Dimensions of social trust and national identity: Addressing a multifaceted relationship

Social trust is crucial for the functioning of societies and states as well as for the wellbeing of individuals. In this article, I expand on previous literature and scrutinise the role of definitions of group membership in the form of national belonging as a key predictor of three distinct dimensions of social trust: particularised trust, trust in strangers and identity-based trust. Drawing on recent data from the European Values Study, I find that stronger ethnic conceptions of nationhood are related to higher identity-based trust, whereas the reverse holds for trust in strangers. The latter relationship, however, must be qualified regarding majority conceptions at the respective national level. Results for particularised trust, however, point towards a more complex relationship than outlined in the theoretical expectations. Thus, this article contributes to extant literature by presenting a comprehensive argument linking all three dimensions to conceptions of nationhood challenging simplified notions of generalised trust. Further, I go beyond extant studies by combining conceptions of nationhood at the individual level with several country-level variables to demonstrate the robustness of the results.     

An archaeology of social relations in an Egyptian village

Postprocessual archaeology has placed great importance on individuals and social interaction, though in practice this often proves a difficult project to realize. The rich archaeological and cultural data offered in an Egyptian context suggest that it is possible to identify how specific individuals and groups functioned with a domestic context, taking into account the complex vectors of social inequality—age, sex, class, status, and life experience. In the process, this paper seeks to question the narrow construal ofgender as analogous to the domain of women, and show the inadequacies of such an approach. It offers an opportunity to mesh material culture with social theory by linking sociocultural, spatial, and temporal data.     

Heterogeneity, Power, and Political Economy: Some Current Research Issues in the Archaeology of Old World Complex Societies

Recent research on Old World chiefdoms and states has largely retreated from the general comparative explanatory paradigm of the 1970s and has focused instead on more historically oriented analyses of culture-specific developmental trajectories. Both theoretical and empirical work tend to emphasize a heterogeneous, conflict-based model of complex society and political economy. This analytical framework has been quite successful in documenting variation and historically determined patterning in the organization of urbanism, craft production, specialization, and exchange. I present an overview of this research and argue that we now need to reintegrate culturally specific analyses within a modified comparative/generalizing perspective on complexity.     

Social agency and the dynamics of prehistoric technology

Technology is not only the material means of making artifacts, but a dynamic cultural phenomenon embedded in social action, worldviews, and social reproduction. This paper explores the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of technology that is compatible with this definition. Because of its focus on social agency, practice theory provides an appropriate starting point for a social theory of technology. In addition, three other themes require explicit attention: scale, context, and the materiality of technology. Four case studies demonstrate how archaeologists are beginning to take technology beyond its material dimensions, and additional questions are proposed stemming from the theoretical issues raised in the paper. The purpose of this essay is to synthesize a diverse set of emerging ideas and approaches to understand better dynamic community-level social processes of prehistoric material culture production.     

The world-systems perspective and archaeology: Forward into the past

This article reviews previous attempts to extend world-system theory from the modern era to prehistoric and archaeological settings. It summarizes major debates among scholars from several disciplines who are comparing the modern world-system with earlier world-systems. Special attention centers on the problems of conceptualizing world-systems, the spatial bounding of world-systems, and understandings of systemic logics.     

人文地理学新思维

本文从社会变革的角度审视人文地理学学科的发展。指出:传统思维的局限性源起于传统社会的运行特征。伟大的社会变革为人文地理学转变思维引来了契。新的思维体现在实证方法的主体地位的确立、规范方法与实证方法相分离、中层理论研究的加强、参与能力的强化、服务对象和目的的多元化、政策研究的意义、研究领域的拓展等。     

Path-dependency in segregation and social networks in the Netherlands

Policy-makers in industrialised countries have been implementing polices to create neighbourhoods with diverse populations in the hopes of increasing and ameliorating inter-ethnic relations. However, social networks seem to remain largely segregated. The composition of people’s social networks is traditionally explained by population compositions and subsequent meeting opportunities versus preferences for homophilious interaction. Little attention has been paid to the social construction behind these two factors. This study of Turkish and native Dutch individuals in two neighbourhoods in Rotterdam from a time-geographic perspective shows that path-dependency plays a large role in keeping social networks segregated. The social circles individuals engage in during their lives are linked together. Individuals are introduced to places, activities and people by their existing social networks, starting with their parents and siblings. As such, they are likely to roam in spaces dominated by people of their own ethnicity, which lessens the opportunity to meet people from other ethnic backgrounds. This role of people’s existing social networks in ethnic segregation has been overlooked in the integration debate so far.     

From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China

ABSTRACT

Growing in number in the last two decades, rural migrant workers in China have completed intergenerational replacement, and young migrants have become a principal part of the migrant population. However, the process of such intergenerational reproduction has not been thoroughly examined. Based on field studies in the Chinese countryside, this paper analyzes the mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of rural migrants from the perspective of rural communities, families, and school education. “Left-behind” rural communities, their migration-oriented social culture, and the cognition of rural–urban differences as constructed through migrant parents facilitated a subjective willingness for migration among left-behind children. Exclusion from urban-biased rural education is often the final external thrust for their migration. Having finished the transition, the households of a new young generation of rural migrants are experiencing a different crisis of reproduction. This paper argues that there is a systematic rupture between labor, households, and rural society and that this presents a critical development trap for China.     

NEW HISTORIES OF EMOTION

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, there was a growing sense that historians had neglected the emotions and failed to think seriously about them. Since then, there has been explosive interest in the history of emotions. What precipitated this development? What has this focus on emotion added to our historical understanding, and what does a historical perspective contribute to research on emotion? Two recent books help us think about these questions. In The History of Emotions, Jan Plamper offers the first book‐length introduction to this field available in English; in Emotional Lexicons, Ute Frevert and a group of fellow historians trace continuities and change in the vocabulary of feeling from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the millennium. At stake, in both books, is the idea that emotions are historically contingent—that history has the ability to shape and transform even the most basic features of human experience. This review essay engages with the central arguments of these books, and offers a somewhat different interpretation of the history of emotions. What is called for, the essay suggests, is not first and foremost a separate history of emotions nor the adding of emotion to existing histories, but new histories that systematically incorporate emotions into their analyses. Historians should seek to demonstrate how emotions are an integral part of history and historiography in a more general sense. Systematic attention to emotions not only adds nuance to a historical narrative, the essay concludes, but also fundamentally affects our ideas about how history actually happens.     

‘Profits,Savings, Health,Peace, Order’: Prostitution,Urban Planning and Imperial Identity in Halifax,Nova Scotia, 1898–1912

In the early years of the twentieth century, city administrators in Halifax, Nova Scotia articulated a new, modern identity for the former imperial garrison town by identifying the local red light district as both a moral and a spatial problem. Between the twilight of Victoria’s reign and Britain’s entry into the First World War, middle-class toleration of a local sex district as a means of managing the city’s populations of imperial servicemen virtually evaporated. Haligonians were inspired instead by North American urban modernisation initiatives to eradicate this visible and physical space for the world’s oldest profession. This paper examines shifting responses to the imperial sexual and political ideologies underpinning collective toleration of Halifax’s racially mixed sex district, offers a case study of this crucial moment of civic refashioning.