Anglo-Saxon charms in the context of a Christian, world view

The following article explores aspects of a Christian world view found in late Anglo-Saxon England, seeking to put such phenomena as magic, miracles and charms in their proper Christian perspective. Previous criticism has had a tendency to accentuate the pagan aspects of the charms and to confuse a modern definition of magic with that of the early medieval Christian view. The view of nature found in Ælfric's sermons, for example, reveals a particular attitude towards magic, miracles and natural remedies such as charms. Magic and miracles are at opposite extremes, while charms are part of an intermediate category of practices not specifically condemned as develish magic, nor fitting into the Christian interpretation of miracles as signs from God.The second part of the article turns to an examination of the charms themselves to demonstrate how they do fit into a Christian view. Charms having to do with elves, as found in the Leechbook, contain large amounts of Christian material. There is an especially strong correlation between these charms and the use of the mass to counteract the influence and effects of elves. Thus the charms, far from being examples of the remnants of paganism, are evidence of the integration of popular material into a Christian view of the world.     

Rural mental health and social geographies of caring

This paper contributes to an emerging geographical literature on the social geographies of caring. Drawing on recently undertaken empirical work in the Scottish Highlands, personal accounts about the provision of both formal and informal care for people with mental health problems are evaluated. The notion of ‘community care’ is critiqued, as too are claims about how rural and remote rural locations engender particular configurations of caring roles, practices and relations. It is shown that geographical distance, social proximity, stoic cultures and rural gossip networks all have a part to play in how caring occurs in such places. The paper concludes by suggesting areas of future research.     

From the bottom of the bottle: justice,prison and social control in the Italian transition

The ‘conflict between politics and justice’ has been a central feature of the Italian ‘transition’ for reasons that touch on the essence of the so-called Second Republic. Apparently dominating the political agenda, it also functioned as a cover for a resurgence of coercive forms of social control in Italy. In response to the social transformations taking place throughout the western world, from the late 1980s the Italian prison system had been expanding and was used to target social marginal groups, especially foreigners and drug addicts. This paper examines how these changes took place, the juridical measures that gave rise to them and their political motivations in the period from the crisis of the First Republic to the declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ in the prison system which (at least for now) seems to have brought to a close the openly populist use of the criminal justice system.     

Fama publica,infamy and defamation: judicial violence and social control of crimes against sexual morals in medieval Castile

Control of crimes such as the sin of lust was one way in which the elites at the head of Castilian town councils emphasised their good government. Among all the such crimes, sodomy was considered to be the most terrible, which brought major misfortunes to the population, and against which it was necessary to avenge. For those accused of this crime, or who actually committed it, it meant exclusion from society. For the urban Castilian elites this struggle was a way of justifying themselves as a governing group. Defence of society against sodomites is related to the political context and to the internal struggles of the urban elites. In the lawsuits analysed, there is clear repetition of a series of words related to individual reputation and social esteem: fama, honour, Buena fama, fama publica, infamia. These can be shown to be vital to the defence of the accused, and also frequently recur in the legislation itself. Rumour was also used as propaganda to shape public opinion and to discredit rivals in the struggle for urban power.     

Medical versus social work-places: constructing and compensating the personal support worker across health care settings in Ontario,Canada

This article explores the role of place in explaining variation in caregiver compensation. Using the labour category of Personal Support Worker (PSW) in Ontario, Canada, it contrasts wage rates across three health care settings: hospitals, long-term care facilities and private homes. An evaluation of current literature from disciplines spanning geography, gender studies, political science and sociology is combined with a critical analysis of policy documents and wage data to reveal that, despite holding similar qualifications and performing comparable job duties, hospital-based workers receive higher wages than home-based workers. I theorize that this wage disparity is partially attributable to the historical privileging of hospital settings in Canada, based on a medical-social continuum of health care valuation. Given that the hospital is constructed as a highly medical place, whereas the home is considered to be a social place, caregiving work enjoys greater financing protection in the former. I argue that these constructions stem from deeply gendered historical roots which view the marketplace as a male-dominated setting for productive waged labour, and the home as a female-dominated setting for unpaid social pursuits. Thus, when personal support services shift from public institutions into private homes, these activities become invisible to the state, and their provision beyond its purview. I conclude that the medical versus social nature of the duties performed by PSWs has become secondary to the medical versus social nature of the setting in which these activities take place. This has translated into lower wages for home-based PSWs, effectively resulting in wage discrimination.     

Hollywood's insidious charms: the impact of American cinema and television on the Soviet Union during the Cold War

Using various archival documents, memoirs, diaries, periodicals and more than 70 personal interviews with contemporaries of the events, this essay is an attempt to show the paradoxes of the cultural Cold War in Soviet consumption of the American visual media – films and television from the United States.     

The social organization of health care in China

Hillier, S.M., and J.A. Jewell. Health Care and Traditional Medicine in China 1800–1982. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. xix + 453 pp. including plates, chapter references, appendix, and indices. $50.00 cloth.

Henderson, Gail E., and Myron S. Cohen. The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. xvi + 183 pp. including photographs, appendices, references, and index. $22.50 cloth.     

Birth control,population control,and family planning: an overview

This overview of the US birth control movement reflects on the emergence of family planning policy due to the efforts of Margaret Sanger, feminists, and the civil rights movement, the eugenics motive to limit "deviant" populations, and the population control movement, which aims to solve social and economic problems through fertility control. Population control moved through three stages: from the cause of "voluntary motherhood" to advance suffrage and women's political and social status, to the concept of "birth control" promoted by socialist feminists to help empower women and the working class, to, from 1920 on, a liberal movement for civil rights and population control. Physicians such as Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson legitimized the movement in the formation of the Committee on Maternal Health in 1925, but the movement remained divided until 1939, when Sanger's group merged with the American Birth Control League, the predecessor of the present Planned Parenthood Federation of America. A key legal decision in 1939 in the United States v. One Package amended the Comstock Act and allowed for the distribution of birth control devices by mail to physicians. Sanger, after a brief retirement, formed the International Planned Parenthood Federation and supported research into the pill. Eugenicists through the Committee on Maternal Health supported Christopher Tietze and others developing the pill. Final constitutional access to contraception based on the right to privacy was granted in Griswold v. Connecticut. The ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972 extended this right to unmarried persons. The right to privacy was further extended in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 on legal abortion. The argument for improving the quality of the population remained from the formation of the Population Reference Bureau in 1929 through the 1960s. Under the leadership of Rockefeller, population control was defined as justified on a scientific and humanitarian basis. US government support for national and international family planning proceeded slowly through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Congress during 1967-70 enacted strong legislation in support of national and international family planning. The Bucharest conference in 1974 highlighted the inadequacies of international population control that deemphasized economic development. Polarization and divisiveness on population policy persists.     

Action heritage: research,communities, social justice

Societies are unequal and unjust to varying degrees and heritage practitioners unavoidably work with, perpetuate and have the potential to change these inequalities. This article proposes a new framework for undertaking heritage research that can be applied widely and purposefully to achieve social justice, and which we refer to as action heritage. Our primary sources are semi-structured conversations we held with some of the participants in three heritage projects in South Yorkshire, UK: members of a hostel for homeless young people, a primary school, and a local history group. We examine ‘disruptions’ in the projects to understand the repositioning of the participants as researchers. The disruptions include introducing a scrapbook for personal stories in the homeless youth project and giving the school children opportunities to excavate alongside professional archaeologists. These disruptions reveal material and social inequalities through perceptible changes in how the projects were oriented and how the participants thought about the research. We draw on this empirical research and theorisations of social justice to develop a new framework for undertaking co-produced research. Action heritage is ‘undisciplinary’ research that privileges process over outcomes, and which achieves parity of participation between academic and community-based researchers through sustained recognition and redistribution.     

Mortuary practices: Their social,philosophical-religious,circumstantial, and physical determinants

Recent, mainstream, American mortuary archaeology, in its paradigmatic outlook, middle-range theory, analytic methodology, and case studies, has emphasized social organization as the primary factor that determines mortuary practices. Broader anthropological and social science traditions have recognized philosophical-religious beliefs as additional, important determinants. The historical roots of mortuary archaeology's focus on the social, and the consequence of this on theory development, is reviewed. Then, through a Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) cross-cultural survey, the kinds of philosophical-religious, social organizational, circumstantial, and physical factors that affect specific kinds of mortuary practices, and the relative importance of these factors, are documented. The data are also used to test basic premises that mortuary archaeologists routinely use today to reconstruct social organization. A balanced, more holistic, and multidisciplinary approach, which considers many kinds of causes beyond social ones, is found necessary to interpret mortuary remains and to reconstruct the past from them.     

Fama publica, infamy and defamation: judicial violence and social control of crimes against sexual morals in medieval Castile

Control of crimes such as the sin of lust was one way in which the elites at the head of Castilian town councils emphasised their good government. Among all the such crimes, sodomy was considered to be the most terrible, which brought major misfortunes to the population, and against which it was necessary to avenge. For those accused of this crime, or who actually committed it, it meant exclusion from society. For the urban Castilian elites this struggle was a way of justifying themselves as a governing group. Defence of society against sodomites is related to the political context and to the internal struggles of the urban elites. In the lawsuits analysed, there is clear repetition of a series of words related to individual reputation and social esteem: fama, honour, Buena fama, fama publica, infamia. These can be shown to be vital to the defence of the accused, and also frequently recur in the legislation itself. Rumour was also used as propaganda to shape public opinion and to discredit rivals in the struggle for urban power.     

Tweet style: campaigning,governing, and social media in Australia

When politicians use the new tools of social media to talk directly to voters, how strategic are these communications? Do lawmakers change how they present themselves in different situations, tweeting differently during campaigns and when their party is out of power, or tailoring their ‘tweet style’ to the preferences of constituents? I explore these questions by categorising 291,091 tweets by politicians in Australia, a nation that features variation in electoral systems in its two legislative houses and which held an election after widespread adoption of social media. When their party controls government, politicians tweet about their personal characteristics and events more often, avoiding clear ideological positions. When an election is called, politicians both in government and in the opposition rally their bases by tweeting toward their own sides of the ideological spectrum.     

Violence on bodies: Space,social reproduction and intersectionality

Abstract

Social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, caste, and class have been analyzed by feminist geographers, who collectively argue that as individuals we experience and live the effects of these social categories simultaneously. Violence as a result of living these categories is not specific to certain spaces or contexts. Nor can violence be imagined as only social – it is also political, economic and institutional. Silvia Federici’s work can assist feminist geographers in understanding how this violence plays out in various contexts. Federici's detailed archival searches and empirical analyses of bodies and reproduction show parallels with contemporary forms of direct and structural violence of the state, patriarchy, and capitalism through unequal power relations and unequal life chances. Refining the scarce scholarly acknowledgement of women (and men) who are exploitable or labeled as irrational and vulnerable, and of human and non-human populations that have been relegated to the realm of surplus and expendable bodies – explain how the organization of capital facilitates and, indeed, relies on violence. In support of this argument, the authors in this collection seek pathways within Federici’s ground-breaking works Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero, which could enrich existing works in the discipline. The contributors reflect on how these particular books have been pivotal to feminist thought generally and their own research, analysis, and pedagogical practice specifically. Through their disparate studies the contributors have intertwined the geographies of structural, institutional, and/or state-sponsored violence with themes arising in Federici’s work.