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Cultural Domains (cultural + domain)
Selected AbstractsWhat's Cultural about Biocultural Research?ETHOS, Issue 1 2005WILLIAM W. DRESSLER Advances in biocultural research have been hampered by the lack of an explicit theory of culture. Culture can be viewed as a collection of cultural models of specific domains with empirically verifiable distributions within a social group. Individuals are variably able to approximate these models in their own beliefs and behavior, a concept referred to as "cultural consonance." Cultural consonance is hypothesized to be associated with psychophysiologic outcomes, including blood pressure and depressive symptoms. In this article, the cultural domain of family life in Brazil is used to illustrate both the concept and measurement of cultural consonance. It is associated with arterial blood pressure and depressive symptoms, controlling for covariates and other explanatory variables. This theoretical orientation can define more precisely the cultural in the biocultural. [source] ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OR LESS: WHAT A NOVELIST MADE OF THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN,HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2009ANN RIGNEY ABSTRACT Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was a popular and critical success when it first appeared, and has had a notable impact on popular perceptions of "the bombing of Dresden," although it has been criticized by historians because of its inaccuracy. This article analyzes the novel's quirky, comic style and its generic mixture of science fiction and testimony, showing how Vonnegut consistently used ingenuous understatement as a way of imaginatively engaging his readers with the horrors of war. The article argues that the text's aesthetics are closer to those of graphic novels than of realist narratives and that, accordingly, we can understand its cultural impact only by approaching it as a highly artificial linguistic performance with present-day appeal and contemporary relevance, and not merely by measuring the degree to which it gives a full and accurate mimesis of past events. The article uses the case of Vonnegut to advance a more general argument that builds on recent work in cultural memory studies: in order to understand the role that literature plays in shaping our understanding of history, it needs to be analyzed in its own terms and not as a mere derivative of historiography according to a "one model fits all" approach. Furthermore, we need to shift the emphasis from products to processes by considering both artistic and historiographical practices as agents in the ongoing circulation across different cultural domains of stories about the past. Theoretical reflection should account for the fact that historiography and the various arts play distinct roles in this cultural dynamics, and while they compete with one another, they also converge, bounce off one another, influence one another, and continuously beg to be different. [source] One therapist, four cultures: working with families in Greater ChinaJOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY, Issue 3 2002Yung Lee Rather than addressing ethnicity through a pre,set cultural lens, I discuss how my experiences as a family therapy trainer in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Shanghai taught me to understand culture through the lens of the family. Similarities and differences among these cultural domains were reviewed. I also demonstrate how each encounter shaped my emotional responses and ways of intervention in the course of family interviews. Even though I belong to the same ethnic background, I had to interact differently in different arenas, despite my cultural values and theoretical orientation. [source] Shifting Egalitarianisms and Contemporary Racism in Rural Victorian Football: The Rumbalara ExperienceTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2007Michael Tynan This article builds on our understanding of racism towards Aboriginal people in Australia through an examination of discriminatory belief structures pervasive in the mainstream community as evidenced through the important social field of country football in regional Victoria. It analyses the power and pervasiveness of the racial stereotyping that exists in some segments of the community by using Langton's (1997) notion of ,iconic images' as well as discussing the importance of particular ideological motivations around values such as ,egalitarianism'. This is achieved through analysing the views of players, supporters and officials of mainstream clubs towards the Aboriginal Rumbalara Football Netball Club. This analysis is structurally situated within a broader understanding of Australian national identity, in particular looking at the intersection of the powerful cultural domains of sport and evolving expressions of whiteness and egalitarianism. [source] ,The double identity' of Taiwanese Chinese: A dilemma of politics and culture rooted in historyASIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2004Li-Li Huang The ,double identity' of Taiwanese as both Chinese and Taiwanese identity was measured among both general and student samples using categorical and continuous measures. As predicted, Mingnan (native province) Taiwanese were higher in Taiwanese identity whereas outside-province Taiwanese were higher in Chinese identity. Both groups shared similar representations of the history of Taiwan, but evaluations of leaders followed patterns of in-group favoritism. These representations of history were used to predict and find zero correlations between Chinese and Taiwanese identity. Taiwanese and Chinese identities were mutually compatible in cultural domains, and mediated the effect of demographic group. However, in issues concerning politicized allocation decisions (and language), Taiwanese and Chinese identity worked in opposite directions, and demographic group (and a critical evaluation of an historical leader) were significant even after controlling for identity. Implications for social identity theory, realistic group conflict theory, and the cross-straits relationship are discussed. [source] Extending the Testimony Problem: Evaluating the Truth, Scope, and Source of Cultural InformationCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2006Brian Bergstrom Children's learning,in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well,relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source. [source] | |||||||||||||