Elitist Egalitarianism: Negotiating Identity in the Norwegian Cultural Elite

Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørn Ljunggren
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
The People ◽  
Cultural Taste

The cultural elite are believed to be under siege due to significant changes in the ‘workings’ of cultural capital. Despite such changes, there is very little information about the class subjectivities of the ‘cultural elite’ themselves. The present article seeks to contribute to this shortcoming by taking advantage of in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals possessing great levels of cultural capital in a highly egalitarian country, Norway. This study shows that while the interviewees experience lack of recognition and honour from ‘the people’, they are far from passively descending. The main demarcation to other groups seems not to be cultural taste, but instead the orientation towards culture, broadly defined. While egalitarian sentiments are voiced, this does not hinder cultural elite awareness, but rather dampens how this can be expressed in public – merged into a form of elitist egalitarianism.

Safe Spaces: Gay-Straight Alliances in High School

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Fetner ◽  
Athena Elafros ◽  
Sandra Bortolin ◽  
Coralee Drechsler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
High School ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
High Schools ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
The People

In activists' circles as in sociology, the concept "safe space" has beenapplied to all sorts of programs, organizations, and practices. However,few studies have specified clearly what safe spaces are and how theysupport the people who occupy them. In this paper, we examine one sociallocation typically understood to be a safe space: gay-straight alliancegroups in high schools. Using qualitative interviews with young adults inthe United States and Canada who have participated in gay-straightalliances, we examine the experiences of safe spaces in these groups. Weunpack this complex concept to consider some of the dimensions along whichsafe spaces might vary. Participants identified several types of safespace, and from their observations we derive three inter-related dimensionsof safe space: social context, membership and activity.

Flâneur or Choraster: A Review of the Travel Narrator In the Formation of the Tourist Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-562
Author(s):  
Stephen Wearing ◽  
Stephen Schweinsberg ◽  
Patricia Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The People ◽  
Tourist Experience

Media representations of destinations play a powerful role in tourism appeal. The narrator assumes a role infused with knowledge and power, employing discourse to describe and interpret places and people to entice armchair audiences to not only travel vicariously alongside them, but to follow in their footsteps. This review article uses the English actor and writer Michael Palin to examine this phenomenon through the lens of the flâneur and choraster. Palin's travels have traditionally been viewed based on their ability to create space from the perspective of a representational voice of authority. In the present article, we wish to ask whether the power of the travel narrator for tourism is perhaps better expressed in their ability to develop a counter (or chora discourse), one where we are able to see space as locally contested. Palin's narrator expresses appreciation of his reliance on the people (chora) that inhabit the spaces he visits. His narrations of travel evidence how the flâneur perspective is influenced (and/or disrupted) by a chora in two ways—that which influences the perspective before travel and directs the gaze, and those that occupy and inscribe meaning on the spaces that are traveled to, that influences and/or forms experience.

From Messina to Delhi: Much Ado about Staging Global Shakespeares in Olympic Times

Sederi ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
International Performance ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The World ◽  
Performance Issues ◽  
The Uk

The present article discusses one of the contributions of the Royal Shakespeare Company to the World Shakespeare Festival, a celebration of the Bard as the world’s playwright that took place in the UK in 2012 as part of the so-called Cultural Olympiad. Iqbal Khan directed for the RSC an all-Indian production of the comedy Much Ado about Nothing that transposed the actions from early modern Messina to contemporary Delhi and presented its story of love, merry war of wits and patriarchal domination in a colourful setting that recreated a world of tradition and modernity. Received with mixed reviews that in general applauded the vibrant relocation while criticising some directorial choices, this 2012 Much Ado about Nothing in modern-day Delhi raises a number of questions about cultural ownership and Shakespeare’s international performance – issues that are particularly relevant if we see the play in relation to other productions of the World Shakespeare Festival in this Olympic year but also in the context of the increasing internationalization of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in contemporary times.

scholarly journals Artelas a Form of Manifistation of Nationality in Musical Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-32
Author(s):  
Galina G. Poddubnaya
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The People

The musical culture of the people, being inside the integral space of folk art, quite fully reflects the peculiarities of the mentality of the people and manifests its self-identification. The present article analyses artels as a form of being of a nationality in musical culture, which involves the mutual enrichment of collective and individual principles of musical folk art.

scholarly journals Shakespeare and the Accumulation of Cultural Prestige in Video Games

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Andrei Nae
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Adventure Games ◽  
Complex Characters

Abstract The present article analyses the manner in which AAA action-adventure games adapt, quote, and reference Shakespeare’s plays in order to borrow the bard’s cultural capital and assert themselves as forms of art. My analysis focuses on three major releases: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, BioShock: Infinite, and God of War. The article shows that these games employ narrative content from Shakespeare’s plays in order to adopt traits traditionally associated with the established arts, such as narrative depth and complex characters. In addition to this, explicit intertextual links between the games’ respective storyworlds and the plays are offered as ludic rewards for the more involved players who thoroughly explore game space.1

scholarly journals Cultural Capital as a Hidden Asset: Culture, Egalitarianism and Inter-Class Social Encounters in Stavanger, Norway

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Vassenden ◽  
Merete Jonvik
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
University Graduates ◽  
Social Closure ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Magnum Opus

In this article, we engage with the theory of cultural capital, which was originally outlined in Pierre Bourdieu’s magnum opus Distinction. We start from a study of lifestyles in Stavanger, Norway, and qualitative interviews with 39 people dispersed in the social space. We find that interviewees with less education are largely indifferent to cultural capital, and secure about their own lifestyles. This diverges from Bourdieu’s depiction of the working-class ‘sense of place’. Yet cultural capital has social consequences. To university graduates, taste and education often matter for self-definition and social networks. Cultural capital thus contributes to social closure. Importantly, though, the highly educated are careful to de-emphasize their cultural capital when appropriate, especially in inter-class social encounters. They keep cultural distinctions hidden. In accounting for why our findings diverge from Bourdieu’s, possible explanations pertain to national cultural repertoires (Nordic egalitarianism) as well as broader (even transnational) changes in morality. Crucially, though, we engage with social interaction, which has been more neglected in previous research. For that purpose, we build on Erving Goffman’s theories. For cultural capital studies, we propose the concept of a ‘discursive gap’, and suggest more emphasis on social encounters.

Reflections on solidarity in global and transnational environment: Issue of social recognition in the context of the potential and limitations of the media

Human Affairs ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Solík ◽  
Juliána Laluhová
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Transnational Organizations ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Informative Role ◽  
The Media

AbstractThe present article deals with issues of social recognition in the global and transnational environment. It deals with the issue of solidarity, a form of recognition that has no adequate parallel beyond nation state borders and manifests itself mainly in the transnational economy. We focus on the articulation of the extraterritorial recognition of social rights-holders at the international and transnational levels of justice. It is clear that conditions in developing countries do not allow the people there to express disapproval in ways that are typical for Western societies. We stress that states should strengthen their influence in global and transnational organizations and equally that the media should improve its informative role and should provide information on what is happening in developing parts of the world.

scholarly journals ‘It’s Something Posh People Do’: Digital Distinction in Young People’s Cross-Media News Engagement

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jannie Møller Hartley
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Cross Media

In this article, I analyse digital distinction mechanisms in young people’s cross media engagement with news. Using a combination of open online diaries and qualitative interviews with young Danes aged 15 to 18 who differ in social background and education, and with Bourdieu’s field theory as an analytical framework, the article investigates how cultural capital (CC) operates in specific tastes and distastes for news genres, platforms and providers. The article argues that distinction mechanism not only works on the level of news providers and news genres but also on the level of engagement practices—the ways in which people enact and describe their own news engagement practices. Among those rich in CC, physical, analogue objects in the form of newspapers and physical conversations about news are seen as ‘better’ that digital ones, resulting in a feeling of guilt when they mostly engage with news on social media. Secondly, young people with lower CC discard legacy news, which they see as elitist and irrelevant. Thirdly, those rich in CC are media and news genre savvy in the sense that it makes them able to critically evaluate the news they engage with across platforms and sites.

scholarly journals The Heroic Battle of Van-Vaspourakan according to the Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-44
Author(s):  
Verjiné Svazlian
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The People ◽  
The Town

The Young Turk leaders of the Ottoman Empire participated in World War I having expansionist objectives and with their former pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic plan to carry out the genocide of the Armenians. The mobilization and the collection of arms of the Armenians started with the war. The governor of Van Djevdet pasha besieged the town with the Turkish armed forces. The people of Van struggled heroically, till the last drop of their blood, to defend their elementary human right for survival and their Motherland. The testimonies and historical songs, communicated by 35 eyewitness survivors of the heroic battle of Van, which I have enscribed, audio- and video-recorded, have served as a basis for the preparation of the present article.

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