Cultural Conceptualization of Tamil Hindu Marriages

This study investigates the cultural conceptualization of marriage among Tamil Hindu communities in Australia and Malaysia. The Hindu cultural schema of marriage relates to the physical, social and spiritual aspects, and language acts as the central aspect of the cultural cognition of the community. Data is based on a variety of sources, particularly focus group discussions, translated verses from Hindu Holy Scriptures (Vedanta), and personal interviews. Findings show various cultural schemas entrenched within the marriage schema, particularly Vedic Astrology, Sacred Invocation and Blessings, which are shared knowledge among community members. The cultural schema of marriage (or vivaha) that is instantiated in the Vedanta considers marriage a religious obligation (Dharma). It is during social interactions that the cultural metaphors associated with marriage are discussed. marriage as a thousand-year crop and marriage as a journey are metaphorical expressions that illustrate the traditional worldview of the Tamil Hindu community.

Different cultural conceptualizations underlying intercultural business communication problems between Thais and Koreans

When people from different cultural backgrounds interact, their divergent conceptualizations may result in communication problems. While the significance of intercultural business interactions between Thais and South Koreans has increased with the development of trade relations between their countries, few attempts have been made to research interactional problems in this context. This study investigates the respective Thai and Korean cultural conceptualizations that underlie communication problems between them in the context of Korean multinational companies operating in Thailand. By analyzing data derived from in-depth interviews, this article elucidates the linguistic features of Thai and Korean speakers in relation to four different culture-specific conceptualizations: for Thais, the cultural schema of kreng jai and the cultural category of phinong; and for Koreans, the cultural schemas of ppalli ppalli and gunsinyuei. The findings show that these cultural conceptualizations govern Thais’ and Koreans’ different ways of interacting, and the paper discusses how these differences lead to and shape misunderstandings and interpersonal conflicts between these cultural counterparts during intercultural business communications.

Strategies to reconcile beliefs and practices: A case study of teacher agency enactment in curriculum making

This qualitative case study investigated why and how a teacher used his agency in curriculum-making. The study uses in-depth interviews, classroom observation, and teaching artefacts to understand the socio-cultural perspective on the interplay among agency, resources, schema, and structure. It finds that in this case, teacher agency was triggered by the perturbation resulting from a misalignment between the teacher’s personal beliefs and the school’s cultural schema. Strategies for reconciling were enacted through resource creation, cultural schema integration, negotiation for curriculum space, and researching. More attention is needed to understand how the perturbation emerged in the practices, the coupling relationships between resources and cultural schema, and the agency transformation.

The Meaning of “Racism”

This article explores the meanings of racism in the sociology of race/ethnicity and provides a descriptive framework for comparing theories of racism. The authors argue that sociologists use racism to refer to four constructs: (1) individual attitudes, (2) cultural schema, and two constructs associated with structural racism: (3) preexisting consequential inequalities, that is, racial dominance, and (4) processes that create or maintain racial dominance. The article compares this framework with a content and citation analysis of 1,037 sociology journal articles published from 1995 to 2015, a period stretching from a major call to renew sociological attention to racism, to the founding of the American Sociological Association journal, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. The authors find six communities organized around distinctive citations and using different meanings of racism. They conclude by pushing toward the question of what racism ought to mean by discussing the implications for both sociological research and public sociology.

Kiasu

This paper presents a study of grammatical usage patterns of the word kiasu in the GloWbE corpus of World Englishes. Kiasu has been borrowed from Hokkien into Singaporean and Malaysian English as a linguistic ‘glocalization’ process enabling speakers to verbalize an important local cultural schema. A grammatical profile is set up that draws on the techniques from linguistic profiling. This study identifies a range of patterns that illustrate how the interaction between grammar and lexis amount to specific semantic construals of the underlying cultural schema of the word.

Penerjemahan Novel Dracula Karya Bram Stoker dari Bahasa Inggris ke dalam Bahasa Indonesia: Kasus Pengalihan Skema Budaya Divergen

<p>Divergent cultural schema (DCS) is a collection of cultural knowledge required to interpret a text, which is assumed to be present in source readers (SR) but absent in target readers (TR). DCS typically takes the form of a highly concise source text without any sufficient information, so the translator applied various strategies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, consisting of its English source text (ST) and Indonesian target text (TT), was chosen as data source due to its strong Victorian-European setting which contains many potential DCS. Data analysis generated several categories of results. The first is units of analysis (n = 758) which are classified into various schemata (n = 21) and subschemata (n = 84) based on certain similarity in schematic characteristics. The second is various types of ST divergence (n = 13). The third is the reasons for applying domesticating (n = 16) or foreignizing (n = 12) strategies, as well as their weaknesses (n = 20). The fourth is domestication as the dominant translation ideology. The fifth is a number of interesting phenomena (n = 25) related to the transfer of DCS such as ideological level, different levels of divergence among TR, and “foreignization” and “domestication” by ST writer. This research demonstrates the complexity of strategy applications and ideological positions which are dependent on many factors such as narrative context, linguistic constraints, ST divergence, or TR schemata.</p>

The Gendered Relationship between Parental Religiousness and Children’s Marriage Timing

In this article, we examine whether mother’s and father’s self-reported religiousness relates differently to the timing of their children’s marriages. Conceptualizing religion as one source of cultural schema about marriage that is likely to conflict with other schemas for living, and theorizing that women are more likely to experience structured ambivalence over religious schema and their enactment than men, we predict father’s religiousness will be associated with children’s marriage in accordance with religious dogma, whereas the experience of structured ambivalence yields a more complex relationship between mother’s religiousness and their children’s marriage. Using longitudinal data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study in Nepal, a primarily Hindu and Buddhist setting, we find contrasting associations between son’s marriage timing and mothers’ and fathers’ religiousness. This provides empirical support for theoretical frameworks that emphasize the gendered nature of religious identity and suggests the influence of religion on other aspects of life is gendered.