Cooperation and coordination among siblings: Brothers' migration in France, 1870–1940

Recent works emphasize the role of the family in migration decisions. They particularly insist on the specific schedule of mobility that depends not only on an individual life cycle but also on the situation of the whole family at a given time. French military registers provide us with very detailed longitudinal information on migrations, scarcely available in other sources. We consider the smallest family group, male siblings, and focus on their migration behaviours. We start by testing the simplest family indicator, birth rank, and we show that, by itself, it has no effect on migration decisions. We then study whether or not there is competition among siblings and, in particular, if the migration of one of them encourages or prevents mobility of the others. Comparing the chances for an individual to move before and after the migration of his brother, we show that brother mobility did have a positive influence on someone's own mobility. However, we find little evidence of the use of networks when looking at migrants' place of destination. Sons are more prone to move in a given family than in another but they don't go to the same places. Therefore, we argue that mobility appears as a collective decision that depends on family strategies. This approach sheds new light on the migration process while insisting on its family component.     

The flavour of history: Food,family and subjectivity in two Indo-European women's memoirs

This article examines two autobiographies written by women with family connections to the former Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia): Marguerite Schenkhuizen's Memoirs of an Indo Woman (1993 Schenkhuizen, M. (1993). Memoirs of an Indo Woman: Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad. Edited and translated by Lizelot Stout van Balgooy. Athens, OH: Ohio Centre for International Studies: Monographs in International Studies. Southeast Asia Series Number 92.  [Google Scholar]) and Karina Schaapman's Motherless (2007 Schaapman, K. 2007. “Motherless: A true story of love and survival”. London: John Murray. Translated by Rosalind Buck [Google Scholar]). Particular attention is given to the customs surrounding the preparation, consumption and distribution of food within these women's families, practices that illuminate the formation and expression of identities across generations of Indo-European migrants, and between the colonial and post-colonial periods. Studies of colonial identity often essentially focus on how aspirations for group membership are expressed. Such emphasis can exaggerate the stasis and cohesion of colonial cultures at the expense of a more nuanced analysis of the varied, sometimes contradictory range of identities that exist within specific historical contexts. To approach identity and subjectivity as related but not necessarily congruent constructs provides significant insight into how ethnic identities that were formed in a family context altered in response to twentieth century decolonisation. The memoirs examined demonstrate that subjectivities formed with reference to foodways in Indo-European (Indo) families were gendered and raced. The colonial identities that were informed by these subjectivities found new and altered expression in the post-colonial era.     

'alim families in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Algiers: Genealogy and heritage

This paper deals with the notions of link, genealogy, family, influence and notability in street life. Based upon a research in court records, it offers a questioning on family links, kinship and neighbourhood relationships. The circulation of goods, properties, symbols and effects, as seen for example in marriage contracts will be the object of a specific focus, mainly through the example of two families of Ulemas of the malekite rite in Algiers 17th and 18th centuries: the Al-Mandjilâtis and the Uqûdjils.     

The sent-down youth of China: The role of family origin in the risk of departure to and return from the countryside

Between 1967 and 1978, over 17million urban youths in China systematically migrated to the rural countryside in a massive relocation movement known as the Sent-Down Movement. The youths who relocated—some by choice, though many forcibly—were part of a grand scheme envisioned by the then ruling Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong, who sought to reeducate urban youth by having them live and labor amongst their rural compatriots. Known as the “sent down youth”, these youths' experiences and struggles of moving to and returning from the countryside offer considerable insight into the ideological importance of family origins. Most notably, the revolutionary movement which swept over China at the height of the sent-down movement in the late 1960s reversed the hierarchical order of society; individuals with higher family origins were now criminalized making them prime targets for relocation to the countryside. In this quantitative analysis, I examine the relationship between family origins and the risk of departure to and return from the countryside for urban youth, using a unique longitudinal retrospective dataset, Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China. I analyze how this relationship plays out not only during the height of the movement, but throughout a more expansive time frame under which youths were reportedly sent-down (1957 to 1980). Through discrete-time survival analysis, I estimate that urban youths from higher family origins (rich peasant and landowner classes) experienced a greater risk for being sent-down versus their counterparts from lower family origins. Most interestingly, youths of higher family origins also experienced a lower risk for returning from the countryside; one interpretation of this finding is that even after spending time in the countryside in the pursuit of absolving themselves of their higher family origins, the stigma attached to their higher family origins persisted.     

The garcia de la paz

According to the famous economist and Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen women have a significant biological advantage over men. Despite this fact women do not always live longer. In today's third world, but also in some areas in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century we find so-called excess female mortality. In this paper we examine child mortality in The Netherlands in general and gendered patterns of child mortality in particular. The focus is on differential mortality patterns by gender for infants, older children, and young adults up to age 20 in the second half of the 19th century. The analysis takes place at three levels. We start off with an exploration of sex differentials in mortality at the national level, based on the existing literature. We next examine gender differentials in mortality at the level of several Dutch communities, in the region called Twente, focussing on the differences between the city and the countryside. The final part of the analysis focuses on the micro level of the individual and his or her family in the rural community of Lonneker located in the Twente region. In this part of our study we make use of longitudinal individual level data which are analysed with event history methodologies. Our analysis clearly demonstrates that young women and girls in The Netherlands were not always in a position to fully capitalise upon their greater biological advantage and suffered instead considerable excess mortality. Especially in the rural parts of the country girls had lower survival chances. The individual level analysis confirms the importance of sex in explaining child and adolescent mortality. These gendered mortality risks can however not be attributed to social and economic household characteristics. The analysis also shows that, when death came, it literally affected the entire family. This phenomenon, better known under the label ‘death clustering’, may have been an effect of parental incompetence.     

The effect of social status on women's age at first childbirth in the late seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century Korea

While records on historical population are available and do exist, the fact that they are so limited in nature is a critical problem. We applied the method of family reconstitution to a Korean household register to deal with these limitations. Based on family reconstitution from five successive registers, we calculated women's age at first childbirth for each social status in two ways: “observed woman's age” at first childbirth = woman's current age–age of her first child, and “estimated woman's age” at first childbirth, which uses linear regression analysis on the basis of positive association between women's age and the age of their firstborn. Our results shed light on the effects of social status and cultural factors on the age at which women in pre-industrial Korea bore their first child.     

Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

This is an article about war survivors who ended up in migration in the aftermath of World War II: former Division soldiers from Poland and former Ostarbeiterinnen from the Soviet Union who settled in Belgium. It analyzes how these migrants dealt in their post-war lives with experiences of harm to their bodies undergone during the war. Often, attempts to ascribe meaning to the physical and/or psychological remnants of this harm were not made through words, but through non-verbal performances. However, such bodily memory could also, consciously or not, become socialized. In this article, I investigate the performance of bodily memory over time within two of the migrants' social entities: immigrant organizations and families, focusing in particular on their interaction.     

Marriage at the intersection between tradition and globalization

In this paper, we will investigate the popularity of marriage migration between Turkish communities in Western Europe and emigration regions in Turkey. Our focus here is specifically on the Belgian case, namely the ‘Emirdag connection’. In Belgium, the majority of immigrants with a Turkish background come from the region of Emirdag, in the province of Afyon. On the basis of quantitative research methodologies, we first consider the magnitude of the phenomenon and the socio-economic situation of those involved. Using the qualitative research techniques of participant observation and in-depth interviews, we analyze the mechanisms in an attempt to explain marriage migration between these regions. Why do so many young people, born and raised in Western Europe, opt for an unknown partner from a region that is largely unknown to them but which proves to be their parents', or even grandparents', region of origin? Why does migration remain such a valuable life project for many young people in these regions of origin, despite the real danger of many negative side effects? The popularity of marriage migration is often explained by its role in making migration possible. However, migration theories alone cannot explain this phenomenon. Here we will argue that the existence of a ‘culture of migration’ that binds the region of origin with the region of destination and in which ‘the family’ as an institution is capable of building a bridge between traditional praxis, as well as the challenges linked to international migration, are crucial for understanding the enduring popularity of marriage migration.     

Marriage,work, and social reproduction in one area of southern Europe at the end of the 18th century: Lorca (1797)

In this article, the process of social reproduction has been analyzed in Lorca, a municipality in the western Mediterranean region of Murcia (Spain) at the end of the 18th century. An exhaustive subset of the data from the local Godoy's census (1797) was used consisting of 29,875 individuals living in a total of 7566 households. This population was distributed between the town, the Huerta (the Murcian irrigated market garden community), and the countryside. Results confirmed, on the one hand, that a direct relationship existed between higher social status and size of household, with a higher number of older children in the households of land-owning farmers than of tenant farmers or day workers. More children in higher status households indicate that children left home later, and therefore inheritance problems rose, which influenced social reproduction within these groups. Spatially, a clear division can be found between the countryside with more male work-hands and a higher index of male activity and the Huerta with a certain female dominance.     

Risk assessment with intimate partner sex offenders

Abstract

Risk assessment with any offender presents a number of challenges. However, risk assessment with offenders who have committed offences against their partners presents practitioners with a number of additional challenges. Intimate Partner (IP) sex offenders are reported to be responsible for the majority of adult serious sexual offences in England and Wales. However, despite calls for a unified approach to sex offender theory there has been little integration between this and the IP and family sexual violence literature. This paper summarizes the relevant literature on prevalence and cross over of sexual abuse by IP offenders, patterns of abuse, generality of offending, psychopathology and risk concerns (including risk of intimate partner homicide). Based on this, recommendations are made for best practice with IP sex offenders.