Stigma and separation: parian status and community persistence in a scottish fishing village
This paper addresses the problem of how and why a small, dependent, and stigmatized occupational community may maintain its social identity long after the material basis for its existence has disappeared. It examines the life history of Ferryden, an east coast Scottish "fishing village" which does not fish. It will argue that the ideology ofthe fisherfolk, who have historically been marked as a distinct and low-prestige occupational, residential, and kin-based group, has been used to redefine and preserve village unity in the face of drastic ecological change. It argues further that this means of cultural adaptation contains the seeds of its own destruction and will, in the long run, prove fatal for community identity. Studies of occupational communities in complex societies suggest a strong link between work, residence, and social image (Horobin 1957; Dennis, Henriques et al. 1969; Lummis 1977). The example of Ferryden suggests the possibility ofa consider? able lag between the ecological and the symbolic transformation ofa community's status. The dynamics of boundary-making between fisherfolk and nonfisherfolk will be placed within a context of economic and political dominance and dependency in eastern Scotland. The discussion is based upon data collected during a year of fieldwork and archival research in Ferryden and Montrose in 1975 and 1976. Villages may now have surpassed tribes as archetypal anthropological units of study. They have become our preserve in the sociological wilderness of complex societies. There is even some concern that villages, like tribal societies, might be endangered (Mead 1980). However, the term "village" suffers from very nearly the same epistemological ambiguity as "tribe" (Fried 1975). That is, everyone uses it, and few bother to define it. Villages may be large or small, isolated or enmeshed in an urban matrix. Villages may house semi-autonomous rural cultivators or industrial wage-slaves. They may be found in tribal, capitalist, or socialist economies (Halpern 1967:122-123). Often, however, it is assumed that villages share a crucial attribute which is often considered to be lacking in the urban setting: a sense of community, of emotional as well as interactional boundedness. Cohen (1982) stresses this affective component in the introduction to his edited volume on rural British communities, which he aptly titles Belonging. However, the literature on British communities also informs us that not all who live in villages "belong" (Fleming 1979; Strathern 1981; Elias and Scotson 1965; Jenkins et al. 1960). As Strathern (1982:249) points out, "an unwarranted
Género e família na construção das identidades portuguesas no Canadá
In an ethnographic case study, gender and household relations are found to play in a Portuguese "community" in southwestern Ontario, Canada. The analysis focusses on the households of emigrants from the fishing town of Nazare whose members also work in fishing in Canada. Comparison is made with the Canadian households of emigrants from the Azores and Tras-os-Montes. Emigrants from the three regions are found to be differently located in the Canadian economy and to maintain different ideals and practices in the reconstitution of household and gender relations in a transnational context.
Child Training and Caste Personality: The Need for Further Research
an earlier version of this paper. When the Constitution of the Republic of India came into force on 26 January 1950 with a pledge to ’secure equality of status and of opportunity’ for all citizens, it meant revolutionary changes in the social stratification of Hindu society. Traditionally, the Hindu society was composed of many different but interdependent groups, known as the Castes, each of which performed certain specific functions. Several factors, besides the Constitutional provisions, had affected some changes in the compartmentalisation of the caste functions, but these changes were rather peripheral. In spite of the changes in functions through the passage of time, people still use stereotypes when thinking of the former traditional caste divisions, the Varnas, and of the Harijans, the ex-untouchables. Thus it is believed that a Brahmin is a pious, religious-minded person; a Kshatriya, a brave warrior, well versed in. warfare, and well trained in aggression and self-assertion; a Vaishya, a prototype of timidity, parsimony, and vegetarianism; a Sudra, a submissive, subservient type of person; and a Harijan, an unclean, untidy person, mere