Grave Look at History

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-198
Author(s):  
Catherine Brew
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Great Capacity ◽  
Place Meaning ◽  
Interpretive Approach

Cemeteries are seldom what they seem. A headstone tells a brief tale, but what if there are no headstones? Is it possible to extract more than the obvious? The dearth of information most frequently encountered necessitates a more interpretive approach. As documents of social history, Australian burial places have a great capacity to reveal not only how people died, but how they lived. In providing a tangible and evocative link to past communities, the history found in cemeteries acts as an insightful ingredient in shaping cultural identity. By ‘reading’ these cultural landscapes, the wider implications of identity, meaning making and the value of individual belonging and wellbeing can be explored. The notion of ‘place making’ and ‘place meaning’ suggests a bigger responsibility to social cohesion and personal development than may be first considered.

scholarly journals Designing Slow Cities for More Than Human Enrichment: Dog Tales—Using Narrative Methods to Understand Co-Performative Place-Making

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Jane Turner ◽  
Ann Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
Future Evaluation

Designing for slow cities and the need to design for future urban environments that include the more than human is a major priority for our times. This position paper problematizes the nature–culture divide in research about place and place-making, where place is understood to be about the sense of meaning we layer on locations in the physical world. It emphasizes the importance of narrative identity and place-making in the context of designing for urban environmental futures and creation of slow cities. We present an overview of a methodology to re-emplace place-making with animals in the context of slow cities and designing for the more than human. The work discussed here explores the use of narrative inquiry with some early narrative data (in the form of stories) about dog walks and those moments where our companion animals demonstrate agentic place-based meaning-making. The problem of understanding “what animals want” and how they make might ”make sense” of an experience is approached via a focus on a rich exemplar case in order to distinguish between emplotment (narrative meaning-making as self) and emplacement (narrative meaning-making as an aspect of place). This is used to create a framework for future evaluation with a view to revealing how “more than human stories”—just like our own familiar human stories—are also about agency and meaning in place. This recognition has import for ways in which we might approach decentring the human when we frame urban design activities.

Spaces of Exclusion: The Significance of Cultural Identity in the Formation of European Residential Districts in British Hong Kong, 1877–1904

10.1068/d310 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Alex Bremner ◽  
David P Y Lung
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
European Population ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Residential District ◽  
Cultural Self

In this paper we discuss the role and significance of European cultural identity in the formation of the urban environment in 19th-century and early-20th-century British Hong Kong. Our purpose is to offer an alternative reading of the social history of Hong Kong-the orthodox accounts of which remain largely predominant in the general historical understanding of that society-by examining the machinations that surrounded attempts by the European colonial elite to control the production of urban form and space in the capital city of Hong Kong, Victoria. Here the European Residential District ordinance of 1888 (along with other related ordinances) is considered in detail. An examination of European cultural self-perception and the construction of colonial identity is made by considering not only the actual ways in which urban form and space were manipulated through these ordinances but also the visual representation of the city in art. Here the intersection between ideas and images concerning civil society, cultural identity, architecture, and the official practices of colonial urban planning is demonstrated. It is argued that this coalescing of ideas, images, and practices in the colonial environment of British Hong Kong not only led to the racialisation of urban form and space there but also contributed to the apparent anxiety exhibited by the European population over the preservation of their own identity through the immediacy of the built environment.

Understanding attendees’ transformative experiences following Tony Robbins’s Unleash the Power Within seminars

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Sue Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
American Life ◽  
Transformative Experiences

Tony Robbins is an American life coach and entrepreneur who claims his motivational workshop, Unleash the Power Within (UPW) can transform people’s lives. This article is based on an interpretative phenomenological analysis of eight participants who had attended different UPW seminars and explored their experiences of transformation. Eight themes were identified: (1) a change in their sense of self, (2) the development of new skills, (3) changes in lifestyle, (4) transformation/conversion, (5) changes in relationships, (6) permanency of change, (7) feelings of fear versus anticipation and (8) loss versus gain. The research concluded that participants had undergone transformation involving significant, valued and enduring changes centred on new meaning in their lives. Further research was suggested to examine both a wider and more in-depth approach, as personal development workshops offer a large and potentially rich field of transpersonal study focused on human meaning-making and change.

Moscow megapolis as an educational environment in the system of intercultural foreign language education

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-33
Author(s):  
V.A. Goncharova ◽  
◽  
V.V. Alpatov
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Foreign Language Education ◽  
Educational Environment ◽  
Educational Activity ◽  
Native Culture ◽  
The Social

Substantiated is the thesis for necessity and possibility of using the social cultural resources of Moscow city to establish an educational environment suitable for building intercultural communicative competence when teaching students foreign languages from the perspective of the intercultural approach. As a key point, the authors put forward the thesis that it is regional culture which is the only one available to the student to abide and understand by their national native culture (which comes equal with learning a foreign language culture within the goal-setting of intercultural foreign language education). At the same time, Moscow is grounded as a resource space for intercultural foreign language education, being a place for building the social environment and communication relations, the center of the regional level of native culture, and the city of intercultural communication. The authors define the related educational urbanistics as interdisciplinary field of designing socio-humanitarian knowledge and experience in the context of the mutually enriching integration of urban space and value-specific (educational) trajectories of personal development of the citizen. As a result, the authors formulate the basic principles of urban educational environment in the context of foreign language intercultural communicative training of students, including the following: knowledge of the universal (global) through the single (local), methodological work with space as a resource and a factor in educational activity design, taking an educational environment as an individually perceived value, designing individual educational trajectory on the basis of mapping, contextual learning, the priority of spontaneous meaning-making, a conscious distinction between education and vocational training.

(Re)visiting spaces of home: German heimat tourists 'returning' to Timisoara, Romania.

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
Andrea Bieber ◽  
Werner Gilde ◽  
Desmond Wee
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Consumer Behaviour ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Tourist Flow

Abstract This chapter explores the diaspora of the Banat Swabian culture, their sense of identity in Germany, and their relation to 'Heimat tourism' through the perception of place in Timisoara in the region of the Banat, Romania. It enables understanding of the impacts of Heimat tourism and the implications for consumer behaviour in the visitor economy and also investigates place-making processes and the (re)creation of destination spaces through experience and narratives. This chapter aims to illustrate how cultural identity, tourist flow, and the perception of place contribute towards the making of heimat, to show how places that are both real and imagined at the same time reinforce a particular tourist gaze and examine how such tourist imaginaries create a 'Heimat tourism' that fosters a hermeneutic cycle perpetuating new meanings of self.

Ay, Neferti, Nakhtmin and Ameny

2019 ◽  
Vol 146 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-208
Author(s):  
Benoît Lurson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Personal Values ◽  
The People ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Amarna Period ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Aristotelian Rhetoric

Summary During his reign, King Ay had a speos built in Akhmim, known as the speos of el-Salamuni. Its façade displays a monumental inscription, which contains a long eulogy to the king uttered by the overseer of works, Nakhtmin. For the composition of this inscription, its author had recourse to the Prophecy of Neferti. This paper investigates the ways and means of this recourse. First, el-Salamuni’s inscription is transliterated, deconstructed, and translated. Then, locutions and verb forms belonging to the first part of the inscription and of the Prophecy of Neferti are compared. This comparison shows that whilst conceiving a unique text, the author of the inscription used locutions and verb forms specific to the Prophecy to compose a text structured like it, thereby allowing the reader to readily call the Prophecy to the mind. A lexical comparison of both texts completes this examination. Next, an investigation of Ay’s deeds related in the inscription reveals the importance of the notion of benefactions (ȝḫ.t), with the speos of el-Salamuni being an exemplification of what being ȝḫ means for the king. Furthermore, although Ay’s deeds praised by Nakhtmin in his eulogy look like a collection of random deeds, they do in fact illustrate different facets of the one pivotal and dominant deed that is central to Ay’s actions: the restoration of communication between the gods, the king and the people, for which purpose the speos happens to be a medium. This investigation also shows that by recourse to the Prophecy, Ay is made into a messianic king, likened to Ameny. Then, in order to explore the reason of the recourse to the Prophecy of Neferti, the speeches of Neferti and Nakhtmin are considered in relation to each other. Based on their common witnessing function, it can be deduced that the author of the inscription considered Neferti to be a true prophecy. This leads to the question of the genre of the Prophecy and of el-Salamuni’s inscription. It is proposed that the inscription is an epideictic text. For convincingly classifying el-Salamuni’s inscription as a rhetorical epideictic composition coming under the Aristotelian rhetoric, the essential features of this genre are sought. As a matter of fact, an audience, a kairos, an appropriate ethos for the speaker, an argumentation founded on the logos, but also a strong pathos, can be characterised. As for the thesis of the discourse, it is understood that if the communication with the gods is restored and if the people take advantage of it, it is thanks to Ay’s personal values. The temporality of Nakhtmin’s encomium, who relates events from his present, the focus of the text on virtue, as well as its dispositio, complete the list of the essential features of an epideictic composition. In conclusion, the notion of propaganda is reassessed, and el-Salamuni’s inscription as an epideictic text reinstated as a long-term socio-political discourse, as a composition admittedly aimed at establishing absolute confidence of the audience in Ay, but also at reinforcing social cohesion and cultural identity, a function probably required after the Amarna Period.

scholarly journals Town, village and bush: war and cultural landscapes in south-eastern Angola (1966-2002)

Afrika Focus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inge Brinkman
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

In most of the literature on the subject, urban and rural areas are presented as real physical entities that are geographically determined. Obviously such an approach is important and necessary, but in this contribution I want to draw attention to ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’ as ideas, as items of cultural landscape rather than as physical facts. This will result both in a history of ideas and a social history of the war in Angola as experienced by civilians from the south-eastern part of the country. The article is based on a case-study that deals with the history of south-east Angola, an area that was in a state of war from 1966 to 2002. In the course of the 1990s I spoke with immigrants from this region who were resident in Rundu, Northern Namibia, mostly as illegal refugees. In our conversations the immigrants explained how the categories ‘town’ and ‘country’ came into being during colonialism and what changes occurred after the war started. They argued that during the war agriculture in the countryside became well-nigh impossible and an opposition between ‘town’ and ‘bush’ came into being that could have lethal consequences for the civilian population living in the region. This case-study on south-east Angola shows the importance of a historical approach to categories such as ‘urbanity’ and ‘rurality’ as such categories may undergo relatively rapid change – in both discourse and practice. Key words: landscape (town, country and bush), war, south-east Angola 

What Brand Is This Place? Place-Making and the Cultural Politics of Downtown Revitalization

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramzi R. Farhat
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Place Branding ◽  
Downtown Revitalization ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Communities Of Interest ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cultural Economies

This article investigates place-branding as a contested “cultural politics.” Through a case study of the creation of a “Downtown” Pomona (California) from the “Antiques Row” and “Arts Colony” that preceded it, the framework furthers our understanding of place-branding by highlighting how communities of interest contest competing cultural outlooks and further outlines the consequences of inadequate attention to the cultural economies that are supported by the meaning-making and place-making strategies of this cultural politics. In discussing how coalitions that cut across business and community interests contest cultural outlooks in an intralocal politics, the analysis offers an alternative to both elite/local and use/exchange approaches to the study of place-branding.

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