Construing Scandinavia: A semiotic account of intercultural exchange in theme park design

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (232) ◽  
pp. 79-102
Author(s):  
Gunnar Sandin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Theme Park ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Image Production ◽  
Architectural Decision ◽  
Park Design ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Design Proposal

AbstractEvaluation of other cultures is a strong force in a culture’s definition of itself. Cultures are formed in encounters that include domination, conflict, and dismissal as much as appreciation and smooth exchange. In this paper, the construction of cultural identity is discussed, with reference to a Scandinavian Theme Park proposal made in cooperation between American design consultants and a local Swedish team of planners and visionaries. The image production in this design proposal, which never came to be realised in architectural production, shows that “Scandinavia” appears as a two-some dialogic construction that adopts stereotyped cultural identities, and that it was not brought to any wider public dialogue. In a semiotic account of this architectural decision-making, models of culture (Lotman. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London: Tauris.) are discussed in terms of the tripartition of culture into Ego-culture, Alter-culture and Alius-culture (Sonesson. 2000. Ego meets alter: The meaning of otherness in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 128(3/4). 537–559.; Cabak Rédei, Anna. 2007. An inquiry into cultural semiotics: Germaine de Staël’s autobiographical travel accounts. Lund: Lund University Press.), considered as a basic abstracted backdrop of what is meant by cultural difference. In this paper it is suggested that this tripartite view on culture, can be further discussed in reflection of post-colonial studies, notably through terms such as “mimicry” (Bhabha. 1984. Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October 28. 125–133.) and “subalterity” (Spivak. 1988. Can the subaltern speak?. In Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture, 271–313. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.). The model of culture can furthermore be discussed through Peirce’s distinction between different stages and carriers of representation, adding to the cultural model an understanding of what it means, over time, for a culture to relate to an admired as well as to a neglected other cultural actor.

scholarly journals Sociocultural and Linguistic Reflections on Post-colonial Studies of H.K. Bhabha

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01107
Author(s):  
Alexandra Milostivaya ◽  
Ekaterina Nazarenko ◽  
Irina Makhova ◽  
Armine Simonyan
Keyword(s):  
Representative Sample ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Translational Process ◽  
Exact Definition

The article is devoted to the socio-cultural and linguistic analysis of the postcolonial theory of H.K. Bhabha, who attempted to explain the colonial discourse, based on the concepts of “hybrid space” and “the phenomenon of mimicry” in his work “The Location of Culture” (1994). According to him, the colonial discourse is a complex, ambivalent and often contradictory process. The movement in time and space does not allow different identities become frozen in the unity of opposite. The difficulty lies in the exact definition of hybridity, understood as a boundary between the fixed identities. Particular attention is paid to the interpretation of the concept of translation of H.K. Bhabha, who believes that the translational process goes through some previously established boundaries and therefore puts them into question. H.K. Bhabha argues that the process of translation leads to hybridity codes and verbal propositions, actualizing their semantics in the socio-cultural situation of the target language. In addition, the focus of research interest of the authors got some lexical and grammatical features of the monograph “The Location of Culture” as a representative sample of the type of the humanitarian scientific style with a primarily cognitive-dominant.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Cheyne
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
External Powers ◽  
The Mind

This introductory chapter commences with a definition of contemplation as the sustained attention to the ideas of reason, which are not merely concepts in the mind, but real, external powers that constitute and order being and value, and therefore excite reverence or admiration. A contemplative, Coleridgean position is outlined as a defence in the crisis of the humanities, arguing that if Coleridge is right in asserting that ideas ‘in fact constitute … humanity’, then they must be the proper or ultimate studies of the disciplines that comprise the humanities. This focus on contemplation as the access to essential ideas explains why Coleridge progressed from, without ever abandoning, imagination to reason as his thought evolved during his lifetime. A section on ‘Contemplation: How to Get There from Here’, is followed by a descriptive bibliography of Coleridge as discussed by philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, and philosophically minded literary scholars.

Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Domain

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

scholarly journals Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Methodological Nationalism

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

Contemporary psychosurgery and a look to the future

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 944-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Feldman ◽  
Ronald L. Alterman ◽  
James T. Goodrich
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Psychiatric Disease ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Current State ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Patient Selection Criteria ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Fine Print

Object. Despite a long and controversial history, psychosurgery has persisted as a modern treatment option for some severe, medically intractable psychiatric disorders. The goal of this study was to review the current state of psychosurgery. Methods. In this review, the definition of psychosurgery, patient selection criteria, and anatomical and physiological rationales for cingulotomy, subcaudate tractotomy, anterior capsulotomy, and limbic leukotomy are discussed. The historical developments, modern procedures, and results of these four contemporary psychosurgical procedures are also reviewed. Examples of recent advances in neuroscience indicating a future role for neurosurgical intervention for psychiatric disease are also mentioned. Conclusions. A thorough understanding of contemporary psychosurgery will help neurosurgeons and other physicians face the ethical, social, and technical challenges that are sure to lie ahead as modern science continues to unlock the secrets of the mind and brain.

Jainism in Danger? Temple entry and the rhetoric of religion and reform in post-colonial India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Open The Doors ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.

scholarly journals ‘A transverse scar on the neck’ – psychosomatic approach in the differential diagnosis and surgical treatment of hyperthyroidism in post-war Finland

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Eve-Riina Hyrkäs
Keyword(s):  
Surgical Treatment ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
Differential Diagnostics ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Surgical Interventions ◽  
Somatic Illness ◽  
Post War ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind

AbstractIn the Finnish medical discussion during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the challenging differential diagnostics between hyperthyroidism and various neuroses was perceived to yield a risk of unnecessary surgical interventions of psychiatric patients. In 1963, the Finnish surgeon Erkki Saarenmaa claimed that ‘the most significant mark of a neurotic was a transverse scar on the neck’, a result of an unnecessary thyroid surgery. The utterance was connected to the complex nature of thyroid diseases, which seemed to be to ‘a great extent psychosomatic’. Setting forth from this statement, the article aims to decipher the connection between hyperthyroidism, unnecessary surgical treatment and the psychosomatic approach in Finnish medicine. Utilising a wide variety of published medical research and discussion in specialist journals, the article examines the theoretical debate around troublesome diagnostics of functional complaints. It focuses on the introduction of new medical ideas, namely the concepts of ‘psychosomatics’ and ‘stress’. In the process, the article aims to unveil a definition of psychosomatic illness that places it on a continuum between psychological and somatic illness. That psychosomatic approach creates a space with interpretative potential can be applied to the historiography of psychosomatic phenomena more generally. Further inquiry into the intersections of surgery and psychosomatics would enrich both historiographies. It is also argued that the historical study of psychosomatic syndromes may become skewed, if the term ‘psychosomatic’ is from the outset taken to signify something that is all in the mind.

scholarly journals A post-colonial legal approach to the Chagos case and the (dis)application of land rights norms

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinnari Bhatt
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Substantive Equality ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractOne way of understanding the exile of the Chagos Islanders and their inability to return to their ancestral land is through a reading of the case from a perspective of post-colonial legal scholarship. Chagossians have strong legal rights to land and remedies of compensation and return through a purposive application of the international legal definition of Indigenous, Magna Carta right to abode and international human rights law that could address their dispossession. Yet, the inability of those rights to be meaningfully applied has been constrained because of the post-colonial way they are legally interpreted, creating a legal vacuum in which basic fairness and substantive equality have been routinely compromised. Drawing attention to the continued legal denial of return in the context of decolonisation, ongoing colonialism and the rule of law makes sense of the legal record and explains the expulsion of the islanders despite the moral merits of return.

scholarly journals Madness of the Mind

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
John O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Therapeutic Relationship ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Clinical Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Therapeutic Engagement ◽  
Clinical Vignettes ◽  
Clinical Engagement ◽  
The Mind ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Simple Definition

The art of psychotherapy has been defined as the capacity of the psychotherapist’s mind to receive the psyche of the patient, particularly its unconscious contents. This deceptively simple definition implies the enormously complex art of receiving the most disturbed, dissociated, maddening, often young and primitive, frightening, and fragmented aspects of the patient’s multiple ages and selves, in the hope perhaps that we might make available to our own mind, to the patient’s mind, and within the therapeutic relationship, whatever it is that we discover together, perhaps with the possibility that this may allow that these dissociated, fragmented, lost, and potentially transformative aspects of self might become more accessible to both therapist and patient. The complexity of this process is further intensified when cultural difference is an important aspect of therapeutic engagement. This paper will explore this rich and complex art. It will include exploration of psychoanalytic, relational, and transpersonal psychotherapeutic perspectives as they inform the potentials and mysteries of this deeply receptive process. The paper will consider the potential this receiving of the other might have for the growth of both the therapist and patient within the life span of clinical engagement and will include consideration of implications for cross cultural clinical work. Clinical vignettes illustrating and informing the ideas explored in this paper will be woven throughout the paper. Whakarāpopotonga Kua tautuhia te toi whakaora hinengaro ko te kaha o te hinengaro o te kaiwhakaora hinengaro ki te pupuri i te hinengaro o te tūroro, mātuatua nei ko ngā matū maurimoe. E tohu ana te tautuhinga ngāwari nei i te kaha uaua o te mahi pupuri i ngā maramara tirohanga, ngā tau, ngā whaiaro tini o ngā tūroro arā noa atu te wairangi, te noho wehe, te kārangirangi, he taiohi, he māori, whakawehiwehi, i runga i te wawata tērā pea ka tuwhera ki ō tātau ake hinengaro, ko tō te tūroro ki waenga hoki i te whakapiringa haumanu. E kene pea mā te mea ka kitea, e tuku ēnei tirohanga pūreirei, kongakonga, ngaro, ā, ngā tirohanga hurihanga whaiaro e whakamāmā ake ki te kaiwhakaora me te tūroro. Ka kaha ake te auatanga o tēnei hātepe i te mea ko te rerekētanga o te ahurea te wāhanga nui o te mahi haumanu. Ka wheraina e tēnei tuhinga te tirohanga toitaurea mōmona nei. Ka whakaurua te wherawherahanga o te wetewetenga hinengaro, te tātanga, me ngā tirohanga whakaoranga hinengaro wairua i te mea ko ēnei ngā kaiwhakamōhio i ngā pirikoko o tēnei hātepe toropupū tino hōhonu. Ka whakaarohia e te pepa nei te ēkene pea o te whakaurunga mai o tētahi kē atu mō te whakatipuranga o te kaihaumanu me te tūroro i roto i te wā huitahi ai. Ka whakaarohia ake anō hoki ngā hīkaro mō te mahi haumanu ahurea whakawhiti. Ka rarangahia ngā kōrero haumanu e whakaahua e whakaatu ana i ngā whakaaro tūhuraina i roto i tēnei tuhinga.

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