Suchergebnisse

Ethnic Factors in Health and Disease.

A neglected area of sociological investigation is the relationship between ethnic factors and suicide mortality. This paper explores this topic among immigrant-ethnic groups in Canada. Three hypotheses are evaluated: (1) the assimilation thesis, which posits that the greater the degree of social assimilation among immigrant-ethnic groups, the greater the suicide rate; (2) the ethnic community integration explanation, which predicts that ethnic groups with strong degrees of community cohesiveness share reduced odds in their incidence of suicide; and (3) the socioeconomic hypothesis, which accounts for observed differences in suicide on the basis of discrepancies in socioeconomic well-being. The results of a multiple regression analysis provide empirical support for hypotheses (1) and (2). The findings are discussed in the con text of multiculturalism and the propensities for sociocultural groups to commit suicide dur ing the processes of assimilation and adjustment to the larger society.

AbstractThe island (more accurately, islands) of Sulawesi is a large and important part of Indonesia1 which certainly deserves more studies of its peoples and resources than is currently the case. These short notes provide some recent information on ethnicity and development in Sulawesi, and are presented mainly as problems that should concern future researchers and planners working in the area. Since the beginning of 1974 I have spent four and half years in Sulawesi, first studying the descendants of Javanese and other exiles in North Sulawesi. Later, I served as consultant anthropologist to the Sulawesi Regional Development Study, a project supported by the Canadian International Development Agency and the Indonesian Department of Public Works.2 During the latter project I visited almost all the kabupaten or administrative subdivisions of the four provinces of Sulawesi. Although the nature of the project did not allow for in-depth research, many problems related to ethnicity and development soon became apparent. Many of the government and secondary reports on the region collected during the study revealed a lack of concern for such issues. It is therefore all the more important that a brief outline of ethnic groups in Sulawesi be presented. The second major reason for these notes is the fact that Sulawesi, along with the other "Outer Islands", is receiving increasing amounts of national and international aid to carry out a wide variety of development projects for its people. It is therefore important that scholars and government officials should be aware of the effects of these projects and to establish how to go about studying them so as not to destroy the socio-cultural life of the Sulawesi people.

Virtually all of the literature concerning the politics of South Africa analyzes the dynamics of that system within the frameworks of racism, authoritarianism, and repression. Yet, strangely, the political institution which is necessarily the bulwark of such a system—the military—has attracted scant attention except in terms of strategy and armaments.