Home  About us  Contact
 

Material Conditions (material + condition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences66%

Selected Abstracts

Reviving ,the Cavalier Poets': Coterie Verse and the Form of the Poetic Anthology

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 10 2010
Nicholas McDowell
In this essay I introduce the impressive literary circle which formed under the patronage of the young gentleman and poet Thomas Stanley in the Inns of Court in the mid-1640s, in the aftermath of royalist defeat in the first civil war, and suggest that a reconstruction of the activities of this coterie can help us to define a new social context for Cavalier poetry. I contend that the culture of poetic experimentation and competitiveness in the Stanley circle was a material condition for the exceptional lyric productivity and publishing activity in the late 1640s of several of those who have become known to posterity as the ,Cavalier Poets', especially Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Alexander Brome, and James Shirley. Recognition of the intimately connected lyric output of the Stanley coterie, which is focused on translation and imitation of classical, neo-Latin, and continental lyric, might help us to revive the study of ,Cavalier' poetry by identifying it with the efforts of Stanley and his friends to expand English lyric capability at a time when the future of English letters looked to them to be under threat. This insight into coterie poetics might also encourage us to rethink how we put together an anthology of early modern verse. [source]

Atomic Diversity, Molecular Diversity, and Chemical Diversity: The Concept of Chemodiversity

CHEMISTRY & BIODIVERSITY, Issue 8 2009
Bernard Testa
Abstract This minireview is meant as an introduction to the following paper. To this end, it presents the general background against which the joint paper should be understood. The first objective of the present paper is thus to clarify some concepts and related terminology, drawing a clear distinction between i) atomic diversity (i.e., atomic-property space), ii) molecular or macromolecular diversity (i.e., molecular- or macromolecular-property spaces), and iii) chemical diversity (i.e., chemical-diversity space). The first refers to the various electronic states an atom can occupy. The second encompasses the conformational and property spaces of a given (macro)molecule. The third pertains to the diversity in structure and properties exhibited by a library or a supramolecular assembly of different chemical compounds. The ground is thus laid for the content of the joint paper, which pertains to case ii, to be placed in its broader chemodiversity context. The second objective of this paper is to point to the concepts of chemodiversity and biodiversity as forming a continuum. Chemodiversity is indeed the material substratum of organisms. In other words, chemodiversity is the material condition for life to emerge and exist. Increasing our knowledge of chemodiversity is thus a condition for a better understanding of life as a process. [source]

Risky Business: Economic Uncertainty, Market Reforms and Female Livelihoods in Northeast Ghana

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2000
Brenda Chalfin
This article examines the implications of economic uncertainty for rural markets and the livelihoods of female traders. It does so through a case study of a community in northern Ghana caught in the throes of a structural adjustment-driven privatization initiative. In order to fully comprehend the nature of the economic uncertainties in which rural economic actors are enmeshed and the manner in which they resist, engage or engender these conditions, two theoretical lenses are interposed. One, focusing on structural dissolution and an overall process of rural, and especially female, disempowerment, is drawn from recent approaches to African political economy. The other, gleaned from the field of economic anthropology, attends to the agency and knowledge of rural entrepreneurs in the face of unstable and imperfect market conditions. By bringing together these different analytic traditions, the critical significance of uncertainty within the complex process of rural economic transformation and reproduction becomes evident. Rather than functioning as a diagnostic of economic crisis and insecurity, uncertainty can be a strategic resource integral to the constitution of markets, livelihoods and economic coalitions. Such a perspective, privileging the institutional potentials of local social practice, makes apparent the forceful role played by female traders in the structuring of rural marketing systems even in the face of externally-induced and sometimes dramatic shifts in material conditions. [source]

Drought, Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2000
Matthew Turner
Over the past twenty-five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land-derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case-by-case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals' decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one's position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty-four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household's land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984. [source]

Spaces of Encounter: Public Bureaucracy and the Making of Client Identities

ETHOS, Issue 3 2010
Lauren J. Silver
I emphasize the material deficits, spatial barriers, and bureaucratic procedures that restrict the storylines clients and officials use to make sense of one another. This article is drawn from a two-year ethnographic study with African American young mothers (ages 16,20) under the custody of the child welfare system. I focus here on the experiences of one young mother and explore several scenarios in her struggle to obtain public housing. I argue that service deficits can be explained not by the commonly articulated narratives of client "shortcomings" but, rather, by the nature of the organizational and material conditions guiding exchanges between public service gatekeepers and young mothers. I suggest that this work advances narrative approaches to psychological anthropology by attending to the roles of social and material boundaries in framing the stories people can tell each other. [identity, adolescent mothers, public bureaucracy, service negotiation, narrative] [source]

The impact of crime victimization on quality of life

JOURNAL OF TRAUMATIC STRESS, Issue 2 2010
Rochelle F. Hanson
The authors review the extant literature examining the functional impact of crime victimization on indices of quality of life. They present findings within a conceptual framework comprised of role functioning, life satisfaction, and well-being, and social,material conditions, including crime-related medical, mental health, and employer costs, and health care utilization. The review indicates that crime victimization impacts multiple domains, including parenting skills, impaired occupational functioning, higher rates of unemployment, and problematic intimate relationships. However, data on relationships between crime victimization and overall life satisfaction were mixed, suggesting the need for further investigation. The authors conclude with a brief discussion of directions for future research. [source]

Not Just ,Visitors' to Prisons:The Experiences of Imams who Work Inside the Penal System

THE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 1 2001
Basia Spalek
This article presents the results of a study exploring the consequences of working within a Christian-dominated penal system upon a group of Imams who regularly visit prisons. The Islamic religion is currently the fastest growing non-Christian religion in British prisons and so it was considered to be important to document the experiences of the spiritual guides of this faith. Interview data revealed that the Imams face many disadvantages as a result of belonging to a non-Christian religion, amounting to a form of ,institutional racism'. However, many of them revealed that they were not the passive victims of institutional racism (and sometimes direct racism also), but rather struggled against their material conditions in order to force the prisons in which they work to respond to their own needs and those of the prisoners whom they serve. Nonetheless, it appears that any opportunities for change are limited by the structural imbalance between Christian and non-Christian faiths within the penal system. [source]

Producing Privatization: Re-articulating Race, Gender, Class and Space

ANTIPODE, Issue 2 2010
Melanie Samson
Abstract:, This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal-type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class. [source]

Consumption and Standards of Living of the Quebec Inuit: Cultural Permanence and Discontinuities,

CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 2 2004
MARCELLE CHABOT
Cette étude examine les tendances récentes relatives aux pratiques économiques des Inuits du Nunavik (Québec, Canada). L'étude se fonde sur une caractérisation des transactions monétaires et non monétaires effectuées par un échantillon de 38 ménages inuit en 1995 Les résultats des analyses montrent que les Inuit sont fortement dépendants des produits manufacturés. L'élévation du revenu a permis la création d'un revenu discrétionnaire. Cependant, les analyses suggèrent que les conditions économiques actuelles réduisent l'expression des besoins et des aspirations purement individuelles et encouragent le maintien des normes de conduites traditionnelles. L'étude conclut que les conditions de vie matérielle et les valeurs se renforcent mutuellement pour freiner la diffusion de la culture de consommation. This study explores some recent trends in the economic practices of the Inuit of Nunavik (Quebec, Canada). It is based on a characterization of the monetary and non-monetary transactions made by a sample of 38 Inuit households in 1995 The analyses show that the Inuit are highly dependent on manufactured goods. The rise in income has allowed for more discretionary income; however, analyses suggest that current economic conditions place limitations on the development of individual wants and aspirations, as well as play a significant role in encouraging traditional norms of conduct. It is suggested that material conditions and values mutually reinforce one another to reduce the penetration of a consumer culture. [source]