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Journal articles on the topic 'Mundane culture'
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1
MERELMAN, RICHARD M. "The Mundane Experience of Political Culture." Political Communication 15, no. 4 (September 1, 1998): 515–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/105846098198876.
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Roskies, David G. "Sholem Aleichem: Mythologist of the Mundane." AJS Review 13, no. 1-2 (1988): 27–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009400002282.
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What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How–Do– You–Do than to place folklore and folk–speech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the treasures of Jewish myth and legend as his natural legacy. But Shmulik′s formative role in From the Fair was as much a fiction as the name Sholem Aleichem itself, which masked the true beginnings of a typical Russian–Jewish maskil named Rabinovitsh. Everything in the program of the Haskalah, as in Sholem Rabinovitsh's early career, militated against the discovery of folklore: the overwhelming antipathy of the Jewish Enlightenment to fantasy, superstition, and folk custom;2 Rabinovitsh's concern for fostering a highbrow literary culture in Yiddish based on the realistic portrayal of poverty, on social satire and stylistic discipline;3 and, perhaps most importantly, the young writer's adulation for the arch-maskil Abramovitsh- Mendele, who embodied this new critical standard.4 When, along with other of his contemporaries, Sholem Aleichem finally overcame these formidable obstacles and negotiated his way back to the folk, readers were so taken by his reinvention of Jewish folklore that they mistook it for the real thing.
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Andryushkova, N. P. "THE CATEGORY OF "MUNDANE CONSCIOUSNESS" IN PSYCHOLOGY." Bulletin of Kemerovo State University, no. 1 (March 20, 2017): 90–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.21603/2078-8975-2017-1-90-93.
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The article analyzes the phenomenon of ordinary consciousness as a category, whose largely contradictory and paradoxical nature evokes interest. It describes the main approaches to the study of ordinary consciousness and views on its nature in philosophical and psychological concepts. The article analyzes the ratio of ordinary consciousness with the related concepts of "mass consciousness", "common psychology", "group consciousness", "social consciousness". It describes the relationship of ordinary consciousness with culture and its place in the life of an individual as a cultural component, an inherent trait of any historical type of consciousness. The conclusion is that ordinary consciousness acts as an intermediary between the subject and the environment in which it is located, as well as between the individual and society. In addition to this, ordinary consciousness has not only a reflective function, but also acts as a regulator of social and particularly group behavior.
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Zimmermann, Ulrike. "On Things from Sea and Shore: British Naval Heroism in Material Culture." Open Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 508–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0044.
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Abstract This article examines social participation and the dissemination of cultural knowledge through artefacts, and analyses how unspectacular and mundane everyday objects manage to convey ideas of the exceptional and heroic, as, for example, in the case of Admiral Lord Nelson and the souvenir culture surrounding him and his victories. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the British Empire expanded and consolidated its global influence, relying heavily on the British Navy in the process. Public interest in the Navy—and in its prominent figures—increased and was also consciously promoted, and, as a consequence, elements of maritime culture were taken up and adapted in everyday culture. Nautically inspired artefacts became the fashion, and the new opportunities for mass production contributed to their proliferation. Thus, admiration for a naval hero found its expression in a multitude of artefacts which, taken by themselves, have nothing of the heroic about them but taken en masse demonstrate the significance of naval prowess in this period, and the forging of connections between the domestic to the foreign sphere.
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Abrahamson, Maria. "Humour and Mundane Reasoning about Alcohol Drinking." Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 15, no. 3 (June 1998): 133–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/145507259801500302.
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Group discussions were conducted, in five different occupational categories, in a medium-sized Swedish town. The occupational areas were media, politics, business, culture and civil service. An analysis is presented of how the interviewees expressed their alcohol habits in serious speech as compared to humorous speech. The participants' statements concerning their own alcohol consumption are related to expressions of what are called modulations in systemic functional linguistics. These form part of the ideational component of language, which concerns the way we communicate experience. Our choice of modulations demonstrates our attitude to the conditions that we describe regulate our ability to act. In serious speech, the speakers tend to value cautious drinking, setting sharp limits to how and when the use of alcohol is appropriate. As regards humorous speech, however, the situation is to a large extent the opposite: the interviewees picture themselves as under external constraints in connection to alcohol. The issues where we find humour are also where we find controversy in serious speech. The differences of opinion that arise, concerning everyday habits and the role model one represents as a parent, give rise to a number of jokes. The parts of serious discource that concern other people display a very different content, having to do with drinking too much, not being able to handle one's liquor consumption and not being permitted to drink alcohol – a content reflected in humorous form when the interviewees talk about themselves.
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Abrahamson, Maria. "Humour and mundane reason about alcohol drinking1." Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 15, no. 1_suppl (February 1998): 24–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/145507259801501s04.
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Group discussions were conducted, in five different occupational categories, in a medium-sized Swedish town. The occupational areas were the media, politics, business, culture and the civil service. An analysis is presented of how the interviewees expressed their alcohol habits in serious speech as compared to humourous speech. The participants' statements concerning their own alcohol consumption are related to expressions of what are called modulations in systemic functional linguistics. These form part of the ideational component of language, which concerns the way we communicate experience. Our choice of modulations demonstrates our attitude to the conditions that we describe regulate our ability to act. In serious speech, the speakers tend to value cautious drinking, setting sharp limits to how and when the use of alcohol is appropriate. As regards humourous speech, however, the situation is to a large extent the opposite: the interviewees picture themselves as under external constraints in connection to alcohol. The issues where we find humour is also where we find controversy in serious speech. The differences of opinion that arise, concerning everyday habits and the role model one represents as a parent, give rise to a number of jokes. The parts of serious discource that concern other people display a very different content, having to do with drinking too much, not being able to handle one's liquor consumption and not being permitted to drink alcohol – a content reflected in humourous form when the interviewees talk about themselves.
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Dressler, William W., Mauro Campos Balieiro, and José Ernesto dos Santos. "Culture and psychological distress." Paidéia (Ribeirão Preto) 12, no. 22 (2002): 5–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0103-863x2002000100002.
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Examining the influence of cultural factors on psychological distress, relative to other (e.g. social and psychological) influences, has been difficult due to the incomplete development of a theory of culture that leads to the reliable and valid measurement of cultural factors in such a way that these can be incorporated into multivariate models. In this paper we present both such a theory and such a methodology, and apply it to the study of the community distribution of psychological distress in an urban area in Brazil. In this theory and method, culture is conceptualized as consisting of shared cultural models that are imperfectly realized in mundane behaviors. The link of cultural model and individual behavior is referred to as "cultural consonance". Here we show that cultural consonance in two different domains is associated with psychological stress, independently from covariates and possible confounding variables. Implications of the results for future research are also discussed.
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Soliman, Mounira. "Mutations of Heroism: The Case of the Egyptian Superheroine." Studi Magrebini 18, no. 2 (November 5, 2020): 265–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2590034x-12340031.
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Abstract The history of heroism in Egyptian culture has mostly been perceived as a male attribute, centering on the figure of the male hero, and generally excluding figures of female heroines. In this article, I explore the representation of one type of female heroism, the rising phenomenon of the superheroine. In contrast to popular definitions of heroism connected to the superhero genre wherein heroism is perceived as an extra-terrestrial superpower, recent depictions of superheroines in Egyptian popular culture focus on representing the mundane aspect of the lives of these characters, leading to a reconceptualization of heroism. I examine three examples of superheroines by three women writers, Qahera by Deena Mohamed, Nano Volta by Hanan El-Karargy, and Lamis by Safia Baraka. I focus on the concept of ‘normalcy’ by way of reading the depiction of the three superheroine characters, arguing that the emphasis on the mundane reality of the three superheroine figures proposes an alternative reading of heroism that depends on women’s agency as it explores their potential for empowerment.
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Holdaway, Simon. "Understanding the Police Investigation of the Murder of Stephen Lawrence: A ‘Mundane Sociological Analysis’." Sociological Research Online 4, no. 1 (March 1999): 107–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.5153/sro.234.
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‘Race’ is a litmus test for understanding relationships within institutions. Conflicts between ethnic majorities and minorities (and other minorities too) have a capacity to not only bring particular features of racialised relations to view but to also lay bare generic, institutional relationships. In this paper, I argue that the Lawrence Inquiry report directs us to mundane features of policing. Crucially we need to understand the complex ways in which the occupational culture of policing constructs and sustains particular forms of racialised relations. There are two key features of this culture. One is a tendency to use stereotypical thinking generally and in relation to ethnic minorities in particular. The other is to neglect the pertinence of race to rouitne police work. The presence and absence of ‘race’ is woven into the routines of the occupational culture. Police action can, as the Lawrence Inquiry report suggests be ‘unwitting’. To argue the existence of ‘unwitting’ action, however, it is necessary to demonstrate that police officers could have acted differently. The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the police investigation into it have to be placed within this context if an adequate sociological analysis is to be undertaken.
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Waheed, Hisham Abdulsattar, and Anan Alkass Yousif. "Popular Culture as a Creation of Art in Frank O'Hara Selected Poems." Al-Adab Journal 2, no. 142 (September 15, 2022): 27–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.31973/aj.v2i142.2405.
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While the significance of Abstract Expressionism in Frank O’Hara’s poetry has been widely discussed in academic researches, this paper aims at exploring the role of popular culture in his poetry and the significance of Pop Art in shaping his poetic production. The paper argues that O’Hara’s employment of topics, consumer and mundane objects, and images taken from popular culture and mass media was the very means to create an unorthodox art. Such an art challenged and opposed the American elitism of high culture and good taste, the very standards by which the artistic value of a piece of art was measured.
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Shipton, Parker. "Land and Culture in Tropical Africa: Soils, Symbols, and the Metaphysics of the Mundane." Annual Review of Anthropology 23, no. 1 (October 1994): 347–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.23.100194.002023.
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Hamilton, Lindsay. "The Magic of Mundane Objects: Culture, Identity and Power in a Country Vets' Practice." Sociological Review 61, no. 2 (May 2013): 265–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12017.
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Dahal, Arvind. "Anti-War Messages in the Songs of John Lennon." JODEM: Journal of Language and Literature 12, no. 1 (August 7, 2021): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jodem.v12i1.38709.
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This study endeavors to explore Lennon’s songs as an expression of rage and rebellion of the common Americans against the bitter realities of the contemporary American war politics of the 1960s and 70s and of the prevailing socio-economic and cultural injustices. It illumines a reality that alternative cultures like drugs, alcohol, homosexuality, nomadism and mystic vision, perceived reprehensible by the contemporary mainstream culture, were in fact manufactured out of harsh American socio-political context. By projecting the painful experiences of the victims during the time of war, the research engages with the extraction of themes like terror of the nuclear arms race and poverty, racism, prison and war, buried in Lennon’s compositions and thereby revealing Lennon’s association with such subcultures to counter and to subvert the mundane, the rationality and material hunger of the mainstream culture in the then America.
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Chan, Andrew, Stewart Clegg, and Matthew Warr. "Translating Intervention: When Corporate Culture Meets Chinese Socialism." Journal of Management Inquiry 27, no. 2 (March 13, 2017): 190–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1056492617696888.
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Under socialist development, the contemporary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) refashions thought management with a changed message. The Party increasingly promotes Chinese cultural values, through a policy of designed corporate culture programs within state-owned and private enterprises. The culture is one that inculcates corporate cultural values “imported” from corporate culture discourses in the Western business world. A curious “translation of ideas” has occurred, ideas that have traveled from the Korean Peninsula and War, through the boardrooms of corporate America and into the mundane practices of the CCP, to build corporate culture. At the core of this culture are practices that Schein has termed coercive persuasion. This article discusses the role of coercive persuasion in two sites: (a) China’s state-owned enterprises and (b) private businesses and social organizations. We conclude that as ideas travel, they may change in substance, whereas in form and functionality, they remain surprisingly similar.
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Mason, Will. "‘Swagger’: Urban Youth Culture, Consumption and Social Positioning." Sociology 52, no. 6 (April 3, 2017): 1117–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038038517698638.
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Sociological studies of youth culture have often focused on processes of social identification. Though some of this work has explored the importance of consumption within young people’s identity practices, much has foregrounded the effects of economic marginality and neglected the importance of ‘race’. This article explores the role of clothing and embodied dispositions, popularly referred to as ‘swagger’, within the ways that young people position themselves in relation to each other. Drawing on field notes and focus group data with a predominantly Somali sample of teenage boys, in a northern English city, this article elucidates the centrality of these seemingly mundane cultural signifiers within everyday processes of ‘racial’ and classed positioning. In doing so, the article seeks to extend contemporary studies of youth culture, consumption and identification by evidencing how marginalized young people simultaneously challenge and reaffirm their positioning, through the performance of stylized masculinity and swagger.
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Buse, Christina, Daryl Martin, and Sarah Nettleton. "Conceptualising ‘materialities of care’: making visible mundane material culture in health and social care contexts." Sociology of Health & Illness 40, no. 2 (February 2018): 243–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12663.
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Giddings, Seth. "Pokémon GO as distributed imagination." Mobile Media & Communication 5, no. 1 (November 28, 2016): 59–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2050157916677866.
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The appeal of Pokémon GO is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality to popular media culture, as players’ mobile phones summon virtual creatures and overlay them on the immediate environment. The significance of this novel device (within popular children’s culture at least) is open to question however. The workings of imagination in children’s lives have always populated mundane experience with nonactual actions and characters, and these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s culture over decades, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. What can critical attention to imagination and technology in pre- and postdigital play tell us about the hybrid realities of Pokémon GO today?
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Krynytska, Nataliya. "MUNDANE SCIENCE FICTION: LOSS OF DREAMS OR MATURITY?" CONTEMPORARY LITERARY STUDIES, no. 18 (December 13, 2021): 59–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.32589/2411-3883.18.2021.246854.
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The aim of the paper is to study the role of the mundane in contemporary culture based on the mundane science fiction (MSF). The term originated in 2004 thanks to «The Mundane Manifesto» by Geoff Ryman and his anonymous co-authors who argued for a focus on the modern science paradigm instead of dreams of outer space. The Manifesto outlines SF subgenre, where the setting is in the near future on the Earth or within the Solar System, excluding interstellar travel or contact with aliens. MSF suggests the believable use of technology and science, as it exists at the current time or a plausible extension of existing technology. There is a debate about the genre limits and its canonical works since it also covers cyberpunk, dystopia, etc. Remarkably, in the Soviet literature, such a genre called «near-future science fiction» existed in the 1940s and 1950s. It is a subgenre of «hard» SF focusing on the inventions useful for the national economy and lacking psychological depth of characters. This literature mostly had low artistic quality because of the Soviet ideological pressure and many limitations.The benefits of the paper are the following. First, the author distinguishes between two ma in approaches to SF, namely a more practical and literal reception and a more metaphorical reception. The former is characteristic of readers of realistic literature who try to find the true-to-life elements in SF blamed as escapism. The latter is close to the SF fans. However, blaming SF for escapism seems an excessive sociologizing of literature and ignoring the great role of metaphor in cultural development. Consequently, MSF is an effort to bridge a gap between SF and realistic literature. Second, the paper presents the first attempt to compare MSF to the Soviet «near-future SF». The author argues that since such a «near-future SF» occupies a niche in Western literature, it is a sign of the global changesthat are taking place during the lifetime of the current generation, bringing, in addition to progress, the acute threat of environmental catastrophe. Moreover, the role of neo Marxism, on the one hand, and technophobia, on the other hand, are emphasized. Third, for the first time the possible connections between MSF and the frontier myth important for the American national cultural mythology are studied. At the core of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel «Aurora» (2015) and James Gray’s movie «Ad Astra» (2019), MSF is regarded as a rejection of the ideology «space: the final frontier». Both works shift the focus from the global to the personal, from the unusual to the mundane, from expansion and colonization to the internal problems. The author concludes that the anthropological turn occurs in SF as well: there is a loss of metaphor, allegory, and archetypal basis, an abandonment of escapism, Enlightenment utopianism, belief in progress, romanticism, and industrialism in favor of more realistic view on the future of humankind. Unfortunately, in many cases, «mundane» means not only «mature» but «boring» here, making SF more science than fiction.
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Dorzweiler, Nick. "Popular culture in (and out of) American political science." History of the Human Sciences 30, no. 1 (December 22, 2016): 138–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695116684314.
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Historically, American political science has rarely engaged popular culture as a central topic of study, despite the domain’s outsized influence in American community life. This article argues that this marginalization is, in part, the by-product of long-standing disciplinary debates over the inadequate political development of the American public. To develop this argument, the article first surveys the work of early political scientists, such as John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, to show that their reformist ambitions largely precluded discussion of mundane activities of social life such as popular culture. It then turns to Harold Lasswell, who produced some of the first investigations of popular culture in American political science. Ironically, however, his work – and the work of those who adapted similar ways of speaking about popular culture after him – only reinforced skepticisms concerning the American public. It has thus helped keep the topic on the margins of disciplinary discourse.
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Kelly, Michael. "Culture and the popular: Introduction to essays in memory of Brian Rigby." French Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (October 28, 2018): 293–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957155818795380.
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This article introduces the special number of French Cultural Studies commemorating the role of Brian Rigby as the journal’s first Managing Editor. It situates his contribution in the emergence of cultural history and French cultural studies during the rapid expansion of higher education from the 1960s in France, the UK, the US and other countries. It suggests that these new areas of study saw cultural activities in a broader social context and opened the way to a wider understanding of culture, in which popular culture played an increasingly important part. It argues that the study of popular culture can illuminate some of the most mundane experiences of everyday life, and some of the most challenging. It can also help to understand the rapidly changing cultural environment in which our daily lives are now conducted.
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Costantini, Cristina. "Forensic Iconicity: The Experimental Law’s Whatness in Digital Culture." Pólemos 14, no. 1 (April 28, 2020): 131–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pol-2020-2008.
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AbstractThinking about the whatness of the Law in the digital era means to return to question its ontological abyss and its metaphysical violence. The essay rests on the idea that Law, to declare or to command, to condemn or to absolve, needs a material medium of communication that allows its sensible perceptibility. At the same time, the concrete appearances of the Law in the public sphere are partial and paradoxical: they are haunted by an ontological excess that resists against a conclusive form of mundane apprehension. Forensic Iconicity is the expression coined to figuratively depict the structural ambiguity between ostensibility and concealment that marks the Law’s presentialness. The aim of the work is to explore the transmutations and the displacements of the ancient bodies of symbolic representation of the Law up to the current dispersion in algorithmic sequences and digital traces. Moreover, according to the view proposed, the unresolved relationship between the abstract prophecy of Law and its physical precipitate has been captured and explained by the means of different paradigms, moving from political theology to algorithmic angelism.
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Subrahmanian, Maya. "Socio-Cultural Traits and Gender Elements: An Analysis through Indian Diaspora in Germany." Center for Asia and Diaspora 12, no. 2 (August 31, 2022): 175–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.15519/dcc.2022.08.12.2.175.
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What makes a culture and what are the cultural traits identified by people are important questions to be developed more within diaspora studies. This article proposes a critical inquiry into the ways of defining socio-cultural traits through the discussions with Indian diaspora living in the context of Western culture. It suggests hypothesis that there is a possibility of hybrid cultures between the Eastern and Western. The ontological status of being ‘Indian’ would be different while living in India and abroad, and the cultural ontology in those subject positions would also vary to produce hybrid cultures. Theories of migration, culture and gender constitute a background and framework in this study. Reflections on cultural identity and cultural traits are obtained in this study through direct interviews with diaspora Indians living in Germany. In this process of analyses, the methodology of gender is adopted along with other methods of qualitative research to see how the socio-cultural perspectives change after migration to Western cultures, and how those are different among men and women. The preliminary argument derived in this article is that cultural traits can be traced in aspects of people’s daily life, but not only through dominant art forms, literature or historical monuments. It is done with a critical perspective on the existing dominant methods of defining culture. This study has a critic on existing methodologies that are Eurocentric, male-centric and neglecting the individual and mundane experiences of people who live in varied cultural contexts with complex cultural identities.
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Anisimov, K. V. "Bunin’s Chests: The Semantic Perspective of a Mundane Image." Studies in Theory of Literary Plot and Narratology 15, no. 2 (2020): 343–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.25205/2410-7883-2020-2-343-354.
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A number of observations provided by the given article are dedicated to a single element taken out of Bunin's plethora of mundane and routine things represented in his prose, i.e. chests and trinket boxes which are traced here in the perspective of symbolic and metaphoric potential of the author’s artistic writing, the ability of the latter to invest intensively the sense into a distinct object – a notion that may serve as a supplement to the mainstream and widespread concept of “enumerating”, cumulative tendency as a predominant in Bunin’s narrative. The reached result of the comparison of chests vs. trinket boxes contains the distinction between the two: whereas the former initiates the anamnesis, the latter – having no correspondence with natural proportions and size of human body – is located much closer to the memory as a spiritual phenomenon. “The Gentleman from San Francisco” is the first story to attract the primary attention. The text contains multiple mentioning of chests and suit-cases. The decisive scene in which both things are involved is the picture of the hero’s preparation for his last appearance among the high society he belongs to. Here, the anonymous gentleman is presented against the background of cases standing wide open in the middle of his room. A consumer transforms into a consumed – this is the inversion of traditional image that Bunin tries to convey to his reader, and this inversion is finally emphasized in an episode of hero’s body’s placement into the box in which English soda water used to be transported. Trinket boxes are pointed out as the second stage on the way of the author’s rethinking of this class of objects. The level of their symbolization now seems to be much higher – first of all because a trinket box yearns away from the “objective” predictability of a chest as an improvised and archetypal coffin compelling a reader to imagine the object of commemorative recreation in a more allegorical and metaphoric way rather than literally and corporally as it was in case with the chests. The primary source for the analysis now is Bunin’s short story “The Grammar of Love”. Its relations with “The Gentleman from San-Francisco” are traced along the leitmotif line of a discovery (“otkrytie” as “discovery”) that contains the sense of a fruitful geographic journey (it’s justly that both stories are travelogues), opening of the trinket box itself (“otkrytie” as “opening”) and revelation as a final result of the entire voyage (“otkrovenie” as “revelation”). What in “The Grammar of Love” becomes a successful embodiment of this mo- tif chain and supplies the plot with the quality of a cycle that leads the main hero right to the point of his psychological rediscovery of himself, in the later story “The Gentleman from San-Francisco” seems to be totally impossible. For the anonymous gentleman the prospect of his revival looks to be closed from the very beginning. In the concluding part of the paper the author basing on the works by Aleida Assmann, develops the idea of projecting Bunin’s im- ages of chests and trinket boxes onto the broad European context. The modern science that deals with the commemorative experience of culture, its practices and representations, has accumulated plenty of data relating to that kind of objects (boxes, chests etc.) as reservoirs of human memory. Their role in Bunin’s poetics is still underrated. However the true meaning of these, at first glance, basically external and unnecessary elements of a narrative is really significant. The author of the article presents a blueprint of possible interpretation of these images in Russo-European comparative perspective.
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Herbst, Marcel. "My Poyln." European Journal of Life Writing 9 (June 12, 2020): C30—C61. http://dx.doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36309.
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The note of My Poyln was written as an introduction to a planned photography book regarding a Jewish past that is cleansed from its erstwhile meaning, desolated, and mourned. The thrust to research and photograph a former time grew slowly, over many years. My reading of the Holocaust is one of grief about the denial of the past (and a more humane future) and the lost cross-ethnic, rich culture. That theme I follow in writing and photography—next to my more normal concerns relating to more mundane matters—see: www.4mat.ch.
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Pound, Scott. "Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics of Information." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, no. 2 (March 2015): 315–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.2.315.
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Kenneth Goldsmith, a sculptor turned writer who now refers to himself as a “word processor,” makes mundane yet strangely enthralling poetry out of transcribed speech. Rather than stake claims to originality and value, Goldsmith extols “uncreativity” and “being boring” as new benchmarks of literary achievement. So far, critics have abjured these claims in favor of close readings of the texts. This essay aims to take the critical conversation in a new direction by arguing that what deserves critical examination is Goldsmith's attempt to conceptualize and practice poetry as information management. Information culture provides Goldsmith with a new understanding of language, a new view of the literary, and a new take on authorship, and the methods of text production that result from these resources travesty literary culture as we know it, which is exactly the point. Goldsmith's indifference to literary culture yields a method for generating texts that is as instructive as it is shocking because it requires us to face the strange prospect of a literature that chooses information culture over literary culture as its ground.
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Eken, M. Evren. "How geopolitical becomes personal: Method acting, war films and affect." Journal of International Political Theory 15, no. 2 (March 7, 2019): 210–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1755088219832328.
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This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the embodiment of screen actors. While International Relations is attempting to move beyond the limits of existing disciplinary methods and methodologies to better grasp the emotional depths of world politics, this article delves into the ‘method’ in performance arts to understand how visual culture diffuses emotional narratives of the state to the population and affectively enables people to experience the international from the perspective of the United States. In this sense, focusing on ‘method acting’ which revolutionised performance arts in the United States from the 1950s, the article examines the mundane encounters in visual culture through which screen/state actors emotionally situate the audience to make them viscerally experience geopolitics, personally feel like a state/warrior and embody a commitment to the war effort at an emotional level.
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HEIN, Evelina. "THE SACRED MOUNT TAISHAN IN THE PROFANE SPACE OF THE CONTEMPORARY CULTURE INDUSTRY OF PRC." Ezikov Svyat (Orbis Linguarum) 17, no. 2 (December 31, 2019): 190–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.37708/ezs.swu.v17.i2.22.
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e paper seeks to address some questions connected to the conflict between the very nature of sacred places like mount Taishan in China and the contemporary phenomenon of culture industry which has its intrinsic value in exploitation of the national history and culture with the purpose of ensuring economical profit for the state. The author traces the roots and the historical development of the worship of mount Taishan into an emblematic universal symbol of Chineseness and points to possible problematic connection between this symbol and the clear profit-making purpose of one concrete project of the culture industry in PRC – the “Culture Industry Park of Mount Taishan”, whose realization started in 2009. As a meaningful focus of the whole project the landscape mega-spectacle “Chinese Taishan: The Great Sacrifice to Heaven and Earth” is examined through its official media covering and the feedback of the spectators. The paper finds that the promoted “harmony” between the history of the sacred mount Taishan and the contemporary mundane use of it as a cultural resource contains potential dramatical developments.
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Crouch, Mira, and Grant O'Neill. "Sustaining identities? Prolegomena for inquiry into contemporary foodways." Social Science Information 39, no. 1 (March 2000): 181–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/053901800039001010.
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As an essential yet also mundane everyday activity, eating in all cultures is expressive of both belief-systems and social distinctions that exist within them. While this has been recognized in social science - and, particularly, anthropology - many questions concerning the meanings of foodways within the overall patterns of “post-modern” culture have yet to be tackled. We argue that a novel signification of food consumption is currently taking place: in a social context where attrition of customary practices creates an extended range of options (which, notably, also represents a constraint), some of the needs of self-conscious individuation that arise within such a context are met through eating practices based on personal choice rather than social habit. In this article, the concept of an “eater's career” is used to explore theoretical and methodological dimensions of inquiry into uses of food that are significant for identity formation and maintenance in contemporary society.
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Linn, Jason. "Snuggling with your identity: beds and the sense of touch in Roman culture." Journal of Ancient History 10, no. 2 (November 28, 2022): 200–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jah-2021-0001.
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Abstract This article seeks to find attitudes and judgments elite Romans made based on a person’s bed. It culls written sources from a diverse range of genres to argue that elite Roman men saw beds as transformative and reflective items. Through long-lasting and frequent contact, a bed’s qualities seeped into bodies and characters. Consequently, as a powerful part of the built environment, beds could strengthen or weaken soldiers as well as help or harm a person’s health. Furthermore, beds’ transformative power meant elite Romans thought where a man slept revealed who he was: his social status, moral fiber, and civilization. In short, beds marked a person’s identity. Examining how Roman elites conceptualized beds informs us on the larger issue of the history of the body, in general, and the sense of touch, in particular. Scholarship on the history of touch tends not analyze the effects of sustained and repetitive contact with a mundane object.
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Thapa, Hukum. "Theatricality of the Body in Bode Jatra: A Study of the Tongue-Piercing Culture." SCHOLARS: Journal of Arts & Humanities 5, no. 1 (February 15, 2023): 16–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/sjah.v5i1.52472.
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The present paper attempts to explore the body in relation to theatricality in Bode Jatra, the tongue-piercing festival of the Newar community in Bode, Bhaktapur. The study treats body as the territorial site to foreground how body performance becomes theatrical, taking the performance of Bode Jatra, the performativity of the tongue-piercing, as its text. The raving performance of tongue piercing generates an expression of cosmogonic consciousness. It encompasses the movement of the body both from micro and macro facet which constitutes the theatrical culmination. Therefore, performativity of the body becomes a trope that necessitates in studying the conception and evolution of theatre with the view that bodily performance is the epitome of theatricality which has hitherto remained veiled. The body which performs liminal in Bode Jatra exerts cosmogonic force that subverts the traditional hierarchy — the mundane world and the world of spirit.
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WILSON, ALEXANDRA. "Killing time: Contemporary representations of opera in British culture." Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 3 (October 17, 2007): 249–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586707002364.
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ABSTRACTRecent debates about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the perceived repositioning of such categories have had potentially profound implications for opera. British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s video installation Killing Time (1994) provides a useful starting point from which to explore these polemics. By juxtaposing images of mundane daily life with a soundtrack drawn from Strauss’s Elektra, Taylor-Wood seems to present opera and ‘the everyday’ as irreconcilable. Yet, the perception of opera as highbrow has by no means been a historical constant in Britain. This article considers the extent to which opera may be regaining the ‘entertainment status’ it enjoyed for a period during the late nineteenth century, or whether its perception as an ‘elite’ product is more deeply ingrained in British culture than ever before. Killing Time’s critique of opera and the commentary it offers on voice, art as redemption, and the politics of participatory art are analysed and contrasted with the representation of opera in a more ‘popular’ medium, a reality television series in which members of the public were trained as opera singers. The article concludes that, while popular culture seems able to embrace opera, the more uneasy relationship today is that between opera and other forms of ‘high art’.
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Thompson, Wendy M. "Weird/Black/Play: Turning Racial Authenticity and Professorial Performance on its Head in the Black Studies Classroom." Radical Teacher 122 (April 28, 2022): 74–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.821.
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This essay examines the expectations placed on black faculty to act as conduits of authentic blackness and black knowing even as they are undermined and undervalued in the classroom and other institutional settings. Paying special attention to the way that racial performance, engaged learning, and the role of the black instructor converge in the black studies classroom, I offer the black/weird as a framework (departure/positioning) from which students can engage in black/weird/play, a remedy that interrupts students’ desire for a particular hegemonic racial performance from black faculty while stimulating critical collective inquiry about black history, experience, culture, and the self. As black/weird/play engages possibility, pleasure, and play while taking cues from black nerd and black popular cultures, students learn to grapple with concepts, structures, subjecthood, and everything else, from the mundane to the fantastic, as they building knowledge and connections alongside and with black faculty who must constantly maneuver the already contested grounds of teaching while black.
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Nordqvist, K., V. P. Herva, and S. Sandell. "Water and Cosmology in the Stone Age of Northeastern Europe." Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 47, no. 1 (March 28, 2019): 23–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.17746/1563-0110.2019.47.1.023-032.
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This paper explores water and watery places as sacred elements among the cultures of the northern boreal zone during the Stone Age, and especially the Neolithic period, through materials deriving from Northwestern Russia and Fennoscandia. The peculiarity and importance of water and certain watery environments, like rivers, lakes, bogs, waterfalls, and rapids, are discussed through depositional practices of material culture, mainly lithic artifacts. Rock-art provides further tools for approaching the topic, not only through its locations in the landscape but also through its motifs, which allow parallels to be drawn to later ethnographical sources and folklore, too. Finally, the paper briefl y touches upon the rationality behind making a strict separation between “sacred” and “mundane” when interpreting prehistoric cultural phenomena. Water was integral to human life in many different ways, but bodies of water and watery places could also be threatening and unpredictable. Therefore water would have been an ambivalent element, probably invested with signifi cant cultural meanings in the Stone Age world.
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Ophir, Adi, and Steven Shapin. "The Place of Knowledge A Methodological Survey." Science in Context 4, no. 1 (1991): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700000132.
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A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1
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Seppä, Tiina. "“Lest They Go Hungry”: Negotiations on Money and Survival." Journal of Finnish Studies 21, no. 1-2 (November 1, 2018): 82–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/28315081.21.1.2.04.
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Abstract In this article I will shed light on the nation-building project in Finland before its independence. In the center of this study are the individuals who at the most part created the material of the national culture and literature: folklore collectors and early Finnish writers. According to the correspondence analyzed here, it appears that there were numerous ordinary, daily factors that influenced their work. Most of these were material, including the economic situation. At a mundane level, the survival of the collectors and writers overlaps with the questions of twenty-first-century precarization research. In this article, I highlight and contemplate these confluences.
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Nguyen, Thi Kim Tien. "he cultural view of Thang Longculture from Tran Thu Hang’snovel named Dan day." Ministry of Science and Technology, Vietnam 63, no. 10 (October 25, 2021): 56–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.31276/vjst.63(10).56-60.
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The novel Dan day is not only the mundane life with the word love and heart but also the unique cultural view of the Thang Long culture of the Le - Trinh dynasties. Firstly, it is the art of Ca tru, reproduced with talented people of the Bach family in Co Tam ward, Thang Long citadel. Secondly, it is the culture of behaviour, the character of the people of the Le - Trinh dynasties, as well as the respect, courtesy, gentleness, and elegance through their gait and posture; through the lyrics and the hearts of the people are always passionate with a singing career. Thirdly, it is the culture in the costumes of the Vietnamese at that time, especially the clothes of the geisha. The article uses the interdisciplinary research (cultural and literature approaches) to point out three Thang Long’s cultural imprints, thereby contributing to affirming the unique quality of this novel not to be mixed with any historical novel by Tran Thu Hang in particular and with other historical novels about the Le - Trinh dynasties in general.
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Qian, Junxi. "Performing the Public Man: Cultures and Identities in China's Grassroots Leisure Class." City & Community 13, no. 1 (March 2014): 26–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cico.12049.
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This article examines cultural practices and social life in urban public spaces of postreform China, focusing on the everyday leisure, entertainment, and cultural activities spontaneously organized by grassroots residents or groups. It examines performativity in constituting cultural meanings, reproducing everyday identities, and building up mutual engagements, and unravels the ways in which ordinary people devote resources, labor, and energy to keep alive individual or collective identities. Performances of cultural identities in public spaces entail improvised and temporary social relations which emerge from the immediate contexts of mundane spatial practices. Empirical analyses of public performativity in Guangzhou identify three scenarios, namely, the performativity of public teaching, public shows and performances, and the performative displays of cultural difference between carnivalesque dancing and “high–end culture” in public leisure.
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Karpov, Vyacheslav, and Kimmo Kääriäinen. "“Abortion Culture” in Russia: Its Origins, Scope, and Challenge to Social Development." Journal of Applied Sociology os-22, no. 2 (September 2005): 13–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/19367244052200202.
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This paper focuses on one aspect of Russia's critical demographic condition: its extraordinarily high rate of abortion. We show that much in the current crisis may be attributed to the persistent cultural legacies of the Soviet past. Using survey data collected in Russia in 2002 along with the 1998 ISSP Religion II data, historical accounts, and statistics on abortion, we suggest that the “abortion culture” that emerged in Russia under communism has had a lasting impact on Russians' perceptions of this issue. This “culture” manifests itself in the widespread and deep-seated view that abortion is a “normal” way of dealing with medical and socioeconomic hardships in personal and family life. These beliefs may account for the fact that Russia's abortion rate is still among the highest in the world, despite generational replacement in the at-risk age group, dramatically improved access to modern contraceptives, and greater openness of public discussion of sexual and reproductive issues. The theoretical importance of this study, in our view, transcends its empirical boundaries: it points to powerful limitations that the informal, unofficial and mundane institutions that had emerged under communism impose on social development and social policy in post-communist societies.
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Maddox, Alexia, Supriya Singh, Heather A. Horst, and Greg Adamson. "An ethnography of Bitcoin: Towards a future research agenda." Australian Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy 4, no. 1 (March 31, 2016): 65. http://dx.doi.org/10.18080/ajtde.v4n1.49.
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Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are a recent socio-technical innovation that seeks to disrupt the existing monetary system. Through mundane uses of this new digital cash, they provide a social critique of the centralized infrastructures of the banking industry. This paper outlines an ethnographic research agenda for this new digital frontier of social practice and exchange and the human affordances of engaging with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Firstly we argue that the use of Bitcoin can be seen as acts of social resistance and a form of social mobility that harnesses the emergent, serendipitous and dynamic properties of digital community. We then outline the disruptive nature of borderless, affordable and instantaneous international transfers within social practice. Finally, we identify the possible permutations of trust that may be found in the technical affordances of Bitcoin and how these relate to user (pseudo)anonymity, cybertheft, cyberfraud, and consumer protection. Bringing together these three key areas we highlight the importance of understanding the ordinary (rather than extra-ordinary) uses of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We contend that focusing upon users interactions with Bitcoin as a system and culture will shed light upon mundane acts of socio-technical disruption, acts that critique and provide alternative financial exchange practices to the economic and regulatory financial infrastructures of the centralised banking industry.
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Maddox, Alexia, Supriya Singh, Heather A. Horst, and Greg Adamson. "An ethnography of Bitcoin: Towards a future research agenda." Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy 4, no. 1 (March 31, 2016): 65–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.18080/jtde.v4n1.49.
Full textAbstract:
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are a recent socio-technical innovation that seeks to disrupt the existing monetary system. Through mundane uses of this new digital cash, they provide a social critique of the centralized infrastructures of the banking industry. This paper outlines an ethnographic research agenda for this new digital frontier of social practice and exchange and the human affordances of engaging with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Firstly we argue that the use of Bitcoin can be seen as acts of social resistance and a form of social mobility that harnesses the emergent, serendipitous and dynamic properties of digital community. We then outline the disruptive nature of borderless, affordable and instantaneous international transfers within social practice. Finally, we identify the possible permutations of trust that may be found in the technical affordances of Bitcoin and how these relate to user (pseudo)anonymity, cybertheft, cyberfraud, and consumer protection. Bringing together these three key areas we highlight the importance of understanding the ordinary (rather than extra-ordinary) uses of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We contend that focusing upon users interactions with Bitcoin as a system and culture will shed light upon mundane acts of socio-technical disruption, acts that critique and provide alternative financial exchange practices to the economic and regulatory financial infrastructures of the centralised banking industry.
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Ulver, Sofia. "From Mundane to Socially Significant Consumption: An Analysis of How Foodie Identity Work Spurs Market Formation." Journal of Macromarketing 39, no. 1 (January 6, 2019): 53–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0276146718817354.
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How does dull turn into cool? Every now and then new markets emerge and consumption that used to be mundane and insignificant transforms into something socially significant. Using the theoretical lens of cultural system transformation, this research set out to analyze how consumers, through their identity work, unintentionally transform a market by negotiating its symbolic boundaries and expanding its borders in relation to their social surroundings. The results showed that consumer identity work contributes to forming the market by providing it with new symbolic meanings (epistemic, entertainment and erotic), by extending it with new discursive and material content (through epistemic refinement), and by expanding it through the provision (active and unintentional promotion of the consumption field to confirm their own identity) of new consumers. This research added to at least three ongoing conversations in marketing research; (i) to the macromarketing research stream on marketing systems by taking a cultural system perspective and recognizing the subtle but transformative impact of symbolic consumer meanings and identity work, (ii) to the consumer culture theory (CCT) research stream on market formation by highlighting consumers’ unintentional change of a market through intense identity struggle in their immediate social circle, and (iii) to both above streams by highlighting what makes identity struggle distinct at a mundane rather than more controversial or extraordinary market.
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Rautalahti, Heidi. "Non-religious Players Asking Big Questions: Video Game Worlds Affording Affinities of Meaningful Encounters." Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (July 1, 2021): 69–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2020-0012.
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The article examines player narratives on meaningful encounters with video games by using an argumentative qualitative interview method. Data gathered among Finnish adult video game players represents narratives of important connections in personal lives, affinities that the article analyzes as further producing three distinctive themes on meaningful encounters. Utilizing a study-of-religion framework, the article discusses meaning making and emerging ways of meaningfulness connected to the larger discussion on the “big questions” that are asked, explored, and answered in popular culture today. Non-religious players talk about intricate and profound contemplations in relation to game memories, highlighting how accidental self-reflections in mundane game worlds frame a continuing search for self.
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Jóźwiak, Wojciech. "„Biały pokój” Bogomiła Rajnowa." Slavica Wratislaviensia 177 (December 30, 2022): 363–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/0137-1150.177.30.
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Serious, terminal sickness that leads to isolation in a hospital constituted a forced break from everyday mundane life and in consequence brought a recapitulation of so far undertaken decisions and actions. In Bogomil Raynov’s literary interpretation presented in 1966, “Пътища за никъде,” it became an excuse to begin some reckoning with the attitudes of Bulgarian intelligentsia of the BRL period. The text, autobiographical to some extent (and adapted to fi lm in 1968), fits perfectly in a momentary thaw in the Bulgarian culture that was characteristic for the first half of the 1960s in Bulgaria, the period of widening the margin of freedom of speech and critical thought directed at past attitudes and actions.
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Barnes, Helen Moewaka, Belinda Borell, and Time McCreanor. "Theorising the structural dynamics of ethnic privilege in Aotearoa." International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v7i1.120.
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Colonial praxis has been imposed on the culture, epistemologies and praxis of indigenous Maori in Aotearoa, entrenching the settler cultural project that ensures the continuation of the colonial state, producing damaging disparities. This article theorises ways in which settler privilege works at multiple levels supporting settler interests, aspirations and sensibilities. In institutions, myriad mundane processes operate through commerce, law, media, education, health services, environment, religion and international relations constituting settler culture, values and norms. Among individuals, settler discursive/ideological frameworks are hegemonic, powerfully influencing interactions with Maori to produce outcomes that routinely suit settlers. In the internalised domain, there is a symbiotic sense of belonging, rightness, entitlement and confidence that the established social hierarchies will serve settler interests. This structure of privilege works together with overt and implicit acts of racism to reproduce a collective sense of superiority. It requires progressive de-mobilising together with anti-racism efforts to enable our society to move toward social justice.
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Restall, Matthew. "THE MYSTERIOUS AND THE INVISIBLE: WRITING HISTORY IN AND OF COLONIAL YUCATAN." Ancient Mesoamerica 21, no. 2 (2010): 393–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0956536110000271.
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AbstractThis brief essay argues that studying the non-Spanish inhabitants of Yucatan's past requires bridging the social distance generated by differences of time and culture and that the specific nature of that distance must first be understood. With respect to the Mayas, their mystique in the modern popular and academic imaginations is as much the creation of Maya elites in ancient and colonial times as it is the product of archaeologists and historians. To demystify the Maya, we must engage mundane as well as exotic sources and be aware of the obfuscating influence of those who interpreted Maya culture before us. A complete picture of colonial Yucatan and of the colonial Mayas must include Afro-Yucatecans, or Africans and their descendents in the peninsula. Rendered invisible by historical processes and lack of scholarly attention, Afro-Yucatecans must be fully examined if we are to fully grasp the Yucatec experience, including the Yucatec Maya experience.
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Azzari, Courtney Nations, Charlene A. Dadzie, and Stacey Menzel Baker. "The Role of Luxury in Rituals and Its Transformative Potential for Consumer Well-Being." Journal of Macromarketing 42, no. 4 (November 21, 2022): 630–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/02761467221136264.
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Driven by social media to capture each moment in life and to “keep up with the Joneses,” nearly every ritual is now cause for luxury consumption, fostering a culture in which bigger and grander is better. However, this commentary raises questions about these practices. How much is too much? What is truly better? Macromarketers must continue to weigh in on these issues. This commentary melds literature on consumer rituals, transformative luxury, and consumer well-being to explore what happens when consumers begin incorporating elements of luxury into more mundane and personal, but highly visible, ritual consumption practices, such as gender-reveal celebrations, divorce parties, and preschool graduations. We elucidate the field of transformative luxury research, examining the ways new and adapted rituals (infused with luxury) transform individual lives and culture, the impact of ritual disruptions, the roles of external influencers (e.g., social media, marketing), and the positive and negative impacts of these practices on consumer well-being.
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Jaiswal, Dr Abhishek Kumar. "The Circle of Karma: A Realistic Approach to Bhutanese Gender, Culture and Religion." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 7, no. 5 (2022): 080–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.75.14.
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The Circle of Karma, a novel published in India in 2005 by Zubaan Books in collaboration with Penguin Books. It is explicitly a Buddhist novel but one that concentrates on the everyday struggle to apply religion to the protagonist- Tsomo’s life. The writing is rich with rich Buddhist imagery but the story firmly grounded in mundane realities of gender and cultural issues, in short an excellent novel about one woman’s hard life, set against vivid gender, cultural and religious background. The novel applies the theory of Nemesis in practice. It deals with the importance of Karma/action. There is message that each human being will experience the Consequences of karma whether good or bad, in one or other way, in this or other birth. There is no escape. The novel is a story of Tsomo the central character, a fat girl compelled by her own restless spirit and later by circumstances to leave her family and go on series of endless travels. Hope and tragedy mark her path in equal measure as her story gives a look of microcosm of Bhutanese society. It is informative regarding the cultural, religious and gender issues in Bhutan which is a Buddhist country.
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Davidenko, Maria. "Searching for lost femininity: Russian middle-aged women’s participation in the post-Soviet consumer culture." Journal of Consumer Culture 19, no. 2 (June 16, 2017): 169–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469540517714021.
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In the existing literature, the relatively stable period of the 1970s, in Russia, is characterised by the rise of ‘socialist consumer modernity’, while the affluent 2000s were the time when a new phenomenon, ‘the culture of glamour’, emerged. Both periods parallel some cultural developments in the western world: the 1970s–1980s supposedly saw the rise of late modernity whereby individuals, freed from constraints of social structures, engage in ongoing process of self-reflexivity and self-fashioning, through consumption. In this article, drawing on the interviews with 20 middle-aged women from Moscow, I examine the limitations on self-fashioning as a means of achieving and maintaining a position of privilege. I particularly focus on the women’s concerns about failing to engage in normative practices of self-care, including anti-ageing cosmetic procedures, and hence failing to embody feminine dispositions that had value in their middle-class milieu. The analysis of such concerns helps discern the ways different markers of identity (gender, class and age) interplay and act as enablers or constraints in the mundane struggle for power at the interpersonal level.
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Askanius, Tina. "“I just want to be the friendly face of national socialism”." Nordicom Review 42, s1 (March 1, 2021): 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0004.
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Abstract This article is based on a case study of the media narratives of the neo-Nazi organisation Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) and situates this particular actor within the broader landscape of violent extremism in Sweden today. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis informed by narrative inquiry, I examine various cultural expressions of neo-Nazi ideology in NRM's extensive repertoire of online media. Theoretically, I turn to cultural perspectives on violent extremism to bring to centre stage the role of popular culture and entertainment in the construction of a meaningful narrative of community and belonging built around neo-Nazism in Sweden today. The analysis explores the convergence between different genres, styles, and content into new cultural expressions of national socialism which bleed into mainstream Internet culture and political discourse in new ways. In the online universe of NRM, the extreme blends with the mainstream, the mundane and ordinary with the spectacular and provocative, and the serious with the silly. In this manner, the analysis lays bare the strategies through which NRM seeks to soften, trivialise, and normalise neo-Nazi discourse using the power and appeal of culture and entertainment.
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Parman, Mazlina, and Nurazmallail Marni. "Sufi Symbols In Poems Of Ibn ᶜArabi And Hamzah Fansuri." UMRAN - International Journal of Islamic and Civilizational Studies 8, no. 2 (June 29, 2021): 21–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.11113/umran2021.8n2.498.
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As a way of communication, poetry is used by the Sufis to portray their knowledge and experiences in searching for God. However, the use of words in describing immaterial experiences spurs misconceptions among readers. Nevertheless, signs such as symbols are still being used in Sufi’s poetry. It plays a key role in expressing mystical thoughts, myriad of emotions, and even uplifting our mundane spirits. This article explores the meaning of symbols in Ibn ᶜArabi’s and Hamzah Fansuri’s poems. Both were known as prominent and controversially Sufi’s figures in two different regions, the Arab World and the Malay Archipelago. In studying it, a semiotic approach is used whilst a comparative approach is carried out to differentiate the existence of influence between the two figures as the latter is influenced theologically with the first. The finding shows that there is a likeness in the use of symbols and meaning connotations brought about by Ibn ᶜArabi and Hamzah Fansuri which proves the existence of influence between them, but variations are exhibited in the designation of the symbols which adhering to the different milieu, culture, and geographical places. Therefore, this study significantly indicating the authentication of Sufi poets in using symbols that portray the nation's culture and background. It also emphasizes the importance of interconnection between different cultures of Islam.