Fertile Bonds Joseph, Suzanne E
2013, 2016, 2013-09-30, 2017-01-10
eBook
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With an average of over nine children per family, older cohorts of Bedouin in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon have one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Many married couples in this ...pastoral community are close relatives--a socially advantageous practice that reflects the deep value Bedouins place on kinship.
To outsiders, such family norms can seem disturbing, even premodern. They attract assumptions of Arab backwardness, poverty, and sexism. Astoundingly, however, Fertile Bonds flips these stereotypes. Anthropological demographer Suzanne Joseph shows that in this particular group, prolific birth rates coincide with moderate death rates and high levels of nutrition. Despite differences in gender, class, and occupation, members of Bekaa Bedouin society rely heavily on kinship ties, sharing, and reciprocity, and experience a high degree of social and demographic equality.
This story, unfamiliar to many, is one that is fading as traditional nomadic livelihoods give way to encapsulation within the state. With the help of this surprising, nuanced study--one of the first of its kind in the Middle East--knowledge of such marginalized pastoral groups will not vanish with the disappearance of their way of life. Joseph’s book expands our understanding of peoples far removed from consolidated government control and provides a broad analytical lens through which to examine demographic divides across the globe.
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Ninety years ago, Knud Rasmussen's popular account of his
scientific expeditions through Greenland and North America
introduced readers to the culture and history of arctic Natives. In
the ...intervening century, a robust field of ethnographic research
has grown around the Inuit and Yupiit of North America-but, until
now, English-language readers have had little access to the broad
corpus of work on Greenlandic natives. Worldviews of the
Greenlanders draws upon extensive Danish and Greenlandic
research on Inuit arctic peoples-as well as Birgitte Sonne's own
decades of scholarship and fieldwork-to present in rich detail the
key symbols and traditional beliefs of Greenlandic Natives, as well
as the changes brought about by contact with colonial traders and
Christian missionaries. It includes critical updates to our
knowledge of the Greenlanders' pre-colonial world and their ideas
on space, time, and other worldly beings. This expansive work will
be a touchstone of Arctic Native studies for academics who wish to
expand their knowledge past the boundaries of North America.
Although today in France church attendance is minimal, when death occurs many families still cling to religious rites. In exploring this common reaction to one of the most painful aspects of ...existence, Thomas Kselman turns to nineteenth-century French beliefs about death and the afterlife not only to show how deeply rooted the cult of the dead is in one Western society, but how death and the behavior of mourners have been politicized in the modern world. Drawing on sermons preached in rural and urban parishes, folktales, and accounts of seances, the author vividly re-creates the social and cultural context in which most French people responded to death and dealt with anxieties about the self and its survival. Inspired mainly by Catholicism, beliefs about death provided a social basis for moral order throughout the nineteenth century and were vulnerable to manipulation by public officials and clergy. Kselman shows, however, that by mid-century the increase in urbanization, capitalism, family privacy, and expressed religious differences generated diverse attitudes toward death, causing funerals to evolve from Catholic neighborhood rituals into personalized symbolic events for Catholics and dissenters alike--the civil burial of Victor Hugo being perhaps the greatest symbol of rebellion. Kselman's discussion of the growth of commercial funerals and innovations in cemetery administration illuminates a new struggle for control over funeral arrangements, this time involving businessmen, politicians, families, and clergy. This struggle in turn demonstrates the importance of these events for defining social identity.
Originally published in 1993.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
From ancient Spain to Italy to Dura Europus, Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World provides a series of case studies illustrating the variety and importance of writing in ...private spaces in antiquity.
This pioneering study surveys all 446 Lower Stratum families in the period under review (800-600 B.C.). It is the most important and the most responsible study of the lower stratum of the ...Neo-Assyrian society proposed to date.
The family is a social construction, whose structure and functions change according to the political, social, and economic moment and geographical region in which it develops. It is the natural and ...fundamental element of society and therefore has the right to protection by society and the State. The family today is not the same as in previous centuries, the so-called globalization, which represents this continuous movement of knowledge and customs, ideologies, and policies in all areas, allows reflection on the changes that have arisen against the concept of family and its diversity, as well as its protection. The objective of this work is to determine the factors that affect the protection of the family and the effects caused by legal fissures. Through the use of the neutrosophic topsis method, the result is to propose the implementation of a family code that recognizes and regulates the different family structures, as well as their protection.
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Until 1989 it was official Communist policy in eastern Europe to absorb Gypsies into the "ruling" working class. But many Gypsies fought to maintain their separate identity. This book is about ...the refusal of one group of Gypsies- the Rom-to abandon their way of life and accept assimilation into the majority population. It is a story about the sources of cultural diversity in modern industrial society and about the fear and hatred that such social and cultural difference may give rise to. The core of the book, based on eighteen months of observation of daily life in a Gypsy settlement, describes the cultivation, celebration, and reinvention of cultural difference and diversity by a people deemed by their social superiors to be too stupid and uncivilized to have a "culture" at all.
For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the "hush harbors" of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury ...their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long - and often violent - struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. To Serve the Living offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.
