Live and let live? Morality in symbolic boundaries across different cultural areas

This article examines morality in taste judgements. In response to Bourdieu’s analysis of France in the 1960s, sociologists note that repertoires of moral evaluation vary across contexts. They typically highlight national variations, like Nordic egalitarianism weakens cultural boundaries, and temporal variations, with transformed values having made cultural hierarchies less defensible. The article investigates a neglected type of moral variation: contrasting cultural areas. In a study of class and culture in Stavanger, Norway, the authors combined oral interviews on taste with photo elicitation in the visual arts, literature and housing/architecture. While interviewees were often careful not to appear disdainful of other people’s tastes, and expressed ambivalence about cultural boundaries, their thoughts on housing/architecture diverged. Here, people did not hesitate to criticise other people’s taste, even to the point of ridiculing their houses. The authors discuss the implications for Lamont’s symbolic boundary perspective, which is predicated on a separation of three types of symbolic boundaries (cultural, socioeconomic, moral). Morality can both weaken and reinforce cultural boundaries, depending on the areas under investigation. In conclusion, the authors suggest ways cultural sociology may conceive of different moral modalities.

Theses on Translation: An Organon for the Current Moment

The theses offer a general theory of translation that encompasses the relation between theoryand practice and the different models of translation that generate theoretical concepts likeequivalence and ethics. The instrumental model that understands translation as a reproduction or transfer of a source-text invariant is critiqued, whereas a hermeneutic model that understands translation as an interpretation that varies the source text is advanced. Verbal choices are treated as interpretive moves that vary a range of textual features according to factors that are drawn decisively from the receiving culture where they are arranged in hierarchies of value. The interpretive act performed by translation is informed by global cultural hierarchies in which value is distributed unevenly across major and minor languages, redefining the ethical and political stakes of a translation project.

Theses on Translation: An Organon for the Current Moment

The theses offer a general theory of translation that encompasses the relation between theoryand practice and the different models of translation that generate theoretical concepts likeequivalence and ethics. The instrumental model that understands translation as a reproduction or transfer of a source-text invariant is critiqued, whereas a hermeneutic model that understands translation as an interpretation that varies the source text is advanced. Verbal choices are treated as interpretive moves that vary a range of textual features according to factors that are drawn decisively from the receiving culture where they are arranged in hierarchies of value. The interpretive act performed by translation is informed by global cultural hierarchies in which value is distributed unevenly across major and minor languages, redefining the ethical and political stakes of a translation project.

The political economy of fanzines on the threshold of state socialism and post-socialism: The story of Czech(o)slovak fanzines

In this article, I analyse Czech and Slovak fanzine-making during the transition from state socialism to post-socialism. The regime change ushered in new dominant forms of cultural production, and thus a situation emerged in which cultural hierarchies were being negotiated and new ways of collective action being formed. Fanzines played a crucial role in building up alternative communities in the new neoliberal system, when there was strong demand for Western subcultural styles and the need of safe space of domestic scenes. Independent publishing depends heavily upon that which it opposes, and when major social changes occur, fanzine-making provided a space for negotiating cultural hierarchies, resulting in specific ways in which fanzines help build and maintain alternative scenes.

Super-Cripple Sights: Disable Heroes in Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

Robert and Tiresias, disable protagonists respectively of Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with their super cripple qualities challenge the imperatives of ableist ideals. Protagonists’ blindness leads them to insight whereas their counter characters’ sight leads them to darkness. Such a role reversal leads to a questioning of dichotomies and establishes an alternative view to the definition of blindness and insight. To support this claim, I use Lennard J. Davis’ concept of disable bodies in literature, Rod Michalko’s notion of fictional explorations of disability, and Nickianne Moody’s model of disability informed criticism backed up by Judith Butler’s notion of body politics, Rosemarie Thompson’s idea of extraordinary bodies, and different critical readings on body. This framework of interpretation validates disable bodies as cultural construction. It also regards literatureas apt venue to challenge culturally assigned definition of ability and disability in favor of new body possibilities. The theoretical framework thus discovers Carver and Sophocles redrawing the concept of able-bodiedness and deeply rooted cultural hierarchies like able/disable, sight/blind, sight/insight, body/mind, visible/invisible, and inside/outside in their literary texts.

Are fashion sketchbooks racist?

Drawing on scholar Marc Augé’s concept of non-place, this article contributes to growing studies that focus on the ways in which fashion produces racism. Recent years have shown a rise in the scrutiny by social media of racist fashion garments and campaigns that problematically stereotype, appropriate and Other marginalized cultures. However, less attention has been given to how racism is constructed through design practices in education and curricula, such as through the different activities and techniques that constitute the fashion ideation process. Indeed, few studies to date have examined how commonplace design tools such as sketchbooks, measuring tapes or mannequins reinscribe forms of Othering. This article sets out to critically examine representations of Othering in fashion design sketchbooks and discuss the role this ubiquitous fashion tool might play in encouraging racist fashion representations. The sketchbooks of undergraduate fashion design students were chosen for this study due to the importance of fashion education as a catalyst for future fashion cultures. From an initial sample of seventy sketchbooks, twelve sketchbooks showed representations of cultural difference through an over-reliance on excessive imagery, with limited text. These strategies showed a pattern of reproducing ahistorical static ideas which reinforce cultural hierarchies. Marc Augé’s concept of non-place is used in this study to refer to how time and space are mobilized using various design techniques and employed within sketchbooks. Such techniques show paradoxical representations of cultural differences, which lack context-specific histories and identities. The study identifies two key strategies used within fashion sketchbooks: firstly, the de-contextualization of cultural difference, and then the re-contextualization of cultural difference. Combined, these strategies show how using collaging techniques in sketchbooks in the fashion design process erases meaning by compressing time and space.

Racial Passing and the Eurasian Question in Kipling's Kim

The hero of Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim is an orphaned European boy who ‘goes native’, blending in among Europeans and Indian natives alike. Although Kim is said to be the son of an Irish sergeant, it is far likelier that a child of Kim's class origins would have been mixed-race. In addition to the economic constraints and lack of social status that afflicted poor whites in India, this article also examines the novel against the backdrop of the colonial authorities’ efforts in British India to resolve the ‘Eurasian Question’. It argues that, though Kipling's depiction of the European orphan who can pass for a native is problematic, it nevertheless betrays deep-rooted anxieties about the racial and cultural hierarchies that legitimated the colonial project. Indeed, the ambiguities of the novel lead Kipling to open the door to such ideas as that the ‘Oriental’ traits of his hero are superior to those of his characteristics that could be regarded as Western. Kipling's selective view of his novel's economic and cultural context cannot avoid giving rise to readings that contradict and undermine the determination to justify the imperial project.

Sport, Nationalism, and the Narration of Cultural Scripts: The Death of Colin Meads and the New Zealand Imagination

This paper explores the narrativization of sports icons within the context of nationalist discourse. The authors explore New Zealand media coverage surrounding the death of Colin Meads in August 2017. Meads, a former all Black rugby captain, coach and administrator, media pundit, and corporate spokesman, was a high-profile public icon. His death was met with saturation national media coverage. The authors’ cultural studies informed analysis of Meads’ narrativization is twofold. First, the authors contextualize the cultural scripts surrounding him prior to his death. Second, they critically read media narrativization following his death within the context of narratives of nation. They explore this mediation in the context of intersecting themes of rurality, Whiteness, masculinity, and rugby. Print media coverage widely articulated Meads to the nation as the archetypical “kiwi,” liturgized his contribution to rugby during and after his playing career, and his “no-nonsense” character. In doing so, it reinforced a selective national narrative, premised on a combination of both remembering and forgetting. This narrative reaffirms White-settler, male heroism, and rugby as central to New Zealand nationhood and assuages contemporary national anxieties and the cultural hierarchies they entangle.