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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Cultural history'
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Ford, Marcia. "Una historia cultural de LatinoAmerica : a cultural history of Latin America /." [Rohnert Park, Calif.], 2003. http://members.aol.com/latinowebquest/Index.html.
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Watson, Kelly L. "Encountering Cannibalism: A Cultural History." Connect to this title online, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=bgsu1149995164.
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Marris, Alan David. "The cultural history of the werewolf." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.260040.
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Gee, Lindsay Mary. "Lydia : a cultural and social history." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3ab35d75-60de-4739-81ad-5e4e8dfb912a.
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A date-chart of significant periods and events from the third millennium BC to the seventh century AD prefaces the work. The text's chronological span runs from the heyday of the Mermnad kingdom to that of the Roman Empire, and the primary emphasis is on giving a narrative of the country's development under Greek influence: a wide range of literary and archaeological material is employed to this end. The thesis is divided into six parts: the first deals with geographical notices in such authors as Strabo and Pliny; the second chronicles the Mermnad period, between the seventh and sixth centuries, with particular reference to contacts with the Ionian Greeks; the third describes Lydian experiences during the ensuing period of Persian hegemony, between the sixth and fourth centuries; the fourth, covering the sequel to Alexander's takeover, focusses on the culminating stages of Hellenization, discussing Sardis' Hellenistic period and the Seleukid and Attalid foundations in the countryside. The fifth part discusses the village communities, over an extended period as the topic warrants: inscriptions of the Roman period predominate, and are incorporated on the grounds that a broader panorama is thereby achieved, and that the patterns delineated will have changed only slowly and are anyway of relevance for the Hellenized country's continuing history. The sixth part, on religion native and foreign, deals with the relevant inscriptions and literature, charting the progressive influence of Persian and Greek cult but also the surviving Anatolian elements. Appendices follow on the evidence for the process of change in language use from Lydian to Greek, on Maionia and the Heraklidai, and on Mycenaean contacts, together with a catalogue of the numismatic sources for religious history. Maps and sketch-plans accompany the text at appropriate points.
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Micaković, Elizabeth Joan. "T.S. Eliot's voice : a cultural history." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/18902.
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This thesis is a diachronic account of T. S. Eliot’s speaking voice, which, over fifty years, developed into the meticulously crafted tool of the twentieth-century author and critic and the politically and socially powerful instrument of the public intellectual. Eliot’s voice, although certainly the offspring of the nineteenth-century marriage of authorship as a bona fide profession and oral performance, was, however, unique in its responsiveness to twentieth-century legal and political debates on national identity and stability, copyright, and the powerful potential of recording technologies to both disseminate an author’s words almost exponentially whilst simultaneously encroaching on the traditional material of authorship: print. Indeed, what underpins this thesis is the argument that he was both fascinated by and actively involved in shaping those very discourses on the authority of the spoken voice in the belief that the power of the spoken word, and ultimately of his own voice, held an unrivalled ability to impact on social behaviour and national stability.
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Munro, Lisa L. "Inventing Indigeneity: A Cultural History of 1930s Guatemala." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/347326.
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Popular images of indigenous cultures, both past and present, have served to construct pernicious racial stereotypes of native peoples throughout the Americas. These stereotypes have led to the discrimination and marginalization of native peoples; however, they also have functioned to construct identities and cultural values of non-Indian people. Existing scholarship on the representation of native peoples of Latin America has focused on the ways that nineteenth-century elites in that region appropriated certain elements of indigenous cultures to construct a sense of national unity and historical continuity. However, this scholarship has overlooked the ways that images of the Maya produced social and cultural identities outside of Latin America, as the U.S. public avidly consumed a variety of images of the Maya and commercialized their material culture in the early twentieth century. Analyzing the question of identity construction through the appropriation of Mayan culture, this dissertation focuses on the U.S. construction and use of a particular racial discourse about native people. Public audiences consumed racial discourses in the context of a series of transnational cultural initiatives, including international expositions, popular film, and textile exhibits, which shaped public understandings of the Maya. I argue that despite growing public interest in Mayan culture and shifting understandings about the relationship between race and culture, these venues of visual display reinforced and reproduced older racial discourses of Indian degeneracy. I examine documentary evidence, such as travel brochures, newspapers, and archival materials to show that sites of visual display invented a new language of "indigeneity," which functioned to define not only native peoples, but also to shape U.S. public social identities. I conclude that the production of racial discourses of the Maya as culturally and racially inferior throughout the twentieth century defined contemporary understandings of U.S. identities and the role of indigenous history.
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Hatherell, William. "A cultural history of Brisbane 1940-1970 /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2003. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe17644.pdf.
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Armstrong, Christopher. "Placing Atlantic Canada, community, cultural history, politics." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0020/NQ43463.pdf.
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Driscoll, P. M. "A cultural history of Wiltshire, 1750-1800." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.598655.
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This thesis constructs the first integrated cultural history of a county as a unit for the eighteenth century. Surveying a diversity of environments, urban and rural, this study emphasises the variety of cultural activities and contexts within a single English county. Such a detailed study of a whole county – not just major towns – brings geography to the fore, recognising the importance of not only ‘natural’, but also human, geography – in the form of communications networks, urban planning, and local economies – in shaping provincial cultural life in the eighteenth century. The thesis mines a rich seam of source material including local newspapers, books, diaries and correspondence to explore five central aspects of Wiltshire’s cultural life. Each of the chapters – on religion, sociability, sport, the theatre, and music – reveals important details of English provincial life, from religious, social, and economic imperatives to leisure pursuits and pastimes. Together, the chapters form a detailed case study of Wiltshire’s own cultural life and the provincial county’s relations with regional, national, and metropolitan social and cultural influences. Because of its breadth of focus and the diversity of its sample, this thesis creates a body of material that is used to analyse key themes in the historiography of eighteenth-century society and culture. The thesis thus employs its empirical geographical basis to interrogate concepts and models such as class, commercialisation, politeness and the urban renaissance, and to evaluate the way these developments played themselves out on the ground in Wiltshire. The county history therefore not only extends historians’ knowledge of local provincial culture and society, but contributes to an understanding of eighteenth-century English culture at large.
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Stevens, Charlotte. "Snapshots from the cultural history of taste." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.416724.
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This thesis explores the cultural, or literary history of taste as a social construct. Taking the mid-eighteenth century as its starting point, the thesis adopts an historicist approach to five very particular texts from this vast history. It begins by focusing on three novels: firstly, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) which was published at a time when there was increasing pressure to create `standards' of taste; secondly, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) which belongs to a moment that scrutinised these `standards'; and thirdly, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837), which reflects an era in which taste is driven by commercial forces. The final chapters explore a significant twentieth-century development in the history of taste: namely, the adaptation of text into film. Here, David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963) become the focus for close investigation. I argue that Lean's Oliver Twist very much belongs to a post-war Britain in which the acquisition of taste was part of a wider framework for maintaining national and social cohesion. Richardson's Tom Jones, I argue, must be read in relation to the cultural revolutions in tastet hat dominatedth e early 1960s.
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Downes, Aviston Decourcei. "Barbados 1880-1914 : a socio-cultural history." Thesis, University of York, 1994. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14001/.
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Lauritzen, Lydia J. "THE MAKING OF BIOETHICAL HISTORY." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1259859539.
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Ghosh, Gour Chandra. "History of minor dynasties in early Bengal : studies in socio-political cultural history." Thesis, University of North Bengal, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/1591.
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Jokilehto, Jukka. "A history of architectural conservation /." Click here to access, 1986. http://www.iccrom.org/eng/e-docs/ICCROM_05HistoryofConservation.pdf.
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Hackenesch, Silke [Verfasser]. "Chocolate and Blackness : A Cultural History / Silke Hackenesch." Frankfurt am Main : Campus Verlag, 2017. http://www.campus.de/home/.
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Tsetskhladze, Gocha R. "Cultural history of Colchis (6th-1st centuries BC)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.244242.
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Downing, Phoebe C. "Fabians and 'Fabianism' : a cultural history, 1884-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:425127c1-94c1-4d20-ba58-fdd457c1f6b8.
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This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.
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Patterson, Ian. "Cultural critique and canon formation, 1910-1937 : a study in modernism and cultural memory." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244805.
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This thesis argues that one of the tasks of literary hiStory is to identify and challenge the processes by which writers who were once highly valued come to be forgotten and excluded from the canon. I investigate the work and cultural milieu of three such writers: Douglas Goldring, John Rodker and Mary Butts. The first chapter sets the terms of the argument, and presents the grounds for a reconfiguration of the conventional historical view of modernism. The second examines the early wor~ of Douglas Goldring: his achievements as editor of The Tramp are related to its cultural and historical situation; I then turn to the history of conscientious objection in the First World War in order to explore the politics of his 1917 novel The Fortune, and to provide historical material necessary for the later reading of Rodker's Memoirs of Other Fronts. This leads on to a discussion of some of his subsequent political novels and plays. In the third and fourth chapters, I analyse the work of John Rodker, from his adolescence in the East End of London to his maturity, first in relation to modernist dance and theatrical experiments in London during the first war, and later to avant-garde writing in England and France in the 1920s, particularly as it draws upon psycho-analysis. The fifth chapter examines the novels of Mary Butts, particularly Ashe of Rings, which is read as a war-novel, but one which makes constructive use of her interest in the occult. What this category meant during that period is also investigated, which allows me to formulate a broader argument that situates her work within a tradition that takes fantasy seriously, while remaining critical of the conceptual framework of psycho-analysis. I follow this up by showing the later importance of unconscious anti-semitism to her capacity to elaborate an ecological nationalism. The final chapter examines anti-semitism and satire in the relationship between Rodker and Wyndham Lewis, and offers a further explanatory justification for the argument of the thesis.
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Falk, Marcus. "Cultural Materiality : The correlation between material and cultural capital in the late eighteenth century Stockholm elite burgher home." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Historiska institutionen, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-360585.
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The eighteenth century saw the slow but steady rise of the middling classes to their nineteenth century social and cultural prominence, reinforced by a changing political landscape and the steadily increasing importance of the market. As the social and cultural power of the city burghers making up the majority of the middling classes grew, so did they start to consume in a manner to reflect to their new status in society. The question that arises then is more exactly how this group consumed, what types of objects that became important and what type of status that became the most paramount. Since status and social groups can differ greatly between both times and places, focus of this investigation is the burgher elite of Stockholm, the social, economical, and cultural centre of Sweden during the whole of the early modern era. By using a combination of Bourdieu's capital theories and Erving Goffman's theories on the presentation of self the inventories of fourteen elite burgher households has been analysed in order to investigate how these individuals constructed their home to present their own perceived social and cultural status. Through a thorough and theoretical investigation of these early modern front regions it can be revealed that the traditional representations of cultural capital, the main form of symbolic status capital, such as paintings and books, albeit important, constituted but a minor part of the capital presentation in the home. Instead it appears as if the most important status capital is presented through sociability, the ability to host social events or, if that option is unavailable, attend social events. Objects with the express function of sociability, such as tea- and dinner-ware, together with chairs, tables, and fashionable interior decoration suggests that sociability indeed stood at the forefront for the presentation of status for the late eighteenth century Stockholm burgher. At the same time, fashionability appears to have been extremely important, with almost all of the investigated households going to great lengths to stay up to date with the most recent trends in both furniture, colours, literature, and china. Much more research is however needed in order to really understand the structures of status and how it was expressed during the early modern times, and especially comparative studies between estate borders is needed in order to understand the status relations between social groups and how this affected status presentations.
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Peters, Philip. "Historical cultural memory celebrated through architecture." This title; PDF viewer required. Home page for entire collection, 2006. http://archives.udmercy.edu:8080/dspace/handle/10429/9.
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Cerqueira, André Sekkel. "A donzela alada: reflexões sobre a retórica e história em Portugal no século XVII." Universidade de São Paulo, 2017. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-17072017-192645/.
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Em nossa pesquisa analisamos os preâmbulos dos livros de história impressos em Portugal entre 1640-1680, dando atenção às práticas da escrita desses textos dedicatórias, cartas ao leitor, prólogos e licenças para a impressão. Os preâmbulos, como constatamos, têm a função retórica de exórdio da obra e, portanto, pretendem captar a benevolência, atenção e tornar o leitor dócil com relação à matéria do livro. Segundo os preceitos retóricos usados no século XVII, uma das maneiras para se atingir esses objetivos era falar sobre o assunto tratado adiante. Encontramos, então, nos prólogos dos livros de história, discursos sobre o que era a história naquele período, os quais confrontamos com o que diziam os tratados sobre esse mesmo gênero. Com isso, nos propomos a fazer uma história das práticas da escrita dos preâmbulos e dos preceitos do gênero histórico no século XVII.<br>In our research we analyze the preambles of the books on history printed in Portugal between 1640 and 1680, paying attention to the writing practices of these texts - dedications, letters to the reader, prologues and licenses for printing. The preambles, as we have seen, have the rhetorical function of exordium of the work and, therefore, seek to capture benevolence, attention and make the reader docile with regard to the matter of the book. According to the rhetorical precepts used in the seventeenth century, one of the ways to achieve these goals was to talk about the subject matter discussed below. We find, then, in the prologues of the history books, discourses on what history was in that period, which we confront with the treatises on the same genre. With this, we propose to make a history of the writing practices of preambles and precepts of the historical genre in the seventeenth century.
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Poltan, Andreas. "Translating Swedish Automotive History : Terminology, cultural adaptations and connectors." Thesis, Växjö University, School of Humanities, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-2366.
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<p>This essay is an analysis of a translation of the chapter Success Begets Success – From 1800 to C70 Coupé in David G. Styles’ book Volvo 1800. The Complete Story. By studying cultural adaptations together with the translation of terminology and connectors and basing the analysis on translation theory, certain conclusions can be drawn about the problems of translating a car-related text. This essay is mainly based on the theories of Vinay & Darbelnet (in Munday 2001), Rune Ingo (2007) and Bengt Altenberg (1999). The main results are that terminology is very important and that a translator needs to know the terms very well in order to translate successfully. For cultural adaptations it is necessary to make the text appear natural in the target culture without losing any vital information from the source text. Failure to meet those demands may result in a text which is rejected by people who are very interested in and knowledgeable about Volvo. Regarding connectors, avoidance of repetition is a key to success and slight increases or decreases in formality must sometimes be performed in order to reach this goal. Translation may be a rather vague science, but there are still strategies that must be regarded as better than others.</p>
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Fredin, Sabrina. "History and geography matter : The cultural dimension of entrepreneurship." Doctoral thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för industriell ekonomi, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-14018.
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This dissertation deals with the rise of new industries through entrepreneurial activities. The aim is to investigate how differences in contexts might encourage or discourage entrepreneurial activities. This contextualization of entrepreneurship enhanced our understanding of when, how and why entrepreneurial activities happen. Entrepreneurship is recognized to be a spatially uneven process and, in addition to previous research that has examined the actions of individual entrepreneurs, we also need to understand the context in which entrepreneurship occurs. We have a good understanding of how structural conditions like industry structure, organization structure and agglomeration effects influence the context, but we know little about how the social dimension of the context is the transmitting medium between structural conditions for entrepreneurship and the decision to act upon identified entrepreneurial opportunities. Following this line of argument, this dissertation is built on the assumption that entrepreneurship is a social phenomenon which gives strong arguments for including local culture in entrepreneurship research. The temporal persistence and the pronounced differences of culture and structural conditions between places reflect path-dependent processes. I therefore use regional path dependence as an interpretative lens to study the contextualization of entrepreneurship in two Swedish cities. Although each context is unique, some generalizations can be drawn from the four individual papers in this dissertation. The first is that industrial legacy leads to the formation of a distinct local culture and that the persistency of this culture influences the subsequent entrepreneurial activities in new local industries. The second is that this persistency of culture suggests that entrepreneurs who are outsiders, geographically or socially, are the driving forces for the emergence of new local industries. Finally, new industry emergence is a result of a combination of exogenous forces and initial local conditions, but it is the entrepreneurial individuals who translate these forces and conditions into entrepreneurial activities.
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Cockayne, Emily Jane. "A cultural history of sound in England 1560-1760." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2000. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251723.
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Sounds both penetrate bodies and emanate from them, and in this thesis I consider both the reception and deployment of sounds in a variety of social contexts - an aural history of England between 1560 and 1760. I confine my analysis to nonverbal and non-musical sounds which were made both deliberately and incidentally, voluntarily and involuntarily, and ask, under what conditions were sounds meaningful? The concern of Chapter 2 is the sense of hearing - how and when it was appreciated or confused, and how it could be sharpened, or dulled and deafened. The experiences of the deaf are also discussed, with a distinction made between the congenitally deaf, and those who became deaf after they had developed verbal language skills. The third chapter considers body sounds, such as belching, farting and sighing, and the factors which influenced their suppression or enhancement. The chapter explores in depth the various functions of laughing and crying, highlighting differences in behaviour between different social and demographic groups. Sound signals - sounds which warned that something was happening or would happen - are the subject of the fourth chapter. The discussion commences with an investigation of sounds which were thought to indicate future disasters, to provide clues about health, or to forecast weather. However, the bulk of the chapter is devoted to signals which were deliberately issued in the public realm in order to convey information, warn of calamities, announce deaths, instruct and gather communities, and mark temporal, social and spatial divisions. Chapter 5 extends this discussion by exploring the ways that secular and ecclesiastical authorities tried to control the apparatus of signalling, and by considering both the success of such attempts and the efficacy of sound signalling. Aggressive sounds feature in Chapter 6. The manner in which aggression was expressed depended on the status of the aggressor and the person towards whom aggression was directed; inferiors were subjected to crude and harsh sounds, while caution was required when projecting aggressive sounds at superiors. Chapter 7 analyses early modern conceptions of noise - sounds which were considered to be irritating. It explores the various contexts of noise, and shows how ' people manipulated their environment to reduce noise disturbance, through legal means and by altering buildings.
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Clements, Rebekah Elizabeth. "A cultural history of translation in early-modern Japan." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/252271.
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Gapps, Stephen. "Performing the past : a cultural history of historical reenactments." Online version, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2100/625.
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University of Technology, Sydney.<br>The reenactment of the past itself has a history. This thesis analyses self-styled 'historical reenactors' in the West and traces the history of the broader phenomenon of historical reenactment in the Australian context from the late nineteenth century to the present. The historical section focuses on several events significant in Australian cultural memory that have been reenacted over time. Historical parades, pageants and reenactments dramatically narrate culturally specific historical sensibilities and demonstrate inter and cross cultural exchanges of historical consciousness. I contend such performances have had a significant position in the formation of popular history since the late nineteenth century and that there is a continuity of conventions in performing the past. I have addressed the position of reenactments as part of a constant interest in the status and power of history in, and for, popular culture. I have shown how a form of history that operated for the public was transformed into a form of history operated by the public in a struggle for authority over the form and content of history. Historical reenactments have been useful avenues for elites to create didactic spectacular history that have also offered the opportunity for marginalised groups to make social and political gains through their participation in the making of public history. Considering the significance of reenactments in the formation of a distinctly Australian public history, they have received little attention from historians. As ephemera, reenactments sit awkwardly in the explanatory frameworks regularly used by historians. Using methodologies from a range of academic disciplines such as performance studies, anthropology and cultural studies, this thesis documents and interrogates the specific form of historical reenactment. In the sections of this thesis that analyse contemporary historical reenactments, I use my own experience as an historical reenactor of more than ten years in an ethnographic approach that reflects on the pleasures, promises and problems 'dressing up as if from the past' offers. In this history I draw continuities between past reenactments and present practices that assist in understanding historical reenactment as a specific cultural form. This thesis contends that reenactments over time have been characterised by three main elements: a collapsing of past and present, an avenue for a 'connectedness' with the past through a sensual experience, and an essential relationship with I authenticity.'
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Ryu, Jae Hyung. "Reality & effect a cultural history of visual effects /." unrestricted, 2006. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-03292007-172937/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006.<br>Title from file title page. Ted Friedman, committee chair; Kathy Fuller-Seeley, Angelo Restivo, Jung-Bong Choi, Alisa Perren, committee members. Electronic text (249 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 29, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 236-249).
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Papadimitriou, Lydia. "The Greek film musical : a critical and cultural history /." Jefferson, N.C. [u.a.] : McFarland, 2006. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0517/2005022634.html.
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Kaleba, Casey Dean. "Violent delights a cultural history of media violence debates /." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2130.
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Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.<br>Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Theatre. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Ryu, Jae Hyung. "Reality & Effect: A Cultural History of Visual Effects." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2007. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/communication_diss/13.
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The purpose of this dissertation is to chart how the development of visual effects has changed popular cinema¡¯s vision of the real, producing the powerful reality effect. My investigation of the history of visual effects studies not only the industrial and economic context of visual effects, but also the aesthetic characteristics of the reality effect. In terms of methodology, this study employs a theoretical discourse which compares the parallels between visual effects and the discourse of modernity/postmodernity, utilizing close textual analysis to understand the symptomatic meanings of key texts. The transition in the techniques and meanings of creating visual effects reflects the cultural transformation from modernism to postmodernism. Visual effects have developed by adapting to the structural transformation of production systems and with the advance of technology. The studio system strongly controlled the classical Hollywood cinema by means of the modern economic production system of Fordism. Breakdown of Hollywood classicism as a production system gave rise to the creation of digital effects with the rise of the concept of the blockbuster and with the development of computer technologies. I argue that the characteristic feature of time-space compression, occurring in the process of the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, clearly reflects that of compression of multi-layered time and space, generated in the development process from analog visual effects, such as trick, rear and front projection, to the digital effects, such as rotoscoping and CGI animation. While the aesthetics of analog visual effects, without computing, can be compared to a Fordist production system, digital effects, which hugely rely on CGI manipulation, are examples of flexible accumulation. As a case study of the local resistance or alternative of Hollywood today, I examine the effects-oriented Korean nationalist blockbuster. The Korean nationalist blockbuster films have sought large-scale filmmaking and presentation of spectacular scenes, including heavy dependence on the use of special effects, which is frequently considered a Hollywood style. This paradoxical combination of peculiar Korean subjects and Hollywood style can be viewed as a form of cultural jujitsu, taking advantage of the force of the dominant culture in order to resist and subvert it.
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Cheung, Desmond H. H. "A socio-cultural history of sites in Ming Hangzhou." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/37020.
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This dissertation takes a fresh approach to the study of place for parsing Ming society. Through a close analysis of the construction and representation of five famous places in the former imperial capital of Hangzhou – a pair of official shrines, a Buddhist monastery, the city god temple, and West Lake – I develop the dual idea of the “site” as a physical place that people made and maintained, and also as an imagined place that had important meanings in the cultural landscape. I argue that no individual group – not even the Ming state – was able to maintain a site on its own, nor was it able to control the meanings ascribed to it. Rather, members of different social groups participated in the construction of a site and the production of its historical meanings, and drew on particular meanings to advance their own concerns. This place-based history was an open resource that was constructed, used, and contested by multiple parties. While it could prompt people to contribute towards the restoration or maintenance of a site, in some cases it also provoked violent engagement with it. This included the intended destruction of statues of villains who engineered the death of a loyal hero, and also the unintended (and mistaken) smashing of religious carvings to punish a nefarious monk.
This place-based analysis presents new possibilities for understanding the dynamics of Ming society by focussing on the interactions between its constituent groups. Each site had a particular place within the political order of the state, and also its own relevance to wider society. The interplay of cultural imagination and physical engagement that underlay the making of historical sites reveals the multiple voices involved in the production of meaning in Ming society, and the cooperation, negotiation, and contestation among the groups to whom those voices belonged.
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Herman, Dana. "Hashavat Avedah : a history of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99925.
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This thesis is an institutional history of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), an organization mandated by the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) to assume trusteeship over heirless Jewish cultural property that had been plundered by the Nazis and later centralized in depots in the American Zone of Germany in the wake of the Second World War. Formally established in 1947, until 1951 JCR functioned as the cultural arm of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) and distributed hundreds of thousands of books, thousands of ceremonial objects, and Torah scrolls to Jewish communities around the world including the United States, Israel, West Germany, Britain, and Canada. Looking beyond its mandated mission, JCR was also involved in searching for caches of Jewish property in the Allied zones, microfilming manuscripts and archives in German public institutions, and negotiating the enactment of West German legislation to safeguard future discoveries of Jewish property.Salo Baron, professor of Jewish history at Columbia University, was JCR's founder and president; many of the foremost Jewish intellectuals of the day, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Baeck were associated with it. This study of JCR sheds light on numerous topics, not the least of which is the political activities of Jewish academics in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Further, the internecine struggles among Jewish organizations over which group best represented world Jewry as trustee of this property is highlighted along with the development of JCR from a research commission to a U.S.-recognized supervisory body. JCR's interactions with the State and War departments as well as with the American military government in Germany add to the discussion of Jewish influence during this period. The examination of JCR's activities in the American zone between 1948 and 1951 serves to underscore the diligent work that was carried out, but also the less than ideal conditions in which this work was done. The distribution process undertaken by JCR and its member organizations emphasizes the debate surrounding what it meant to culturally reconstruct the Jewish world after the Holocaust. Finally, a discussion of JCR's very limited activities, from 1952 to 1977 when it was finally dissolved, underscores the difficulties inherent in maintaining a relevant rationale and function in an ever-changing political landscape.<br>Cette these presente l'histoire institutionnelle de la Jewish CulturalReconstruction, Inc. (JCR), une organisation mandatee par le bureau dugouvernement militaire des Etats Unis (OMGUS) pour assumer la tutelle desbiens juifs culturels sans heritier, qui ont ete pilles par les nazis et plus tardcentralises dans les depots de la zone americaine en Allemagne apres la DeuxiemeGuerre mondiale. De sa creation officielle en 1947 a 1951, la JCR a fonctionnecomme l'antenne culturelle de la Jewish Restitution Successor Organization(JRSO). Elle a distribue des centaines de milliers de livres, des milliers d'objetsrituels et des rouleaux de Torah aux communautes juives dans le monde,notamment aux Etats-Unis, en Israel, en Allemagne de l'Ouest, en Grande-Bretagne et au Canada. Outre sa mission originelle, la JCR a egalement participea la recherche des caches de biens juifs dans les zones alliees, a enregistre surmicrofilms des archives et des manuscrits appartenant aux institutions publiquesallemandes et est egalement intervenue pour encourager une legislation ouestallemandeafin de sauvegarder les decouvertes a venir des biens juifs.
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Barker, Clare Frances. "Exceptional.Children, Disability and Cultural History in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.486383.
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This thesis explores representations of children with disabilities in recent postcolonial fictions from New Zealand, Africa and South Asia. It contends that while disabled characters appear frequently within postcolonial texts, disability is rarely considered critically within postcolonial literary studies and that this is a significant omission. In turn, humanities-based disabilitY studies has not yet paid adequate attention to conceptions of disability arising from non-Western cultura.1 contexts. In order to begin to address these theoretical elisions, I apply disability theory in my textual analysis, interrogating how disability intervenes. in, and facilitates, critical fictional engagements with postcolonial cultural histories. My research focuses specifically on the figure of the exceptional child who, in postcolonial Iiter?ry criticism, is typically interpreted in metaphorical terms as a symbol of the vulnerable or damaged postcolonial community or nation. While current literary disability theory similarly .' proposes. that disability is most often deployed within fiction as a metaphorical device, and is inevitably depoliticised in the process, I examine the materialist explorations of normalcy, embodiment and health that occur in my selected texts. I identify how disability is mobilised as a material, socially situated presence which enables the writers' cultural critiques. This thesis is divided into six chapters, each examining a novel with a disabled child protagonist. The first two chapters, on Patricia Grace's Potiki (1986) and Ken Hulme's the bone people (1983), consider disability in relation to indigenous cultural politics in New Zealand; Chapters Three and Four engage with the intersections between disability and gender in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) and Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India (1991); and the final two chapters, focusing on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), explore postmodernist representations of exceptionality. My analysis demonstrates that these texts repres~nt disability in politicised, situated and unsentimental terms, an approach that is necessitated by the complex cultural histories in which the fictions are located. I conclude that further collaborations between postcolonial studies and disability studies are essential in order to advance current thinking on disability in non-Western contexts and to expand postcolonial theory's attention to conditions of difference.
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Bain, Alastair G. D. "A Cultural History of Silence in England 1500-1800." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.509224.
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This thesis is a cultural-historical discussion of the role and significance of silence in shaping aspects of belief and practice in early modern England. It proposes that silence was significant and formative not just as a relative absence of sound but also as a recognised characteristic of certain forms of behaviour. Thus, it was figured in the modification, control or suppression of speech; in actions such as gesture and bodily comportment; and in conditions such as obedience, subordination, humility, piety, and patience. Some forms of silence also derived from, and influenced, human relationships with the natural world. The main areas of discussion are family and community life; religion; death and the afterlife; the restricted means of communication exemplified in deafness and dumbness, and connections between silence and solitude. However, further threads run through the thesis. These include the relationship of silence to social order, sins of the tongue, personal fulfilment, the exercise of authority, and approaches to God, nature, spirituality, and religious asceticism. Another important consideration is the extent to which the expectation and understanding of silence varied over the three centuries in question, particularly as a consequence of increasing rates of literacy, changes in household and family dynamics, and between pre- and post-Reformation theologies.
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Berry, Trine Bjørkmann. "The film of tomorrow : a cultural history of videoblogging." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/53713/.
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Videoblogging is a form of cultural production that emerged in the early 2000s as a result of the increasing availability of cheap digital recording equipment, new videoediting software, video website hosting and innovative distribution networks across the internet. This thesis explores the close entanglement of culture and technology in this early and under-examined area of media production – most notably in the self-definition and development of a specific community around video practices and technologies between 2004-2009. These videobloggers' digital works are presented as an original case study of material digital culture on the internet, which also produced a distinctive aesthetic style. The thesis traces the discourses and technological infrastructures that were developed both within and around the community of videobloggers and that created the important pre-conditions for the video artefacts they produced. Through an ethnographically-informed cultural history of the practices and technologies of videoblogging, this thesis engages with the way in which new forms of cultural and technical hybrids have emerged in an increasingly digital age. The ethnographic research is informed by histories of film and video, which contribute to the theoretical understanding and contextualisation of videoblogging – as an early digital community – which has been somewhat neglected in favour of research on mainstream online video websites, such as YouTube. The thesis also contributes to scholarly understanding of contemporary digital video practices, and explores how the history of earlier amateur and semi-professional film and video has been influential on the practices, technologies and aesthetic styles of the videobloggers. It is also shown how their aesthetic has been drawn on and amplified in network culture, mainstream media, and contemporary media and cultural production. Through a critical mapping of the socio-technical structures of videoblogging, the thesis argues that the trajectories of future media and cultural production draws heavily from the practices and aesthetics of these early hybrid networked cultural-technical communities.
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Murphy, P. P. "A cultural history of gesture : England c.1380-1559." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.680230.
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This thesis evaluates the cultural work of gestures in the religious life of late medieval England. It exposes a void in current scholarship to suggest that gestural performances lie at the centre of contemporary modes of learning, highlighting how embodied engagements with faith allow for a new analysis of the nature of late medieval religious practices and teaching. The study establishes a sustainable grammar of religious gestures in late medieval England, tracing sources of encouragement for embodied performance before examining how established corporeal regimes could be distorted and re-appropriated. The thesis begins with an introduction to the engagements with gestural politics that have emerged in medieval textual studies in recen t years to suggest that gestural studies may be a tangible, flowering field. I turn to the liturgy as the starting point for my own examination of the gestural culture of late medieval Christianity, exploring verbal and bodily engagement by preachers and congregants with generalised notions of gestural behaviour, while highlighting distortions of practice in relation to the liturgical year. The thesis then examines how the gestures of the Church are used and misused in contemporaly religious drama, noting the distinct mannerisms that are associated with particular saints and biblical figures, while outlining the gestural transgressions that occur, especially with relation to diabolic characters. The next section focuses on the relationship between gestures and the imagination in Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and Margery Kempe's Book to highlight the individualistic possibilities of gestural performance in the fifteenth century. The final chapter examines the theological rebuke to this gestural culture, specifically in the crafting of the Book of Common Prayer, highlighting how reformers in the sixteenth century dealt with the corporeal engagement with God which had flourished previously, with specific relation to visual and material culture.
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Takegami, Mano. "A Humanitarian Monster| Mizuki Shigeru and Manga as Cultural Redemption." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10829947.
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<p> Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) is one of the most sophisticated and accomplished of modern manga artists. His work synthesizes ancient and modern Japanese visual artistic methods with contemporary tropes from Western graphic art to tell profound and complex stories that reflect major themes of war and the supernatural world. This thesis argues that Mizuki’s work should be reevaluated as a valuable contribution to modern art based on the following three qualities: technical mastery and innovation in visual art; socio-political and philosophical depth of content; and his impact on other contemporary Japanese artists. Such study is significant because of the popularity of manga and other graphic art in shaping both popular culture and the view of art adopted by younger generations. Thus, studying Mizuki has implications for our understanding of art and its intersection with popular culture, and raises questions regarding whether popular media like manga should be considered seriously by art historians. </p><p>
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Selby, Shawn M. "Congress, Culture and Capitalism: Congressional Hearings into Cultural Regulation, 1953-1967." Ohio : Ohio University, 2008. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1212766295.
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Schillinger, Stephen. "Common representations : Jack Straw and literary history as cultural history on the early modern stage /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9363.
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Drelová, Agáta. "A cultural history of Catholic nationalism in Slovakia, 1985-1993." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/21846.
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This thesis is about the construction of a nationalised public Catholic culture in Slovakia from 1985 to 1993. At the core of this culture was the assumption that the Catholic Church had always been an integral part of the Slovak nation, her past, her present and her future. The thesis seeks to answer the question of who created this culture during the 1980s and 1990s and how and why they did so. To answer these questions this thesis adopts a cultural approach and explores how this culture was created utilising the concepts of collective memory, symbols and events as its main analytical tools. The data for this analysis include, but are not restricted to, materials produced in relation to various commemorative events and pilgrimages, especially those related to the leading national Catholic symbols: the National Patroness Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows and Saints Cyril and Methodius. The thesis argues that this culture was deliberately constructed from the point of view of many actors. Before 1989 these included the official Catholic hierarchy, underground Catholic Church communities, the pope and nationalist Communists. After 1989 these actors continued to construct this culture even as their positions of power changed. Most notably, underground Catholics became part of current ecclesiastical and political elite, and communist nationalists dissociated themselves from the Communist Party but retained their position within the cultural and political elite. The thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter looks at how the nationalised public Catholic culture started in the mid-1980s with underground Catholic communities that focused on culture and grassroots mobilisation. The second chapter looks at how the nationalist Communists and the official church hierarchy became involved in construction of parts of this culture and how their involvement resonated with the underground Catholic communities. Chapter Three examines how this culture continued to develop in the early 1990s in a new political context, and how it contributed to a broader cultural legitimisation of Slovak independence.
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Samuelsson, Johan. "Kommunen gör historia : Museer, identitet och berättelser i Eskilstuna 1959-2000." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, Department of Economic History, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-6196.
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<p>The overall purpose of the thesis is to examine the shaping of the identity of the municipality. One empirical question raised in the dissertation is how the municipal museum has been established as a part of the municipal administration. This is done through an empirical study of the municipality of Eskilstuna in the period 1959-2000 and its official historical narration. I have analyzed four cases where historical narration was produced, mainly by the city museum. These cases are: a city Jubilee in 1959, the building of a city museum in 1979, a city exhibition in 2000 and the documentary work of the museums in relation to contemporary society (Samdok). The historical narration of the municipality over time has some perspectives in common; it is mainly a genetical narration where the municipality’s character is transformation and development. Even if some themes change over time, this has been one basic element. The place that is in focus is also constant, the industrial sections of Eskilstuna. This means that a rather large area is excluded in the narrative. However it is important to emphasize one thing here, that the rural areas are mainly represented by prehistoric times up to the Middle Ages. The manifestation of identity is therefore problematic. The city, however, is associated with symbols of transformation, modernity and development. But even if the main perspective in the narrative is that of transformation, there is a more antiquarian or traditional part as well. Here the museum building plays an important part; the museum has been built up in what can be called the historical industrial milieu. There is one more aspect of the identity of the municipality that must be emphasized here. In many ways, the municipality has used symbols and epochs from national history, for example the Middle Ages, national saints, industrialization etc. In this way the municipality is constructed as a part of something typically Swedish. Even if there were permanent features in the narration, change and new perspectives were also included, such as immigrants, women and pop culture.</p>
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Bilton, Chris. "Towards cultural democracy : contradiction and crisis in British and U.S. cultural policy 1870-1990." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1997. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/36329/.
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This study examines the theoretical contradictions of 'cultural democracy' in Britain and the United States. Cultural democracy here refers to the claim that community participation in cultural activities (artistic production and consumption) leads to participation in a democratic society. In Britain 'cultural democracy' has been associated especially with the 'community arts' movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Using Gramsci's theory of 'hegemony' as a framework for analysis, I will argue that the theoretical inconsistencies of 'cultural democracy' in the 1970s and 1980s can be traced back to a fundamental contradiction in British and U.S. cultural policy, between 'materialist' and 'idealist' conceptions of culture. This contradiction has resulted in moments of crisis in British and U.S. cultural policy, followed by periods of 'unstable equilibrium'. In support of this argument I will focus on four of these moments of contradiction and crisis. First I will develop my hypothetical model of contradiction, crisis and equilibrium in relation to the British community arts movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Then I will apply this model to three successive 'moments of crisis' in British and U.S. cultural policy: the 'civilising mission' of the late nineteenth century public cultural institutions in Britain and the U.S., particularly the settlement house; the U.S. federal arts projects of the 1930s; dilemmas of access and accountability in recent media policy. I will conclude by exploring some alternative theoretical formulations of the relationship between 'culture' and 'community' and their possible application to cultural policy and cultural democracy.
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Maxson, Brian. "Review of The Italian Renaissance and Cultural history of the Rinascimento." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/6193.
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This book reviewed rejects recent scholarship that has minimized the significance of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, it argues that the cities of Florence, Venice, and Milan enjoyed a distinct period of precocity over the rest of Europe between roughly 130--1500.
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Gao, Qian. "Remembering the Cultural Revolution : history and nostalgia in the marketplace /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1421604431&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 182-204). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Calder, Lendol Glen. "Financing the American dream : a cultural history of consumer credit /." Princeton, NJ [u.a.] : Princeton Univ. Press, 1999. http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0b4s4-aa.
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Downs, Carolyn Mary. "A social, economic and cultural history of bingo (1906-2005)." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.440405.
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O'Callaghan, Liam. "A social and cultural history of rugby football in Munster." Thesis, Leeds Beckett University, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.528350.
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Cole, E. J. "The cultural history of exotic fruits in England 1650-1820." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.597824.
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This thesis examines the place of fruit in early-modern English culture and society, and in particular as a dimension of its response to the West Indian environment. Only a small minority encountered exotic fruit in this period. But in patterns of attraction and resistance to these immigrants from the colonial periphery we may find important markers for wider kinds of cultural change. The first section of this study, entitled ‘Exotic Fruits and the English Mind’, considers the impact of tropical fruits upon the English psyche. In the <i>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</i> (1690), John Locke, despite having no first hand knowledge of the New World and its fruit, chose the pineapple as his symbol for a thing which could only be known through direct sense experience. Locke exemplifies how tropical fruit were first naturalised within England in its intellectual life. The second chapter, ‘Exotic Fruits and the English Body’, assesses the culinary, dietary and medical discourses which shaped patterns of response to exotic fruit as objects of actual consumption. ‘Exotic Fruits in English Soil’ next eliminates how the cultivation of tropical fruit became an issue for horticulture and natural history in England. ‘The Rise and Fall of Exotic Fruit in England’ finally examines the nineteenth-century climax of the production of tropical fruits with the British Isles, an era in which the pineapple became almost a national symbol. Through the study of the English response to exotic fruit we may explore how metropolitan culture responded to the new worlds opened up by trade and colonization. England’s transformation form an insular, inward-looking nation to a sophisticated, outward-looking world power is mirrored through the cultivation and consumption of exotic fruits, and in particular through the pineapple fetish. To paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, fruit are good to think about.
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Pietruska, Jamie L. "Propheteering : a cultural history of prediction in the Gilded Age." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47827.
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Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2009.<br>Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 316-340).<br>This study of the changing practices and perceptions of prediction in the late nineteenth century reveals the process by which Americans came to rationalize economic and cultural uncertainty into modern life. Forecasts of all kinds were ubiquitous in the late nineteenth century; as the United States fashioned itself into an urban-industrial power with a national economy and an increasingly corporate and bureaucratic society, prediction became an increasingly significant scientific, economic, and cultural practice. As a postbellum crisis of certainty destabilized ways of thinking about the future-in science, social science, and religion-predictions, whether accurate or not, offered illusions of control over one's future to citizens of a rapidly modernizing America. I argue that the late-century search for predictability found as much uncertainty as it did certainty, that consumers of predictions were at once desirous and dismissive of forecasts that often took on greater cultural than economic value, and that producers and consumers of prediction together rationalized uncertainty and shaped a new cultural acceptance of the predictable unpredictability of modern life. In the first half of the dissertation I analyze the work of U.S. Department of Agriculture statisticians, private cotton estimators, Weather Bureau forecasters, and local "weather prophets," all of whom sought to systematically convert their observations into economically valuable predictions. In the second half of the dissertation I focus on the work of utopian novelist Edward Bellamy, fortune-tellers, and spirit mediums, whose prophecies circulated by the thousands through rural and urban America.<br>(cont.) "Propheteering" offers a new narrative of modernization by examining the tools and cultural practices used by both institutions and individuals to make sense of the late-century scientific and social reimagination of the future, however uncertain and fragmentary that future promised to be.<br>by Jamie L. Pietruska.<br>Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS
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Speakman, Lydia M. "The cultural construction of history in museums and heritage attractions." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 1992. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20390/.
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This study examines the role of the curator in the interpretation of history in museums and heritage attractions. The research uses data from twelve case studies collected from observation and interviews to examine the decision-making processes undertaken by curators in devising exhibitions and displays. The study examines the different interpretative opportunities available to the curator in determining their construction of history, in the selection of artefacts and the choice of historical interpretative approaches and interpretative techniques. The study demonstrates that the curator has to mediate his or her interpretative choices with a number of constraints. These constraints include the availability of artefacts, finance, the market, institutional structure and the ethics of the museum profession. In examining this decision-making process, the study argues that the construction of history in museums and heritage attractions represents a microcosm of the wider processes involved in the cultural construction of history. The study examines the role of history in society in upholding current beliefs and practices. Museums, as cultural institutions concerned with the past, are on the forefront of presenting society with its selective tradition, and as such are symbols of present values and attitudes. Curators, by virtue of their institutional role, are part of this wider cultural dynamic. Therefore their constructions of history in exhibitions, remain firmly within the current sociopolitical boundary, even though those constructions may also act to test and extend that same boundary.