Controversial Animal Tourism Considered from a Cultural Perspective

An aspect of controversial animal tourism that has received little attention is its relationship with cultural tourism. The article presents a categorization of cultural tourism, and sports attractions and events related to the abuse of animals. It shows how tourists, driven by cultural omnivorousness and the wish to stand out from the crowd, eagerly enjoy controversial forms of animal tourism on their travel. In order to avoid the pitfall of western ethnocentrism ending in accusations of barbarism, the issue is also reflected on from an intercultural point of view, which helps to understand that local communities have different attitudes to animals and their wellbeing. In addition, a historical overview shows that ‘animal friendliness’ does not have a long tradition in western thinking about the human-animal relationship and is only of recent date. Sustainable solutions for controversial animal tourism have to be found by raising tourists’ awareness by means of information and education.

ETNOGRAFÍA DEL CONFLICTO SOCIOCULTURAL EN TORNO A LOS BURROS-TAXI DE MIJAS

These pages attempt to contribute ethnographic material to the discussions and contextual circumstances of a peculiar sociocultural conflict over the relationship between humans and animals in the village of Mijas-Miha (Andalusia, Western Mediterranean), where the existence over six decades of a local service of Donkey-Taxi for tourists has recenly unleashed an abolitionist campaign by animal rights activists. Through the use of ethnographic methodology, this fundamentally descriptive and case-based article is originated around the contradictions of the urban-animalist ideology regarding the ways of life and the Andalusian peasantry culture. Processes which sometimes places us in the urban vs. rural traditional dialectic, or as a result of a globalizing Western ethnocentrism in relation to how to apprehend the nature and the human.

Time to Face the Music: Musical Colonization and Appropriation in Disney’s Moana

Despite Disney’s presentation of Moana as a culturally accurate portrayal of Polynesian culture, the film suffers from Western ethnocentrism, specifically in its music. This assertion is at odds with marketing of Moana that emphasized respect for and consultation with Polynesians whose expertise was heralded to validate the film’s music as culturally authentic. While the composers do, in fact, use Polynesian musical traits, they frame the sounds that are unfamiliar within those that are familiar by wrapping them with Western musical characteristics. When the audience does hear Polynesian music throughout the film, the first and last sounds they hear are Western music, not Polynesian. As such, the audience hears Polynesian sounds meld into and then become the music that defines a typical American film. Thus, regardless of Disney’s employment of Polynesian musicians, the music of Moana remains in the rigid control of non-Polynesian American composers. Rather than break new ground, Moana illustrates a musical recapitulation of white men’s control and marketing of the representations of marginalized people. Moana’s music is subject to appropriation, an echo of how colonial resources were exploited in ways that prioritize benefits to cultural outsiders.

God’s World Is Not an Animal Farm – Or Is It? The Catachrestic Translation of Gender Equality in African Pentecostalism

Building on scholarly debates on Pentecostalism, gender and modernity in Africa, this article engages a postcolonial perspective to explore and discuss the ambivalent, even paradoxical nature of African Pentecostal gender discourse. It analyses the conceptualization of gender equality, in particular the attempt to reconcile the notions of ‘male–female equality’ and ‘male headship’, in a sermon series delivered by a prominent Zambian Pentecostal pastor, and argues that the appropriation and interruption of Western notions of gender equality in these sermons can be interpreted, in the words of Homi Bhabha, as a catachrestic postcolonial translation of modernity. Hence, the article critically discusses the Western ethnocentrism in some scholarly debates on gender and Pentecostalism in Africa, and points to some of the fundamental questions that Pentecostalism and its ambivalent gender discourse pose to gender-critical scholarship in the study of religion.

Conceptual-theoretical Re-orientation in Social Movement Discourse

Western ethnocentrism in the social movement discourse keeps cropping up now and again. An attempt is made to arrive at a theoretical orientation unconstrained by historical contingency, but at the same time, without being a-historical. Conceptually, a distinction is made between social mobilisations and social movements, and between social movements and quasi-social movements. Since social movements are inevitably linked with social changes, a classification of social movements by its intended changes is presented to distinguish between varieties of social movements. Finally, the use of means — institutional and non-institutional — is factored into the theoretical orientation.

On the Borders of Social Theory: Learning from other Regions

In the first section of the paper a few general remarks concerning three lineages of universalism are outlined; these comments act as an introduction to a more detailed examination of ‘Euro-Americanism’. In this second section, the main focus of analysis falls on examples taken from the literature of critical urban studies. In the final part, a briefly stated case is made for learning from the South. It is suggested that it is not only crucial to question all forms of Western ethnocentrism, but that by scrutinizing critically the historical constitution of the relations between the First World and the societies of the periphery, the realities of the West can be better comprehended. In fact, it is argued that without such a connection First World geographers will not be able to grasp the meanings and dispositions of the societies in which they live, and in this important sense will remain ‘intellectual prisoners of the West’.