CH 11: Looking at the Past and Across Cultures

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CH 11 Looking at the Past and Across Cultures
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WHAT IS HISTORICAL-COMPARATIVE RESEARCH (HCR)?

• HCR places historical time and/or cross-cultural
  variation at the center of analysis
• HCR looks at how a specific mix of diverse
  factors come together in time and place to
  produce a specific outcome (e.g., war, social
  movement, migration, etc.)
• HCR makes big comparisons, of units like
  nation-states, societies, cultures, to see how
  they are similar and different
• HCR examines social processes across several
  cultural or historical settings

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What research questions are suitable for HCR?

• Big questions about macro-level change over
  time (across historical eras) or in two or more
  sociocultural contexts
• When the goal is to understand/explain
  macro-level events
• e.g., a terrorist attack, a nation going to war,
  sources of racism, large-scale immigration,
  religious conflict, urban decay, etc.
• Do people who immigrate form attachments to their
  new country or stay connected across
  international borders?
• What about the questions that drive the article,
  Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New
  Economy?

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CONCEPTUALIZATION

• Write down all the concepts you can recall from
  Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
  Economy
• Sort concepts into groups, classify them

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Concepts can be grouped in various ways, for
example

• social structures
• social processes
• social relations
• social actors
• activities
• events
• social contexts/locations/populations

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Concepts can also be arranged on a continuum,
from specific to universal

• universal concepts apply across social settings,
  historical time, and culture
• specific concepts apply only to particular social
  settings, historical eras, or cultures
• Many concepts fall between these extremes
• (Neumann, pp. 299-300)

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H-C research uses a blend of research techniques

• traditional history, field research, interviews,
  content analysis, existing statistics, etc.

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Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
Economy

• Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild,
  in Rothenberg, Ed., Beyond Borders Thinking
  Critically About Global Issues, 2006.

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With globalization, women are on the move as
never before

• Theres growing migration of millions of women
  from poor countries to rich ones, where they
  serve as nannies, maids and sex workers
• Lacking help from male partners, many women have
  succeeded in male world careers only by turning
  over care of children, elderly parents, and homes
  to women from the Third World

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The female underside of globalization

• Millions of women from poor countries in the
  south migrate to do the womens work of the
  north work that affluent women are no longer
  able or willing to do
• Migrant women often leave their own children back
  home, in the care of grandmothers, sisters, and
  sisters-in-law

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The pattern of female migration reflects a
worldwide gender revolution

• In both rich and poor countries, fewer families
  can rely solely on a male breadwinner
• In the U.S., the earning power of most men has
  declined since 1970, and many women have gone to
  work to make up the difference
• ? So who will take care of the children, the
  sick, the elderly?

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Hypothesis The lifestyles of the First World
are made possible by a global transfer of the
services associated with a wifes traditional
rolechild care, homemaking, and sexfrom poor
countries to rich ones.
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To generalize and perhaps oversimplify

• In an earlier phase of imperialism, northern
  countries extracted natural resources and
  agricultural products from lands they colonized
• Today, while still relying on Third World
  countries for agricultural and industrial labor,
  the wealthy countries also seek to extract
  something harder to measure and quantify, that
  can look very much like love.

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Historical precedents for the globalization of
traditional female services

• In the ancient Middle East, the women of
  populations defeated in war were routinely
  enslaved and to serve as household workers and
  concubines for the victors
• Among the Africans brought to North America as
  slaves in the 16th 19th centuries, about 1/3
  were women children, and many became concubines
  and domestic servants
• 19th century Irishwomenand rural Englishwomen--
  migrated to English towns and cities to work as
  domestics in homes of growing upper middle class

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The feminization of migration

• From 1950 1970, men predominated in labor
  migration to northern Europe from Turkey, Greece,
  and North Africa
• Since then, women have been replacing men
• In 1946, women were fewer than 3 of the
  Algerians and Moroccans living in France by
  1990, they were more than 40
• Overall, half of the worlds 120 million legal
  and illegal migrants are now believed to be women
• Patterns of international migration vary from
  region to region, but women migrants from a
  surprising of sending countries actually
  outnumber men, sometimes by a wide margin (See
  pp. 533-534)

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Composition of household workforce in US has
changed with the life chances of different ethnic
groups

• In late 19th century, Irish and German immigrants
  served the northern upper and middle classes,
  then left for factories as soon as they could
• Black women replaced them, accounting for 60 of
  all domestics in the late 1940s, and dominated
  the field until other occupations opened up
• West coast maids were disproportionately Japanese
  American until that group found better options
• Today, ethnicity of workforce varies by region
  Chicanas in the Southwest, Caribbeans in New
  York, native Hawaiians in Hawaii, whites, mostly
  rural, in Maine
• (Ehreneich, Maid to Order The Politics of Other
  Womens Work Harper's, 4/1/2000)

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The globalization of womens work is NOT a simple
synergy of needs among women

• Fails to account for failure of First World
  governments to meet the needs created by womens
  entry into workforce
• The American andto a lesser degreeEuropean
  welfare state has become a deadbeat dad
• US does not offer public child care, nor insure
  paid family and medical leave
• Omits the role of men, who still do less than
  their fair share of domestic work
• Often leaving working women with a second shift

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Push factors not so simple either

• Female migrants are not the most impoverished, so
  absolute poverty not a push factor
• They are typically more affluent and better
  educated than male migrants
• Such women are likely to be enterprising and
  adventurous enough to resist the social pressures
  to stay home and accept their lot in life
• Noneconomic factors also influence decision to
  migrate
• To escape expectation to care for elderly family
  members, to give paychecks to husband or father,
  to defer to an abusive husband
• A practical response to divorce or need to raise
  children as single mother
• Other factors may make men of poor countries less
  desirable as husbands (e.g., unemployment and
  related social problems such as alcoholism and
  gambling)

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Globalization of child care housework brings
independent women of the world togetherbut not
as sisters allies with common goals

• Instead they come together across a great divide
  of privilege and opportunity
• A global relationship has formed that in some
  ways mirrors the traditional relationship between
  the sexes
• The First World takes on a role like that of the
  old-fashioned male in the family
• Poor countries take on a role like that of the
  traditional woman within the family
• A division of labor feminists critiqued when it
  was local has now, metaphorically speaking,
  gone global

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What is Unique about HCR?

• Builds on Limited and Indirect Evidence
• Interprets the Meaning of Events in Context
• -Supracontext awareness
• -Coherence imposition
• -Capacity overestimation
• Integrates the Micro and Macro Levels
• Uses Specific and Transcultural, Transhistorical
  Concepts

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HOW TO DO A HCR RESEARCH STUDY

• Acquire the necessary background
• Conceptualize the issue
• Locate and evaluate the evidence
• Organize the evidence
• Synthesize and develop concepts
• Write the report

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RESEARCHING THE PAST
Historians and social researchers study the past
in different ways

• Historians
• See collection of historical evidence as central
  goal in itself
• Interpret data in light of other historical
  events
• Are not overly concerned about developing theory

• Social researchers
• See collection of historical evidence as
  secondary
• Want to extend or build theory or apply social
  concepts to new situations
• Use historical evidence as a means to an end to
  explain/understand social relations

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Types of Historical Evidence

• Primary sources
• Running records
• Recollections
• Secondary sources

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Primary sources and their limitations

• primary sources sources created in the past and
  that survived to the present
• presentism the fallacy of looking at past events
  from the point of view of today and failing to
  adjust for a very different context
• ethnocentrism as applied in comparative
  research, the fallacy of looking at the
  behaviors, customs, and practices of people in
  other cultures narrowly from your cultures point
  of view

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Evaluating primary sources

• After locating documents, you must evaluate them
  with external and internal criticism
• external criticism evaluating the authenticity
  of primary source materials
• internal criticism evaluating the credibility of
  information in primary source materials

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Running records and their limitations

• Running records ongoing files or statistical
  documents that an organization such as a school,
  business, hospital, or government agency
  maintains over time
• Limitations
• organizations do not always maintain them
• organizations do not record information
  consistently over time

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Recollections and their limitations

• recollections a persons words or writings about
  past experiences created by the person some time
  after the experiences took place
• oral history interviews with a person about his
  or her life and experiences in the past
• Limitation because memory is imperfect,
  recollections and oral histories can be distorted
  pictures of the past in ways primary sources are
  not

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Secondary sources and their limitations

• secondary sources specific studies conducted by
  specialist historians who may have spent many
  years studying a narrow topic. Other researchers
  use these secondary data as sources.
• Limitations
• Holes or gaps in the historical record and few
  studies on your topic
• Inaccurate historical accounts
• Biased interpretations