Ṣaṣṭhī

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-241
Author(s):  
Saswati Sengupta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Foster Mothers ◽  
And Gender

Cultural memory and living practice of Bengal representṢaṣṭhī as the patron deity of childbirth and children’s welfare. But she is marginalized in the elite public domain despite the sanctity of motherhood within patriarchy. A search for Ṣaṣṭhī, through the regional Upa-purāṇas, maṅgalakābyas, proverbs, popular verses, and brathakathās reveals several Ṣaṣṭhīs: a goddess of the groves, a group of rain goddesses, a group of foster mothers, an old woman, and a goddess of the lying-in-chamber after delivery. Mothers who do not fit the norm of the caste-patriarchal nourishing mothers, as signalled by Ṣaṣṭhī, are often re-presented in Brahmanical imagination as ghoulish devourers of children. Kshīrer Putul (1896) by Abanindranath Tagore further mutates Ṣaṣṭhī for the modern colonized metropolis. This is significant in the context of modern Bengal’s re-forming of tradition marked by the dissociation between the metropolitan and the rural, the elite and the plebian cultures, fed by differences of class, caste, and gender.

scholarly journals Doctors, suicide and mental illness

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 165-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Gerada
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Mortality Data ◽  
Next Of Kin ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Additional Risk ◽  
The Public ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Health Programme

This article focuses on doctors and suicide. It provides real examples to illustrate why doctors die by their own hand. These reasons are replicated in the general population, but also include a host of additional risk factors related to being a doctor. In each case, information about the doctor is in the public domain or, as in one case, consent from the next of kin has been obtained for a detail not in the public domain. The author is a doctors' doctor, heading up a confidential health service for doctors with mental illness or addiction, the National Health Service Practitioner Health Programme. Mortality data from the programme (January 2008–January 2017) will also be included. For the sake of confidentiality, data is collated and details regarding age and gender have been approximated.Declaration of interestNone.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Cultural Memory in the Videogames Industry

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Emil Lundedal Hammar
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Videogame Industry ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Game Developers

Abstract Following the materialist approaches to contemporary digital memory- making, this article explores how unequal access to memory production in videogames is determined along economic and cultural lines. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with different European, Asian and North American historical game developers, I make the case for how materialist and cultural aspects of videogame development reinforce existing mnemonic hegemony and in turn how this mnemonic hegemony determines access to the production of memory- making potentials that players of videogames activate and negotiate. My interview findings illustrate how individual workers do not necessarily intend to reproduce received systems of power and hegemony, and instead how certain cultural and material relations tacitly motivate and/or marginalise workers in the videogame industries to reproduce hegemonic power relations in cultural memory across race, class and gender. Finally, I develop the argument that access to cultural production networks such as the games industry constitutes important factors that need to be taken seriously in research on cultural memory and game studies. Thus, my article investigates global power relationships, political economy, colonial legacies and cultural hegemony within the videogame industry, and how these are instantiated in individual instances of game developers.

scholarly journals “Neither here nor there”: traces of the feminine in the photoperformances of Ana Mendieta

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 319-330
Author(s):  
Olga da Costa Lima Wanderley
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
American Artist ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Ana Mendieta ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Constitutive Factor

This article addresses the questions triggered by the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who has a large part of her work composed exclusively of camera performances and what she termed earth-body-works. Through her strategies of representation based on the disappearance of the female body, Mendieta draws our attention to the legitimized violence and erasures through the establishment of fixed identities – ethnic and gender – within the hegemonic discourses of power. The notions of performance as an instrument for transmission of knowledge and cultural memory, of performativity as a constitutive factor of the categories of identity, as well as of archive, repertory and live event will be explored in the effort to problematize as the themes of exile and feminine, regular in the art of Mendieta, reach a deeply political dimension based on their artistic propositions that integrate photography with performance art.

scholarly journals Murals make (Our) history: paintings on the wall as media of cultural memory. Interpreting the current state of Warsaw’s commemorative murals

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 114-135
Author(s):  
Ilija Upalevski
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Secondary Memory ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Complex State ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State

The aim of this paper is to closely examine the ways in which the outdoor mural as a form of art. has been used for commemorative purposes in the context of the Polish capital. Drawing on content analysis this paper will argue that regardless of their democratic potential and potential to act subversively in the public domain, the commemorative murals in the case of Warsaw are predominantly reflecting the official narrations/representations of the past and thus reproducing the state-supported, nation-centered, male-dominated perspective of history. Referring to Wulf Kansteiner methodological instructions, the paper introduces the notion of “secondary” memory makers in order to describe the position the mural makers are occupying in the field of Warsaw’s cultural memory. It will also be argued that mural makers, by adapting their works to the demands of the cultural institutions responsible for the memory production and dominant discourses of memory from mainly pragmatic reasons, are forgoing a fair portion of the democratic and subversive potential of the murals. As such, the paintings on the walls are, intentionally or not, further involved in more complex state-sponsored strategies of nationalizing the public space.

The New and the Old in the Art of Cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Emison
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Old World ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
And Gender

Alberti initiated the task of articulating goals for narrative visual art, thereby rebalancing the traditional Christian emphasis on word over image. When the choice wasn’t made for them by a patron, Renaissance artists faced dilemmas about whether to appeal to a broader public (the faithful) or a more narrow one (collectors, humanists, and emerging connoisseurs). Film faced similar challenges and struggled to define its cultural place: art versus business, America versus Old World, capitalism versus Soviet communism. Hollywood specialized in romantic themes, often treated like fairy tales, though at other times addressing tensions of class and gender. Films were also used to present a version of war suitable for cultural memory, variously heroic or pacifist.

Renewing the coal mining past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Cornips ◽  
Louis van den Hengel
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Coal Mining ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Mining Area ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Cultural Renewal ◽  
And Gender

Abstract This article examines how inhabitants of Heerlen, a town in the province of Limburg in the southeast of the Netherlands, renew the cultural memory of coal mining in the area through parodic linguistic and cultural practices linked to the (re)articulation of collective local and social identities. Heerlen became a center for the coal mining industry in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The closure of the mines between 1965 and 1974 had devastating consequences for the economic, social, and cultural developments of the area. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the region’s mining past, creating new momentum for Heerlen in its transition from a struggling former mining area to a city focusing on long-term socio-economic development and cultural innovation. In this context, new practices of cultural memory are emerging through local performances of language and culture that operate to reconstruct Heerlen’s coal mining past through parodic repetition. By discussing two case studies exemplifying the creative ways in which dominant accounts of the mining past are being rearticulated, we explain how the use of parody may serve to undermine the interacting social norms, identities, and hierarchies that have come to shape cultural memories of mining in communities historically defined by working-class and male-dominated labor. The article integrates linguistic and sociolinguistic research, studies of regional history, and theories of parody rooted in contemporary literary criticism and gender studies, to demonstrate the importance of place-bound practices of languageculture as a compelling force of linguistic and socio-cultural renewal.

A Feminist Peep into Public Art in India’s Northeast

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-115
Author(s):  
Samhita Barooah
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

Based on participant observation, symbolic interactionism and feminist analysis of diverse art forms available in the public domain, the article focuses on the stereotyped notion of masculinity, which gets projected into the urban landscape of modern cities in Northeast India. It takes a critical stance on some of the prominent mascots, symbols and identities which are attached to products, services and ideologies predominantly rooted in patriarchy and gender-based discrimination. The observations shared in the article are drawn from the researcher’s field experiences and do not hold any offence to any particular agency, group, denomination or individual. It attempts to bring forth a subaltern narrative which is gradually getting erased from public memory from a queer feminist lens of locating oneself in a public space. It also questions the gender-normative imagination of modern India, which is rapidly engulfing all forms of diversity into its monoculture of development.

Constructing a ‘first’ First Lady through memory: The case of China’s Peng Liyuan

Journalism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 1239-1256
Author(s):  
Qi Ling ◽  
Dan Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Unusual Case ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
First Ladies ◽  
First Lady ◽  
And Gender

Our study analyzed how cultural memory of previous and contemporary First Ladies was used as a journalistic device by US media to make sense of the unusual case of Peng Liyuan, the current First Lady of China. A textual analysis showed that news coverage of Peng relied on a Western and gendered conception of the First Lady while distancing her from her predecessors. We found that resonance with the idealized First Lady template served to signal Peng’s progressiveness in both the general and the political sense. Although Peng’s performance as a ‘first’ First Lady was celebrated in international politics, it is important to be aware that cultural values and gender norms associated with the First Lady identity can become rhetorical tools that sustain the existing political order between the West and the non-West.

scholarly journals The historiography of kardimarkara: Reading a desert tradition as cultural memory of the remote past

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fossil Bones ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Remote Past

The idea that the kardimarkara tradition in the Lake Eyre region is a distant cultural memory of the remote past, of a time when the desert once teemed with life, was propelled into the public domain by JW Gregory in his 1906 book, The Dead Heart of Australia. This paper examines the historiography of the kardimarkara narratives, arguing that such use of Indigenous tradition needs to be subject to the same canons of scholarship and critical analysis as other historical records. The reading of kardimarkara as cultural memory is a misunderstanding of a typical ‘Dreaming’ narrative, in which kardimarkara represents the rainbow serpent, and where contemporary observations of fossil bones are used to validate this landesque ideology. This paper proposes a general framework for scrutinising and evaluating the historicity of oral tradition.

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