Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology

This article investigates Madison Smartt Bell’s Haitian trilogy as a neocaptivity narrative that combines in new ways the conventions of the slave (captivity)narrative and the Barbary captivity narrative. Furthermore, it examines the culture-crossing of the character of Doctor Hébert in the course of the successful slaveuprising of Saint Domingue (1791-1804). Captivity, I argue, constitutes the central theme and structuring device and also triggers Hébert’s culture-crossing in a reversed Hegelian master-slave dialectic that needs to be read together with Riau’s enslavement. Lacking the social recognition of a free subject, Riau attains his independent self-consciousness through physical resistance and Saint-Domingue’s distinct black culture. Whereas Hébert learns to actively resist slavery as he crosses over into the Haitian society. In their struggles, both undergo the three phases (preliminal, liminal, post-liminal) of rites of passage.

Given the increasing complexity of living in a global village, countries and regions that are parts of larger political entities frequently have considered the optionof separating or seceding an ideal solution to their problems with a larger center of power. Isolation, a form of “freedom from,” has the potential of offering themfree rein or “freedom to” manage their affairs for their own sake. Francophone playwrights and filmmakers have found the dialectical interplay between “freedomfrom” and “freedom to” fertile dramatic soil for plays and films. Some of them work in both of these and other genres. These works seem to ask the same question: Is it desirable or possible to achieve both, even in ideal isolation, without suffering cultural stagnation or repeating the abuse of power on the part of the political center that led to the separation? This article explores the answers to this question given in the plays of Aimée Césaire, Anne Hébert, and Wajdi Mouawad within the greater context for this issue found in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Azouz Begag’s Un Mouton dans la baignoire and in francophone films by Raoul Peck, Bertrand Tavernier, Claire Denis, Rachid Bouchareb, Ousmane Sembène, Michael Haneke, and Mathieu Kasovitz.

In the hyper-mobile world of today, the industry of tourism and cultural entertainment, witnesses the multiplication of opportunities to travel. According toJohn Urry, we inhabit mobile cultures where being kind to strangers is a positive cultural value. This reality archives the bloody past of hospitality, which from theideological fields facilitated, for instance, the conquest of the Americas. In the present discussion, I delve into the world of literature and explore Viaje a caballo por las provincias Argentinas [Journey on horseback across the provinces of Argentine] a work originally written by William Mac Cann, a British businessman who visited the country between 1947 and 1948. His observations not only reveal the collective patterns of behaviour that have remained part of daily life up to date. The volume describes the attempts of an elite interested in creating a united, but subordinated, image of society, and illuminates the diverse mechanisms of imperial expansion. Hospitality plays a crucial role in the hierarchy of travellers presented in the book, with some belonging to the higher classes of society and others unnamed.

This contribution is devoted to frontier theory, the analysis of its conceptual apparatus as well as its topical issues and practical application. We propose a revision of this theory, and confront the usefulness of the term “frontier” with other the similar concepts such as border, boundary and limit. The paper alsoproposes a typology of frontiers characterized by various aspects; civilization, intercultural, religious, and anthropological, among other. From the standpoint ofthis discussion, the authors consider the Southern Russian bordering region of the Caspian Sea, today a much conflicted territory.

This paper intends to highlight how the Kazakhs, the indigenous ethnic group that emerged as the leading subject of society in Kazakhstan after independencefrom the former Soviet Union, reclassify and remodel their self-culture in the new socio-political context. Despite the craving for resuscitating the Islamic tradition,shrunk under colonial domination, rather the indigenous folklorized Islam came to be classified as a pure national tradition under the fear of radical Islamism,causing the exclusion of the orthodox Muslims. This paper looks at hijabed Muslim women, considered to be outside the reclassified boundary of national tradition, and efficiently controlled and marginalized by the discourse produced by the ruling powers. The authors include field research and interviews from a number of participants, making visible the strategies of exclusion and the political narratives constructed around what people should remember and learn. These narratives recollect forms of imperialism which continue to be, in one way or another.

This paper considers Kazakh traditional culture in terms of its etiquette rules. Four main blocks are explored: the etiquette of greeting and farewell, hospitality,family etiquette, and blessings, all of which are mandatory in everyday situations. This study acquires importance in relation to the complicated processes of interethnic relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Kazakhstan. Familiarity with the traditions and norms of behavior in Kazakh society as well a basic knowledge of ethnic etiquette serves to strengthen intercultural relations and to understand the ways of life of neighboring and distant peoples. This topic is of special importance in relation to the study of communication culture among interethnic groups after the collapse of the USSR.

This paper argues for a dialogical approach to the cultural relations between East and West. Recognizing the importance of Edward Said’s 1978 work Orientalism, the paper shows a desire to recover more positive approaches that endeavor to integrate Eastern culture and its influence upon the West, not in terms of power or domination, but in terms of cross-cultural encounters. In order to briefly exemplify the debate, I use two examples from Chinese folk culture in the form of movie adaptations in the West, and mention the multiple opera versions of Shakespeare’s plays in the East.

This paper explores the role of Confucian education in the perception and representation of the image of the Japanese soldiers in Chinese cultural products.The paper recognizes that perceptions have been greatly affected by governmental demands as well as by other changing aspects that have evolved alongside societal changes, and traces a brief panorama of Japanese imperialism as reflected in popular cinema across different time periods. Finally, the paper tries to illuminate Sino-Japanese relations in the context of Confucianism and collectivism, extending the argument to include the international community at large.

This paper argues that food security is a very important topic in cosmopolitanism, one that has simply not received the kind of attention that it should receive.The paper reveals how global food monopolies destroy possibilities for national self-sufficiency, raises questions about neo-nationalism in an age of terror,and exposes the insidious and invidious corporate neo-imperialism that attends seed patenting. “Food, eating, and ethics” as a topic is rarely seen as a proper or important part of discussions about “the new cosmopolitanism,” let alone as part of literary discussions. This paper examines the violence and barbarity of transnational corporations such as Monsanto. I show what happens in the global supermarket and how lives and livelihoods are at stake, how the new corporate imperialism swallows up traditions and histories, and how dangerous food has become.

Heritage-making can mean many things to different cultures, especially with the advent of multiculturalism and interculturalism. From this perspective, awide array of cultural items, devices and values can be witnessed, and some of these are significant, yet others are considered in the balance. To argue that heritagemaking is an ongoing process brings to light the fact that cultures and the actors involved do not only have a task in the social order, but also the knowhow to direct the way of their discourses. At its core is the view that one must deal with language games, which effectively engage the active participants in circulating heritage. These games are taken into account as clusters of speech acts rules that are classified as assertives, commissives and directives, which correspond to the three types of rule: hegemony, hierarchy and heteronomy. Nonetheless, heritage-making under the contemporary signs of the times can be appropriated, communicated, substituted or even challenged by partakers of a certain culture and by way of a choice of language employed. It is in the context of the latter that we specifically lay emphasis on the language of auctoritas and potestas as decisive in cultural heritage-making.

In Canada, the language and techniques of museums and heritage sites have been adopted and adapted by some immigrant communities to make sense oftheir place within their new country. For some groups, “heritagization” is a new value, mobilized for diverse purposes. New museums and heritage sites serve as a form of ethnic media, becoming community gathering points, taking on pedagogical roles, enacting citizenship, and enabling strategic assertion of identity in the public sphere. This article explores this enactment of heritage and citizen-membership through a case study, the Sikh Heritage Museum, developed in Abbotsford by Indo-Canadians. Established in 2011 in an historic and still-functioning gurdwara, the museum is an example of a community’s desire to balance inward-looking historical consciousness and community belonging, with outward-looking voice, recognition and acceptance by mainstream Canadian society. The museum has also become a site of tension between top-down and bottom-up initiatives, where amateur and local expressions butt up against professionalized government activities such as the Canadian Historical Recognition Program that seek to insert formal recognition and social inclusion policies. The article considers the effects of this resource and power differential on the museum’s development, and on the sensibilities and practices of immigrant “heritage” and “citizenship” in Canada.

History is not anymore the prerogative of historians, nor is displaying heritage the exclusive privilege of museum curators. In the digital era, local interconnectedamateurs commit themselves to the cultural circuit of heritage through the mediation of globalised images. In that circuit, heritage and social memory take aparticular form: as resources for tourism and trade, but also resources for collective action, social engagement and cultural production. “Ordinary people” engage in playful leisure such as genealogy, local history, photography, walking, exploring, surfing on the Internet, self-publishing, etc. As do-it-yourself hobbies associating offline and online practices, these hedonist activities, which blend production and consumption, creation and transmission, tend to redraw heritage communities. What do they tell us about the change of commodity, space and time? What do they tell us about the contemporary process of heritagisation and the role of people as well as the place of institutions in it? We focus on the shifts induced by the emergence of empowered actors, the “prosumers,” who participate in various networks, institutional as well as non-institutional, combining amateurs and professionals. Their collaborative experiences lead to design spaces of inspirational actions that we highlight in the context of two post-industrial areas, Swansea (UK) and Saint-Etienne (France).

This paper discusses inheritance after migration on both sides of the Bulgarian-Turkish border. A specific approach to the (re-)settled people and movingobjects, inheritance and patrimonialisation of the movement, instrumentalized by the (state) border, is applied in a comparative way to two specific groups: the Bulgarians from Aegean Thrace, or the so called “Thracian Bulgarians” resettled after the Balkan wars, and the Turks who were born in Bulgaria and resettled in Turkey during the several migration waves in the twentieth century in two localities – Tsarevo, Bulgaria and Edirne, Turkey. In this study, heritage is thought of as inheritance from an activist position, as ritualised and everyday life practices, as reactualisation of meanings, network of heirs and circulating objects – values, symbols, knowledge and memory. The paper analyses practices of crossing the border of heirs as: as tourists, as explorers of their origins, as neighbours inhabiting border territories. Nowadays, on an institutional level, they are engaged in developing projects that aim at transborder collaboration and in exhibiting cultural heritage with a focus on the levels of cultural diversity in the places close to the border.

This paper explores alternative meanings and appropriations of the category colonial heritage. How do different categories of people practice and appropriatespaces that have been labelled as colonial heritage? How are these formely colonial spaces (re-) appropriated, contested, commodifed, in contemporary societies? My interest here is strongly influenced by Ann Stoler’s work on Imperial Debris, ruins and ruination (Stoler, 2008). Building upon her argument, I argue for a critical ethnography of how colonial spaces are practiced, experienced, inhabited, rescripted, by multiple agencies and agents, in contemporary times. Based in ethnographic research, this text explores processes of labelling and circulating through spaces in Melaka (West Malaysia), explores linkages between nostalgia and alternative notions of heritage, and questions the local meanings ascribed to heritage (translatable as warisan, in bahasa melayu). Building upon Rosaldo’s (1989) notion of imperialist nostalgia and Hertzfeld’s (2005) concept of structural nostalgia, I end by discussing the production and consumption of colonial nostalgia in contemporary times.

Tourism is a worldwide phenomenon which is causing both a rereading and a rewriting of tradition. Heritage, apart from its academic (ethnographic, historiographical, etc.) or cultural (identity of peoples) consideration, is nowadays an important tourist resource. Thus, it is included within more global markets and it also becomes the engine of local, regional and national development of communities. This supposes a reconceptualisation of cultural goods according to mechanisms which this paper describes with the support of determined paradigms (interpretative communication, ecocriticism, etc.), and also according to studies of explanatory cases, such as the intangibles of water culture and the way in which its legends have been displayed in order to catch the attention of visitors.

The research reported in this paper examines the spiritual heritage of the Russian émigrés of the first half of the 20th century. The Russian émigrés is aunique phenomenon in the history of Russia. The October Socialist Revolution 1917, shock of creative intelligentsia at the events taking place in the country, rejection of the Soviet government and exile – all that became a trigger mechanism for formation of a huge Russian culture layer abroad. While the Soviet government made attempts “to erase” a significant part of the cultural and historic memory of the Russian people, eradicate from the Russian soul the belief in God and was rapidly building a new state with a new ideology, the Russian emigrants became a kind of protector for the great Russian culture and traditions of the Russian people. Largely owing to the Russian émigrés and their huge love for the Motherland the thread connecting the Russia’s past and future was not broken.

In spite of the long tradition of coexistence, and in spite of the emergence of some kind of “postmodern relativism,” the positions of believers and secularist remain very distinct. What is it more precisely that distinguishes secularists from believers? In this article I explore the topics of “postmodernism” and relativism in order to establish parallels and differences. In particular, I compare two critiques of “western” relativism, one formulated by Muslim scholar Ziauddin Sardar and the other by the American philosopher Allan Bloom who criticizes relativism as a belief.

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate the theoretical and methodological applicability of the relevant theories of Marcuse and Foucault to analyzing the relationship between comedic pleasure and the popular media. The researchers investigate the similarities of and the differences between the respective positions of Marcuse and Foucault as they relate to power relations, subjectivity, and practice. Likewise, the methodological applicability of these theorists’ work to a discourse analysis of how media content constructs comedic pleasure is considered. Overall, the present study explored the arrangement and deployment of discourses of comedic pleasure as exploited by the power/knowledge mechanism of the media and the entertainment industry. And, through this discussion, the current study argued that three key statements constitute a discursive framework for the analysis of comedic pleasure in the popular media.