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The slave trade and trust
172-177.Views:56Does culture have an impact on society, and if so, how? The study by Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon set out to examine the impact of the slave trade, which has left its mark on the African continent and its economy, but which ended some 100 years ago, on the cultural, norm-following, beliefs and values of individuals. Their aim is to explore the reasons that led to the historical disconnect within Africa between local governments or municipalities (politics), between the outlying communities (neighbours) and even within family relations, which may still influence economic development today. Nunn and Wantchekon's hypothesis is based on an earlier study by Nunn, which showed a causal link between the 400-year slave trade and the income conditions of the African population today, looking at the long-term economic effects of the slave trade.
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Community is more than just a physical space: Discuss this statement with specific reference to the role of the concept and experience of contemporary community
129-145Views:40What happens if among the members of a society and among the smaller and larger units and groups making up the society trust and confidence seems to be disappearing at once? What happens if confidence reposed into each other fall victim to social differences as well as to the economic / cost-of-living boxing of modern information society? How to stop the crisis symptom that seems to be developing this way and which is shown in the fragmentation of communities?1 With other words, is it possible to “stick again together” a community or even a whole society started to disintegrate? The questions, even if not so characteristically phrased, provide sociologists actually with the scope of understanding our modern, individualistic world (Habermas 1994). Gusfield (1975) depicts dichotomy of community and society in a way that we should interpret community as a pervading, significant contrast. By now literature seems as if it was only be able to picture the changes taking place in the images both of the society and community describing them by even more pronounced, contradictory processes. The changes that send messages on the disintegration of categories and frames becoming insecure instead of the security and integration quasi missed by Habermas. It also seems as if—quasi as an answer given to this process—occlusion/seclusion both on the part of community members and the various communities from the seemingly unknown and insecure changes were more intensive (Légmán 2012). We intend to construe these phenomena on the next pages, but due to extension limits without the need for completeness of social interpretations. We want to do it with the help of mainly one dimension: value preference through the example of a given society, namely the Hungarian one. Thus we get to the stability and the solidarity of the members of the smallest unit of society, one which accepts and expresses various value preferences, the family.
