Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER C. PERDUE
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Nomadic Pastoralists ◽  
Nature And Nurture ◽  
Ethnic Categorization ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractEcologies of production and state classifications shaped Chinese imperial frontier policies. In Chinese classical debates about the effect of environment on human character, the dominant view held that all peoples could become civilised, but a dissenting view held that barbarians could never change their ways. Nomadic pastoralists likewise debated whether to adopt certain Han cultural practices or reject them. Chinese dynasties often accepted diversity, but at certain times tried to eliminate difference by persuasion or by force. Three cases illustrate these processes during the Qing period: the relationship between Manchus and Mongols, Qing policies towards aboriginal peoples and the settlement of Taiwan, and Qing policies towards southwestern mountain peoples. In each case, policies came out of the interaction of ethnic categorization, views on cultural transformation and frontier environments. When Qing rulers lost the ability to recognise such cultural distinctions, they lost a key to the endurance of the empire.

scholarly journals Tradition and Transitions: Elders Working in Canadian Prisons, 1967-1992

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-275
Author(s):  
Seth Adema
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Conditional Release ◽  
Aboriginal Community ◽  
Penal Institutions ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Voluntary Basis

Between 1967 and 1992, Aboriginal traditional Elders played increasingly important roles working with Aboriginal inmates in Canadian penitentiaries. Whereas in 1967 a small group of individuals entered prisons as Elders on a voluntary basis, unrecognized by Correctional Services Canada (CSC), over the following decades Elders and CSC developed increasingly formal relationships. By 1992 the Corrections and Conditional Release Act legislated the employment of Elders as spiritual leaders for Aboriginal peoples in prison. This transition was brought about because of an ongoing cultural dialogue between Aboriginal prisoners through inmate groups called the Native Brotherhoods, Aboriginal community organizations that worked inside prisons, and penal administrators. While Native Brotherhoods and the Elders who worked with them were central to the decolonization of prisons, in legislating the practice of Aboriginal spirituality in prisons and mandating the employment of Elders, CSC took control of Aboriginal cultural practices and alienated the community groups that once supported Elders. While the increased rights of Elders under this new framework responded to many of the needs voiced by prisoners and community members, the shift from community-based to institutional-based service represented an important change in the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and Canadian penal institutions. This paper argues that the efforts of individual Elders and Native Brotherhoods and the consolidation of control over their efforts by the penal administrations were the result of simultaneous processes of decolonization and neocolonialism.

Deepening a Sense of Being Taiwanese

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 366-390
Author(s):  
Shu-ling Yeh ◽  
Ying-Cheng Chang
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Taiwanese Identity ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Core Part

Abstract This paper examines how the Amis, the largest indigenous community in Taiwan, draw on their Catholic faith to understand what it means to be Taiwanese. For over a century, the Amis were treated as marginalised citizens by the Japanese colonial government and the Han-Chinese Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo. Their predicament changed when political priorities shifted from cultural assimilation to multiculturalism after 1987. Successive Taiwanese governments since then have actively sought to incorporate indigenous culture as a core part of Taiwanese identity. Focusing on how the Amis intertwined their adopted Catholic notions and practices with pre-Christian ideas, social structure, and rituals, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the Amis carve out a place for themselves in wider Taiwanese society. It adds to ongoing discussions about the relationship between conversion and cultural transformation in Oceania by arguing that Catholicism empowered the Amis to deepen their sense of belonging to the island republic and, for the first time, assert themselves fully as Taiwanese.

scholarly journals Illuminating Vestige: Amateur Archaeology and the Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Rural France

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Historical Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Rural France

AbstractThis article provides a historical ethnography of an abrupt and transient awakening of interest in Roman vestige during the 1970s in rural France, and explores its implications for comparative understanding of historical consciousness in Western Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Languedoc, and particularly the commune of Monadières, it details a vogue for collecting pottery shards scattered in a nearby lagoon that developed among local inhabitants. The article frames this as a ritualized “expressive historicity” emergent from political economic restructuring, cultural transformation, and time-space compression. It analyses the catalyzing role of a historian who introduced discursive forms into the commune for symbolizing the shards, drawn from regionalist and socialist historiography, which local people adapted to rearticulate the historicity of lived experience as a novel, hybrid genre of “historical consciousness.” These activities are conceptualized as a “reverse historiography.” Elements of historiographical and archaeological discourses—for example, chronological depth, collation and evaluation of material relics—are reinvented to alternate ends, partly as a subversive “response” to contact with such discourses. The practice emerges as a mediation of distinct ways of apprehending the world at a significant historical juncture. Analysis explores the utility of new anthropological theories of “historicity”—an alternative to the established “historical idiom” for analyzing our relations with the past—which place historiography within the analytical frame, and enable consideration of the temporality of historical experience. Findings suggest that the alterity of popular Western cultural practices for invoking the past would reward further study.

scholarly journals El otro lado de la modernidad boliviana. "Vuelve Sebastiana" y la reconfiguración de las coordenadas espacio temporales para pensar la Nación

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
Jaime Omar Salinas Zabalaga
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the film Vuelve Sebastiana (1953) by Jorge Ruiz, focusing on its ideological and aesthetic aspects. The analysis establishes connections between the idea of “nation” in the context of cultural transformation prompted by the economic and social policies of the National Revolution of 1952 and the way the Chipaya community is represented. The central argument is that "Vuelve Sebastiana" can be read not only in relation to the new national identity but as an expression of a new national imaginary regarding the indigenous communities of the Altiplano. The author proposes that "Vuelve Sebastiana" represents the nation through the temporal and spatial cartographies of a modern nation-building project, making visible some of its tensions and contradictions and allowing us to explore the imaginary that has redefined the relationship between the State and the indigenous communities of the Altiplano throughout the  second half of the 20th century.

Banal Cosmopolitanism? Values and Cultural Repertoires of Youth in Adriatic Croatia

2021 ◽  
pp. 174997552110271
Author(s):  
Sven Marcelić ◽  
Željka Tonković ◽  
Krešimir Krolo
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
National Language ◽  
Cultural Consumption ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Repertoires ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Extended Interpretation

The field of cultural consumption features an abundant body of research addressing the relationship between the local and global. While this research concentrates on issues of cultural repertoires and socio-economic context, the investigation of values continues to be been under-researched. An extended interpretation of the concept of banal cosmopolitanism is proposed as an attempt to describe the relationship between cultural consumption and values. Based on quantitative research (N = 2650) of high-school students in major cities of Adriatic Croatia, using cluster analysis, three value types were identified: modern, transitional and traditional. Our research shows that the modern type is mainly correlated with highbrow cultural practices and stronger preference towards foreign cultural artefacts, whereas traditional type is more prone to be involved in the local culture that uses national language. The article concludes that there is a positive relation between values and preference towards global culture that can be interpreted as a form of embodied cultural capital, adding a stronger emphasis on values to the current discussion on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and culture.

Fission and Fusion: From improvisation to formalism in law and music

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Manderson
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
The Relationship

Law and classical music are both performative disciplines. Both became concerned with practices of textual interpretation, and with questions of the authority of those texts and the legitimacy of those interpretations. But exactly how did that happen, and with what social consequences? The relationship between law and music across the centuries shows striking parallels and echoes. If we study them carefully each can illuminate the other, binding them together so that we can see them as two aspects of the same process and the same histories. The insights we gain from the novelty of their conjunction help us to understand these social changes better and differently. This conjunction will also help us see how much our disciplinary blinkers prevent us from observing the far-reaching social forces which these cultural practices at each moment both echo and animate.

5. Inventing the samurai

2021 ◽  
pp. 86-112
Author(s):  
Michael Wert
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Military Science ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Tokugawa Period ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter argues that the samurai were “invented” in the Tokugawa period as a strictly defined group with a unique identity created through popular culture and codified social cultural practices. Commoners and samurai alike consumed, and participated in, warrior-related activities. People read warrior histories, military science manuals, were influenced by warrior theatre, like the 47 ronin story, and the value therein. It also describes how low-ranking warriors became more political, their education increasing connected to notions of warrior legitimacy and the relationship between warriors and the imperial institution. In so doing, the chapter, chronologically, leads readers to the collapse of the last warrior regime during the Meiji Restoration and the Boshin War.

Introducing the Marots

Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 233-235
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
The Family ◽  
Literate Culture ◽  
Clement Marot ◽  
The Relationship

Chapters 16–19 are a case study of the family that produced the best-selling vernacular literary author of sixteenth-century France: Clément Marot. The example of this family also provides one way of examining the relationship to family and social hierarchy of a genre of writing that was fundamental to literate culture: poetry. The aspiration to social ascent was only one of the reasons why poetry was so widely composed in sixteenth-century France, but it was a key one. Like other cultural practices—ranging from dress and heraldry to forms of address—poetry was therefore itself part of the very mechanics that constructed social hierarchy.

Poor Little Rich Kids? The Role of Nature versus Nurture in Wealth and Other Economic Outcomes and Behaviours

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 1683-1725 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra E Black ◽  
Paul J Devereux ◽  
Petter Lundborg ◽  
Kaveh Majlesi
Keyword(s):  
Adoptive Parents ◽  
Nature Versus Nurture ◽  
Biological Parents ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Birth Factors ◽  
Nature And Nurture ◽  
Parental Wealth ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents. Comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child, we find that, even prior to any inheritance, there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for pre-birth factors and we find little evidence that nature/nurture interactions are important. When bequests are taken into account, the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger. Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth. We further build on the existing literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the role of nature and nurture on intergenerational mobility, looking at a wide range of different outcomes using a common sample and method. We find that environmental influences are relatively more important for wealth-related variables such as savings and investment decisions than for human capital. We conclude by studying consumption as an overall measure of welfare and find that, like wealth, it is more determined by environment than by biology.

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