Suchergebnisse

Abstract. Interviews and participation with members of rural volunteer fire departments (VFDs) in New York State, indicate that local communities in rural regions are structured around VFDs. Such "communities" involves both the fraternity of the fire house, resting on the teamwork essential to firefighting, and a wider locality, which the VFDs spatially define and symbolically integrate through a ritual of parades, fund raising efforts, and their example of community service. The working class, attached to the locality by stable residence and recruited intergenerationally into the fire service, supplies the majority of volunteers.Neoliberal modernization threatens this recruitment pattern. Problems have developed because the "new middle class" rejects VFD participation, except as ambulance volunteers. As localities compete for outside investment through the reduced cost of their services, they have exploited volunteers to provide fire protection at less cost than that of paid departments. This commodification of the VFDs risks destroying their character as a system of moral obligation unifying a locality and is an inequitable, and unsustainable, "tax" on working class volunteers. But innovative systems of emergency and other services can be used to attract the new male and female middle class into volunteer local activities.

It is argued that wilderness, a category of rural landscape socially constructed in the US from the ideas of the English Romantic movement, obfuscated & displaced aboriginal subsistance land use patterns & locally oriented farm communities. In the Adirondack Mountains of NY, the urban industrial elite in the last half of the nineteenth century were able to extend this wilderness definition of landscape in a way that legitimated their social roles as stewards of the general welfare, consolidating their aristocratic pretensions as a landed upper class. Travel writers, American scene painters, & the Protestant clergy played a leading role in this cultural redefinition of landscape, a definition later taken up by the suburban middle class & operationalized by the state as NY's Forest Preserve & Adirondack State Park. In displacing & obscuring prior subsistance land use patterns, wilderness is a political category employed by elites at the expense of historical accuracy & marginal populations. 41 References. AA

Content analysis of 355 stories on nature that appeared between 1898 & 1983 is used to examine science reporting in The New York Times. Science stories, which comprise a conceptual subsystem of Times articles, have three narrative assumptions: (1) scientific inquiry is treated as having a progressive quality that reduces apparent natural chaos to comprehensible & predictable order, & the state is increasingly depicted as playing a central role in underwriting & coordinating scientific research for the general welfare; (2) individual curiosity & risk-taking, as well as teamwork, are depicted as essential to progress, & good science is seen as a vehicle for individualism & a model for good journalism; & (3) the disruptive potential of nature is mitigated by the moral solidarity that localities display in responding to emergencies. The consequences of Times coverage based on these premises are threefold. Nature stories articulate a historically prior system of community-based values, corresponding to the neighborly responsibility of the old Mc of the small town rather than reflecting the mobility expectations of a new & Ur Mc. Second, Times reporting celebrates & justifies two themes central to liberalism: faith in human progress through science, & the conviction that such progress unites individualism with an activist & expanding role for government. Expectations of the scientific conquest of nature have, in recent years, led to the publicizing of failures of such efforts -- swine flu innoculation, mechanical heart transplants, etc. Rather than openly repudiating the liberal view of the scientific endeavor, The Times has since the 1950s adopted a more ambivalent stance. It is as though the new Mc, the newspaper's primary readership, has lost its grounds for historical optimism without as yet being able to fabricate a postliberal metaphor through which to understand its future as a class or the natural society. AA

Examines political violence affecting indigenous women and families, and describes the growth of grassroots support organizations to develop economic, educational, and political resources. Describes the Grupo de Apoya Mutuo (GAM), the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (CONVIGUA), Mamá Maquín, and other organizations.