scholarly journals Bazaar aesthetics: On excess and economic rationality

2020 ◽  
pp. 136787792097164
Author(s):  
Maitrayee Deka
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Internet Connectivity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

For more than a century, social theoretical writings on consumer culture and commodity aesthetics have concentrated on the world of capitalist commodities and commercial spaces: on brands, shopping malls and global media culture. Popular commodity aesthetics have had a marginal presence in the literature. However, today, as the popular masses are entering commercial culture to an unprecedented extent, through cheap electronics, ubiquitous internet connectivity and accessible knock-offs, popular commodity aesthetics have increased in importance. In this article, I use fieldwork in Delhi’s electronics bazaars to develop an inside perspective on the popular aesthetic of the bazaar. I argue that bazaars are characterized by excess: the excess of a seemingly chaotic architecture, household objects, and unhindered sociality. The excess is not simply a symptom of an underlying irrationality. It is deeply embedded in the social and economic life of bazaars and contributes towards the ability of small-scale commerce to endure and survive.

The Causes of Greek Decline

1944 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 10-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Walbank
Keyword(s):  
Economic Life ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Of Greece

In one of the most popular anthology passages in Latin, Servius Sulpicius, writing to console Cicero for his daughter's death, describes how, as he reached Greek waters, sailing from Asia, he began to look about him at the ruins of Greece. ‘Behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, on the right the Piraeus, on the left Corinth, cities which had once been prosperous, but now lay shattered ruins before my sight.’ Oppidum cadavera he goes on to call them—corpses of cities! The picture, it will probably be objected, is overdrawn; certainly the ruin of Greece was, by Cicero's time, already a rhetorical commonplace, to be echoed by Horace, Ovid and Seneca in turn. But it was based upon an essential truth. The Saronic Gulf, once the centre of the world, was now, for all that Greece meant, a dead lake lapping about the foundations of dead cities. In that tragic decay—which was not confined to mainland Greece—we are confronted with one of the most urgent problems of ancient history, and one with a special significance for our generation, who were already living in an age of economic, political and spiritual upheaval, even before the bombs began to turn our own cities into shattered ruins.This, then, is my reason for reopening a subject on which there is scope for such diverse opinion: adeo maxima quaeque ambigua sunt. If any further justification is required, then I will only add that the recent publication of Professor Michael Rostovtzeff's classic study of the social and economic life of the Hellenistic Age is at once an invitation and a challenge.

Anti-sage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Educational Administration ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
New York University ◽  
Terrorist Organizations ◽  
Politics And Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World

Chapter 10 proceeds in light of our suggestion that sagely behavior is freely chosen, benign, yet powerful, and seeks cooperation in the world in ways that are positive, progressive, nurturing, and constructive in nature. This chapter, however, accounts for people who have been gifted with or have assiduously developed powers of rapport or charisma, achieving notable fractal congruence in the social, political, or economic life of institutions or communities but who have gone the other way. This phenomenon over a wide range of scale can elevate those who become destructive or aggrandizing to the ultimate detriment of society. Numerous followers can gravitate to the kind of socially-fractally-adept individual that we call an anti-sage. The chapter discusses examples of the antisage phenomenon in cults and terrorist organizations such as the People’s Temple and Aum Shinrykyo. In this narrative pertinent expressions of human selfness include: Protean self vs. fundamentalist self and parochial altruism. Also explored are politics and government, notably the administration of George W. Bush, creed-based religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, and aggrandizement in educational administration, such as that of John Sexton’s presidency of New York University.

Apologies, Redemption, and Repair

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica M. Emerich
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social World ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Holistic Model ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Work

This chapter deals with the healed self, contextualized as united with the natural world, moving toward its reconciliation with the third arm of the holistic model of health—the social world. First, there are apologies and confessions to be made by industrialists and consumers who have recognized the “Consequences of Modernity”and their own roles in those results. LOHAS is a capitalist endeavor but also attempts to position itself as resistant to those processes, and as such it must articulate “LOHASians” as ultimately powerful in themselves to change the course of late capitalism and consumer culture. There are instructions on how to say you're sorry and move on to the real work of mopping up the mess. As part of this, LOHAS narratives tell us to remain positive, but also that older notions of desire and ideals of happiness afloat in the culture were off course. By situating individual consumers and producers as capable of bringing about sweeping social transformation, LOHAS not only sustains consumer culture, but also contextualizes it as the locus for the healing of the world.

CCTV's Global Outreach: Examining the Audiences of China's ‘New Voice’ on Africa

2014 ◽  
Vol 151 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Gorfinkel ◽  
Sandy Joffe ◽  
Cobus Van Staden ◽  
Yu-Shan Wu
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Brand Awareness ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Global Media ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
China Central Television

This scoping article introduces key issues surrounding the globalisation of China Central Television (CCTV), focusing on its African operations, content and reception, specifically in Kenya and South Africa. At a time when the Chinese government is seeking to enhance positive perceptions of China and China–Africa relations, and its associated media outlets are seeking to compete with other major global players like CNN and the BBC, this article takes steps towards understanding the extent to which CCTV may be succeeding in these missions. Some of the challenges identified for CCTV-Africa in our small-scale pilot study include attempting to simultaneously target ‘African’, ‘Western’ and Chinese audience groups, which may detract from its ability to appeal to specific international audiences; competition from other international and local broadcasters who already have a strong spectator base; and a lack of accessibility, awareness and sustained interest in the channel. It calls for more in-depth research into global audiences' reception of CCTV-Africa, and CCTV more generally, in order to track CCTV's brand awareness and assess whether China's global media soft power activities actually have any leverage in enhancing cross-cultural relations and international audiences' perceptions of China in Africa and the world.

The Decline of the Social

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-474
Author(s):  
Alain Touraine
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of

It is impossible to define sociology other than by reference to ill-defined entities like society or the social. Nevertheless, it seems necessary nowadays to ask the question explicitly, whether these referents have relevant meaningful contents. The idea of society has been profoundly reformist or reforming. Wherever the political system has become open and more complex, and state intervention in economic life has expanded, the field of sociology itself has expanded to the point where we can speak of the triumph of a sociological vision of the world. Industrial society was a complete historical construction, defined by a morality, a philosophy of history and various forms of solidarity. The idea of society was never more closely associated with those of production and social justice. Now, we no longer live our collective life in purely “social” terms nor expect social answers to our problems. The decomposition of the idea of society, set off by the fragmentation of the world in which that idea developed, got worse. The current predominance of the theme of globalization has been accelerating the decline of the “social” representation of public life. The time has come to reconstruct sociology, no longer on the basis of what we thought was a definition of the social and of society, but on the basis of the explosion of those ensembles which had been thought to be solid, and of the attempts to reconstruct the space in which subjects can reconstitute a fabric of consensus, compromise and conflict.

The Icon Project

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Sklair
Keyword(s):  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist Control

In the last quarter century, a new form of iconic architecture has appeared throughout the world's major cities. Typically designed by globe-trotting "starchitects" or by a few large transnational architectural firms, these projects are almost always funded by the private sector in the service of private interests. Whereas in the past monumental architecture often had a strong public component, the urban ziggurats of today are emblems and conduits of capitalist globalization. In The Icon Project, Leslie Sklair focuses on ways in which capitalist globalization is produced and represented all over the world, especially in globalizing cities. Sklair traces how the iconic buildings of our era-elaborate shopping malls, spectacular museums, and vast urban megaprojects--constitute the triumphal "Icon Project" of contemporary global capitalism, promoting increasing inequality and hyperconsumerism. Two of the most significant strains of iconic architecture--unique icons recognized as works of art, designed by the likes of Gehry, Foster, Koolhaas, and Hadid, as well as successful, derivative icons that copy elements of the starchitects' work--speak to the centrality of hyperconsumerism within contemporary capitalism. Along with explaining how the architecture industry organizes the social production and marketing of iconic structures, he also shows how corporations increasingly dominate the built environment and promote the trend towards globalizing, consumerist cities. The Icon Project, Sklair argues, is a weapon in the struggle to solidify capitalist hegemony as well as reinforce transnational capitalist control of where we live, what we consume, and how we think.

Toward an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in Comparative and International Politics

1960 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl W. Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
General Context ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The World ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Masses

Recent decades have seen a vast increase of research in international relations, as in all fields of political and social science. We have more facts and many more expressions of opinion, and we are facing increasingly serious problems of reorientation. We know that much in the world of relations among nations has changed and is still changing, but what is the nature of this change? Is the world becoming more international? Is it turning into one world in which even the United States and the Soviet Union are influencing each other ever more, or at least into two worlds of two rival and ever more tightty integrated Communist and non-Communist blocs? Is the nation-state being superseded by the rise of new continent-wide or ocean-wide treaty organizations or federations?And what is happening within most of the old and new nation-states, as they enter upon these new arrangements? Are their governments becoming more stable or less? Are their political and administrative capabilities rising or declining? Are power and prestige within these states shifting toward the elites or toward the masses of their populations? Are political controls of economic life in the long run growing or receding? Are we moving toward a world of “garrison states” or toward a world of “open societies,” or is the world moving in uncharted directions for which not even images have yet been found?Surely, these seem sweeping questions. Scholars and men of affairs might be tempted to put them aside, and to turn their attention to the immediate business at hand. They may prefer the study of some particular conflict between two countries, or of the interests of this or that state, or of the merits of this or that policy at some particular moment. All serious questions, it has been argued, are particular and perhaps unique, and any broader and more general answers might be neither warranted nor wanted.Such a retreat into the exclusive study of small-scale and short-range problems is based upon a fallacy. We cannot think about particular problems without making assumptions about the general context of the world in which they occur. Usually these assumptions are intuitive and vague. We form some indefinite conception of how states of a particular size and type of government and culture are expected to behave at particular times and places, and we feel surprised when some particular country departs strikingly from these half-formed expectations.

The Cosmology of Arthur F. Bentley

1960 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-961 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron Q. Hale
Keyword(s):  
Economic Structure ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Functional Theory ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Transactional Approach ◽  
Current Emphasis

“Realism” in systematic political science in this country began to emerge, in a reaction against the inadequacies of legal and institutional description, early in this century. David Easton, remarking the change, cites in evidence Arthur F. Bentley's attempt “to fashion a tool.” By midcentury, it may be said, Bentleyism is tooling the fashion. A recent commentator, deploring the current emphasis on methods and measurements, declares the new orthodoxy has left its mark on the profession no less than on the world and is partially responsible for our failure to identify and solve social problems. Yet, for all the talk about Bentley's influence, and despite the social significance of his ideas, there has been too little study of his theory of politics. I propose to examine his writings as those of a “realist” and to show how his search for both “realism” and a “science of politics” may lead to a surreptitious sanctification of the actual. In short, in this paper I shall argue that the implications of Bentley's cosmology are conservative.Bentley's political work had an ulterior end; it was not pure curiosity. “My interest in politics,” he said, “is not primary, but derived from my interest in the economic life, and … I hope from this point of approach ultimately to gain a better understanding of the economic life than I have succeeded in gaining hitherto.” The terms of his solution, expressed first in The Process of Government, reflected his understanding of the early twentieth-century midwestern social and economic structure. Influenced by social Darwinism and sociological realism, and rejecting legal and judicial formalism, Bentley advanced what could be called a “functional” theory, based upon what he later called the “transactional approach.”

scholarly journals CULTURAL HYBRIDITY TOWARDS AN UPWARD MOBILITY: IMPLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA AND AMERICAN CORPORATE CULTURE IN INDONESIA

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Alfred Inkiriwang ◽  
Riani E. Inkiriwang Winter
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
Intercultural Exchange ◽  
The World ◽  
American Media

Hybridity has been defined in many terms. Subsequently, cultural hybridity is associated with different meanings, as seen from a spectrum of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. In the realm of Transnational American Studies in Indonesia, the hybridization of American Media and American Corporate Culture into those domains in Indonesia would be an observable transnational cultural phenomenon. American corporate culture has a hegemonic dominance in the world as it has in Indonesia. Similarly, in the current global media culture, American media’s influence has brought with it its culture to places throughout the world including Indonesia. In the current discourses hybridity has “long left behind the negative implications and connotations of inferiority” and it presents currently the intercultural exchange of transnational and global mobility. This article explores American and Indonesian cultural hybridity as a notion of upward mobility in the domain of media culture and corporate culture in Indonesia.

scholarly journals Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamonn Carrabine
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Green Criminology ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Landscape Photography ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century

Green criminology has sought to blur the nature–culture binary and this article seeks to extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding of the shifting contours of the divide. The article begins by setting out these different approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the 19th century and how the world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture.

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