Search Results

Conclusions

Melanie J. Wright

in Moses in America: The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative

Previous chapters in this book have considered in depth how Lincoln Steffens, Zora Neale Hurston, and Cecil B. DeMille represented Moses and the exodus in twentieth century America. These studies ... More

Previous chapters in this book have considered in depth how Lincoln Steffens, Zora Neale Hurston, and Cecil B. DeMille represented Moses and the exodus in twentieth century America. These studies were capable of being read as discrete units and contain their own interim conclusions. This final chapter outlines conclusions that arise from the book in toto. It touches on the currency and contestedness of the biblical text in modern America; it also argues for an expansion of the concerns of biblical studies, to include popular cultural forms and nonelite readings. This move at once enhances and relativises the position of the professional biblical interpreter.Less

Amalgams and Mosaics, Syncretisms and Reinterpretations: Reading Herskovits and Contemporary Creolists for Metaphors of Creolization

Robert Baron

in Creolization as Cultural Creativity

This chapter explores the metaphors used for creolization in order to discover how cultural creolization is theorized. It explains that contemporary creolists use metaphor when characterizing forms ... More

This chapter explores the metaphors used for creolization in order to discover how cultural creolization is theorized. It explains that contemporary creolists use metaphor when characterizing forms and processes resulting from different combinations of cultural components of different provenances. The large collection of metaphors shows numerous patterns of the mixture of cultural forms and their change into new entities where cultural elements of various provenances may continue to exist.Less

Specific Aspects of Plantation Systems in the New World: Community Subcultures and Social Classes

Eric R. Wolf

in Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World

This chapter attempts to discuss peasants in relation to landless workers and other social groupings within plantation systems. It places a typological construct on a continuum that could do justice ... More

This chapter attempts to discuss peasants in relation to landless workers and other social groupings within plantation systems. It places a typological construct on a continuum that could do justice to the range of variation in existing plantation systems in the New World and traces out the implications of these variable modes for the formation of subcultures, classes, and communities in the different regions. Plantation creates new communities, which translates in spatial terms into the chain of command of owners, managers, overseers, permanent laborers, and seasonal workers. The new-style plantation dispenses altogether with personalized phrasings of its technical requirements. These may involve attempts to widen the resource base through the manipulation of two different sets of cultural forms and attempts to improve life chances through mobility and, finally, to defend a specialized culturally defined niche and to participate in the life of the host society through a double adaptation.Less

Conclusion: A History of the Future

Xin Liu

in In One's Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-reform Rural China

The ethnographic materials presented in this book articulate a theoretical position in response to two popular tendencies in writing about contemporary Chinese society. First, it aimed to write from ... More

The ethnographic materials presented in this book articulate a theoretical position in response to two popular tendencies in writing about contemporary Chinese society. First, it aimed to write from the perspective not of the local cadres but of the hosts, ordinary villagers. Second, the ethnographic materials in the book were examined from the perspective of a worm, not from the bird's-eye view usually taken by those attempting to grasp the significance of rural transformation in China. This chapter examines the “immoral economy” and the arbitrary combination of cultural forms.Less

Put a Little Color on That!

Black Hawk Hancock

in American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination

This chapter highlights the lived immediacy of dancing leading to both a simultaneous investment in mastery of those embodied practices and an obliviousness to how those interactions erase the ... More

This chapter highlights the lived immediacy of dancing leading to both a simultaneous investment in mastery of those embodied practices and an obliviousness to how those interactions erase the historical conditions of those cultural forms. By mapping out the dominant discourses through which the dance is conceptualized and articulated, it shows how the very discourses through which people understand their actions are always subject to those who wield the most power over them. Here, the theme of cultural appropriation in relation to the specificities of the Lindy Hop revival allow the dance to be openly embraced as a cultural form since it has no current grounded racial identity in popular culture. As a result, these discourses provide a window into understanding how the dominant racial logic of American society circulates even in the most apparently innocuous cultural practices.Less

Introduction: Coloniality and Hong Kong Chineseness

Law Wing Sang

in Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese

The chapter explains that this book argues that collaboration is the key to finding an extended analytical framework within which to grasp the power formation of Hong Kong. It intends not to argue ... More

The chapter explains that this book argues that collaboration is the key to finding an extended analytical framework within which to grasp the power formation of Hong Kong. It intends not to argue that Hong Kong is the only place where colonial rule relied on collaboration, but that the existence of pervasive collaborative relations provides a convenient but often-neglected route to understanding the irregularly shaped cultural landscapes of Hong Kong. It notes that the book will account for the large variety of interests and forces involved in order to show the mobility and the variability these colonial cultural forms (i.e. colonialities) manifested.Less

English Policing and Contemporary Culture

Ian Loader and Aogán Mulcahy

in Policing and the Condition of England: Memory, Politics and Culture

This chapter offers an assessment of the current condition of English policing culture. This entails revisiting Raymond Williams' threefold typology of cultural forms — the dominant, the residual, ... More

This chapter offers an assessment of the current condition of English policing culture. This entails revisiting Raymond Williams' threefold typology of cultural forms — the dominant, the residual, and the emergent — sketched towards the end of Chapter 2 and which has quietly guided subsequent efforts at interpretation. In recapitulating the principal themes that featured in Parts II and III of this book, the chapter aims to further a sociological and political analysis of the mix of lay, professional, and governmental sensibilities that struggle with one another to constitute (and re-constitute) English policing culture.Less

Techniques, technologies and cultural form

Robin Nelson

in State of Play: Contemporary 'High-end' TV Drama

This chapter draws freely on examples to illustrate the key impacts of technologies on cultural form in TV3. Though technology is not seen as determining cultural forms, it is one of the main forces ... More

This chapter draws freely on examples to illustrate the key impacts of technologies on cultural form in TV3. Though technology is not seen as determining cultural forms, it is one of the main forces in a field which shapes the programmes that appear on the small screen. In TV3, developments in technologies have played a significant part not just in distribution but also in approaches to making TV dramas and their textual forms. Developments influenced by technologies include an increased emphasis upon visual style, an aspiration to be as close to cinema as possible, increased dynamism of image and sound and a new configuration of the tension between credible illusionism and textual playfulness. It may be that television ‘viewing’ will become increasingly hypermediate and interactive in the manner of engagements with computers but, at present, it appears that the television's historical disposition towards unmediated presentation as ‘the ultimate goal of visual representation’ may be sustained but with a higher-quality, more ‘cinematic’ treatment of a wider range of visual images.Less

The Rise of the New Korean Wave

Dal Yong Jin

in New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media

This chapter first discuses the rise of Korean popular culture and its dissemination in Asian countries, known as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. It characterizes the Korean Wave into roughly two major ... More

This chapter first discuses the rise of Korean popular culture and its dissemination in Asian countries, known as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. It characterizes the Korean Wave into roughly two major historical developments: the Hallyu 1.0 era (approximately between 1997 and 2007) and the Hallyu 2.0, New Korean Wave, era (mainly from 2008 to the present). Although these two periods share some common phenomena, they are dissimilar in their major characteristics, such as the major cultural forms exported, technological developments, fan bases, and government cultural policies. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the recent evolution of Hallyu in a socioeconomic context alongside its textual meanings. The chapter then discusses the hybridity in Korean popular culture followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.Less

The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol

Eric R. Wolf

in Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World

This chapter attempts to unravel the different strands and levels of motivation and interest that were historically brought together into a powerful collective representation. It represents an effort ... More

This chapter attempts to unravel the different strands and levels of motivation and interest that were historically brought together into a powerful collective representation. It represents an effort to analyze a national master symbol as a manifold of heterogeneous referents drawn from various traditions of ethnicity, class, and region and combined into a multifunctional unity through intersecting signs. A symbol is encountered that seems to enshrine the major hopes and aspirations of an entire society. The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint, represents such a master symbol. Cultural forms provide the cultural idiom of behavior and ideal representations through which different groups in a society can pursue and manipulate their different fates within a coordinated framework. The Guadalupe symbol links together family, politics, and religion; colonial past and independent present; Indian and Mexican. It reflects the salient social relationships of Mexican life and embodies the emotions they generate.Less

Individualism and its Discontents

in Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists

How do the case studies and the way of thinking about public discourse speak to contemporary debates about the American cultural scene—the ideologies, religions, and views of the world—and about the ... More

How do the case studies and the way of thinking about public discourse speak to contemporary debates about the American cultural scene—the ideologies, religions, and views of the world—and about the impact of these cultural forms on the potentials for progressive politics? This chapter addresses this topic by considering the views of various social critics (along with scholars and journalists) and comparing them to what one sees when one observes activist groups. The chapter discusses the problems and possibilities of individualism and civil society in America. It argues that progressives actually need individualism, but of a particular kind: an individualism that seeks justice and liberty equally, that neither rejects rights language nor accepts it uncritically, and that does not assume that liberty or the individual are “natural” phenomena. The chapter also shows how elements of such an individualism can be found in contemporary activism.Less

Ambivalence towards Power: Approaches to Authority in Postcolonial Morocco

in The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life

In Islamic cultures, and in the Arabic language, the inherent ambivalence of innumerable concepts is on full display. Single words often contain a proposition and its direct opposite, just as popular ... More

In Islamic cultures, and in the Arabic language, the inherent ambivalence of innumerable concepts is on full display. Single words often contain a proposition and its direct opposite, just as popular sayings and self-evident actions demonstrate the two-edged nature of many connections and associations. This chapter takes up the challenge of ambivalence to social science—once readily accepted but inappropriately abandoned in more recent decades—by considering the ambivalent attitudes and actions revealed in the daily lives of Moroccans. Whether it is in their approach to questions of gender, political authority, or saintly legitimacy, a common theme of ambivalence towards power runs through many of the cultural forms found in the Arab/Muslim world, and it is through such circumstantial instances as those presented here that one can, perhaps, comprehend the seeming contradictions by which power is brought within the ambit of everyday life.Less

Stories and Practices of Community Organizing

in Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists

In addition to articulating a religio-political language, faith-based community organizing has created other distinctive cultural forms. This chapter describes some of these, especially the stories ... More

In addition to articulating a religio-political language, faith-based community organizing has created other distinctive cultural forms. This chapter describes some of these, especially the stories and practices generated by this movement. First, it examines a recurrent form of story telling in which participants interpret their lives in the light of organizing principles. Second, it looks at one example of the unconventional, special-purpose “actions” that community organizations sometimes mount, studying the ways in which practical action and discourse combined to communicate the organization's political proposals and principles. Third, it considers a standardized dramaturgical form central to congregation-based community organizing: the large public meeting. And finally, the chapter assesses how even the most routine activities, such as business meetings, serve not only to accomplish practical purposes but also to enact and reinforce organizing values. Such practices and stories give faith-based organizing a much richer cultural life than it would have were it solely a system of ideas.Less

Strange Interpretations

W. Puck Brecher

in The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine aesthetic eccentricity as an emergent feature of identity formation during this new age and traces its trajectory throughout the Edo ... More

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine aesthetic eccentricity as an emergent feature of identity formation during this new age and traces its trajectory throughout the Edo period (1600–1868). Aesthetic eccentricity refers not only to deviant cultural forms—mainly within the visual arts—but also to subjectivities that privilege individuality, emotion, and intuition over conventional behavior. It tends toward egocentrism and often conveys a subject's desire for detachment from occupational responsibilities, ideological constraints, or commercial pressures. The remainder of this chapter first situates the topic within existing English and Japanese scholarship by examining how others have approached eccentricity as a field of study. It then offers a genealogy of the terms commonly used to signify aesthetic eccentricity in the Edo period. Next, it introduces some of the historiographical issues that have guided inquiry into aesthetic eccentricity in early modern Japan, including the favored tendency to equate it with later avant-garde movements. The chapter concludes by advancing several counterintuitive arguments that collectively demonstrate how strangeness, particularly during the last century of the Edo period, permeated mainstream ethical values to assume an inviolable position within mainstream culture.Less