Mutual aid societies

Simon Springer (Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada) contributes this short essay about his visit to Moscow and Domitrov. He organized a session titled “For Kropotkin” with Anthony Ince for the IGU Moscow Regional Conference and made a trip to the Kropotkin museum in Dmitrov.

De communautaire spanningen binnen de Belgische Werkliedenpartij liepen voor de Eerste Wereldoorlog hoger op dan tot nu toe aangenomen werd. Niet alleen zorgde de taalkwestie voor onenigheid, maar Vlamingen en Franstaligen bleken zich te identificeren met andere vaderlanden: de Franstaligen met België, de Vlamingen met Vlaanderen. De Vlaamse socialisten hadden tot de Eerste Wereldoorlog zelfs anti-Belgische trekken omdat zij de Belgische Omwenteling verwierpen als een ongelukkige broodopstand, die door de katholieken misbruikt was om zich van Nederland af te scheuren. De achterliggende gedachte was zelfs dat België een kunstmatige creatie was. Hun Franstalige kameraden eigenden zich 1830 nadrukkelijk toe als een nationale revolutie, die door de burgerij aan de arbeiders ontstolen was. Zij profileerden zich als ‘volbloed’ Belgen, met dien verstande dat verschillende Waalse socialisten al vanaf 1909 de wallingantische toer opgingen.
Kortom, de partijeenheid binnen de BWP is sterk overschat. Er is terecht op gewezen dat socialistische politici in de eerste plaats binnen het Belgische politieke kader dachten. Maar daar de conclusie aan verbinden dat ze allen aan hetzelfde vaderland verknocht waren, is fout. Deze onderschatting van de communautaire verschillen binnen de partij is ten eerste te wijten aan het selectieve geheugenverlies van de meeste socialistische voormannen na de Eerste Wereldoorlog. De zware aanvaringen tussen Vlamingen en Walen pasten niet in het succesverhaal dat de partij na 1918 schreef. Ten tweede heeft de Vlaamse beweging in de loop van de 20ste eeuw een monopolie verworven op het keurmerk van het 'Goede Vlamingschap'. Door zichzelf op te werpen als de voorhoede van de hele natie, is de Vlaamse beweging erin geslaagd haar tegenstanders af te schilderen niet alleen als vijanden van de flaminganten, maar van heel Vlaanderen. De uitvallen van de Vlaamse socialisten naar de Vlaamse beweging zijn dan ook vaak geïnterpreteerd als zovele bewijzen voor hun 'anti-Vlaamse' houding. Uit dit boek blijkt echter dat hun anti-flamingantisme vóór 1914 niet tot een afwijzing van Vlaanderen leidde, noch tot een toenadering tot het Belgische vaderland. Daarvoor waren er te veel tegenstrijdige factoren in het spel, waarvan de belangrijkste factor vanaf de eeuwwisseling de zware communautaire crisis in de partij was. De Gentse socialisten voelden de verwijten van hun Waalse kameraden aan het duistere Vlaanderen immers aan als een onterechte kritiek op hun propaganda-arbeid. Een kritiek die des te harder aankwam omdat hun voorhoederol in 'Arm Vlaanderen' een van de centrale mythen van hun zelfbeeld was.

ENGLISH 
History of mutual aid societies and working class in the province of Avellino. The origin of the social security system; the links between social associations and politics. 

ITALIAN 
Storia delle società di mutuo soccorso e della classe operaia in provincia di Avellino. Le origini del sistema previdenziale; i legami tra associazioni sociali e politica.

In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune (Trice 2014), while discussing how modern Native Americans have become culturally invisible in the United States, indigenous rapper Frank Waln stated “we’re a people with a past, not of the past.” This is a process he calls “symbolic annihilation.” In many ways, the Gallina invert Waln’s sentence. They were a people of the past but without a past. By purposely removing objects that referenced their place-based past, they removed their recent history to focus more fully on the period of the distant past (Basketmaker II) that was their atavistic ideal. They simultaneously removed themselves from history while wrapping themselves in their own version of the past. For this chapter, then, to reverse the standard archaeological gaze and view the Gallina as active producers and not just recipients of history, I used geosocial networks and architectural patterning to explore potential patterns in the archaeological record through the lens of social movements. The case study was conducted at the community level. The community data were synthesized in a bottom-up, diachronic, and cross-regional inquiry into the use of space and use of markers of place within and between Gallina communities. Thus, the Gallina are viewed as part of a historical continuum instead of merely within a spatially restricted culture area. From this perspective, they become much more than a culturally impoverished group that was pushed into poor resource areas at the margins of more demographically dense, culturally rich groups. Instead, when the non-local ceramics found in some Gallina households are interpreted as remnants of largely forgotten inscribed memory, they become a people with varied histories who chose to reject the northern Southwest’s changing social landscape by systematically removing their place-based connections to that history and then reworking their political and ideological world.
By taking a diachronic and network perspective, the Gallina become a people who chose their way in their world. Specifically, they decided to step out of a cultural and ideological trajectory diametrically opposed to their ideas on how life should be organized. Once socially and historically situated, the Gallina highlands look more like a place of refuge for people who were rebelling against political and religious changes in the northern Southwest than an area populated by simple folk unable to keep pace with their rapidly changing neighbors. The Gallina region suddenly becomes a much more complicated place—a diverse collection of people dedicated to creating a new community at the edges of their previous world, one with clear material connections to antecedent regional groups (see Simpson 2016) but with new architectural and artifactual forms (i.e., tri-notched axes and pointed-bottom vessels). However, they are not a hybrid group like the colonial resistors Homi K. Bhabha (1994) was describing when he redefined hybridity. Instead, as a product of their atavistic movement, they become hybrids through time. By appropriating the past for their own intentions, they become rebels in their present—pioneers of a future history.

Radical geographers have been preoccupied with Marxism for four decades, largely ignoring an earlier anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s. When anarchism is considered, it is misused as a synonym for violence or derided as a utopian project. Yet it is incorrect to assume anarchism as a 'project', which instead reflects Marxian thought. Anarchism is more appropriately considered a protean process that perpetually unfolds through the insurrectionary geographies of the everyday and the prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association. Unlike Marxism’s stages of history and revolutionary imperative, which imply an end-state, anarchism appreciates the dynamism of the social world. In staking a renewed anarchist claim for radical geography, I attend to the divisions between Marxism and anarchism as two alternative socialisms, wherein the former positions equality alongside an ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism while the latter maximizes egalitarianism and individual liberty by considering them as mutually reinforcing. Radical geographers would do well to reengage anarchism as there is a vitality to this philosophy that is missing from Marxian analyses that continue to rehash ideas–such as vanguardism and a proletarian dictatorship–that are long past their expiration date.

ENGLISH 
The book analyzes the birth of the workers’ associations in the province of Naples and follows their development until the crisis of the end of the XIX century. Mainly based on sources of the State Archive of Naples and on daily newspapers, it focuses on mutual aid societies, which after Italian unification were the most common form of workers’ organization and had several functions, from social security to trade union representation. The book examines the social and political function of these associations, highlighting how they participated in the conflicts between capital and labour and how they were involved in the electoral disputes. Individual chapters are dedicated to socialist and catholic organizations, as well as to the management of the associations, analyzing the origin and the use of the social funds, the main activities of the mutual aid societies and the distortions which hindered their development. The book aims both at narrating the story of organizations and social movements and at proposing an interpretation of their role in the process of modernization of Naples and in its inclusion in the unitary state. Two questions are at the heart of the book: what role was plaid by organization within social conflicts; which part associations had in the life of the workers and in the Neapolitan society, mainly as regards the insertion of the poorer social classes in political life. 

ITALIAN 
Il volume esamina la nascita delle associazioni operaie nella provincia di Napoli e ne segue lo sviluppo fino alla crisi di fine Ottocento. Basato in prevalenza su fonti dell’Archivio di Stato di Napoli e sulla stampa quotidiana, dedica l’attenzione maggiore alle società di mutuo soccorso, che nei primi decenni postunitari rappresentavano la più diffusa forma di organizzazione dei lavoratori e avevano funzioni che spaziavano dalla previdenza sociale alla rappresentanza sindacale. Delle mutue sono studiate sia la funzione previdenziale sia quella politica, evidenziando come si sono inserite nei conflitti tra capitale e lavoro e in quali forme sono state coinvolte nelle dispute elettorali. Singoli capitoli sono dedicati alle organizzazioni di ispirazione socialista e cattolica e alla gestione delle associazioni, prendendo in esame la provenienza e l’utilizzo dei fondi sociali, le principali attività e le distorsioni che ne hanno inficiato lo sviluppo. Il volume intende sia narrare la storia delle organizzazioni e dei movimenti sociali nei quali furono coinvolte, sia proporre un’interpretazione della funzione che hanno avuto nel processo di modernizzazione di Napoli e nel suo ingresso nello Stato unitario. Alla base vi sono due interrogativi: quale fu il ruolo dell’organizzazione nei conflitti sociali; che importanza ebbero le associazioni nella vita dei lavoratori e nella società napoletana del tempo, soprattutto per quanto concerne l’inserimento dei ceti subalterni nella vita politica.

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers’ engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the nineteenth-century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’s enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the twentieth-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice-based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the ‘freedom of geography’ and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions.

What are the possibilities for well-being in exile? If one is displaced, and in a constant struggle for what has been lost, can you be “well”? An individual’s answer to these questions might change on a day-to-day basis, or over the course of one’s lifetime. A definition of wellbeing is useful here: “the balance point between an individual’s resource pool and the challenges faced.” Resources the Tibetan community draws on include concepts and practices from Tibetan Buddhism, the leadership of the Dalai Lama, and political action and community care forged in the different contexts of lack of citizenship in South Asia and citizenship in the diaspora outside of it. China’s invasion and colonization of Tibet in the 1950s led to Tibetans fleeing south to India for refuge. In the six decades since then, the diaspora has spread around the world while many Tibetans also remain inside Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in Tibetan communities in Canada, France, India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the USA from 1994 through 2020, including activism in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Notions of care embedded in Tibetan political activism enable possibilities for well-being even in times of loss. The idea of activism as care is the key.

When Johan Maurits of Nassau, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil (1630-54), sent out expeditions against the maroons of Palmares, he was informed by his intelligence officers that the inhabitants followed the “Portuguese religion,” that they had erected a church in the capital, that there were chapels with images of saints and the Virgin Mary and that Zumbi, the king of Palmares, did not allow the presence of “fetishists.” Portuguese sources confirm that Palmares had a priest who baptized children and married couples and that its inhabitants followed Catholic rite, although according to Governor Francisco de Brito, they did so “in a stupid fashion.” Many more examples of the existence of Afro-Catholic elements in maroon communities in Latin America can be found. They question the widespread assumption that Catholicism had been forced upon all African slaves and that, even among those who seemingly embraced the colonizer’s faith, it functioned merely as a veneer underneath which their truly African, indigenous beliefs remained hidden. As the case of Palmares indicates, slaves did not necessarily wish to liberate themselves from all “Catholic ballast” once they ran away but sometimes remained strongly attached to it. 
This conclusion corresponds to the assumption by the Brazilian historian Marina de Mello e Souza that upon arrival in the Americas, many slaves did not perceive Catholic elements as something foreign since “Catholicism represented a link to their native Africa.” Souza is but one of several scholars who in recent years contributed to a shift in the study of black performance culture in the New World. The new paradigm essentially consists in the acknowledgment that our understanding of black performance culture can be bettered if we take into consideration that many Africans had already adopted certain European—predominantly Portuguese—cultural and religious elements before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.
In the context of this shift, there has been an increased interest in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods (irmandades/hermandades) and confraternities (confrarias/cofradías). While it was long assumed that these so-called “black brotherhoods” were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. As Linda Heywood has argued, “many Kongos and not a few Angolans had been Christians before their enslavement in Brazil. Thus they would have been familiar with the brotherhoods in Luanda, Soyo, and Kongo, and the central role they played in the creole society of Kongo, Angola and São Tomé.” Nicole von Germeten’s research on black brotherhoods in Mexico also concluded that “some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic.” 
Ira Berlin also observed that black brotherhoods played a crucial role in the intercontinental networks that developed in the context of the transatlantic slavery. However, like most scholars, Berlin perceives brotherhoods as an essentially Iberian phenomenon that was crucial to the development of black identity the Iberian World, differing from North America, where “numerous informal connections between black people” developed, but not brotherhoods. Although Berlin confirms that slaves “created an intercontinental web of cofradias … so that, by the seventeenth century, the network of black religious brotherhoods stretched from Lisbon to São Tomé, Angola, and Brazil,” he believes that those slaves who ended up in Dutch, French or English colonies refrained from developing brotherhoods since there were no “comparable institutional linkages” that allowed them to do so. Berlin’s assumption thus presupposes that brotherhoods could only be established with institutional support and excludes the possibility that slaves themselves may have taken the initiative to create such organizations.
This article questions this conclusion and explores the possibility that slave organizations modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods have existed in North America. In doing so, it follows a reasoning by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs and James Sidbury, editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013), according to whom “approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures.”  A first section provides an overview of the characteristics of Afro-Iberian slave brotherhoods. The following section presents a comparative analysis between king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods and those at African-American Election Day and Pinkster festivals in New England and New York. The article ends with a reflection on the origins of Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora.

Instead of waiting for revolution this paper argues for  the power of the everyday, where our collective undoing of capitalism is an ongoing process of subversion. Such an evolutionary politics of insurrection, a protean “spirit of revolt”, is located as a politics of immanence entwined within our very being in the world. It is an ontology of rebellion, rather than an epistemology of deferral. Everyday conversations and mundane practices can embody this ethos of insurrection through the principles of continual reflexivity and revision. Since geography is ultimately a politics of process it bespeaks evolution rather than revolution, and so we need to consider what it might mean to drop the “r”. Although the ordinary story that such a philosophy of transformation implies is less alluring than the grandiose idea of revolution, it has greater potential to bring results, as it is more in tune with how social change actually happens.

ENGLISH 
Sociability has been an important topic of historical research since some decades. It is, indeed, an essential element for political participation, of both upper class and workers. Through sociability, either formalized in association or informal, citizens have become aware of their rights and have begun to concern themselves with public affairs. The article examines how historians have narrated rise and development of sociability in the XIX and XX century, as well as the relations between sociability and political activities. 

ITALIAN 
Da alcuni decenni la sociabilità è un importante tema dell’indagine storiografica. Essa, infatti, è un elemento imprescindibile per la partecipazione politica, sia della borghesia, sia dei ceti popolari. Attraverso la sociabilità, o formalizzata in associazioni o informale, i cittadini hanno preso coscienza dei loro diritti e hanno cominciato a interessarsi della cosa pubblica. Il saggio esamina come gli storici hanno raccontato la nascita e lo sviluppo della sociabilità nell’Ottocento e nel Novecento, nonché le relazioni tra sociabilità e attività politiche.

Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations, this essay highlights several main questions and issues.
It discusses the definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational activities among immigrants. Using examples from specific types of organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious groups, hometown associations, political groups), it examines the factors that shape immigrants’ formal sociability. The paper then addresses the class and gender composition of memberships, compares the associative practices of the mostly European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the mostly Asian, Latin American and African arrivals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and discusses the issue of state involvement. The essay approaches the topic from a global and
historical perspective to show how quasi-universal processes on the one hand, and local and temporal specificities on the other, shaped ssociational practices in a way that transcended the ethno-national traditions and characteristics of particular immigrant groups and host countries

"The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Towards Spatial Emancipation" sets the stage for a radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. By embracing anarchist geographies as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for non-hierarchical connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging, we configure a political imagination that is capable of demanding the impossible. Experimentation in and through space is the story of humanity’s place on the planet, and the stasis and control that now supersedes ongoing organizing experiments is an affront to our very survival. Singular ontological modes that favor one particular way of doing things disavow geography by failing to understand the spatial as an ongoing mutable assemblage that is intimately bound to temporality. Even worse, such stagnant ideas often align to the parochial interests of an elite minority and thereby threaten to be our collective undoing. What is needed is the development of new relationships with our world, and crucially, with each other. By infusing our geographies with anarchism we unleash a spirit of rebellion that foregoes a politics of waiting for change to come at the behest of elected leaders, and instead engages new possibilities of mutual aid through direct action in the here and now. Anarchism is accordingly framed as a perpetually evolving process of geographical prefiguration that seeks to refashion entrenched modes of understanding and being in the world vis-à-vis the authoritarian institutions, proprietary relations, and pugnacious geopolitics that dominate contemporary political relations and their associated configurations of space. We can no longer accept the decaying, archaic geographies of hierarchy that chain us to statism, capitalism, gender domination, racial oppression, and imperialism. Instead, geography must become beautiful, wherein the entirety of its embrace is aligned to emancipation.

Anarchism is a perennially misunderstood idea. Far from representing violence and chaos, anarchism is instead a form of praxis that centers on non-hierarchical organization and the practice of mutual aid, implemented through the everyday politics of direct action, voluntary association, and self-management. Although often misrepresented as an ideology solely concerned with the destruction of the state, the power of anarchist geographies resides in their integrality, which refuses to assign priority to any one of the multiple dominating apparatuses that constrain our lives, as all are seen as irreducible to one another. Anarchism is the struggle against all forms of oppression and exploitation, a protean and multivariate process that is decidedly geographical.

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare, people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of Covid-19.

The world’s media was quick to weave a narrative of selfish individualism, full of empty supermarket shelves and con-men. However, if you scratch the surface, you find a different story of community and self-sacrifice. Looking at eighteen countries and regions, including India, Rojava, Taiwan, South Africa, Iraq and North America, the personal accounts in the book weave together to create a larger picture, revealing a universality of experience - a housewife in Istanbul supports her neighbour in the same way as a teacher in Argentina, a punk in Portland, and a disability activist in South Korea does.

Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and relationships we already have to create that society, challenging institutions of power that have already shown their fragility.

Dopo quella di Pinerolo (sorta nel 1848), la Società di Mutuo Soccorso ed Istruzione degli Operai in Savigliano è la seconda sorta in Piemonte. Nasce il 21 luglio 1850 su iniziativa del setaiolo Biaggio Pejretti e del tintore Giuseppe Giordana. La finalità è quella di fornire aiuto agli iscritti e provvedere, direttamente od indirettamente, alla loro istruzione. Con l'arrivo da Torino, nel 1853, della seconda linea ferrata italiana e la nascita della fabbrica dei treni realizzata con capitale belga (poi diventata Società Nazionale delle Officine di Savigliano, quindi Ferroviaria Savigliano, Fiat Ferroviaria ed infine Alsthom, che ha progettato il «pendolino», treno veloce ad assetto variabile ed ora costruisce Italo) la Società di Mutuo Solccorso saviglianese cresce fortemente e, nel tempo, finisce per inglobare tutte le altre simili «SAocietà», maschili e femminili, esistenti nel territorio. Il saggio percorre la storia dell'importante sodalizio dall'origine all'anno 2000.

In recent decades, the considerable proliferation of the self-help groups (especially those of the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA)) has attracted the interest of those engaged in the social sciences as well as of those responsible for mapping out health policies. This article is based on the 10-year involvement of the authors in a participatory action research project for the promotion of self-help groups in Greece as well as to an extensive literature review of the AA and NA movements. Based on this methodology, the objective of this article is twofold. First, it identifies the radical perspective of self-help groups, as the main source for their effectiveness, while it attempts an assessment of their effect on traditional professional attitudes. Second, it raises concerns over the radical perspective of these initiatives in the framework of their transition from an alternative stance towards their integration in formal Health Systems. This transition process is manifested in the following developments: (1) the constantly increasing number of old members who quit the role of the volunteer sponsor and undertake the financially beneficial role of (para-) professional addiction counselor; (2) the instrumentalization of 12 steps; (3) the increasing number of members who adopt the nosological perspective of addiction 4. The various adverse effects of dominant culture on the internal working of the groups are studied. Moreover, this article attempts a comparative assessment of the produced experience with the AA and NA movements in Greece and abroad.


Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/16066359.2011.588353\\\\\\\\\\\\\

A Sociedade Protetora dos Desvalidos foi a primeira associação civil negra do Brasil, instalada em 1851 e regulamentada pelo governo em 1861. De acordo com seu estatuto de 1874 e reiterado em 1894, a associação admitia como sócios efetivos “todos os cidadãos brasileiros de cor preta”, com o objetivo de auxiliá-los na doença, invalidez, prisão, velhice e, até mesmo, após a morte, através de um funeral digno. Proporcionava também pensões aos familiares dos sócios e supervisionava a educação dos órfãos. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo principal entender como os trabalhadores livres de cor, associados a SPD, constituíram naquele espaço uma noção de solidariedade e pertencimento racial, que atendessem às suas demandas nas últimas décadas do século XIX, como acesso à cidadania, educação e ajuda mútua. Em um contexto de crise do escravismo, com a efervescência dos movimentos abolicionistas no Brasil, principalmente nas décadas de 1870 e 1880, procuro entender qual era o lugar da SPD nessa conjuntura. Para isso, utilizei como fontes principais os documentos do Arquivo da Sociedade Protetora dos Desvalidos (ASPD), como atas, estatutos, relatórios, demonstrativos financeiros, pedidos de inscrição, bem como solicitações de socorro, pensão e aposentadoria.

Purpose–Much of the contemporary literature surrounding the barriers to community self-help in the advanced economies has placed great emphasis on capital-orientated barriers, such as a household's access to financial capital, time capital, human capital and social capital. Focusing explicitly on one-to-one mutual aid, and drawing on rich qualitative data from two urban communities in the UK, this paper aims to re-visit the barriers to participation that prevent households from doing more for others in their community.

Gamblers Anonymous (GA) has long been described in the scientific literature as more secular in orientation than similar 12-step fellowships such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Through interviews and meeting observations during the course of two studies (beginning in 2003), we found this reputation well earned, with GA putting considerably less emphasis on the “12 steps” themselves. The latter is a spiritual process designed to facilitate and enhance recovery from addictive behaviors and lifestyles. Instead, GA favors an arguably pragmatic emphasis on abstinence from gambling and tasks such as dealing with debts. Yet much of the available literature is nonetheless dated. We also found that GA has become more spiritual in orientation during the last two decades. In this article, we explore the uneasy tension between secularism and spirituality in GA, with special attention to the role played by the Serenity Prayer in this fellowship. The prayer invokes God yet is favored even by the most ardently secular GA members we interviewed. Here, the Serenity Prayer is used as a window into a highly creative approach to spiritual matters—one that is arguably unique to GA in the world of 12-step recovery.

My final paper for my undergraduate career, this paper was presented for the Economic Rhetoric class taught by Dr. Julie Gonzalez in July 2017.

This paper looks at the history of social welfare provision from the early American colonies through the beginning of the twentieth century. I argued that making the current environment friendlier to these earlier forms of welfare provision would increase both their quantity and quality.

I plan to incorporate some of this paper into a future project on a new natural law theory of public economics.

Mining activities started in the south-west Sardinia in the second half of the nineteenth century and profoundly affected the social and economic characteristics of the Iglesiente. In its early stages it was a real “gold rush” that attracted many entrepreneurs, technicians and workers: they contributed into creating a remarkable, long-lasting industrial and social experience.
The present survey was conducted upon some public and private archives, exploring the dynamics that brought up new social classes originated by mining, and focussing mostly upon the executives. Some kinds of associations have been studied, e.g. the mutual assistance unions, the workers' clubs and corporate elites, together with the role of Freemasonry, the structure of “Dopolavoro” fascist organizations, thus highlighting the peculiar way that led to a proper mining cultural identity.

In un sistema sanitario caratterizzato da elementi di eccellenza, ma
anche dal tendenziale sottofi nanziamento dell’intervento pubblico e dalla scarsa diffusione di forme di intermediazione della spesa privata come quello italiano (paragrafo 1), la mutualità sanitaria può essere (ri)scoperta come modalità di intervento in grado di coniugare la natura non pubblica dello schema organizzativo e di finanziamento con la necessità di non erodere ulteriormente la tenuta finanziaria e simbolica del SSN. Tutto ciò a patto che, da un lato, la mutualità sanitaria sappia valorizzare le specificità che la distinguono – sul piano identitario e delle prassi – da altri soggetti che operano a pieno titolo nel mondo della sanità integrativa (paragrafo 2); dall’altro, a condizione che sappia attualizzare e ritematizzare i propri tratti identitari e le proprie prassi in funzione di un quadro culturale, sociale e demografico fortemente mutato (e in costante evoluzione) rispetto al contesto in cui a metà Ottocento le forme organizzate di mutualismo videro la luce anche in Italia (paragrafo 3). In altre parole – argomentiamo (paragrafo 4) – ciò che è necessario perché le mutue giochino un ruolo riconoscibile nella sanità integrativa e nel welfare territoriale è un apparente paradosso: se le SMS desiderano conservare o recuperare le connessioni con “lo spirito delle origini”, devono infatti avere il coraggio di innovare e di cambiare, anche radicalmente. Per farlo, per una mutualità che non intenda disperdere il proprio connotato identitario rincorrendo altri concorrenti su un terreno che non le è proprio e che rischierebbe perciò di snaturarla, sarà utile che le mutue si aprano per includere chi oggi è escluso anche dalla sanità integrativa, rinnovino le proprie modalità di fi nanziamento e di azione progettuale, riannodino i legami tra mutualità di territorio e mutualità sanitaria, promuovano processi partecipativi e dal basso, interloquiscano con più efficacia con attori “esterni”, in una logica di rete e di prossimità. Si tratta quindi di adottare una visione strategica che illustriamo nel  paragrafo 4 e che abbiamo sintetizzato con l’acronimo APRIRSI (Ascoltare, Prevenire, Riannodare, Includere, Rinnovare, Sostenere, Innovare).

Self-help and mutual aid have been at the heart of the consumer cooperative movement and its response to food insecurity since its inception. Yet how these terms are conceptualized and practiced in contemporary food coops often has more to do with their individual histories, ideologies, and the values of those involved than it does the history of the cooperative movement. Drawing on ethnographic examples from two London-based food coops with diff erent backgrounds, this article explores how each enacts ideals of aid and exchange. It argues that the context of austerity creates "awkwardnesses" between and within personal values and organizational structures in the face of inequality, leading to blurred boundaries between diff erent models of aid and exchange and the forms of moral accounting that these entail.

Mining work has been characterized by its physical violence, the risks of accidents involved, the injuries and the permanent invalidity due to the diseases acquired over the years under to the conditions of the different mining environments. The development of this activity has generated
new environments and new human communities throughout their life cycle. The action of mining companies regarding labourer's health was broader than of the immediate medical assistance to injured workers. In Portugal, the evolution of the health care and social assistance provided to the mining populations in illness and to the workers due to its occupations, and in death during the 19th and 20th century is still poorly known. During this period, workers also constituted mutual aid associations. The republican state, in turn, created the Institute of Social Compulsory Insurance and Social Security after the Great War in 1919. The companies had to create compulsory insurances for fatal accidents and ways to deal with sickness, accidents at work,  disability, old age and to establish pensions for survival. With the institutionalization of the
corporate nationalist state in 1933, the Institute came under the authority of the new Sub-Secretariado das Corporações.
This communication presents the results of an archival survey of these mining institutions, describing their action and outlines the historic path towards the nationalization of care in sickness and death from the end of the nineteenth century until the third quarter of the twentieth century.

Gamblers Anonymous (GA) has long been described in the scientific literature as more secular in orientation than similar 12-step fellowships such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Through interviews and meeting observations during the course of two studies (beginning in 2003), we found this reputation well earned, with GA putting considerably less emphasis on the “12 steps” themselves. The latter is a spiritual process designed to facilitate and enhance recovery from addictive behaviors and lifestyles. Instead, GA favors an arguably pragmatic emphasis on abstinence from gambling and tasks such as dealing with debts. Yet much of the available literature is nonetheless dated. We also found that GA has become more spiritual in orientation during the last two decades. In this article, we explore the uneasy tension between secularism and spirituality in GA, with special attention to the role played by the Serenity Prayer in this fellowship. The prayer invokes God yet is favored even by the most ardently secular GA members we interviewed. Here, the Serenity Prayer is used as a window into a highly creative approach to spiritual matters—one that is arguably unique to GA in the world of 12-step recovery.

A brief response to the request by the editors of Transformation Journal to consider "some radical, imaginative and challenging ways" to address the challenges becoming increasingly visible in 2020 and in response to the pandemic specifically. This article explores some thoughts on the nature of authority in South Africa, and the ways in which national narratives and imaginaries of governmental authority and ungovernability have shifted since 1994. Rethinking histories of ungovernability from the 1980s in South Africa, the article posits some potential for reimaginations of society in South Africa.

English This article argues that New Labour's reliance on a 'social inclusion through employment' approach is problematic – especially when applied in lower income areas. This is due to the significant gap between actual employment rates and a full-employment scenario in such areas, its unidimensional view that equates social inclusion with having a job, and its failure to recognise and value forms of work beyond employment. We evaluate whether and how one alternative form of work – mutual aid – could be harnessed to help activate social inclusion. Through 400 interviews in UK lower income urban neighbourhoods, we find little evidence that people use mutual aid, instead preferring to receive some form of payment. Based on this recognition, the article develops a proposal for an Active Citizens' Credits scheme to activate mutual aid, and in so doing, provide a complementary social inclusion policy. Français Cet article soutient que la dépendance du Nouveau Parti Travailliste d'une approche telle que l'insertion sociale par l'emploi est problématique – surtout lorsqu'elle est appliquée dans des zones à faibles revenus. Ceci est du à la différence importante entre le taux de l'emploi réel et le scénario de plein emploi dans de telles zones, ses vues unidimensionnelles qui assimilent l'insertion sociale avec le fait d'avoir un emploi, et son échec à reconnaître et valoriser des formes de travail différentes, au-delà de cet emploi lui-même. Nous évaluons si et comment une autre forme de travail – l'aide mutuelle – pourrait être utilisée pour aider à activer l'insertion sociale. Après une enquête auprès de 400 ménages dans des quartiers urbains aux plus faibles revenus du Royaume-Uni, nous avons trouvé très peu de preuves qui montrent que le public utilise l'aide mutuelle, préférant plutôt percevoir une certaine forme de paiement. Basé sur cet état de fait, l'article développe une proposition pour un système de crédits pour Citoyens Actifs afin d'activer l'aide mutuelle et de fournir ainsi une mesure d'insertion sociale complémentaire. Español Este artículo demuestra que el enfoque de dependencia del nuevo partido Laborista en 'la inclusión social a través del empleo' es problemática, especialmente cuando se aplica a áreas de bajos ingresos. Esto se debe a la gran diferencia entre el actual número de empleos y el plan de empleo en tales áreas, así como su visión unidimensional en la que iguala la inclusión social con tener un empleo. También se debe a su fallo en reconocer y valorar las formas de trabajo más allá del empleo. En el artículo, evaluamos si es posible aprovechar una forma de trabajo alternativa (de ayuda mutua), para así ayudar a la inclusión social activa. Tras 400 entrevistas en vecindarios urbanos de bajos ingresos en el Reino Unido, nos encontramos con poca evidencia de que la gente se ayude mutuamente, en realidad prefieren recibir cualquier forma de pago. Basándonos en este descubrimiento, el artículo desarrolla una propuesta para un plan de Créditos para el Ciudadano Activo para así activar la ayuda mutua y proveer una política complementaria de inclusión social.

The article deals with the historical foundation of the Italian Workers' Mutual Aid Society in Constantinople (Società Operaia Italiana di Mutuo Soccorso in Costantinopoli) pointing out its peculiarity for any researches on the historical Italian community in Istanbul. Since its foundation in 1863, the Society, like other similar institutions founded all over Europe, had two main different tasks: the mutual aid and assistance directed towards the workers and their families; and the  patriotic engagement for the freedom and the unity of Italy.
The article's aim is to study the role of the Società Operaia in improving the workers’ living condition and the development of mutual aid among the members in case of disease or inability of working. In this sense this Institution can be counted among the associations that during the XIX century contributed to the working classes' welfare and well being. The mutual aid, the material assistance and the charity granted to the workers and their families is then a reflecting mirror to study the integration and the labor condition of minorities under the Ottoman Empire.
By reading the meeting minutes of the Society, the official documents and the historical press, we face a reality different from the one portrayed in Edmondo De Amicis and Pierre Loti novels: the Italian workers immigrated in the Ottoman Empire after the 1848-1849 European crisis, were generally fleeing misery and wars. That is the reason why the communitarian assistance, that they were able to implement under the Ottoman Empire, mark a starting point for new searches on labor history and migration.

Au milieu du XIXe siècle, la mutualité, en tant que forme moderne de protection sociale, représente pour un grand nombre de familles ouvrières un affranchissement à l’égard d’une assistance charitable humiliante. Mais la mutualité ouvrière n’est pas qu’une simple forme de la prévoyance libérale comme l’épargne ou l’assurance. En effet, les associations mutualistes se présentent plutôt comme de véritables « familles fi ctives » à l’intérieur desquelles doit s’imposer une culture solidaire au moment de la transition à l’économie de marché. La résistance des mutualistes à l’intrusion de l’Église ultramontaine, de même que la contribution de la mutualité à la formation de la classe ouvrière témoignent bien de cette volonté populaire de refonder, au milieu du XIXe siècle, les liens sociaux à l’intérieur d’une communauté ouvrière démocratique et égalitaire. Cet espoir, toutefois, se butera aux transformations profondes engendrées par le capitalisme industriel dans le dernier tiers du XIXe siècle.

In the mid-19th Century, mutual aid, as a modern form of social protection, represented freedom from the humiliation of charity for a large number of working-class families. Working-class mutual aid was not just a simple form of liberal self-help, such as savings and insurance. Friendly societies (or mutual aid societies) appear rather to have operated as « fi ctive kin », meeting the need for solidarity during the transition to a market economy. The resistance of members of friendly societies to the intrusion of the ultramontane Church, as well as the contribution of mutual aid to the making of the working class, testifies well to the popular project, during the mid-1800s, of rebuilding the social fabric within a democratic and egalitarian working-class community. This hope, however, came up against the profound changes caused by industrial capitalism during the last third of the 19th Century.