Kristina Göransson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824832599
- eISBN:
- 9780824870195
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824832599.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the ...
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Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of a deep generational divide. More complex than simple disparities of education or changes in income and consumption patterns, this growing gulf encompasses language, religion, and social memory. This book explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change. The family remains a pivotal feature of Singaporean society and the primary unit of support. It focuses on the middle generation, caught between elderly parents who grew up speaking dialect and their own children who speak English and Mandarin. In analyzing the forces that bind these generations together, the book deploys the idea of an intergenerational “contract,” which serves as a metaphor for customary obligations and expectations. It examines the many different levels at which the contract operates within Singaporean families and offers striking examples of the meaningful ways in which intergenerational support and transactions are performed, resisted, and renegotiated. The book provides insights into the complex interplay of fragmenting and integrating forces and makes a critical contribution to the study of intergenerational relations in modern, rapidly changing societies and the challenges that Singaporean families face in today's hypermodern world.Less
Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of a deep generational divide. More complex than simple disparities of education or changes in income and consumption patterns, this growing gulf encompasses language, religion, and social memory. This book explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change. The family remains a pivotal feature of Singaporean society and the primary unit of support. It focuses on the middle generation, caught between elderly parents who grew up speaking dialect and their own children who speak English and Mandarin. In analyzing the forces that bind these generations together, the book deploys the idea of an intergenerational “contract,” which serves as a metaphor for customary obligations and expectations. It examines the many different levels at which the contract operates within Singaporean families and offers striking examples of the meaningful ways in which intergenerational support and transactions are performed, resisted, and renegotiated. The book provides insights into the complex interplay of fragmenting and integrating forces and makes a critical contribution to the study of intergenerational relations in modern, rapidly changing societies and the challenges that Singaporean families face in today's hypermodern world.
MELISSA WALKER
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813124094
- eISBN:
- 9780813134789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813124094.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the local farmers' recollection of their experiences in the rural transformation in the American South. It suggests that the ...
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This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the local farmers' recollection of their experiences in the rural transformation in the American South. It suggests that the transformation of agriculture undermined farm people's ties to the past and the rural southerners, through their stories, sought a kind of redemption, a restoration of a sense that their lives and their way of life had mattered. Their shared memory focused on self-sufficiency, a rural work ethic, persistence through hard times, a commitment to mutual aid, an attachment to the land and the local community, and the relative equality of rural folk. Their descriptions of transformation and its meanings were marked by sharp class, generational, and racial divides.Less
This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the local farmers' recollection of their experiences in the rural transformation in the American South. It suggests that the transformation of agriculture undermined farm people's ties to the past and the rural southerners, through their stories, sought a kind of redemption, a restoration of a sense that their lives and their way of life had mattered. Their shared memory focused on self-sufficiency, a rural work ethic, persistence through hard times, a commitment to mutual aid, an attachment to the land and the local community, and the relative equality of rural folk. Their descriptions of transformation and its meanings were marked by sharp class, generational, and racial divides.
Melanie Tebbutt
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066139
- eISBN:
- 9781781704097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066139.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Social History
Chapter 4 suggests that much interwar social behaviour was more relaxed than before the First World War and the informalising trends of popular culture exposed generational fissures which were ...
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Chapter 4 suggests that much interwar social behaviour was more relaxed than before the First World War and the informalising trends of popular culture exposed generational fissures which were particularly apparent in concerns about the cinema's imaginative and sensual impact. Courtship and ‘dating’ were becoming ‘private’ acts of consumption, taking place away from family and neighbourhood venues, in public social spaces such as the cinemaintroduction and dance hall. This distancing stimulated many adult concerns about their inability to supervise adequately young people's leisure, and produced much often ill-informed commentary about how young people's sexual lives were changing. What received less attention were shifting imaginative landscapes and the cinema's catalysing role for emotional tensions between individual and public expressions of masculinity, as the chapter suggests in its exploration of the responses which particular films evoked in some young men.Less
Chapter 4 suggests that much interwar social behaviour was more relaxed than before the First World War and the informalising trends of popular culture exposed generational fissures which were particularly apparent in concerns about the cinema's imaginative and sensual impact. Courtship and ‘dating’ were becoming ‘private’ acts of consumption, taking place away from family and neighbourhood venues, in public social spaces such as the cinemaintroduction and dance hall. This distancing stimulated many adult concerns about their inability to supervise adequately young people's leisure, and produced much often ill-informed commentary about how young people's sexual lives were changing. What received less attention were shifting imaginative landscapes and the cinema's catalysing role for emotional tensions between individual and public expressions of masculinity, as the chapter suggests in its exploration of the responses which particular films evoked in some young men.
