Ethnography, Thievery, and Cultural Identity: A Rereading of Michel Leiris's L'Afrique fantôme

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Larson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
The Third ◽  
Michel Leiris

During 1931–33 Michel Leiris took part in an ethnographic expedition across Africa, the highly publicized Dakar-Djibouti mission. This essay examines three documents related to the mission. The first, remarks that Leiris wrote before the trip, reveals his understanding, either conscious or unconscious, that theft would be an essential part of the mission's ethnographic strategy. In the second, a journal kept during the expedition, Leiris recorded specific incidents of theft. I argue that the ethnographers' thieving, portrayed as spontaneous acts, is in fact a political one that allows them to collect objects of great cultural significance while ensuring a European identity distinct from the identity of the colonized. The third document is the published version of the journal, which Leiris titled L'Afrique fantôme. Variants in this version and a photographic illustration prefigure Leiris's rethinking of ethnography's role in decolonization.

Cultural Metamorphosis of the Expressions of European Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-299
Author(s):  
Oana-Antonia Ilie
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Intercultural Dialogue ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Continuous Change ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Global Village ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World

AbstractIn the recent decades, we have witnessed a change of paradigm, from the national to the European paradigm, one that is not centered on the national culture but on the values of the united Europe. The symbols, values and traditions of EU increase its visibility and contribute to a unifying European identity. However, this identity is not a single entity but a composite of multiple, integrated elements, that are subject to continuous change. For citizens from different countries to assimilate and identify with the European creed, continuous transformations and adjustments are taking place, process in which some elements are enhanced, while others suffer transformations. The third millennium was often described by experts as the era of intercultural communication as intercultural dialogue is the territory in which cultural identity is constantly redefined and negotiated. Now that mass media has pushed further the frontiers of knowledge and that our world has become, as predicted by Marshall McLuhan, a “global village”, the issue that we are confronted with in times of crises is whether the world is really a true village, connected by such principles as solidarity, peace, harmony, love, or rather a jungle where only the fittest and strongest cultures will survive?

Māori Research(er) in Three Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Jacquie Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
Health Literacy ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Third ◽  
Ruth Behar ◽  
Seeking Help

These three poems re-present the findings from a research project that took place in 2013 (Kidd et al. 2018, Kidd et al. 2014). The research explored what health literacy meant for Māori patients and whānau when they accessed palliative care. Through face-to-face interviews and focus groups we engaged with 81 people including patients, whānau, bereaved loved ones, support workers and health professionals. The poems are composite, written to bring some of our themes to life. The first poem is titled Aue. This is a Māori lament that aligns to English words such as ‘oh no’, or ‘arrgh’, or ‘awww’. Each stanza of the poem re-presents some of the stories we heard throughout the research. The second poem is called Tikanga. This is a Māori concept that encompasses customs, traditions and protocols. There are tikanga rituals and processes that guide all aspects of life, death, and relationships. This poem was inspired by an elderly man who explained that he would avoid seeking help from a hospice because ‘they leave tikanga at the door at those places’. His choice was to bear his pain bravely, with pride, within his cultural identity. The third poem is called ‘People Like Me’. This is an autoethnographical reflection of what I experienced as a researcher which draws on the work of scholars such as bell hooks (1984), Laurel Richardson (1997) and Ruth Behar (1996). These and many other authors encourage researchers to use frustration and anger to inform our writing; to use our tears to fuel our need to publish our research.

The Cradle of Exotica

2020 ◽  
pp. 4-25
Author(s):  
Karen Polinger Foster
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Third Millennium ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
And Control ◽  
Clay Tablet

This chapter discusses the role of exotica in the Mesopotamian mind. By 1875, The Epic of Gilgamesh had begun to emerge from the thousands of clay tablet fragments freshly unearthed in the remains of the great royal library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. Gilgamesh’s drive to possess the exotic is rooted in long-standing Mesopotamian tradition. From the third millennium on, when he supposedly reigned, scholar-scribes organized and classified nearly all aspects of the natural world. Thematic lists of flora and fauna, heavenly bodies, precious and semiprecious materials, and topographical features provided the educated elite with a means of conceptualizing patterns and interrelationships. For Gilgamesh, as for many Mesopotamian rulers, the acquisition and display of exotica were key aspects of kingship. Once secured within the walled, urban cores of Mesopotamian cultural identity, exotica offered tangible signs of wide-ranging military might, commercial enterprise, and political status and control.

Slavery

2009 ◽  
pp. 315-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Page DuBois
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Ancient Greek

This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways to address this matter: one is by using the analogy of slaves from other historical circumstances who did write about such experiences, in the form, for example, of the slave narratives of ante- and post-bellum America. Other strategies for imagining or representing ancient slaves' experience involve extrapolating from silence, supplying the other side of a one-sided dialogue between master and slave.

scholarly journals Introduction: The Politics of Diversity in Music Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Alexis Anja Kallio ◽  
Kathryn Marsh ◽  
Heidi Westerlund ◽  
Sidsel Karlsen ◽  
Eva Sæther
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Music Teachers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Policy Agendas

AbstractThe Politics of Diversity in Music Educationattends to the political structures and processes that frame and produce understandings of diversity in and through music education. Recent surges in nationalist, fundamentalist, protectionist, and separatist tendencies highlight the imperative for music education to extend beyond nominal policy agendas to critically consider the ways in which understandings about society are upheld or unsettled and the ways in which knowledge about diversity is produced. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarly foundations that this book builds upon before introducing the four sections of the book and contributing chapters. The first section of the book focuses on the politics of inquiry in music education research. The second section attends to the paradoxes and challenges that arise as music teachers negotiate cultural identity and tradition within the political frames and ideals of the nation state. The third section considers diversities that are often overlooked or silenced, and the final section turns to matters of leadership in higher music education as an inherently political and ethical undertaking. Together, chapters work towards a more critical, complex, and nuanced understanding of the ways in which the politics of diversity shape our ideals of what music education is, and what it is for.

scholarly journals POLITIK IDENTITAS DALAM PERSPEKTIF POSKOLONIAL STUDI KASUS HIP HOP DANGDUT GRUP NDX A.K.A

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Yedija Remalya Sidjabat ◽  
Vissia Ita Yulianto ◽  
Royke Bobby Koapaha
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Leadership Culture ◽  
Identity Negotiations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Pros And Cons

Hip hop dangdut is music identity of NDX A.K.A group. Hip hop dangdut that became popular in society also bring the pros and cons for some groups. Political identity in this research investigates background in choosing music dangdut and hip hop that integrated in NDX’s songs. Political identity used to see the factor that played a role in  formation of hip hop dangdut, but not fully realized by NDX group. Political identity in  formation of hip hop dangdut then analyzed in textual and contextual to answer the contestation of hip hop dangdut in postcolonial perspective. The concept postcolonial in this research is criticized dominance or the form of leadership culture (hegemony) conducted by capitalists. Hip hop dangdut formed because of the hegemony of media in popularizing hip hop that occurs massively. Contestation on hip hop dangdut identity is analyzed using the concept of mimicry and hybridity to see ‘in-between’ space or third space that can be described the position of hip hop dangdut. Negotiations between hip hop and dangdut is a form of hybridity that takes place in ambivalence, which is mimicking and mocking, and not entirely subordinated to the cultural discrimination that occurs to the strategy of globalization. The performance and NDX music that performed on stage shows the cultural identity negotiations between hip hop and dangdut that formed in the third space.

scholarly journals The Third Space Formation Of Hindu In Sidoarjo

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 110
Author(s):  
Siti Alif Ulfah
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Collection Method ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
The Third

This research discusses the formation of the third space and articulation of the cultural identity of Hindus in Sidoarjo. There are social restrictions related to religious articulation and it is important that this minority group tries to represent their identity as Hindus in Sidoarjo. This issue is studied using the theory of the third space (space in between) from Homi K. Bhabha. The above problems are discussed through ethnographic research methods. The research approach is qualitative and uses a post-colonial perspective. The data collection method in this research is purposive, technique with observation, interviews, and documentation. The result of this research is that Hindu identity interprets and articulates its own identity. Through the setting and image of Sidoarjo regency, there are categories of Sidoarjo Hindus. This category is divided into three parts, namely Hinduism from Sidoarjo, Hinduism from outside Sidoarjo, and Hinduism from Bali. although there is a mixture of the three, they develop strategies in dealing with the dominant discourse in Sidoarjo. Their way of dealing with the dominant discourse is by developing a third spatial formation shaped administratively and militaristically, social codes and networks and through "ogoh - ogoh". The third space for Hindus in Sidoarjo is that they are productive, dynamic, and negotiate. Therefore, they voice their identity through ideas, strategies, and creative power.

The Mediterranean culture of fishing: Continuity and change in the world of Jewish fishermen, 1500–1929

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-304
Author(s):  
Shai Srougo
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mediterranean Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Sea Tenure ◽  
Maritime Community

This essay discusses the maritime Jews and their changing role in the fishing occupation in the Mediterranean sea. The first part presents the trends in historiography regarding the Thessalonikian Jewish fishermen in Ottoman and Post Ottoman periods. The second section explores the maritime world of Jewish fishermen in Ottoman Thessaloniki between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. We will establish the cultural identity of the Jewish fishermen, which expressed itself in Thermaikos Bay. The third part depicts the reasons for the collapse of the Jewish sea tenure in Greek Thessaloniki, especially between the years 1922-1924, and continues to describe one of the responses; the settlement of several fishing families in Acre (in Mandatory Palestine). Their experience in the new environment was short (1925-1929) and we will investigate the linkage between their cultural marginality in the core society to the failure of forming a Jewish maritime community in Acre.

The Day the Earth Stood Still? – Reading Jürgen Habermas' Essay “February 15” Against Ian McEwan's Novel Saturday

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell A. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
International Law ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
The Third ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
The Earth

The third essay in Habermas' collection The Divided West is entitled “February 15, or: What Binds Europeans.” The essay regionalizes the global claims Habermas makes in the longer chapter “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” That is, in “February 15” Habermas makes the case for a European post-national order that he hopes will become the vanguard for the emergence of universal cosmopolitanism. Habermas concludes that all that is lacking for the achievement of this beachhead from which Europe can, in its turn, champion a “community of free and equal citizens” in a “global public sphere,” is a “European identity.”

The Research on Evolve of Idea on Urban Space Construction in China

2013 ◽  
Vol 409-410 ◽  
pp. 891-895
Author(s):  
Ye Peng ◽  
Bing He
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Fourth Stage ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Space Construction ◽  
The Government ◽  
Government Authority

There is five stages for the China's urban space construction’s ideas with the evolve of china, the first phase is the pre-1859 phase, the dominant ideology in this time is a traditional Chinese ritual ideas; the second phase is 1859-1949, this stage is a interation of the traditional Chinese ritual and Western ideas; the third stage is 1949-1979, the stage is under the influence of the government authority to create urban space; the fourth stage is the 1979-2009, this stage is under the influence of the market economy to create urban space; the fifth stage is in 2009 and beyond, this stage will be the next multi-cultural identity and values ​​of urban space construction.

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