The Hambach Forest in the German Debate on Climate Protection: Is There a Symbolic Value beyond the Environmental Value?

In the late summer of 2018, the Hambach Forest (North Rhine Westphalia/ Germany) appeared prevalently in the media due to massive protests against its clearance for lignite mining with for the power generation. Because coal power as a form of energy supply is extremely climate intensive, the Hambach Forest rapidly became a symbol of the fight against climate change and the ongoing destruction of nature and its resources for economic reasons. Due to the extra-ordinarily prominent role of the Hambach Forest in the public opinion across Germany, this research addresses values of the forest to the population in monetary terms as well as the underlying factors that determine those values. For the analysis, a contingent valuation survey was conducted in December 2019 in Germany. The proposed amounts for the preservation of the Hambach Forest are mostly in accordance with previous evaluation studies of woods and forests, although this time almost only passive-use values are decisive. Further, a conversion of the WTP values to the area of the Hambach Forest results in an extra-ordinarily high per-hectare value of about 3.6 million. Thus, the symbolic value of the forest is remarkable and should be considered in future political decisions.

Getting attached to a classic Mustang. Use, maintenance and the burden of authenticity

This paper investigates the relationships consumers cultivate with mass-market commodities while caring for their authenticity. Drawing on a six-year ethnography of classic Mustang owners communities in France, Switzerland and Belgium, the authors show that, far from being a symbolic value only, or a resource into which people can “invest” in a mechanism of social distinction, authenticity can also appear as a burden that weighs constantly on the relationship between people and things. Indeed, throughout their uses and maintenance, the material integrity of classic Mustangs is of great concern for their owners, who apprehend every breakdown or maintenance intervention as threats that could jeopardize their car's authenticity. For the sake of security, comfort or health, because new regulations come up, or because some original parts are not available anymore, classic Mustangs owners compose with heterogeneous elements, constantlyreshaping both their cars and their concerns for authenticity. The authors draw on Hennion's notion of “attachement” to describe the intimate relationship that grows through these arrangements. The notion particularly helps to grasp the ambivalence of the bonds between people and things: while they get more and more attached to their classic Mustang, owners are getting more and more worried. Moreover, throughout this growing relationship and the recurrent material interventions it draws on, the car does not remain passive. It progressively reveals itself, sometimes surprising its owner. Therefore, not only is authenticity “in the making” in this process, the contours of the thing itself evolve, as well as the knowledge of its owner.

Semiotic and Rhetorical Patterns in Dance and Gestural Languages

The body is the crossroad of the biological and cultural (representational) experience of human being. It has a basic rhetoric potential, which is exploited, in various cultures, through ’s concept of “orientation metaphor”, able to transpose certain concepts into space, as well as Fontanier’s “metonymies of the physical”, or Greimas“ ’metonymic actors” identified in the bodily segments and acting each “in the name of an actant” (Greimas). Therefore, the body is an “expressive space” (Merleau-Ponty), the symbolic value of its segments being deeply involved in choreographic significations.

Italy-Japan. Dialogues on Food

Italy and Japan are two of the countries where food has traditionally had greater symbolic value. They are two culinary realities now exported all over the world, for a long time representative of lifestyles, social and economic dynamics in many cases similar in the course of their respective histories. This volume, by the contributions offered by authorities and guests, managers, experts, journalists and scholars from Japan and Italy, presents a great number of implications of the cultural representations of Food Culture, analysed in a multi-perspective approach, underlying the value of food and cuisine in Japan and Italy nowadays as in the past, through a considerable transition between tradition and modernity.

The Double Entendre of Paul’s Trade as σκηνοποιός (Acts 18:3)

The word σκηνοποιός (Acts 18:3), a hapax legomenon, has been the subject of intense scrutiny because it may disclose the socio-economic nature of Paul’s trade. However, attempts to reconstruct historically his trade have not confidently identified its accurate historical reference. Since this difficulty derives from Luke’s choice of vocabulary—he uses a word that is very rare in the canon of Greco-Roman literature—this study attends to the word’s rhetorical setting that may explain Luke’s lexical choice. This choice would enhance the word’s symbolic value although weakening its referential value. Σκηνοποιός is plausibly an instance of Lukan etymological wordplay that draws on the continued symbolism of σκηνή in Luke-Acts—a term that captures Luke’s restoration eschatology.

Housing as an Object of Consumption: Analysis of Functional, Symbolic and Investment Value

Analysis of housing as an object of consumption rests upon the concept of the value of consumer object. A set of certain features of an object constitute its value and housing is explored by analysing its functional, investment and symbolic value. The results of the empirical study allows us to reasonably state that housing as an object of consumption is recognizable in the population surveyed. The assessment of functional, investment and symbolic value aspects varies with respect to the basic characteristics of housing – location in the city, living area and type of housing. The analysis of housing as an object of consumption revealed growth trends in the relevance of investment value, changes in attitudes towards housing loans and the relevance of owner status in the housing tenure.

Mediating Andean Modernity: The Literary Oracular in Muerte por el tacto by Jaime Saenz

Upon his return from Berlin in 1939, Jaime Saenz started working in La Paz for intelligence agencies and public relations offices of Bolivia and the United States, which led to correspondent positions with Reuters and McGraw-Hill World News. His trajectory into Cold War Bolivian state nobility seemed all but guaranteed. However, on the brink of this breakout moment, he renounced his job —and professionalism altogether— committing himself to a life of literature and alcoholism as his marriage unraveled. In response to repeated interventions, he justified his every loss with a further indictment of the precautious, which was an outgrowth of his belief in the existence of a higher truth that was both accessible and impervious to analytical reason. In this article, I ask how Saenz’s poetry from the 1950s metabolized the rhetoric of indictment which it had inherited from the Tellurism of the Chaco generation. How might Muerte por el tacto (1957) be symptomatic of a broader aim of restoring to modern poetry its oracular legitimacy? On what grounds did Saenz indict precautious defenders of historical culture? And how did such an indictment mediate “national energy” (Tamayo) as it came into language through the nativist discourse of the land? Paying focal attention to regimes of revelation in Saenz’s early poetry and the historical conditions of its production, this article updates a discussion among Transatlanticists about the legitimization of irrationalism in 20th-century poetics and politics by assessing the socio-symbolic value of the oracular in the regionalist discourse of modernism.

Mediación editorial y valor agregado: La obra de Jaime Saenz desde las redes sociales del pasado

This article offers a critical study of the place that Jaime Saenz occupies within the broader context of translated literatures to shed light on the construction of his image as a writer both in Bolivia and in the countries in which he has been translated. How is Saenz's work viewed from a global perspective? I propose a methodology that analyzes and visualizes web media to study Saenz's position vis-à-vis his Bolivian and Latin American peers within the local and global mediation scene. I read Saenz's work through a web media map that visualizes him diachronically within a framework that considers his production and reception by publishers, editors, translators, literary agents, critics and sponsors, in national and international contexts. In this article I focus on showing the editorial mediation processes of Saenz's work comparatively and in relation not only to literature, but to the broader cultural field, which includes the social sciences and audiovisual arts. The image of a writer that results from this process (dark, accursed, esoteric, and associated with a mystical Andean spirituality) adds symbolic value and prestige to the author. A web media analysis helps to visualize how this added value was created over time and within its socio-political contexts.

SCENOGRAPHY AND COSTUME IN JAPANESE KABUKI THEATER: TRADITIONS AND MODERNITY

The article explores the history of traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, the stages of its formation and the basic principles of dramaturgy in retrospective and in modern times, the role and symbolic value of costumes, as well as the general features of theater performances. The modern trends of the theater were analyzed and issues of the space of its scene were investigated. Obvious conservatism of kabuki and its fundamental dissimilarity to the theater of the European model were noted. The process of evolution of the Kabuki theater was studied, which responding to the challenges of modernity, acquires new elements and features, together give rise to the fundamentally new phenomenon in the theatrical art. It has been determined that the logic of construction and development of the theater and stage space in Japanese traditional Kabuki theater derived from the need for specific interaction between the performer and the audience. With the formation of the theater, its audience expanded at the same time, in particular due to the privileged strata. The premises of theater and its stage also evolved. Eventually, the design features of Kabuki theater space became not only a prominent element in the interaction between the performers and spectators, but also an important factor that predominantly determined the characteristics of dramaturgy. In Japanese Kabuki theater, such methods as makeup, hair pieces and costumes are simultaneously those means of expression that are necessarily included in the process of staging a performance, and determine its content and storyline, as well as determine the nature of the performer’s acting. These means are kind of sign and symbolic system, which has to be read by the spectator in order to fully understand the nature of performance. The peculiarities of the costume allow us to read in advance nature of the character in performance, to guess his or her actions, etc. The peculiarity of Kabuki is that the play script is dictated by the performers themselves, but not by the scriptwriter. The director as an independent figure in Kabuki theater comes to the first plan only in the modern era, and it is mostly characteristic of innovative and experimental theaters. It is worth noting that given the challenges of modernity, Kabuki still acquires new elements and features, together generating a fundamentally new phenomenon in the art of theater, and in general, Kabuki remains a traditional theater.