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Cultural Forms (cultural + form)
Selected AbstractsNot playing around: global capitalism, modern sport and consumer cultureGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 2 2007BARRY SMART Abstract The development of modern sport is bound up with processes of economic and cultural transformation associated with the global diffusion of capitalist forms of consumption. In this article I draw attention to aspects of the globalization of modern sport that were becoming apparent towards the close of the nineteenth century and then move on to consider the factors that contributed to sport becoming a truly global phenomenon in the course of the twentieth century. Consideration is given to the development of international sport and sports goods companies, the growth in media interest and the increasing significance of sponsorship, consumer culture and sporting celebrities. The global diffusion of modern sport that gathered momentum in the course of the twentieth century involved a number of networked elements, including transnational communications media and commercial corporations for which sport, especially through the iconic figure of the transnational celebrity sport star, constitutes a universally appealing globally networked cultural form. Association with sport events and sporting figures through global broadcasting, sponsorship and endorsement arrangements offers commercial corporations unique access to global consumer culture. [source] The Reliable Beauty of Aroma: Staples of Food and Cultural Production among Italian-Australians,THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2004Roberta James This paper takes an ethnographic journey into Italian-Australian cultural production through an examination of the Italian term for both the flavour and taste of herbs, aroma. Here, I explore the ways in which staple foods and their commensalities engender staple cultural production without necessarily overdetermining the culture produced. Taking the material indeterminacy of culture as a theoretical starting point, I argue that this is the reliable beauty of aroma as well as is its capacity to capture the realities of culture as lived experience. When culture is approached from this direction, stature is returned to ethnographic subjects as people living lives rather than as automatons of cultural form. From this vantage, a theoretical preoccupation with order and structure may be seen to hinder rather than enhance an apprehension of ethnographic fact. [source] Six Trophies and a Funeral: Performance and Football in the City of VallettaCITY & SOCIETY, Issue 2 2006GARY ARMSTRONG This paper examines the elaborate celebrations organized by the fans of Valletta City football (soccer) club, Malta, when they win the Maltese football league. It argues that these celebrations constitute a continuation of the carnivalesque. Valletta fans have a reputation for their fanatical support, and are renowned as tough-guys. Their celebrations are moments of drunken excess, which celebrate this "diamond-in-the-rough" authenticity, and satirize their opponents, which they see as inauthentic "pretenders." The celebrations use symbolism drawn from an earlier carnival tradition,particularly the symbolism of death, and the re-enactment of funereal performance. The paper therefore argues that contemporary football celebration has replaced the carnival as a cultural form through which social antagonisms,of locality and social class,are manifest. The paper also examines the relationship between these spontaneous celebrations, and state-sponsored pageants,including the modern carnival,which are primarily aimed at tourists. [Football Celebration, Valletta, Carnival, Nostalgia, Class]. [source] Language Acquisition Meets Language EvolutionCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 7 2010Nick Chater Abstract Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the "logical" problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology. [source] DISLOCATING SOUNDS: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie PopCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2009BRENT LUVAAS ABSTRACT Anthropologists often read the localization or hybridization of cultural forms as a kind of default mode of resistance against the forces of global capitalism, a means through which marginalized ethnic groups maintain regional distinctiveness in the face of an emergent transnational order. But then what are we to make of musical acts like Mocca and The Upstairs, Indonesian "indie" groups who consciously delocalize their music, who go out of their way, in fact, to avoid any references to who they are or where they come from? In this essay, I argue that Indonesian "indie pop," a self-consciously antimainstream genre drawing from a diverse range of international influences, constitutes a set of strategic practices of aesthetic deterritorialization for middle-class Indonesian youth. Such bands, I demonstrate, assemble sounds from a variety of international genres, creating linkages with international youth cultures in other places and times, while distancing themselves from those expressions associated with colonial and nationalist conceptions of ethnicity, working-class and rural sensibilities, and the hegemonic categorical schema of the international music industry. They are part of a new wave of Indonesian musicians stepping onto the global stage "on their own terms" and insisting on being taken seriously as international, not just Indonesian, artists, and in the process, they have made indie music into a powerful tool of reflexive place making, a means of redefining the very meaning of locality vis-à-vis the international youth cultural movements they witness from afar. [source] Anthropology and the New Technologies of CommunicationCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2006Brian Keith Axel This article is a set of reflections on how a modern linguistic ideology of communication produces a fundamental misrecognition of the formation of the modern liberal subject as a naturally communicating subject. I explore the complex features of this misrecognition as a legacy of Cold War procedures of knowledge production about communication and technology to suggest that ethnographies of new technologies of communication unwittingly proliferate presumptions about the ontological integrity of the human prior to communication and prior to the advent of technologies of communication. This dilemma offers an alternative point of departure for the study of new technologies of communication in pursuit of a renewed, critical investigation into the circulation of modern cultural forms of intelligibility. [source] Globalizing Disaster Trauma: Psychiatry, Science, and Culture after the Kobe EarthquakeETHOS, Issue 2 2000Joshua Breslau In January of 1995 a massive earthquake struck the city of Kobe, Japan. This article examines how this event became an opportunity for extending global networks of the science and medicine of trauma. The article is based on ethnographic research in Kobe and Los Angeles with psychiatrists who responded to the earthquake in its immediate aftermath. Three aspects of the process are examined: 1) changes in psychiatric institutions that were ongoing at the time of the earthquake, 2) the place of psychiatry in Japanese cultural self-criticism, and 3) the particular technologies for identifying and treating trauma. Globalization in this case cannot be seen as an imposition of Western cultural forms, but rather an ongoing process that reproduces differences between cultures as particular elements travel between them. [source] Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2002Associate Professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contemporary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undisputed capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for repudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, exploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood, children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race] [source] Mediating "The Voice of the Spirit": Musical and religious transformations in Nigeria's oil boomAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010VICKI L. BRENNAN ABSTRACT In this article, I examine a musical recording made by a Yoruba Christian church in the context of Nigeria's oil boom in the 1970s. I focus on the recording as a node of mediation: a site at which multiple forms of mediation converge to bring together institutional orders and individual subjectivities. Those responsible for the recording drew on meaningful cultural forms,in this case, religion, music, and electronic media,to make authoritative claims about morality and experience in the context of profound social change. I seek to understand how religious groups use media to create links between political-economic transformations and individual experience. [Nigeria, Christianity, mediation, music, religious authority, political economy] [source] Cultural arts education as community development: An innovative model of healing and transformationNEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT & CONTINUING EDUCATION, Issue 116 2007Kwayera Archer-Cunningham This chapter discusses a three-tiered process of collective experiences of various artistic and cultural forms that fosters the healing and transformation of individuals, families, and communities of the African Diaspora. [source] Mothers of Solitude: Childlessness and Intersubjectivity in the Upper ZambeziANTHROPOLOGY & HUMANISM, Issue 2 2009Sónia Silva SUMMARY Drawing on normative cultural forms and interpersonal encounters, I seek to convey the sense of sadness and devastation associated with childlessness in the Upper Zambezi, and to interpret that sense as a pathology of severed intersubjectivity. I also argue that as irremediable as this pathology might seem, elderly childless women may momentarily revert to personhood through compassion, itself experienced as the restoration of intersubjective ties. The conditions of personhood and nonpersonhood, in addition to being structural and processual, are emotional, performative, and intersubjective as well. [source] INVOLVED SPECTATORSHIP IN ARCHAIC GREEK ARTART HISTORY, Issue 2 2007GUY HEDREEN It is argued that models of spectatorship developed by Alois Riegl and Richard Wollheim offer a productive means of understanding how the Archaic Greek eye cup works. Eye cups represent the faces of particular mythological creatures who expect to see their mythical counterparts in the space occupied by spectators. The decoration of the cups is structured so as to invite the beholder to enter imaginatively into the Dionysiac world. Some representations of silens shown with frontal faces invite a similar response. A significant amount of Archaic poetry experienced, like the vases, in symposia also induced symposiasts temporarily to adopt fictional or mythical personae. As Nietzsche observed in The Birth of Tragedy, a comparable form of involved spectatorship is also at the heart of early Greek drama. A common aesthetic conception of involved spectatorship manifested itself concretely in several different media or cultural forms in late Archaic Greece. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||