non-Western Communities Research Articles

Betwixt and Between: Ethnoarchaeology, Women, Susan Kent

The gilded Marshalltown traditionally went to the guy dressed in faded khakis, eyes squinting in a weather-beaten face, pipe in hand, trowel in the belt (Flannery 1982:267). He dug square holes to ...

Sport Psychology for Development and Peace? Critical Reflections and Constructive Suggestions

In the fast growing field of “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP), often coordinated by Western organizations working in non-Western communities, many programs have a psychological orientation. Programs talk, for example, about using sport to develop life skills, to build self-esteem, to improve motivation, or to change prejudicial attitudes. This article draws on the evolving body of research addressing SDP, along with experiences with SDP in sub-Saharan Africa, to discuss both the problems and the potential for applying a psychological lens to sports and development. While I suggest caution in assuming psychological skills are central to international development—particularly as emphasizing individual level change risks obscuring the more serious structural realities facing many target communities—I will suggest that sport psychology can offer useful listening skills, research skills, and collaboration skills towards a genuine contribution to meaningful SDP.

Afrocentric Approaches to Working with Immigrant Communities

In this paper I present a case for using an Afrocentric approach in community development work with young African diaspora communities. The challenge faced by social work and community development in working with such immigrant groups is that the dominant individualistic-based theoretical approaches do not work effectively for people from communities with collective understanding of themselves. An Afrocentric approach means that the Africans see themselves as agents, actors, and participants in determining their destiny rather than as marginals in the Community Development workers’ designs based on Eurocentric theories. Equally applicable is the Ubuntu philosophy that is also based on African cultures, emphasises that our human destiny is both as a collective as well as individuals. This approach helps to understand the importance of families and the relatives for diaspora communities. It also helps to explain the problems encountered by such communities. There are lessons to learn about working with non-Western communities from a community development perspective and reclaiming community development for communities as well in the 21st century.

Adolescent Perceptions of Social Media in a Pacific Rim Community

This study explored social media use among 50 adolescents attending a public high school in a non-Western community. Adolescents participated in focus group interviews and completed a written self-report survey. Findings revealed that these teenagers use electronic communication forms such as phone texting and social networking sites to connect with friends and family. They show a preference for Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, do not engage in risky Internet behavior, and acknowledge both positive and negative aspects of electronic communication forms. In addition, their selection of electronic communication forms is dependent upon several factors that include the strength of the relationship and type of discourse exchange. For example, they reserve phone texting and cell use, which are more private communication mediums for family and friends. Electronic communication did not replace face-to-face interactions; rather it complemented and extended those interactions. Findings support existing literature on adolescent social media use and those shared with other collectivist cultural groups.

Emotion in Exchange: Situating Hmong Depressed Mood in Social Context

AbstractThe connections between emotions and social exchange in non‐Western communities remain largely uncharted. I conducted long‐term anthropological fieldwork on the dynamics of depressed mood in exchange cycles from 2000 to 2002 in Hmong highland villages in the Province of Luang Phabang, Laos. Hmong gift and commodity exchanges embody diametrically opposed values and different social configurations. Hmong depressed mood (tu siab) emerges as a regulatory device at the tension‐laden intersection of these opposing spheres of social exchange. Tu siab is part of a bidirectional process that connects the individual and social realm and may be conceived of as a means of local cultural resistance to global processes of monetarization and commodification. Comparison to Hmong communities in French Guiana reveals that depressed mood plays a key role in the regulation of exchange even after substantial socioeconomic transformations in the framework of global and local market economies. These data provide evidence of the deep embeddedness of Hmong depressed mood (tu siab) in specific cultural contexts, challenging universalizing and psychopathologizing approaches to cross‐cultural research on emotions.

1611 The Comorbidity of Chronic Pain and Insomnia in a Community Adolescent Sample: Prevalence and Association with Sociodemographic and Psychosocial Factors

Background and AimsThe comorbidity of chronic pain and insomnia has received increasing research attention in Western clinical pediatric populations; yet, little is known about its sociodemographic and psychological correlates in...

The Comorbidity of Chronic Pain and Sleep Disturbances in a Community Adolescent Sample: Prevalence and Association with Sociodemographic and Psychosocial Factors

The comorbidity of chronic pain and sleep disturbances has received increasing research attention in Western clinical pediatric populations; yet, little is known about its sociodemographic and psychological correlates in non-Western community pediatric populations. This study aimed to examine the prevalence of comorbid chronic pain and sleep disturbances and its associated factors in a community sample of Chinese adolescents. A total of 1,518 adolescents aged from 11 to 19 years participated in this school-based study. Apart from sociodemographic background, participants were assessed on chronic pain, sleep disturbances, depression, perceived stress, and social support. Prevalence of co-occurrence of chronic pain and sleep disturbances was determined. Participants with single symptom were compared with those with symptom co-occurrence on pain characteristics and sleep patterns. Multiple regression model evaluated factors associated with symptom comorbidity. While the prevalence of chronic pain and sleep disturbances was 11.4% and 25.6%, respectively, the overall prevalence of comorbid chronic pain and sleep disturbances was 19.1% (95% confidence interval: 16.9, 21.4). Fully adjusted stepwise regression analysis identified being female, more depressive symptoms, and higher perceived stress to be significantly associated with comorbid symptoms. Adolescents with both symptoms reported significantly more pain sites, higher worst pain, and higher pain-associated interference than those reported chronic pain only. Participants with comorbid symptoms also had poor subjective sleep quality, greater sleep disturbances, and more daytime dysfunction than those reported sleep disturbances only. Our data offered preliminary evidence that comorbid chronic pain and sleep disturbances occurred among about one-fifth in the present sample of Chinese community adolescents. Future studies should examine whether the two symptoms interact with each other in affecting the physical, mental, and cognitive development of adolescents.

Conradian contracts: exchange and identity in the immigrant imagination

Conradian Contracts: Exchange and Identity in the Immigrant Imagination Tamas Juhasz Lanham: Lexington, 2011. xiv + 218 pp.Themes of displacement, alienation, and feature heavily throughout the terrain of Conrad's works, and Conrad's own sense of exile as a Polish native has been well documented. In addition, many have noted that Conrad as a struggling writer experienced disappointment in low commercial sales, constantly in debt for most of his career. In Conradian Contracts: Exchange and Identity in the Immigrant Imagination, Tamas Juhasz combines these two aspects of rejection-the social and the economic-to suggest that Conrad considered economic success as an avenue towards social integration for the displaced, foreign individual, an interpretation that, Juhasz argues, manifests within Conrad's novels and short stories through varied forms of transactions, pacts, and systems that mingle the financial-commercial sphere and the personal-social sphere in an individual's problematic attempt to (re)gain a lost sense of fulfillment and unity.Relying heavily on Jacques Lacan, Juhasz considers the concept of commerce to include any relationship that encompasses sites of desire, recognition, and reciprocity, defining exchange as the substitution or replacement of one thing for another. In this way, connections between dissimilar objects (and people) can be made, connections which are also dependent on dialogue, or some type of communication, and on a metaphorical agreement of value. Juhasz believes Conrad's works display an understanding of trade and commerce as sites of desire and that his characters express a yearning to return to, in a Lacanian sense, a unified, complete self. This desire for wholeness, particularly evident in the imagination of diasporic and marginalized subjects, constitutes a narcissistic search for an ideal self that is both unattainable and illusory. According to Juhasz, the tension among the realms of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real is expressed primarily through systems of exchange: Conrad's characters avoid the Real through engagement with cultural transactions within the Symbolic order which also is incompatible with the Imaginary because transactions are purely dualistic manifestations (32). Equipped with a broad, psychoanalytic definition of commerce and reciprocity, Juhasz includes five novels (Almayer's Folly, Under Western Eyes, Secret Agent, Lord Jim, and Nostromo) and three short stories (Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, and The Duel) in his analysis. Juhasz fully outlines his interdisciplinary approach in Chapter Two, but he begins his first chapter with an analysis of Almayer's Folly in order to portray how Conrad's first novel anticipates the motif that will become dominant in Conrad's later works. Juhasz analyzes Almayer's various failed attempts to achieve social connection and recognition, including through his quasi-incestuous relationship with daughter Nina. Contesting Thomas Moser's infamous dismissal of Almayer's Folly's romance as an uncongenial subject (qtd. in Juhasz 9), Juhasz instead views the narrative romance as an integral parallel to Almayer's trading relationships, or another version of the motif that promises personal fulfillment, of easing the pain of isolation (32), to the displaced individual in much the same way trade promises economic fulfillment. However, Juhasz contends that Almayer's withdrawal and ultimate death speaks to his inability to establish a successful system of reciprocity, attributed to Almayer's failure to adjust to a nonWestern community but also represents the fractured ties of the modern self with community. only return Almayer receives is an absolute (but unprofitable) act of return to the state of non-being (20). Juhasz's in-depth analysis of Almayer's Folly sets up thematic elements such as the threat of annihilation, broken community, subversive desires, and commodity that will reappear in subsequent chapters, and prepares readers for a comprehensive study that will bring together postcolonial, gender, and psychoanalytical-linguistic criticisms. …

Lessons from the 2004 Asian tsunami: Epidemiological and nosological debates in the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder in non-Western post-disaster communities

The nosological validity of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) remains controversial in non-Western communities. After natural disasters, epidemiological studies often overlook these conceptual debates and assess post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) by short screening instruments. Such PTSS estimates are reported as inflated prevalence rates of PTSD in post-disaster settings. To discuss the prevalence and determinants of PTSS within the context of pertinent epidemiological and nosological debates. We assessed PTSS and grief symptoms of 643 survivors from five Indian villages struck by the Asian tsunami using the Impact of Events Scale - Revised and Complicated Grief Assessment Scale. We adopted a case control design and employed complex sample multiple logistic regression statistics to study the determinants of PTSS. The prevalence of PTSS was 15.1% (95% CI 12.3%-17.9%). PTSS was significantly associated with traumatic grief, female gender, physical injury, death of children and financial losses, but not with functional disability (p = .91). Although PTSS were common in this population, elevating them to a psychiatric construct of PTSD is questionable, when functional impairment and avoidance behaviours were absent. Grief reactions, socio-economic burden, and poor support systems contribute towards PTSS. We highlight the important issues regarding the nosological validity and epidemiology of PTSD in non-Western communities.

Universalism and the new museology: impacts on the ethics of authority and ownership

The emergence of the new museum studies in the late twentieth century forged a rearticulation of museum ethics with respect to the prerogative of diverse stakeholders to claim authority and ownership of museum objects. Stemming in part from indigenous claims to collections, the incipient representational critique accepted (if critically) the ethical foundations of repatriation and shared authority. The recent Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum, augmented by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussions of cosmopolitanism, substantively contradicts this ethic by creating a divide between the universal and the local in the ownership of cultural property and the definition of knowledge. These ambiguities engender conflicting reactions in an author sympathetic to indigenous repatriation claims, but invested in museums as didactic and preservative sites. True to the claims of the universal museum, local claims to material culture do problematize the idea of the museum, but the ethical commitments to the representation of non-Western communities inherent to the new museum studies require it. This paper examines the intellectual foundations of this contradiction and the resulting impact upon the ethical collection and display of museum objects.

The presence of religious organisations, religious attendance and earnings: Evidence from Indonesia

This article examines the socio-economic significance of religious institutions in non-western communities using data from a survey of around 500 heads of households across nine Pesantren in Indonesia. It finds that local community benefits from more intense interaction with the local religious leaders of Islamic boarding schools ( Pesantren) than does the external community. But the direct benefit of living close to Pesantren only matters for religious participation, not for earnings. However, the study finds that religiosity is more positively significant for earnings of the community surrounding the Pesantren, probably due to networking effects. Hence, community involvement of religious leaders can indirectly and positively affect earnings of the surrounding community. The overall results suggest that Pesantren contribute to the formation of social capital, particularly in the form of religiosity, which contribute to the improved welfare of the surrounding community.

Women Writing History: Looking Backward and Forward

Women Writing History:Looking Backward and Forward Durba Ghosh (bio) Kathleen Canning . Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 224 pp. ISBN 0-8014-8971-6 (pb). Kate Davies . Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 336 pp. ISBN 0-19-928110-6 (cl). Julie des Jardins . Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 400 pp. ISBN 0-8078-5475-1 (pb). Devoney Looser . British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 288 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7905-1 (cl). Bonnie G. Smith , ed. Women's History in Global Perspective, 3 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004–2005). 960 pp. Volume 1: ISBN 0-252-02931-3 (cl); 0-252-07183-2 (pb). Volume 2: ISBN 0-252-02997-6 (cl); 0-252-07249-9 (pb). Volume 3: ISBN 0-252-02990-9 (cl); 0-252-07234-0 (pb). Reginald Zelnik . Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography (Seattle: Donald Treadgold Studies on Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, 2005). 152 pp. ISBN 0-252-07234-0 (pb). Devoney Looser's British Women Writers begins with a summary of "herstory," a mode of writing history that grew out of Second Wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bridging a political commitment between feminist activism and feminist scholarship, "herstorians" attempted to produce histories written by women about women (1–3). A generation later, the herstory movement may seem outdated, but it remains a reference point for explaining the emergence of the particular books in this review. Several of these books challenge this particular chronology of the emergence of herstory; Kate Davies, Julie des Jardins, and Devoney Looser [End Page 162] analyze women who felt themselves to be historians in periods when the writing of history by women was unusual. Reginald Zelnik's account of the life and work of Anna Pankratova treats her more as a historian and a committed Communist Party member than as a woman. All, though, reframe the project of herstory by arguing that women were always in one way or another engaged in writing history—collecting records, making arguments, and constructing narratives—well before they were recognized as historically significant and welcomed into the historical profession in the late twentieth century. While five of the titles reviewed focus on women writers of history in American and European contexts, the three volumes of Bonnie Smith's Women's History in Global Perspective, commissioned by the American Historical Association's Committee on Women Historians, chronicle another aspect of the early-twenty-first-century emergence of women's history as a field within the profession. The three volumes have distinct goals and ambitions, but they share a political commitment to integrate women's and gender history into the subdiscipline of global and world history, which has largely resisted critical feminist analysis. The essays in this series are synthetic accounts, written by distinguished feminist historians who address history writing and history making by women in both Western and non-Western communities. This review is organized somewhat chronologically and, in the spirit of dialogue, in pairs in order to read one scholar's methodologies against another's. Although the books themselves are wide ranging—three are academic monographs, one is a revised set of previously published essays, one a posthumously published book, and the final three a set of synthetic essays—each offers us rich possibilities for how one might write the history of women at particular sites and moments. Looser's British Women Writers takes up a broad timespan and a broader range of authors than does Davies's Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, which examines the correspondence of two women. Nonetheless, they have some significant overlaps, both in argument and in material. They both examine Catharine Macaulay, who was widely known in late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American circles. While Looser situates Macaulay among the other figures in her study, Davies examines...

Human Rights and Social Provision

Human rights queryfalse are typically presented in terms of entitlements, correlative duties, claims, “trumps,” and remedies. 1 These framings, which draw principally on law and philosophy, emphasi...

Science, science education and their discontents: a response to commentaries on the paper, Portrait of a Science Teacher as a Bricoleur: A case study from India

In this response to commentaries by Ali Sammel, Jhumki Basu and Alberto Rodriguez, I present my perspective on three important issues raised by the commentators. These issues relate to the role of a researcher in her field settings and society, the critique of science and science education as oppressive dominant discourses, and co-opting participants as researchers. I argue that researchers should work actively for progressive change in discursive fields such as educational research, in which they are firmly embedded rather than playing an interventionist role in field settings where their discursive positionality maybe temporary and not that rooted. Regarding the critique of science and science education, my response favors a perspective wherein an understanding of the marginalization and oppression of non-western communities caused by western science and science education is counterbalanced by an appreciation of the ways in which marginalized communities can use science and science education for affecting progressive change. Lastly, I recognize the value of co-opting participants in writing and communication of research. Open image in new window

Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria

In The Harmony of Illusions, Allan Young questioned whether the category of trauma, which first emerged during the nineteenth century, could be referred back through historical time and identified in, for example, Pepys's diary, Shakespeare's plays, or the epic of Gilgamesh as certain literary scholars have claimed. Young concluded that this was not possible, that none of these pre-nineteenth-century texts refer to what we now know as traumatic memory because this form of memory was not available to their writers. For Young, our sense of identity is shaped as much by our conceptions of what memory is as by the memories that we have. Trauma, like other forms of memory, is a historical and cultural product, which is not to deny its reality or the suffering that is associated with it but rather to locate that reality in the individual and collective investments that are made in it and in people's beliefs and convictions. In sum, Young argues, This disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these effects and resources (5). The emergence and diagnosis of trauma attracted the attention of clinicians and researchers throughout the western world. Its influence rapidly spread through the Americas, Britain, Australia, Europe, and Israel; and it was used in turn to describe and to shape treatment of responses to extreme events in many different situations. Young reminds us that trauma is not a universal category found in many different places and times but rather a discourse of memory that emerged at a specific time-in the late nineteenth century--and that is embedded in and inseparable from the particular concerns of western culture. Building on the work of Young, a group of professional aid workers articulated in Rethinking the Trauma of War their growing concerns regarding the uncritical export of trauma discourse to non-western societies. Based on their own experience of helping adults and children to rebuild their lives after the devastation of war, the contributors to this volume underline that because the concept of trauma derives from a particular (western) cultural orientation to suffering, its relevance to non-western communities may be limited; that trauma, in other words, should be regarded not as scientifically neutral but as culturally specific in its concepts and interventions. The volume highlights three particular assumptions that are inherent to and embedded within current trauma discourse. First, this discourse operates on the basis of a strongly individualist approach to human life, with a marked emphasis on the disengaged self and on intrapsychic conflicts. However, this notion of the self may not be valid in many non-western cultures, which are predicated on alternative notions of the self and its relationship to others. Secondly, it is assumed that the forms of mental disorder that are described by western psychiatry map unproblematically onto those found elsewhere. However, in non-western contexts, it is likely that the idioms of distress vary considerably; the emergence of a particular symptom does not necessarily mean that it has the same meaning or significance across different cultures. Finally, the emergence of a professionalized trauma discourse has tended towards the handing over of memory to experts to pronounce on its meaning and significance. The assumption that the West represents the center of expertise, which is exported to non-western war zones, risks ignoring local concepts of suffering, misfortune, and illness and eliding those discourses of loss and bereavement that may fulfill the role for the local community that in western cultures is provided by the trauma discourse. While they do not critique the relevance and efficacy of trauma discourse in the West, the contributors to the volume provide a compelling argument that its dominance in approaching the suffering of non-western societies can silence local perspectives on what is important and blind us to alternative ways of helping. …

Social sustainability in the transport sector: an essential requisite for sustainable mobility

Sustainable mobility emphasises the need to integrate mobility into an overall pattern of sustainable development. Previous researches point towards altering the patterns of transport by focusing primarily on the goal of environmental-protection and economic efficiency. Mobility, however, is a socially contextualised phenomenon operating beyond mere 'transport/ movement'. Its linkage with the ideas of liberty, equity, risk and need necessitate a more generic understanding to pursue the goals of sustainable mobility in a practical and achievable fashion. As a pilot study, this paper reviews the mobility patterns and needs of non-western immigrants in Norway to shed light on the 'social sustainability' ethos using both quantitative and qualitative analysis in the realm of transport planning. It establishes a case for fair distribution of mobility resources among the non-western immigrant community in Norway to achieve one of the primary goals of sustainable development, namely, equity and social justice.

Lifetime comorbidity of obsessive–compulsive disorder with psychiatric disorders in a community sample

Epidemiological research indicates that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) still constitutes a major public health problem. To study the comorbidity of psychiatric disorders in OCD subjects in a non-Western community sample, 25,180 individuals were interviewed face-to-face at home according to DSM-IV for diagnosis of psychiatric disorders by 250 trained clinical psychologists. The subjects were predetermined with a randomized cluster sampling method among all families residing in Iran. From 444 individuals diagnosed as OCD, 157 (35.4%) developed at least one of the psychiatric disorders. The most common comorbid psychiatric disorders were major depressive disorder and simple phobia. Comorbidity of two or more additional psychiatric disorders in OCD individuals was rare. There was no difference between genders in the comorbidity of psychiatric disorders with OCD. Low comorbidity of psychiatric disorders with OCD shows that OCD tends to occur in isolated rather than as cluster problems in a clinical sample.

Socio-economic and psychological correlates of suicidality among Hong Kong working-age adults: results from a population-based survey

The global toll of suicide is estimated to be one million lives per year, which exceeded the number of deaths by homicide and war combined. A key step to suicide prevention is to prevent less serious suicidal behaviour to preclude more lethal outcomes. Although 61% of the world's suicides take place in Asia and the suicide rates among middle age groups have been increasing since the economic crisis in many Asian countries, population-based studies of suicidal behaviour among working-age adults in non-western communities are scarce. Data from a population-based survey with 2015 participants were used to estimate the prevalence of suicidal ideation and behaviour among the working-age population in Hong Kong, and to study the associated socio-economic and psychological correlates. We focused particularly on potential modulating factors between life-event-related factors and suicidal ideation. Six per cent of the Hong Kong population aged 20-59 years considered suicide in the past year, while 1.4% attempted suicide. Hopelessness, reasons for living, and reluctance to seek help from family and friends had direct association with past-year suicidal ideation. Reasons for living were found to moderate the effect of perceived stress on suicidal ideation. Suicidality is a multi-faceted problem that calls for a multi-sectored, multi-layered approach to prevention. Prevention programmes can work on modulating factors such as reasons for living to reduce suicidal risk in working-age adults.

Caregiver Sensitivity in Cultural Context: Japanese and U.S. Teachers' Beliefs About Anticipating and Responding to Children's Needs

Western investigators assume that caregiver sensitivity takes similar forms and has similar outcomes in all cultures. However, cultural research suggests that sensitivity in the West has more to do with responsiveness to children's explicit expression of need, and that sensitivity in non-Western communities has more to do with anticipation of children's needs and receptivity to subtle and nonverbal cues. To date, no studies have directly assessed these differences. The present study examines interviews of 20 preschool teachers, 9 from the United States and 11 from Japan. Teachers were presented with scenarios and asked whether it is better to anticipate or respond to children's needs. Findings support the hypothesis that U.S. teachers prefer to respond to explicit expressions of need and that Japanese teachers prefer to anticipate children's needs. U.S. teachers also emphasize that children should learn to depend on themselves, that children are responsible for clarifying their own needs, and that children's self-expression should be encouraged. By contrast, Japanese teachers emphasize that children should learn to depend on their teachers, that teachers are responsible for clarifying children's needs, and that teachers must make assumptions about children's needs. These findings have implications for helping Japanese children and their parents adapt to the U.S. preschool setting.

Suicide prevention and social capital: A Samoan perspective

This paper draws on the example of Samoa to argue that Western models of health promotion and suicide prevention, especially those which draw on conventional understandings of social capital, are not appropriate for non-Western communities, for they are generally not sensitive to cultural beliefs, values and rituals. As such, the value of homogenously promoting social capital as an adjunct to suicide prevention strategies needs to be questioned. Suicide prevention and resilience strategies must be culturally relevant and developed ‘by the people for the people’, to address the nature of the suicide problem in Samoa.