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published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This study examines the role of the churches of various Christian denominations during the period 1870-1914. It investigates three areas of County Durham. The Borough of South Shields is the main focus of the study and provides evidence of the churches' work in a large urban centre. Two comparative studies are also included: the coal mining villages of the Deerness Valley close to Durham City provide evidence from a newly industrialised area whilst the villages of Upper Teesdale illustrate trends in a more rural area in which the lead mining industry was in significant decline during this period. The approach of the study is comparative throughout. The study concentrates on several aspects of the churches' work. The provision of manpower and buildings are examined as the churches' response to the needs created by social change; there is also an investigation of the effectiveness of evangelical mission as a means of recruiting support for the churches. The study examines the churches' work with and attitude towards children - both inside and outside Sunday school - and with adults in various non liturgical activities. There are also sections on the churches' role in education and social welfare work. The study reflects recent developments in the fields of social and religious history in its examination of the churches' fears of 'decline' during this period and the extent to which such fears were justified. The comparative approach enables urban developments to be compared and contrasted with rural activities and allows the experience of different denominations to be included in the study.

State-run formal schools were established as novel educational institutions throughout the Tibetan regions in China in the 1950s. Based on a fifteen-month anthropological fieldwork in a Tibetan region in A mdo, this dissertation examines the impact of formal education on social change in Tibetan communities. Through a comprehensive analysis of: Chinese government policies; economic development; Tibetan educational models and practices; personal narratives from Tibetans of different generations; and traditional rituals, this dissertation investigates the role of formal education in Tibetan society. I argue that formal education is a main factor spurring social change in Tibetan communities. Education, through established formal institutions, integrates Tibetan communities into the national society of China, bringing close contact with non-Tibetan outsiders and binding students together with shared values and goals. This study shows that formal education is a legitimating venue through which Tibetans seek socioeconomic benefits and, as a result, education creates diversification in livelihoods and influences the dynamics of family structure, marriage patterns, identity, gender relations, and labor divisions.

This dissertation explores how the tea-growing districts of China and colonial India were integrated into the global division of labor over a formative century of boom-bust expansion. I explore this history of competition by highlighting two dimensions of economic and intellectual change: the intensification of agrarian labor and the synchronous emergence of new paradigms of economic thought. As tea exports from China and India soared and competition grew fiercer, planters, factory overseers, peasants, and government officials shifted their attention from the wealth-creating possibilities of commerce to the value-creating potential of labor and industrial production. This study also historically situates two older, teleological assumptions in the field of Asian economic history: the inevitability of industrialization and of proletarianization. Both assumptions emerged from social and economic transformations during the nineteenth century. In particular, periodic market crises compelled Chinese and colonial Indian officials to seriously question older "Smithian" theories premised upon the "sphere of circulation." Instead, both regional industries pursued interventionist measures focused on the "abode of production." In India, officials passed special laws for indentured labor recruitment. In China, reformers organized tea peasants and workers into agrarian cooperatives. Finally, colonial officials and Bengali reformers in India agreed that they needed to liberate the unfree "coolie" from the shackles of unfree labor. And in China, reformers articulated a critique of rentier "comprador" merchants and moneylenders who exploited peasant labor. Thus, although the "coolie" and "comprador" became twentieth-century symbols of Asian economic backwardness, they were each, as concepts, produced by profound social and economic changes that were dynamic, eventful, and global in nature.

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As China is undergoing a great social transformation, urbanization has brought millions of domestic migrants into Beijing. After the 2008 Olympics, long term Beijingers have started to express their hostility against the overwhelming population of domestic migrants. This thesis seeks to enlarge our understanding of the nature and dynamics of this local hostility in Beijing, as a case study of the construction of prejudice that results from social change. It is illustrated under a combined framework of Durkheim’s theories of social change and anomie, Allport’s theorizing about prejudice, and Elias’s writings on insiders and outsiders. In order to answer how and why local hostility happened recently in Beijing, I located my ethnographic research on a grassroots organization consisting of long term Beijingers. There are three main findings. First, social change provides the invention of new traditions and norms that long term Beijingers were able to adopt before migrants came and had the chance to get settled. This enabled long term Beijingers to express their hostility by claiming that the migrants were “uncivilized”. Second, urbanization and a series of urban reforms not only brought migrants into the city, but also disturbed the existing lifestyles of the long term Beijingers and made them feel relatively deprived. Nostalgic sentiments aroused among long term Beijingers blamed outsiders for their perceived deprivation. Thirdly, the civic participation that the grassroots organization encouraged did not significantly reduce their prejudice against outsiders. Instead, local hostility was veiled by active participation and was believed to be legitimate because of the support of the local power structure, the mainstream media, and by other government policies.

Thesis (MPA.) -- University of Limpopo, 2006 / Refer to document

The original impulse sparking this project – namely the paradox of suffering and violence in the twentieth century- guides the reader along an unexpected set of detours, occasionally drawing one away from the usual watering holes of political theory. Along the course, we contemplate the powers of force and facilitation, violence and sovereignty; don overalls and embark on a scenic tour of the inner workings of an internal combustion engine; scramble under razor wire to glimpse the terror of camps and torture complexes; contemplate the soul and its relation to violence and life; creep into ‘a delightful boudoir’, spying acts of reciprocity and consensuality that are capable of pleasurably making possible what was previously impossible; navigate vast tributaries of lubricative flows, across administrative systems, bureaucracies and governments; find ourselves caught amidst the excitement and terror of a surge of flooding bodies; and discover secreted away from the grinding friction of opposing forces, spaces of pure reciprocity capable of generating a true peace. The course of this inquiry necessitates an expansive search through fields of pain and pleasure, of force and facilitation,, of violence and hope. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)