Kinship And Conquest

Download or read book Kinship and Conquest written by Joanna H. Drell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of Medieval Europe have long employed the family as a window through which to explore broader social, political, and economic issues. Drawing primarily on the abundant charter sources in the archive of S.S. Trinità at Cava dei Tirreni, Joanna H. Drell has reconstructed the history of family relationships in the Principality of Salerno from its conquest by the Normans in 1077 to the death of the last Norman king in 1194. In Kinship and Conquest, Drell challenges historians to modify their views on the nature of medieval family structure. Complicated ties of blood and marital kinship enabled the Norman kings to solidify their central authority in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily. The author finds that in the principality a broad range of kin participated in the management of family property, and that kinship networks remained highly flexible. Drell mines the Cava archive to illuminate not only the composition of the noble families and the nature of kinship networks, but also the extent of genealogical memory, the depth of Norman cultural influence, and the strategies the families used to transfer patrimonial holdings and, hence, political power. One of the first books to integrate the Italian South into the larger history of Medieval Europe, Kinship and Conquest is a novel contribution to the rich historiography on kinship and political power in western Europe.

Download or read book Colonial Kinship written by Shawn Michael Austin and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay, historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní—one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay—not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asunción, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming “brothers-in-law” (tovajá) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.

Download or read book Colonial Intimacies written by Erika Perez and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A gem of historical scholarship!”—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America How do intimate relationships reveal, reflect, enable, or enact the social and political dimensions of imperial projects? In particular, how did colonial relations in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southern California implicate sexuality, marriage, and kinship ties? In Colonial Intimacies, Erika Pérez probes everyday relationships, encounters, and interactions to show how intimate choices about marriage, social networks, and godparentage were embedded in larger geopolitical concerns. Her work reveals, through the lens of social and familial intimacy, subtle tools of conquest and acts of resistance and accommodation among indigenous peoples, Spanish-Mexican settlers, Franciscan missionaries, and European and Anglo-American merchants. Concentrating on Catholic conversion, compadrazgo (baptismal sponsorship that often forged interethnic relations), and intermarriage, Pérez examines the ways indigenous and Spanish-Mexican women helped shape communities and sustained their culture. She uncovers an unexpected fluidity in Californian society—shaped by race, class, gender, religion, and kinship—that persisted through the colony’s transition from Spanish to American rule. Colonial Intimacies focuses on the offspring of interethnic couples and their strategies for coping with colonial rule and negotiating racial and cultural identities. Pérez argues that these sons and daughters experienced conquest in different ways tied directly to their gender, and in turn faced different options in terms of marriage partners, economic status, social networks, and expressions of biculturality. Offering a more nuanced understanding of the colonial experience, Colonial Intimacies exposes the personal ties that undergirded imperial relationships in Spanish, Mexican, and early American California.

Download or read book The Social Conquest of Earth written by Edward O. Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year (Nonfiction) Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence (Nonfiction) From the most celebrated heir to Darwin comes a groundbreaking book on evolution, the summa work of Edward O. Wilson's legendary career. Sparking vigorous debate in the sciences, The Social Conquest of Earth upends “the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first” (Discover). Refashioning the story of human evolution, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to demonstrate that group selection, not kin selection, is the premier driving force of human evolution. In a work that James D. Watson calls “a monumental exploration of the biological origins of the human condition,” Wilson explains how our innate drive to belong to a group is both a “great blessing and a terrible curse” (Smithsonian). Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, the renowned Harvard University biologist presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth’s biosphere.

Download or read book Kinship to Kingship written by Christine Ward Gailey and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have women always been subordinated? If not, why and how did women’s subordination develop? Kinship to Kingship was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society. Using a Marxist-feminist approach, Christine Ward Gailey analyzes women’s status in one society over three hundred years, from a period when kinship relations organized property, work, distribution, consumption, and reproduction to a class-based state society. Although this study focuses on one group of islands, Tonga, in the South Pacific, the author discusses processes that can be seen through the neocolonial world. This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines necessarily entails the subordination of women. And the opposite is also held to be true: state and class formation cannot be understood without analyzing gender and the status of women. Of interest to students of anthropology, political science, sociology, and women’s studies, this work is a major contribution to social history.

Download or read book War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible written by Jacob L. Wright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped the way many think about war. Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible? In this book, Jacob Wright offers a fresh and fascinating response to this question: War pervades the Bible not because ancient Israel was governed by religious factors (such as 'holy war') or because this people, along with its neighbors in the ancient Near East, was especially bellicose. The reason is rather that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel, one that can both transcend deep divisions within the population and withstand military conquest by imperial armies. Drawing on the intriguing interdisciplinary research on war commemoration, Wright shows how biblical authors, like the architects of national identities from more recent times, constructed a new and influential notion of peoplehood in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Download or read book Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece written by Lee E. Patterson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study enriches the dialogue on how societies often use myth to construct political, social, and cultural identity---hardly unique to the ancient Greeks, it is rather a human phenomenon for a culture to embrace an identity grounded in a putative ancestry that is expressed in the traditional stories of that culture. --Book Jacket.