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21. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Ema Pires Re-scripting Colonial Heritage
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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.
22. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Elena Serdyukova Keeping of Cultural Heritage in Emigration: Experience of Russia Abroad
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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.
23. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Susan LT Ashley Re-telling, Re-cognition, Re-stitution: Sikh Heritagization in Canada
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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.
24. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Vintilă Mihăilescu “Something Nice.” Pride Houses, Post-peasant Society and the Quest for Authenticity
25. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Sonia Catrina, Cyril Isnart Introduction: Mapping the Moving Dimensions of Heritage
26. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Meglena Zlatkova (Re-) Settled People and Moving Heritage – Borders, Heirs, Inheritance
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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.
27. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Michel Rautenberg, Sarah Rojon Hedonistic Heritage: Digital Culture and Living Environment
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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).
28. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein Believers and Secularists: “Postmodernism,” Relativism, and Fake Reasoning
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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.
29. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Eloy Martos Núñez, Alberto Martos García Tourist Neoreadings of Heritage in Local and Transnational Contexts
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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.
30. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Nicolito A. Gianan Heritage-making and the Language of Auctoritas and Potestas
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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.
31. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Hamid Andishan Incommensurability in Global Ethics, The Case of Islamic Aniconism and Freedom of Speech
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Can all values be reduced to one or a few fundamental ones? Two values may neither exceed the other in importance nor be equal. In such situation, they cannot be reduced to each other or to a third value, and we can call such values as ”incommensurable”. Drawing on the concept of incommensurable values and what recently is called ”global ethics”, I will argue that if two values from two different cultures conflict, one must pay enough attention to the idea of ”incommensurability of values” in order to avoid a bias judgment of either. I will show how this is the case in the conflict between the Islamic ethics and the secular ethics, examining a specific case: Islamic prohibition on images of Mohammed and the liberalist reverence for freedom of speech.
32. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
N.N. Trakakis Love and Marriage, Yesterday and Today
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Taking as its starting-point Eva Illouz's sociological study Why Love Hurts (2012), this paper develops a philosophical framework for understanding love and marriage, particularly in their contemporary manifestations. To begin with, premodern practices in love and marriage during the ancient Greek and Byzantine eras are outlined and contrasted with modern forms of love, whose overriding features are (according to Illouz) suffering and disappointment. To cast some light upon this great transformation in the fortunes of love the discussion takes an axiological and metaphysical turn by placing the transformation within the context of the kind of relational morality and metaphysics proposed by many idealist philosophers.
33. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Corneliu C. Simuţ Ecodomical Attempts to Ideologically Transform the World into a Protective Realm for All Human Beings through Using the Concept of Goodness in Dealing with the Reality of Religion
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This paper investigates the possibility of identifying various ecodomical or constructive possibilities which have the potential to ideologically transform the world at a global scale in the sense that they can promote a set of ideas with positive connotations in dealing with the extremely complex issue of religion. Whether religion is good or bad, positive or negative has nothing to do with this article’s basic methodology which seeks to isolate various theoretical attempts aimed at approaching the issue of religion through a common denominator. For this paper, this common denominator is the human being and, by association, the notion of goodness which will be used in order to demonstrate that, concerning religion, it can provide not only a theoretical framework for positive discussions about religion but also an ecodomic possibility whereby humanity can transform the world into a safer environment for persons of all races and convictions. Four such ecodomical attempts to use the notion of goodness will be analyzed in connection with the reality of religion: John Shelby Spong who promotes goodness in order to free society of religion so for him religion is useless, Ion Bria for whom goodness cannot be detached from religion so religion is vital, Vito Macuso whose conviction is that goodness exists with or without religion so religion is neutral, and Desmond Tutu who believes that goodness can turn religion, any religion for that matter, in a positive reality, so in his understanding religion is positive.
34. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Weilin Fang Studies on Civil Emotionalism and the Modern Transformation of Chinese Tradition
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This article focuses on the study of the emotional discourses contained in the Chu bamboo slips dating back to the Chu kingdom of the Warring States period, and announces a newly discovered tradition of Emotionalism in ancient China. In addition to the two main traditions of Confucianism and Taoism, there is a third tradition of Emotionalism that has hitherto not attracted adequate attention and has not been sufficiently studied. I propose that rather than perceiving traditional Chinese culture through the binary looking glass of the dichotomous concept of “Complementation of Confucianism and Taoism,” Chinese culture may be represented more accurately if viewed in the light of a “Threefold Coexistence of Confucianism–Legalism, Taoism–Buddhism and Civil Emotionalism,” along with other lesser-known schools of thought. The uncovering of the hidden tradition of Emotionalism will reveal new perspectives on the modern transformation of traditional Chinese culture. This third tradition represents a conviction of civil liberalism that is of great importance to the transformation of ancient Chinese tradition into a modern constitutional culture.
35. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Inna Valerievna Miroshnichenko, Elena Vasilievna Morozova Networking Mechanisms of Identity Formation
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The authors prove and describe the action of new networking mechanisms of formation of identities which arise in the context of societal transformations of the modern society. The networking mechanisms of identity formation represent a complex of interrelated and interdependent practices in global information and communication space, promoting individual and collective identification, interiorization and reflection. The complex includes the mechanism of network communication, mechanism of reflexive involvement of a person into the public space, mechanism of network topos-structuring and mechanism of public crowdsourcing. The results of the empirical research show that the functionality of the mechanism of network communication for reproducing/positioning traditional identities and projecting new identities resides in its digital nature (readiness and openness for changes) and a network ethos (orientation to the integration into the community of different value orientations and statuses of actors and provision of cooperation between them on the basis of the development of the uniform complex of values and standards). The mechanism of reflexive involvement of individuals into the public space enables individual and collective actors to project the independent social worlds requiring the creation of their own virtualized public spaces that are closely linked with the common social space. The mechanism of network toposstructuring and mechanism of public crowdsourcing, forming situation and problem identities, have the high mobilization potential to update the activity of network communities in the form of individuals’ initiatives and large-scale civil movements where new sustained identities form which can also gain the protest nature. The authors come to conclusion that the complex of network mechanisms produces the dynamic matrix of the identity of a modern person allowing to take the opportunities for its development in the contemporary conditions of new social reality formation. At the same time, the complex of networking mechanisms is not stable; its content depends on those institutional practices which determine further conditions, processes and results of formation of identities, requiring their conceptual understanding and empirical research in social sciences.
36. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Bina Nir Western Culture and Judeo-Christian Judgement
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Judeo-Christian Western culture recognizes a legislating, judging and punishing God. The view that a judge separate from man indeed exists, constitutes, among other things, cultural motivation for the pursuit of success, on the one hand, and fear of failure, guilt, on the other. The human-being fears the consequences of judgement, especially those entailing punishment, and attempts with all his might to succeed in the eyes of the judge. This study‟s underlying assumption is that judge-ment constitutes a deep structure in Western culture and that its religious origins are in the culture‟s Jewish and Christian sources. Although religious judgement under-goes processes of secularization throughout the culture‟s history, it remains a deep cultural construct; while worldviews are deeply embedded in the religious expe-rience, as Jung (1987) contends, they have a latent capacity for preservation in the secular experience. A genealogical methodology will be applied to examine the con-cept of judgement. While genealogy deals with the past, its aim is to understand and critique the present reality. The genealogy will scrutinize the Jewish judgement (as portrayed in the biblical doctrine of rewards), the Catholic judgement and the Calvinist judgement, while calling attention to their similarities and differences.
37. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Mónica Gómez Salazar Onto-Epistemological Pluralism, Social Practices, Human Rights And White Racism
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Based on onto–epistemological pluralism and social practices this work maintains that the proclamation of cultural neutrality originating in the idea of equality without any distinction of color, sex, language, religion or political opinion, really favors white racism and cultural imperialism of the liberal way of life.This article argues that the process of reasoning which justifies human rights is distorted by particular interests, such as the colonization of American territory in the case of the Declaration of the Good People of Virginia in 1776. As no–one questioned the reasons upon which the false belief that some human beings were classified as inferior or superior according to their physical features, it was reiterated as if it were a truth and, consequently acted upon, thereby fixing this belief in stereotypes. In this article I argue that the present Declaration of Human Rights is the result of continuing inherited presuppositions from the 18th Century. These have not been questioned and have constituted the world in which we live as a racist world in which the liberal tradition has consolidated its political power.
38. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Motsamai Molefe Individualism in African Moral Cultures
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This article repudiates the dichotomy that African ethics is communitarian (relational) and Western ethics is individualistic. „Communitarianism‟ is the view that morality is ultimately grounded on some relational properties like love or friendship; and, „individualism‟ is the view that morality is ultimately a function of some individual property like a soul or welfare. Generally, this article departs from the intuition that all morality including African ethics, philosophically interpreted, is best understood in terms of individualism. But, in this article, I limit myself to the literature in the African moral tradition; and, I argue that it is best construed in terms of individualism contrary to the popular stance of communitarianism. I defend my view by invoking two sorts of evidences. (1) I invoke prima facie evidence, which shows how both secular and religious moral thinkers in the tradition tend to understand it in individualistic terms. And, (2) I invoke concrete evidence, I show that the two terms that can be said to be definitive features of African ethical framework, namely: personhood and dignity, are individualistic. I conclude by considering possible objections against my defense of individualism as a central feature of African ethics.
39. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Perihan Elif Ekmekci, Berna Arda Interculturalism and Informed Consent: Respecting Cultural Differences without Breaching Human Rights
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Interventions in medicine require multicenter clinical trialson a large rather than limited number of subjects from various genetic and cultural backgrounds. International guidelines to protect the rights and well-being of human subjects involved in clinical trialsarecriticizedforthe priority they place on Western cultural values. These discussions become manifest especially with regard to the content and methodology of the informed consent procedure. The ethical dilemma emerges from the argument that there are fundamental differences about the concept of respect for the autonomy of individuals in different cultures and religions. Some communities prioritize the consent of community leaders or the head of family –usually men – over the voluntary and free consent of the individual. The aim of this work is to discuss this ethical dilemma to determine a base for a consensus that satisfies the sensibilities of different cultures without damaging the rights and autonomy of human subjects.
40. Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology: Volume > 15 > Issue: 2
Chien-Shou Chen The Enlightenment Turns to China: The International Flow of Concepts and Their Geographic Dispersion
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This article attempts to strip away the Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment, to reconsider how this concept that originated in Europe was transmitted to China. This is thus an attempt to treat the Enlightenment in terms of its global, worldwide significance. Coming from this perspective, the Enlightenment can be viewed as a history of the exchange and interweaving of concepts, a history of translation and quotation, and thus a history of the joint production of knowledge. We must reconsider the dimensions of both time and space in examining the global Enlightenment project. As a concept, the Enlightenment for the most part has been molded by historical actors acting in local circumstances. It is not a concept shaped and brought into being solely from textual sources originating in Europe. As a concept, the Enlightenment enabled historical actors in specific localities to begin to engage in globalized thinking, and to find a place for their individual circumstances within the global setting. This article follows such a line of thought, to discuss the conceptual history of the Enlightenment in China, giving special emphasis to the processes of formation and translation of this concept within the overall flow of modern Chinese history.