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Cultural Interventions for Reducing Violence Among Young, African American Males

Lance Williams

in Social Work With African American Males: Health, Mental Health, and Social Policy

Violence is the second leading cause of death for those aged 18 to 24. For Black youth aged 15 to 24, it has been the leading cause of death since 1978. Connections is an intervention program that ... More

Violence is the second leading cause of death for those aged 18 to 24. For Black youth aged 15 to 24, it has been the leading cause of death since 1978. Connections is an intervention program that integrates adaptive cultural resources from both the dominant American Anglo culture and the African culture. This chapter reviews the Connections program underway in Englewood, one of the poorest communities in Chicago, and its approaches to stemming the violence that pervades the lives of residents.Less

Reasserting Control: The Regulation of Mass Culture

Corey Ross

in Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich

This chapter considers one major aspect of the heterogeneous responses of cultural and political elites to the rise of the media and burgeoning entertainment industry. It focuses on efforts, above ... More

This chapter considers one major aspect of the heterogeneous responses of cultural and political elites to the rise of the media and burgeoning entertainment industry. It focuses on efforts, above all through means of state regulation, to reassert elite values and standards by establishing a formal framework of control over popular culture, including literary and film censorship as well as state ownership of broadcasting. While the censorship of cultural forms as a means of social control was of course nothing new at the time, the avowedly commercial orientation of most popular amusements and their unprecedented dissemination via new communications technologies elicited a new brand of cultural interventionism among the educated elite, a belief not only in their ability to improve the tastes and cultural practices of the masses, but indeed in their right — even duty — to do so.Less

Cultural Conflict and Conflict Resolution

Ngoh Tiong Tan

in Handbook of International Social Work: Human Rights, Development, and the Global Profession

This chapter focuses on culture, conflict, and conflict resolution. Social work actively engages culture in micro, meso, and macro settings. Social workers, especially those on the international ... More

This chapter focuses on culture, conflict, and conflict resolution. Social work actively engages culture in micro, meso, and macro settings. Social workers, especially those on the international front, should be competent in cross-cultural intervention and conflict resolution. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first addresses culture, culture in context, and cultural competence. The second focuses on conflict resolution, alternative dispute resolution, and the management of cultural conflict. There are many types of culture conflicts, such as interpersonal and community conflict, conflicts between subcultures, class conflict, and ethnic conflict. Social workers in multicultural societies and a globalized world need to be well versed in both principles and skills of mediation and conflict management. Conflict and culture are tools for social change: Conflict provides the impetus for change and culture adjusts to a more functional way of relating and adapting to the social environment.Less

Sustainability Clashes and Concordances

Thomas Baron and Jeff Todd Titon

Timothy J. Cooley (ed.)

in Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy

Cultural sustainability as concept and movement is rooted in discourses, practice, and theory drawn from environmental conservation and sustainability. Metaphors from nature and culture are ... More

Cultural sustainability as concept and movement is rooted in discourses, practice, and theory drawn from environmental conservation and sustainability. Metaphors from nature and culture are convergent or divergent across semantic domains. This chapter explores metaphors of vulnerability such as endangerment, invasive and exotic, loss and protection, as well as tropes of restoration and recovery such as resilience and forms of intervention through protest, regulation, or stewardship. It also discusses cases in which cultural traditions and environmental conservation are in conflict, exemplified in disputed indigenous whale hunting. The creative tension in folklore studies engaging extinction, emergence and revitalization is further discussed as a foundational disciplinary issue. Intervention in nature through ecosystem engineering or conservation reliance is compared with cultural intervention and protection.Less

Soft Power on the Sidelines

Patryk Babiracki

in Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire, 1943-1957

This chapter shows how Soviet cultural interventions, increasingly aggressive and insensitive to Polish conditions, alienated even those Polish communists and cultural figures who were Stalin's most ... More

This chapter shows how Soviet cultural interventions, increasingly aggressive and insensitive to Polish conditions, alienated even those Polish communists and cultural figures who were Stalin's most loyal allies. Developments in the USSR and Poland's forced transformations of 1948–54 affected Soviet soft power in a couple of ways. First, as Stalin unleashed a new wave of terror in the USSR, the Stalinist administrative machine shoved effective Soviet soft power initiatives to the sidelines—paralyzing independent initiative, empowering opportunism, and promoting low-quality, aggressive propaganda on behalf of the Soviet state. Second, most Polish cultural figures and functionaries found little fulfillment—and often much shame—in their roles as impresarios of Stalinism, with its adulation of the Soviet leader, pseudoscience, and senseless propaganda. They found themselves increasingly unwilling to interpret the culture that the Soviets were forcing them to accept. Coercion took hold over Polish culture; as a result, the hitherto open Soviet-Polish confrontations over meaning and form in all spheres of cultural activity moved to the back stage.Less

Cultural Intervention in America’s Eden

Heather A. Diamond

in American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

This chapter traces the history of cultural intervention in traditional arts in Hawaiʻi. It first looks at the 1989 Festival of American Folklife, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, and how it ... More

This chapter traces the history of cultural intervention in traditional arts in Hawaiʻi. It first looks at the 1989 Festival of American Folklife, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, and how it fit into ongoing negotiations over ethnographic authority. It then considers how, at the end of the monarchy, traditional arts were politicized and collected as a way of establishing a record of indigenous civilization in relation to nineteenth-century ideals held by European powers. It also examines the role of religious institutions and national and local government in shaping ethnic identity by sponsoring ethnographic studies and cultural revivals. Finally, it discusses collaborations between the Hawaiʻi State Foundation for Culture and the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts to establish programs for cultural preservation based on assessments of traditional culture as both valuable and endangered. The chapter shows how tourism and tradition are bound together in the marketing of Hawaiʻi.Less

Introduction

Heather A. Diamond

in American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

This book explores the poetics and politics of festival making as seen through an ethnographic history of the 1989 Hawaiʻi program at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), the largest ... More

This book explores the poetics and politics of festival making as seen through an ethnographic history of the 1989 Hawaiʻi program at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), the largest national tourist event in the United States. The SFF is an idealistic, innovative, populist-based experiment in cultural democracy that celebrates cultural diversity and advocates cultural preservation through fieldwork-based research that identifies culture bearers and offers public presentations and interpretations of their cultural contributions. The SFF blurs the boundaries of both museum and tourism presentations that rely on clear demarcations between viewers and viewed. This book examines how the themes of public sector folklore culture brokering, cultural tourism, ideas about multiculturalism, the role of tradition in national image making, and the impact of cultural intervention on local communities converge in the SFF. It also raises important questions about the stakes surrounding the politics of tradition and multiculturalism while highlighting the importance of looking critically at the ways peoples and places are represented through cultural agencies.Less

Media Arts as Intervention

Yvonne Spielmann

in Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video

This chapter considers some examples in the international media arts that can be identified as aesthetic/cultural interventions, i.e. they demonstrate decisive strategies of creative intervention ... More

This chapter considers some examples in the international media arts that can be identified as aesthetic/cultural interventions, i.e. they demonstrate decisive strategies of creative intervention into the corporate/commercial products of the media cultural environment that surrounds us globally. In particular, it looks at aesthetic practices in media arts in Europe and Japan. The task is to widen the horizon of discussion and argue for overcoming some of the existing barriers between media and cultural discourses, and also between arts and media. It is not about identifying peculiar Japanese and European media arts. The more interesting question is what are the overriding, effective, and suitable strategies for processes of intervention, dialogue, and violation that can cope with standard media tools and technologies that spread out everywhere.Less

Commerce and the Critical Edge: The Politics of Postsocialist Film and the Case of Feng Xiaogang

Haomin Gong

in Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China

This chapter examines how postsocialist China's uneven social and cultural conditions shape the field of commercial filmmaking by focusing on the work of Feng Xiaogang. Before expounding on the ... More

This chapter examines how postsocialist China's uneven social and cultural conditions shape the field of commercial filmmaking by focusing on the work of Feng Xiaogang. Before expounding on the relationship between unevenness and commercial filmmaking in Feng's case, the chapter looks at the social space in postsocialist China as represented in his films. It then discusses the major focus of Feng's films—common people's everyday lives—and especially how these characters reflect and respond to the uneven sociocultural features that determine the field of commercial filmmaking. It also considers Feng's use of humor in his films, three of which are A Sigh (2000), Cell Phone (2003), and A World Without Thieves (2004). The chapter shows that the trajectory of Feng's filmography exhibits a possible and effective form of cultural intervention in the age of popular culture. Feng's films reveal a cultural paradox of postsocialist China: while they embed the director's critique of social problems amid uneven conditions, they take advantage of all-encompassing commercialization.Less

Stories in the Building of Deaf Identity: The Potential of Life Storytelling to Enhance Deaf Flourishing and Well-Being

Goedele A. M. De Clerck

in Deaf Identities: Exploring New Frontiers

To encourage resilience and well-being, this chapter by a deaf anthropologist, social scientist and psychotherapist describes storytelling as a strategy that is critical for the formation of personal ... More

To encourage resilience and well-being, this chapter by a deaf anthropologist, social scientist and psychotherapist describes storytelling as a strategy that is critical for the formation of personal and collective deaf identities. She introduces the “anthropology of deaf flourishing” to illustrate how deaf identity can be understood as a complex process of learning through interacting with changing cultural contexts and multiple communities in which deaf people participate and narrate their life experiences. The signed storytelling is framed as a cultural resource and tool for transformation that enables deaf storytellers to generate agency, position themselves contextually, and creatively alter their stories to increase their potential. Findings from a study in the United Kingdom support the power of storytelling as a deaf cultural resource that allows deaf refugees to internalize the potential for resilience and well-being.Less

Beyond the Festival Afterglow

Heather A. Diamond

in American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

This chapter examines the legacy of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF) in its restaging, national and local offshoots, and memory as well as the local impact of national cultural intervention. ... More

This chapter examines the legacy of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF) in its restaging, national and local offshoots, and memory as well as the local impact of national cultural intervention. It considers the various forms in which the SFF was transported back into a local context—performance, film, follow-up projects, and memory. It also raises a number of questions about Festival aftereffects, such as the impact of the Festival on cultural preservation programs and policy in Hawaiʻi, or the larger implications of institutional attention to tradition. The chapter argues that beyond its time-bound performance, the Hawaiʻi program provided an ongoing means of production and reproduction, but that its aftereffects were blunted by local politics and socioeconomic factors. It also explains how the Festival legitimized and made cultural celebrities of participants, albeit mostly on a small scale. Finally, it shows how the Festival and its 1990 restaging reinforced the notion that geniality, hospitality, reciprocity, and inclusivity are qualities inherent in Hawaiʻi lifestyles.Less