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Patterns of exclusion/inclusion and people’s strategies

Iver Hornemann Møller and Pedro Hespanha

in Active social policies in the EU: Inclusion through participation?

This chapter begins by differentiating five major systems — work, income/consumption, the social network, the cultural system and the political system. It then further explores its different ... More

This chapter begins by differentiating five major systems — work, income/consumption, the social network, the cultural system and the political system. It then further explores its different subsystems by examining how far can one predict a person's position within other subsystems from her/his position within one specific subsystem. Theories are tested by empirical data, upon which new hypotheses are being formulated. The empirical analyses is first of all based on the INPART data; other observations, however, when they can shed new light on the INPART observations or give them a broader perspective are also referred to. This chapter examines the patterns of inclusion and exclusion. It also elaborates on the issue and focus on the different strategies every person applies to attain her/his personal preferences for inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation.Less

Post-Revolutionary Iranian Literature in the World and in the Persian Cultural System

Laetitia Nanquette

in Iranian Literature after the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World

In this concluding chapter, I bring together the reflections from the first part of the book on the place of post-revolutionary Iranian literature in contemporary Iran, and those from the second part ... More

In this concluding chapter, I bring together the reflections from the first part of the book on the place of post-revolutionary Iranian literature in contemporary Iran, and those from the second part of the book on its circulation outside of the Iranian borders. I discuss the position that post-revolutionary Iranian literature has in these two spaces and reflect on how this has evolved in the past forty years. The chapter starts by analysing two books that have had an important circulation outside of Iran: ‘The Book of Fate’ ‘ by Parinoush Saniee and ‘Censoring an Iranian Love Story’ by Shahriar Mandanipour. I then make a comparison between literature and other arts (cinema and visual arts) to find what is specific to literature in the place and circulation of Persian art products. Finally, I argue that Iranian literature is slowly being replaced in the Persian cultural system both within Iran and abroad, by visual media. This is a major shift in the history of Persian culture which has been dominated by the literary for centuries.Less

Systematic and Emergent Culture

Gary Tomlinson

in Culture and the Course of Human Evolution

Non-human animal cultures show few signs of systematization, but complex cultural systems are basic to human culture today and appear far back among our ancestors, revealed to us in Paleolithic tool ... More

Non-human animal cultures show few signs of systematization, but complex cultural systems are basic to human culture today and appear far back among our ancestors, revealed to us in Paleolithic tool making techniques. Early hominin cultural systems arose before symbols appeared and relied on a growing complexity in the use of indexes: these were hyperindexical cultures. We can model their formation as an outgrowth of increasing computational complexity in hominin cognition. The unprecedented complexity of hyperindexical cultural systems in late hominin evolution carried many consequences. Cultural systems came to be more and more abstracted as systems—more and more holistically transmitted—and they accumulated in cultural traditions; eventually emergent, evolving lineages of cultural systems arose. All these features enabled cultural systems for the first time to stand outside the feedback cycles of biocultural niche construction as relatively autonomous entities, even though they were generated from niche constructive dynamics. These extra-cyclic systems or cultural epicycles took on an unprecedented role as feedforward elements controlling or steering biocultural niche construction. It is this new role, above all, that differentiates late hominin (and especially sapient) evolution from the evolutions of other cultural animals.Less

Traditions and Tasks: Household Production and the Internal Economy at Dean Hall Plantation, South Carolina

Nicole Isenbarger and Andrew Agha

in Beyond the Walls: New Perspectives on the Archaeology of Historical Households

This chapter addresses the production of colonoware pottery at a plantation site in South Carolina. The authors are able to explore the ways this ceramic tradition was used by enslaved persons not ... More

This chapter addresses the production of colonoware pottery at a plantation site in South Carolina. The authors are able to explore the ways this ceramic tradition was used by enslaved persons not only to venerate and maintain core West African cultural systems, but also how the household production of colonoware strengthened ties and created competition and differences among households within the community. They illustrate that by producing colonoware for sale, individual households engaged with the internal economy that thrived during the antebellum period of Charleston’s past. By examining what individual households chose to spend their money on, the authors are able to draw attention to what the enslaved may have valued in their own lives. Producing colonoware gave the enslaved limited power over their own labor, allowing them to make independent choices and decisions about how they would work for themselves.Less

Recasting the Media System: Network Convergence and Digital TV

Yu Hong

in Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy

This chapter argues that the 2008 global economic crisis and the economic restructuring that followed have accelerated state-led digitization, corporation, and capital accumulation within the state ... More

This chapter argues that the 2008 global economic crisis and the economic restructuring that followed have accelerated state-led digitization, corporation, and capital accumulation within the state media system. After contextualizing media reforms as part of the state’s cultural-system reform program, the chapter examines the case of digital TV, tracing the bumpy process of using convergence as a cover to corporatize cable networks and content production while revealing the leading role of state-owned digital media companies exemplified by Shanghai Media Group and Zhejiang Wasu in this process. It also underscores the inherent contradictions of the corporate digital-TV enterprise, especially demand deficiency resulting from systematic socioeconomic inequality and the contingency of public service left to the discretion of state companies that manage digital TV.Less

Oistrakh and the Impresario: Soviet Concert Tours and Systemic Integration

Kiril Tomoff

in Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945-1958

This chapter examines the Soviet encounter with the cultural facilitator of the mid-century Western cultural production system: the impresario. Soon after their artists began touring the West, Soviet ... More

This chapter examines the Soviet encounter with the cultural facilitator of the mid-century Western cultural production system: the impresario. Soon after their artists began touring the West, Soviet policy makers realized that the Western impresarios organized much more successful exchanges than did the system of cultural diffusion developed by the Soviets. The decision to entrust tours to impresarios instead of old networks of friendship societies resulted in more successful tours, but also in outright integration into the U.S.-dominated global economy of music production. Once Soviet cultural bureaucrats identified reliable impresarios, such as Sol Hurok in the United States, they adapted quickly to maximize the propaganda and financial advantages of those partnerships. In a material sense, the transimperial exchange of musicians created a short term win-win situation.Less

Cultural Traditions

Robert Walker

in The Child as Musician: A handbook of musical development

This chapter argues that children's musical development should be concerned with the more stable aspects of cultural life and less with the ... More

This chapter argues that children's musical development should be concerned with the more stable aspects of cultural life and less with the effects of ‘cultural transmission in process’. However, contemporary issues of acculturation, especially with the effects of the global entertainment industry as it targets the financial capacities of young people in order to persuade them to buy its products, require some mention. This chapter comment on three cultures which show stable cultural values, practices, and beliefs about music established over time through the processes of diffusion. Whether it is the practice of Lut u yu (singing with pigs) in Papua New Guinea, the ancient Chinese elegant music of Aak in Korea, or the elima songs of the Ituri Pygmy in central Africa, children in these cultures are making adult music from their early childhood.Less

After “1968”1972 and the Youth of the World

Kay Schiller and Christopher Young

in The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

Ten days before the opening of the 1968 Mexico Games, violent clashes between students and police culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre, which caused 260 deaths and 1,200 injuries within a stone's ... More

Ten days before the opening of the 1968 Mexico Games, violent clashes between students and police culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre, which caused 260 deaths and 1,200 injuries within a stone's throw of the Olympic sites. This chapter explains that during 1968, the revolution was not the sole preserve of Mexican students. Across vast tracts of the Western world, the cultural eco-system was evolving much faster in the past. It notes that in Western Europe, a rapidly expanding education system propelled huge numbers of young people into a tertiary sector hopelessly under-equipped for the speed of cultural change, formenting discontent. In Germany, nascent unease with the older generation's supposed amnesia about the recent past became acute. It highlights that the culture of 1968—like the SPD's election victory with which it was inextricably linked—certainly influenced them, but the ways in which it did so were not always obvious.Less

A Typology of Family Farming Patterns

Sonya Salamon

in Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest

This chapter emphasizes the importance of land in farming. Land is of such importance within an agrarian social system that whoever owns it has power over family and community members, especially ... More

This chapter emphasizes the importance of land in farming. Land is of such importance within an agrarian social system that whoever owns it has power over family and community members, especially those who want to farm. Control of land is the measure of status within the farm family and of family status in the community. In every generation, as owners age and prepare to die, they must plan or carry out the ritual transfer of their land. As land control moves through families via intergenerational transfers, or through communities via the land market, the transmission is a vehicle for re-creating and reenacting the cultural system. Land control is therefore a particularly powerful analytic window on the organization of an agrarian cultural system.Less

Culture, Agriculture, and Politics of Rice in Java

Michael R. Dove

in Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness

This chapter addresses the cultural–ecological divide between swidden and wet-rice fields that has long dominated the Southeast Asian landscape. The difference between the two agricultural ... More

This chapter addresses the cultural–ecological divide between swidden and wet-rice fields that has long dominated the Southeast Asian landscape. The difference between the two agricultural technologies — swidden and irrigation — in their legibility to the state underpinned a wider cultural differentiation between forested and open lands, upland and lowland, barbarism and civilization. Nonetheless, in some respects the Javanese saw the two as opposite poles in a single overarching cultural–ecological system. The lowland agrarian states saw clearly where their vested interests lay, however, which explains the long history of state deprecation of swiddens and forests and valorization of irrigated rice cultivation and, indeed, of rice itself. The colonial powers were also quick to identify the logic of these agro-ecological systems and insinuate themselves into favorable positions within them. Insight into these agro-ecological systems, whether by colonial or postcolonial authorities, serves political ends, which are cloaked in appeals to cultural values. Paradoxically, those with the most encompassing vision of the agricultural landscape also have engaged in the greatest obfuscation of its dynamics.Less

Introduction

Heidi Keller, Kim A. Bard, and Julia R. Lupp

in The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development

Science, and by extension society, requires a comprehensive theory of attachment to guide research and practice—one grounded in a contextualized conception of attachments and their development, which ... More

Science, and by extension society, requires a comprehensive theory of attachment to guide research and practice—one grounded in a contextualized conception of attachments and their development, which encompasses knowledge from diverse disciplines engaged in the study of human development. To improve on the current paradigm, this volume embraces the diversity of attachment systems across cultures and primate species, and assesses the core assumptions and methods of attachment theory. Resultant understanding is used to project an updated version of attachment theory—one that can be applied across cultures. Suggestions for more culturally sensitive research methods are proposed and ideas applicable to current practice and policies discussed. A reconceptualized theory of attachment is presented based on principles that are generalizable, valid, and reliable across diverse primates and diverse human cultures. In addition, the need to make adjustments in attachment philosophy is stressed, and strategies are discussed to communicate and work with researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders.Less

An Image to Carry the World Within It Performance Cartography and the Skidi Star Chart

Martin Brückner

in Early American Cartographies

This chapter focuses on an important issue for many American Indians concerning the pursuit of knowledge, which often undermines cultural self-determination. Maps such as the Skidi Star Chart are a ... More

This chapter focuses on an important issue for many American Indians concerning the pursuit of knowledge, which often undermines cultural self-determination. Maps such as the Skidi Star Chart are a graphic index of a cultural system. The act of publication disrupts traditional networks of knowledge sharing, privileges certain “knowable” components of that cultural system over others, and permits readers to use that published information in any way. The author's analysis here may provide some insights concerning how the Skidi Star Chart works, but it is fragmentary and incomplete at best. Although the image is widely disseminated on the internet and in other media, any interpretation or use of the Star Chart gives it a life independent of Skidi concerns. The Skidi Star Chart is a sacred living artifact, and the Skidi Pawnee have precious few heritage artifacts left.Less

From Skill Acquisition to Expertise

Diane Vaughan

in Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk

It is survival of the fittest. At the Academy, beginners struggle to adjust cognitively and physically to the material objects, devices, and ways of doing and thinking required for their ... More

It is survival of the fittest. At the Academy, beginners struggle to adjust cognitively and physically to the material objects, devices, and ways of doing and thinking required for their temporally-driven work. Then, as they progress to apprenticeship and working live traffic, we see how trainers fine-tune interpretive practices and how cognition is shaped by system structure, goals, technology, history, and culture. It is learning by mistake. These lessons are reinforced by controllers in the room, who are both audience and social control, leaving no error unnoticed. The trainer instills competing system goals as cultural scripts: in this case, the safe, orderly, and expeditious delivery of air traffic. The practical accomplishment is a highly developed cultural system of knowledge. In becoming experts, mind, body, technologies, and institutionalized cultural beliefs merge, becoming tacit knowledge, such that tasks can be done automatically, freeing controllers to think about the higher order matters of dead reckoning, such as planning, anticipating, and recognizing anomalies. When they have acquired tacit knowledge, they have reached the final stage of skill acquisition: expertise. Expertise is the ability to assess and respond to situations in the moment based on past experience, without articulated purpose or intentional decisions making.Less

Culture

N. J. Enfield

in Relationship Thinking: Agency, Enchrony, and Human Sociality

This chapter addresses the notion of culture as a large-scale, community-level context for social agency in communicative interaction. The concept of cultural system is defined in semiotic terms. The ... More

This chapter addresses the notion of culture as a large-scale, community-level context for social agency in communicative interaction. The concept of cultural system is defined in semiotic terms. The chapter presents a case study of social behavior among speakers of the Kri language (a minority language of Laos), with specific reference to the notion of ritual in informal communication, and illustrated through an ethnographic study of the design of houses in Kri villages and the specific relation between social status and the spatial array of the Kri house. The case study also illustrates agency in everyday life, linking the flexibility and accountability of individuals to community norms and the possibility of sanctions.Less

From Hippocrates to Shakespeare and Dickens: epilepsy's entry into ‘the circuit of culture’

in Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter

This chapter describes the cultural narratives of epilepsy in the mid-twentieth century. It considers the medical-cultural languages of epilepsy from Hippocrates through to William Shakespeare, ... More

This chapter describes the cultural narratives of epilepsy in the mid-twentieth century. It considers the medical-cultural languages of epilepsy from Hippocrates through to William Shakespeare, William Gowers, and Charles Dickens. It also reviews the textual play between different narrative genres. This chapter suggests an archaeology of those signifying systems and narrative relationships that have come together over time to inscribe epilepsy with meaning within western medical-cultural systems. It argues that ‘the epileptics’ produced through the genealogies presented are not the same epileptics.Less