Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Toledo, 2009. / Typescript. "Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in History." Bibliography: leaves 201-213.

Bibliography: leaves 232-238. / This study explores and documents the experiences of coloured workers in the Factreton area. Coloured workers in Factreton have a tendency to be unresponsive to political issues and political organisation. This unresponsiveness to politics is due to coloured workers tendency to perceive, and deal with, political and non- political realities as separate and unconnected. Coloured worker's social consciousness has been shaped by a particular set of historical and current factors. These factors are collectively termed, "The Politics of Exclusion". The apartheid state has politically, culturally, economically and psychologically excluded coloured workers from having access to the resources and status of the white population. The apartheid state has also separated coloured workers from the African majority. Coloured workers have responded to their oppression and exclusion by using non-political means to sustain community life. These have included particular kinship networks, high church attendance amongst women, excessive alcohol consumption amongst men, and a range of other cultural forms. Coloured workers' day-to-day struggle for economic survival has also tended to reinforce their unresponsiveness to politics. Coloured workers' lack of a clear political identity together with a prevalence of individualism and exclusive forms of behaviour has resulted in coloured workers distancing themselves from political organisation and action. These issues and arguments were developed through the use of extensive interviews with coloured workers and political activists. Furthermore, my year long residence within the Kensington/Factreton area was a vital method and experience which shaped this study.

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This thesis uses a number of sources to piece together evidence of working-class reading habits during the period 1850 to 1914: autobiographies, library borrowing records, middle-class contemporary observations, and answers to correspondents pages in popular periodicals. Middle-class dominance of literary production through the publishing industry, librarians, editors, and book reviews helped to shape working class autobiographical representations of reading. Literary conventions of autobiographies limit them as a source. By portraying the authors' life as a success story the genre puts greater emphasis on the reading of accepted classics and canonical works. Studies of two early libraries show how notions of class and gender affected the provision of texts in libraries. Later records prove that reading for leisure purposes had increased dramatically over the period from 1850 to 1914 and that juvenile literature was popular even with adult readers. Changes in the publishing industry and the popularity of genres are reflected in the library stock. An alternative source confirms these trends. The answers to correspondence pages of the London Journal, Reynolds' Newspaper and the Family Herald reveal that a number of common readers wanted to read in order to better themselves socially and intellectually. A popularised version of autodidact culture was both promoted and sought in the pages of popular periodicals. The thesis concludes that two distinct trends in reading are evident through the period: reading for self-improvement subtly shaped by autodidact culture, and an increase in leisure reading

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The thesis is about a village which has become a part of the industrial city of Bangalore, the ways in which this change in circumstances is taken into account in social relations and moral judgments and tbe relation between Hindu religion and morality. From this local study I draw tentative conclusions about social relations and movements of ideas in Indian industrial society. In chapter 1 (Introduction) I describe the conditions of my fifteen months' fieldwork. I criticize the view that economic and technical changes cause moral or social changes directly and predictably, that the effect of industrialization and urbanization must be to alter 'folk' or 'traditional' society in the direction of a single ideal type of 'urban' or 'industrial' society and that this must involve great social strain and breakdown of norms. Social change means changes in moral values and ideologies. Changes in economic and other circumstances do not determine ideologies, but are taken into account as reasons for altering social categories and making new kinds of value judgments. It is at this level of ideologies and values, rather than of 'ideal types' constructed out of external similarities, that it is useful to make comparisons between societies. Indian ideologies are expressed particularly in religious terms and the key to understanding social change in India lies in the changing relations between religion and morality. Chapter 2 (History and description) traces the village's history from its foundation around 1800 to its incorporation into Bangalore (pop. 1.2m) in the 1950s, and describes the present appearance of the village and housing conditions within it. The leading peasant families sold their land for building or built on it themselves, and became building contractors or wholesale merchants. Their sons were educated in English, and tended to become factory workers or clerks. Half the village's population of 6700 belong to families of recent immigrants. More than half the village's workers are in positions requiring some skill or responsibility. Bangalore consists largely of a network of such urban villages which are not submerged but become more conscious of their identity as the neighbourhood gains moral significance at the expense of communities of birth. Chapter 3 (Groups within the village) describes the vestiges of traditional relations between castes and the surviving village offices. These things, like village cults and festivals, acquire a new value as the reality of rural life recedes and the village's recent past is idealized in the myth of a co-operating community, associated with peasant virtues. Immigrants as well as old families are attached to the village, as a unit in which relations are moral rather than economic, and particularly as an arena in which claims to respect or status can be defended. The villagers are divided into old families and immigrants, by language (half speak Tamil the rest mainly Teluga or Kannada), by religion (four fifths are Hindus, the rest Giristians apart from a few Muslims), by caste by 'family', which varies in meaning according to the situation, by economic class, by economic relations of creditor and debtor, or of employer and employee in the case of the minority who work for other villagers by education by age, by sex by occupation, by party and faction, by voluntary associations.,by close neighbourhood and by friendship. Wherever possible I give statistics, based on a sample survey of every tenth household. In chapter 4 (Caste and family) I discuss caste ideology, the religious justification of hierarchy, the place of endogamy and occupation, and the relation between castes and 'subcastes'. I describe the main castes of the village, most of which belong to the 'middle' block of castes and are social equals, the situations in which caste counts, and the way in which endogamous groups divide, unite, overlap and change their names. The closed endogamous group tends to be replaced by overlapping marriage circles, which the household may redefine for itself within limits. Ideal relations within the family may be inferred from simple rules about who is entitled to respect, but the content of this respect, and the criteria for giving it, are changing in the direction of equality and autonomy. Chapters 5 and 6 (Religion) describe cults of the whole village, cults of other groups and personal religion. I distinguish three aspects of Hinduism: brahmanism, associated with prestige and auspiciousness, and with the values of dharma (order), permanence, hierarchy, purity and ritual, the religion of groups, for the protection and welfare of closed communities, and the religion of choice, associated with moksha or liberation, renunciation, devotion, the direct relation of the soul to God, and, particularly in the modern form of this kind of religion with conscience, responsibility and service. Brahmanism and group religion are complementary. The thinking that characterizes then is thoroughly hierarchical: men are arranged in a hierarchy of birth and function, the legitimate ends of life in a hierarchy of value. Each item in the hierarchy is justified Dy its association with those above it. Just as castes derive status from their relation to Brahmans, the interest (artha) of groups is justified by and subordinate to the eternal order (dharma) of the whole, and group religion is justified by and subordinate to brahmanism. The religion of choice tends to make universal not hierarchical distinctions, and to regard worshippers as equals. Each of these aspects is particularly associated with one of the three main temples in the village: the ore brahmanical temple, the temple of the village's patron goddess, and a Math or religious institution built over the grave of a Guru. The Math is a centre not only of devotional religion, but of social and moral innovation: its younger devotees organized a night school for village children, and have been prominent in other enterprises associated with the ideology of 'social service'. They transformed universalistic ethical beliefs which were latent and unstressed into the common assumptions of a generation influenced by the reforming enthusiasm, moral fervour and equalitarianism of the Independence movement. In chapter 7 (Respect) I consider the use and meaning of 'respect' and words connected with it ('big man' andc). Respect is a fundamental social value and the form in which economic and other relations on larger scales are projected on to the village's scale of values. It has two main components 'prestige', a given, de facto quality related to birth, wealth and influence, and 'honour', a moral, de jure quality depending on the autonomous moral judgments of others. In modern conditions the second component tends to gain importance at the expense of the first, and the conversion of wealth or power into status conies to depend now on complying with universalistic norms. Forms of organization for common action are compromises between two types: the traditional pancaayat or council, where decisions are taken by consensus and 'big men' respected for their 'prestige' take the initiative, and the modern association, where decisions are voted on and men respected for their personal moral qualities take the initiative. I describe a municipal election, and the two ways in which candidates build up support by acting through dyadic links of 'respect' and by a direct appeal to voters or supporters through ideological arguments. Chapter 8 (Values) I relate values and social relations in the village to the two types which Piaget calls heteronomy aud autonomy. Heteronomy is associated with constraint, hierarchy and unilateral respect, autonomy with aspiration, equality and mutual respect. They correspond to Bergson's closed and open types of morality, religion and society.

This study analyses the ‘prose of circumstances’ which implies the ‚discovery of prose fiction by the working-class movement in Germany from 1863 to 1906‘. In its introduction, it points to the prior history in the 1840s. The aim is both to identify developments in the working-class prose and to further differentiate the literary network in the second half of the 19th century. Previous research mostly perceived working-class literature from a socio-historical perspective; the last publications date back more than thirty years. Mostly summaries and not monographs, they focus on poetry and theatre of the labour movement. In contrast, this study looks into various forms of prose writing: a pre-revolutionary novel fragment by G. Weerth, a novel in three volumes dealing with the foundation phase of social democracy by J.B. von Schweitzer; short narratives published in feuilletons and calendars of the 1870s by the authors C. Lübeck, A. Otto-Walster and R. Schweichel; autobiographical writing from 1867 to 1906 by J.M. Hirsch, H.W.F. Schultz and F.L. Fischer as well as a piece of early social reportage by P. Göhre. In this way, the study presents a spectrum of diverse narrative modes, reflects on the conditions of genre and highlights differences and similarities at the same time. By considering source texts and intertextual relations, I do not examine the narrative pieces separately, but in their interdependence with other texts. The study focuses on narrative characteristics while examining overall literary and social developments. As a sequence of case studies, the chosen working-class prose narratives can be perceived from an innovative angle. The majority of texts are discussed in detail and related to contemporary bourgeois texts for the first time. Thus, the dominant perspective of bourgeois and poetic realism is broadened by the category of ‘social realism’. For this reason, the study can be seen as a contribution to a revised understanding of literature in the second half of the 19th century.

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