Chapter 5 investigates the networks of relationship that sustain individuals and communities in the poems. It addresses family, marriage, sexual desire and agency, male bonds and loyalty, and the expectations placed on women and men. It also considers childhood and old age, hospitality, and wider social connections, arguing that epic memory preserves not only heroic deeds but everyday forms of attachment and obligation.

The connection between Christianity and the development of Western welfare states is long-standing, albeit somewhat neglected by scholarship. Recent work has suggested the formative influence on the formation of different welfare "regimes" through different Christian ideas of work, need, poverty, and the family, as well as differnt ecclesiologies. The chapter outlines these and proceeds to examine the philsophical connection between social welfare and religion, through the work of Raymond Plant. Plant argues that welfare policy invariably draws on inherently "contestable" social concepts, such as ‘need’, ‘want’, ‘right’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, and ‘community’. To know what kind of good social policy is pursuing, it is essential to clarify what meaning and weight we accord to such concepts. But doing this demands we have a clear idea of the kind of creatures whose goods we are pursuing. In essence, social welfare theory of this kind rests on anthropological commitments. The chapter illustrates this by reference to Richard Titmuss, Margaret Thatcher, and Frank Field, and in so doing, underlines how this entire debate is open to theological perspectives.

Although by no means uncompromising in his hostility to the “welfare” – or as he termed it the “social assistance” – state, Pope John Paul II was more critical of its legitimacy, processes and results than were William Temple, Jacques Maritain (or Rowan Williams). His antagonism was drawn, in part, from his formative experiences in Communist Poland, but it is the anthropological reasons for his more critical appreciation that are foundational. John Paul conceived of the human person as created and oriented to transcendence, as an effective moral agent, and with a clear capacity for reason and truth, as well as being relationally constituted and completed by ‘gift’. The consequence of this for his understanding of the welfare role of the state was a palpable reluctance to countenance social welfare structures that removed agency and responsibility from people. His resulting vision of welfare was not one in which the state had no direct role for welfare provision, but one in which work, family and the natural patterns of associational solidarity were the first and primary basis for welfare.

This book places the larger autobiographical projects of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other for the first time, drawing on a range of previously unanalyzed works. It argues that the structurally layered, word-and-image form of comics is particularly well-suited to negotiate complex filial inheritances and manage identity in the face of transgenerational trauma. Each chapter is organized around a different formal trope that highlights an aspect of the visual language of comics and its material processes: boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs. From Jewishness to gender, from high modernism to lesbian feminist communities, Filial Linesshows how the comics form is capacious enough to accommodate the push–pull of inheritance and invention, enabling both creators to negotiate their place in (or beyond) various lines of familial, cultural, and artistic descent. Integrating formalist and psychoanalytic frameworks, and parsing alignments and differences with different forms of practice, the book situates today’s graphic memoir canon as an unexpected outpost – and expansion – of avant-garde formalism long after the modernist moment of form.

Potential immigrants do not even apply for a visa because they also confront social forces from the community bearing on their families that deter them from leaving. Many young adults become deterred from migrating not merely from visa requirements, but also due to opposition and pressure from the family. Despite how most of China has a patrilocal kinship system and culture that more strongly sanctions men from marrying outside their bloodline, Chinese parents are much more likely to oppose women going abroad than men, even if this opposition decreases as they age. Aside from overt opposition children may face, many women specifically are discouraged from migrating abroad or even traveling abroad due to concerns about their daughter’s physical safety, socioeconomic dependence on their parents, and societal peer pressure. Such concerns are particularly strong in the patriarchal context of China as it is mediated by a traditional filial duty amongst the one-child-only generation toward their parents and the intense influence that parents exercise over the educational, career, and marital choices of their adult children – both of which have a stronger deterrent effect on daughters than on sons.

Deterrence also operates through a belief among potential immigrants that they need time to build sufficient socioeconomic status (SES) and social ties in their country of origin with which they can prove to foreign governments, family, and others in the country of origin they will return to their country when applying for an NIV and therefore enhance the opportunities they have to travel abroad. Many repeatedly defer migrating abroad because they devote time accumulating SES and social ties to meet several expectations of society, like the expectation that adult children complete a college education, obtain a “respectable” and stable job, purchase a home with a mortgage, marry, have and raise children, work enough to afford paying for the mortgage and sending their child to university, and increasingly take care of their parents as they age – all of which effectively tie up and therefore ground many individuals from going abroad. Others deterred from applying for a visa later often become especially eager to intentionally provide their children with preimmigration support to go abroad as what I conceptualize as second-generation emigrants.

This chapter turns to the forces of unity that drove patients’ publishing projects, focusing on the role of asylum periodicals in construing and maintaining real and imagined communities within and beyond the asylum. Producing and consuming periodicals brought together various actors with distinct skill sets, enabling, to a degree, transgression of the institutional boundaries that otherwise kept different groups of patients separated. This transgression fed into the representation of the asylum community as a family on the pages of asylum periodicals, reenforcing the institutionally imposed family model, according to which patients were ascribed the role of children under the care and protection of a father-like superintendent and a motherly matron. However, asylum periodicals show not only the manifestation of this framework’s application but patients’ active engagement with these symbols. Finally, the chapter explores former inmates’ continuous involvement in asylum periodicals, suggesting that some patients formed lasting and meaningful connections during their stay in mental institutions and relied on the asylum for support during their reintegration into society.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, this chapter explores how informal norms interact with formal justice. It recounts the challenges faced by complainants and female staff while working inside police stations.

You may have thought that as an early childhood education and care (ECEC) provider, your unifying focus will be centred around on the children in your setting. Supporting children’s learning and wellbeing may indeed be the priority, but this cannot be achieved without the positive involvement of children’s family members. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model describes the layered systems of support that children can be influenced by, acknowledging that no individual child exists in a vacuum (See chapters 1 and 2 for further details). The resources and wellbeing of the family as a whole will have an impact on children’s development, behaviour and engagement in ECEC settings, as well as at home and other community settings.

The voyages of Columbus and his successors linked the two hemispheres, and this chapter surveys the positive and negative biological, cultural, and social consequences of this “Columbian Exchange.” Among these were the spread of disease and the transfer of plants, animals, and consumer goods, along with economic changes that led to social protests, revolts, warfare, and forced migrations in an increasingly interdependent world. Religious transformations, including the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the creation of Sikhism, were interwoven with all of these developments, as religions, too, migrated and morphed. New urban social settings and cultural institutions, such as coffee and tea houses, theatres, and salons, offered men—and sometimes women—opportunities for entertainment, sociability, consumption, and the exchange of ideas, but the increasing contacts among peoples also resulted in more rigid notions of human difference.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.