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Cultural Significance (cultural + significance)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Negotiating Personal and Cultural Significance: A Theoretical Framework for Art Museum Education

CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL, Issue 4 2007
Olga M. Hubard
This article presents a theoretical framework for those who facilitate engagements with works of art. The aim is to help facilitators negotiate potential differences between the original meaning(s) of an artwork and the fresh interpretations spectators articulate. The author applies Umberto Eco's ideas about literary texts to instances of interpretation in the visual arts. Eco suggests that the implications of unexpected readings change in different situations. Therefore, the facilitators' challenge is in discovering how to handle each individual encounter. To this end, facilitators may wish to ponder: What meaning does the new interpretation conflict with? And what is the distance between the cultural conventions of spectators and the conventions that framed the creation of the work? Real world examples are used to shed light on these questions and their significance. [source]

Sports and celebrations in English market towns, 1660,1750

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 188 2002
Emma Griffin
This article explores the recreational uses of streets and squares in the early modern market town. Late seventeenth-century financial accounts reveal civic authorities spending small sums on plebeian recreations,bonfires and bull-baitings,usually located in the market square. However, they also reveal a steady decline in municipal support for such recreations in the century following the Restoration. The author uses this evidence to argue that the early modern market place was an important communal space with a cultural significance as well as practical commercial value, and that the century following the Restoration saw the beginning of moves to clear plebeian sports and celebrations out of the public streets and confine the market place to traffic and trading. [source]

A Question of Rites?

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2006
Perspectives on the Colonial Encounter with Sati
Although a rare occurrence, sati has become a highly controversial issue in modern India. In the wake of the now notorious burning of Roop Kanwar in 1987, sati and its glorification became a terrain on which wider issues about religion, identity, modernity and tradition were contested. In this debate both supporters and opponents of sati invoked the rhetoric of ,rights'. It is generally agreed that such terms in the contemporary debate have their roots in the colonial period; some supporters of sati go as far as to argue that those who condemn sati as a violation of women's rights are adopting a ,Western' perspective without appreciating sati's ,true' social, religious and cultural significance. In doing so, however, they assume a homogenous and consistent colonial condemnation of sati. New perspectives suggest, however, that the British response to sati was more multifaceted than this allows and the link between colonial discourses and modern protagonists more complex. [source]

Hunting the Devil: Democracy's Rhetorical Impulse to War

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2007
ROBERT L. IVIE
The rhetoric of evil, so prominently evident in contemporary presidential public address, articulates a primal motive for the war on terrorism by projecting democracy's shadow onto the external enemy. In this regard, the president's discourse is a manifestation rather than aberration of U.S. political culture, a reflection of the nation's troubled democratic identity. Upon close inspection, it reveals the presence of the mythos of a democratic demon contained within the republic, various ways in which the unconscious projection of this devil figure is rhetorically triggered, and the cultural significance of its lethal entailments. The diabolism of presidential war rhetoric, we suggest, functions as an inducement to evacuate the political content of democracy, leaving a largely empty but virulent signifier in its place, which weakens the nation by reproducing a culture of war. [source]

Remembering White Detroit:Whiteness in the Mix of History and Memory

CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 2 2000
John Hartigan Jr.
Detroit provides a unique perspective on issues of whiteness because it grounds many situations where whites are racially objectified,in settings where the nor-motive status of their racial position cannot be assumed, and where whiteness is not often an unmarked identity. The distinct class texture of their objectifications are evident in comments by white Detroiters grappling with the city's history, either through their personal memories or their current experiences. The heterogeneity of their versions of Detroit's history suggests that whites contend with die continuing cultural significance of race and of whiteness from a range of uneven social positions. [Whiteness, urban underclass, social memory, race, Detroit] [source]