scholarly journals Esoterogeni og aktiv forskjellsdannelse: Religion og identitetsskapning, i Stillehavet og andre steder

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Thorgeir Kolshus
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Island State ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Empirical Point ◽  
Global Agency ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking its cue from Marx’ and Weber’s grand theorizing, a key narrative in Western modernity has been the inevitable dissolution of pre-modern identities. This thesis has informed both policy making and notions of global agency, and in effect caused a particular worldview in which everyone will become more or less the same – what I refer to as the Star Trek-vision of globalized culture and values. In this article, I borrow the linguistic concept of ‘esoterogeny’, the creation of the obscure, to address whether difference, far from being coincidental, serves a more fundamental experiential purpose and consequently is actively maintained. The empirical point of departure are church fissions and denominational dynamics in the Pacific island state of Vanuatu. I argue that in an age characterized by identity politics, in which recognition and attention are scarce resources, all keen observers of social systems should expect the outcome of ever more global interaction to lead to an increase in articulations of social and cultural difference.

scholarly journals Genres at work: A holistic approach to genres in book publishing

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110060
Author(s):  
Karl Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Book Publishing ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Spatial Understanding ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Empirical Point ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article presents a holistic approach to the study of genres in book publishing that includes formal aspects of literary texts, marketing strategies and categorisations used by producers, and perspectives on how these labels are perceived by readers and critics, as well as a temporal and spatial understanding of how genres evolve. The empirical point of departure is the recent boom in Nordic Noir, exemplified by the following three Swedish authors successful in the 21st century: Lars Kepler, Jens Lapidus and Camilla Läckberg. The discourses surrounding Nordic Noir and how these authors and their writing relate and get related to it are used as an example of how book-trade genres operate in multiple and complex ways, and how genres produce effects that move back and forth among creators, producers and consumers. It proposes a twofold model, where genres are understood as constituted by all of the relations between these areas together. Through Kepler, Lapidus and Läckberg, the article shows how Nordic Noir has emerged over the years; how it changes with its publishing context; and how the genre’s internal discrepancy between literary content and marketing and reception is a crucial component in understanding Nordic Noir.

Asleep at the Wheel: Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Fatigue-Related Crashes in Honolulu

2001 ◽  
Vol 1779 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl E. Kim ◽  
Eric Y. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation System ◽  
Outcome Data ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Crash Data ◽  
Island State ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Limited Opportunity ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Injury Outcomes

As an island state located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there is limited opportunity for long-distance driving, Hawaii provides an interesting context in which to study fatigue-related crashes. Data from the Hawaii Crash Outcome Data Evaluation System are used to analyze and map fatigue-related collisions. Injury outcomes of fatigue-related crashes are analyzed by using police crash data, emergency medical service records, and insurance claims records. There are distinct temporal and spatial patterns as well as relationships between fatigue-related crashes and driver characteristics. Recommendations for preventing fatigue-related crashes are developed. Roadway segments where fatigue-related crashes occur are identified as possible sites for various engineering treatments. Temporal and demographic information also can be used to design and implement more effective programs and systems for fatigue-related crashes.

Re-imagined Community: The Mapuche Nation in Neoliberal Chile

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-220
Author(s):  
Gerardo Gómez Michel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Multicultural Community ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Self Recognition ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Multicultural Policies

In the last decades, one of the punchlines that has sought to legitimize neoliberal political discourse in Latin America is that of a harmonious multicultural community resulting from the recognition of cultural difference. However, progressive multicultural policies are routinely confronted with neoliberal economic mandates and prevalent socio-economic inequalities grounded in dominant criollo-mestizo culture. In this context, the multicultural policies of many of the region’s governments achieve little when it comes to improving the lives of indigenous peoples. Neoliberal multiculturalism may come to constitute a disciplinary framework deployed against indigenous groups to enforce political and economic demands. This chapter analyzes the ways in which some indigenous communities, namely the Maya in Mexico, the Mapuche in Chile and Afrocolombians on the Pacific coast, deal with and challenge these multicultural politics in their countries. Governmental efforts to promote multiculturalism may result in important limitations, as in the case of ambiguous legal procedures to define who can be represented as part of an indigenous culture. One of the ways indigenous communities (here we took Afrolatinamericans as well as indigenous people) have found to challenge neoliberal intercultural policies is to re-imagine their culture identity through memory and literature. Constructing a discourse of self-recognition as a different “imagined community” from the hegemonic criollo-mestizo group within the territory of the Nation-State they inhabit, they articulate a counter-narrative that not only challenges the infamous narratives about them inherited from the Colonial era, but also challenges those of recent times dictated from above

‘Be a model, not a critic’: Self-help culture, implicit censorship and the silent organization

Organization ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 135050842093923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Mygind du Plessis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Meaningful Activity ◽  
7 Habits ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Analytical Perspective ◽  
Employee Silence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Empirical Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article seeks to explain ‘silent organizations’ (i.e. organizations with an absence of critical voices) through an analytical perspective derived from Judith Butler’s work on censorship, and in this way suggest an alternative to explanations in the existing literature on employee silence, which are often tied to the actions and motivations of the individual employee. It is thus argued that self-help books are reflective of wider cultural dynamics and concomitant normative pressures directed at the subject in contemporary capitalism, which among other things promote the absence of criticism in the workplace. The empirical point of departure for this argument is the two bestselling and culturally resonant self-help books The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Theoretically, the article applies Butler’s notion of ‘implicit censorship’ where censorship is understood as productive in the sense of being constitutive of language and subjects. Hence, in the analysis, it is shown how discursive regimes in self-help literature tend to be constructed in such a way that extroverted criticism cannot emerge as a meaningful activity, and is thus implicitly censored.

Wittgenstein’s Remarks Concerning the Accessibility of Foreign Cultures

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Bremer
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Intrinsic Feature

AbstractWittgenstein (1889-1951) was highly disapproving of scholars whom he thought unable to properly acknowledge diversity amongst cultures or take due note of the enormous differences separating them from tribes living in radically heterogeneous cultural environments. The best known and paradigmatic example of his attitude to such differences is to be found in his Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, where he wrote: “[…] how impossible for him [Frazer, J.B.] to understand a different way of life from the English one of his time”. But to cut a long story short, whether Wittgenstein saw this “impossibility” as an intrinsic feature of the task or not is by no means unambiguously clear. To resolve this question, I shall take as my point of departure the socio-anthropological writings of B. Malinowski (1884-1942), who spent several years amongst one of the Pacific island tribes - the Trobriands. In his “field studies”, Malinowski focused on the tribe’s “form of life”: i.e. on their belief in ritual and magic, and on how their customs interlinked with kinship and with their economy. Taking into account Malinowski’s own pragmatic conception of language and his notion of the divergent character of scientific and magical forms of belief, I then outline Wittgenstein’s notions of “language game”, “family resemblance” and “form of life”. The usage of these concepts will show in what sense Wittgenstein would have recognized the similarities within and between different cultures and human societies - but, equally, just how far we can understand a human way of life deeply different from our own.

The origin of the oppositional patterns of cultural diversity in different levels

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (08) ◽  
pp. 2050105
Author(s):  
You-Zhao Gou ◽  
Jun-Ying Cui ◽  
Xiao-Pu Han
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Numerical Simulations ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Communication Cost ◽  
Time Varying ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
Modeling Framework ◽  
Different Levels

The evolution of cultural diversity in some social systems can be observed as the oppositional patterns in different levels, namely, the directions of the trends of diversity in different levels are opposite. In this paper, we propose a payoff-driven metapopulation modeling framework to investigate the origin of the oppositional patterns in the trends of cultural diversity. This model considers the mobile agents in multiple communities, and the cultural characteristics of an agent are represented by a vector. The diffusion of cultural characteristics is driven by two opposite effects: the communication cost positively depending on cultural difference between agents, and the cultural attractiveness single-peak-functional correlating on cultural difference. In the numerical simulations of the model, the polarization is observed in the case with the homophily principle, and two types of the oppositional patterns can emerge in the case with time-varying mobility of agents. These findings efficiently explain the emergence of the oppositional patterns and help to understand the evolution of diversity under the dynamics of both synchronization and variation.

Producing Philosophes in Oceania: Enlightenment through Pacific Spaces

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Kate Fullagar
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Pacific People ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
New Space

The belated European rediscovery of the Pacific helped to test, modify, extend, or otherwise realize the critical, collecting, and conjecturing ethos of the Enlightenment. Whether official philosophers or not, voyagers found in the “new” space of the Pacific more data about the natural and social worlds than they had known before, which led to more empirical comparing, more systematic speculation, and more secular self-questioning. Most scholarship on Enlightenment and Pacific voyaging, however, focuses on relatively elite or well-educated thinkers who were already on the path toward an Enlightenment mindset before they even saw the southern hemisphere. A different story about Enlightenment and the Pacific emerges for less-obviously philosophical voyagers. For these travelers—most of them destined for a maritime but not necessarily an intellectual life—the Pacific could prove to be the primary or originary field for creating an Enlightenment disposition. More particularly, interactions with Pacific people were the means by which some Europeans apprehended what their “philosophical betters” typically discovered via texts. Pacific spaces prompted Enlightenment practices in ordinary mariners more readily or more evidently than they originated them in the educationally advantaged. This article surveys the experiences of a handful of ordinary voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. It aims to move forward discussions about the role the Pacific region and Pacific people played in developing so-called Western modernity.

Systemtheorie und Handlungstheorie – Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis von Aggregation und Emergenz / System-theory and action-theory – Comments on the relationship of aggregation and emergent properties

1978 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Willke
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Emergent Properties ◽  
Specific Question ◽  
Physical Chemical ◽  
Action Units ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Point Of Departure

AbstractThe goal of this article is not to answer a specific question but to analyse some ways to ask questions in relation to highly complex systems. The point of departure is a controversy between PARSONS and LUHMANN about the relationship between parts and wholes, between action units and systems. In the first part (I and II) the positions are presented to point out the problem: can we analyse complex social systems within the frame of action theory on the basis of action units and the functional preconditions of coordinating contingent interactions; or do the emergent properties of complex systems call for a subordination of action theory under the concept of processual prerequisites of system guidance?The second part (II and III) deals with a possibility to revise LUHMANN’s program of an “analysis of complexity” (a program which also is increasingly important for the analysis of complex physical, chemical or biological systems). The classificatorial constraints of LUHMANN’s program are discussed under the perspective of a more adequate theory of generalized media of system guidance.

Policing the war on drugs and the transformation of urban space in Manila

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Bræmer Warburg ◽  
Steffen Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Urban Area ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Hot Spots ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Intimate Connection ◽  
Metro Manila ◽  
Empirical Point ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article explores policing and urban ordering in the Philippine war on drugs. With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, the article highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots. It is examined how inspirations from counter-insurgency strategies are implemented in policing the war on drugs and discussed how this form of policing is negotiated and what implications it produces on the ground. In doing so, the article asks, ‘how have counter-insurgency policing strategies transformed urban space and the possibility of life in the poorer sections of Manila’? Drawing on a conceptual framework on borders, policing and the production of fear, the article argues that there exists an intimate connection between the employed policing strategies and the transformation of urban space with the potential of fundamentally reconfiguring urban sociality in areas such as Bagong Silang.

Between Legibility and Alterity

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-274
Author(s):  
Michael Birenbaum Quintero
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Activism ◽  
The Pacific

Chapter 5 discusses how, in the past three decades, black southern Pacific traditional music has been recast as a touchstone for cultural difference through its mobilization by black artists, activists, and intellectuals and the Colombian state. Positing black identity in Colombia depended on what might be called a politics of resemblance, the couching of local black cultural practices in such a way as to be recognizable as legitimate bearers of credible difference. Once adopted by the state in the 1991 multicultural Constitution, the music of the Pacific has been taken up in a context of neoliberal multiculturalism, as a resource for a variety of divergent and even contradictory agendas, including economic development, social amelioration, governance, and local activism.

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