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Human Relations (human + relation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	66%

Selected Abstracts

Southern Trauma: Revisiting Caste and Class in the Mississippi Delta

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2004
JANE ADAMS
ABSTRACT Two classic ethnographies, Hortense Powdermaker's After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South and John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town, contributed to a "master narrative" of the Mississippi Delta and the South that viewed class largely through the lens of race. Their work contributed to the community studies and culture and personality traditions and became part of the public discourse of race in the United States. This article examines the institutional and theoretical frameworks within which they worked. We focus on three aspects of their work: (1) their definition of class that left race as the only salient social divide; (2) their portrayal of middle- and upper-class statements as normative; and (3) their uncritical use of data from elsewhere in the South to interpret their Indianola data. We report the events at the Yale Institute of Human Relations that led Dollard to publish before Powdermaker. [source]

Factors Affecting Satisfaction Levels of Japanese Volunteers in Meal Delivery Services for the Elderly

PUBLIC HEALTH NURSING, Issue 5 2008
Hisayo Yanagisawa
ABSTRACT Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors affecting satisfaction with volunteer work of participants in a meal delivery service for the elderly. Design: A cross-sectional study with a self-administered survey was carried out. Sample: Of 364 volunteers assisting with a meal delivery service for the elderly in rural towns A (80), B (159), and C (125), 247 responded (response rate: 68%). Method: An anonymous self-administered questionnaire survey was administered seeking information about basic attributes, sense of satisfaction with volunteer work, and working circumstances such as human relationships with fellow volunteers, meal service users or professional staff members, opportunities for meetings or workshop, publicity through public relations magazines, and the like. Results: In multivariate logistic analysis, the sense of satisfaction of volunteers was closely associated with human relations among volunteers (odds ratio [OR] 5.15, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 1.84,14.40, p<.01), meal service users (OR 3.84, 95% CI 1.37,10.77, p<.05), and professional staff members supervising the meal delivery service (OR 3.53, 95% CI 1.27,9.84, p<.05). Human relations were also affected by the emphasis on communication, consultation with supervisory staff members, having opportunities for meetings, having friends with whom to confer, and publicity through public relations magazines. Conclusion: Satisfaction levels of volunteers in meal delivery services for the elderly were most affected by human relations with fellow volunteers, meal service users, and professional staff members. Increasing opportunities for communication may be important to promote good human relationships among volunteers and volunteer activities. [source]

THE UNIVERSALITY OF JEWISH ETHICS: A Rejoinder to Secularist Critics

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 2 2008
David Novak
ABSTRACT Jewish ethics like Judaism itself has often been charged with being "particularistic," and in modernity it has been unfavorably compared with the universality of secular ethics. This charge has become acute philosophically when the comparison is made with the ethics of Kant. However, at this level, much of the ethical rejection of Jewish particularism, especially its being beholden to a God who is above the universe to whom this God prescribes moral norms and judges according to them, is also a rejection of Christian (or any other monotheistic) ethics, no matter how otherwise universal. Yet this essay argues that Jewish ethics that prescribes norms for all humans, and that is knowable by all humans, actually constitutes a wider moral universe than does Kantian ethics, because it can include non-rational human objects and even non-human objects altogether. This essay also argues that a totally egalitarian moral universe, encompassing all human relations, becomes an infinite, totalizing universe, which can easily become the ideological justification (ratio essendi) of a totalitarian regime. [source]

Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell's Industrial Novels

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 5 2000
Christoph Lindner
This essay looks at material culture from the production end of the economic cycle in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South where, as an elusive luxury glimpsed only in passing, the consumption of commodities remains oddly and conspicuously absent. Gaskell's writing, that is, shows not so much commodity culture, but the industrial and social conditions required to underwrite it, the human machinery of an industrial market economy. In particular, the essay examines Gaskell's response to the reifying influence of the commodity on productive society and the ways in which industrial conditions serve as a matrix for human relations. In Gaskell, the commodity and its attendant cultural practices have an alienating and dehumanizing influence on society's productive membership. The novels, however, resist that influence every step of the way, investigating ways in which to restore humanity and so reconcile a fractured society. [source]

Trust Your Compatriots, but Count Your Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2008
Patti Tamara Lenard
Although trust is clearly central to human relations of all kinds, it is less clear whether there is a role for trust in democratic politics. In this article, I argue that trust is central to democratic institutions as well as to democratic political participation, and that arguments which make distrust the central element of democracy fail. First, I argue for the centrality of trust to the democratic process. The voluntary compliance that is central to democracies relies on trust, along two dimensions: citizens must trust their legislators to have the national interest in mind and citizens must trust each other to abide by democratically established laws. Second, I refute arguments that place distrust at the centre of democratic institutions. I argue, instead, that citizens must be vigilant with respect to their legislators and fellow citizens; that is, they must be willing to ensure that the institutions are working fairly and that people continue to abide by shared regulations. This vigilance , which is reflected both in a set of institutions as well as an active citizenry , is motivated by an attitude termed ,mistrust'. Mistrust is a cautious attitude that propels citizens to maintain a watchful eye on the political and social happenings within their communities. Moreover, mistrust depends on trust: we trust fellow citizens to monitor for abuses of our own rights and privileges just as we monitor for abuses of their rights and privileges. Finally, I argue that distrust is inimical to democracy. We are, consequently, right to worry about widespread reports of trust's decline. Just as distrust is harmful to human relations of all kinds, and just as trust is central to positive human relations of all kinds, so is distrust inimical to democracy and trust central to its flourishing. [source]

Dealing with damage: the desire for psychic violence to soothe psychic pain

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND POLITICS INTERNATIONAL, Issue 3 2005
Raman KapurArticle first published online: 10 JAN 200
Abstract Damage and destruction in people's lives can be dealt with either through recognizing and resolving psychic pain and loss or acting out destructive human relationships. This paper highlights the internal processes within a patient and a troubled society where psychic pain may not be recognized, experienced and worked through, so leading to the possibility that psychic violence may be used to soothe heartfelt emotional injuries. Psychic pain is often associated with emotional poverty and inadequacy. This paper describes the idea that pain is acted out through psychic violence and how the therapist has to face and contain many facets of this human frailty disguised as ,sexed-up' violence. My observations of psychic violence in the everyday life of a society exposed to over 35 years of death and destruction are also described. Here, there is not the comfort of the consulting room to detoxify poisonous projections, which often present under the psychic guise of superiority and contempt. Intrapsychic formulations are outlined which underlie such violence and clinical interventions and suggestions to repair societal troubles are offered to help this disturbed state of mind move towards more whole-object human relations. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Factors Affecting Satisfaction Levels of Japanese Volunteers in Meal Delivery Services for the Elderly

Ritual, Stories, and the Poetics of a Journey Home Among Latino Catholics

ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Issue 1 2009
DAVID P. SANDELL
ABSTRACT This essay centers on a storyteller's performance of ritual in stories to draw associations between the life of the Biblical Mary with her son Jesus and the subjectivities and dispositions of people living in impoverished conditions. The storyteller explores these subjectivities and dispositions, characterizing the exploration as a journey. She also defines an ethical position where the self meets otherness,both sacred and cultural,to engender positive human relations. The essay combines the storyteller's performance with the author's to reproduce the effects, advance the ethics, mitigate the politics of representation, and provide an understanding of the journey's end,a place called home. [source]