Race, Region, Representativity, and the Folklore Paradigm

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-212
Author(s):  
Michael Birenbaum Quintero

Chapter 4 examines the assimilation of Pacific musical practices into the paradigm of folklore at the mid-twentieth century, marking a new relationship between cultural practices and the epistemologies and socialities that undergird them. Folklore was part of a broader process defining the figure of the people and resignifying their role, including racial imaginaries, in the Colombian nation. The discussion traces the structure of the invisibility of blackness from conceptualizations of the nation’s cultural foundations, and shows how innovative practitioners were able to parlay much-circulated discourse about the Colombian regions into recognitions of the Pacific as a culturally salient region, and of blackness as among the nation’s cultural wellsprings. Paradoxically, it was through the same, often disempowering, practice of reification that the affirmation and representation of the local became possible, even as the circumscription of the folkloric object made it possible for a number of different meanings to be injected into it.

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Daniel Hummel

A small but growing area of public administration scholarship appreciates the influence of religious values on various aspects of government. This appreciation parallels a growing interest in comparative public administration and indigenized forms of government which recognizes the role of culture in different approaches to government. This article is at the crossroads of these two trends while also considering a very salient region, the Islamic world. The Islamic world is uniquely religious, which makes this discussion even more relevant, as the nations that represent them strive towards legitimacy and stability. The history and core values of Islam need to be considered as they pertain to systems of government that are widely accepted by the people. In essence, this is being done in many countries across the Islamic world, providing fertile grounds for public administration research from a comparative perspective. This paper explores these possibilities for future research on this topic.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore

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.


This book offers new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, the book follows a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. The book challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The chapters offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing—dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks—remains stationary.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-95
Author(s):  
Vili Nosa ◽  
Kotalo Leau ◽  
Natalie Walker

ABSTRACT Introduction: Pacific people in New Zealand have one of the highest rates of smoking.  Cytisine is a plant-based alkaloid that has proven efficacy, effectiveness and safety compared to a placebo and nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for smoking cessation.  Cytisine, like varenicline, is a partial agonist of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, and blocks the rewarding effects of nicotine. Cytisine is naturally found in some plants in the Pacific region, and so may appeal to Pacific smokers wanting to quit. This paper investigates the acceptability of cytisine as a smoking cessation product for Pacific smokers in New Zealand, using a qualitative study design. Methods: In December 2015, advertisements and snowball sampling was used to recruit four Pacific smokers and three Pacific smoking cessation specialists in Auckland, New Zealand. Semi-structured interviews where undertaken, whereby participants were asked about motivations to quit and their views on smoking cessation products, including cytisine (which is currently unavailable in New Zealand). Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, with thematic analysis conducted manually. Findings: Pacific smokers reported wanting to quit for loved ones and family, but did not find currently available smoking cessation products effective. Almost all participants had not previously heard of cytisine, but many of the Pacific smokers were keen to try it. Participants identified with cytisine on a cultural basis (given its natural status), but noted that their use would be determined by the efficacy of the medicine, its cost, side-effects, and accessibility. They were particularly interested in cytisine being made available in liquid form, which could be added to a “smoothie” or drunk as a “traditional tea”.  Participants thought cytisine should be promoted in a culturally-appropriate way, with packaging and advertising designed to appeal to Pacific smokers. Conclusions: Cytisine is more acceptable to Pacific smokers than other smoking cessation products, because of their cultural practices of traditional medicine and the natural product status of cytisine.


Author(s):  
Judith A. Bennett

Coconuts provided commodities for the West in the form of coconut oil and copra. Once colonial governments established control of the tropical Pacific Islands, they needed revenue so urged European settlers to establish coconut plantations. For some decades most copra came from Indigenous growers. Administrations constantly urged the people to thin old groves and plant new ones like plantations, in grid patterns, regularly spaced and weeded. Local growers were instructed to collect all fallen coconuts for copra from their groves. For half a century, the administrations’ requirements met with Indigenous passive resistance. This paper examines the underlying reasons for this, elucidating Indigenous ecological and social values, based on experiential knowledge, knowledge that clashed with Western scientific values.


1989 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-381
Author(s):  
Arthur R. Liebscher

To the dismay of today's social progressives, the Argentine Catholic church addresses the moral situation of its people but also shies away from specific political positions or other hint of secular involvement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the church set out to secure its place in national leadership by strengthening religious institutions and withdrawing clergy from politics. The church struggled to overcome a heritage of organizational weakness in order to promote evangelization, that is, to extend its spiritual influence within Argentina. The bishop of the central city of Córdoba, Franciscan Friar Zenón Bustos y Ferreyra (1905-1925), reinforced pastoral care, catechesis, and education. After 1912, as politics became more heated, Bustos insisted that priests abstain from partisan activities and dedicate themselves to ministry. The church casts itself in the role of national guardian, not of the government, but of the faith and morals of the people.


2019 ◽  
Vol 507 ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Zhongfang Liu ◽  
Zhimin Jian ◽  
Christopher J. Poulsen ◽  
Liang Zhao

Author(s):  
Timothy Burke

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.


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