Neighbors And Strangers

Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighborly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbors and strangers alike. During the colonial period population growth, immigration, economic development, war, and religious revival transformed the nature and context of official and economic relations in Connecticut. Towns lost the insularity and homogeneity that made them the embodiment of community. Debt litigation was transformed from a communal model of disputing in which procedures were based on the individual disagreements to a system of mechanical rules that homogenized law. Pleading grew more technical, and the civil jury faded from predominance to comparative insignificance. Arbitration and church disciplinary proceedings, the usual alternatives to legal process, became more formal and legalistic and, ultimately, less communal. Using a computer-assisted analysis of court records and insights drawn from anthropology and sociology, Mann concludes that changes in the law and its applications were tied to the growing commercialization of the economy. They also can be attributed to the fledgling legal profession's approach to law as an autonomous system rather than as a communal process. These changes marked the advent of a legal system that valued predictability and uniformity of legal relations more than responsiveness to individual communities. Mann shows that by the eve of the Revolution colonial law had become less identified with community and more closely associated with society.

The compelling, insightful, and challenging memoir of a Christian woman's exploration of her faith while living in community with strictly Orthodox Jews. As Maria Johnson explains: "I knew that Christianity is rooted deep in Judaism, but living in daily contact with a vital and vibrant Jewish life has been fascinating and transforming. I am and will remain a Christian, but I am a rather different Christian than I was before."

This book explores rural societies in western Europe from 700-1050. It focuses on the bottom of the social hierarchy, rejectingviews that see rural society exclusively through the structures of lordship and challenging the teleological idea of the residential group as the prototype of the late-medieval structured community.

As a leading country in global refugee resettlement, Canada operates a unique program that allows private groups and individuals to sponsor refugees. This innovative approach has received growing international attention, but there remains a need for a more expansive understanding of the sponsorship framework and its potential implications within Canada and across the world. Strangers to Neighbours explains the origins and development of refugee sponsorship, paying particular attention to the unintended consequences and ethical dilemmas it produces for refugee policy. The contributors to this collection draw upon law, social science, and philosophy to bring a more robust and objective perspective on Canada's historical experience with sponsorship into wider conversations about the refugee crisis and resettlement. Together, they present recent cases that exemplify how the model has been applied and how it functions, while also analyzing the challenges that emerge in host-sponsor relations. This volume further examines how sponsorship has been implemented differently in countries such as the United States and Australia. The first dedicated study of refugee sponsorship policy, Strangers to Neighbours assembles leading scholars from a range of disciplines to consider whether Canada's system is indeed a sustainable model for the world.

In Strangers and Neighbors, Andrea M. Voyer shares five years of observations in the city of Lewiston. She shows how long-time city residents and immigrant newcomers worked to develop an understanding of the inclusive and caring community in which they could all take part. Yet the sense of community developed in Lewiston was built on the appreciation of diversity in the abstract rather than by fostering close and caring relationships across the boundaries of class, race, culture, and religion. Through her sensitive depictions of the experiences of Somalis, Lewiston city leadership, anti-racism activists, and even racists, Voyer reveals both the promise of and the obstacles to achieving community in the face of diversity.

In the present age of migration, the influx of immigrants from distant lands leads inevitably to the spatial and social restructuring of cities and regions. It is often accompanied by fears of and hostility towards the newcomers. Nevertheless, in Europe, North America and Japan this influx of immigrants is essential to economic growth. How can immigrants become accepted members of the society of their adopted country? How can strangers become neighbours? What alchemies of political and social imagination are required to achieve peaceful coexistence in the mongrel cities of the 21st century? What philosophies and policies have made integration successful in Canada and how can it be translated into European context? The book tackles an important contemporary issue – the social integration of immigrants in a large metropolis – by way of the detailed case study of one Canadian city. The book provides a large political and legal context which makes this case study comprehensible and inspiring to readers outside Canada.

This book examines alleged “superhuman” powers predominantly associated with smith/artisans in five African societies. It discusses their ritual and social roles, mythico-histories, symbols surrounding their art, and changing relationships between these specialists and their patrons. Needed but also feared, these smith/artisans work in traditionally hereditary occupations and in stratified but negotiable relationships with their rural patron families. Many of them now also work for new customers in an expanding market economy, which is still characterized by personal, face-to-face interactions. Rasmussen maintains that a framework integrating anthropological theories of witchcraft, alterity, symbolism, and power is fundamental to understanding local accusations and tensions in these relationships. She also argues that it is critical to deconstruct and disentangle guilt, blame, and envy—concepts that are often conflated in anthropology at the expense of falsely accused “witch” figures. The first portion of this book is an ethnographic analysis of smith/artisans in Tuareg society, and draws on primary source data from this author’s long-term social/cultural anthropological field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali. The latter portion of the book is a cross-cultural comparison, and it re-analyzes the Tuareg case, drawing on secondary data on ritual powers and smith/artisans in four other African societies: the Amhara of Ethiopia, the Bidan (Moors) of Mauritania, the Kapsiki of Cameroon, and the Mande of southern Mali. In the concluding analysis, there is discussion of similarities and differences between these cases, the social consequences of ritual knowledge and power in each community, and their wider implications for anthropology of religion, human rights, and African studies.

How important are foreign affairs in the grand scheme of civilization? Do defenses against the invasion of strangers influence the evolution of culture? Drawing on decades of experience in government as well as in the academy, William R. Polk offers a uniquely informed, comprehensive view of foreign relations. Bridging academic disciplines he treats foreign affairs as they occur in the real world. Instead of separating diplomacy, intelligence and espionage, defense and warfare, trade and aid, intervention and law from one another, he shows how they interact and together form a whole pattern with which we must deal if we are to move safely into the 21st century. But Neighbors and Strangers is not just a guide to the future; Polk draws upon all recorded history, and indeed upon studies of animal and primitive social behavior, and from the entire world for vivid examples to illuminate for the general reader the underlying principles and consistencies that characterize relations with foreigners. Indeed, going deeper into the human experience, Polk documents "fear of the foreigner" as a visceral response so deep-seated and so pervasive that it transcends human memory, individual experience and even logical analysis. More generally, he shows that the tension created by having to live as neighbors with those who, in the definition of contemporaries, were irredeemably alien has been one of the major causes of the rise of civilizations. Accessible and engaging, Neighbors and Strangers is a revelatory look at how foreign affairs are a profound reflection of human nature.