scholarly journals The spreading of a counter-culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Paolo Stuppia
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sustainable Communities ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
May 1968 ◽  
Back To The Land

This article studies the 60s-70s counterculture, taking the example of the French back-to-the-land movement that spread after the May 1968 revolt. It is based on an ongoing ethnographic research started in 2008 in the Pyrenees. After having outlined an atlas of the French back-to-the-land phenomenon, my aim is to analyze its reasons and persistences, 50 years after first people moved to the countryside to live in intentional communities. Some of the areas invested by those people still preserve the original counter-cultural spirit of the 60s-70s, attracting until today « new settlers » trying to live differently form the rest of the society, defend nature and re-create sustainable communities.

Myth and the ‘home culture concept’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Modigliani
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Intentional Communities ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Cultural Expressions ◽  
Back To The Land

Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s art history master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established “myth” as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’s seeming “lack of history,” the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media based art groups, and the influence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson’s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists.

Modern Homesteading in America: Negotiating Religion, Nature, and Modernity

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kneale Gould
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Rural Living ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Face ◽  
Back To The Land

AbstractThis article explores the spiritual dimensions of modern back-to-the-land (or homesteading) practices in contemporary American culture. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, it examines the ways in which nature is sacralised and everyday life is ritualised by those who have chosen to lead lives of partial self-sufficiency in rural locales. Through an examination of oral and literary source material, and several case studies, this study demonstrates the ways in which nature is constructed as a source of meaning and authority for those who are disaffected from traditional religious institutions. This article also seeks to unfold the complexities involved in living `close to nature', such as the dangers in seeing 'natural living' as the only standard for the moral life and the tendency for 'back to the land' practices to be advocated by those whose class location is a privileged one. The analysis offered here is intended as a point of access into broader tensions in American culture: between traditional and alternative forms of religious practice, between the idealisation of rural life and the realities of rural living, and between the desire for freedom and the desire for self-imposed constraint in the face of modernity.

Living Sustainably

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Whitney Sanford
Keyword(s):  
Lifestyle Changes ◽  
Intentional Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Voluntary Simplicity ◽  
Catholic Worker ◽  
Residential Communities ◽  
Governance Systems ◽  
The Us ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Building Community

How can we live together in ways that are healthy and sustainable for people and the planet? This book tells the story of people attempting to live intentionally and sustainably by practicing ideals of nonviolence, participatory democracy, and voluntary simplicity. Between 2011 and 2015, I conducted ethnographic research in over twenty intentional communities, which can be broadly defined as residential communities organized around shared values, around the US. These communities understand themselves as demonstration communities, developing and testing, but not imposing, new patterns of living, eating, and communicating. Communities in this book include ecovillages, cohousing communities, and Catholic worker houses and farms, located in urban, rural, and suburban regions. The initial chapters of the book explore why people come to these communities, who comes, and what they do when they get there, including growing food, creating governance systems, and building community. Each faced similar sets of challenges that are familiar to us: most people are ambivalent in our attitudes towards authority, regulation, and community. The final chapters suggest ways to apply what these communities have learned in the context of our own lives and regions. Food co-ops, pocket neighborhoods, and cohousing, for example, offer some benefits of intentional communities such as control over food but require fewer drastic lifestyle changes.

Counter culture: Causes, extent and solutions of systematic bias in the analysis of behavioural counts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel L Pick ◽  
Nyil Khwaja ◽  
Michael A. Spence ◽  
Malika Ihle ◽  
Shinichi Nakagawa
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
Null Model ◽  
Mechanistic Explanation ◽  
Effect Sizes ◽  
Systematic Bias ◽  
Intra Class Correlation ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
Provisioning Rate ◽  
Parental Provisioning ◽  
Observation Period

We often quantify a behaviour by counting the number of times it occurs within a specific, short observation period. Measuring behaviour in such a way is typically unavoidable but induces error. This error acts to systematically reduce effect sizes, including metrics of particular interest to behavioural and evolutionary ecologists such as R2, repeatability (intra-class correlation, ICC) and heritability. Through introducing a null model, the Poisson process, for modelling the frequency of behaviour, we give a mechanistic explanation of how this problem arises and demonstrate how it makes comparisons between studies and species problematic, because the magnitude of the error depends on how frequently the behaviour has been observed (e.g. as a function of the observation period) as well as how biologically variable the behaviour is. Importantly, the degree of error is predictable and so can be corrected for. Using the example of parental provisioning rate in birds, we assess the applicability of our null model for modelling the frequency of behaviour. We then review recent literature and demonstrate that the error is rarely accounted for in current analyses. We highlight the problems that arise from this and provide solutions. We further discuss the biological implications of deviations from our null model, and highlight the new avenues of research that they may provide. Adopting our recommendations into analyses of behavioural counts will improve the accuracy of estimated effect sizes and allow meaningful comparisons to be made between studies.

Going North, coming South: Guatemalan migratory flows

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164
Author(s):  
Michelle J. Moran-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
International Migration ◽  
Return Migration ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
New Ideas

Understanding the return aspect of international migration is vital because returnees replete with new ideas, perceptions on life, and monies affect every dimension of social life in migrants’ places of origin.  Yet, return migration remains uneven and an understudied aspect of migratory flows because migration scholars have privileged why individuals migrate, the underlying motivations for their moves abroad, and how migrants assimilate and succeed in their destinations abroad. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article addresses the migratory flows of Ladino and Mayan Guatemalans:  those who go North, but in particular, those who come South. And in doing so, it highlights their similar and divergent responses towards migration processes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document