Don\u27t Say Slave: Interpreting Slavery at NAI 2011

Slave, servant, fugitive, runaway, master, slave owner, and farm. What do all of these words have in common? Well, if you went to Angela Roberts-Burton\u27s NAI session, Overcoming the Obstacles of Interpreting Slavery, you would know that all of these are words that she urged interpreters not to use when interpreting slavery and slave life. Instead, you should use: enslaved, freedom seeker, fled bondage, slave holder, and slave plantation. [excerpt

Criados agrícolas en la Suecia del XIX. El caso de Escania

In Sweden, as in other parts of north Western Europe, the servant system was well integrated with the marriage pattern and household formation system. While waiting to get married, young people for a period of their Iives worked as unmarried servants living in a master's household. Thus, Laslett's term "life cycle servants" is well suited to Swedish conditions. However, during the nineteenth century the importance of the servant system began to decrease, as a consequence of commercialisation of agriculture, industrialisation and urbanisation. On large farms and manors unmarried servants were replaced by married contract-workers, who lived with their families in dwellings owned by the employer. To young people the appearance of this new occupation meant a chance of forming a family without having access to a farm or crof1. In the twentieth century, the mechanisation of the agricultural production and migration from rural to urban and industrial areas further reduced the importance of the servant system in the countryside. The servant occupation became more or less a female occupation of domestic service in urban areas

Migration, Representations and Social Relations: Experiences of Jharkhand Labour to Western Uttar Pradesh

Studying a stream of migration from Jharkhand to western Uttar Pradesh (UP), this article focuses on the work and life experiences of migrant labour from tribal India. Based on an in-depth study of a Jharkhand village, alongside a briefer stint at the destination village in UP, it examines the micro-level nuances and complexity of migrant labour movements and their often unexpected and unrecognised social consequences, particularly, the renegotiation of class and gender relations at home and the destination. Apart from pointing to the deep interconnections between the relations of production and reproduction, it demonstrates how the use of distinct representations of work and life due to spatial distanciation contribute to renegotiating both labour relations and social identities

Challenging Containment: African Americans and Racial Politics in Montclair, New Jersey, 1920-1940

In 1930 Mary Elizabeth Bolden sent for her ten year old son, Theodore, from the rural Virginia farm where the family worked as sharecroppers. She had moved to Montclair the previous year with her sister, Ada, and brother in-law, James, and worked as a domestic servant to support herself. ..

Unmarried adolescents and filial assistance in eighteenth-century Flanders

Service was one of the main characteristics of the European Marriage Pattern in pre-industrial western Europe. During this stage of the life cycle adolescents could acquire the material assets and skills that were required to marry and start an independent household. Whilst in service, servants could save between 40 and 60 per cent of their cash wage. This paper illustrates that servants also used their earnings to assist their families. Parents of servants in particular could rely on both remittances in cash and in kind. As such, placing children in service was also a source of income for peasant household in Flanders. I argue that both patterns of land ownership and the restricted access to welfare ressources explain why servants displayed this altruistic behaviour.adolescents, farm servants, saving, Flanders, family assistance, poor relief, household formation, European Marriage Pattern,

Vigilant servant leadership

Over the last 70 years the Organic community has espoused a set of principles on which to farm, grow and live by. We have actively advocated the lifestyle, technologies and means to resolve many local and global issues which are now the titles of best-selling novels and treatise of recent times, Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry to name a couple (Benyus 2002, McDonough & Braungart 2002). A carbon economy is exactly what we have espoused for decades. It is nice to feel we were right. Continuing on a theme in the previous editorial, it is also very frustrating times. It is difficult to celebrate when generations of work is not acknowledged, or actively ignored. The symptoms of frustration abound; little or no research funding for Organic systems approaches is proportioned to our value to the food chain or calculated wider environment benefits and definitely less for the organisations that may organise it. While at the primary school level of education we have some success, we find there is diminishing support at the tertiary level. The situation is not better, it is worse. How could this be? How could we have permitted this to happen? Have we been absorbed, or peaked as a culture, accomplishing what we set out to do. I suggest not; the fun is just beginning, and so too the challenges

Colonial sovereignty, forms of life and liminal beings in South Africa

Book synopsis: Svirsky and Bignall assemble leading figures to explore the rich philosophical linkages and the political concerns shared by Agamben and postcolonial theory. Agamben's theories of the 'state of exception' and 'bare life' are situated in critical relation to the existence of these phenomena in the colonial/postcolonial world

Coping with the Supply-Demand Gap of Agricultural Labourers: A Case Study of Uttar Dinajpur District of West Bengal

The present paper has analyzed the mechanism by which farmers try to cope with the supply-demand gap of agricultural labourers during busy agricultural seasons in the face of growing shortage of agricultural labourers. The traditional mechanism of patron-client relationship between farmers and agricultural labourers has been dealt with in this regard. In this paper an attempt has been made to find answer to the following questions: What is the degree of attachment of the agricultural labourers with the employer? Is there any patron-client relationship between the employer and the employee? How effective is this relationship as a coping mechanism to mitigate the problem of supply-demand gap of agricultural labourers? The paper is based on a micro level study conducted in six villages of Uttar Dinajpur district, a predominantly agricultural and backward district of West Bengal. The study has suggested that to cope with the situation of supplydemand gap of farm labour, there is no other alternative but to adopt selective mechanization of farm activities. Some degree of mechanization is already there which is visibly on the rise. In future, there will be more inducement to undertake mechanical innovation to tackle the growing supply-demand gap in the farm labour.Patron-client relationship, Supply-demand gap, Farmer-labourer attachment, Agricultural labourers, Agricultural and Food Policy, J22, J23, J43,