Cultural Crossroads Research Articles

Crossroads of Language, Culture, and Education – Editors’ Foreword

Crossroads of Language, Culture, and Education – Editors’ Foreword

Unity and diversity turko-mongol world: Kultobe settlement as a crossroads of religions and cultures

The culture and art of the Turkic-Mongolian world is one of the deepest subjects of the humanities, which again and again take the attention of researchers. The historical vicissitudes, which was formed over many centuries, contributed to spread Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in the Great Steppe. We can see it in unique art artifacts and architectural structures. This article is devoted to unity and diversity study of the Turkic-Mongolian world, based on the example of the Kultobe settlement, which is presented by the authors as the oldest peculiar crossroads of religions and cultures. The Kultobe settlement, during scientific years and archaeological research by the Kazakh Research Institute of Culture, truly unique material evidence (architectural objects and artifacts) was discovered, which allows us to speak of this unique monument of archeology as one of the “crossroads” of religions and cultures in the Turkic-Mongolian world. The Kultobe settlement and later Yasi, a spiritual and religious place, developed -Turkic Sufism. The famous Sufi and poet K.A.Yasawi lived and preached here. The work was prepared under the state assignment of the Altai State University, project №748715Ф.99.1.ББ97АА00002 “The Turkic-Mongolian world of the “Greater Altai”: unity and diversity in history and modernity.”

Meeting Report - Workshop 'Actin-based mechanosensation and force generation in health and disease'.

International experts in the fields of cellular motility, force generation and mechanosensation met in Baeza, a UNESCO World Heritage city, from the 10th to the 13th of November, 2019. The meeting, part of the 'Current Trends in Biomedicine' series, took place at the 'Sede Antonio Machado', a beautiful 17th century building turned into a conference center of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA), which sponsored the event. The meeting was organized by Alexis Gautreau, Pekka Lappalainen and Miguel Vicente-Manzanares, with the support of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Spanish-based company IMPETUX. Fifty scientists presented recent results during the talks, poster sessions and thematic discussions. As Baeza itself served as a crossroads of medieval Christian, Moorish and Jewish cultures, the meeting brought together cell biologists, biochemists, biophysicists and engineers from around the world that provided an integrated vision of the role of the actin cytoskeleton, force generation and mechanosensation in diverse physiological processes and pathologies.

CONFERENCE CIRCUIT: At the crossroads of information and culture: The 64th IFLA Conference

CONFERENCE CIRCUIT: At the crossroads of information and culture: The 64th IFLA Conference

Architecture at the Crossroads of Cultures: The Church Complex in Varzahan near Bayburt in the Light of New Finds

Varzahan (modern Ugrak near Bayburt in Turkey) is the completely destroyed church complex located at the junction of cultural worlds: Byzantine and Muslim, Armenian and Kartvelian. Although its churches were known mainly from W. Bachmann’s description and photographs, our recent archival finds (the photographs of N. Okunev’s expedition) allow us to reconstruct the appearance and construction history of the Varzahan churches. For the first time, the construction of the cross-domed church has been reconstructed: it was a triconch inscribed into a cross-like outline; the function of the small church next to the octagon has been discovered: it was a gate church. The author provides many architectural and decorative analogies to the monuments of Varzahan. There is a number of unique details indicating that the patron of the major construction project in Varzahan invited, along with the Byzantine builders from the Asia Minor, two groups of masters from Tao (probably identical with the two crews of David Kuropalates in the 960s – early 970s), one oriented to Cappadocia (the triconch builders), another to the Pontos (the builders of the octagon and the gate church), or including masters from these regions. The most probable date for this “joint work” seems the period between 979 and 988, when the “lords” (strategos/doux) of the theme of Chaldia were David’s allies Chordvanel and Bagrat, the natives of Tao.

Srednjovekovne biblioteke na tlu današnje Vojvodine

Throughout history, the region of present-day northern Serbian province of Vojvodina has been a crossroads of cultures and civilizations. In this context, one can observe the history of medieval libraries. In this period of time, some sources have documented the existence of a library in a very famous and rich Cistercian monastery in Petrovaradin. This was one of the most prominent convents in medieval Hungary and even Rodrigo Borgia was trying to obtain the incomes of this abbey by becoming its governor. There is an inventory of this monastery dating back to 1495 where many liturgical books are listed. The city and the fortress of Bač were a centre of renaissance in the medieval Southern Hungary, thanks to the work of the archbishop Peter Varadi. What has remained of his library shows that he has read classical Greek and Roman authors, patristic texts, Byzantine writers and so on. Finally, in the monastery of Krušedol, built in 1508, the Serbs who fled to Hungary had their first large-scale cultural and spiritual centre, with a vast library from which several valuable manuscripts have survived.

Screening Art: Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema by Seán Allen

 Reviews Schopenhauer, and Klee as well as on Kaa. While these analyses show neatly how there can be contagion between style and ideas, it would have been good to have a clearer sense of whether style is to be understood as a kind of supplementary embellishment of an idea or constitutive of it (and the implications of this for the stylistic idiosyncrasies of her own critical language—what might it mean to ‘excavate’ a critique (p. ), for instance, or for forces to be ‘virulent’ (p. )?). In her chapters on narrative prose, too, the discussions that properly contributed to her main argument in the end pertained for the most part to representations of (mostly human) uprightness, weight, falling, and so on, as opposed to aspects of form or style. Vernon Lee, as an adherent of empathy aesthetics who applied this approach to literature, could have made a helpful ally when addressing the slippage between metaphorical and literal ‘lightness’ (etc.). Maskarinec could also have made more of the idea that in thinking about literature, the analogue of Klee’s upright human viewers is not Franz Biberkopf or Gregor Samsa (who is, aer all, on Mark Anderson’s reading the ‘incarnation of aesthetic form’ (Maskarinec, p. )); it is the reader, who is, as she suggests (p. ), ‘embodied, bipedal, and energetic’, and whose physical engagement with writing and print, as with sculpture or painting, was, at the time, of heightened interest. S H’ C, O R C Screening Art: Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema. By S A. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. .  pp.£. ISBN ––––. Seán Allen has devoted a lot of his professional career to contributing to the establishment of research on East German film, and most notably on the state-owned film company DEFA. In all of these works, in particular DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and international Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, ) and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (New York: Berghahn, , with Sebastian Heiduschke), he not only sought to appreciate DEFA films for their aesthetic value within the system of one-party state socialism, but also to incorporate these analyses of individual films within wider aesthetic and political trends. With his latest book, Allen continues this path of establishing East German film studies as a subdiscipline, this time with a more specialized focus on the genre of Künstlerfilme, or artists’ films. As he summarizes in the Conclusion, ‘[f]ocussing on the East German Künstlerfilm not only throws light on the development of the careers of directors such as Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Ralf Kirsten and Herwig Kipping, but at the same time opens up new perspectives on how we might approach DEFA and GDR culture generally’ (p. ). Accordingly, he has opted for a cultural-history approach that would allow him to reflect on the contribution of art to the building of a socialist society. Borrowing from Charles Taylor, Allen speaks of the ‘Socialist Imaginary’, in contrast to pure social theory, in order to make use of a structure that can be applied to something MLR, .,   that is shared by a much larger group of people than just experts. By socialist imaginary, Allen refers to the ‘way ordinary people “imagine” socialist society and seek to articulate this not in theoretical documents, but rather in terms of a set of images, stories, legends and other cultural products, including, above all, film’ (p. ). rough this, he argues that at the various junctures in the history of pre-war and post-war cinema, shiing paradigms in the fields of art and aesthetics impacted upon the socialist imaginary of the GDR. e role of the DEFA Künstlerfilm in both mediating and articulating such transformations is the subject of this study (p. ). Because of the strong similarities to the Künstlernovelle, many artists’ biographies produced by DEFA are not merely straightforward biographies but ‘treat the central protagonist as a fictionalised construct and as a springboard for an extended discussion of aesthetics and the role of art in socialist society’ (p. ). Choosing to write a cultural history of DEFA Künstlerfilme, furthermore, lends itself...

Qualitative Interviewing in Ethnic-Chinese Contexts: Reflections From Researching Taiwanese Immigrants in the United States

Qualitative interviewing is a broadly used method of data collection, but its discussions have rarely been situated in ethnic-Chinese contexts and immigrant communities. What factors are crucial for conducting effective interviews with ethnic-Chinese subjects? In what contexts do general principles not apply, thereby needing adjustments, and how? Reflecting on the experience of interviewing approximately 100 Taiwanese immigrants in the United States, I discuss the importance of mindfulness, cultural sensitivity, and triangulation. I argue that researchers need to be mindful of the potential effects of interviewers’ and interviewees’ structural positions on the interview process, quality, and outcomes. Cultural understanding is necessary when assessing ethical issues and designing interview questions. However, researchers also need to set aside their knowledge of ethnic-Chinese culture from time to time in order to capture the nuanced cultural meanings. Finally, conducting ethnographic observations helps researchers understand the lived contexts of subjects’ experiences and their varied interpretations. Using examples from two research projects, I illustrate significant factors that facilitate or hinder the proceeding of qualitative interviewing with ethnic-Chinese subjects. These reflections foster researchers’ understanding and practice of reflexivity at the crossroads of methods and ethnic culture.

Espiritus de Invierno

In many parts of Europe and especially in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Basque Country), archaic and mysterious figures regularly haunt carnival rites since the Middle Ages (but referring, according to some specialists like A. Darpeix, member of the historical and archaeological society of Perigord, to a distant shamanic and Neolithic antiquity). They are masks adorned with skins of animals, vegetables, and straw, surrounded by bells and bones, often crowned with horns and pieces of wood. Thus arises the wild man within modern paganism to symbolize the rebirth of nature emerging from winter. The figures are essentially ambiguous, at the crossroads of nature and culture. The masks always speak of the mysteries of existence: in traditional societies, they were or still are the figures of ancestors and spirits of the dead, that of protective or evil spirits.

The Mediterranean Today. Stability, Instability, Orientations. A first rapid excursus

A quick trip to some Mediterranean countries shows significant disparities, situations of inequality, different religious preferences, and struggling minority populations. The dream of a Mediterranean crossroads of cultures, which has taken up so much space in our past, seems today to retreat-- leaving behind a sea that has become a kind of hard border, difficult to cross for many men, women, children, who too often have lost their lives. The European Union prefers to defend its own borders from migrants and also from possible asylum seekers. It defends itself, and the Mediterranean is an important pawn in these actions, from the flows of arrivals from Africa, viz. the role of Libya, from which people escape the Syrian tragedy. For this purpose, they use countries like Greece and Turkey. A notable reversal for Italy in particular, an Italy that experienced first-hand migratory phenomena.

A. Zhaksylykov’s novel “Singing Stones” in aspect of the literary domain theory

The authors of the article believe that the symbolic systems to which the language belongs form structured databases in a certain way - domains that develop according to specifi c rules and aff ect the culture of a language community. According to the hypothesis of the research presented in the paper, Russian-language literature is a special cultural domain generated by the ethnogenetic (in this case, Kazakh) and canonical (Russian) fi elds of culture. It was found that at the crossroads of cultures - and literatures - a new aesthetic phenomenon is being formed, which modern literary criticism has yet to describe. The main objectives of the study included interpretation of the text by the method of hermeneutic commentary, elimination of linguocultural lacunae, and complex poetic analysis. The research material was the fi rst pentalogy novel by A. Zhaksylykov “Dreams of the Damned” - “Singing Stones”. The authors conclude that modern Russian literature gravitates not so much to the Russian (in the strict sense of the term) language fi eld as to the Russophonic or translingual fi eld, using the term by professor Steven Kellman.

Muslim culture of the Golden Horde according to medieval Arab sources

Islam played an important role in the formation and development of the Golden Horde statehood. Medieval Arabic annals and notes of travelers who visited the Golden Horde on their own have given a lot of information about the penetration of Islam and the establishment of its positions in the Golden Horde society. Among them, a special place is occupied by the writings of the Egyptian authors of the Mamluk era. Along with the established close diplomatic and trade relations between the Volga and the Nile, the dialogue of cultures was also widespread at that time. The spiritual traditions of the Golden Horde evolved at the crossroads of different cultures and peoples, and this happened in Mamluk Egypt. The important point was the fact that by the XIV century, the Golden Horde and the Mamluk Egypt had a strong position in the international arena. The proposed article reveals various facts related to the penetration of Muslim culture into the social and political life of the Golden Horde according to materials from medieval Arabic sources.

“Concerto senza frontiere”: il Sud del mondo si ritrova a Napoli. Integrazione e transculturalità nella canzone napoletana odierna

As a crossroad of different cultures, Naples occupies a culturally relevant role in the Mediterranean. Once land of emigration, the city has now become a land of immigration, a cosmopolitan metropolis where different peoples live together in a transcultural context. The recent Neapolitan music describes this contemporary process of integration, recounting the social and cultural changes. Mixing traditional popular rhythms with new sounds and using functional code-switching, the Neapolitan song can therefore be considered a typical example of world music. The article, based on a corpus of 15 songs from 1993 to 2017, aims to highlight and analyze the characteristic subalternity of southern Italy as an element of connection with other Mediterranean populations; the image of the Mediterranean Sea as connecting point between cultures; the process of integration and peaceful coexistence as themes of recent Neapolitan songs.

Where tulips and crocuses are popular food snacks: Kurdish traditional foraging reveals traces of mobile pastoralism in Southern Iraqi Kurdistan

BackgroundIraqi Kurdistan is a special hotspot for bio-cultural diversity and for investigating patterns of traditional wild food plant foraging, considering that this area was the home of the first Neolithic communities and has been, over millennia, a crossroad of different civilizations and cultures. The aim of this ethnobotanical field study was to cross-culturally compare the wild food plants traditionally gathered by Kurdish Muslims and those gathered by the ancient Kurdish Kakai (Yarsan) religious group and to possibly better understand the human ecology behind these practices.MethodsTwelve villages were visited and 123 study participants (55 Kakai and 68 Muslim Kurds) were interviewed on the specific topic of the wild food plants they currently gather and consume.ResultsThe culinary use of 54 folk wild plant taxa (corresponding to 65 botanical taxa) and two folk wild mushroom taxa were documented. While Kakais and Muslims do share a majority of the quoted food plants and also their uses, among the plant ingredients exclusively and commonly quoted by Muslims non-weedy plants are slightly preponderant. Moreover, more than half of the overall recorded wild food plants are used raw as snacks, i.e. plant parts are consumed on the spot after their gathering and only sometimes do they enter into the domestic arena. Among them, it is worth mentioning the consumption of raw wild crocus corms, also still common in Turkish Kurdistan and that of wild tulip bulbs, which was documented to be popular until the beginning of the twentieth century in the Middle East. Comparison with other ethnobotanical field studies recently conducted among surrounding populations has shown that Kurds tend to gather and consume the largest number of non-weedy wild vegetables.ConclusionThe collected data indicate robust traces of nomadic pastoralism in Kurdish traditional foraging. This finding confirms that studies on wild food plant gathering in the Fertile Crescent and Turco-Arabic-Iranic regions of the Middle East are crucial for understanding the possible evolution of wild food plant gathering through history within the post-Neolithic continuum between pastoralism and horticulturalism.

Een duffen politieken strijd

Abstract A dull political battle. An analysis of the political news coverage in De Telegraaf, 1902-1914 In 1893, De Telegraaf was founded as a response to the ‘boring news coverage of the bourgeois press’. As a self-declared neutral newspaper, inspired on the emerging Anglo-American mass press, the young daily was the odd one out in the Dutch bourgeois-journalistic landscape. This contribution shows how De Telegraaf, as one of the largest newspapers of this period, reported about Dutch politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its reporting shows that the newspaper considered politics with a certain distance: as a game with accompanying rules. The most effective political strategy was that of authenticity: sincere politicians who sought to connect with their voters were praised by the newspaper. This contribution shows that research on the crossroads of political culture and media can shed a new light on the political form changes around the turn of the century. The popular press played a crucial role in shaping the new politics.

At the Crossroad of Cultures: Education and Identity of Hungarian Deaf Learners in Romania

Deaf people living in ethnic-national minority situation form a social group whose members have multiple cultural backgrounds. Starting from interpretations which are viewing the deaf child as a member of a distinct cultural and linguistic minority, I studied the education of Hungarian deaf pupils in Romania graduating from the Hungarian Special School in Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, with particular regard to the relationship between formal and informal language use in school, communication culture and identity. Methodologically the research is based on life path interviews with Hungarian Deaf Special School graduates, family case studies of two or three generation deaf families and structured interviews with experienced educators. The research results reveal that the educational practice of the concerned educational institution strengthens the pupils' identity awareness and sense of belonging to the Hungarian nation in two distinct, still interconnected ways: on the one hand, through oral language acquisition, nursing the oral Hungarian language skills, and on the other hand through cultivating the Hungarian Sign Language embedded in the deaf culture within the learner community. Nowadays, the conditions and modalities of exercising this role are changing in several respects. The positive educational effects achieved so far can be reinforced and strengthened by educational policies based on the recognition and cultivation of cultural diversity, in all its complex and multifaceted manifestations, including the peculiar needs of ethnic minority deaf learners.

Rabbanite manuscripts in Karaite hands: findings from the Crimean genizot and libraries

This article is an attempt to reconstruct the contents of the two genizot in the Rabbanite synagogue of Kaffa (Crimean Peninsula) from the Genoese to the early Ottoman period, and the manuscripts in the possession of this community. Kaffa was located at a cultural crossroads for Jews from Byzantium, Persia, the Middle East, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe who settled there, bringing manuscripts from these lands. Following the relocation of the Kaffa Rabbanite Jews to Karasubazar in the last decades of the fifteenth century, a considerable number of such manuscripts found their way into this community’s genizah and its library. The identification of these early Kaffa materials sheds light on the subjects of Jewish intellectual interests prevalent in medieval Crimea and the Black Sea region, common patterns of use of books by Karaites and Rabbanites, the existence of public and private libraries, and of book exchange processes between the Crimea and other lands.

Analyzing Portrayals of Modern Women and Popular Culture in Television Soap Operas of Pakistan

Media convergence has phenomenally transformed Indian television audience's soap opera viewing experience by offering digital exposure to diversified content. The paper presents an exploratory study, analyzing Indian viewers’ reception of the dramatized portrayals of modern women and popular culture in television soap operas of Pakistan. The study finds reasons for Pakistan's soap operas’ popularity and registers Indian readers’ guided interpretations of polysemic televised projections of women and culture. Triangulation methodology is employed including questionnaire, telephonic interviews, and participatory observations. Discourse analysis of celebrated soap opera ‘Humsafar ’ detected a research problem that women participate in reinforcing misogynic value systems with rigidly dichotomized and objectified roles, treated with an androcentric gaze. The paper introduces “altagonist”as a hybrid character category that negotiates between the bipolar roles. The study concludes that dramatized representations of Pakistani women are at the crossroads of east-west cultures, struggling with patriarchy, expanding their gender capacities, and initiating behavior change. The research paper holds crucial relevance in the Indian subcontinent to re-open an academic doorway for participatory communication on television soap operas as integral units of South Asian Popular Culture.

Peculiarities of intercultural competence in teaching foreign languages

The article deals with the issues related to intercultural competence in teaching foreign languages. The modern world and society are increasingly in need of people who can think creatively, analyze, and understand others. And a foreign language is one of the best tools to develop these skills. Comparison of countries, people, customs, traditions, cultural heritage stimulates and motivates the desire to increase and deepen the knowledge about other countries and their own country. At the center of the modern personality-oriented concept is the personality of the student, his needs, and interests. The main goal of teaching a foreign language is seen in the formation of communicative and intercultural competencies among pupils. In the process of teaching foreign languages, both competencies are formed interconnected intercultural competence is formed based on communicative and in the process of its development. Each lesson of a foreign language is a crossroads of cultures this is the practice of intercultural communication because each word reflects a foreign world and a foreign culture.

Queer in Queen: Camp aesthetics and queer performativity in Queen’s music videos

The present paper situates its concerns at the crossroads of cultural studies, queer studies and visual culture in an effort to illustrate how queer identity is visually performed and formed through a particular aesthetic discourse that foregrounds kitsch, excess and self-conscious parody. Consecrated by Susan Sontag in 1964 as camp aesthetics, this visual discourse generates artistic acts whose major goal is to reach beyond ideological categories, hierarchies, dichotomies in order to destabilize their authority. This study focuses on some of Queen’s music videos in an attempt to argue that they represent clear instances of camp visuality designed by the band’s front man, Freddie Mercury, as part of a therapeutic artistic form of coping with his own queerness. In this respect, the present paper explores the connections between these particular visual representations and their potential to destabilize traditional master narratives such as heteronormativity.