Family history,identity, and public history: writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200th year

Abstract

Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also involves an exploration of the many different ways in which contemporary Australians are active agents in the creation of historical knowledge when practicing family history.     

日本平安时代大江氏家族的贡举参与探究

大江氏家族是日本平安时代名闻遐迩的文化世家,公元7-8世纪中国科举制的东传为大江氏家族发展提供了重要契机。大江氏家族自始祖大江音人以来,读书应举,十一世父子、兄弟连第,可谓是英才迭出。研究大江氏家族的贡举参与不仅有益于剖析大江氏家族贡举成功的原因,还能把握大江氏家族与日本贡举制特征的内在关联性,挖掘贡举制度无法根植在日本社会的泉源。     

Work and Family Life among Migrant Factory Workers in China and Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Through on-site interviewing, a comparative study has been carried out about migrant factory workers in industrialised parts of China’s Guangdong province and in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. Even though China and Vietnam possess similar legacies of socialist transformation and have household registration regulations that restrict rural migrants’ access to urban social services and impede their settlement in cities, there exist marked differences in Guangdong and Ho Chi Minh City in migration patterns, factory work conditions and migrant worker family livelihoods. In particular, migrant families in Ho Chi Minh City largely stay intact and tend to settle there permanently, while married migrant workers in Guangdong normally need to split up their families and remain trapped in circular rural–urban migration. As shall be seen, the national and local governments play important roles in determining the inclusion or exclusion of migrants from urban life, the wages they are paid and their standard of living and, most important of all, their children’s access to education. Each of the two countries’ differences in implementing policies is examined and comparatively analysed.     

Revisiting Colonial Dismemberment in South Africa: On Cultural Text and the Mandela Nuclear Family

Abstract

For many years, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela—in a number of his public statements and writings—frankly expressed his regrets regarding the strain that his anti-apartheid activism put on his immediate and nuclear family. From his marriage to Evelyn Mase, and later to his second marriage to Nomzamo “Winnie” Madikizela, one central thread that permeates both is the impact of colonial-apartheid dismemberment on the Mandela nuclear family. Thus, the focus of this article is on the critical analysis of a cultural text that was authored by the late former statesman to reflect on various aspects of his life. Relying on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, the objective of the article is to understand how such a cultural text registers the idea of colonial-apartheid dismemberment as lived by the Mandela nuclear family under colonial-apartheid oppression. Besides the 27 years spent at Robben Island prison, much of Mandela's life was characterised by his neglect of family responsibilities, as a result of the lived realities of his activism against colonial-apartheid South Africa. Thus, using the case of Mandela's nuclear family structure, the article critically analyses the role of cultural texts such as autobiographies in registering colonial-apartheid dismemberment in South Africa.     

家族企业继承机制及其文化基础的国际比较

家族企业对经济的重要贡献已经得到公认 ,而家族企业对继承人的选择、培养以及是否实施适当的继承规划机制是关系到家族企业的持续发展、乃至生死存亡的关键问题 ,本文试图通过比较华人家族企业、美国家族企业和日本家族企业在企业代际传承中的实践 ,发现华人家族企业的现状 ,以便对华人家族企业下一步应采取的步骤有更清楚的认识。     

Family Formation in the Baltic Countries: A Transformation in the Legacy of state socialism

This article examines the transformation of nuptiality patterns in the Baltic countries since the late 1960s, in the context of long-term trends. The aim of the study is to compare the entry into first conjugal union in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and analyze the position of the Baltic countries in a broader European perspective. The analyses employ microdata from national surveys conducted in the framework of the European Family and Fertility Surveys program. Our main results on the timing and mode of union formation show that in Estonia and Latvia the shift from direct marriage to cohabitation started well before the fall of the state socialist regime, and followed a trajectory close to Scandinavian countries. In Lithuania, on the other hand, the change in the pattern of union formation has been much slower. The article discusses the factors underlying the observed similarities and dissimilarities in union formation.     

Permanence of the Family Farm Questioned: Rural Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century Estonia and Sweden

The family farm has symbolic significance in many parts of the world. In this paper we argue that the “rooted” identity of the farmer emerged as a reaction to rapid modernization in society and that, in actual fact, the nineteenth century rural communities were both geographically and socially mobile. We examine how kinship ties were expressed in spatial terms with the help of two examples from Harjumaa in north Estonia and Västergötland in south Sweden. These micro-histories are taken both to illuminate and subvert some of the key ideas about identity, belonging, and mobility of the nineteenth-century farmer.     

Development as a Source of Conflict: The Sahukars,Displaced People and the Maoists in Koraput

The dominant debate in India on the role of development in reducing conflicts still remains open. Despite development measures by both state and non-state actors, conflicts continue to emerge frequently in the country. In Koraput district of Odisha state, development models implemented by the state and by non-state actors have accentuated conflicts. The Sahukar-model of development has caused land alienation among marginalised communities leading to conflicts between the landowners and the landless. Large-scale displacements caused by mega development projects have intensified the confrontation between the displaced and the state. The Communist Party of India-Maoist (‘Maoists’ in short) claims to have an alternative development model, which rejects the state-led development plan. The alternative model imposed by the Maoists—reclaiming land from the rich and adopting ‘Community Farming’—has further exacerbated the conflicts among various communities. Though the nature of conflict and its contenders keep changing, the conflicts as such refuse to die down in Koraput.     

试论战后日本文学批评中前田爱的作用和地位

借鉴西方符号学和文本分析理论,前田爱构建起日本的文本分析理论,并以此为利器,广泛涉猎读者论、媒体论、都市文学分析,为立体解读文本丰富内涵奠定了基础,在战后日本文学批评中起着承上启下的作用.     

Tobacco contract farming in Zimbabwe: power dynamics,accumulation trajectories,land use patterns and livelihoods

ABSTRACT

Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Programme resulted in a massive growth of the country's tobacco sector. Some authors have labelled this, the ‘tobacco boom’. The effects of this growth are variegated across space and time. This study explores the growth of tobacco contract farming in Goromonzi and Zvimba districts and the resultant effects on land use patterns, accumulation, power dynamics and livelihood outcomes. In illuminating on contract farming, the study also pays attention to non-contract farmers. The rise in the number of contract farmers is attributed to; better extension services, improved and guaranteed access to input and output markets. At the same time, tobacco contract farming is marked by several vicissitudes. Some farmers withdrew from the contracts due to low output prices and high input costs resulting in indebtedness. Similarly, some contracting firms dropped out from the contracting arrangements. Overall, many contracted growers accumulated more than non-contract farmers.     

Suits and Frocks: Dressmakers and the Making of Feminine Identity in Postwar Australian Society

In a context of heightened domestic ideology post–World War II, self-employed dressmakers contributed significantly to the making of the identity of Australian women. Through the skilled work of interacting with their clients and sewing their clothes, dressmakers both supported individual women’s presentation of “self” and operated at the intersection of gender and class relations. Working at home, they were not only making women’s clothes but also producing the social world. Drawing on interviews with thirteen women, this paper explores how such dressmakers’ work constructed a visual representation and interpretation of a feminine identity particular to their time, place, and local cultural context.     

Remembering the family home: emotions,belonging, and migrant men in multicultural Australia

Abstract

The article opens a space in which to discuss migrant men's emotions and their engagement with family life. It focuses on Australia's Goan community to explore the fluidity of ethnic identity and its relation to remembered family and childhood. The article suggests a “family” that is not only a domestic home but is constituted across both time and space. The men's memories of their childhood and family life prior to arrival in Australia are central to their constitution of self within Australia. These memories provide the men with the emotional means to contest their positioning in Australia's multicultural framework. The men's memories of childhood are experienced beyond domestic and multicultural spaces, making remembered families an important part of their work lives and sense of success in Australia.     

Crime,punishment, family violence,and the cloak of legal invisibility

Abstract

In this article, the authors trace how the Anglo-Australian system of criminal law constructs crime within the family differently from other forms of crime. The zone of legal impunity for intrafamilial crime was carved out by special defences and immunities, such as provocation and marital rape, as well as policing policies and practices that effectively decriminalised “domestic” forms of physical and sexual abuse. Legal impunity was never absolute, and there were notable exceptions where the familial and gendered aspects of the crime in fact aggravated the offence, such as the law's treatment of spousal murder by females as a form of “petty treason”, warranting the most severe punishment of burning at the stake. Reforms in the late twentieth century removed overt forms of gender discrimination from the criminal law, exposing a new legal visibility of crime within “the family”, though as the authors conclude, there are still remnants of differential treatment in fields of sentencing law and practice.     

A Divided Family: Race,the Commonwealth and Brexit

Abstract

The Commonwealth has long been conceptualised as ‘a family of nations’ in a reflection of the size, diversity and shared values of the organisation. As the discussion in post-Brexit Britain engages with questions of race and immigration, it is important to consider the role the Commonwealth played in the referendum campaigns. The combination of the Leave campaign’s promises to reinforce ties with ‘kith and kin’ in Commonwealth countries with the xenophobia that defined the campaign prompts the question what exactly does the Commonwealth mean in modern Britain? The EU referendum revealed two Commonwealths—one reflecting the backgrounds of Britain’s ethnic minorities, and one centred on the three majority white nations of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. This article will offer an investigation of these conflicting visions of the Commonwealth in the referendum, as well as the voting motivations of Commonwealth nationals and British citizens of Commonwealth descent.     

Drawing the Line: Sex Education and Homosexuality in South Australia, 1985

This paper examines a specific controversy over the control and content of sex education in South Australia in 1985 that was triggered by concerns about homosexuality. Drawing on Foucault's idea of the "deployment of sexuality", the paper examines the way in which the issue of homosexuality became the focal point for a concerted struggle over sex education in state schools. It is argued that the idea of homosexuality, or more accurately male homosexual sexuality, served as a boundary marker that both defined and revealed the content and scope of school-based sex education. It is shown that this controversy was an instance of the "deployment of sexuality" through which public opinion was concentrated and mobilised to ensure that prevailing heterosexual norms remained the defining parameters for sex education. Thus it is also demonstrated that sex education is deeply implicated in both the construction and maintenance of prevailing (gendered) sexual norms.     

Economic crisis,families, and family policy in the Baltic states, 2009–2014

ABSTRACT

The three Baltic countries experienced the most rapid population decline throughout the 1990s and 2000s in Europe. The resulting critical demographic situation motivated the governments of the Baltic states to pay more political attention to family policy issues than in the rest of Europe. The aim of the paper is to analyze the development of family policy in Baltic countries and factors that influenced it during the 2009 economic crisis. Also, the outcomes in terms of child poverty and fertility are highlighted. Results show that the economic resources and fertility level had an essential impact on family policy in the Baltic states. Economic support to families, in turn, directly alleviate the poverty level of families and indirectly influence fertility.