Different types of creativity on the two sides of shutters

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Bloch

A charitable sale housed in the Paris showrooms of Christie’s displayed works created by European artists. These were painted over or on the backs of specially commissioned carved house shutters typical of the Zafimaniry region of Madagascar. The present article considers and contrasts the two types of creativity juxtaposed at the Christie’s sale. The European work stresses the artist’s individual originality and social isolation from the everyday lives of those who come to admire or buy the works. The process of the art’s production ends abruptly at the moment of exhibition and sale. In contrast, the work of the Malagasy carvers is contained within a general concern of continuing the life and growth of their families. Their art intends to harden and beautify the houses that represent the continuation of the families’ life. There is no disconnection between the carver and those who will see and use the shutters similar to that of the European artists, and there is no clear beginning or end to the process of creation similar to the point of exhibition and sale. The Malagasy carvers do not want to be different from their predecessors; they want to continue the work and lives of those they are in contact with.

Author(s):  
Banu Özkazanç-Pan

This chapter focuses on hybrid selves, a new kind of self that arises as a result of the distinct context, experiences and set of social and material practices that a person engages in to understand themselves and those around them. While there are many different ways to define hybrid, its use here examines those novel socio-cultural transformations, combinations and “mixings” that take shape at the moment of cultural encounter. Hybrid selves form differently even if facing the same set of circumstances and conditions such studying the everyday lives of business people can elucidate the repertoires of actions that they embody and eschew. By outlining the main tenets of hybrid selves, this chapter challenges conceptualizations of ‘self’ that are based on static notions of identity which limit how we can understand people. It provides examples and comparative illustrations of hybrid selves and contrasts them with research that aims to study similar people in diversity and cross-cultural management. The chapter points out main differences between hybrid selves and bi-cultural or multicultural notions of identity that generally offer hyphenation as a solution to the complex ways people may understand themselves.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2019/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónika Balogh

The present article develops a practical operational view of Ruth Benedict’s shame and guilt culture concept as one of the attributes which might characterize the structure and operation of Japanese social groups. After giving a short overview of critical approaches to this concept, several norm-forming, normoperating and sanctioning practices are examined in relation to the aspect of shame and guilt reactions from the everyday lives of intercultural industrial organizations (companies) located in Hungary, featuring Japanese company cultural elements in their operation. The evaluation and analysis of several related phenomena are conducted on the basis of fieldwork, involving further sociological concepts such as relational subjectivism, kanjin 閑人, shikaku 資格 and ba 場, chū 忠 and kō 孝, giri 義理 and ninjō 人情, wa 和, amae 甘えand others.


Author(s):  
Peter Hopkins

The chapters in this collection explore the everyday lives, experiences, practices and attitudes of Muslims in Scotland. In order to set the context for these chapters, in this introduction I explore the early settlement of Muslims in Scotland and discuss some of the initial research projects that charted the settlement of Asians and Pakistanis in Scotland’s main cities. I then discuss the current situation for Muslims in Scotland through data from the 2011 Scottish Census. Following a short note about the significance of the Scottish context, in the final section, the main themes and issues that have been explored in research about Muslims in Scotland.


Author(s):  
Christel Marais ◽  
Christo Van Wyk

South Africa is heralded as a global ambassador for the rights of domestic workers. Empowerment, however, remains an elusive concept within the sector. Fear-based disempowerment still characterises the employment relationship, resulting in an absence of an employee voice. The dire need to survive renders this sector silent. This article explores the role that legislative awareness can play in the everyday lives of domestic workers. By means of a post-positive, forwardlooking positive psychological and phenomenological research design the researchers sought to access the voiced experiences of domestic workers within their employment context. Consequently, purposive, respondent-driven selfsampling knowledgeable participants were recruited. In-depth interviewing generated the data. The distinct voice of each participant was noted during an open inductive approach to data analysis. Findings indicated that empowerment was an unknown construct for all participants. They lacked the confidence to engage their employers on employment issues. Nevertheless, domestic workers should embrace ownership and endeavour to empower themselves. This would sanction their right to assert their expectations of employment standards with confidence and use the judicial system to bring about compliant actions. The article concludes with the notion that legislative awareness could result in empowered actions though informed employee voices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-278
Author(s):  
Adrián González Casanova ◽  
Juan Carlos Pardo ◽  
José Luis Pérez

AbstractIn this paper, we introduce a family of processes with values on the nonnegative integers that describes the dynamics of populations where individuals are allowed to have different types of interactions. The types of interactions that we consider include pairwise interactions, such as competition, annihilation, and cooperation; and interactions among several individuals that can be viewed as catastrophes. We call such families of processes branching processes with interactions. Our aim is to study their long-term behaviour under a specific regime of the pairwise interaction parameters that we introduce as the subcritical cooperative regime. Under such a regime, we prove that a process in this class comes down from infinity and has a moment dual which turns out to be a jump-diffusion that can be thought as the evolution of the frequency of a trait or phenotype, and whose parameters have a classical interpretation in terms of population genetics. The moment dual is an important tool for characterizing the stationary distribution of branching processes with interactions whenever such a distribution exists; it is also an interesting object in its own right.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rubin

Hypothesizing after the results are known, or HARKing, occurs when researchers check their research results and then add or remove hypotheses on the basis of those results without acknowledging this process in their research report ( Kerr, 1998 ). In the present article, I discuss 3 forms of HARKing: (a) using current results to construct post hoc hypotheses that are then reported as if they were a priori hypotheses; (b) retrieving hypotheses from a post hoc literature search and reporting them as a priori hypotheses; and (c) failing to report a priori hypotheses that are unsupported by the current results. These 3 types of HARKing are often characterized as being bad for science and a potential cause of the current replication crisis. In the present article, I use insights from the philosophy of science to present a more nuanced view. Specifically, I identify the conditions under which each of these 3 types of HARKing is most and least likely to be bad for science. I conclude with a brief discussion about the ethics of each type of HARKing.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 580-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kadri Tüür

The object of study in the present article is birds, more precisely the sounds of birds as they are represented in Estonian nature writing. The evolutionary and structural parallels of bird song with human language are reviewed. Human interpretation of bird sounds raises the question, whether it is possible to transmit or “translate” signals between the Umwelts of different species. The intentions of the sender of the signal may remain unknown, but the signification process within human Umwelt can still be traced and analysed. By approaching the excerpts of nature writing using semiotic methodology, I attempt to demonstrate how bird sounds can function as different types of signs, as outlined by Thomas A. Sebeok. It is argued that the zoosemiotic treatment of nature writing opens up a number of interesting perspectives that would otherwise remain beyond the scope of traditional literary analysis.


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