Houses,Objects, and the Politics of Inheritance in Josep Maria de Sagarra's Vida privada

Josep Maria de Sagarra's novel Vida privada (1932) portrays an upper-class Catalan family, the Lloberolas, as unable to adapt to the new economic and political situation taking place in the city of Barcelona at the end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and at the beginning of the Second Republic in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Through a close reading of this family's houses, furniture, and personal belongings, I argue that material elements in this novel are central to the narrator's ethical critique and moral judgment of Barcelona's elite. The Lloberolas treat humans as objects and objects as humans, and I contend that, in an ironic emulation, the narrator also objectifies the Lloberolas and equates them with their objects. This comparison elucidates the family's superficiality and corrupted morals. Objects are also essential in destabilizing public and private boundaries because they often transcend the private domain and expose—to the readers and to the other inhabitants of Barcelona—the protagonists’ personality. Moreover, in Vida privada, houses, furniture, and surnames are understood as an inheritance that transfers very specific ideals of social status from parents to children. By presenting this material heritage with the exemplifying case of the Lloberola family, Sagarra offers a sharp critique of the Catalan upper classes and their superficial values. Their necessity to cling to an inherited world centered on material possessions finally results in their loss of power and evidences their economic and moral decline.     

秦及汉初简牍中的“外妻”

"外妻"初见于睡虎地秦简,指隶臣"外妻",新出《岳麓书院藏秦简(伍)》中又有"奴外妻"。"外妻"之"外"指妻与夫的身份存在良与贱、庶与奴的差异。隶臣"外妻"特指隶臣自由民身份的妻。秦及汉初"隶臣"的性质可按来源不同分为"刑徒"和"官奴婢",有"外妻"者身份一般为"刑徒"。隶臣"外妻"需提供隶臣"从事公"时的衣服,后改为"冗作"而官府"勿禀食"。隶臣家庭有一定财产,其经济收入来源于从事商业活动及雇佣劳动等。隶臣"外妻"所生子女承袭出生时其父的身份。"奴外妻"特指私家奴的自由民身份的妻。私家奴与"外妻"在身份上虽有奴庶之别,但私家奴对"外妻"有夫权和家长权。奴与"外妻"的婚生子女身份从父,但奴对子女无父权。"外妻"现象是秦及汉初"良贱为婚""庶奴为婚"的一种反映。     

Le statue di marte e venere nel tempio di marte ultore sul foro di augusto 1

This paper explores the question of whether any circumstances, events or activities can be identified that may have made Cicero feel that he and / or other people were experiencing a moment or period of happiness in their private or public lives. By reviewing meaningful excerpts from a variety of Ciceronian works, this contribution presents examples of possible conditions and instances of happiness in Cicero's life (as far as it is possible to discover the feelings of an individual exclusively on the basis of their writings to other people). While Cicero hardly ever mentions preconditions for his own ‘happiness’ or states explicitly that he is ‘happy’, it can be inferred that he took pleasure in a range of situations that are generally regarded as blessings for human beings, such as having a family or a comfortable home. His special intellectual capability and his political career presented Cicero with further possibilities of winning success and satisfaction. Yet Cicero's feelings of happiness in all respects seem to have a basic component oriented towards community. Because Cicero's personal life is so intertwined with his public life and he has also considered the issue philosophically, his emotional disposition in ‘normal’ and ‘extraordinary’ moments is of a particular quality: he was able to derive joy from beliefs such as that he had saved the Republic, beyond the ordinary pleasures of all human beings such as conversations with good friends.     

Warlords’ Rainmaking: Religion,Science, and Legitimating Governance in Early Republican China

This article uses case studies to examine the rainmaking activities of provincial military governors during a historical period when a decentralized China suffered from frequent droughts. On the one hand, it analyzes why their rainmaking has been interpreted in a very negative light and demonstrates that progressive intellectuals writing in the Republican-era (1912–49) print media were crucial to fostering misunderstandings of the rainmaking activities of these “warlords” as superstitious and backward. On the other hand, it argues that public ceremonies of praying for rain served as a crucial venue for the military governors to perform their local authority and make a claim to political legitimacy. Some of them pursued efficacy by all possible means, including experimenting with Western “scientific” rainmaking techniques of concussion and fire, which suggests that their rainmaking efforts were not merely a utilization of traditionalism, but drew from a complex and eclectic rainmaking culture emerged in early twentieth-century China. In an age when truly effective weather modification methods had not yet been discovered, the highly visible public rainmaking activities of warlords, regardless of results, constituted an integral and important dimension of their local governance, particularly in desperate times, amidst prolonged and severe droughts when popular feeling was unsettled and volatile.     

从刘备集团的继嗣之争看刘封之死

汉末群雄割据,各路军阀互争雄长,展开了政治、经济、军事等各方面的竞争,以扩大自己的优势,其中子嗣也是重要的一环。刘备作为东汉末年的军阀之一,长期流亡于各地,在进入荆州时,依然未有子嗣,故收养刘封为义子。在前期,刘封的积极意义居多,但自刘禅降生以来,刘封逐渐演化成刘备集团内部的一个不安定因素。刘备试图通过"分陕而治"调和这一矛盾,但终究归于失败。刘封被处死,成为汉末军阀内部政治斗争的牺牲品。     

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.     

Unveiling China’s Relinquished Marital Mode: A Study of Yuan Shikai’s Polygamous Household

This article investigates one of the last polygamous families in modern China, the household of Yuan Shikai, who was the first president of the Republic of China. Before his presidency, Yuan was a prominent reformer and high-ranking official in the late Qing Empire. Although he implemented numerous influential progressive reforms to promote China’s modernization, he himself led a traditional private life within his own home: He married ten women, built himself a large harem, and fathered thirty-two children. This article explores Yuan’s polygamous marriages by revealing the characteristics of his marital life, probing the styles of his nuptial experience, and examining his approach of managing his family. Through this study, we can see another aspect of China’s transformation from tradition to modernity, along with its national transformation from empire to republic. Therefore, this study help us not only explore the long-relinquished old-style marriage system and uncover a long forgotten system of spousal union, but also unmask the role of polygamy in shaping the lives of Chinese social and political elites before its final abolition in the early 20th century.     

Blurred lines: the home front,the battlefront,and the wartime relationship between citizens and government in the Republic of Vietnam

In the Republic of Vietnam, the blending of the home and battle fronts shaped the relationship between citizens and their government. Civilians viewed the national government as the institution responsible for various forms of social welfare related to the war and the resulting militarisation of non-combatants’ lives. An examination of citizens’ letters to its ministries shifts the focus from questions of political legitimacy to citizens’ expectations of their government. The role of gender in family and social structures also shaped how Vietnamese civilians perceived their war experiences and their relationships to the government.     

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.     

Distinctions,distinctions: ‘public’ and ‘private’ force?

This article evaluates recent literatures within International Relations on so‐called ‘private force’. It suggests that the conceptual weaknesses of much of this literature can be accounted for, in part, by a misunderstanding of the historical and sociological importance of the way power is organized and legitimated through shifts in the public—private distinction. This distinction is one of the primary mechanisms, if not the primary mechanism, for organizing political, economic and, therefore, military power. For the sake of historical accuracy and conceptual integrity scholars should abandon the terminology of ‘public’ and ‘private’ force. Tracing how public‐private distinctions shift and change as an effect of political power is a joint task for historical sociology and international political theory     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

冯夏威的自杀殉国与民族主义的社会动员

论文简述了冯夏威自杀殉国与1905年抵制美货运动的联系及其民族英雄形象塑造的过程和重要意义。1905年华侨冯夏威为抗议美国排华政策,在上海美国领事馆门口服毒自尽,奏响了抵制美货运动的序曲,并以民族英雄的形象贯穿运动始终。冯夏威的民族英雄形象是个体自塑与社会他塑的复合体。自杀殉国与遗书自述,完成了个体自塑的描摹;各方悼念与报道宣传,实现了社会他塑的目标。其自杀动机与反美抵制行为,契合了中国近代民族主义的发展潮流与认同需求,个人意志表达呈现出社会化、国家化、民族化的趋向。中国近代民族主义的急进发展,不仅为社会他塑提供了空间与动源,而且也认可了个体自塑的存在与价值。     

Samuel Clarke’s Lives and husbands’ remembrances of their wives

ABSTRACT

Among the narratives of eminent divines and Christian worthies that Samuel Clarke derived from published sources and included in his many publications are the lives of fifteen early modern women, three of them written by their husbands. Humphrey Gunter’s funeral memorial of his wife Mary, Samuel Clarke’s life of Katherine, and Richard Baxter’s of Margaret have a personal immediacy and an affectionate detail often absent from the other biographies. In the contexts of both the original publications and Clarke’s texts, their depictions of spousal relationships reflect the tension between traditional commemoration and individual expression apparent in seventeenth-century narratives of women’s lives. The bonds each husband recalls celebrate the virtuous wife, though none of the recollections is as forthright as Baxter’s insightful recognition of Margaret’s complex character and her significant role in their marriage.     

Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's Domestic Lives

‘Home’ is one of the most evocative and comforting words in the English language. It produces, at least in its idealized form, notions of safety, comfort, privacy, individuality and communion with family and friends. The supposed autonomy or permanence of home, however, is undermined frequently throughout one's life course revealing instead spaces of interactionism, public disturbance, discomfort, conflict, labour, stress and even violence. Reading Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's voluminous letters one reads the emotional and psychological importance of ‘home’ and the vital necessity of the ideal world apart. The middle-class home was meant to stage a domesticated and comfortable private haven, withdrawn from public view and distant from the imperatives of the economy and politics, however, the house was also the physical representation, the outward ‘sign’, of the Carlyles' public identity. How the House looked and functioned – externally and internally – represented the Carlyles to the outside world. Home was, as Walter Benjamin alluded, like a sheltered theater box from which the occupants looked at the stage of the outside world and also the stage upon which the outside world cast its own critical eye on the action within. The necessities of life and the public fascination with the interior signify that private and public are largely mutable concepts. Any clear distinction between inside and outside, private and public are complicated as we look at the intimacies of the Carlyles' lives.     

1954—1961年朝鲜实习生来沪培训述论

朝鲜战争后,根据中朝双方签订的经济及文化合作协定,大批朝鲜实习生于1954—1961年来到中国接受培训。中国有关部门、上海各实习工厂自上而下地构建起相应的组织管理体系,为朝鲜实习生顺利完成培训任务创造了良好的条件,并在日常生活方面对他们给予了周到细致的照顾,探索建立了一套行之有效的培训体系,使朝鲜实习生回国时大多具备了一定的专业技术能力,有的还在某些领域取得了突出的成绩,为朝鲜国民经济的恢复和发展培养了不可或缺的技术人才。     

Giulia Gramsci: Democracy and ‘the sexual question’

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between the way one lives in ‘private’ and one's political theory by considering Gramsci's views on both democracy and ‘the sexual question’, and in light of evidence from his marriage with Giulia Schucht, to assess whether the microstructural aspects of their lives reveal any ambiguity and contradictions with Gramsci's avowals on these two notions. Giulia's story suggests a need to reconsider perspectives on Gramsci. The inner coherence of her story highlights the inconsistencies between what Gramsci thinks and what he does (his ‘theory and praxis'). In short there is sufficient evidence to hypothesise that Gramsci had difficulty living up to his profession of democratic relations. The concluding sections of the paper consider the significance of Giulia's story for reconstituting political theory.     

Dysfunctional domesticity: female insanity and family relationships among the West Riding poor in the mid-nineteenth century

"Dysfunctional domesticity" contributes to the growing reevaluation of the importance of the history of the family to understanding the history of insanity. Using patient case histories from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, this article examines representations of family life among poor in England in the 1830s and 1840s. Among the so-called moral causes of insanity, family relationships held a prominent place. Female patients more than male patients had their mental illnesses attributed to their domestic circumstances: the poverty of their home lives, grief over a death of friends and family, love and marital relationships gone wrong, and violence in their homes. The case histories reveal that poor women experienced many pressures in the domestic sphere, and insanity may have been one way to escape dysfunctional domesticity.     

Kitchenspace: Gendered territory in central Mexico

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace—indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place—as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or ‘smoke’ kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about ‘the kitchen’ as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces.     

Political Decoupling: Private Implementation of Public Policy

Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm’s revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state’s drought from 2015–2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water.