EXPLORING CULTURAL COMMODITY IN RELIGIOUS TOUR OF MOUNT KAWI

Mount Kawi is a mountain believed to have supernatural powers. By the existence of Imam Soedjono and Eyang Djugo as historical figures, pilgrims often come to pray in search of blessings. Pilgrims coming to Mount Kawi are not only Javanese but also Chinese. The presence of the ethnic Chinese community influences the cultural distinction in the site. A large number of visitors coming to Mount Kawi brings several shifting elements. To attract the attention of pilgrims, the locals create religious-cultural tourism in Mount Kawi as a compelling attraction. The shift plays a serious impact on the socio-cultural dimension. This appealing creativity serves as a commodity for the tourist. Cultural commodity in religious tourism is supported by the interests of the authorities. Thus, the purpose of this study is to reveal the emergence of commodification in Mount Kawi. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method to describe the causes of commodification. The data are obtained from the field, observation, and interviews through informants. The narrative is employed instead of numeric data thus the data are organized, classified, and criticized. Hence, to reveal the cultural commodities in Mount Kawi, the commodification theory and hegemony are applied.

Global range expansion history of pepper (Capsicum spp.) revealed by over 10,000 genebank accessions

Genebanks collect and preserve vast collections of plants and detailed passport information, with the aim of preserving genetic diversity for conservation and breeding. Genetic characterization of such collections has the potential to elucidate the genetic histories of important crops, use marker–trait associations to identify loci controlling traits of interest, search for loci undergoing selection, and contribute to genebank management by identifying taxonomic misassignments and duplicates. We conducted a genomic scan with genotyping by sequencing (GBS) derived single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of 10,038 pepper (Capsicum spp.) accessions from worldwide genebanks and investigated the recent history of this iconic staple. Genomic data detected up to 1,618 duplicate accessions within and between genebanks and showed that taxonomic ambiguity and misclassification often involve interspecific hybrids that are difficult to classify morphologically. We deeply interrogated the genetic diversity of the commonly consumed Capsicum annuum to investigate its history, finding that the kinds of peppers collected in broad regions across the globe overlap considerably. The method ReMIXTURE—using genetic data to quantify the similarity between the complement of peppers from a focal region and those from other regions—was developed to supplement traditional population genetic analyses. The results reflect a vision of pepper as a highly desirable and tradable cultural commodity, spreading rapidly throughout the globe along major maritime and terrestrial trade routes. Marker associations and possible selective sweeps affecting traits such as pungency were observed, and these traits were shown to be distributed nonuniformly across the globe, suggesting that human preferences exerted a primary influence over domesticated pepper genetic structure.

A “Model” American Musical

This chapter submits three properties that define Hamilton as a model American musical. First, it is a model cultural commodity on multiple political fronts: rendering race ambiguous, it appeals to the typical Broadway audience; promoting utopian fantasies, it enchants the underprivileged. Second, it puts forth a model history education tool that lauds white Founding Fathers, applauds American exceptionalism, and downplays atrocities suffered by its disenfranchised people. Last but not least, Hamilton facilitates the rise of model minorities—the elitist people-of-color who thrive in a neoliberal society where individuals do not necessarily operate on a level playing field. This essay proposes the term “model minorities”—both a critique of and reparation to “model minority,” a problematic term coined to refer to Asian Americans in the 1960s, to elucidate the key relationship between Hamilton and the minority population in the times of neoliberalism.

The Industry of Landlords: Exploring the Assetization of the Triple-A Game

The monetization of the modern Triple-A game has undergone severe changes, as free-to-play revenue models and game as a service distribution strategy have become standard for game developers. To date, the established tradition of the industry’s political–economic analysis focused on the value extraction and user exploitation of video game as a cultural commodity, centered on the video game as generating value through the selling of boxed or digital units. In this article, we present a new analytical framework grounded in understanding the modern video game as an asset that continuously generates revenue for its owners. This theoretical lens encapsulates the changes in contemporary game development, distribution, and value generation. To demonstrate, we apply it to the analysis of the monetization strategies of three recent free-to-play Triple-A titles: Fortnite (2017), Apex Legends (2019), and Call of Duty: Warzone (2020).

Telling a Double Story

Between 1904 and 1919, Dutch author and critic Albert Verwey spearheaded the prominent magazine De beweging. Though it was a cultural commodity that needed to be sold, the autonomy of De beweging had to be defended and negotiated as well, sometimes at a significant cost. This chapter explores this paradox, focusing on the ways Verwey ‘sold the unsaleable’ and used the stories he told about his journal to market De beweging. Branding cultural objects comes down to not only telling a story about them, but also pitching that story against the stories others may create. I argue that Verwey’s ambition was to persuade other stakeholders to engage with his story by investing materially or symbolically in De beweging.

Spinning is winning: Social casino apps and the platformization of gamble-play

Social casino apps are an emergent genre in the app economy that sits at the intersection of three different industries: casino gambling, freemium mobile games, and social media platforms. This institutional position has implications for the social casino app’s political economy and culture of consumption. We argue that social casino apps are representative of a broader casualization of risk that has taken hold in a platform society. By combining the uncertainty and chance associated with gambling with the interruptibility, informality, and modularity of free-to-play mobile games, social casino apps offer complete contingency in how they are designed and played. Game progression and social networking features are used to normalize the relationship between the consumer of social casino apps and the contingency of their desired form of play. As a result, the experience of risk is no longer restricted to the casino floor and in fact becomes a part of one’s daily routine. This casualization of risk marks the next adaptation of the contingent cultural commodity, where nothing is guaranteed and everything is subject to chance.

Neo-Orientalist Approaches in XR (Extended Reality) Applications

Being one of the most prominent reflections of intercultural interaction, orientalism is the West's description of the East according to its own beliefs and understanding. This concept also includes the alienation and isolation of the human while trying to define 'the others'. The digital culture has searched for alternative realities and identities visible through virtual worlds controlled by the individual. This search for identity has led to the transformation of a fictional and shallow imagination into a cultural commodity through various stereotypes, just like in orientalism. Extended reality is one of the new oases of neo-orientalism as a research subject that combines the concepts of virtual and augmented reality. The increasing fusion between the human mind and machines radically changes the way people are born, live, learn, work, produce, dream, discuss, or die. This research aims to interpret the effects of transformation of information in XR technologies within the axis of neo-orientalism perspective through new individual experiences.

Knowledge production on sport economics: a systematic review

The study analyzes the scientific production that deals with the economic activity of the sport. This is a systematic review that evaluates scientific papers published in the last Olympic cycle (2012-2016) in national and international journals, in English, Spanish and Portuguese, indexed to the Portal of Journals of Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel). From the content analysis, 355 studies were examined that, despite their diversity, were grouped into 16 categories. The considerations suggest an ample process of commercialization of the sport as a cultural commodity and, also, vehicle of sale and propagation of other products.

THE ‘MYTH’ OF THE PHALANX: BATTLE FORMATIONS AND CULTURAL INTERACTION

The article will discuss the importance of the phalanx as a way to point out cultural links and cultural competition between Greeks and Romans. It will argue that there is a wider discourse in military literature on the phalanx as a cultural commodity, by both historians and authors of ‘military manuals’, each author building on the arguments of the other, and that the Taktika of Aelian and Arrian are a key link in understanding this discourse in the context of the second century AD.