scholarly journals Semiophores in Multimodal Communication: Verbal and Visual Representation of Cultural Values. Soviet and British Candy Wrappers of the Latter Half of the 20th Century as a Case Study

Author(s):  
Kristina O. Vetrova ◽  
Svetlana L. Mishlanova

The article considers complex semiophore analysis of Soviet and British candy wrappers representing social and cultural development of Soviet and British society in a certain period of time. Examination of non-trivial research material, definition of the term semiophore and the development of a complex method of semiophore analysis make the presented research relevant. Semiophores are indicated by the authors as derivative multimodal semiotic objects that represent historical, political and cultural identity in different ways. The authors have examined 53 candy wrappers, among which 30 candy wrappers are of a Soviet and 23 ones are of a British origin. All of them were produced in late 20th century. Candy wrappers being semiophores are considered as a complex of associated, functional, pragmatic, logical and semantic connections. This causes a necessity to develop a complex methodology of semiophores analysis. As a result, a complex method of semiophore analysis has been elaborated. The method has been applied in research of Soviet and British candy wrappers of the latter half of the twentieth century. The authors have concluded that in most cases the verbal and visual components that form the structure of a candy wrapper correspond to each other and actualize the image presented on it. All images presented on the Soviet wrappers can be thematically divided into various groups, for example, some candy wrappers represent crucial historical events, literary characters, cultural phenomena and architectural objects of Russian cities. In general, the images presented on the Soviet candy wrappers perform an educational function, contribute to the formation of cultural, national, political identity and self-identity of Russians. British candy wrappers are characterized by a simple design and usually present the name and look of the product. At the same time, the name of a product has a clear structure and informs the consumer about the manufacturer and the content of the product. Unlike the Soviet candy wrappers, the British candy wrappers were found to be primarily aimed at providing product information and advertising the product. The authors are eager to apply the developed complex methodology to the analysis of other types of semiophores in their further research.

Author(s):  
Tegwyn Hughes

This paper will investigate girls’ comics in late 20th century Britain to illuminate the experiences of the adolescent post-war generation. My research focuses on girls’ comics, specifically Bunty, Mandy, and Judy, which were read widely throughout the country. The illustrated stories in these publications typically portrayed teenage girls as the protagonists in a variety of situations and adventures. By using the primary source documents of the comics as the main basis for my research, I explore the following questions: to what extent did the comics reflect the changing assumptions about gender and gender expectations in British society from the 1950s to 1970s? Did girls feel empowered by the stories they read, or did they feel like they had to conform to a certain ideal of womanhood produced by gender norms? How were these ideals configured by race, especially by Caribbean migration in post-war Britain? By examining this small portion of British popular culture and its reception, I will gain a wider understanding of fluid and dynamic ideas about gender in these crucial decades of the late 20th century.  


Author(s):  
April Alliston

Sexually explicit images are among the oldest known representational artifacts, and yet none of these were ever understood as “pornography” until the word and concept began to emerge in Western European languages during the 19th century. At that time, it was used equally to refer to written texts and visual representations. The word has since entered into much more widespread usage, often referring to any and all sexually explicit material, more often to material that appears specifically designed “to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings” (Oxford English Dictionary). Since the popularization of internet pornography in the late 20th century, the term has even come to be applied to any image considered to emphasize the pleasure and seduction of the viewer over realistic representation (as in “food porn,” “real estate porn,” etc.). Many attempts have been made to define pornography more specifically, but little consensus has been achieved. Courts of law have generally avoided defining the word “pornography,” preferring to categorize sexually explicit or arousing representations in terms of “obscenity.” Feminist scholars have disagreed on the definition of pornography to the extent that the conflict became known as the “Porn Wars” of the last several decades of the 20th century. Sexually explicit or sexually stimulating representations can elicit powerful emotional responses that vary widely, and they are inextricable from questions of social power. Thus, the very act of defining pornography is implicated in political struggles over some of the most fundamental issues of human life: gender, sexuality, social equality, and the nature and power of representations. There remains no general or stable agreement concerning what it is, what effects it may have, or even whether it exists at all.


Author(s):  
Barbara Alice Mann ◽  
Heide Goettner-Abendroth

Evidence of matriarchy had always existed in Western chronicles, albeit scattered or hidden amid other ethnographic tidbits, all of them filtered heavily through the androcentric lens of Christian missionaries or European travelers. Most of these old European sources were either puzzled or horrified by women-led cultures, having had nothing to attach them to but scary stories from Herodotus about the ferocious Amazons as “men-slayers” or the Christian theological depictions of sinful Eve, resulting in the “burning times” (witch hunts). Moving out from Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, especially into Africa and the Americas, home to many matriarchal cultures, was very unsettling to the patriarchal paradigm of Europe. Until quite recently, this culture shock combined with colonialism to ensure that scholarship on matriarchy was crafted exclusively by elite, Western scholars, nearly all of them male and coming from nothing remotely resembling a matriarchal culture. Scholars in the 19th century were all infiltrated by the unilinear, universal evolution theory, as a part of European American colonialism, sporting racist and sexist roots. These disabilities distorted comprehension of the matriarchal form of society, allowing Western scholars either to dismiss it outright as a fantasy or to portray it crudely, as a wicked, Amazonian domination of men. This background left enduring marks on the scholarship around matriarchy until new interest was piqued among German and American scholars in the 19th century, moving thought from the Amazonian conception to the definition of matriarchy as a “mother right.” These scholars remained mired, however, in the racist and sexist premises of European colonialism, well into the 20th century. As colonial Eurocentrism lifted in the mid- to late 20th century, scholars from non-Western, matriarchal cultures worldwide began chiming in on the conversation, in order to revamp old ideas together with Western female scholars. The “maternal values” in matriarchal studies do not indicate Western sentimentalism, but principles formulated by Indigenous, matriarchal societies themselves, in their sayings (e.g., Minangkabau) and in their social rules (e.g., Iroquois), based on the prototype of Mother Nature, as conceptualized in mythology, proverbs, songs, etc. Collating all the evidence of non-Western and Western 21st-century scholarship, matriarchy is here defined as mother-centered societies, based on maternal values: equality, consensus finding, gift giving, and peace building by negotiations. Gift economies, defined by modern matriarchal studies as a transitive relation in closed communities, is a core concept of all matriarchies. The result is a gender-egalitarian society, in which each gender has its own sphere of power and action. All these societies are characterized by matrilinearity, matrilocality, and women as keepers of the land and distributors of food, based on a structured gift economy. As derived from inductive studies of singular matriarchal societies and in collaboration with Indigenous scholars writing on their own communities, the current definition of matriarchy is a mother-centered, gender-egalitarian society that practices the gift economy. Modern matriarchal studies primarily assesses the patterns of those cultures, past and present, in their unique displays of gender egalitarianism and generally social egalitarianism.


Author(s):  
Christophe Emmanuel Premat

It is common to describe political identity using surveys that address cultural values. The construction of indicators by mixing answers to a set of questions then becomes a relevant method when taking a behavioral approach. Scholars such as Ronald Inglehart or Pippa Norris have been engaged in longitudinal studies using two important series of surveys; World Values Survey and European Social Survey Aggregate data enabled them to perceive strong trends in different societies in the world, which is why they linked the evolution of political identity with the shift of cultural values in western societies towards post-materialistic post-1970s. This finding might explain why citizens cared more about issues such as environmental protection, quality of life, and personal and cultural development instead of simply economic security, growth, and stability of power relations. The present study analyzes the repertoire of unconventional participation of European citizens with the data from European Social Survey.


Author(s):  
Jamie A. Davies

Synthetic biology—the creation of new living systems by design—is a rapidly growing area of science and technology that is attracting attention well beyond the laboratory and is provoking vigorous public debate. ‘Biology: from analysis to synthesis’ explains that the most general definition of synthetic biology works by dividing biology as a whole into analytic and synthetic branches. Synthetic biology is a broad subject partly because of the way it is defined, and partly because it has two distinct and independent historical roots: one intellectually driven and running deep into 19th-century natural philosophy, and the other more practically orientated and emerging from late 20th-century biotechnology.


Afghanistan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Warwick Ball

The Silk Road as an image is a relatively new one for Afghanistan. It appeals to both the pre-Islamic and the perceived Islamic past, thus offering an Islamic balance to previous identities linked to Bamiyan or to the Kushans. It also appeals to a broader and more international image, one that has been taken up by many other countries. This paper traces the rise of the image of the Silk Road and its use as a metaphor for ancient trade to encompass all contacts throughout Eurasia, prehistoric, ancient and modern, but also how the image has been adopted and expanded into many other areas: politics, tourism and academia. It is argued here that the origin and popularity of the term lies in late 20th century (and increasingly 21st century) politics rather than any reality of ancient trade. Its consequent validity as a metaphor in academic discussion is questioned


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Francisco Xavier Morales

The problem of identity is an issue of contemporary society that is not only expressed in daily life concerns but also in discourses of politics and social movements. Nevertheless, the I and the needs of self-fulfillment usually are taken for granted. This paper offers thoughts regarding individual identity based on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. From this perspective, identity is not observed as a thing or as a subject, but rather as a “selfillusion” of a system of consciousness, which differentiates itself from the world, event after event, in a contingent way. As concerns the definition  of contents of self-identity, the structures of social systems define who is a person, how he or she should act, and how much esteem he or she should receive. These structures are adopted by consciousness as its own identity structures; however, some social contexts are more relevant for self-identity construction than others. Moral communication increases the probability that structure appropriation takes place, since the emotional element of identity is linked to the esteem/misesteem received by the individual from the interactions in which he or she participates.


Author(s):  
Anatoly S. Kuprin ◽  
Galina I. Danilina

The purpose of this study is the analysis of limit situation in the narrative of war. The material of the study is the novel of Daniil Granin “My Lieutenant” and related texts. In the first part of the paper, the authors explore existing approaches to the term “limit situation” and similar concepts into scientific and philosophical traditions; limits of its applicability in literary studies and its relation to the categories of “narrative instances” and “event”. Proposed a literary-theoretical definition of the limit situation, which can be used in the analysis of fiction texts. Existing approaches to the examination of the situation of war are analyzed: philosophical-existential, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary. In the second part of the paper, the authors propose their method for analyzing limit situations in texts about war, which basis on existing approaches and preserves the text-centric principle of studying the structure of the story. Two interrelated areas of research have been identified: the study of war as a continuous limit situation in the intertextual aspect (the discourse of war); the study of limit situations (death, suffering, guilt, accident) in the narrative of war as part of a specific text. In the third part of the scientific work,the analysis of war as a continuous limit situation results in the study of the concept of “limit” (border) in a fiction text. The role of “limit” (border) concept in the texts about the war is studied, the possible types of limits in the discourse of war are examined. Limit situations in the narrative of war are analyzed on the basis of the novel “My Lieutenant” by Daniil Granin. A review of journalistic and scientific works about the novel revealed both the continuity and the differences between the novel and the “lieutenant” prose of the 20th century. An analysis of the limit situations in the novel revealed their key position in the narrative. These situations are independent of the fiction time, of the fluctuation of the point of view’; the function of the abstract author is to build the narrative as a “directive” immersion of the hero and narrator in these situations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (11) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Nadiyanti Mat Nayan ◽  
David S Jones ◽  
Suriati Ahmad

In 1880, when the British moved their Federated Malay States administrative centre to Kuala Lumpur, the Padang quickly became a symbol of British economic and administrative colonisation, and a nucleus of the socio-cultural development of Kuala Lumpur. This paper discusses the layers of history, symbolism and cultural values that the Padang contributes to the socio-cultural tapestry of both Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia, and the lack of relevant planning and heritage measures to conserve these attributes and characteristics. The conclusions offer avenues to engage with pre- and post-colonisation that enable re-making and the conservation of the iconic space of Kuala Lumpur.Keywords: Urban open space; Merdeka Square; Kuala Lumpur City Hall; National Heritage Act 2005eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2019. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/e-bpj.v4i11.1721


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