"We do not live for material things:" indigenous culture and food security in Brazil, the case of the Cinta Vermelha-Jundiba village

This project is based on a qualitative analysis of the opinions of key actors involved in the construction of the indigenous village Cinta Vennelha-Jundiba (CVJ) in Brazil. The CVJ village represents a unique case in Brazil: for the first time in history, an indigenous group from different ethnic backgrounds got together and bought their own land. The research question that guided the analysis is in the context of the creation of the CVJ village: Does food play a role related to cultural reinvention and ethnic reconstruction? The purpose of this project is to explore how food has the communicative function of a bridging mechanism between the Pankararu and the Pataxo cultures in the CVJ village. The conclusions of the analysis show that the interaction between the CVJ's inhabitants is characterized by profound cultural reconstruction and ethnic reinvention, and food production and consumption are key factors in these processes.

"We do not live for material things:" indigenous culture and food security in Brazil, the case of the Cinta Vermelha-Jundiba village

This project is based on a qualitative analysis of the opinions of key actors involved in the construction of the indigenous village Cinta Vennelha-Jundiba (CVJ) in Brazil. The CVJ village represents a unique case in Brazil: for the first time in history, an indigenous group from different ethnic backgrounds got together and bought their own land. The research question that guided the analysis is in the context of the creation of the CVJ village: Does food play a role related to cultural reinvention and ethnic reconstruction? The purpose of this project is to explore how food has the communicative function of a bridging mechanism between the Pankararu and the Pataxo cultures in the CVJ village. The conclusions of the analysis show that the interaction between the CVJ's inhabitants is characterized by profound cultural reconstruction and ethnic reinvention, and food production and consumption are key factors in these processes.

Understanding Intraethnic Diversity

This paper fills a scholarly gap in the understanding of intraethnic diversity by way of a case study of the formation of a Taiwanese American identity. Drawing on a review of the existing scholarly literature and data from systematic field observations, as well as secondary data including ethnic organizations’ mission statements and activity reports, we explore how internal and external processes intersect to drive the construction of a distinct Taiwanese American identity. The study focuses on addressing three interrelated questions: (1) How does Taiwanese immigration to the United States affect diasporic development? (2) What contributes to the formation of a Taiwanese American identity? (3) In what specific ways is the Taiwanese American identity sustained and promoted? We conceive of ethnic formation as an ethnopolitical process. We argue that this ethnopolitical process involves constant negotiation and action in multiple spaces beyond nation-state boundaries. We show that immigration dynamics and homeland politics interact to create diversified rather than homogenized patterns of diasporic development and ethnic identification. The lifting of martial law in 1987 and democratization in Taiwan since then have led to increased public support for Taiwanization and Taiwanese nationalism in Taiwan. Rising nationalism in the homeland has in turn invigorated efforts at constructing an ethnonational – Taiwanese American – identity in the diaspora through proactive disidentification from the Chinese American community and civic transnationalism. This ethnopolitical identity is re-affirmed through cultural reinvention, outreach and networking, and appropriation of Taiwan indigenous cultures and symbols. We conclude by discussing the complexity of diasporic development and identity formation.

‘So complete a change’ (in So Short a Time) – Scottish Romanticism, Modernity and Collective Memory

This chapter provides an overview of the themes of the book. Largely in response to their own national predicament in post-Union imperial Britain, Scottish writers of the Romantic period brought to the British Atlantic a historiography of collective or cultural memory, which imagined an unprecedented fissure within the flow of time that had rent the present from the past. This sense of an immense gulf between past and present – measured in only one or two generations and imagined to be within reach of, or just beyond, living memory – was attended by deep national anxieties but also by a renewed optimism, of social and cultural reinvention. As it circulated along the routes of the British empire, Scottish history writing of the period made a fundamental contribution to the culture of modernity in the Atlantic world.

Reception Studies and Cultural Reinvention in Aristophanes and Tawfiq Al-Hakim

We look on the totality of the past as dreams, certainly interesting ones, and regard only the latest state of science as true, and that only provisionally so. This is culture.Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?Reception studies in classics live a complicated scholarly life. On one hand, a healthy collection of new monographs appears on the market every year that shows the strength of this subfield, including such recent additions as Gonda Van Steen's Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands and Simon Goldhil's work on the Victorian reception of classics called Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity. Collections of essays that contribute to the field are also copiously produced. Thus two scholars could lately declare that ‘[n]o sub-field in the discipline of Classics has experienced such growth, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, over the past fifteen years or so as the study of reception of classical material’. Charles Martindale, credited with throwing down the receptive gauntlet some twenty years ago, recently wrote an essay on the flourishing state of this subfield within classics, reporting that reception studies have proven classics to be not ‘something fixed, whose boundaries can be shown.’ He adds the following:Many classicists (though by no means the majority) are in consequence reasonably happy, if only to keep the discipline alive in some form, to work with an enlarged sense of what classics might be, no longer confined to the study of classical antiquity ‘in itself’—so that classics can include writing about Paradise Lost, or the mythological poesie of Titian, or the film Gladiator, or the iconography of fascism.

Gypsy Pentecostalism, Ethnopolitical Uses and Construction of Belonging in the South of Spain

The Gypsy Evangelical movement started in the west of France where, in the mid twentieth century, the first conversions took place. Back home, the converted started preaching among their people, spreading the religious movement all the way to western Andalusia. Half a century later, we can hardly call this a “new” movement, but we can certainly say that Gypsy Pentecostalism has become one of the most original organizational experiences developed by Spanish gypsies. The process of constructing this new sense of ethnic and religious belonging has been marked by the double suspicion that hangs over Evangelical Gypsies: first, as part of a stigmatized ethnic minority and, second, as members of a religious “sect”. However, this has also helped to strengthen the process of ethnogenesis and cultural reinvention that is redrawing the image of gypsies from the angle of Evangelism. It has also brought about the strategic and intentional mobilization of ethnicity—the search for recognition and political activity aimed at obtaining public resources to finance extensive social development.