Cultural Landmarks and Urban Landscapes in Three Contrasting Societies

Cultural heritage sites and landscapes are intuitively connected in urban systems. Based on available databases of cultural landmarks, we selected three pairs of cities that are currently dominated by three contrasting religions (Catholic, Buddhist and emerging culture) to compare the long-term changes in cultural landmarks, to quantify their spatial distribution in the current landscape, and to examine the potential influences these landmarks have on landscapes. The landmark database and landscapes were constructed from archived maps, satellite imagery and the UNESCO heritage sites for Barcelona, Bari, Beijing, Vientiane, Shenzhen, and Ulaanbaatar. Roads in Asian cities are mostly constructed in alignment with the four cardinal directions, forming a checkerboard-type landscape, whereas Bari and Barcelona in Europe have examples of roads radiating from major cultural landmarks. We found clear differences in the number of landmarks and surrounding landscape in these cities, supporting our hypothesis that current urban landscapes have been influenced similarly by cultural landmarks, although substantial differences exist among cities. Negative relationships between the number of cultural landmarks and major cover types were found, except with agricultural lands. Clearly, cultural landmarks need to be treated as “natural features” and considered as reference points in urban planning. Major efforts are needed to construct a global database before an overarching conclusion can be made for global cities.

An Ancient in Catherinian Russia: Classical Reception, Sensibility, and Nobility in Princess Ekaterina Urusova's Poetry of the 1770s

This article argues for the importance of Princess E.S. Urusova's four poems published between 1772 and 1777 to scholarly discussions of both classical reception and noble culture. Urusova engages more intensively than any other Russian writer of the period with the European Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, formulating thereby unique responses to major literary and political concerns of the 1770s. In the literary sphere, the Quarrel allows Urusova to conceptualize with exceptional perspicacity the multifaceted cultural environment of the time: contributing to Russia's claim to be the direct heir of the Greeks and Romans, she also makes the interesting case that the emerging culture of sensibility ideally equips readers and writers to absorb the classics. In the political sphere, by evoking the framework of ancient virtue through classical intertexts, she envisages an alliance between the sovereign and a strong nobility based on both cultural refinement and a sense of duty and service to the nation. Urusova's case shows how imitating and reinterpreting the classics helped one woman to find her voice as a poet in eighteenth-century Russia.

Musical and psychological anthropology: scientific and educational project

The relevance of the article lies in the need to comprehend at a new level the methods of organizing education at a university in order to actualize the professional and personal reflection of students in the context of the analysis of existing artistic anthropopractics, including in the aspect of personal preferences of cultural and stylistic phenomena. The purpose of the author's scientific and educational project – musical and psychological anthropology – was to create a course and organize the learning process at the humanities faculties of a pedagogical university through self-knowledge of young people in the process of getting education. To organize the process of self-knowledge of students and actualize reflection, a complex of methods of musical-psychological anthropology was developed and tested: analysis of ideal and real artifacts of musical consciousness; analysis of types of musical behavior; analysis of intonation archetypes; case analysis "psychological complex of a modal personality – a carrier of a certain musical style"; analysis of precedent texts of musical culture (generational, ethno-cultural and confessional preferences) and other author's methods. The developed methods constitute a methodological toolkit that is studied and used in the course of musical and psychological anthropology at a university for research and self-understanding of university students (learning through research of self). The generalization of the results allows us to speak about the effectiveness of the approach to the study of the mentality of the implicit social groups of the modern metropolis (Moscow) by studying the musical preferences and value orientations of young people. The general significance of the project of musical-psychological anthropology as a scientific field of knowledge and anthropopractic within the educational process is seen in the creation of conditions for students to acquire "living" new knowledge and to satisfy the need for self-understanding and "care for oneself" (M. Foucault) as a subject of an emerging culture.

Students of Academic Capitalism: Emotional Dimensions in the Commercialization of Higher Education

This article spotlights the emotional aspect of the commercialization of university studies. Whereas the literature on current challenges of higher education highlights the students’ customer role, we reveal how neoliberal studenthood combines a consumerist worldview with the discourse of emotional experience. The narratives of Israeli students in the present article show consumerist–emotional therapeutic duality in the ways they make sense of their encounter with the university. Students evaluate how their professors meet their emotional, therapeutic, and consumer needs and perceive the knowledge they acquire as providing them with both pragmatic skills and emotional experience. We argue that this duality is significant to the emerging culture of ‘academic capitalism’ and show how the commercialized feelings and pragmatics of self-development operate as a manifestation of ‘emotional capitalism’.

Rights Rhetoric

Two competing narratives of rights constitutionalism have emerged in the rights discourse in Asian democracies. One account is often characterized as a universalist approach toward individual rights, driven by Western notions of liberalism and focused on civil and political liberties. In contrast, some Asian states have asserted a relativist approach toward rights, prioritizing communitarian interests and economic development over individual freedoms of expression, assembly, and personal liberty. Pitted against each other, these two frames have produced dichotomies perceived as being in tension with each other: between universalism and relativism, between individualism and communitarianism, and between civil-political rights and economic development. These constructed dichotomies perpetuated during the “Asian values” debate have continued even in the aftermath of that discourse to shape rights rhetoric and practice in the states that had been its strongest proponents. Yet the established political and constitutional paradigm has begun to shift. The changing political and popular landscape has been due in part to sustained political participation and growing rights consciousness since the turn of the twenty-first century in modern Malaysia and Singapore. This emerging culture of constitutionalism sets the backdrop for developing constitutional adjudication in these aspiring Asian democracies.

Emerging Culture and Cultural capital: The cases of yoga, meditation and vegetarianism in the U.K.

Yoga and meditation have experienced a boom in Western appropriation in recent decades and consistently grow more culturally ubiquitous. Likewise, rates of vegetarianism increase every year. However, little scholarly work has been produced around these newer forms upon the cultural landscape. This paper seeks to remedy this fact. It aims to advance understandings as to the patterns of consumption regarding newer cultural forms, with yoga, meditation, and vegetarianism as case studies. Proceeding with the U.K. as the field of study, this paper presents an original national survey. It performs a multiple correspondence analysis and multinomial logistic regressions with the survey data to accomplish a topographical mapping and bivariate analysis of consumption and interaction with these cultural forms. Through this empirical and statistical analysis, it asserts that objectified cultural capital is still important for the social distinction associated with participation patterns of these forms. These emerging forms of culture are thus rarefied in a way that more closely resembles traditionally highbrow cultural forms.

The Role of Indigenous Knowledge System in African Development

This paper examines the relevance of Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) for African development, using qualitative data. The findings revealed that wholesale adoption of foreign ideas has rendered Africans subservient in the world, despite their rich cultural heritage. This situation promotes substitution of IKS, the foundation of African progress, thereby creating more problems for Africans. Yet, IKS still provides succour for the majority of Africans. The emerging culture of individuality and nuclear family is not realistic in Africa where social structures largely reflect kinship solidarity and communalism sustained by social capital, which has become widely recognised. It is therefore suggested that Africans should revise their local circumstances to prevent further plunder of Africa. Also, there is urgent need for adaptation of African IKS to modern reality because the conditions that sustained it have been modified. Rather than focus on wholesale adoption of western remedies, Africans need to explore their IKS to promote common understanding in the context of contemporary globalisation. Africans at home and those in the Diaspora should utilise their abundant natural resources and human capital to repair the dented image of Africa. An upgraded version of African IKS can drive and sustain this mission.