entirely new factory, and a new city, to manufacture it. Once it was done supporting the Nazi war effort, the enormous factory in the newly named Wolfsburg offered both headaches and opportunities to shattered postwar Germany and the region’s British occupiers. The occupation years are the subject of the third chapter, as the Nazi people’s car somehow escaped the taint of the Third Reich and went into production under difficult conditions. Chapter 4, the longest, offers a general history of postwar German car culture, as automobiles—especially the now-reliable and ubiquitous Beetles—became the symbols of a new freedom as well as an acceptable if sometimes controversial outlet for male aggression and bloodshed. Chapter 5 follows the successful export product abroad, looking briefly at the Beetle’s less-than-spectacular arrival in Britain before turning to its remarkable growth in the U.S. market and its emergence as an icon of American culture. Rieger dwells no more than necessary on the astonishing irony of this banner product of Hitler’s militant racism coming to embody the pacifist individualism of the hippie, along with its (perhaps less astonishing) apotheosis as Herbie the Love Bug in a Disney movie. Next he charts the decline of the now-obsolete Beetle as it was withdrawn from the U.S. and German markets in the 1970s and ’80s. It makes sense, therefore, that chapter 7 takes the story to Mexico, where production of the car in Puebla continued until 2003 and where its users bestowed on it a uniquely Mexican identity with scarcely a hint of its German origins. A final chapter functions as a kind of postscript, divided between the development and sales of the superficially similar New Beetle, developed in Germany in the 1990s specifically for the U.S. market, and accounts of hobbyists and collectors in many countries who obsess over old Beetles. [End Page 275] Rieger is clearly impressed by the Volkswagen company’s leadership and resilience, and in places the book takes on a boosterish tone. However, any apologetics are thoroughly tempered by accounts of the company’s sometimes bitter labor disputes in Germany and Mexico. Nor does Rieger whitewash the firm’s intimate ties to some of the Third Reich’s horrors, notably its eager exploitation of slave labor during World War II. The subtitle’s claim to a “global history” is perhaps a little overstated, but the substantial accounts of Germany, the United States, and Mexico fill out a portrait of a car that was an international success story without any precedent—certainly not its only rival in total production numbers, the very American Ford Model T. There are no startling revelations in Rieger’s story, and his analysis remains cautious and subtle. In view of his topic’s scope, it is no surprise that his research is more broad than deep. He uses some archival material and interviews to supplement his principal reliance on published sources. The writing is reliably clear if neither elegant nor especially concise. Each chapter concludes with a fairly lengthy summary, and a brief epilogue...

Cdc48: A Swiss Army Knife of Cell Biology

Cdc48 (also called VCP and p97) is an abundant protein that plays essential regulatory functions in a broad array of cellular processes. Working with various cofactors, Cdc48 utilizes its ATPase activity to promote the assembly and disassembly of protein complexes. Here, we review key biological functions and regulation of Cdc48 in ubiquitin-related events. Given the broad employment of Cdc48 in cell biology and its intimate ties to human diseases (e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), studies of Cdc48 will bring significant insights into the mechanism and function of ubiquitin in health and diseases.

On Viviana A. Zelizer: Economic lives. How culture shapes the economy (2011, Princeton University Press, Princeton)

This recent book contains the essence of the outstanding work of Zelizer concerning her analysis of economic institutions from the perspective of culture and society. Economic activities are viewed using a micro-habitual approach according to which our casual habits and everyday actions are embodied in monetary transactions which reflect power relations and social structures. The earnings and expenditure of a loving couple or the resources that a household allocates to a child, etc., represent economic dilemmas which involve our most intimate ties as parents, children, partners and lovers.

Introduction to ‘Soul and Culture’

This introduction briefly places Karl Mannheim’s 1918 lecture on the crisis in relations between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ culture in the context of Mannheim’s negotiations with Georg Simmel’s sociology of culture, as mediated by the young Mannheim’s intimate ties to Georg Lukács and his circle.

The promotion of unhealthy habits in gay, lesbian, and straight intimate partnerships

Health habits are linked to nearly half of U.S. and British deaths annually. While a legacy of research suggests that marriage has important positive consequences for health habits, recent work emphasizes that intimate ties can also deter from healthy habits and promote unhealthy habits. However, few studies examine the mechanisms through which unhealthy habits are promoted in marriage. Moreover, little research explores how unhealthy habits are promoted in intimate ties other than marriage—such as in gay and lesbian cohabiting relationships. The present study analyzes the mechanisms through which gay, lesbian, and straight long-term partners (N = 120) contribute to one another's unhealthy habits. Three distinct mechanisms emerge. First, respondents identify a process of unilateral health habit diffusion wherein one partner's health habits directly influence the other partners' habits. Second, respondents describe bilateral unhealthy habit diffusion, wherein both partner's unhealthy habits are reinforced via mutual pleasure seeking or mutual failed motivation. Third, respondents describe a discourse of personal responsibility, wherein both partners purposefully fail to deter one another's unhealthy habits. Analysis further illustrates how these mechanisms operate differently for men and women in gay, lesbian, and straight relationships.

Battling with Memleket in London: The Kurdish Diaspora's Engagement with Turkey

Since the late 1980s there has been a significant migration of Kurds from Turkey to various countries in Western Europe. Even though Kurds from Turkey make up a significant proportion of London's ethnic minority population, they constitute an ‘invisible’ diasporic community, both in terms of the current debates surrounding ethnicity and the Muslim minority in the UK, and in diaspora studies. This article examines how the Kurdish diaspora interacts with, and relates to, their country of origin. It highlights their resistance to, and struggle with, Turkey (as defined by their displacement and suppression of cultural and linguistic rights) as well as the close and, at times, intimate ties Kurds continue to maintain with Turks and Turkey. Whilst the first is conceptualised as ‘battling with Turkey’, the latter is conceptualised within the framework of ‘memleket’ (homeland) ties. The article explores how the Kurdish diaspora encodes its orientation towards, as well as its resistance to, Turkey; in so doing, it brings visibility to this largely ignored and understudied, yet politically very active, diasporic formation in London.

Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (review)

Reviewed by: Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf Anne Besnault-Levita Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Claire Drewery. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 150. $99.95 (cloth). In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in modernist fiction by women. Within the context of the diversified new modernist studies, much work has focused on reviving supposedly minor writers while others have offered new critical perspectives on the short fiction of famous authors such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.1 But since Dominic Head's 1992 study of the modernist short story and his statement that the genre "ought to be seen as centrally involved in the revolution in fictional practice,"2 Claire Drewery's book is the first to take up the subject of modernist short fiction's specificity by examining the complex interconnections between genre, gender, and liminality through an original corpus of texts. In fact, one of the achievements of her book is to convince us, if need be, that the marginalized Richardson and Sinclair should be included in a study of female modernism. Her research also makes a valuable [End Page 214] contribution to recent scholarship on the literary codings of female experience in modernist fiction, although she specifies in her introduction that "the liminal themes common to women's short fiction are . . . characteristic traits of both modernism and the short story in general" (11). Drewery's book maps the locations of liminality in the short stories of Mansfield, Woolf, Richardson, and Sinclair not just as a "pervasive theme" but as a trope expressing "the condition of short fiction as genre" and revealing how it is often preoccupied with "in-between spaces," "moments of interlude," "crises of identity," and the transgression of "boundaries, whether psychological or social, thematic or theoretical" (3). As the liminal is a "complex phenomenon," "both palpable and intangible" (4), Drewery draws on the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralist theory with illuminating readings from Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and Terry Eagleton, among others. Her main thesis is that "as writers, as modernists, and as women," Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf "negotiate [liminality's] embodiment of an ominous threat of exclusion with a realm of creative and potentially subversive possibility" (13). As such, her work offers a new reading of the tensions, paradoxes, and ambivalences that are central to the aesthetics of the modernist short story while showing the intimate ties between liminality and "women's subjectivities" (11). The book falls into six chapters, all of them exploring a different aspect of the liminal through the textual analysis of a few representative stories. The first chapter focuses on the spiritual and aesthetic metaphor of the journey as a spatial, temporal, and psychological experience of alienation, exile, and transience. In the second chapter, Drewery addresses the subject of mortality and mourning, two hardly articulable liminal and subjective conditions the representation of which challenges the modernist drive towards formal and structural unity. She offers particularly subtle and convincing pages on Mansfield's fictions of haunting memories. The third chapter logically moves from "impossible mourning" to the study of death as a pervading theme and generic trope whereby modernist short fiction negotiates its intrinsic impulse towards an absent "other." Expanding on the recent research on modernism's nostalgia for the past and its resulting "uncanny tradition" (67), the fourth chapter offers a thought-provoking discussion on the psychological and psychoanalytical gothic in a few short fictions by Sinclair and Woolf, and analyses how this other type of liminal experience is conveyed through an experimental and elliptic prose. In the following chapter, Drewery uses Julia Kristeva's theory of signification, Judith Butler's notion of performativity (to me the most useful reference here), and the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on Modernity and Ambivalence to look in a fresh way at the modernist literary representation of "inner life," its paradoxes and dilemmas. Her concluding chapter explores the link between the modernist epiphanic moment and the liminal condition by building on the recent research on...

“Inhospitable Splendour”: Spectacles of Consumer Culture and Race in Wharton’s Summer

Research Article| March 01 2012 “Inhospitable Splendour”: Spectacles of Consumer Culture and Race in Wharton’s Summer Gary Totten Gary Totten Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (1): 60–89. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-2010 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Totten; “Inhospitable Splendour”: Spectacles of Consumer Culture and Race in Wharton’s Summer. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2012; 58 (1): 60–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-2010 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Gender, health behavior, and intimate relationships: Lesbian, gay, and straight contexts

Many studies focus on health behavior within the context of intimate ties. However, this literature is limited by reliance on gender socialization theory and a focus on straight (i.e., heterosexual) marriage. We extend this work with an analysis of relationship dynamics around health behavior in 20 long-term straight marriages as well as 15 gay and 15 lesbian long-term cohabiting partnerships in the United States (N = 100 individual in-depth interviews). We develop the concept of “health behavior work” to align activities done to promote health behavior with theories on unpaid work in the home. Respondents in all couple types describe specialized health behavior work, wherein one partner works to shape the other partner’s health behavior. In straight couples, women perform the bulk of specialized health behavior work. Most gay and lesbian respondents—but few straight respondents—also describe cooperative health behavior work, wherein partners mutually influence one another’s health behaviors. Findings suggest that the gendered relational context of an intimate partnership shapes the dynamics of and explanations for health behavior work.

Couples counseling with Latinos

Intimate ties and emotional relationship gain the function to confirm, to stabilize and, afterwards, to structure the coherency's model of the structured self-organization up to that moment. When the couple perceives the bond of the relationship such as a sole and exclusive for a person, they take a leading role to be able to deduce a sense of individuality and uniqueness in the way to feel himself in the world. Based on these considerations, in this paper I propose a brief description of a counselling method, which characterises the work I am carrying out since several years in the counselling and therapy with couples.