Guardians of Our Heritage

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Victoria Donovan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Historic Monument ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Way

This chapter focuses on the role of heritage objects as props in the performance of national identity. It draws on participant observation work at local festivals and commemorative ceremonies to expose the way heritage objects have been incorporated into new rituals and traditions in the Putin era. These cultural practices reflect an increasingly chauvinistic understanding of the local and national self. The chapter details in particular the initiative led by the ultranationalist critic and writer Aleksandr Prokhanov to establish a new historic monument in Pskov as a focus of nationalistic reflection and performance after the annexation of Crimea. The project is understood as an elite-driven attempt to perform national identity on the local stage, reinforcing traditional associations of the region with ideas of sacredness and self-sacrifice.

Choosing a spelling system for Mauritian Creole

2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaliya Rajah-Carrim
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Government ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Way

Mauritian Creole (Kreol) is a French-lexified creole spoken on post-colonial and multilingual Mauritius. Although it is extensively used, it has not been officially standardised. The choice of a given orthography reflects language beliefs and is therefore ideologically loaded. More specifically, the way creoles are standardised can reflect the bias towards these languages which are seen as inferior to, and dependent on, their lexifiers. In the Mauritian case, this issue is especially significant because there are now efforts to devise an official standard for the language. In 2004, the Government set up a committee to develop a standard orthography for MC. This paper considers use of, and attitudes to, written Kreol. The material presented is based on interviews conducted in Mauritius and participant observation. Although interviewees do not make extensive use of Kreol in written interactions, they tend to support the promotion of literacy in the language. Responses highlight the tension between Kreol and the colonial languages — English and French — and also the role of Kreol as an index of national identity. Our findings confirm that the choice of an orthographic system reflects linguistic and social hierarchies. I conclude that this study has practical social implications for the standardisation of Kreol.

Diasporic and Gendered Identities in Moroccan Transnational Cinema: Mohammed Ismail’s Ici et là (Here and There)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Mouhcine El-Hajjami ◽  
Souad Slaoui
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Transnational Cinema ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

The present paper aims at examining the extent to which Moroccan cinema could establish a diasporic visual discourse that cements national identity and contests the impact of westernization on migrants. Moreover, through the analysis the way in which independent identities are constructed in the host land, the article tries to incorporate a feminist discourse to highlight the role of the female subject in retrieving its own agency by challenging patriarchal oppression. Therefore, we argue that Mohammed Ismail’s feature-length film Ici et là (Here and There) has partially succeeded in creating a space for its diasporic subjects to build up their own independent identities beyond the scope of westernization and patriarchy.

scholarly journals Civil Religion or Nationalism? The National Day Celebrations in Norway

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 206
Author(s):  
Pål Ketil Botvar
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
General Population ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Better Than ◽  
The Way

The Norwegian National Day (17 May, also referred to as Constitution Day) stands out as one of the most popular National Day celebrations in Europe. According to surveys, around seven out of every 10 Norwegians take part in a public celebration during this day. This means that the National Day potentially has an impact on the way people reflect upon national identity and its relationship to the Lutheran heritage. In this paper, I will focus on the role religion plays in the Norwegian National Day rituals. Researchers have described these rituals as both containing a significant religious element and being rather secularized. In this article, I discuss the extent to which the theoretical concepts civil religion and religious nationalism can help us understand the role of religion, or the absence of religion, in these rituals. Based on surveys of the general population, I analyze both indicators of civil religion and religious nationalism. The two phenomena are compared by looking at their relation to such items as patriotism, chauvinism, and xenophobia. The results show that civil religion explains participation in the National Day rituals better than religious nationalism.

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.

scholarly journals The Revolution Will Be Performed. Cameras and Mass Protests in the Perspective of Contemporary Art

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Image Production ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
New Situation ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract This article offers an analysis of Videograms of a Revolution (1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujica and The Pixelated Revolution (2011) by Rabih Mroue, which both reflect on the role of amateur recordings in a revolution. While the first deals with the abundant footage of the mass protests in 1989 Romania, revealing how images became operative in the unfolding of the revolution, the second shows that mobile phone videos disseminated by the Syrian protesters in 2011 respond to the desire of immediacy with the blurry, fragmentary images taken in the heart of the events. One of the most significant results of this new situation is the way image production steers the comportment of people involved in the events. Ordinary participants become actors performing certain roles, while the events themselves are being seen as cinematic. This increased theatricality of mass protests can thus be seen as an instance of blurring the lines between video and photography on the one hand and performance, theatre and cinema on the other.

Subversive Celebrations: Holidays as Sites of Minority Identity Contestation in Repressive Regimes

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Lisel Hintz ◽  
Allison L. Quatrini
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Identity Salience ◽  
Institutional Barriers ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Identity Narratives ◽  
Spring Festival ◽  
Ethnographic Observation

Abstract What role do nationally celebrated holidays play for groups that are not considered—or do not consider themselves—to be part of the majority nation of a state? What function do holidays specific to minority group cultures serve under regimes that discriminate against those groups? This article explores holidays as a forum for contestation for the national identity proposals promulgated by the state in repressive regimes. We argue that national holidays are meaningful sites of identity contestation for four reasons: the role of holidays in heightening identity salience, the malleability of identity narratives, the relative lack of institutional barriers to acts of celebration, and the significance of refusing to participate in celebrations. We collected the data through interviews and participant observation of the Hui in China and the Kurds in Turkey. We employ ethnographic observation and intertextual analysis to compare these identity narratives. We find that the Hui legitimize their group’s existence by co-opting the traditional Spring Festival, or by outwardly insisting they are not celebrating while still engaging in festivities. In contrast, Turkey’s Kurds resist the government’s co-optation of the spring celebration of Newroz as a Turkish national holiday.

Musical resistance and musical bodies in the making: A worker-band from southern China

2021 ◽  
pp. 136787792110117
Author(s):  
Vincent Guangsheng Huang
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Southern China ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
And Performance

This study explores the role of the body in the making of a migrant worker-band and the potential for musical production and performance activities to reshape workers’ cultural subjectivities. A framework of reflexive embodiment is used to understand how musical production and performance activities shape the cultural subjectivities of migrant workers through three bodily processes: body as text/text as body, body as instrument and body in performance. By highlighting the bodily dimension, this article seeks to broadly engage with and advance scholarship on the nexus between cultural practices and the formation of working-class subjectivity, and to specifically enrich our understanding of the migrant workers in contemporary China. This alternative musical practice is a form of ‘musical resistance’ that is not only culturally remaking working-class bodies but also providing cultural resources for the solidarity of the working-class community.

scholarly journals Subsistence, Environment and Mesolithic Landscape Archaeology

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Variability ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Landscape Archaeology ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Variability ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Since the 1970s, research into Mesolithic landscapes has been heavily influenced by economic models of human activity where patterns of settlement and mobility result from the relationship between subsistence practices and the environment. However, in reconstructing these patterns we have tended to generalize both the modes of subsistence and the temporal and spatial variability of the environment, and ignored the role that cultural practices played in the way subsistence tasks were organized. While more recent research has emphasized the importance that cultural practices played in the way landscapes were perceived and understood, these have tended to underplay the role of subsistence and have continued to consider the environment in a very generalized manner. This paper argues that we can only develop detailed accounts of Mesolithic landscapes by looking at the specific forms of subsistence practice and the complex relationships they created with the environment. It will also show that the inhabitation of Mesolithic landscapes was structured around cultural attitudes to particular places and to the environment, and that this can be seen archaeologically through practices of deposition and recursive patterns of occupation at certain sites.

scholarly journals Edmonton Hiphop Kulture: Techniques of self and cultural sustainability

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Heather Patricia Pearson ◽  
Roya Yazdanmehr
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Cultural Sustainability ◽  
Critical Hermeneutic ◽  
University Professor

The word culture is rich with complex meanings and despite its use in common speech little is known about it and even less about the practices that contribute to ‘its’ continued existence, what might be called cultural sustainability. Edmonton Hiphop Kulture:Techniques of Self and Cultural Sustainability documents the role of techniques of self, defined as the daily practices an individual uses to transform his or her body, soul, thought and conduct of being (Foucault, 1988, p. 18), in the development and maintenance of Hiphop Kulture in Edmonton, Alberta. Using a Critical Constructivist methodology, the researchers document the weekly creation of Hiphop Kulture knowledge at Cipher5, a knowledge circle organized by Hip Hop specialists Andre Hamilton, Don Welsh, and MacEwan University professor Dr. Michael B. MacDonald.  With Michel Foucault’s (1988) theory in mind that culture is a form of administration built by techniques of production, signification, domination and self (Kendall & Wickham, 1999, pp. 3-54), this paper documents the researchers’ exploration of techniques of self in Hiphop Kulture. The researchers theorize that these techniques, or cultural practices, include self-expression, belonging, and identity development and that these three techniques encourage the sustainability of Edmonton Hiphop Kulture. Research methods include participant observation at weekly Cipher5 meetings, autoethnography, interviews with Cipher5 members, and a literature review including a critical hermeneutic analysis of Hiphop literature.

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