scholarly journals PLATO AND THE DANGEROUS PLEASURES OF POIKILIA

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Conceptual Connection

Abstract A significant strand of the ethical psychology, aesthetics and politics of Plato's Republic revolves around the concept of poikilia, ‘fascinating variety’. Plato uses the concept to caution against harmful appetitive pleasures purveyed by democracy and such artistic or cultural practices as mimetic poetry. His aim, this article shows, is to contest a prominent conceptual connection between poikilia and beauty (kallos, to kalon). Exploiting tensions in the archaic and classical Greek concept, Plato associates poikilia with dangerous pleasures to redirect admiration toward a distinctly philosophical pursuit of the nature of beauty. This is to displace a prominent and problematic cultural sensibility—the aesthetics of poikilia—not to deny that fascinating variety, even in mimetic poetry, may be beautiful. Rather, Plato's cultural critique lays bare an epistemological problem in the ethical psychology of beauty: since they cannot be distinguished from what seems beautiful, how should one respond to fascinating yet dangerous attractions?

scholarly journals Cultural Ecology and Cultural Critique

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Bailey ◽  
Claire Booth-Kurpnieks ◽  
Kath Davies ◽  
Ioanni Delsante
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Place Studies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Policy Information

In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting professor at City University, London, and associate at the think-tank Demos, to write a report on culture as part of its Cultural Value Project. The claim within the report was to redirect culture away from economic prescriptions and to focus on ecological approaches to ‘value’. Holden considers the application and use of ecological tropes to re-situate culture as ‘non-hierarchical’ and as part of symbiotic social processes. By embracing metaphors of ‘emergence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘convergence,’ he suggests we can “gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy information and implementation”. This article addresses the role of ‘cultural critique’ in the live environments and ecologies of place-making. It will consider, with examples, how cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms generate mixed ecologies of relations between aesthetic, psychic, economic, political, and ethical materialisms. With reference to a body of situated knowledges, derived from place studies to eco-regionalisms, urban to art criticisms, we will consider ecological thinking as a new mode of cultural critique for initiating arts and cultural policy change. Primarily, the operant concept of ‘environing’ will be considered as the condition of possibility for the space of critique. This includes necessary and strategic actions, where mixed ecologies of cultural activity work against the disciplinary policing of space with new assemblages of distributed power

scholarly journals Miejsca kultury w antropologii i etnografii edukacyjnej

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Hana Červinková ◽  
Tomasz Woźniak
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Educational Anthropology ◽  
Anthropology Of Education ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Key Aspects

The focus of this article is on culture as a central concept of educational anthropology – a subdiscipline of anthropology that focuses on the fields of education and learning as key aspects of social life. It begins with an introduction into how culture has been criticially conceptualized in anthropology and ethnography and then illustrates how educational anthropologists have used the concepts of culture and cultural critique to analyze educational processes in diverse sociocultural settings. The author points out three primary areas in which anthropology of education enriches our understanding of education and learning: 1) investigations of diversity of educational practices in different sociocultural contexts; 2) critical examination of cultural practices and structures of inequality and exclusion vis-à-vis minority subjects in the educational process; 3) positioning of participatory research approaches and engagement as legitimate methodological and scholary standpoints. The article builts primarily on examples of texts that have been recently published in the Polish language in order to help situate the perspective of educational anthropology in Polish scholarly discourse and tradition.

Constructing Korean and Japanese interculturality in talk

Pragmatics ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Membership Categorization Analysis ◽  
Japanese University ◽  
Membership Categorization ◽  
First Languages ◽  
The Face ◽  
Cultural Experts

This article investigates how participants accomplish interculturality (Nishizaka 1995, 1999; Mori 2003) when they engage in talk about Korean cultural practices involving labels and descriptions which construct one another’s national/ethnic identity. Within the framework of Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1972, 1979, 1992), three segments of conversation were analyzed between Korean users of Japanese attending a Japanese university and their Japanese work colleagues or college friends. The analysis challenges key assumptions about intercultural conversation in several ways: 1) by demonstrating that interculturality is not always achieved in talk among speakers from different nations who have different first languages; 2) through illustrating how cultural expertise is often claimed by ‘non-members’ of the culture; and 3) by showing how presumed cultural experts do not always enact their cultural memberships, even in the face of cultural critique. The study reveals that the various membership categorizations that occur are contingent on how the participants respond to the assessment of various cultural practices. The findings of this study provide further awareness of how cross-cultural identity construction and interculturality are accomplished in talk.

BROWNING’S BISHOP CONCEIVES A TOMB: CULTURAL ORDERING AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Author(s):  
E. Warwick Slinn
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Symbolic Function ◽  
Ecclesiastical Architecture ◽  
History Of

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1845, Robert Browning sent a poem entitled “The Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” to the acting editor of Hood’s Magazine. He writes: “I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments” (DeVane and Knickerbocker 35–36). Because of this letter, the immediate historical context for the poem has commonly been taken as the Oxford (Tractarian) movement and Newman’s retraction in 1843. The Cambridge Camden Society (not the London antiquarian society of the same name, which is sometimes thought to be Browning’s reference) was also associated with Romanism, being accused of popery in 1844 and subsequently dissolved by the Cambridge authorities in February 1845, the same month Browning submitted his poem. (It continued as the Ecclesiological Society.) Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist (1841–), the Cambridge Camden Society aimed to study ecclesiastical architecture, following Pugin’s Contrasts (2nd edition, 1841) in complaining about the moral corruption of church architecture and promoting an ethical-spiritual basis for reform.1 Journal items focussed on a range of issues from the symbolic function of church layout to the details of epitaphs and tombs, generally mixing visual values with ecclesiology. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (139–44) and John Morley in Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (52–62) detail these issues. Browning’s “other embroilments” may well refer therefore to the growing controversy in the 1840s about sepulture and sepulchral style, about the appropriateness or otherwise of ornate tombs and canopies. Hence this poem about a deathbed scene and a Bishop’s tomb may be clearly located within the broadly enveloping mid- Victorian network of cultural practices related to death: distinctively encoded rituals of mourning, debate about gravestones and epitaphs, depictions of deathbed scenes (in painting as well as literature), and widespread discussion of what came to be known as the four last things — death, judgement, heaven, and hell.

Social epistemic actions

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Pezzulo ◽  
Laura Barca ◽  
Domenico Maisto ◽  
Francesco Donnarumma
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Joint Action ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Epistemic Actions ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Online Social Interaction

Abstract We consider the ways humans engage in social epistemic actions, to guide each other's attention, prediction, and learning processes towards salient information, at the timescale of online social interaction and joint action. This parallels the active guidance of other's attention, prediction, and learning processes at the longer timescale of niche construction and cultural practices, as discussed in the target article.

Pembinaan Semula Peradaban Komuniti Cina Muslim Berasaskan Dialog Antara Agama: Pengalaman di Terengganu dan Brunei

Sains Insani ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-84
Author(s):  
Azarudin Awang ◽  
Azman Che Mat ◽  
Sophian Ramli
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Interfaith Dialogue ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Muslim Family

Bagi sesebuah negara yang mempunyai etnik pelbagai anutan kepercayaan dan perbezaan amalan budaya, dialog antara agama berperanan membetulkan semula kekaburan dalam kehidupan beragama dan berbudaya. Melalui peranan Saudara Baru, dialog antara agama mampu menjadi medan bagi menjelaskan kebenaran tentang agama Islam kepada masyarakat bukan Muslim dan pelaksanaan amalan budaya asal kepada Muslim asal. Objektif kajian ini ialah melihat pengalaman pelaksanaan dialog antara agama di Terengganu dan relevansi dalam kehidupan beragama di negara Brunei. Metode kajian ini menggunakan kajian dokumen yang menyentuh komuniti Cina Muslim di Terengganu dan Brunei. Pengalaman pelaksanaan dialog antara agama di Terengganu dan negara Brunei memperlihatkan dialog antara agama mampu membetulkan salah faham dan selanjutnya mengendurkan ketegangan hubungan antara agama dan budaya antara komuniti Saudara Baru, ahli keluarga bukan Muslim dan masyarakat Muslim asal. Biarpun begitu, adalah dicadangkan agar kajian yang menyentuh dialog antara agama perlu diperkukuhkan sebagai medium membina semula peradaban memandangkan penduduk di kedua-dua lokasi ini terdiri daripada berbilang etnik dan agama sedangkan pada masa yang sama masalah yang menyentuh hubungan antara agama sentiasa timbul. Abstract: For a country with diverse ethics of beliefs and cultural practices, interfaith dialogue plays a role to redefine ambiguity in religious and cultural life. Through the role of the New Muslim (Muslim Convert), interfaith dialogue can become a medium to explain the truth about Islam to the non-Muslims and the implementation of real cultural practices to the others Muslim. The objective of this study is to examine the experience of interfaith dialogue in Terengganu and in Brunei. The method of this study is being conducted in document research that related with the Muslim Chinese community in Terengganu and Brunei. In addition, interviews with people involved in the management of New Muslims also carried out. The experience of interfaith dialogue in Terengganu and Brunei shows that dialogue capable explains misunderstandings and further loosening the tension between religion and culture among New Muslims, non-Muslim family members and Muslim communities. However, it is recommended that studies on interfaith dialogue should be strengthened as a medium for rebuilding civilization as the residents of both locations are multi-ethnic and religious while at the same time the problem of interreligious persists.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

The Beginnings of Islam in Afghanistan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arezou Azad
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Political System ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Initial Conversion ◽  
The Way

Covering the period from 709 to 871, this chapter traces the initial conversion of Afghanistan from Zoroastrianism and Buddhism to Islam. Highlighting the differential developments in four regions of Afghanistan, it discusses the very earliest history of Afghan Islam both as a religion and as a political system in the form of a caliphate.  The chapter draws on under-utilized sources, such as fourth to eighth century Bactrian documents from Tukharistan and medieval Arabic and Persian histories of Balkh, Herat and Sistan. In so doing, it offers a paradigm shift in the way early Islam is understood by arguing that it did not arrive in Afghanistan as a finished product, but instead grew out of Afghanistan’s multi-religious context. Through fusions with Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, early Abrahamic traditions, and local cult practices, the Islam that resulted was less an Arab Islam that was imported wholesale than a patchwork of various cultural practices.

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