scholarly journals Indigenous Ritual Aesthetics on Stage: A Survey of Contemporary Syncretic Theatre of Oceania

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kemuel DeMoville
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Cultural Element ◽  
Return Home ◽  
The Way

<p>The use of indigenous ritual (both formal and informal), ritual performance, and mythology in modern Oceanic theatre speaks directly to cultural practitioners and informed audience/readers. Various contemporary syncretic plays originating from Oceania will be analyzed for their connection to indigenous ritual. These plays include John Broughton’s Te Hokinga Mai (The Return Home), Sudesh Mishra’s Ferringhi, Jo Nacola’s Gurudial and the Land, Briar Grace-Smith’s Ngā Pou Wāhine and When Sun and Moon Collide, Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa’s Last Virgin in Paradise, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ka Wai Ola, Albert Belz’ Te Maunga, and Makerita Urale’s Frangipani Perfume. Understanding the way in which syncretic theatre is created in postcolonial societies within Oceania will help to build a greater understanding of how cultures and communities are restructuring and reclaiming traditional cultural practices within their respective communities. Using various play-specific dramatic and anthropological theories, scripts are analyzed in order to identify the indigenous cultural element present within the respective scripts.</p>

scholarly journals Indigenous Ritual Aesthetics on Stage: A Survey of Contemporary Syncretic Theatre of Oceania

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kemuel DeMoville
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Cultural Element ◽  
Return Home ◽  
The Way

<p>The use of indigenous ritual (both formal and informal), ritual performance, and mythology in modern Oceanic theatre speaks directly to cultural practitioners and informed audience/readers. Various contemporary syncretic plays originating from Oceania will be analyzed for their connection to indigenous ritual. These plays include John Broughton’s Te Hokinga Mai (The Return Home), Sudesh Mishra’s Ferringhi, Jo Nacola’s Gurudial and the Land, Briar Grace-Smith’s Ngā Pou Wāhine and When Sun and Moon Collide, Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa’s Last Virgin in Paradise, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ka Wai Ola, Albert Belz’ Te Maunga, and Makerita Urale’s Frangipani Perfume. Understanding the way in which syncretic theatre is created in postcolonial societies within Oceania will help to build a greater understanding of how cultures and communities are restructuring and reclaiming traditional cultural practices within their respective communities. Using various play-specific dramatic and anthropological theories, scripts are analyzed in order to identify the indigenous cultural element present within the respective scripts.</p>

The Beginnings of Islam in Afghanistan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arezou Azad
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Political System ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Initial Conversion ◽  
The Way

Covering the period from 709 to 871, this chapter traces the initial conversion of Afghanistan from Zoroastrianism and Buddhism to Islam. Highlighting the differential developments in four regions of Afghanistan, it discusses the very earliest history of Afghan Islam both as a religion and as a political system in the form of a caliphate.  The chapter draws on under-utilized sources, such as fourth to eighth century Bactrian documents from Tukharistan and medieval Arabic and Persian histories of Balkh, Herat and Sistan. In so doing, it offers a paradigm shift in the way early Islam is understood by arguing that it did not arrive in Afghanistan as a finished product, but instead grew out of Afghanistan’s multi-religious context. Through fusions with Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, early Abrahamic traditions, and local cult practices, the Islam that resulted was less an Arab Islam that was imported wholesale than a patchwork of various cultural practices.

All in the space of a poem: Spatial logics in poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
K. Arunlal ◽  
C. Sunitha Srinivas
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Contemporary Poetry ◽  
Living History ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Human Sense ◽  
Spatial Logics ◽  
The Way

One of the oldest cultural practices of human societies, poetry, simultaneously responded and contributed to the evolution of human sense of spaces. Before print culture became ubiquitous, poetry was a time-art: all classic poetic techniques and devices were meant to hold a piece of verse permanently in a person’s memory, and by extension, in a community’s living history. However, contemporary poetry has little use for the chronologic dimension of poetry. The correlation of spatialized poetry with the new proliferation of ideas regarding space can be explored in multiple angles. The way space is looked at has changed in all art forms due to certain contingencies of modern history. This paper is a mapping of these alterations in the spatial turn of poetry, and a further application of ideas of space in understanding contemporary poetry.

Elaborations

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Suk-Young Chwe
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
The One ◽  
Influence Behavior ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins by describing two competing kinds of explanations to the one offered in the preceding chapter. The first is the way in which rituals are thought to influence behavior through direct psychological stimulation. The second is based on how being physically together in a group of people affects individual emotions. It addresses the question of whether common knowledge is an impossible ideal. It then discusses how publicity—or more precisely, common knowledge generation—and content are never really separable, in contrast to the book's argument that both must be considered in understanding cultural practices such as rituals. The chapter goes on to explain how historical precedent can generate common knowledge and generating community through common knowledge.

Listening and Waiting, Excavating Later

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-201
Author(s):  
Peter R. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Community Archaeology ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Epistemic Humility ◽  
Iron Technology ◽  
The Way

Careful listening to oral traditions, a significant part of Tanzanian Haya heritage, for nearly a year led to an ancient shrine where Haya elders encouraged excavations. This was early participatory community archaeology, where indigenous knowledge and the initiative of elders paved the way to significant archaeological finds about iron technology and the enduring qualities of knowledge preserved by ritual performance. Patient apprenticeship to knowledge-keepers during ethnoarchaeological observations of iron technology also led to significant insights into inventive techniques in iron technology that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Listening with epistemic humility, opening ourselves to other ways of constructing history and heritage, unveils heritage under treat. A forgotten massacre by German colonials, the knowledge of which has been erased by disease and globalization, was revealed and is now preserved only by listening closely to Haya elders five decades ago.

Feminist philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elinor Mason
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Way

Feminist philosophy is philosophy that is aimed at understanding and challenging the oppression of women. Feminist philosophy examines issues that are traditionally found in practical ethics and political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language. In fact, feminist concerns can appear in almost all areas of traditional philosophy. Feminist philosophy is thus not a kind of philosophy; rather, it is unified by its focus on issues of concern to feminists. Feminist philosophers question the structures and institutions that regulate our lives. When Mary Wollstonecraft was writing in 1792, the institutions excluded and subordinated women explicitly. Wollstonecraft, as the title of her book (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) makes clear, was extending the enlightenment idea that men have basic human rights, to women. Wollstonecraft argued that women should not be seen as importantly different from men: there may be differences due to different upbringing, but, Wollstonecraft argues, there is no reason to think men and women differ in important ways, and women should be given the same education and opportunities as men. What seemed radical in 1792 may not seem radical now. Yet gender inequality persists. Thus philosophers must look beyond the formal rules and laws to the underlying structures that cause and perpetuate oppression. The feminist philosopher is always asking, ‘is there some element of this practice that depends on gender in some way?’ Feminist philosophers examine and critique the way we structure our families and reproduction, the cultural practices we engage in, such as prostitution and pornography, the way we think, and speak and value each other as knowers and thinkers. In order to examine these issues the feminist philosopher may need an improved conceptual toolbox: we need to understand such complex concepts as intersectionality, false consciousness, and of course, gender itself. Is gender biologically determined – is it something natural and immutable, or is it socially constructed? As Simone de Beauvoir puts it, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Feminist philosophers tend to argue that gender is all (or mostly) socially constructed, that it is something we invent rather than discover. Gender is nonetheless an important part of our world, and feminist philosophy aims to understand how it works.

The politics of representing the African diaspora in the Caribbean

1994 ◽  
Vol 68 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-308
Author(s):  
Kevin A. Yelvington
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Jamaican Culture ◽  
The Way

[First paragraph]Roots of Jamaican Culture. MERVYN C. ALLEYNE. London: Pluto Press, 1988. xii + 186 pp. (Paper US$ 15.95)Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Dover MA: The Majority Press, 1991. xxii + 207 pp. (Paper US$ 9.95)A recent trend in anthropology is defined by the interest in the role of historical and political configurations in the constitution of local cultural practices. Unfortunately, with some notable individual exceptions, this is the same anthropology which has largely ignored the Caribbean and its "Islands of History."1 Of course, this says much, much more about the way in which anthropology constructs its subject than it says about the merits of the Caribbean case and the fundamental essence of these societies, born as they were in the unforgiving and defining moment of pervasive, persuasive, and pernicious European construction of "Otherness." As Trouillot (1992:22) writes, "Whereas anthropology prefers 'pre-contact' situations - or creates 'no-contact' situations - the Caribbean is nothing but contact." If the anthropological fiction of pristine societies, uninfluenced and uncontaminated by "outside" and more powerful structures and cultures cannot be supported for the Caribbean, then many anthropologists do one or both of the two anthropologically next best things: they take us on a journey that finds us exploding the "no-contact" myth over and over (I think it is called "strawpersonism"), suddenly discovering political economy, history, and colonialism, and/or they end up constructing the "pristine" anyway by emphasizing those parts of a diaspora group's pre-Caribbean culture that are thought to remain as cultural "survivals."

scholarly journals Imagination in Children Entering Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Jovchelovitch ◽  
Jacqueline Priego-Hernández ◽  
Vlad Petre Glăveanu
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Although children are born in a world of already established cultural practices and social representations, the appropriation and internalization of culture are not tasks of reproduction but of imaginative construction. The cultural development of the child offers an empirical opportunity to examine the role of the imagination in the practices by which human children enter culture. This chapter focuses on three such practices—care, play, and storytelling—to observe the imagination at work. By imagining the world both as what it is and as different from the way it is, the authors show that children’s imaginative engagement guides the microgenesis of cognition and macroprocesses of cultural development, and it establishes the freedom to create as a key process in the realization of self and society.

Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Roles: Traditional Teachings or Internalized Colonialism?

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (15-16) ◽  
pp. 2083-2101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyndy Baskin
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women’S Roles ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The Way

Prior to the colonization of Turtle Island, Indigenous women held leadership roles within their communities. Colonization brought patriarchy and racism which attacked women’s identities. Violence toward Indigenous women and girls continues to be a tool of the colonial state while many Indigenous peoples have internalized patriarchal beliefs which manifests in the way they view women’s identities. This article argues that patriarchy may have infiltrated so-called “traditional teachings” that dictate rules about women’s participation in spiritual and cultural practices. It highlights the voices of Indigenous women who discuss this exclusion and how they are taking back their power.

Globalization, Culture and E-Business

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian J. Corbitt
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
World View ◽  
Business Development ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Economic Environment ◽  
Electronic Business ◽  
It Impacts ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
The Way

This chapter is concerned with the way globalization, culture and e-business are interacting in the world economic environment to produce globalized trade and expansion of e-business not only across nations, but between organizations and across organizations internationally. This chapter is also concerned with the nature of globalization and gaining an understanding of what globalization means in various cultures. It will produce an understanding of why globalization is important in understanding e-business, how it impacts on e-business and how it has supported and promoted the changing nature of trade across the world. This chapter will also address why understanding culture is important in the e-business realm. Electronic business cannot be isolated from the cultures in that it works. While there is a tendency towards a world view, or globalized view, of the nature of e-business, the managerial factors and human interaction within e-business are imbued with cultural practices that challenge any sense of uniformity or heterogeneity. We will also be concerned with how e-business development is related to the expansion of globalization thinking and of the way that we are changing our worldview as a whole.

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