American Symbols Research Articles

Exemplar-based ingroup projection: The superordinate national category is associated more strongly with ingroup than outgroup political leaders

We studied mental representations of social categories in the context of political groups nested within national identities. Extending previous works derived from the Ingroup Projection Model, which had investigated category representations based on prototypical attributes, we examined category representations based on prototypical exemplars, focusing on group leaders. We hypothesized that the mental representation of the superordinate, national, category is more strongly associated with the mental representation of ingroup political leaders than outgroup political leaders. We tested our hypothesis in three preregistered experiments, looking at two different national-political contexts and using diverse methods. In Studies 1 (N = 145) and 2 (N = 103), both conducted in Israel, we found that participants explicitly associated the national category with leaders of their own political camp more than with leaders of the rival political camp. In Study 2, we further found that participants were more likely to falsely remember that ingroup relative to outgroup political leaders were paired with the national category (versus their political wing). In Study 3 (N = 381), conducted in the USA, we found using an implicit measure of association (ST-IAT) that Democrats and Republicans sorted stimuli, representing political leaders, faster when the national category (represented by American symbols) was paired with the ingroup rather than the outgroup category. Implications for theoretical accounts of ingroup projection, as well as for the understanding of political polarization and intergroup leadership, are discussed.

Family in the Woods

Captain Fantastic, an independent drama written and directed by Matt Ross in 2016, and starring Viggo Mortensen, addresses several themes that are central to utopian studies: the viability of an intentional community removed from mainstream civilization, the possibility of living in harmony with nature, as well as the ambition to inculcate alternative cultural values by a radical educational program. The main character, Ben Cash, decided to raise his entire family of 6 kids in the dense forests of Washington state. While training them to survive under extreme circumstances in the wilderness, he also undertakes their entire education, encouraging individual thinking and a strongly critical attitude to mainstream American society and culture. The sudden suicide of his wife forces Ben to return to ‘normal America’, confronting him with both the consequences of his parental decisions and his potential responsibility in his wife’s death. The essay interprets the movie in the context of the American utopian tradition, particularly its individualist variety exemplified by the myth of the American Adam and the ideas of Thoreau's Walden (1854). Captain Fantastic fulfils a crucial generic criterion by skillfully satirizing some of the characteristic features and attitudes of mainstream American culture through the eyes of the children who experience it for the first time, subjecting the conventional ‘American utopia’ to a trenchant criticism. At the same time, it also questions the possibility of radical alterity: can a single family defy society by re-enacting a mythical American pattern and abandoning civilization to raise their kids in the woods? Do parents have the right to experiment on their children after their utopian hopes of opposing American capitalist society have been dashed? The clash of utopias is ultimately resolved by Ben's decision to admit his responsibility for his wife's mental illness and death and to give up the backwoods utopia and settle on a farm, conforming to another fundamental American symbol: the pastoral ideal of the garden.

Med varme bøsselesbiske hilsner

With Gay Greetings and Lesbian Solidarity: Transnational AIDS-activism and the Danish National Organization for Gays and Lesbians 1981-1994. AIDS-activism is an understudied area of Danish history, and the previous research made has only focused on the Danish government’s response to the epidemic. Using Signild Vallgårda’s theories of ‘problematization’ and ‘path dependency’, and Sidney Tarrow and Donatella della Porta’s theories of transnational activism, this article examines how The Danish National Organization for Gays and Lesbians developed AIDS-activism strategies at international conferences. By analyzing conference notes, meeting minutes, and campaign materials, this article finds that the AIDS-epidemic was mainly problematized as a discriminatory problem within the international organizations The Nordic Council for Homosexuals and the International Lesbian and Gay Association. This was caused by the organizations’ previous work with discrimination. A diffusion of AIDS-prevention strategies evolved within these international forums and while the diffusion of AIDS-prevention strategies mainly happened between European homosexual organizations, Danish AIDS-activists used American symbols to frame the AIDS-epidemic, such as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The use of American symbols in the Danish AIDS-activism, might have made the American influence in the Danish AIDS-activism seem bigger.

Excavating the Ancestry of ‘Globetrotting’: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the 1980s

During the twentieth century, systems of racial segregation flourished in both the United States and South Africa. Crusades for racial equality aimed at dismantling racial boundaries emerged in both nations. Sport played a key role in these endeavours. Drawing colour lines in athletic competitions reinforced ideologies of white supremacy while demanding racial equality in sporting contests fuelled campaigns challenging segregation. In an American culture that used athletes as globetrotting ambassadors to promote mythologies of exceptionalism, in particular aspirational but unrealized visions of racial equity, interchanges with South Africa highlighted the complex historical intersections between politics, race, and sport. From all-white US track and field tours of South Africa that began in the 1930s, to the key role that the leading American symbol of conquering colour lines, Jack Robinson, played in athletic affairs with South Africa, to American rebellions against anti-apartheid boycotts in the 1980s, this essay introduces a special issue on ‘Excavating the Ancestry of “Globetrotting”: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and Anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the 1980s’.

Safety in Numbers? A Qualitative Analysis of the 1999 National Firearms Survey

Firearms and their place in American society have been under heavy scrutiny for the past several decades. Previous academic research typically focused on the firearm as a weapon that needs to be regulated, controlled, and the relative fight between various parties concerning second amendment and constitutional rights. However, inadequate scholarly research focuses on the firearm as an abstract, symbolic entity in American culture, and what the firearm represents to Americans in a more complex, abstruse way. This research utilizes the National Firearms Survey (NFS), conducted in 1999, as a mechanism of secondary qualitative analysis to examine the ways in which Americans view their firearms conceptually. After employing qualitative content analysis using data provided by the NFS, we found that Americans seemed to be more concerned about safety and training regarding firearms, as opposed to traditional notions of the firearm as an American symbol of liberty and freedom.

Cognitive technologies in cluster of identification of irrational images of Romanticism and symbolism

The main goal of the project is to use cognitive technologies to create an author’s, metaphorical, temporal system model of images of modern jewelry using the linguo-combinatorial method in the implementation of retro styles - locally stable structures of the design landscape represented by the cultural code of the irrational eidos of poetry and prose of North American symbolism and romanticism of the mid-19th century..

Malvinas/Falkland Islands War: a look into ads

PurposeLittle is known about patriotic appeals and Latin American symbols in ads. The purpose of this study was to content analyze Argentine and English print newspaper ads to examine how advertising expression and content differed in the two countries while they were fighting the Malvinas/Falkland Islands War.Design/methodology/approachA total of 3,707 ads were analyzed from La Nación and The Times from April 1, 1982, to December 31, 1982. Appeals, advertised products, cultural values and code-switching were studied.FindingsThe War resulted in marginal changes to advertising in Argentina and England. Interestingly, while the use of national symbols was scarce across both countries, Argentina accounted for the majority of the references to the war. A number of Argentine brands that adapted their names from English to Spanish are taken into account.Research limitations/implicationsBy drawing comparisons to English ads, this paper illustrates the boundaries of strategies and appeals in two different cultures over the same time period. This study extends the literature on the use of advertising during periods of conflict.Practical implicationsThis content analysis provides a look at the strategies, tactics and symbols used by print advertisers in Argentina and England during the War.Originality/valueThe study provides a depiction of advertising campaigns featured in Argentine and English newspapers during one of the most recent armed conflicts in South America. The study provides a summary of changes in advertising as a result of the War. In doing so, the paper extends the advertising literature to an understudied market.

Public-College Student-Athletes and Game-Time Anthem Protests: Is There a Need for a Constitutional-Analytical Audible?

National-anthem-related protests among NFL players have revealed complexities associated with symbolic counter-speech tied to American symbols of patriotism. For public-college officials and coaches, who are bound by the First Amendment, the handling of game-time anthem protests may reverberate beyond the court of public opinion. Because uniformed collegiate student-athletes occupy a constitutional limbo-land in which they are distinguishable both from members of the general adult population and their non-athlete student peers, the traditional framework for evaluating limits on their game-time political counter-speech may prove unwieldy. This article presents an alternative constitutional-analytical approach that contemplates the unique status of collegiate student-athletes and the nature of competitive teams. Within this potential framework, administrator-imposed limits on anthem protests would be reviewed strictly. Courts considering coach-imposed limits on anthem protests, however, might opt for a less rigid form of review that allows for a more direct balancing of interests.

Cultural experiential goal pursuit, cultural brand engagement, and culturally authentic experiences: sojourners in America

Our research uses an interpretive approach to explore the consumer journeys of sojourners, temporary residents of a new country, with attention to cultural experiential goal pursuit and cultural brand engagement. Depth interviews with students from nine countries studying in America document that home country access to American popular culture impacts cultural experiential goals; the temporary nature of sojourners’ stay engenders instrumental brand use (vs. brand attachment); and cultural brand engagement relies on indexical/iconic brand meanings inextricably tied to the desired cultural experience. Three cultural experiential goals and their brand engagement emerge: the “imagined American” cultural experience is grounded in American myths and stereotypes and iconic brand meanings; the “unique Americana” experience is grounded in Americana symbolism and indexical brand meanings with American symbolism; and the “life like the locals” experience is grounded in observed realities in America and indexical brand meanings. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications related to our findings.

Confronting Institutional Discrimination in a Color-Blind World

This article builds on the scholarship on color-blind ideology by examining discourse challenging two cases of institutional discrimination (the criminalization of unauthorized immigrants and sports teams’ use of Native American symbolism). Our research questions are first, what general options do anti-racists have for navigating norms of color-blindness in the public sphere? Second, how does context influence how people confront institutional discrimination? Based on an ethnographic content analysis of 165 letters to the editor published in American newspapers, we find that opponents of institutional discrimination have the choice of addressing one of four laminations. In each lamination, authors acknowledge framings of racial discrimination that are unacknowledged in previous ones. In the abstraction lamination, authors do not recognize race and ethnicity. In the pigmentation lamination, authors identify race and ethnicity, but not discrimination. Authors in the discrimination lamination acknowledge the practice is harmful to a particular racial or ethnic group, and the contextualization lamination lends added dimensionality to the discourse. A comparison of the laminations of pro-immigrant and anti-mascot letters demonstrates varying willingness to acknowledge racial discrimination. Namely, the pro-immigrant discourse was more color-blind than anti-mascot criticism. We consider the potential causes of these findings and offer suggestions for future research in the conclusion

The image of the USA and Great Britain in the political cartoon magazine "Perets" in the first years of the Cold War

The study deals with one of the most important episodes of the history of the twentieth century - the beginning of the Cold War. The focus is on the peculiarities of the formation of the image of the external enemy for the USSR on the pages of periodical media, namely, the political cartoon magazine "Perets". It is revealed that the main ideological adversaries of the Soviet apparatus of propaganda were the United States and Great Britain, the countries that formed the basis of the anti-Hitler coalition. Due to the analysis of materials of the publication - political cartoons, short stories, satirical poems - the characteristic features of the image of these two states are revealed. It is proved that the images of the opposing countries were filed by the magazine "Perets'" in the form of three categories. The first block is the image of the American and English leaders (in this case G. Truman, V. Churchill), which began to appear massively in the journal in connection with the Fulton speech of Churchill and the implementation of the "Marshall Plan". The emphasis is placed on political cartoonists' tendency to compare the leaders of the United States and Great Britain with the leaders of Nazi Germany. The second unit features personalized images of the United States and the Britain (Uncle Sam, John Bull, British Lion, etc.). A characteristic feature of this group is the demonstration of the domination of American symbols over the British, which was to show the Soviet reader an American-dependent position of the United Kingdom and other Western European countries. The last block of images combines works that demonstrate the relations between "capitalist" countries. In order to create the desired effect on the reader, the Soviet propaganda machine emphasized the emergence of territorial or economic disputes between the United States and Britain, presenting this as a stage of aggravation of relations between "imperialist countries." All of these features in the images of external enemies were aimed at elevating patriotic sentiment among the Soviet society and confidence in the actions of the ruling Communist Party.

59.4 Healing Through the Arts: Native American Symbolism

Participants will be able to identify some of the key symbolic characteristics of Native American art, including weaving, painting, sand painting, and pottery while gaining some understanding of aspects of Native American culture. This knowledge will help clinicians’ understanding and treatment of Native American patients.

Disparaging Trademarks and Social Responsibility

This study examines the use of disparaging and offensive trademarks and mascots by sports teams. Specifically, this study considers whether the continued use of Native American symbols and mascots in sports comports with the Christians-Nordenstreng conceptualization of social responsibility, which considers the three principles of human dignity, truth-telling, and nonmaleficence. To do this, the article considers the history and arguments both for and against the use of these symbols in sports communication. This article concludes with a discussion of how the use of these trademarks does not fulfill the three principles of social responsibility and what that means for the symbols’ continued use.

Glee-talia: adapting Glee for an Italian audience

ABSTRACTGlee was an American television program that emphasized differences in high school students’ social status by juxtaposing popular teens with underdogs. This theme, consistently reinforced in promotional materials in the US, got lost in translation when Glee was exported to Italy. Through an examination of cultural symbols and editing practices that affect both visual and auditory elements, this study brings critical attention to one element of the transnational television adaptation industry. Although the Italian alteration of American promos disrupts the encoding of Glee’s central narrative—the exclusion of marginalized identities by those with privilege—I conclude that viewers’ increased familiarity with American symbols ultimately reinforces the social binary that separates popular characters from social outcasts; furthermore, the development of Italian promos for Glee’s second season demonstrates the learning curve inherent in promotional materials’ cross-cultural adaptation.

America’s Signal Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury

This article examines how Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text’s libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson’s account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel’s registration of America’s hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is thus further examined as an aspect of the text’s aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America’s cultural capital and financial markets. The destabilization of class structures due to turbulent financial markets breeds a semantic confusion between real and symbolic signifiers of class status, a process facilitated by the narrator’s comparison of these women to prototypically American symbols, such as “Oscar-Barbie” statuettes and dolls. Fury’s mapping of Solanka’s cultural products, dolls and masks, from New York to the peripheral nation of Lilliput-Blefescu further actualizes the flow of American cultural and economic power to peripheral regions. This, alongside the text’s problematic characterization of gender and race, is read as evidence of Rushdie as a writer in terminal decline.

Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. By Cindy Ott (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. xvi plus 323 pp. $23.45)

From food of the poor to the essential dessert at one of America's most inclusive holidays, Ott uses the pumpkin to illustrate the way that culture and commodities influence each reciprocally over time. Pumpkins and squash were undifferentiated in the colonial era and were valued because they were easy to grow, high-yielding, and hardy. While some forms of squash were sold in limited quantities at market, there was little economic value to selling pumpkins because all classes grew it on marginal land for supplementing their diets and as animal fodder. Initially, the pumpkin was seen as a lower class food by colonists while most Europeans viewed its large size and wild growth as a symbol of an America that was on the “edge of civilization” (24-5). Ott explains that the pumpkin's meaning was ambiguous until it shifted for the first time in 1796 with Amelia Simmons' American Cookery. Ott says this was the “beginning of the transformation of the pumpkin from uninspired side dish into glorified dessert,” and this culinary shift lead by women in the household helped to elevate the pumpkin into a cultural icon (52). While Ott does not discuss women's contribution to the creation of this American symbol in length, it appears this culinary shift was critical in elevating the orange pumpkin above other forms of squash. While there are no botanical differences between squash and pumpkin, the two became divorced as the pumpkin came to represent more than just an everyday food item. The pumpkin came to represent hard-work, independence, and the values of agrarian life and thus became synonymous with New England. Ott argues that the South was less receptive to adopt the pumpkin because plantations embraced capitalist production, therefore, Southern identity was not as receptive to agrarian ideals of small farmers that emanated out of New England. Elevating the pumpkin to a dessert was a crucial change because it disassociated many of the previous negative images of the pumpkin and made it into a proud symbol of New England, and eventually the entire United States, but the transition from regional to national symbol and its adoption in other regions of the country is still obscured.

David W. Ellwood. The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century.

This wide-ranging volume describes how in the long twentieth century “American symbols and stories, images, products, and people acquired a form of power that sooner or later penetrated every debate on the Old World's prospects” (p. 1). The book's main concern is with a form of “soft power” that has operated to influence economy and culture. Direct American interventions in war and occupation, and in international policy on trade, labor, and industry, are well described. However, these only provide background for how America has worked in Western Europe both as a pervasive cultural force by means of its consumer products and media (film in particular) and as a vast source of myth and symbols. The concentration is on Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. The chronology is determined by three general periods of war: 1898–1941, 1941–1960, and 1989–2009 (post-Cold War). During times of direct American interventions, but also, as David W. Ellwood argues, during times of American isolation, the United States figured in European discourses on the future, and in debates over capitalism, technology, and consumerism. Even before the Spanish-American War era that begins the book, European culture was saturated with clichés and stereotypes about the U.S. After 1898, as Western Europeans began to question their own creation of modernity, “America itself became a metaphor” for modernity and a touchstone for its contestation (p. 32). Utopian visions of America pervaded those discussions of social and economic policy seen as socially progressive or growth oriented. Dystopian views served anti-modernism. Friedrich Nietzsche decried the American obsession with products, and historian Fritz Stern critiqued U.S. mechanization and materialism. On the positive side, Antonio Gramsci saw in Fordism a model for a fairer share for workers and Leon Trotsky predicted the future triumph of Americanized Bolshevism. Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger also associated American capitalism and Bolshevism, but decried their common feature of decadent standardization and collectivization. Adolf Hitler's emphasis on spirit, culture, and national consciousness appeared to some as the perfect antidote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his America, while H. G. Wells, Léon Blum, and David Lloyd George all saw the New Deal as a model for social justice.

War and Union in Little America: The Space of Hawthorne's Rome

[I brave] the imputation of making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality. That comes up as exactly the point-that no Rome of reality was concerned in our experience, that the whole thing was a rare state of the imagination [....] Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends I Home to one of the United States' earliest expatriate communities and an important overseas center for artistic creation, nineteenth-century Rome was simultaneously a physical locus for the production of American arts and letters, an iconic symbol of America's Republican heritage, and a setting onto which Americans projected their hopes and fears for the contemporary United States. Rome was, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "the capital of the ancient & of the modern world" (372), and for Nathaniel Hawthorne, no less than for sculptors like Thomas Crawford and William Story, it was a space in which to fashion American symbols. The Marble Faun (1860) offered descriptions of exotic foreign landscapes to an American readership eager for firsthand views of both contemporary and historic Europe, and for cues as to their own developing national identity. This article suggests how Hawthorne's descriptions of (or as James might have said, imaginations of) Rome tell a story of national identity and national schisms during a period of civil turmoil, unification and territorial expansion on both sides of the Atlantic. As Emerson noted, "Every traveler must describe not what is, but what he sees," for "the best things we learn" from travel in Italy are "confirmation in unexpected quarters of our simplest sentiments at home." "[N]ames and places" being "of small importance," he supposed, a "well regulated mind will attain to the same thoughts and feelings in Sicily, in Rome, in New England" (Lectures 90). Much as Michel de Certeau imagined that "we travel abroad to discover in distant lands something whose presence at home has become unrecognizable" (50), Henry James wrote in 1867 that Americans in Europe were able to "pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property wherever we find it" (A Life in Letters 17). This "aesthetic claiming" of cultural markers in a landscape already rich with its own systems of meaning is an act de Certeau dubbed a tactic, a technique many critics have noted in American writings of the period set in Rome. Paola Gemme, for example, has outlined Risorgimento-era comparisons of Italians with American slaves, and of Austrian rulers with American slaveholders, a paradigm used to support arguments both for and against U.S. slavery. Dennis Berthold, meanwhile, has suggested that connections between foreign politics and American domestic issues influenced the writings of Herman Melville, whose fictional characters may have been inspired by contemporary Risorgimento leaders (122) and who drew parallels between Italy's unification and the North's struggle to end slavery while maintaining the union. Such transatlantic transferences may also map geographic metaphors found in Italy back onto the United States. Annamaria Formichella Elsden notes how critics have identified passages from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento (1861), contrasting "southern" Italy with "northern" Europe, "as evidence of a neat north/south parallelism that can be imported back to U.S. soil" (67). Elsden cites Nathalia Wright's reference to "an echo of the nineteenth-century American sectional conflict over slavery in the contrast established between the voluptuous south of Italy and the north, with its reforming impulse" (Wright 93), and Jenny Franchot's suggestion that Agnes of Sorrento "offers an expatriate justification for American northern assertions of superiority over the American South ... and its enslaved population of African Americans" (Franchot 247). This geographic binarism of South and North in the antebellum United States was also being "exported" in the other direction and projected onto Rome by American writers. …

Interpreting an Early Classic Pecked Cross in the Candelaria Caves, Guatemala: Archaeological and Indigenous Perspectives

Pecked crosses, a variant of a common Prehispanic American symbol often referred to as a “quartered” or “quadripartite” circle, are commonly found in central and northern Mexico during the florescence of Teotihuacan (ca. A.D. 100–650) and often interpreted as astronomical devices. The subject of this article is a pecked cross found in the Candelaria Caves, Guatemala, one of four examples that have been found to date in the Maya world. The author interprets the symbol through two distinct lenses—first as an archaeologist and then through its cosmological significance according to contemporary Q'eqchi' Maya daykeepers. Although the methodologies and approaches differ, there is common ground between them—both point to the symbol’s associations with ritual events, directionality, and the passage of time.

“There's Millions in It!”: The Gilded Age and the Economy of Satire

“There's Millions in It!”: <i>The Gilded Age</i> and the Economy of Satire