Managing Marginalization: Young French-North Africans and Local Associations

This article is about associational life among French-North Africans in the Paris suburbs. Associational life has been seen as an important means for excluded groups to exercise agency, especially in the two following bodies of theory: new citizenship and transnational studies literature. This article contrasts these influential theoretical perspectives with empirical research on youth engagement in associations. I argue that both the literature on new citizenship and transnational studies tends to focus our attention too much on heroic notions of a) new participative democracy and b) first-generation global networks of immigrants. As a result, other processes of locally embedded marginalization of ‘second-’ and ‘third-generation’ immigrant populations, such as in Paris’ banlieues and local association networks, can be overlooked. This article therefore takes as its empirical focus, research carried out on the relationship between young people of North African origin and local associations in Aubervilliers. Rather than a patchwork of participative local democracy or a ‘breeding ground’ for transnational immigrant agency, my fieldwork reveals that associations can often be half-hearted antidotes to social disenfranchisement and, sometimes, actual mechanisms which maintain exclusion.     

Medieval Britain and Ireland in 1989

Abstract

CHILDHOOD IS A TIME of rapid biological growth and development, and a stage of the life course during which bodies are particularly sensitive to social and environmental stressors. As a consequence, events which may impact upon a child’s care and treatment can become physically embodied within their bones and teeth. The skeletal remains of children have been neglected within archaeological discourse until recently, but they are, in fact, a particularly important demographic for understanding the impact of social processes on past population health. This research examines the prevalence of skeletal disease in children (≤16 years) in Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) between ad 1000 and 1700. Data for a total of 4,626 children from 95 sites were collated from published and unpublished skeletal reports and analysed for evidence of skeletal changes reflecting disease. A biocultural approach was adopted in which the evidence was interpreted in relation to ecological, social, economic and environmental conditions. It was observed that childhood levels of skeletal stress did increase significantly after 1540. It was noted that during the Reformation sociocultural and economic factors added to stressors in the ecology of the medieval child. The effects of the Reformation were found to be the greatest aggravator in the rise of morbidity prevalence over seven centuries. Differences in morbidity patterns between non-adult age categories indicated that a state of ‘childhood’ existed until at least eleven years of age, after which there appears to have been a gradual transition into adolescence and adulthood.     

The relation of form and function

Foley, William A., and Robert D. Van Valin. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. xii + 416 pp. including notes, references, and topics and language indices. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.     

Capital,Illegal Slaves,Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60

Previous studies of British plantation colonies, including the island of Mauritius in the south-western Indian Ocean, have paid little attention to the economic dimensions of the transition from slave to free labour that occurred during the early nineteenth century. Reports by Mauritian colonial officials make it possible to reconstruct the transformation of the island's economy between 1810 and 1860 from one oriented towards trade and commerce to one dominated by the production of sugar for the British imperial market. This transformation occurred in the midst of a series of interconnected developments that included an illegal trade in slaves between 1811 and circa 1827, changes in imperial tariff policy in 1825, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the advent of the modern system of indentured labour in 1834 and the suspension of Indian emigration to the island between 1838 and 1842. The importance of domestically generated and controlled capital in shaping the Mauritian economy during this period highlights the need to examine the extent to which and the ways in which domestic capital framed the contours of social and economic life elsewhere in the nineteenth-century colonial plantation world.     

A link in ‘the great chain of Empire friendship’: the Victoria League in New Zealand

With the objective of exploring New Zealand women's part in imperialism, this article focuses on the history of the Victoria League. Through its activities during war and peace, the League promoted New Zealand's place as a loyal part of the British Empire. The League in New Zealand was part of a ‘female imperialism’ whereby elite women in the ‘white’ settler societies performed gendered work to promote the strength and unity of the Empire. Women's work considered suitable for empire friendliness and unity ranged from hospitality and socialising in the ‘private’ female world, to the support of immigration and education. Wartime saw patriotic ‘mothers of empire’ in full force. The article covers the League's work into the second half of the twentieth century when, despite the ‘end of empire’, imperial loyalty endured, entwined with emerging national identities. Maternal imperial identity slowly waned, the legacy of Queen Victoria lasting until local challenges to the process of colonisation became vocal.