Cultural Attractors Research Articles

Tourist-recreational impact on the Moscow–St. Petersburg macroregion: a multi-scale assessment using Big Data

The possibilities of using one of the varieties of Big Data – geolocalized photographs – as an objective indicator of the spatial distribution and intensity of tourist and recreational load within the macroregion “From Moscow to St. Petersburg” allocated within the framework of the State Program for Tourism Development are considered. The study uses an original geoinformation model assembled on the basis of freely distributed OpenStreetMap layers and photo points localized in space and time. It allows, on the one hand, to characterize the features of the placement of attractors (natural, cultural) and tourist and recreational infrastructure, on the other – to objectively assess the spatial distribution of the presence of tourists and recreants within the macroregion and describe the specifics of their intra-annual (seasonal) “attraction”. Aggregation of photography points into polygons, taking into account the differentiated clustering distance, made it possible to form areas of seasonal (summer, winter and spring-autumn) stay of tourists, as well as to get an idea of the minimum year-round and maximum episodic areas within the macroregion and individual areas exposed to the potential impact of tourists and recreants. The differences between the minimum and maximum areas of stay of tourists and recreants are proposed to be used to assess the effectiveness of the functioning of the industry in the areas of the macroregion. The obtained spatial areas and patterns of tourists’ presence open up opportunities for an objective assessment of the potential load on natural and cultural heritage sites. The uneven inclusion of both natural and cultural attractors in the sphere of tourism and recreation has been revealed, which leads to a situation where some objects of natural and cultural heritage experience significant industry pressure, while others remain almost or completely unaffected by the presence of tourists and recreants.

Cultural heritage attractors: does spatial configuration matter? Applications of macro- and micro-spatial configurative analysis in the historic urban area of Rome

Top world heritage artifacts act as pedestrian flow attractors in historic urban areas. Despite the growing literature on pedestrian movement in cities, evidence of the relationship between cultural attractors and the spatial characteristics of street spaces between these artifacts is scarce. This contribution applies the theory of natural movement and uses diachronic space syntax and micro-spatial analysis to investigate the reciprocities between street networks and the presence of global heritage attractors in the historic urban area of Rome. The results from the macro-scale spatial analyses show good correlations between the current most popular cultural attractors and the global integration of the street network. The degree of spatial integration of the street network is particularly important at the time of construction of important artifacts, as shown in the diachronic analyses. City growth and urban transformation can affect the central position of these important artifacts. However, in the case of highly attractive artifacts, these continue to perform as movement attractors. The result of a local neighbourhood investigation shows that micro-spatial parameters, such as the spatial relationships between building entrances and streets, may influence the choice of routes between important artifacts. Thus, the flows of people’s movement can be influenced by both micro-spatial street characteristics and spatial configuration.

Micro urban spaces and mental well-being: Measuring the exposure to urban landscapes along daily mobility paths and their effects on momentary depressive symptomatology among older population

The urban environment plays an important role for the mental health of residents. Researchers mainly focus on residential neighbourhoods as exposure context, leaving aside the effects of non-residential environments. In order to consider the daily experience of urban spaces, a people-based approach focused on mobility paths is needed. Applying this approach, (1) this study investigated whether individuals’ momentary mental well-being is related to the exposure to micro-urban spaces along the daily mobility paths within the two previous hours; (2) it explored whether these associations differ when environmental exposures are defined considering all location points or only outdoor location points; and (3) it examined the associations between the types of activity and mobility and momentary depressive symptomatology. Using a geographically-explicit ecological momentary assessment approach (GEMA), momentary depressive symptomatology of 216 older adults living in the Ile-de-France region was assessed using smartphone surveys, while participants were tracked with a GPS receiver and an accelerometer for seven days. Exposure to multiple elements of the streetscape was computed within a street network buffer of 25 m of each GPS point over the two hours prior to the questionnaire. Mobility and activity type were documented from a GPS-based mobility survey. We estimated Bayesian generalized mixed effect models with random effects at the individual and day levels and took into account time autocorrelation. We also estimated fixed effects. A better momentary mental wellbeing was observed when residents performed leisure activities or were involved in active mobility and when they were exposed to walkable areas (pedestrian dedicated paths, open spaces, parks and green areas), water elements, and commerce, leisure and cultural attractors over the previous two hours. These relationships were stronger when exposures were defined based only on outdoor location points rather than all location points, and when we considered within-individual differences compared to between-individual differences.

Narrative as cultural attractor.

By structuring information in a systematic relational framework, narratives are cultural attractors that are particularly well-suited for transmission. The relational structure of narrative is partly what communicates causality, but this structure also complicates both transmission and selection on cultural elements by introducing correlations among narrative elements and between different narratives. These correlations have implications for adaptation, complexity, and robustness.

The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment.

When a population exhibits collective cognitive alignment, such that group members tend to perceive, remember, and reproduce information in similar ways, the features of socially transmitted variants (i.e., artifacts, behaviors) may converge over time towards culture-specific equilibria points, often called cultural attractors. Because cognition may be plastic, shaped through experience with the cultural products of others, collective cognitive alignment and stable cultural attractors cannot always be taken for granted, but little is known about how these patterns first emerge and stabilize in initially uncoordinated populations. We propose that stable cultural attractors can emerge from general principles of human categorization and communication. We present a model of cultural attractor dynamics, which extends a model of unsupervised category learning in individuals to a multiagent setting wherein learners provide the training input to each other. Agents in our populations spontaneously align their cognitive category structures, producing emergent cultural attractor points. We highlight three interesting behaviors exhibited by our model: (1) noise enhances the stability of cultural category structures; (2) short 'critical' periods of learning early in life enhance stability; and (3) larger populations produce more stable but less complex attractor landscapes, and cliquish network structure can mitigate the latter effect. These results may shed light on how collective cognitive alignment is achieved in the absence of shared, innate cognitive attractors, which we suggest is important to the capacity for cumulative culturalevolution.

15.5 How Should Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists be Culturally Responsive to Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) Including Unwanted Sexual Touching? An Ethnographic Study in Cambodia

Prevention of child sexual abuse (CSA), including unwanted sexual touching, is of critical significance, and interventions with culturally diverse groups pose significant challenges to child and adolescent psychiatry. The objective, using Cambodia as a case study, is to provide a framework for a culturally responsive program to prevent CSA. Fieldwork between 2014 and 2021 involved 380 informants: 1) child abuse generally, 86 relatives of abused children, 62 Buddhist monks and officiants; 2) abuse by monks, 196 informants (104 female, 92 male); and 3) genital touching, 36 informants (22 female, 14 male). We were guided by United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Ethical Research Involving Children (ERIC) criteria. We explored cultural constructions of all forms of CSA and how people reconciled their ideas with those brought by Western mental health professionals. Through content analysis, we noted the cultural registers and the use of popular cultural references. There were at least 150 defined cases of sexual abuse across the 3 groups, mainly in the first 2 groups. Most informants viewed CSA as stemming from “cultural attractors,” including blighted endowment from a previous life, a bad character, astrological vulnerability to abuse, preordained entanglement between the child and the abuser (they are “fated” to meet), sexual craving, “entering the road to ruin,” and a moral blindness that portrays the abuser as blameless. CSA prevention programs in developing countries often strive to change the local cultural values through education. We argue that a better strategy is to leverage—rather than eradicate—these beliefs to overcome misbeliefs about CSA including unwanted sexual touching. The findings provide a template to enable child and adolescent psychiatrists, working with police, counselors, educators, and rights-based organizations, to provide better services to those affected by CSA. There are implications for child and adolescent psychiatrists working with immigrants who resettle in Western countries.

All Roads Lead to Polenta: Cultural Attractors at the Junction of Public and Personal Culture

In the process of retelling information, individuals often inadvertently transform it to be more consistent with their cultural schemas. We explore the long‐term cultural change inherent in this process, focusing on utterances about cultural tastes as our case study (e.g., music, food, and outdoor hobbies). We use a word embedding model to simulate a “telephone game” where each actor partially hears an utterance, uses their cultural schemas to guess the missing word, and tells the result to the next actor. While laboratory “telephone games” explore short transmission chains of approximately four steps, our approach lets us simulate these chains out to 1000 steps. We find that these chains are often pulled toward powerful “cultural attractors”—essentially points of least resistance where communications end up through transmission error alone. Moreover, some attractors operate across taste domains: transmission chains gravitate toward these attractors regardless of which cultural domain they begin in. The most powerful such attractor we located concerns high‐status, broadly liked food. Taste in food may thus have an underappreciated centrality within personal taste: verbal accounts describing taste in food may be particularly stable across multiple retellings, while accounts about other taste domains may become transformed into accounts of taste in food.

Proximity tourism and cultural amenities: Evidence from a regional museum card

Although cultural tourism has generated extensive literature, it has often overlooked proximity tourism practices and the determinants of visits to near-home cultural amenities, often located in rural destinations with lower market appeal. This article investigates visiting behaviors and characteristics of intra-regional flows from urban settings toward museums and heritage sites located in surrounding areas. We use a unique transactional data set of about 76,000 subscribers to a regional museum card in Piedmont (Italy) to analyze visiting patterns in the 2011–2014 period from the city of Turin to out-of-town cultural institutions. Our empirical analysis shows that being male, having lower socioeconomic status, visiting home-based museums, and loyalty to the card program are the most relevant factors explaining propensity to out-of-town visits. At the same time, a clear polarization of visits between a limited number of cultural attractors and the tail of minor heritage sites suggests that differences in museum characteristics can generate distinct motivations for visits to the two types of cultural institutions. From a policy perspective, although a definitive evaluation of the effect of the museum card on proximity tourism cannot be undertaken, findings suggest that bundle of minor attractions and major urban museums can generate indirect network advantages, foster cultivation of taste, and eventually stimulate both the demand for regional destinations and the development of original cultural programs.

"His body is human, but he has a tiracchāna heart": An ethnographic study of the epigenesis of child abuse in Cambodia.

In Cambodia, more than half of all children experience physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. This article examines how Cambodians view the causes and effects of child abuse and analyses its underlying cultural forces. Adopting a conceptual framework originally developed for the cultural context of violence against women, 110 cases of child abuse were ethnographically studied, comprising 61 cases of sexual abuse (50 girls and 11 boys), 26 cases of physical abuse (13 girls and 13 boys), and 23 cases of emotional abuse or neglect (13 girls and 10 boys). The perpetrators included fathers and other close relatives, lay Buddhist officiants and monks, and neighbors. Most informants viewed the sexual or physical abuse of children as stemming from "cultural attractors," including blighted endowment caused by deeds in a previous life, a bad character starting early in life, astrological vulnerability to abuse, preordained entanglement between the child and the abuser (they are "fated" to meet), sexual craving, "entering the road to ruin," and a moral blindness that portrays the abuser as blameless. Although these traits are similar to those identified in the explanations of violence against women, there were notable differences such as the role of the tiracchāna in explaining sexual abuse, including incest. Using these findings, this article identifies a cultural epigenesis of child sexual abuse, and provides a blueprint for developing a culturally responsive plan to prevent child abuse.

The Relationship between the Accuracy of Cultural Transmission and the Strength of Cultural Attractors

The Relationship between the Accuracy of Cultural Transmission and the Strength of Cultural Attractors

Violence Against Women in Cambodia: Towards a Culturally Responsive Theory of Change

Almost one in four women in Cambodia is a victim of physical, emotional or sexual violence. This article brings together two seldom connected fields: Theory of Change (ToC) and cultural responsiveness in international development. It applies these approaches to a priority in global health, which is to prevent violence against women (VAW) and, drawing on my research on the epigenesis of VAW in Cambodia, develops an argument on the need for interventions to work with tradition and culture rather than only highlight it in problematic terms. The research draws on an ethnographic study carried out in Cambodia with 102 perpetrators and survivors of emotional, physical and sexual VAW and 228 key informants from the Buddhist and healing sectors. The eight ‘cultural attractors’ identified in the author’s prior research highlight the cultural barriers to acceptance of the current Theory of Change. ToC for VAW prevention in Cambodia seems to assume that local culture promotes VAW and that men and women must be educated to eradicate the traditional gender norms. There is a need for interventions to work with tradition and culture rather than only highlight it in problematic terms. The cultural epigenesis of VAW in Cambodia is an insight which can be used to build culturally responsive interventions and strengthen the primary prevention of VAW.

The Cultural Epigenesis of Gender-Based Violence in Cambodia: Local and Buddhist Perspectives

Almost one in four women in Cambodia is a victim of physical, emotional or sexual violence. The study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which Cambodians see its causes and effects and to identify and analyse the cultural forces that underpin and shape its landscape. An ethnographic study was carried out with 102 perpetrators and survivors of emotional, physical and sexual violence against women and 228 key informants from the Buddhist and healing sectors. Their views and experiences of it were recorded—the popular idioms expressed and the symptoms of distress experienced by survivors and perpetrators. From these results, the eight cultural forces, or cultural attractors, that are seen to propel a person to violence were identified. Violence stemmed from blighted endowment, or ‘bad building’ (sɑmnaaŋ mɨn lʔɑɑ) determined by deeds in a previous life (kam). Children with a vicious character (kmeeŋ kaac or doṣa-carita) might grow to be abusers, and particular birthmarks on boys were thought to be portents. Krʊəh, or mishap, especially when a female’s horoscope predicted a zodiac house on the descent (riesəy), explained vulnerability to violence and its timing. Astrological incompatibility (kuu kam) was a risk factor. Lust, anger and ignorance, the ‘Triple Poison’, fuelled it. ‘Entering the road to ruin’ (apāyamuk), including alcohol abuse, womanising and gambling, triggered it. Confusion and loss of judgement (mohā) led to moral blindness (mo baŋ). These were the eight cultural attractors that shaped the landscape of violence against women. The cultural epigenesis of violence against women in Cambodia is an insight which can be used to build culturally responsive interventions and strengthen the primary prevention of violence against women. An understanding of the epigenesis of violence could strengthen the primary prevention of violence against women.

Determining Drivers of Destination Attractiveness: The Case of Nature-Based Tourism of Bangladesh

The purpose of this study is to identify the most important drivers for developing destination competitiveness of Bangladesh nature-based tourism by evaluating tourists’ perception. A nationwide structured questionnaire survey of total 432 Bangladeshi tourists is carried out by dividing the whole country into two parts for equal representation. Based on this data, a profile of the tourists is constructed before ranking of attributes from most important to least important on a five-point Likert scale. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) has been conducted finally to identify the most important factors from 24 selected attributes related to nature-based tourism of Bangladesh. The key findings indicate that seven attributes are more important to respondents than others as all these has average importance value more than 4 out of 5 while only two is least important. From the EFA of these attributes, supported by a parallel analysis, four major factors are extracted namely, tourism infrastructure; historical and cultural attractors; natural attractors; and communication facilities and lifestyle similarities. Thus, this study will help both policy makers to develop long term destination policy focusing on natural attractors and service providers to customize their services according to tourists’ expectation. Consequently, this paper conceptualizes the importance of focusing on specific sectors of tourism and the way of developing competitiveness of nature-based tourism of Bangladesh. However further studies can be conducted to match tourists’ evaluation of attributes on importance and performance and/or evaluating same perception from service providers rather than tourists.

The Semantic Drift of Quotations in Blogspace: A Case Study in Short-Term Cultural Evolution.

We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with a number of well-studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent (a) with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and (b) with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations.

What are cultural attractors?

Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to. Clarifying these explanatory concepts identifies problems and ambiguities in the work of cultural epidemiologists and commentators alike.

Is Zimbabwe ready to venture into the cultural tourism market?

Zimbabwe has long relied solely on abundant wildlife resources to attract tourists. The government land reform programme has, however, resulted in the significant depletion of these resources. In this paper, cultural tourism is suggested as a complementary attraction to domestic tourists. The findings of the study, based on a questionnaire administered face-to-face, indicate that to enter this market Zimbabwe will need to build capacity in areas such as personnel, where frontline staff will need to be recruited, trained and motivated to meet customer needs. In conclusion, it is mentioned that the unstable economic and political climate prevailing in Zimbabwe militates against the development of cultural attractors.

Cross‐cultural issues in user learning and the design of digital interfaces

AbstractHall (1976) believes that culture is a selective screen through which we see the world and that the basic differences in the way members from different cultures perceive reality are responsible for the mis‐communications of the most fundamental kind. Hofstede (1997) notes that cultural orientations are deeply embedded in cultures over hundreds and thousands of years and modern media have not dislodged these cultural orientations. Indeed, cultural norms, assumptions, values, and orientations remain crucial for understanding people from various cultures. This understanding extends to designing a variety of information retrieval systems for international access and use, including Web‐based digital libraries. Since the Web is international in nature, Web design should embed ‘cultural attractors” (e.g., colors, metaphors, language cues, navigation controls, and other visual elements) that should create the’ look and feel” to match the cultural expectations of the users of a local culture (Smith, et al., 2004). The speakers will address the various roles culture plays in the design and use of system interfaces, in general, and of digital libraries in particular. They will present analyses from their current research findings on culture and its impact on information seeking, interface design, and digital library development. They will discuss methods of bridging the gap between various cultures through both providing effective user‐centered system design and educating information professionals.