Landscape as Spectacle: World's Fairs and the Culture of Heroic Consumption

1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
D Ley ◽  
K Olds

The meaning of a public spectacle, world's fairs, is examined, with particular emphasis on the 1986 world's exposition in Vancouver. Various theoretical readings of mass culture and popular culture are analysed: on the one hand, the view of the culture industry, imposing hegemonic meanings through spectacles onto a depoliticised mass audience, and on the other the view of an active interpenetration of cultural producers and consumers, which includes the capacity for resistance to the web of signification spun by dominant elites. The thesis is considered that world's fairs are an instrument of hegemonic power. Although Expo 86 was organised by a political and economic elite, evidence from 2200 visitors points to a fractured and negotiated power that was never absolute.

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 220-242
Author(s):  
Susanne Korbel

AbstractThis article investigates the coinciding of the mass migration from Europe to the Americas and the emergence of mass culture, two developments that shaped everyday life, popular entertainment, and Jewish and non-Jewish relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Jewish actors and actresses were among the most prominent performers who staged in Orpheums, Varietés, and vaudevilles on both sides of the Atlantic. In their performances they drew on the notion of a new quality of mobility that society was experiencing, utilizing it to negotiate issues such as of the cultural construction of identities and Jewishness, or to critically reexamine antisemitic and nationalistic attitudes. On the one hand, mobility enabled negotiations of controversial issues. On the other hand, mobility led to accusations against popular entertainment, both legitimate and erroneous—for example, that vaudevilles functioned as covers for clandestine prostitution. Therefore, the article examines the question of how mobility influenced popular culture. What were the controversial issues that mobility raised, and what accusations did these evoke? In what ways did actors and actresses in popular culture address gender and Jewishness? To answer these questions, the article analyzes the spaces of popular entertainment in Budapest, Vienna, and New York through close examinations of newspapers, manuscripts, playbills, and records of censorship.


Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1021-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.


Author(s):  
Anne Atlan ◽  
Nathalie Udo

This study analyzes the natural and social factors influencing the emergence and publicization of the invasive status of a fast growing bush, gorse (Ulex europaeus), by comparison between countries on a global scale. We used documents collected on the web in a standardized way. The results show that in all the countries studied, there are several public statuses attributed to gorse. The invasive status is the one that is most shared. The other most frequently encountered status are those of noxious weed, and of economically useful. The invasive status is publicized in nearly all countries, including those where gorse is almost absent. We quantified the publicization of the invasive gorse status of gorse by an indicator with 5 levels, and then performed a multivariate analysis that combines natural and social explanatory variables. The results lead us to propose the concept of invasive niche: the set of natural and social parameters that allow a species to be considered invasive in a given socio-ecosystem.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Ferry Fauzi Hermawan

This study aimed to identify the forms of masculinity in the Indonesian popular culture in the beginning of New Order regime. This study was based on the two novels: Cross Mama and Kekasih-Kekasih Gelap, written by Motinggo Busye. The analysis used new historicism theory proposed by Stephen Greenblatt. The analysis also considered various cultural contexts emerged in 1970s. The results show three shared trends in the novels. The first trend shows that the masculinity tends to be represented by both men worshiping patriarchal values such as the myth of woman’s virginity and men perceiving woman as a sexual object. The second trend shows that masculinity is stereotyped based on masculinity, power, and male dominance. The third trend shows that masculinity relates to various products of mass culture at the time. This last trend shows that in that era,the ideal male figure is represented as the one who: (1) is sexually active with many women, (2) has a muscular body, (3) has a handsome look, and (4) has a financial capability. Besides the shared three trends, the result also shows that the texts in the novels do not only reflect the cultural situations in the 60’s and 70’s but also contribute in shaping the social values of the cultural situations.


Author(s):  
Patricia Mindus

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics, and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the Web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics who warn that cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This chapter sets the problem, “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?,” into the broad context of practical philosophy by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy.” The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. The chapter's claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fail or succeed. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work.


Author(s):  
Marta Massi ◽  
Chiara Piancatelli ◽  
Sonia Pancheri

Albeit often perceived as two worlds apart, low culture and high culture are increasingly converging to collaborate in mutually advantageous ways. Brands—including the name, term, sign, symbol, or combination of them that identify the goods and services of a seller or group of sellers, and differentiate them from those of the competitors—are the new territory where high culture and low culture co-exist and collaborate, creating new possibilities of cross-fertilization and hybridization between the two. Through the analysis of successful examples coming from different industries, this chapter aims to highlight how brands have blurred the distinction between low culture and high culture. On the one hand, brands can use the heritage of the arts world to gain authenticity and legitimate themselves in the eyes of consumers and the society. On the other hand, artists and arts organizations, such as museums and other art institutions, can indulge in popular culture in order to become appealing to younger target markets and enhance their brand awareness and image.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-67
Author(s):  
Ekaterina B. Kriukova ◽  
Oxana A. Koval

The article presents a survey of the 20th century intellectual quests related to the problem of the author and her status. The question of authorship becomes a key issue in the modern era for both philosophy and literature. On the one hand, both fields reflect upon the authorship as their own intrinsic principle, on the other hand, both literature and philosophy question the privileged position of the author as the sole meaning-maker. The undertaken comparison of the original interpretations of the prominent 20th century thinkers allows us: (1) to demonstrate how the ideological content of the concept itself has changed, the author being labeled as a co-participant, producer, collective subject, function within discourse, non-reader, and witness; (2) to introduce different strategies of understanding the author’s figure, depending on the chosen point of view; (3) to trace the logic of the transition from the modern to the postmodern through the explication of relations between the author and the character (M. Bakhtin), the author and his work (W. Benjamin), the author and popular culture (T. Adorno), the author and the discourse (M. Foucault), the author and the letter (M. Blanchot), and the author and the Other (G. Agamben).


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-140
Author(s):  
S. V. Storozhuk ◽  
◽  
I. M. Hoian ◽  

The article shows that the modern mass interest in the occult is conditioned, on the one hand, by the world crisis, the lack of stable and reliable foundations for self-determination and human orientation in the world, and on the other – by the formation of impersonal man and the establishment of mass society. The lack of a stable worldview, universal values, ideals and social standards, and, at the same time, unwillingness to pose and solve complex socio-cultural problems, is the main reason why modern (postmodern) people choose occult ideals and norms that do not require deep reflection, however, they provide them with a sense of belonging to the universe. Most of them are offered by the modern mass culture industry. Although its products are of great concern to traditional Christian values and virtues, we have no reason to give them an unequivocally negative assessment at the moment, at least given that they offer models of The article shows that the modern mass interest in the occult is conditioned, on the one hand, by the world crisis, the lack of stable and reliable foundations for self-determination and human orientation in the world, and on the other – by the formation of impersonal man and the establishment of mass society. The lack of a stable worldview, universal values, ideals and social standards, and, at the same time, unwillingness to pose and solve complex socio-cultural problems, is the main reason why modern (postmodern) people choose occult ideals and norms that do not require deep reflection, however, they provide them with a sense of belonging to the universe. Most of them are offered by the modern mass culture industry. Although its products are of great concern to traditional Christian values and virtues, we have no reason to give them an unequivocally negative assessment at the moment, at least given that they offer models of The article shows that the modern mass interest in the occult is conditioned, on the one hand, by the world crisis, the lack of stable and reliable foundations for self-determination and human orientation in the world, and on the other – by the formation of impersonal man and the establishment of mass society. The lack of a stable worldview, universal values, ideals and social standards, and, at the same time, unwillingness to pose and solve complex socio-cultural problems, is the main reason why modern (postmodern) people choose occult ideals and norms that do not require deep reflection, however, they provide them with a sense of belonging to the universe. Most of them are offered by the modern mass culture industry. Although its products are of great concern to traditional Christian values and virtues, we have no reason to give them an unequivocally negative assessment at the moment, at least given that they offer models of social relations that due to testing by various occult organizations, may receive a public request, or be rejected.


Author(s):  
Hardy Pundt

While developing a Web-based travel planning system, the necessity to implement a mobile component has been identified. Such a conception is aimed at a comprehensive support of a workflow that enables users to plan a trip in advance using the Web-based application, but to modify the original plan wherever and whenever they want while carrying out the journey. Within both components, Point-of-Interest (POI) plays a significant role to determine a tour. It is one claim of this chapter that the relevance of POI is dependent on the perspective of a user. As a consequence, the originally used POI database was replaced by a POI ontology which promised to support the workflow more comprehensively. This conceptual change raised several questions concerning the domain dependence of the POI ontology on the one side and universal aspects of the ontology on the other.


Philotheos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Danilović ◽  

There is almost no Christian who has never heard about John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers since the Apostle Paul himself. He is honored as a saint, and his Liturgy is the most celebrated one in the Byzantine Rite even today. On the other hand, the story about the Gittite Goliath and a young boy named David, the future king of Israel and the one from whose royal line Christ will be borne, is one of the most read and used biblical stories. Art, music, popular culture, even sports, and politics – all of them, in their own way, used this story to tell how a tiny ruddy boy can win the giant. But how was it in the time of Saint Chrysostom? How did he read this story? If one knows the difference between the Greek and Hebrew version, which one did John read and preach to his community? Can his approach to this biblical text help us better understand Church Fathers’ exegesis and the Bible itself?


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