Cahokia’s Beginnings

Author(s):  
Alleen Betzenhauser

The combined movements of local and foreign people from pre-Mississippian villages and hamlets into mound centers and out to isolated farmsteads resulted in the creation of Cahokia at AD 1050 as an urban space and the center of a regionally integrated polity. Through these movements, landscapes were redefined and identities and power relations among local and foreign groups were negotiated. It is asserted that such movements interfered with local sources of power while a sense of shared identity was fostered through participation in communal events. Through analyses of site layout, occupational history, and material culture, the historical effects of these movements are traced.

Author(s):  
Mara Mărginean

Building on several international professional meetings of architects organized in Romania or abroad, this article details how various modernist principles, traditionally subsumed to Western European culture, were gradually reinterpreted as an object of policy and professional knowledge on urban space in the second and third world countries. The article analyses the dialogue between Romanian architects and their foreign colleagues. It highlights how these conversations adjusted the hierarchies and power relations between states and hegemonic centres of knowledge production. In this sense, it contributes to the recent research on the means by which the "trans- nationalization of expertise" "transformed various (semi)peripheral states into new centres of knowledge and thus outlines a new analytical space where domestic actions of the Romanian state in the area of urban policies are to be analysed not as isolated practices of a totalitarian regime, but as expressions of the entanglements between industrialization models, knowledge flows and models of territoriality that were not only globally relevant, but they also often received specific regional, national and local forms.


Author(s):  
Galit Noga-Banai

This chapter focuses on the creation of holy sites in Rome that are comparable in their significance to those in Jerusalem—that is, touched by past sacred events and/or sacred bodies. It maps the reasons for the change of attitude toward Jerusalem in Rome, and makes the argument that once the locally connected holy sites projected into the urban space, especially the local bonding of the sites related to Peter and Paul, it was possible to include Jerusalem in the Roman decorative programs. The discussion concentrates on the dynamic involved in the commemoration of sacred spaces in Rome, from the architecture of the holy sites (Basilica Apostolorum, S. Paolo fuori le mura) to portable objects related to them.


Author(s):  
Patricia Lewis ◽  
Nick Rumens ◽  
Ruth Simpson

Mobilising postfeminism as an analytical device, this article re-examines how women business owners discursively engage with the identity of the mumpreneur. Drawing on interviews with women business owners, this article reconceptualises the compatibility between motherhood and entrepreneurship associated with the mumpreneur, in terms of a hybrid identity that interlinks feminine and masculine behaviours connected to home and work. Study data reveal the discursive practices present in interview accounts – choosing family and work, strategic mumpreneurship and enhancing the business without limits – which draw on postfeminist discourses to constitute hybrid entrepreneurial femininities associated with the mumpreneur category. The article contributes to the gender and entrepreneurship literature, in particular, the scholarship on mumpreneurship, by first, showing how engagement with the mumpreneur identity is implicated in the reproduction of masculine entrepreneurship; second, demonstrates how encounters with the mumpreneur contribute to the creation of a hierarchy of entrepreneurial identities which reinforces the masculine norm; and third considers how the mumpreneur as a hybrid identity mobilises entrepreneurship in children in gendered ways. While the emergence of the mumpreneur as a contemporary entrepreneurial identity has positively impacted how women’s entrepreneurship is viewed, the study demonstrates that it has not disrupted dominant discourses of masculine entrepreneurship or gendered power relations in the entrepreneurial field.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-40
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Wheeler

For the Past Five Decades, media texts, broadcast over television air waves, have created a shared identity among viewing audiences. John B. Thompson notes that if culture is understood as “the ways in which meaningful expressions of various kinds are produced, constructed and received by individuals”, then mass media can be understood as central to the creation and maintenance of culture (pp. 122-23). The words and images that construct a media culture are the very building blocks of collective identity. As Michael Schudson observes, “news is part of the background through which and with which people think” (p. 16).


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Pugh ◽  
Katherine Miller Wolf ◽  
Carolyn Freiwald ◽  
Prudence M. Rice

AbstractThe Spaniards established severalcongregacionesor missions in central Petén, Guatemala, shortly after the 1697 conquest of the region to help control local indigenous populations. Recent investigations at the church and community of Mission San Bernabé revealed details about the entangled relations of Mayas and Spaniards. Foucault's four technologies of domination help explicate these power relations as they were played out in the small settlement and the church at its center. Material culture differed in many ways from that of the pre-conquest Itzas, but was clearly predominantly “Maya.” Spanish-style goods and burial patterns were found as were hybrid ceramic wares, the Spanish-style artifacts most common in an elite residence, reflecting that Maya elite acted as brokers with the Spaniards. The occupants also incorporated Spanish domesticates into their diets. Some changes likely resulted from various ethnic groups residing in the same settlement, but others were the product of indigenous adaptations to the situation of contact. Nevertheless, it is clear that the mission anchored a number of strategies of domination that subdued the occupants of San Bernabé.


Author(s):  
Rogério Barbosa da Silva ◽  
Amanda R. G. Martins ◽  
Caio Saldanha

The Tecnopoetics group has developed the concept of Poemaps, which constitutes a system for the creation of poetry within a logic of georeferencing. The intrinsic elements of the Poemaps are: (1) the critical articulation linking poetry and urban space: (2) the use of online mapping services to georeference poetry to certain spaces — fostering the desire to write about lived or imagined spatialities; (3) the topic of the labyrinth — inside a mechanism to foster imagination and questioning about existential complexities in the cities; (4) the creation of interactive poetry as enhancer of criticism — through the use of commentary-poems, fusing transtextual categories, such as metatextuality or architextuality, insofar as texts are also prone to intermedialities; (5) the concept of a web application capable of performing as an open artwork.


2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79
Author(s):  
Dmitry N. Zamyatin ◽  
◽  

Literary texts can be considered as the most attractive research material for analyzing the key features of both the semiotics of the city as a whole and the semiotics of individual cities, to which many works of art are devoted. The urban space of Modernity as a result of the processes of powerful semiotization can be considered as both textual and intertextual. The intertextuality of Modern urban spaces presupposes sets of “floating” topological signifiers corresponding to similar sets of “floating” topological signs. In the traditional semiotics of the city, the existence of two realities is assumed — the “real” reality and the “semiotic” reality, between which clear logical correspondences and/or relations can be observed and analyzed. The appearance of non-classical/post-classical urban narratives focused on the problems of dis-communication at the beginning of the 20th century became one of the important signs of the primary formation of the post-city and post-urbanism phenomena. The post-city is not a text and can not be regarded as a text; at the same time, it can generate separate texts that are not related to each other in any way. Post-urban texts, which are the communicative results of specific co-spatialities, remain local “flashes” that do not form a single text or meta-text (super-text). Hetero-textuality is a phenomenon of post-urban reality, which is characterized by the coexistence, as a rule, of texts that do not correlate with each other, relating to certain stable urban loci. Trans-semiotics in general context is understood as the study of any texts that involve the creation of sign-symbolic breaks or “gaps” with any other potentially possible correlating texts in the process of signification. Trans-semiotics of post-cities are studies of (literary) texts that involve the creation of sign-symbolic breaks or “gaps” with any other potentially possible correlating texts related to a particular urban locus in the process of signifying any urban loci. The post-city heterostructuality can be considered as the co-spatiality of mutually exclusive texts corresponding to “non-seeing” post-city loci. Post-urban trans-semiotics in the course of their development form a kind of “dark zones” that reject or neutralize any attempt at any semiotic interpretation.


Reified Life ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 148-174
Author(s):  
J. Paul Narkunas

This chapter describes how English and French as the de jure languages of human rights at the International Criminal Court. As a result, populations who do not adhere to Western Enlightenment notions of rights can be declared terrorists or “enemies of humankind.” By tracing the workings of translation in the ICC through the Thomas Lubanga trial, the author discusses how translation can deny human status to those brought before the ICC. It also provides, however, the means to challenge the legitimacy of the court as merely another sign of universalizing western justice, solidified by the fact that all people brought before the ICC come from the continent of Africa. By focusing on how language produces reality, the creation of natural rights claims allow for new forms of political protection in the chasm between differing legal orders. Consequently, thinking the role of translation as metaphor and practice for world making and the production of agency is an inchoate form of political aesthetics. Translation may offer, thus, a way to reconceive the human and its attendant rights due to language’s role in world making, subject production, and power relations. This indicates a form of ahuman agency.


Author(s):  
Anne E. Lester

The concept of linguistic “translation” helps to understand the process by which the material culture of the Byzantine empire, taken from Byzantine churches and palaces following the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, was interpreted in new environments in the Latin West. This was a process that required input from those invested in shaping the meaning of the relics and the creation of unique works of art in the form of new reliquaries.


2019 ◽  
pp. 250-330
Author(s):  
Caitlín Eilís Barrett

Expanding current constructions of Nilotica, chapter 6 examines the creation of three-dimensional “Egyptian” landscapes through garden statuary and water features at the Casa di Acceptus e Euhodia. Sidestepping unproductive debates about whether garden statuary signified “religion” or “Egyptomania,” this case study shows how “Egyptianizing” statuary collaborated with the garden’s other contents to create an interactive model landscape. Some evidence from this house suggests that its inhabitants may have directed a domestic cult toward a form of Isis. However, this chapter argues that such practices should not overdetermine our understanding of the garden assemblage. Rather than a binary divide between “Isiacs” and “non-Isiacs,” evidence suggests a broad spectrum of available religious choices. Furthermore, domestic material culture does not correspond to religious identity in a simple or straightforward way. Regardless of their relationship (or lack thereof) to Egyptian-derived cults, most Pompeians appear to have employed domestic Aegyptiaca and Nilotica in fairly similar ways.


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