Suchergebnisse

This article outlines the specific form taken by the social scientific study of childhood in Australia, identifying both what is shared with childhood research in other English-language countries, and what is distinctive in the Australian setting. It begins by sketching the social history of childhood in Australia, with particular reference to what was specific about the childhood experiences of Aboriginal children, as well as the peculiarities of settler-colonial family life. It then goes on to identify the moves towards a distinct focus on childhood in Australian sociology, which have until now been relatively modest, closely linked to other social science disciplines (notably history, anthropology, social policy and psychology), and theoretically more or less derivative of international developments in childhood sociology. The key research themes are outlined, including Aboriginal childhoods, the children of asylum-seekers and refugees and children's experience of divorce and separation, against a background of an increasingly neoliberal organization of social science research activity. The article then sketches the place of childhood in Australian public debate, and concludes with some observations on the possible future directions of the sociology of childhood in Australia.

The 20th century has not been one for Occidentals to be proud of, when you think of the aspirations of Western liberals at its outset, the efforts directed at all manner of progress and improvement, and how much so many millions of people have ended up suffering, and continue to suffer, at each other=s hands. The management of violence in all its diverse forms is arguably a problem of similar significance in the year 2001 as it was in 1901 - or 1801, 1501. It could be said that it has simply become more complex and differentiated. In addition, since 10 November 1989, roughly, there has been a striking shift in the way Western nations, states and peoples reflect back on the normative dimensions of their past history. Concepts like >reparation=, >restitution= and >reconciliation= have taken on new resonances, and observers like Elazar Barkan (2000) remark on a new and growing collective desire, largely but not only among Occidentals, to rethink history in ways which redress a range of past injustices. The idea of >restorative justice= (Strang & Braithwaite 2001), then, is one which applies not only to contemporary problems such as the relationship between perpetrators and victims of crime, it also gets stretched across time to encompass historical injustices (Gordon 1996) which have come to be seen as such because their cognitive frames have shifted. This normative rethinking of the past is, however, hotly contested, resulting from deep-seated disagreement about whether and how such conceptual reframing of history is to take place. The argument I would like to aim for here is that in order to work our way through these disputes intelligently, as well as addressing the fundamental issues underlying the experiences of historical injustice, it is important to engage - more systematically than we have so far - with our understanding of the idea of >civilization=. There seems to be little hesitation to mobilise varying conceptions of >barbarism= in reference to events, actions and forms of social organization we regard as immoral, unjust, cruel, inhumane or oppressive, but barbarism=s implied converse, civilization, leads a much more troubled existence, especially among social and political theorists and researchers. This same contrast can be seen in relation to the other issue taking a central place in European Australian=s rethinking of the history of their relations with Aboriginal people: the removal of Aboriginal children. Both the practice itself and the subsequent critique of that practice rely heavily on the concept of >civilization= to legitimate themselves. There was seen to be a sort of isomorphism between the approach to land and to family life; just as Aborigines were seen as bereft to rights to land because they did not cultivate it, and thus >uncivilized=, so too were they seen as bereft of rights to their own children, because they did not >cultivate= them into a form of civilization recognizable to Europeans (Dorsett 1995). Just as it was the duty of Europeans to cultivate the land to its maximum capacity, so too it was their duty to >cultivate=, educate Aboriginal children to their >maximum= capacity, that is, as assimilated and Europeanised. Civilized society is, in this usage, exactly what Aborigines are not part of, and it was this exclusion which supported the denial of their access to full citizenship, apparently leaving unchallenged the broader conceptions of egalitarianism and equity on which Australian national identity was supposed to rest. But, again, the critique of Aboriginal child removal which has emerged over recent decades also presents itself as informed by the appropriate degree of civility, and the earlier administrators and officials as characterized by a barbarism which current generations should condemn as an example of cultural genocide. The kinds of question that this paper addresses, then, include: What do the various policies and practices surrounding the removal of Indigenous children tell us about the inner workings of liberal rationalities of government, and what do changes in those rationalities in turn tell us about our current retrospective understanding of those policies and practices? How can the history of Indigenous child removal illuminate both the peculiarities of governance under settler-colonialism and underlying features of liberal rationalities of government more generally?

So far there have usually been only two answers to the question of what to do with dichotomies in sociology, either embrace them or attempt to synthesize them. However, this has produced merely an endless vacillation between the two positions, and a paradoxical constant reproduction of dichotomous thinking, rather than its transformation. This paper works towards a 'third answer' to the question, first, by outlining how the concept of the 'Hobbesian problem of order', as proposed by Talcott Parsons, underpins all sociological dichotomies, and why it is important to re-read Hobbes and revisit the socalled 'problem of order'. Second, it explains how Bruno Latour's model of the 'Constitution' of modern thought helps us to understand the dynamics of oppositions like nature/society or agency/structure, and how the problems with dichotomies derive from only perceiving part of the Constitution, rather than all of it. The paper concludes with a discussion of one example of a type of sociology that does operate across all of Latour's Constitution because it is based on a different conception of what is problematic about social order, Norbert Elias''figurational sociology', as well as some observations about what we might do with sociology's Constitution from this point onwards.

This paper argues for the integration of a greater awareness of reproductive conduct into sociological theory and research. Instead of conceiving the relationship between demography and sociology as one where sociological concepts are used to illuminate demographic concerns, the paper works towards the development of a demographic perspective in sociological understandings of modern society and its historical development. The argument will be for the notion of the `reproductive self', with a greater emphasis on understanding human identity as stretching over time and generations, rather than as self-contained, timeless and autonomous. The paper will show that such a conception of human identity enables us to improve our understanding of a range of theoretical issues, including the relation between social structure and action and the rationality of human action, as well as revealing the historical roots of a number of long-term trends which are usually treated as changes typical of the second half of the twentieth century.

Aufhauend auf einem systematischen Vergleich der Theorien von Weber, Elias und Foucault wird eine Kritik der These vom »Zivilisationsprozeß « formuliert, in deren Mittelpunkt der Begriff der »Zivilisationsoffensive« steht. Danach ist die Rationalisierung menschlicher Subjektivität in der Geschichte moderner Gesellschaften weniger einem anonymen Prozeß zunehmender » Verflechtung« geschuldet, als vielmehr dem interessebedingten Handeln konkreter Akteure im historischen Prozeß. Untermauert wird diese Kritik an Elias durch eine Konfrontation seiner Thesen mit den Ergebnissen der neueren Sozialgeschichtsforschung.