by P. Huerre, M. Pagan-Reymond, J.M. Reymond (1990)
L'enfance, l'âge adulte, la vieillesse existent assurément. Mais l'adolescence? S'agit-il d'un passage obligé, fatal, ou bien, au contraire, d'un phénomène socio-culturel qui reflète tous les signes du malaise de plus en plus visible d'un monde en mutation? L'adolescence est, en effet, un concept récent dans l'histoire des hommes. Les sociétés primitives ne le connaissent pas et des sociétés très évoluées -la Grèce, Rome, la France du Moyen Age et des Temps modernes- l'ont ignoré. Mettant en évidence le caractère relatif et artificiel de cet entre-deux-âges par l'observation de ses manifestations et de ses avatars au fil des temps, depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, cet essai montre que l'on assiste à une mise en scène de l'adolescence où ce sont tour à tour (ou simultanément) la nature, l'Etat, la famille, la religion, l'économie, la démographie, les concepts éducatifs ... qui lui décrivent son rôle.
Ruth Harris
Examining the French debate over crime and madness in the fin de siècle, Harris argues that psychiatric theories of human behaviour and new sociologicalinterpretations of crime combined to undermine the traditional foundations of the penal system and helped to shape the new science of criminology.
Gail Hershatter
This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declasse elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life, entering the historical record whenever others wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama. Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation.^ In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives.^ How can sources generated by intense public argument about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials: guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers.^ Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech, Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.
Michael E. Gardiner
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge.In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including:*The French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau*Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics*Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin*Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life.Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research.
Alison Clarke-Stewart, Judy Dunn
This book is concerned with the question of how families matter in young people's development - a question of obvious interest and importance to a wide range of readers, which has serious policy implication. A series of key current topics concerning families are examined by the top international scholars in the field, including the key risks affecting children, individual differences in their resilience, links between families and peers, the connections between parental work and children's family lives, the impact of childcare, divorce, and parental separation, grandparents, and new family forms such as lesbian and surrogate mother families. The latest research findings are brought together with discussion of policy issues raised.