Search results
Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are well-known because of their rich grave goods, but this wealth can obscure their importance as local phenomena and the product of pluralistic multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and some Merovingian cemeteries and aims to understand them using a multi-dimensional methodology. The performance of mortuary drama was a physical communication and so needed syntax and semantics. This local knowledge was used to negotiate the arrangement of cemetery spaces and to construct the stories that were told within them. For some families the emphasis of a mortuary ritual was on reinforcing and reproducing family narratives, but this was only one technique used to arrange cemetery space. This book offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistic perspective. Each chapter builds on the last, using visual aesthetics, leitmotifs, spatial statistics, grave orientation, density of burial, mortuary ritual, grave goods, grave robbing, barrows, integral structures, skeletal trauma, stature, gender and age to build a detailed picture of complex mortuary spaces. This approach places community at the forefront of interpretation because people used and reused cemetery spaces and these people chose to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased because of their own attitudes, lifeways and lived experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will also be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social differentiation because it proposes a way to move beyond grave goods in the discussion of complex social identities.
Early modern Westminster is familiar as the location of the Royal Court at Whitehall, parliament, the law courts and the emerging West End, yet it has never been studied in its own right. This book reveals the often problematic relations between the diverse groups of people who constituted local society - the Court, the aristocracy, the Abbey, the middling sort and the poor - and the competing visions of Westminster's identity which their presence engendered. There were four parishes in Westminster at the turn of the sixteenth century. The parishes of St Martin's and St Margaret's have been identified as two of only eighteen English parishes for which continuous and detailed parish records survive for the turbulent period 1535-1570. Differences in social organization, administrative structure and corporate life in the two parishes also provide a study in contrasts. These crucial differences partly shaped forms of lay piety in each parish as well as their very different responses to the religious reformations of Henry VIII and his children. The death of Henry VIII heralded important changes in Westminster. Most strikingly, however, this was a period of major religious change, in stark contrast to the piecemeal changes of Henry's reign. The dissolution of Westminster's abbey gave rise to special problems. The book examines individuals who wielded the most influence at the local government; as well as the social identity of these parish elites. Finally, it explores the interaction of religion with the social and political developments observed in the post-Reformation town.
Chapter 2 Class: jobs, families, mobilities and social identities This chapter explores class identifications in England since the 1940s. As such, it is primarily about the ways in which people experience class, the economic, social and cultural processes which shape individual subjectivities, and the extent to which these mould social identities. As suggested in the introduction, social identifications are understood as a relational: they are both about how one defines oneself in relation to others and about how one is categorised by other individuals, groups
the people they confined, much of which stigmatised the institutionalised. The individual chapters in this book belong inside a wider intellectual project: establishing how colonial social identities were produced through medicine and its institutions, specifically through the hospitals for the insane. The term ‘social identity’ is taken here to mean the way that certain groups were formed inside
institutional context. Thus far, this study has engaged with aspects of social identity expressed in medicine through and inside the institutional setting. Along the way, the study has also invoked aspects of the emerging discursive anxiety about the colonial-born and insanity, which in the early twentieth century led to mental hygiene movements in Australia and New Zealand. Therefore, the chapter also
(what the literature on collective identity calls ‘group identification’ and ‘social categorisation’). We document these processes by drawing on exploratory interviews conducted with black marketing experts specialising in the African-American market who provide us with distinctive readings of the meaning of consumption for blacks. These experts are viewed here as individual black consumers and as members of an occupational group organised around increasing the place of consumption in individual social identities. In the next section, we discuss the place of group
aspect it was the Establishment. In another, a leisure class of prestige who took part in the London Season, and followed the country house round. More rarely it might be extended to take in the leaders of industry and finance, but only when they were taken up in high politics, or caught up in the social round. ‘Society’ was a descriptive term for titled and influential people who monopolized prestige roles. (1983b: 29–30) Social identity is a matter of negotiating among the differing group identities each person maintains (Royce, 1982). In each instance, identity is
overlapping areas. I have argued for a nuanced approach to conceptualising working class experiences and identities during the mid-twentieth century. In seeking to explore the processes of social identity formation I have argued that occupational definitions and labour market experiences, while still useful, are inadequate. In Chapter 2 I argued that workplace experiences need to be JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 200 03/05/2012 10:31 Conclusion 201 considered alongside the dispositions, values and behaviours instilled in early socialisation. I further argued that the
‘industrious’ building tradesman as a pre-​eminent arbiter of genteel architectural and decorative tastes? At the outset, it is important to acknowledge that recent scholarship in the fields of consumption and material culture has challenged this polarity. Lawrence Klein notes that while in the earlier part of the eighteenth century ‘politeness’ was juxtaposed with ‘usefulness’, it was also commonly understood that ‘commercial life itself demanded a kind of politeness’.35 In an age where social identity was both adaptive and dynamic, the transgression of formal social
pensions, continued broadcasting, to the population as a whole, through the institutions we have all evolved for this kind of public debate and decision-making. In this way, our membership of a particular social group comes to have a political dimension, and this becomes part of our political identity. Political identity is the site where varied social identities are drawn together with a political purpose. Political identity should be distinguished from other kinds of identities, especially other social identities. In particular it is important not to fall into the trap