scholarly journals FROM STREET DANCES AND 'BREAKING' TO NIGHT CLUBBING: POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT AS CULTURAL AND SYMBOLIC CAPITAL IN CONTEMPORARY ATHENS

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Koutsougera
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Local Discourses ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Global And Local

This paper is an anthropological portrayal of two cultural forms of popular entertainment, with a central emphasis on their dance practices: hip hop dance styles and night clubbing. Their main components are discussed in relation to emotions, materials and regulatory language and how these surround the sense of authenticity of the self, grounding the notion of the popular. Breakdance, street dances of the Athens hip hop scene and night clubbing practices in the western suburbs of Athens unravel in a descriptive manner in order to illuminate their interwoven elements in terms of authenticity and the permutations of the popular. The cultural and symbolic agendas of the subjectivities and collectivities engaged in these popular cultural forms unveil, along with the ways global and local discourses intersect, to produce a territory for identity formation. By highlighting the key aspects of popular entertainment in contemporary Greece, the aim of this article is to contribute to the anthropological study of popular culture by pointing out its role in the processes of shaping and performing subjectivity and in the production of authenticity. 

Organizing women migrants: The Filipino and Cape Verdean women’s associations in Rome

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-39
Author(s):  
Wendy Pojmann
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Women ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Women Migrants ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Women's Associations ◽  
Women's Organizing ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Female Migrant ◽  
Migrant Groups

Migrant women’s associations in Italy did not simply emerge from informal networks. The Filipino and Cape Verdean women’s associations in Rome are examples of the results of multiple factors that contributed to the strategy of self-organization established by migrant women with the intention of empowering themselves. An awareness of their unique position as women from mostly-female migrant groups, a lack of institutional bodies prepared to assist them, and the leadership of individual women were key aspects in the formation of the first migrant women’s associations in Rome. Gender and nationality were the main components of migrant women’s organizing in the first mostly-female migrant groups. 

“You're Only Ever A Block From The ‘Hood”

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 152-170
Author(s):  
Alex Blue V
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Automobile Plant ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Spatial Reorientation ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
The City

This article explores the use of sound, lyrics, and performance as tools for spatial reorientation and reimagining, identity formation and affirmation, and counternarrative or counterarchive in a rapidly gentrifying contemporary Detroit, Michigan. Two discrete, yet discursively linked case studies are presented—performances by the same artist in two different spaces—that exhibit various modes of “flipping,” slang that can refer to multiple transformative practices in contemporary Detroit. These practices include the use of overdetermined spaces, or spaces that have been declared abandoned or vacant, for something other than their original intent—i.e. using a decommissioned automobile plant as a music video set; sampling, which can be understood as using sonic components from previously recorded songs in the creation of new hip-hop beats; buying homes in a state of disrepair, fixing and reselling them at large profits; and inverting meaning itself, via slang or coded language. Additionally Black techniques of sounding and performance are illuminated, with a focus on echo as a mode of co-creation. These various practices are all responses to the growing wave of gentrification that gains momentum in the city daily. The analysis draws primarily from ethnographic research conducted from 2016 to 2018, culling data from participant observation, recorded interviews, informal conversations, field notes, lyrical and video analysis, and the analysis of mediated accounts, both print and online. As the analysis shows, the strategies utilized by artists in Detroit ensure that no matter how much the spaces in Detroit continue to change, and no matter how much an attempt is made to provide racially curated space through various forms of violence, you’re only ever a block from the ‘hood.

Communicating Geoinformation Effectively With Virtual 3d City Models

2010 ◽  
pp. 120-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Jobst ◽  
Jürgen Döllner ◽  
Olaf Lubanski
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Knowledge ◽  
Physical Models ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
3D City Models ◽  
3D Environments ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Knowledge Structuring ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
City Models

Planning situations are commonly managed by intensive discussions between all stakeholders. Virtual 3D city models enhance these communication procedures with additional visualization possibilities (in opposite to physical models), which support spatial knowledge structuring and human learning mechanisms. This chapter discusses key aspects of virtual 3D city creation, main components of virtual environments and the framework for an efficient communication. It also explores future research for the creation of virtual 3D environments.

“We care about others”: discursive constructions of corruption vis-à-vis national/cultural identity in Indonesia’s business-government relations

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kanti Pertiwi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Government Function ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Local Discourses ◽  
Global And Local ◽  
Discursive Constructions

Purpose This paper aims to problematize existing conceptualization of corruption by presenting alternative perspectives on corruption in Indonesia through the lens of national/cultural identity, amidst claims of the pervasiveness of corruption in the country. In so doing, the paper also sheds light on the micro-processes of interactions between global and local discourses in postcolonial settings. Design/methodology/approach The study applies discourse analysis, involving in-depth interviews with 40 informants from the business sector, government institutions and anti-corruption agencies. Findings The findings suggest that corruption helps government function, preserves livelihoods of the marginalized segments of societies and maintains social obligations/relations. These alternative meanings of corruption persist despite often seen as less legitimate due to effects of colonial powers. Research limitations/implications The snowballing method of recruiting informants is one of the limitations of this paper, which may decrease the potential diversity and lead to the silencing of different stories (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2013). Researchers need to contextualize corruption and study its varied meanings to reveal its social, historical and political dimensions. Practical implications This paper strongly suggests that we need to move beyond rationalist accounts to capture the varied meanings of corruption which may be useful to explain the limited results of existing anti-corruption efforts. Social implications This study calls for a greater use of qualitative methods to study broad social change programs such as anti-corruption from the perspective of the insiders. Originality/value This paper contributes to the discussion of agency at the interplay between the dominant and alternative discourses in postcolonial settings. Moreover, the alternative meanings of corruption embedded in constructions of national identity and care ethics discussed in this paper offer as a starting point for decolonizing (Westwood, 2006) anti-corruption theory and practice.

Discursive democracy and the challenge of state building in divided societies: reckoning with symbolic capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Ivie ◽  
Timothy William Waters
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
State Building ◽  
Policy Options ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Discursive Democracy ◽  
Political Communities

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have so far contemplated. Theories of discursive democracy illuminate how this might be possible. We deploy the discursive idea of symbolic capital to show how one might identify the lines along which people in Bosnia could constitute meaningful, internally legitimated political communities - or that would indicate the experiment was not worth attempting. Unless advocates of democratic state building can articulate, rather than assume, a sufficiency of common ground among the populations’ multiple, overlapping and conflicting identities, they may have to revert to the default of separate political communities.

The Needle Drop

Transfers ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-117
Author(s):  
William B. Noseworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The Other ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
The One

Scholarship in the field of hip-hop studies has convincingly argued against a “cultural grey out” and in favor of “local idiosyncrasies” in the mobility of cultural forms. That said, no published study has focused on the movements of the artists themselves in a transpacific context that places scenes in Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam in conversation with one another. Varying histories of colonialism and postcolonial movements are essential aspects of each social context. I argue that the transpacific lens allows scholars to draw out the movements of individuals, influences, and emergent trends in the art form to better understand how artists are, metaphorically, scratching back and forth between representing originality on the one hand and the need for popular appeal on the other. I draw on vinyl itself as a metaphor for this article, which is framed as an EP.

Hawaiian Music and Oceanizing American Studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (04) ◽  
pp. 1163-1172
Author(s):  
LEAH KURAGANO
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
American Studies ◽  
High Culture ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Culture Concept

American studies has been dedicated to understanding cultural forms from its beginnings as a field. Music, as one such form, is especially centered in the field as a lens through which to seek the cultural “essence” of US America – as texts from which to glean insight into negotiations of intellectual thought, social relations, subaltern resistance, or identity formation, or as a form of labor that produces an exchangeable commodity. In particular, the featuring of folk, indigenous, and popular music directly responded to anxieties in the intellectual circles of the postwar era around America's purported lack of serious culture in comparison to Europe. According to John Gilkeson, American studies scholars in the 1950s and 1960s “vulgarized” the culture concept introduced by the Boasian school of anthropology, opening the door to serious consideration of popular culture as equal in value to high culture.1

scholarly journals “Once I’m there I can find out where I am”

Ethnologies ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bodner
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Spatial Construction ◽  
Subsistence Practices

Contemporary folklorists working on place have increasingly highlighted power and conflict as key aspects of spatial construction and the concomitant identity formation this practice provides. Utilizing this perspective and building on the work of social geographers’ research on the homeless I document the ways in which urban spatial regimes structure everyday practices of a street kid community in downtown Toronto. Utilizing the distinction between prime and marginal space to build an ecological map of the urban landscape I argue that my research participants’ utilization of de Certeau’s tactic of temporal manipulation claim public microsites for subsistence practices but reproduce their own esoteric subculture within marginal or refuse spaces that constitute a distinct backstage which rarely appears in the literature.

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