Local Social Order Research Articles

The trace of the trees: a historically situated geospatial assessment of deforestation in Bosawas biosphere reserve

ABSTRACT Deforestation is often framed as one of Nicaragua’s most pressing ecological challenges. Historically, the country has addressed the issue by relying on fence-and-control approaches to conservation. This is the case of Bosawas, the largest biosphere reserve in Central America. Despite advancements in remote sensing data, few spatially explicit attempts have been made to assess how this type of conservation scheme interacts with the country’s deforestation trends. This research combines two independently generated high-resolution land cover maps and agrarian census data to assess the extent of deforestation that has taken place in Bosawas from 1990 to 2022. Our findings indicate that the establishment of the biosphere reserve has proven ineffective in preventing deforestation and evidence that its current trend is closely related to the encroachment of capitalistic agrarian-based modes of production. This encroachment is rooted in a long history of state-led interventions, which has led to the gradual dissolution of local customary social orders, allowing the penetration of new ones that privilege individualistic and profit-oriented forms of land tenure and resources exploitation. Hence, conservation strategies that neglect the historical and political-economic roots of deforestation in Bosawas risk aggravating territorial conflicts and facilitating land dispossession modalities affecting mostly local inhabitants.

Social order in Sweden's politicized and vulnerable neighborhoods – The perspective of residents

AbstractThis paper draws attention to a group of neighborhoods that are the object of heated elite discussions in many European countries. Using Sweden as our case, we demonstrate the feasibility of conducting high‐quality surveys with residents in neighborhoods where large shares have an immigrant background and low socioeconomic status. Moreover, we develop a measurement that allows us to assess what residents in two of Sweden's politicized and vulnerable neighborhoods think is needed to improve the social order of their local areas. We find that residents believe that neighborhood problems are generally about a lack of social control between people and that residents are not preoccupied with culture clash issues. Overall, beliefs about what contributes to social order are structured, largely homogenous and independent of elite discourse. Based on a comparison with a nationally representative sample, we conclude that residents in vulnerable neighborhoods and residents in other neighborhoods share a similar worldview and approach to daily life, but that the need for local social order is more keenly felt in the vulnerable neighborhoods.

Centrifugal Forces Impacting Urbanization in the Eastern Mediterranean during Roman and Early Islamic Times

My goal with this essay is to make the existence of a distinctive Levantine cultural paradigm a lens through which to examine long-term patterns of urbanization and cultural change in the Eastern Mediterranean—focusing especially on present-day Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Inspired by the agenda and approach of global history, the essay is an attempt to highlight a number of salient features of societal formation processes in this region that set them apart from such processes in the heartlands of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The paradigm holds that societal formation dynamics in the Levant have been dominated more by centrifugal than by centripetal forces, thus predisposing local social order in the region towards greater local agency, resiliency, polycentrism, heterarchical social structure and societal complexity less conspicuously reflected in grand monumentality. The implications of this hypothesis for understanding urban resilience in the Late Roman and Early Islamic periods in the Eastern Mediterranean will be explored drawing, in particular, on previous research on the “cities of the Decapolis” and on findings of archaeological excavations at Tall Hisban and the wider Madaba Plains region in Jordan.

Study on the Long-Term Prevention and Control Mechanism of Evil Forces in Villages

The existence of evil forces in rural areas undermines local social stability and economic order, brings tremendous harm to people’s life and personal safety, and also threatens the achievement of the whole goal of a peaceful China. Since the launch of the special struggle against evil forces, China has achieved remarkable results in combating evil forces in rural areas, but improvements are still required. This paper attempts to summarize the dilemmas in the fight against evil forces in rural areas and put forward targeted suggestions for the establishment of a long-term prevention and control mechanism for evil forces in rural areas, so as to provide theoretical references for the realization of the normalization of the fight against evil forces.

The heart and soil of value-based business: emerging circular business network and vernacular accountings

ABSTRACT The way individual actors in organisations are involved in local social orders and handle knowledge to manage everyday tasks may take various forms not sanctioned by formal organisational hierarchy, yet with the potential to affect a company’s managerial work and guide the development of formal practices. This qualitative case study deploys the concept of vernacular accountings (Kilfoyle et al., 2013) to an organisation building a business in a circular economy (CE) context. The case illustrates locally self-generated accountings as an inherent part of an organisation’s management system’s development and as tools individuals apply to manage their occupational tasks to cope with a diversity of beliefs and traditions within CE networks. The case organisation is an intermediary of industrial side streams circulation in the agricultural sector, allowing for examination of the role human–nature relationships and local understandings play in developing organisational processes and accounting practices. Moreover, the study illustrates how vernacular accountings may reveal deficiencies in formal officially sanctioned systems and thus contribute to developing management accounting and control practices. In this view, the way individuals interact, participate in vernacular information economies and produce information to justify their decisions may play a key role in understanding management accounting and control in a nonconventional business environment. The study also emphasises the importance of understanding various orientations towards sustainability and nature embraced by participants in CE business networks, suggesting that vernacular accountings may hold the potential to capture this diversity.

Community development in Chinese commodity housing estates through civic action

In contrast to the ‘community lost’ argument describing the changing local social order in urban China, an increasing amount of local civic action is occurring in newly built Chinese commodity housing estates through the application of local social networks and capital, enabling the development of local community life. On the basis of the key themes underlying local civic action, in this study we develop a theoretical framework linking the application and development of local social networks and capital through multiple civic action steps by applying a dichotomised definition of social networks and considering the involvement of multiple stakeholders within China’s institutions. In a case study of a newly built Chinese commodity housing estate, we used interviews and questionnaires to identify social changes in the neighbourhood inspired by civic action that promotes place attachment, mutual trust and civic responsibility. The development of local community life is created in a heterogeneous neighbourhood, and the influence of civic action on the local social order is reflected within the Chinese context.

Whose integration?

Lingering spatial disparities within the EU have often been explained by macro-level structural trends. However, studies have also spelt out the role of local agency in organising social integration processes through local institutional arrangements. The agency of socially skilled local actors is acquired by recombining various resources and denotes their capacity to (re)negotiate the web of local relations and membership in the community through the distribution of developmental goods and controlling access to services. Informed by theories of development as institutional change and strategic action field theory, our paper analyses the evolution and action of this local project class in organising social order by acting as brokers between the institutional environment and local institutional arrangements. Our research question hinges upon the process through which the project class (re)combines resources in order to maintain local social order based on their own perceptions and visions of the locality. Empirical evidence was gathered through various qualitative research projects over two decades, supplemented by recent follow-up interviews with the same actors in a small peripheral town in northern Hungary. Our extended research indicates that maintaining local social order derives from the local elite’s perceptions of spatial injustice, which means maintaining pre-existing social and class positions. This is a highly selective process and reflects degrees of vulnerability within the local community.

On the History of the Palladian Architecture in British Colonies. On the Example of the Singapore Architecture in the First Half of the 19th Century

The article deals with the history of the spread of the Palladian tradition in the architecture of the British colonies. The reasons why the spread of the architectural style was not ubiquitous are revealed in detail. A list of English colonial possessions and a brief description of the specific policy conditions that influenced the architecture development in each of the regions are given. Specific examples demonstrate the change processes in the Singapore architecture. The selfless activity of F.Raffles, the Governor of Singapore, who was passionate about A.Palladio’s ideas in architecture, is described. Examples of projects of public buildings and private mansions are considered. Different periods of style transformation are highlighted; certain examples demonstrate the specific influence of local building materials, climate, public sentiment and social order on architecture. The question of the neoclassicism influence on Palladian architecture and the emergence of neo-Palladian design during the eclectic period is raised. Also, the description contains examples of architectural projects from other countries in the region, in particular Sri Lanka and Burma. Some of the examples go beyond the chronological period of the first half of the 19th century in order to demonstrate the establishment of the Palladian tradition in some countries of Southeast Asia. Colonial Palladianism is evaluated on the example of the architecture of Singapore and India.

Making Good and Breaking Bad: Materiality and Community in Netherlandish Cities, 1380–1520

Abstract This article discusses community formation at a neighbourhood level from a material-spatial perspective. It argues that a wholesome, safe, ‘good’ living environment required both social harmony and well-functioning material (infra-) structures. Neighbours’ conflicts, mined from the court records of five cities in the late medieval Low Countries, provide the evidence for two main themes. The first concerns making things, especially houses and their attendant facilities, and the second breaking things: acts of deliberate destruction within living environments, and by implication, breaking communal peace. Neighbours took on diverse roles, among which their more material commitments have remained especially underexplored by historians. Yet the shared use, construction and upkeep of facilities and infrastructure around domestic spaces, which were of high value, had considerable influence on power relations and social interactions. Groups of neighbours participated in legal validation processes and offered physical help to each other, but also policed local social order and bad behaviour. The latter often involved damaging material constructions. Such informal communities thus acted as links to more formalised urban structures and organisations, and as foundations from which the latter could develop. Their interactions with central urban governments were more multidirectional and contested than has often been assumed. Understanding the social-material dynamic at the neighbourhood level therefore reveals an important layer in pre-modern urban politics.

Wrestling Gym in Dagestan as a Space for Masculine Socialization

Abstract The paper analyzes the process of sports gender socialization of boys and adolescents in the case of freestyle wrestling in Makhachkala, the capital of the Russian North Caucasus Republic of Dagestan. The methods and practices of educating future men in the wrestling gym are functionally related to the model of hegemonic masculinity rooted in the local gender and social order, which is under pressure from urbanization and modernization. The wrestling gym insulates students from both the “demoralizing” influence of the home environment and the marginalized scripts of masculinity associated with street life. Through training, boys and adolescents acquire a masculine habitus that can later become the basis for their careers in sports and other spheres of social life, as well as the social capital necessary for successful participation in coalition clinches. They internalize the principle of consistency in gender and age stratification and the lifestyle associated with the ideology of “muscular Islam.”

Embodied and affective negotiation over spatial and epistemic group territories among school-children: (Re)producing moral orders in open learning environments

This study investigates how schoolchildren organise their spatial and epistemic ‘territories’ among peer groups to constitute local social and moral orders in open learning environments. Open learning environments, the result of recent school reforms in Finland, challenge the conventional organisation of traditional classrooms. We use a microanalysis of naturally occurring video-recorded interactions to show the interactional dynamics of how children produce epistemic and spatial territories by creating moment-by-moment unfolding participation frameworks and emotional alliances. We suggest that the lack of institutional structures in open learning environments withholds children from the territorial shelters that exist in more traditional classrooms. Therefore, open learning environments make students and their peer groups more vulnerable in terms of their social face (Goffman, 1955), including their competence and skills, as they are constantly exposed to other people's observations and criticisms of and interventions in their peer groups. Our results shed light on the tendency of human beings to produce spatial and epistemic structures and moral orders where none exist.

Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia ed. by Kathryn Robinson (review)

Reviewed by: Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia ed. by Kathryn Robinson Thomas Gibson Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia. Edited by Kathryn Robinson. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. 2021. 277 pp. ISBN 978-981-325-120-5 [End Page 212] This volume contains a collection of essays by nine authors all of whom collaborated on a research project on 'Being Muslim in Eastern Indonesia'. The project was based at the Australian National University in Canberra and the Universitas Hasanuddin in Makassar, South Sulawesi. Each author focusses on the role played by the local imam in their area of research. This was an inspired methodological decision. Local communities have a wide range of latitude in the way they select their imams, who are often among the most respected members of their communities. Local imams must navigate an increasingly complex field of competing opinions about what constitutes correct doctrine and practice, as well as changing social and economic conditions. In most cases, their goal is to ensure that all members of their congregations can continue to worship together in peace while continuing to preside over the life cycle rituals that reproduce the local social and cosmic order. The essays explore a wide range of ways local imams go about these tasks, providing a window into the way global currents of religious opinion, national economic development, and increasing levels of higher education are assimilated at the local level throughout Eastern Indonesia. Rather than trying to synthesize the material in the volume, I will summarize the most notable features of each paper. A bit of background is in order. In many parts of Eastern Indonesia, the local population is divided between those who follow the practices endorsed by the 'traditionalist' Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) organization and the 'modernist' Muhammadiyah organization. For the past hundred years, the Muhammadiyah has been denouncing many Indonesian local customs, adat, as contrary to Islam, claiming that they amount to the worship of beings other than Allah (syirk), or that they constitute illegitimate innovations in scripturally mandated religious practices (bid'ah). Many of these so-called 'local customs' were not local at all, but were practiced throughout the Islamic world in the precolonial period. They were based in the oral transmission of scriptural knowledge and in the mystical traditions of the Sufi brotherhoods. These practices were called into question only when modern schooling created a class of educated lay persons and when vernacular translations of Islamic texts allowed them to bypass the interpretations of the ulama who had been trained in the traditional oral way. Educated modernists saw excessive mysticism as one of the reasons why the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe and subjected it to severe criticism. Traditionalists were at first put on the defensive, but soon began to justify their practices in new ways. In Indonesia, tensions between the followers of the NU and Muhammadiyah seem to have moderated over the past generation as imams have altered certain practices in response to modernist criticism, and as modernists have adopted a more tolerant attitude toward some of the practices they continue to view as ill-founded. A prime example of this is the recitation of the Maulid an-Nabi by Jaffar al-Barzanji (1716–1764), a poetic account of the life of the Prophet, during life cycle rituals throughout Indonesia and elsewhere in the Islamic world. Modernists regard this practice as showing the Prophet undue veneration on a par with Allah, and so as a species of syirk, traditionalists are fiercely devoted to it. This disagreement has the potential to disrupt a great many life cycle rituals, and imams must be able to finesse the issue. [End Page 213] More recently, a new generation of students has come under the influence of the views of the Salafi movement emanating from Egypt and Saudi Arabia that is far less willing to accommodate local cultural practices anywhere and that seeks to impose a uniform interpretation of Islam on the global community. It is this latter current of opinion that local imams must now seek to accommodate to maintain some level of social harmony. Muhamad Adlin Sila discusses the way members of the royal family of...

Implementing community-based forest management in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest: a strategic action fields perspective

ABSTRACT We assess the conditions under which forest-dependent groups in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest may overcome inequalities in the legal access to forest resources. Through the development of contrasting case studies, we address attempts made by two community-based associations that represent those groups to legalize their timber production. We explore the dominance and mobilization of resources and draw on the Strategic Action Fields perspective to organize and systematically compare the case studies. Results reveal that to overcome existing barriers to legalization, communities need to create a social movement dynamic to seize opportunities caused by the exogenous interferences in local social orders. Skilled social actors need to mobilize powerful supporters to accumulate resource endowments necessary to put forward the legalization process. These results are particularly important considering the enormous environmental importance of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest, the increase in deforestation rates, and the precarious socio-economic situation of forest-dependent peoples.

Odor as a medium of cohesion and belonging1

Within the social sciences, family research in sociology has in recent years – and for good reason – taken to adopting a “practical turn” to its subject. Drawing on the concepts of doing and displaying family, numerous authors have provided valuable insights into the everyday dynamics of establishing and maintaining personal relationships. However, surprisingly little research can be found on the sensorial foundation of family relationships. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) It seeks to shed light on the still neglected sensory dimension of family practices by tracing fundamentals of a sociology of the senses in general and of odors in particular. (2) Based on qualitative research on multi-local families after separation and divorce, these considerations will be introduced as a lens helpful in studying current family practices in shared residence arrangements. These families are confronted with the challenge of establishing attachment and a sense of “we-ness” against the background of cyclical growth and reduction of the household community and the changing rhythms and patterns in their everyday lives. Following Goffman’s The Territories of the Self, we will explore how parents and children stabilize and also sensorily experience a local social order and belonging. In this, odors are of particular importance. Beyond verbal communication, they have a potential for merging what is separate and at the same time maintaining distinctions.

Convergence and local orders in the dynamics of change in higher education: a perspective from Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the leadership and management challenges of a public university in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of academic managers. Based on a series of interviews at one of the regional universities established in the mid-2000s, the paper sheds light on one of those rarely investigated contexts where models of public management are arbitrarily patched on frameworks of institutional governance in the name of modernisation. The perspective of those tasked with implementing the modernisation agenda of the government within recently established universities is considered here, in an attempt to highlight the fortune of prescribed models of university governance and management in their confrontation with local social and cultural orders. A micro-level situationist perspective is adopted, drawing on the concept of local orders to identify local factors affecting the organisational capabilities and institutional status of a remote institution where the dominant cultural and social orders permeate workplaces more easily. Our unique perspective also reveals an increasingly diverse Saudi higher education landscape, and the challenges it poses to the government’s one-size-fits-all model of governance for public universities.

‘Just ask Eric’: On the Importance of Governance Efficacy, Territorial Ties and Heterogenous Networks for Rural Development

AbstractTerritorial capital is more than economy, business and socioeconomic status of residents. It is also the way residents of localities form social networks and how these are intertwined with the local political, institutional and administrative configurations. Sampson (2011) argues that while social networks foster the conditions under which collective efficacy may flourish, they are not sufficient for the exercise of social cohesion and social control. Networks have to be activated to be meaningful. Interaction is embedded in local traditions and social order is produced locally. Analysing interviews from a rural location in Denmark, we examine how referential features of group life (spatial areas, relations, shared pasts) generate action. We develop the concept of ‘governance efficacy’ to denote the capacity to mobilise collective efficacy in relation to territorial development. We argue that such a concept is an important element in explaining why and how a peripheral location is able to manage social challenges despite population decline.

Regional dialect and multiethnic youth style in a Danish social housing project

ABSTRACTThis paper presents an empirical account of the use of regional dialect and multiethnic youth style by young speakers who are born and have grown up in Vollsmose, an ethnically and linguistically diverse neighbourhood in the city of Odense, Denmark. By combining a quantitative analysis of linguistic variation with insights drawn from ethnographic fieldwork, the paper will demonstrate how multiethnic youth style and regional dialect are used in complex configurations that vary systematically with the social organisation among peers. The article gives an account of these complex linguistic patterns and shows how they form part of the local social order in Vollsmose. Overall, analyses show that linguistic differences run along gendered lines: non-standard features are used primarily by boys with the exception of one ethnically associated feature which girls use more than boys. However, the study points to considerable gender-internal variation as well, since boys’ use of non-standard features corresponds with their social affiliations. One socially prominent group of boys uses a ‘hybrid register’, comprised of both ethnically and regionally associated features; another group uses only ethnically associated features, while the rest use only the regional dialect.

OSMANLI AİLE YAPISININ MİLLET SİSTEMİ İÇİNDEKİ KONUMU

Çalışmada ilk olarak Osmanlı Devleti içerisinde yaşayan toplulukların, idari yapılanmalarında uygulanan millet sistemi ele alınmıştır. İslam devletlerinin temel esasına dayanan “ümmet” anlayışıyla yürütülen bu idari sistem; toplulukların aile yapısına da sirayet etmiştir. Osmanlı Devleti’ne özgü sosyal düzen olan millet sisteminde bireyler. Dâhil oldukları mabetler ekseninde idare olunurdu. Osmanlı topraklarında yaşayan topluluklar, dini aidiyet ile zikredilir; mahalli oluşumlar, içtimai düzen ve toplumsal normlar din ekseninde özerk bir formda şekillenirdi. Osmanlı Devleti, her milletin kendi idari düzenini yürütmesine izin vermekteydi. Aynı topraklar üzerinde ayrı dil, din ve ırka mensup topluluklar bir arada yaşamış; bu durum topluluklara benzer sosyal alışkanlıklara ve kültür etkileşimlerine sahip olma imkânı sağlamıştır. Farklı din ve mezhep isimleriyle anılan milletlerin aile müessesine bakışı, evlilik ve çocuk sayıları gibi detayların incelendiği çalışma; sosyal hayattaki benzerlik ve farklılıkları ortaya koymayı amaçlamıştır. Toplum hayatının en temel birimi olan ailenin, Osmanlı millet sistemi içerisindeki konumu çalışmanın asıl konusunu oluşturmaktadır.

Moral order among members of a friendship group of preschool boys

The making of assessment descriptions can be key processes in children's negotiations of the social and moral orders of their peer groups. This paper examines how a friendship group of preschool boys followed through a year-long video-ethnography construct their local social and moral order, through use of a particular interactional resource, membership categorizations. A collection of clips of the boys' use of membership categorizations was created and analysed. Overall, the boys frequently described their own (or pretend play characters') behaviours as 'fixing' and 'helping', and reacted positively to these descriptions, by agreeing to do the actions, carrying out the actions and including group members so described in play. Likewise, if one of the peers' behaviours was described as 'destroying', 'smashing' or a similarly aggressive action, the boys oriented to these named qualities as negative, through changing the play topic, moving away or sanctioning the person so described. We argue that the ways in which the boys use and respond to the referenced activities and index them as 'positively' or 'negatively' bound to the relationship category of being a good friend or peer group member determine what counts to the participants themselves as acceptable moral behaviour.

NÅR „PENGE“ ER ANDET OG MERE END PENGE: Røde fjerruller på Reef Øerne

Until the middle of the 20th century red feather rolls were an important and highly
 visible aspect of social life in the the Northern Santa Cruz Islands comprising Nendö,
 Reef Islands and Duff Islands. These rolls, commonly but misleadingly known and
 referred to as “red feather money” even in anthropological literature, by the 1970s had
 nearly gone out of use and by the 1990s they had disappeared. In this historical
 reconstruction the red feather rolls are viewed in their heyday in their regional as well
 as their local social context. The ethnographic knowledge behind the reconstruction is
 based on all the available sources of the precolonial and colonial periods, the major
 anthropological analyses of the 1960s and the 1970s and my own fieldwork data
 established after 1973. The anthropological analysis of the material takes guidance
 from Maurice Godelier (1978) who points out that valuables in primitive society often
 have a dual character, they are both commodities and gifts; and from Kajsa Ekholm
 (1978) who states that power relations in tribal societies are largely established,
 consolidated and maintained through the control of valuables. Red feather rolls played
 an important part in the regional trading system connecting the Northern Santa Cruz
 Islands. This peculiar form of valuable was only produced in the rich central island of
 Nendö from where it was taken to the more marginal islands as part of the inter-island
 trading, usually in exchange of women. The big trading canoes were only built in the
 Duff Islands and had to be for paid in red feather rolls. They were owned and sailed by
 the leading big-men in the Western Reef Islands who accordingly were able to exercise
 considerable control over the influx and the flow internally of the feather rolls. Feather
 rolls were indispensable in the gift-exchanges accompanying all major social ceremonies
 and events such as bridewealth, compensations and life-cycle ceremonies. So a generous
 local big-man could use his feather rolls for the benefit of his relatives and favoured
 friends who were in need of it, and at the same time he would make them into his loyal
 supporters. In this social system, control of the unique valuable was the major road to
 respect and influence, even to power, for the big-man. The red feather rolls were part
 of an intricate local social order which depended for its reproduction on the regional
 trading system. But all this had to disappear when market economy based on western
 money, Christian influence, and colonial control took over. The regional trading system
 collapsed; the red feather rolls lost their significance and the big-men the base of their
 power.