Poverty and Polygyny as Political Protest: The Waldensians and Mormons.

Abstract

This paper examines Waldensianism and Mormonism, two very different religious movements, separated by time, space, cultural, and economic conditions. The sources are a mixture of secondary and published primary sources, including church documents both in translation and the original language, and personal writings, such as diaries and letters. The treatment of these sources is not unusual, rather the contribution of this paper is a synthetic theoretical analysis of these movements in terms of the practical consequences of action. Both movements were coherent attempts to address contemporary social issues; neither was principally illogical nor irrational, nor comprised primarily of socially disconnected individuals. These movements were neither apolitical nor solely comprised of pure political action. Instead, both became political protest movements, in addition to being religious movements, because the symbolic content of the movement was interwoven with contemporary politics: the movements' ideological critiques implicated the larger political structure which attempted to prevent ideological change. These religious struggles were processes, becoming political movements because ideological change implied political action.

“Trading places”: Do individual status changes reduce misattributions of poverty?

“…Numerous empirical studies have investigated the structural causes of poverty and economic deprivation (see Jahan, 2007;Reddy & Minoiu, 2007 for meta-analyses). It has been repeatedly demonstrated that a person's economic status is strongly dependent on unalterable antecedents such as parental status (Jahan, 2007;Ashby & Schoon, 2010), ethnicity (Emigh et al, 2001;Platt, 2009), gender (Buvinic, 1998;Christopher et al, 2002), individual health (Filmer, 2008), residential neighborhood (Van Ham et al, 2013), or school location (Sirin, 2005;Milam et al, 2010). Furthermore, poverty is often transmitted from one generation to the next (Bird, 2013) due to discrimination in the education system and low social mobility (Walpole, 2003;Sirin, 2005;Kiernan & Mensah, 2011).…”