Why did the medieval West condemn clerical marriage as an abomination while the Byzantine Church affirmed its sanctifying nature? This book brings together ecclesiastical, legal, social, and cultural history in order to examine how Byzantine and Western medieval ecclesiastics made sense of their different rules of clerical continence. Western ecclesiastics condemned clerical marriage for three key reasons: married clerics could alienate ecclesiastical property for the sake of their families; they could secure careers in the Church for their sons, restricting ecclesiastical positions and lands to specific families; and they could pollute the sacred by officiating after having had sex with their wives. A comparative study shows that these offending risk factors were absent in twelfth-century Byzantium: clerics below the episcopate did not have enough access to ecclesiastical resources to put the Church at financial risk; clerical dynasties were understood within a wider frame of valued friendship networks; and sex within clerical marriage was never called impure in canon law, as there was little drive to use pollution discourses to separate clergy and laity. These facts are symptomatic of a much wider difference between West and East, impinging on ideas about social order, moral authority, and reform.

Romantic relationships, especially good ones, are desired of almost all humans. However, what makes such relationships good and nourishing? For the most part, it is the support and intimacy that exists within the couple, and their ability to experience life and face difficulties together. This book is divided into two sections, one focusing on the couple and their intimate relationship, and the other on how that relationship influences their offspring. Part one examines whether sacrificing in an intimate relationship is always beneficial and whether it help strengthen the marital/couple unit? Attachment theory has had a significant influence on how we view relationships in childhood as well as in adulthood. The book sheds light on the mechanisms that mediate attachment style and the quality of the intimate relationships, exploring the relationship between one's ability to express empathy and that person's ability to offer social support to his/her partner. The second part of the book explores what young adults think about marriage, influenced by their parental relationship; how parental relationships affect children's social experience in school; how parental approaches to children affect their sibling relationship; the parental role in childhood eating disturbances; and how the family climate affects children's loneliness. All in all, the book affords a thorough review not only of what marital/couple intimacy is and what can affect it, but how significant it is in affecting their children, in and out of the house. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Psychology.

This book provides new and empirically grounded research-based knowledge and insights into the current transformation of the Russian child welfare system. It focuses on the major shift in Russia's child welfare policy: deinstitutionalisation of the system of children's homes inherited from the Soviet era and an increase in fostering and adoption. Divided into four sections, this book details both the changing role and function of residential institutions within the Russian child welfare system and the rapidly developing form of alternative care in foster families, as well as work undertaken with birth families. By analysing the consequences of deinstitutionalisation and its effects on children and young people as well as their foster and birth parents, it provides a model for understanding this process across the whole of the post-Soviet space. It will be of interest to academics and students of social work, sociology, child welfare, social policy, political science, and Russian and East European politics more generally.

People eat and drink very differently throughout their life. Each stage has diets with specific ingredients, preparations, palates, meanings and settings. Moreover, physicians, authorities and general observers have particular views on what and how to eat according to age. All this has changed frequently during the previous two centuries. Infant feeding has for a long time attracted historical attention, but interest in the diets of youngsters, adults of various ages, and elderly people seems to have dissolved into more general food historiography. This volume puts age on the agenda of food history by focusing on the very diverse diets throughout the lifecycle.

This book grapples with the potential impacts of collective trauma in war-rape survivors' families. Drawing on inter-ethnic and inter-generational participatory action research on reconciliation processes in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, the author examines the risk that female survivors of war-related sexual crimes, now-mothers, will breed hatred and further division in the post-conflict context. Showing how the historical trauma of sexual abuse among survivors affects the ideas, perceptions, behavioural patterns and understandings of the ethnic and religious 'Other' or perpetrator, the book also considers the influence of such trauma on other attitudes rarely addressed in peacebuilding programmes, such as notions of naturalised gender-based violence, cultural scripts of sexuality and support for dangerous or violent aspects of the patriarchal social order. It thus seeks to sketch proposals for a curriculum of peacebuilding that takes account of the legacy of war rape in survivors' families and the impact of trauma transmission. As such, Trauma Transmission and Sexual Violence will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology and gender studies with interests in peace and reconciliation processes and war-related sexual violence.

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary analysis into the lives of migrant children and youth over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day. Adopting biopolitics as a theoretical framework, the authors examine the complex interplay of structures, contexts and relations of power which influence the evolution of child migration across national borders. The volume also investigates children's experiences, views, priorities and expectations and their roles as active agents in their own migration. Using a great variety of methodologies (archival research, ethnographic observation, interviews) and sources (drawings, documents produced by governments and experts, films and press), the authors provide richly documented case studies which cover a wide geographical area within Europe, both West (Belgium, France, Germany) and East (Romania, Russia, Ukraine), South (Italy, Portugal, Turkey) and North (Sweden), enabling a deep understanding of the diversity of migrant childhoods in the European context.

Originally published in 1991. Covering courtship, disclosure, diversity, and public implications, the essays here discuss topics such as erotic magic, nakedness, physicians' attitudes about sex, boy-love, saints and sex, and the politics of sodomy, as they were manifested in medieval Europe and the Middle East.

After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has experienced large-scale transformations owing to national and international migration, urbanization, the development of many national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and economic dynamism. Globalization and economic liberalization have created opportunities to develop sustainable social policies by strengthening the national economy of the country. Major progress has been made in closing the gender gap, and the Constitution of Bangladesh provides equality of status and opportunity to all its citizens irrespective of sex. However, domestic violence perpetuated against women is a common phenomenon in Bangladesh. This book is a study about domestic violence against women in Bangladeshi society. It delineates, in particular, why and how some women become the victims of domestic violence in the changing socio-economic setting of Bangladesh. The author explores the multiple contexts in which domestic violence occurs by focusing on the everyday experience of women subjected to this violence. The book shows how changing socio-economic setting, urbanization and the growing demand for female labor influences the phenomenon and experience of domestic violence. It demonstrates that domestic violence is entangled in a complex web of institutionalized social relations that necessitates a structural and contextual understanding of the production of such violence in family, kinship and gender relations. Finally, it identifies factors that cause, perpetuate, and mitigate domestic violence or give strength to women to struggle and raise their voices or take shelter in the law against the perpetrators of domestic violence. A novel contribution to our understanding of how gender relationships are differently constituted and contested in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi women, both in natal and affinal families, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Sociology, Gender and Law and South Asian Studies.

Fathers, Prisons, and Family Reentry: Presencing as a Framework and Method asks scholars, policy makers, advocates, and practitioners to rethink family reentry in a new light, to seek to understand both the urgent and intolerable loss as well as the real and present potential of families. There are almost one million parents of minor-aged children currently serving time in U.S. prisons-most of them fathers. Based on post-phenomenological analyses, William Muth offers a new framework for conceptualizing family reentry as a present phenomenon. It seeks to reveal the intense ways incarcerated fathers and their families live their present-absence, and draws on these intensities to define a new role for researchers and practitioners: nurturing the potential of families in the here and now. The current situation is intolerable. A credible family reentry approach is urgently needed. This book is an attempt to address these families as they potentially are, and might become, if we would be willing to "meet them half-way," in the words of the poet Alice Fulton.

Young people's participation is an urgent policy and practice concern across countries and context. This book showcases original research evidence and analysis to consider how, under what conditions and for what purposes young people participate in different parts of Europe. Focusing on the interplay between the concepts of youth, inequality and participation, this book explores how structural changes, including economic austerity, neoliberal policies and new patterns of migration, affect the conditions of young people's participation and its aims. With contributions from a range of subject experts, including young people themselves, the book challenges current policies and practices on young people's participation. It asks how young people can be better supported to take part in social change and decision-making and what can be learnt from young people's own initiatives.

For anyone studying childhood or families a consideration of the state may not always seem obvious, yet a good critical knowledge of politics, social policy and social theory is vital to understanding their impacts upon families' everyday lives. Accessibly written and assuming no prior understanding, it shows how key concepts, including vulnerability, risk, resilience, safeguarding and wellbeing are socially constructed. Carefully designed to support learning, it provides students with clear guidance on how to use what they have read when writing academic assignments alongside questions designed to support the develop of critical thinking skills. Covering issues from what the family is within a multicultural society, through issues around poverty, social mobility and life-chances, this book gives students an excellent grounding in matters relating to work with children and families. It features: * 'using this chapter' sections showing how the content can be used in assignments; * tips on applying critical thinking to books and articles - and how to make use of such thinking in essays; * further reading.

The family remains the most contested institution in American society. How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work explores the ways adults make sense of their family lives in the midst of the complicated debates generated by politicians and social scientists. Given the rhetoric about the family, this book is a well overdue account of family life from the perspective of families themselves. The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a whole view of different types of families. The chapters focus on contemporary issues such as who do we consider to be a part of our family, can anyone achieve family-life balance, and how do families celebrate when they get together? Relying on stories shared by a racially/ethnically diverse group of forty-six families, this book finds that parents and siblings cultivate a family identity that both defines who they are and influences who they become. It is a welcomed installment to conversations about the family, as families are finally viewed within a single study from a multicultural lens.

This book examines labouring-status women in late medieval Valencia as they negotiated the fundamentally defining experience of their lives: marriage. Through the use of notarial records and civil court cases, it argues that the socio-economic and immigrant status of these women greatly enhanced their ability to exercise agency not only in choosing a spouse and gathering dotal assets, but also in controlling this property after they wed. Although the prevailing legal code in Valencia appeared to give wives little authority over these assets, court records demonstrate that they were still able to negotiate a measure of control. In these actions, labouring-status wives exercised agency by protecting their marital goods from harm, using legal statutes to their own advantage. In looking at the experiences of labouring-status women, this monograph shifts the debate regarding women's access to and control of property in the medieval period. Exploring a group previously unexamined by scholars, it argues that our understanding of women's marital strategies changes, challenging the central role of blood and marital kin in these negotiations. -- .

This book considers the ways that family relationships (parental, marital, sibling or other) mimic, and stand in for, political ones in the Early Modern period, and vice versa. Bringing together leading international scholars in literary-historical fields to produce scholarship informed by the perspective of contemporary politics, the volume examines the ways in which the family defines itself in transformative moments of potential crisis - birth and death, maturation, marriage - moments when the family is negotiating its position within and through broader cultural frameworks, and when, as a result, family 'politics' become most apparent.

Women in the thraldom of man has led sometimes, in one form or another, to the most horrible abuses. In this book, originally published in 1939, the author traces and analyses the institutions of marriage and family in India. The women of India, after their ancient matriarchal supremacy, declined into medieval degradation and slavery, brought about by subtle and prolonged subjugation by men through the instrumentality of legal restraints, supposed religious grounds, the Purdah, child-marriage and widow-burning. These iniquities were practised under the sanctified excuse of matrimony. The author points out, in this objective sociological study, practical methods of emancipation of Indian women, and urges the necessity for a radical change of values which would give the greater impetus to these vitally necessary reforms. The book is of especial interest as a sociological study of a curious and cruel form of organized inhumanity. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context. This book is a re-issue originally published in 1939. The language used and views portrayed are a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

In recent years there has been a rapid growth of interest in the sociological study of childhood. This new book draws together the major developments in the field. In particular, the book discusses contemporary sociological and anthropological research in order to develop key links between the study of childhood and social theory, exposing its historical, political and cultural dimensions.

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying ... ? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so ... but philosophers lead a very different life ... So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease to remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.

Multigenerational living - where more than one generation of related adults cohabit in the same dwelling - is recognized as a common arrangement amongst many Asian, Middle Eastern and Southern European cultures, but this arrangement is becoming increasingly familiar in many Western societies. Much Western research on multigenerational households has highlighted young adults' delayed first home leaving, the result of difficult economic prospects and the prolonged adolescence of generation Y. This book shows that the causes and results of this phenomenon are more complex. The book sheds fresh light on a range of structural and social drivers that have led multigenerational families to cohabit and the ways in which families negotiate the dynamic interactions amongst these drivers in their everyday lives. It critically examines factors such as demographics, the environment, culture and family considerations of identity, health, care and well-being, revealing how such factors reflect (and are reflected by) a retracting welfare state and changing understandings of families in an increasingly mobile world. Based on a series of qualitative and quantitative research projects conducted in Australia, the book provides an interdisciplinary examination of intergenerational cohabitation that explores a variety of concerns and experiences. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in housing, demographics and the sociology of the family.

The sites, spaces and subjects of reproduction are distinctly geographical. Reproductive geographies span different scales - body, home, local, national, global - and movements across space. This book expands our understanding of the socio-cultural and spatial aspects of fertility, pregnancy and birth. The chapters directly address global perspectives, the future of reproductive politics and state-focused approaches to the politicisation of fertility, pregnancy and birth. The book provides up-to-date explorations on the changing landscapes of reproduction, including the expansion of reproductive technologies, such as surrogacy and intrauterine insemination. Contributions in this book focus on phenomenologically-inspired accounts of women's lived experience of pregnancy and birth, the biopolitics of birth and citizenship, the material histories of reproductive tissues as "scientific objects" and engagements with public health and development policy. This is an essential resource for upper-level undergraduates and graduates studying topics such as Sociology, Geographies of Gender, Women's Studies and Anthropology of Health and Medicine.

Adopting a conversation analytic approach informed by ethnomethodology, this book examines the process of socialization as it takes place within everyday parent-child interactions. Based on a large audio-visual corpus featuring footage of families filmed extensively in their homes, the author focuses on the initiation of interactive assessment sequences on the part of young children with their parents and the manner in which, by means of embodied resources, such as talk, gaze, and gesture, they acquire communicative skills and a sense of themselves as effective social actors. With attention to the responses of parents and their understanding of their children's participation in exchanges, and the implications of these for children's communication this book sheds new light on the ways in which parents and children achieve shared understanding, how they deal with matters of 'alignment' or 'disalignment' and issues related to their respective membership categories. As a rigorous and detailed study of children's early socialization as well as the structural and embodied organization of communicative sequences, Socialization: Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life will appeal to scholars of sociology and child development with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, early years socialization and the sociology of family life.

This book sheds light on the invisible early post-arrival period of female family migrants, traditionally considered to be low skilled or professionally quiescent. With attention to the experiences of Chinese and Taiwanese women married to German men, it examines the ways in which the private sphere-marked by intermarriage couple dynamics and native-foreigner relations-constitutes the main locus of women's socialization in the host country, as interactions with their intimate partners in the family realm shape both their self-conceptions and their employment intentions. Based on interviews with migrant women and their spouses, the author outlines the subject positions that characterize female migrants' attitudes to external constructs and entering the labor market, showing that female family migrants frequently take on family migrant and wife roles that permeate intimate relationships and impede employment intentions, but also often strive to realign with their pre-departure independent selves and thus regain agency. A study of gender dynamics and labor market entry among newly arrived female migrants, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in gender, migration, and work.

There have been a number of social, political and economic shifts that have played a major role in constraining, enriching, mediating and altering everyday family interactions and family practices. These include globalization, economic instability, neoliberal government paradigms, a culture of consumerism, technological advancements, shifting demographics and changing parenting ideologies. This book considers what advancements have been made in family leisure research over the past two decades within the context of a rapidly shifting society and examines potential new directions for scholarship. The book begins with an emphasis on the need for scholarship that explores diverse constructions of family and provides a call to action for family-centered scholars to engage with broader social issues. A collection of authors argue the importance of expanding the understanding of family to include older adults, highlight the missing perspectives of recreation and leisure agencies in family scholarship, and examine the ways in which information communication technology may alter family leisure. Authors also consider the dominance of particular theoretical perspectives, and the limitations and consequences of such perspectives, to understand the complexity, diversity and richness of the lived family experience. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Leisure Sciences and an invited commentary in the Annals of Leisure Research.

The rising visibility of interracial couples calls for increased attention to the overlapping of culture and race, in safe spaces centered on small-group dynamics, or in public spaces where peoples of African descent are under the public gaze. This comparative study seeks to de-center the U.S-centered viewpoint common to much of the literature on black/white relations. Based on nine years of fieldwork in the American South and in France, Coquet shows many unexpected parallels between the two societies. Gendered perceptions of cultural authenticity and sexual ethics are a guiding thread, being inseparable from the historical and political contingencies (re-)defining acceptable forms of dating, marrying, and parenting among cis-heterosexual couples in both societies. Her account emphasizes resilience and agency as couples seek to protect themselves and their children, while their extended or symbolic kinship networks help white partners acknowledge the existence of racial privilege.

Originally published in 1958, this book discusses how marriage and Fulbe family life, the economy and the whole organization of society is centred on cattle; how the welfare of the herd and its increase, the balance betweent he size of the herd and the size of the family are major preoccupations in the life of a Fulani herd-owner.