Cultural Accommodation Research Articles

Moldovan Perception of Greece as a Tourism Destination

Purpose: This research study analyzes Moldovans' intentions to visit Greece, and their perceptions of Greece's image as a tourism destination, according to the following dimensions: (1) environmental beauty and convenience, (2) country's citizens, (3) place and architectural structure, (4) shopping and tourist accommodation and (5) similarity of the local culture and cuisine with the Moldovan one. The goal is split into four objectives. Design/methodology/approach: For attaining the goal, a self-administered questionnaire was delivered. The empirical study was conducted in the capital of Moldova. The findings are based upon a sample of 139 respondents. Findings: The findings reveal that, overall, Greece's image as a tourist destination among Moldovan consumers is partially positive. The perceptions of the tourism dimensions were evaluated in the descending order as follows: place and architectural structure, shopping and tourist accommodation, environmental beauty and convenience, country's citizens and similarity of the local culture and cuisine with the Moldovan one. Research limitations/implications: As it was undertaken only in the capital of Republic of Moldova and because most respondents are young people and females, the findings of this investigation do not absolutely reflect the perceptions of all Moldovans. Also, because the number of respondents is small, it is not representative of the whole Moldovan population. Hence, the results might not be very realistic and accurate. Originality/value: This study provides insightful theoretical implications and practical recommendations in creating marketing strategies that would help in managing and improving Greece's image as a destination among Moldovan tourists. Also, no study, at least to the researcher's knowledge, has evaluated Greece's image as a destination among Moldovan consumers. Finally, due to the increasing number of Moldovan tourists in Greece, it is important that Greece grasps this opportunity and positively influences the intentions of the visiting Moldovans via a positive destination image.

Moe and Internet Memes: The Resistance and Accommodation of Japanese Popular Culture in China

The cultural exports of Japanese anime and manga have faced both praise and scorn in the Chinese market. Although the Chinese state generally regards these cultural artefacts as a negative influence, the adoption of visual techniques and concepts associated with Japanese popular culture has become common in China, particularly on the internet. This article seeks to understand the implications of the ‘glocalisation’ of Japanese anime and manga in China. It discusses how Japanese popular culture is perceived by the Chinese Communist Party and by the general public, and how the Chinese state has invested in its own domestic comics and animation industries in an attempt to curb the cultural flow from Japan. Through examining a satirical Chinese virtual character who is heavily influenced by Japanese graphic techniques and concepts, this article demonstrates that governments are not the final arbiters in matters of cultural influence and illuminates the complex nature of transnational cultural flows between China and Japan.

The Devout and the Disabled: Religious and Cultural Accommodation‐as‐Human‐Variation

AbstractThis article shows that we can identify a subset of religious and cultural accommodation cases that follow the structure of a particular disability model: the Human Variation Model. According to this model, disadvantageous disability arises because most social arrangements are tailored to the needs of individuals with typical characteristics; people with atypical features are frequently left out from these arrangements. Hence, the latter need personalised resources tailored to them, or their social and/or material environment ought to change according to their atypical characteristics. I argue, however, that not everyone's claim stemming from an atypical characteristic merits accommodation – it would be simply unreasonable to provide personalised resources to everyone or modify the environment to accommodate everyone's needs. In other words, these human variation claimants must be ‘reasonably accommodated’. Nevertheless, members of certain social groups have a justifiable claim to receive such accommodation and those in religious and cultural groups could be among them for two specific sociological reasons.

Cooperating or competing in three languages: cultural accommodation or alienation?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the effect of using foreign languages on cooperative behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma setting. The cultural accommodation hypothesis suggests that people are less cooperative in English, associated with the Anglophone cultural cluster, than in French, which is – as is Belgium – associated with the more cooperative Latin European cultural cluster.Design/methodology/approachChoices are framed as pricing strategies in the context of duopolistic competition. In total, 422 Flemish-Belgium participants with English and French as foreign and Dutch as their native language played in one of three language treatments.FindingsWhile the authors observe differences between the native and both foreign languages, which are moderated by gender, the authors do not find any difference in effects between the two foreign languages that are associated with different cultures. Extending cultural accommodation arguments, the data suggests an effect specific to the use of the two selected foreign languages.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to this literature by reporting an experimental test of cultural accommodation and alienation effects related to two foreign languages. The authors explore novel arguments, related to cognitive psychology and gender effects.

How do the Romans Feel When Visitors “Do as the Romans Do”? Diversity Ideologies and Trust in Evaluations of Cultural Accommodation

Past research finds foreign visitors who accommodate their behavior to local norms to a moderate degree are appreciated more than those who accommodate little, but more extreme accommodation does n...

The Jesuit Heresiological Discourse as an Enlightenment Project in Early Modern China

Refutations of Buddhism, Daoism, and various Chinese popular cults formed a vital balance to the gestures of cultural accommodation attempted by the Jesuits in late-Ming and early-Qing China. Yet this heresiological discourse remains largely invisible in the prevailing historiography, which prominently features the accommodating Jesuit bent on forging synthesis between the East and West. This article seeks to address such neglect by centrally engaging this discourse and arguing that the Jesuits and their Chinese converts, in their consistent stress on reason and (Aristotelian) science as a basis of their criticisms of Chinese religion, articulated a hybrid notion of heterodoxy that anticipated in significant ways post-Enlightenment conceptions of superstition. Thus the article offers a case study in support of the emerging revisionist scholarship that interprets the European Enlightenment as a multi-stage historical process originating at least partially outside Europe in the sites of cross-cultural encounters during the Age of Discovery.

Unequal but fair? Cultural recognition and self-government rights

This review of Patten’s Equal Recognition suggests that minority rights can be grounded either in cultural accommodation rights or collective self-government rights. I defend four propositions: (1) individuals’ interests in membership in political communities cannot be reduced to their interests in being able to pursue their own conceptions of the good; (2) liberal states do not have to extend neutrality as equal treatment to self-government claims that intersect with their own jurisdiction; (3) claims for the establishment of public languages and territorial autonomy need to be justified on the basis of self-government rights rather than on grounds of equal treatment of cultural identities; (4) as a condition for their admission, immigrants can be expected to waive collective self-government rights rather than cultural protection rights.

Domestication of Audiolingualism in ELT in China: From the Perspective of Cultural Accommodation

Audio Lingual Method (ALM) or Audiolingualism is a language teaching methodology introduced in the 1950s in the western world. It was later domesticated in a painless way in Chinese foreign language pedagogy －in contrast to the Chinese cultural resistance to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in China. The paper explores why Audiolingualism is not inimical to the Chinese culture of learning while CLT seems to have encountered cultural resistance, although both approaches are of foreign origin. By putting a number of issues under scrutiny, the paper contends that the Chinese adoption of ALM, and coolness towards CLT, had deep roots in traditional Chinese culture and philosophy of education.

Nord’s Documentary Versus Instrumental Translation: The Case of Hugo’s Demain, dès L’aube

<p>Documentary and instrumental strategies were widely employed in translation works. The paper examined the application of documentary and instrumental strategies to the French poem <em>Demain, dès L'aube</em> by Victor Hugo (1802-1885). The author compared numbers of translation works from the academic and public field for the usage of the strategies by Nord (2005). The result indicated that while documentary translation was depicted as an overt version or report of a text in another language. On the other hands, instrumental translation was depicted as a form of communication that was autonomous from the source text (ST) and which might be appraised on how effectively it passed across an author’s message (Chersterman, 2000). These distinctions were useful in the translation of the case text since they both indicated the understanding and consciousness of both cultural and linguistic accommodation during translation in order to pass across the original message intended by the author of the source text (Greenberg, 2003).</p>

Dinamika Hubungan Islam dan Agama Lokal di Indonesia: Pengalaman Towani Tolotang di Sulawesi Selatan

This study focuses on the relation between Islam and local religion in Indonesia. The common relation pattern occurred in each encounter between Islam and local religion; is that fulfilled by the compromise and the conflict at the same time. In the case at South Sulawesi, the cultural accommodation of Towani Tolotang was able to perform it on a good situation that brought them to be accepted by the Muslims majority without relinquishing their former believes. In certain condition, despite the underlying differences between the two, both Islam and Towani Tolotang can hardly be socially separated from one another. Although the state admitted six religions only, but practically we found various types of religions others. Their adherents strive doing any efforts to keep their existence and continuity for their future. The result of this study shows that Towani Tolotang in its encounter with Islam emerged some types of conflicts and compromises on its dynamics.

Transformational leadership in the educational system of the United Arab Emirates

Globally, there is increasing pressure on schools to enact change, and the literature indicates that transformational leadership is positively associated with school leaders’ effectiveness at implementing positive reforms. Here, we report on a study conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) within the current context of intense educational restructuring in the K–12 system. The purpose was to investigate whether school principals in the UAE practise transformational leadership, and whether they and their teachers perceived principals’ leadership styles differently to their western counterparts. This study adopted a mixed methodology, and revealed variation in perceptions between principals and teachers related to whether principals were practising transformational leadership. However, when analysed using Hofstede’s cultural framework, this variation may be related to cultural differences between the western orientation of the leadership model adapted by Emirati principals and the Islamic orientation of the population. Therefore, a new model of transformational leadership is proposed, based on a paradigm that may be more appropriate for Middle Eastern/Islamic contexts. This Modified Transformational Model may be useful to those leaders who wish to adopt transformational leadership with cultural accommodations.

Interiors and Homemaking in Displacement: A Study of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California

This paper examines how displaced immigrants create meaningful spaces for themselves in a setting with vastly different customs, values, buildings, and institutions. Through a naturalistic field study, this paper examines in detail the choices, preferences, and decisions made by Vietnamese Americans in Southern California to rebuild their homes and interiors. Salient in their conceptualizations of homemaking were multigenerational family and genealogical linkages with ancestors and extended kin, as well as ritual linkages through worship, food, décor, and spatial requirements. The lessons from this study on homemaking in displacement also reveal the following emergent concepts: home as cultural investment—interior spaces created to facilitate culture specific living, lifestyle, use, activities, and interactions; home as cultural accommodation—spaces modified and transformed to accommodate cultural values and preferences; and home as cultural repository—home as a container for artifacts, paintings, art, and more. All of the above were significant in Vietnamese American homemaking.

“Skittles & Red Bull is my favourite flavour”: E-cigarettes, smoking, vaping and the changing landscape of nicotine consumption amongst British teenagers – implications for the normalisation debate

Aims: From an academic discourse explaining trends in drug-related attitudes and behaviours, “normalisation” now also encompasses public health policy advocating “denormalisation” of smoking. This study explored young people’s attitudes and behaviours to cigarettes and e-cigarettes to ascertain whether a process of “renormalisation” was underway. Methods: A six-month multi-method study was conducted in NW England. Data collection in April-July 2014 included a convenience sample survey of 233 students; secondary analysis of a 3,500 respondent survey; stakeholder interviews; participant observation sessions; focus groups; and participatory research events with over 100 students. Findings: With the public performance of “vaping” valued as an indicator of experienced use, young people used e-cigarettes primarily for flavour combinations and to perform “tricks”. Smoking cessation and nicotine consumption were less important motivations. When comparing e-cigarettes with eight indicators of normalisation – additionally, legal status and risk perception – there were indications of a growing cultural accommodation of “vaping”. Conclusion: The changing landscape of nicotine and non-nicotine products challenges traditional conceptualisations of “smoking” and “non-smoking” and problematises the notion of linear processes of normalisation in respect not just of young people’s tobacco and nicotine use, but more generally, of delivery systems and the drugs dispensed within them, suggesting marketplace-differentiated normalisation.

“Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

A VIAGEM NA POÉTICA DE HELENA KOLODY

Cruz Machado is the starting point of Kolody Helena's life, the poetess considered inestimable by the critics, she wrote in Parana about things of the State reality and from this perspective it revealed a new national data. In this colony the eldest daughter and the first Brazilian in the Kolody family was born and spent her first two years. From city to city, Helena established permanent residence in the state capital and leave your name forever recorded in the memory of Parana as a poetess. Of the many themes explored by the poetess in her poetry, one of them becomes important because of her Slavic ancestry: the immigration and with it the affiliates themes - the trip and its variants, the presence of the immigrant, the absorption and cultural accommodation - are themes that visited frequently her poetry. This article presents a reflection about the theme of the trip that materializes in poetic expression an experience sometimes not experienced. The theme confirms and reaffirms in the immigrant displacement, printed in suffering, in the cherished hope, in internalizing movement, in the final departure, in space travel, in the various forms of escapism. The trip as a displacement from the the real world to a world created from a desire to rise toward the infinity materializes in poetic images that compose numerous poems written by our poetess. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Tabela normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Times New Roman,serif;}

Indian Cuisine in Western Dish: Negotiations and Assertions in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Arranged Marriage

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a prominent South-Asian writer, has won several prizes for the short stories collection entitled Arranged Marriage , published in 1995, wherein she has sinuously added the food recipes, culinary ingredients and the beautifully stacked kitchen in the narrative pattern of the stories to convey those contests that characterize the lives of the Indian immigrants who attempts to imagine the promising worlds beyond the familial and cultural antagonisms. In these stories the food can also be seen functioning as an index of changing social and cultural status of the characters in their journey from India to America and mediating the experience of displacement and encoding the accounts of cultural exchange, accommodation, estranging relationships, resistance and illusory existences in contexts marked by racialism, violence, expulsions and inequality. The uniqueness of the present study lies in engraving the element of the represented Indian cuisine which proves to be the only source of happiness, comfort and security for these characters living in an alien world i.e. America, and they also appears to be cherishing their ethnicity by retreating to their native cuisine.

A Church of Two Steeples: Catholicism, Labor, and Ethnicity in Industrial New England, 1869–90

Drawing evidence from militant ethnic newspapers, historians have long known of conflict between Irish Americans and the French Canadians of New England in the nineteenth century. Alternative sources now bring greater clarity to this multifaceted struggle. Diocesan correspondence and documents from press outlets unassociated with the two communities further emphasize French Canadians’ attempts to resist assimilationist forces but better define the source of such assimilationist sentiments. Whereas the Irish working class aimed to integrate the new Catholic element into a labor movement that it largely controlled, Irish American bishops recognized that the Church’s institutional interests demanded cultural accommodation.

Cultural accommodation of group substance abuse treatment for Latino adolescents: Results of an RCT.

Comparative studies examining the difference between empirically supported substance abuse treatments versus their culturally accommodated counterparts with participants from a single ethnic minority group are frequently called for in the literature but infrequently conducted in practice. This randomized clinical trial was conducted to compare the efficacy of an empirically supported standard version of a group-based cognitive-behavioral treatment (S-CBT) to a culturally accommodated version (A-CBT) with a sample of Latino adolescents primarily recruited from the juvenile justice system. Development of the culturally accommodated treatment and testing was guided by the Cultural Accommodation Model for Substance Abuse Treatment (CAM-SAT). Seventy Latino adolescents (mean age = 15.2; 90% male) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 group-based treatment conditions (S-CBT = 36; A-CBT = 34) with assessments conducted at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 3-month follow-up. Longitudinal Poisson mixed models for count data were used to conduct the major analyses. The primary outcome variable in the analytic models was the number of days any substance was used (including alcohol, except tobacco) in the past 90 days. In addition, the variables ethnic identity, familism, and acculturation were included as cultural moderators in the analysis. Although both conditions produced significant decreases in substance use, the results did not support a time by treatment condition interaction; however, outcomes were moderated by ethnic identity and familism. The findings are discussed with implications for research and practice within the context of providing culturally relevant treatment for Latino adolescents with substance use disorders.

Native EFL Raters’ Criteria in Assessing the Speech Act of Complaint: The Case of American and British EFL Teachers

Despite the importance of interlanguage pragmatic rating (ILP) in the second language teaching and learning context, scant attention has been devoted to it. This study aims to investigate native EFL teachers’ major criteria in assessing the speech act of complaint produced by Iranian EFL learners. To fulfill this end, two groups of experienced native raters, including American (n=47) and British (n=30) EFL/ESL teachers, were elected for evaluating the complaint discourse completion tests (DCTs) made from video-prompts which were answered by EFL learners before. The content analysis of raters’ comments on the EFL learners’ productions revealed eleven different criteria including logical reasoning and comments, politeness, linguistic appropriacy, semantic formula, interlocutors’ relationship, register choice, formality, degree of intensity, cultural accommodations, degree of directness, and finally fluency and naturalness respectively from the most to the least frequent ones. The result of the t-test and chi-square analysis proved that British and American raters differed significantly in their degree of variations and preferences of these criteria. The results further showed that EFL learners’ responses seemed unreasonable and impolite to native raters which might be due to the different cultural norms between L1 and L2 societies and consequently encourage us to be aware of the importance of teaching sociopragmatic knowledge to the EFL learners.

Ancient Mayan “Deformity”: Cultural Accommodation of Congenital Physical Anomaly in Mesoamerican Prehistory

Research investigates ancient Mayan sociopolitical practices regarding individuals with congenital physical anomalies, including dwarfism, acromegaly, clubfoot, and polydactyly. Research endeavors to determine if social marginalization of individuals with such traits is a human universal and to explore the potential existence of more amicable alternative paradigms. Analysis of pathology, as identified via clinical diagnostic criterion from modern medical literature, determined that the pre-Columbian Maya represent a model by which social mobility was facilitated, or at the very least not hindered, by physical variation: elites appear to have acquired and maintained status by means of their atypical physical traits. Subsequent cross-cultural ethnohistoric comparison of this paradigm with modern cultures may yield interesting anecdotal implications for contemporary social issues regarding the perceived marginilizatinon of individuals with similar afflictions. As evidenced by the Maya, an effective method of normalizing human variation may be through incorporation of the aformentioned traits into the existing cognitive framework of society’s collective conscience.