Cultural Conservatism Research Articles

Sardinia's nuraghi: Four millennia of becoming

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social impact of the enduring presence of the nuraghi, Sardinia's monumental Bronze Age towers. From later prehistory through the modern era, the towers have featured prominently in both the social and environmental landscapes of the island. Their enduring importance has been attributed to cultural conservatism or functionalist motivations. Instead this paper considers the sustained social impact of the nuraghi as an ongoing and disjointed process of identity formation, shifting the focus away from the tower's origins and on to the ongoing repercussions of their presence. While the premise of this paper is a pragmatist‐inspired epistemology, its theme is what Edward Soja (1985) has called ‘the spatiality of social life’, the complex interplay between space and society, and the manner in which conceptions of each are constituted by the other.

Book Reviews

Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration from America's Favorite Magazine. A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction. Victoria Aarons. Beyond the Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of Las Vegas. Alan Balboni. Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. S. Elizabeth Bird, ed. Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century. Fergus Bordewich. Against the Tide: Women Reformers in American Society. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds. The Comedy of Democracy. James E. Combs and Dan Nimmo. alt. Culture: An A‐to‐Z Guide to the '90s—Underground “on‐line, and over‐the‐counter.” Steven Daley and Nathaniel Wice. What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence Against Wives. David Peterson Del Mar. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Paul N. Edwards. Virtual Archaeology: Re‐creating Ancient Worlds. Maurizio Forte and Alberto Siliotti, eds. Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small‐Town America. Richard V. Francaviglia. A Visit with Harlan Hubbard. Wade Hall. The Archaeology of the Donner Party. Donald L. Hardesty, with contributions by Michael Brodhead, Donald K. Grayson, Susan Lindstrom, and George L. Miller. Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown, eds. Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. Outsiders in 19th‐Century Press History: Multicultural Perspectives. Frankie Hutton and Barbara Straus Reed, eds. Women of the Far Right. The Mothers' Movement and World War II. Glen Jeansonne. The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Michael. Kammen. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Caren Kaplan. White Widow. Jim Lehrer.Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. Janet Leigh and Christopher Nickens. Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines. Robert Lesser. Big Trouble. J. Anthony Lukas. Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution. Holly A. Mayer. Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman. David Morgan, ed. Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness. Brendan O'Flaherty. Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth‐Century America. Kathleen Pyne. From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850. Jacqueline S. Reiner. American Women Historians, 1700s‐1990s.Jennifer Scanlon and Shaaron Cosner. Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies. James Seaton. Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity 1800–1865. Helen Small. Art Carney: A Biography. Michael Seth Starr. John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity. Gamy Wills. Stars in Blue: Movie Actors in America's Sea Services. James E. Wise, Jr., and Anne Collier Rehill. The Anatomy of Prejudices. Elisabeth Young‐Bruehl

Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics?

Although the controversy on birth control in the 60s centered around Catholic opposition to so-called state sponsored immorality in the 1960s a new dimension emerged when some spokespersons accused birth control advocates of promoting Black This resulted in a strange alliance between Power advocates such as the Panther Party and Muslims and cultural conservatives represented by the Roman Catholic Church. Opposition to birth control among some Blacks escalated during the second half of the 1960s. Most objections came from poor young males rather than from the middle class. Some of the male opposition seemed to stem from machismo in which siring a child was often viewed as proof of manhood. In contrast a study conducted in 1973 concluded that there was considerable evidence that women were more positively inclined toward family planning than White women. Furthermore women activists were taking concrete action to secure birth control services in the face of militant allegations of genocide. Moreover the effort of the Planned Parenthood Center of Pittsburgh had contributed to the development of contraceptive programs. By the early 1970s a major shift on the association of contraception with genocide was noted due to failure of the men to convince women that birth control was tantamount to genocide and to the diversion of their attention to the issue of sterilization abuse among women of color.

The underbelly of the tiger: gender and the demystification of the Asian miracle

This article analyses the Asian miracle both as an ideological construct and as an empirical experience. As an ideological construct, the Asian miracle can best be understood in the context of the western construction of Otherness. Such a construction is an expression of a complex web of power relations forged mainly by a struggle between east and west over industrial achievement, the meaning of industrial progress and governance. As an empirical experience, industrialization in East Asia may be appre22 hended through gender as a key organizing principle manifested in a four-tier system of industrial work. Industrial strategies in East Asia have been deployed in conjunction with reproductive strategies which correspond to the specificities of capital formation and degree of capital25 technology intensity. The emerging social patterns since the crisis began in 1997 indicate that gradual changes which have taken place in the political economy of women's labour in East Asia have not necessarily altered a gender order governed by cultural conservatism which privileges males over females. A female gaze on the relation between economy and polity may contribute to the redesign of development policy along norms and values that can promote more gender-balanced and humane societies.

A Political Paradox: North Carolina's Twenty-Five Years Under Jim Hunt and Jesse Helms

January 11, 1997, was a frigid Saturday with sort of clinging cold that stings ears and numbs toes. Still, about five thousand citizens of North gathered outdoors on wide lawn in front of Broughton High School near downtown Raleigh. They rose to their feet when James Taylor sang Carolina in My Mind, then watched as James B. Hunt Jr. took oath of office as their governor for fourth time. Hunt had chosen site for ceremony as a symbolic backdrop for his inaugural address, a ten-minute speech devoted entirely to one subject: schools. More than ever before in our history, he declared, more than any state in America has ever done, I ask you, I ask all of us, to make a new commitment to public Four and a half months later, North General Assembly heard another speech, a far different address in both tone and substance. Senators and representatives, along with judges and Governor Hunt, assembled in redcarpeted, cinder-block-walled state House chamber to hear state's senior U.S. senator. Jesse Helms, who was in his twenty-fifth year in Senate, had accepted an invitation to make his first address ever to legislature. It was, like many of Helms's home-state speeches, an amalgam of thoughts and themes, of preaching and politics. He delivered a rhetorical thrust at the foreign aid give-away agency and its arrogant bureaucrats. He repeated a joke told by Ronald Reagan and echoed former president in declaring that big government is problem. He did not address himself to environmental, educational, and fiscal issues that state lawmakers confront daily. But, as he has often done through years, he contended that unless and until American people demand restoration of those moral and spiritual priorities, I simply do not believe that we are going to solve any other problems either. It is difficult to imagine--impossible, actually--Hunt delivering Helms's speech, or Helms delivering Hunt's. Jesse Helms crusades for prayer in public schools, but he is no crusader for public education. Jim Hunt wouldn't dream of waiting until voters insist on a moral turnaround to advance solutions to problems in public realm. The differences between these two political figures go beyond simple dichotomy of governor and Democrat versus senator and Republican. They are not diametrical opposites; Hunt is not far left way Helms is far right. And, to be sure, Democratic governor takes care to remain in touch with state's abiding cultural conservatism. Still, to take a long view of both their careers, it is inaccurate to contend that there really isn't much policy difference or philosophical distance between them. Hunt and Helms differ dramatically in their outlooks on life and their life experiences, in content of their politics and their approach to government. Yet, each in his own way, Jim Hunt and Jesse Helms have dominated North Carolina's politics during last quarter of twentieth century. Their current terms in office do not end until after next century dawns. As influential members of their political parties, each has contributed to course of southern politics, serving as inspiration or example to others. Each has made a mark on nation's affairs--Helms most recently in foreign policy, Hunt in his work on education and teaching standards. Both Hunt and Helms won their first statewide elections in 1972, a watershed election year in North politics. After seven decades of unbroken Democratic rule, Republican Jim Holshouser won governorship and Helms won a seat in U.S. Senate. For a while, Helms served in shadow of Democratic senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., who gained national fame with his Watergate investigating committee. In 1976, however, Helms emerged as a political power when his forces helped Ronald Reagan win North presidential primary and rejected Holshouser as a delegate to Republican National Convention. …

Cultural conservatism, political liberalism: From criticism to cultural studies

Cultural conservatism, political liberalism: From criticism to cultural studies

Welfare state, unemployment, and social justice: Judgments on the rights and obligations of the unemployed

This article reports judgments on the rights and obligations of the unemployed in The Netherlands. A large majority of the Dutch population is shown to support (i) the unemployed’s right to social security as well as their obligation to work, (ii) the principle that declining a job offering should be punished, and (iii) harsh sanctions in some specific cases of job refusal. An emphasis on the obligation to work results from conservative attitudes regarding both distributive justice (economic conservatism) and retributive justice (cultural conservatism). Furthermore, conservative attitudes regarding distributive justice derive from a privileged economic position (especially high income and infrequent experience of unemployment), whereas conservative attitudes regarding retributive justice result from a restricted cultural position (low level of education, technical rather than cultural type of education, and limited involvement in arts and culture).

Art History’s Anxiety Attack

In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77) the editors of October, led by Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, published responses to aQuestionnaire on Culture that was sent to an unspecified range of scholars, critics and artists during the previous winter. This issue occasioned two articles by reporter Scott Heller: Visual Images Replace Text as Focal Point for Many Scholars in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 19, 1996) and What Are They Doing To Art History? in ARTnews (January 1997). Heller's articles, among other things, emphasized the apprehensions of the October editors, surveyed the diverse opinions of the survey's respondents and displayed the reactions of many disciplinarians of art history. The October editors and many of the respondents to the questionnaire appear threatened by a loose grouping of presumably misguided scholars, whom they never explicitly name, that has rejected the tried and true rigors of academic art history for the so-called trendy and gullible field of visual and cultural studies. This disciplinary policing is at times analogous to U.S. conservatives' fixation on the national borders, imagined to be under siege by various outsiders, and the Christian Coalition's cultural offensive to buttress the malignant traditions that have historically regulated boundaries between cultures, genders and sexualities. October's characterization of the relationship between art history and visual studies resonates with the sound-bytes of cultural and political conservatives - this is quite evident in the severe language that detractors use to discount visual studies' critical commitments. Consider the example of Bruce Cole, Professor of Art History at Indiana University and founding member of the Association for Art History, an organization that was founded in protest of the broadening purview of the national College Art Association (CAA) and as a supposed ideology-free alternative to what some consider to be the increasing politicization of CAA. As Heller quotes Cole: We don't see art solely as social illustration or ideological fodder. . . There has to be a basis on which one builds, a factual basis that uses evidence and standards. Art historians can do things sociologists can't. Equally akin to the discourse of cultural reactionaries is the following complaint from Krauss, now Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She told Heller that: Students in art history graduate programs don't know how to read a work of art. . . They're getting visual studies instead - a lot of paranoid scenarios about what happens under patriarchy or under imperialism. In all fairness, the academic media attention paid to the October questionnaire also uncovered opposing voices that were equally reactionary in their dismissal of art history as a legitimate and vital Heller quotes Anne Higgonet from Wellesley College as saying: I see a defunct and useless field collapsing, and a much stronger, much more important field emerging. Within the media frame that the October questionnaire generated, nevertheless, the supposed shortcomings of scholarship in visual studies were emphasized, while the institutionally privileged activities of the discipline of art history were posited as irreproachable. Foster, another longtime editor of October, who now teaches in the art history department at Princeton University, is quoted as saying: Cultural studies doesn't have much philosophically to offer. It in a loose, anthropological notion of culture, and a loose, psychoanalytic notion of the image . . . culture is a passport that can lead to fairly touristic travel from discipline to discipline. Foster's attacks on visual and cultural studies do not even make gestures toward acknowledging the problematic philosophical, cultural and theoretical frameworks that the discipline of art history sneaks into analyses of visual objects. The result of such partisanship is the construction of an unnecessary competition: visual studies vs. …

College student perceptions of crime and casino gambling: a preliminary investigation.

To gain insight into how attitudes toward casino gambling vary by an area's experience with gambling, a survey was given to 415 university students at the University of Nevada, Reno, and 420 students at the University of Memphis. Casino gambling has been legal in Reno since 1931, but was introduced in the Memphis area in 1992. Given the differences in duration and degree of integration of casinos in each area, significant differences were expected by area in respondents' perceptions of casinos and casino gambling. While some significant differences were found, the most prominent finding is the degree of similarity of attitudes of students in each university and the high percentage in each sample that associated casino gambling with types of crime. Where significant differences did exist, the findings are interpreted as supporting either an exposure hypothesis or a cultural conservatism hypothesis.

From Country Lanes to Sunbelt Boosterism: The South Since World War II

From Country Lanes to Sunbelt Boosterism: The South Since World War II Dan T. Carter (bio) Numan V. Bartley. The New South, 1945–1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. xiii + 548 pp. Notes, critical essay on authorities, and index. $39.95. Between 1948 and 1967, the Louisiana State University Press published nine of the ten projected volumes for its “History of the South,” a series ending with George Tindall’s account of The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945. By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that an additional volume was needed to describe the tumultuous changes that had occurred in the region in the decades after World War II and the Press commissioned Numan Bartley of the University of Georgia to undertake the daunting task of describing that transformation. In The New South, 1945–1980, Bartley has succeeded to a remarkable degree and his work is a welcome addition to the original series. On the eve of World War II, the American South was in the midst of an economic and demographic upheaval. In the generation that followed the war, the percentage of southerners living on the land fell from more than 40 percent to less than 15 percent; during the 1950s alone 3.5 million southerners—two-thirds of them black—left the region altogether. The traditional southern world that revolved around family, clan, church, and community reeled under what Bartley describes—with some ambivalence—as the “juggernaut of progress” (p. 124). Through a dozen well paced chapters, Bartley weaves together the many strands of this complex story. In describing American politics over the last two decades, it has become commonplace for scholars and writers to note what writer John Edgerton coined the “Americanization of Dixie and the Southernization of America.” But Bartley reminds us that the interaction between region and nation was always a two-way street even during the 1950s and 1960s when the racial struggles of the era made the South seem well outside the American mainstream. Rock and roll (to cite one example) may not have been a southern invention, but it is difficult to imagine contemporary popular American music in the absence of the Mississippi-born Elvis Presley who (in his early days at least) melded the musical culture of [End Page 136] working-class black and white southerners and helped to change the face of American music. And even though Billy Graham was based in North Carolina, his marriage of southern fundamentalism, cultural conservatism and anticommunism prefigured the resurgence of a national movement that culminated in the creation of the Christian Coalition. If Bartley is sensitive to the interaction of regional and national history, his story—at least through the 1960s—remains firmly rooted in the region and his central theme is the relationship between power and politics. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, the solidly Democratic political leadership often seemed little more than errand boys for elites who dominated the region’s economy: remnants of the old planter class, lumber and sawmill operators, textile millowners, small businessmen and the banker-lawyers who serviced them. For these southerners, cheap, nonunionized labor, low taxes (and social services to match) formed the core of their economic philosophy and they bluntly defended “disfranchisement, malapportionment, and one party-politics as proper and desirable methods for preserving the southern way of life” (p. 33). He also gives a nuanced account of the various dissenting groups, beginning with popular front liberals of the late 1930s and 1940s. Inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal and supported through the mid-1940s by national organized labor (particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations), this fragile coalition sought to build a biracial political movement on the twin shoulders of “economic justice” and political reform. But they were always crippled by the truncated, white-only electorate, and southern conservatives—skillfully deploying anticommunist rhetoric and race-baiting taunts—easily brushed aside this brief postwar flowering of southern liberalism. Bartley is particularly skilled at linking the “zeitgeist” of white conservatism and sketching the way in which a broader religious and cultural conservatism reinforced the status quo. The emergence of a substantial middle class in the decades after the war...

The evangelical church of Zaire and the female ordained ministry 1

African culture(s) had assigned inferior roles to women in society. The first Christian missionaries did very little to liberate women from this cultural enslavement. The missionaries's understanding of the leadership roles of women was not very different from that of African culture and its societal organisation. Many churches in Africa had kept to this cultural conservatism and also adopted the missionary theology. However, there are some Christians who accept women into the pastoral ministry, while others consider this move as blasphemous and unbiblical. The role of the church in this conflictual issue is to elaborate a new biblical hermeneutic which would help the church to create a conducive environment where men and women would understand their humanity on an equal basis and participate in God's salvific mission for the world.

Doubting and Believing: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contexts of Faith

R eligious and cultural conservatism currently enjoys much press and some praise. In contrast, many corners of our intellectual and academic worlds promote what Stephen Carter ( 1 993) has termed a culture of disbelief. Current practices of teaching writing and interpretation the academy exemplify this culture. Academics several fields focus on unmasking hidden and illusory meanings, on revealing private personal pathologies and larger cultural wrongs. Some literary theorists openly recommend avoiding conviction and propose only hesitant, qualified modes of reasoning and writing lest conviction lead to dogma­ tism (Hartman, 1 9 9 1 ) . best lack all conviction; while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity (Yeats, 1 986, p. 9 1 ). The current academic doubting game (Elbow, 1 986) is sustained by the practice of in terrograting cultural values and paradigms. The doctrinaire quality of this belief system confronts students when they arrive at colleges and universities with diverse convictions that-despite their differences from one another-differ even more radically from the skepticism that is the required mode of thinking, reading, and writing many univers ities' English curricula. Because the relationship between the life of the mind and the resources of belief has received so little attention academic and scholarly circles, and because a diversity of cultural values and beliefs about learning are manifest among today's college s tudents , I propose that i t i s t ime to renew our attention to the relationships among belief and knowledge, skepticism and learning, education and obligatory doubt. Rightly and wrongly, students reject or are confused by academic pedagogies and scholarly goals that focus relentlessly on skepticism and adversarial debate. As writers and readers, as teachers of writing and ways of reading, how should we expand the repertoire of analytic methods and practices that we employ? How can we reintegrate the valuable rigors of the life of the mind with the ability to read with the eyes of faith? The renowned Marxist teacher and activist Paolo Freire, for example, was also a committed Jesuit missionary. Can we not con­ tinue to applaud his liberatory pedagogy and begin to remember the religious convictions that inspired his teaching? Peter Elbow ( 1 986) has defended the be­ lieving game alongside and dialectical relationship with the doubting game familiar to academicians, as a more comfortable starting point for many student

Book Reviews

Journal of American CultureVolume 19, Issue 4 p. 121-129 Book Reviews First published: Winter 1996 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1996.1904_121.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Stephen Aron Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852. David Schuyler The National Road. Edited by Karl Raitz Possessed by the Past. David Lowenthal The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes a Public History. Delores Hayden Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration from America's Favorite Magazine. The Mountain West: Interpreting the Folk Landscape. Terry G. Jordan, Jon T. Kilpinen and Charles F. Gritzner American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969. Gerald Bordman Herman Melville: A Biography Vol. 1, 1819-1851. Hershel Parker Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution. Holly A. Mayer The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Martin Barker and Roger Sabin American Sacred Space. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds Tokens of Affection: The Letters of a Planter's Daughter in the Old South. Carol Bleser, ed Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies. James Seaton Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings. James Barbour and Tom Quirk, eds Seeking Pleasure in the Old West. David Dary Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. Rhona J. Berenstein Abandoned In The Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment. Newton N. Minow and Craig L. Lamay Volume19, Issue4Winter 1996Pages 121-129 RelatedInformation

Cultural conservatism, political liberalism: from criticism to cultural studies

Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism is an impassioned response to the debates on culture and the literary canon over the last decade. James Seaton argues that the attempts of E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom to unite cultural conservatism with political liberalism have been inadequate. He believes that their fullest integration is found not in a doctrine, but in a tradition, the tradition of cultural critics from Mencken through Ellison.Chapters on Lionel Trilling, H. L. Mencken and Irving Babbitt, Ralph Ellison, Dwight Macdonald, Diana Trilling, and Edmund Wilson affirm the continuing pertinence of their work to today's concerns. Seaton then turns to the careers of Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag to explore the impact of the cultural radicalism of the sixties on literary criticism. Subsequent chapters analyze the successes and failures of contemporary cultural studies through the writings of Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson.Separately, these chapters provide provocative readings of the individual critics; together they make a case for the tradition exemplified by these critics as an alternative to contemporary cultural studies. The issues the book discusses extend beyond literary criticism and the academic world to the political-religious- cultural conflicts of today's culture wars.These lively, closely argued essays explain very clearly what the issues are, how they arose, and why they are important. --Christopher LaschA forceful argument about the relationship between literary studies and politics that will add something important to the vigorous, and often fierce, discussion of the canon, the politics of literature, and educational reform.--William Cain, Wellesley CollegeJames Seaton is Professor of English, Michigan State University. He is co-editor, with William K. Buckley, of Beyond Cheering and Bashing: New Perspectives on the Closing of the American Mind.

Behavioural interventions required in South East Asia to minimize infections with HIV.

The World Health Organization expects the rate of new HIV infections to decline in all global regions before the year 2005, except in South East Asia. More than 3 million people become HIV infected each year in South East Asia. It is incorrect to discuss it as a whole since the cultures in the region are so different. For example, in Thailand, relatively relaxed attitudes toward sexuality make it relatively easy to openly discuss sexual matters, while in India men tend to disrespect women and discussion of sexual matters, even among middle class couples, is rare. So far, there have been few successful HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the region due to various obstacles. A lack of political commitment and a heavy-handed approach by governments are common. In many countries, it is impossible to introduce sex education in schools or HIV education in the workplace. In those cases where there is sex education, lack of frankness and a dearth of peer group discussion make the programs ineffectual. The cultural conservatism of the approach to HIV prevention is not matched by behavioral conservatism in many people. In Myanmar, there are more than 200,000 HIV-infected individuals, most of whom are injecting drug users. Commercial sex workers in Myanmar operate underground. HIV is spreading from Myanmar into Bangladesh and India in the north, into southern China (especially Yunnan Province) in the south, and Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. In many South East Asian countries, governments hesitate to support nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as to form partnerships with NGOs to plan and implement HIV prevention strategies. Testing blood and blood products for HIV infection continues to be sporadic throughout the region. Even in those cases where HIV testing of the blood supply is done, quality control is often absent. For example, in India, there are few adequate testing programs and paid donors, many of whom are HIV infected, supply 50% of all blood used. The effectiveness of programs and resources to diagnose and treat sexually transmitted diseases varies widely.

Becoming and remaining a people: Native American religions on the Northern Plains

The power of religion to preserve individual and group identity is perhaps nowhere more evident than among Native American peoples. In Becoming and Remaining a People, Howard Harrod shows how the oral traditions and ritual practices of Northern Plains Indians developed, how they were transformed at critical points in their history, and how they provided them with crucial means of establishing and maintaining their respective identities. This book offers a bold new interpretation of anthropological studies, demonstrating how religious traditions and ritual processes became sources of group and individual identity for many people. Harrod reconstructs the long religious development of two village peoples, the Mandans and the Hidatsas, describing how their oral traditions enabled them to reinterpret their experiences as circumstances changed. He then shows how these and other groups on the Northern Plains remained distinct peoples in the face of increased interactions with Euro-Americans, other Indians,.and the new religion of Christianity. Harrod proposes that other interpretations of culture change may fail to come to terms with the role that religion plays in motivating both cultural conservatism and social change. For Northern Plains peoples, religion was at the heart of social identity and thus resisted change, but religion was also the source of creative reinterpretation, which produced culture change. Viewed from within the group, such change often seemed natural and was understood as an elaboration of traditions having roots in a deeper shared past. In addition to demonstrating religious continuity and change among the Mandans and the Hidatsas, he also describes instances of religious and social transformation among the peoples who became the Crows and the Cheyennes. Becoming and Remaining a People adopts a challenging analytical approach that draws on the author's creative interpretations of rituals and oral traditions. By enabling us to understand the relation of religion both to the construction of social identity and to the interpretation of social change, it reveals the richness, depth, and cultural complexity of both past Native American people and their contemporary successors.

Historia de la Arquidiócesis de Bogotá: Su itinerario evangelizador, 1564-1993 by Luis Carlos Mantilla R., O.F.M.

BOOK REVIEWS743 courts from actuaUy dictating pubUc poUcy? WiU the Supreme Court, like its American «????ßfß?,take an expressly activist turn and re-configure the Canadian poUtical landscape with newfound rights and freedoms? And furthermore, suggests Morton, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms seems to have brought Canada one perilous step closer to full Americanization. Can Canadians now expect interest groups of every imaginable ideological stripe to pursue thetf goals through Utigation radier than legislation? And with their own Supreme Court now thoroughly poUticized, can they expect to be treated—whenever a vacancy occurs—to the sort of unhinged lunacy that attended the recent norninations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the American court? These are enormously important questions, and F. L. Morton is thus far only one of a handful of Canadian scholars to give them the attention diey deserve. His discussion is shaf and provocative, and, Ui the spirit of George Grant and other prominent Canadian cultural conservatives, he counsels against too ready an embracement of distinctly American solutions to unsettling social and ethical problems. His book would be a valuable addition to any course concerned with the complex ???ef^ of religion, poUtics, and ideology Ui the contemporary world. Michael W Cuneo Fordham University Latin American Historia de la Arquidiócesis de Bogotá: Su itinerario evangelizador, 15641993 - By Luis Carlos Mantüla R., O.F.M. (Bogotá: PubUcación de la Arquidi ócesis de Bogotá. 1994. Pp. xx, 353.) This study considers several themes in tracing the evolution of the Bogotá Archdiocese over the last four hundred years. Father Mantilla's earUer scholarship includes monographs describing Franciscan missionary activities Ui the colonial territories of modern-day Colombia. His more general survey emphasizes changing as weU as persistent ecclesiastical issues from the sixteendi century to the present. WhUe quoting extensively from unpubUshed materials in Colombian, Spanish, and the Vatican archives, he draws his narrative largely from secondary sources. He has reUed especiaUy on the voluminous writings of die late Colombian church historian, MonsignorJosé Restrepo Posada. As Mant üla explains, the Bogotá upheaval in AprU, 1948, which destroyed much of die archbishop's archives, has served to make Restrepo Posada's pubUcations, such as his monumental Arquidiócesis de Bogotá: datos y biográficos de sus prelates, essential for research on Colombian ecclesiastical development. 744BOOK REVIEWS Delineating obstacles to Christianization during the first century of Spanish settlement Ui the vast expanses of what would become Colombia, MantUla summarizes various problems confronting the early Bogotá prelates. These included common impediments to evangeUzation throughout the Andes, such as linguistic barriers, the persistence of indigenous rituals and social customs, and the emergence of syncretism. The bad example of many early missionaries and colonists, poor preaching, which MantUla suggests was not appropriately addressed until afterVatican CouncU II, and the Spanish mistreatment of the vanquished natives further slowed the growth of Christianity. He contends that jurisdictional disputes between church and civU authorities, especiaUy during the eighteenth century, contributed not only to disciplinary decline among the clergy but to many problems the hierarchy would face foUowing independence. In summarizing nineteenth-century trends, MantUla provides no significant analysis of the frequently troubled relations between the Bogotá archbishops and poUtical leaders in the new nation. He attributes the church reform laws of the mid-nineteenth century, which preceded those in most other Latin American nations by at least a decade, almost entirely to the baneful influences offoreign ideologies. The embattled archbishops,ManuelJosé Mosquera andAntonio Herrán, are presented as persecuted victims of impious and raging anticlerics. He adds nothing to die ???efGe??????? of the church conflicts beyond what appears UiJuan Pablo Restrepo's 1885 comprelrensive but polemical La Iglesia y el estate en Colombia. The eventual efforts of President Rafael Nunez Ui normaUzing church-state relations are not even mentioned. ???e discussion of twentieth-century social questions is Ukewis8 superficial. MantUla focuses more on the catechetical concerns of archbishops than their responses to social inequaUty. His emphasis of communist manipulations during the 1948 Bogotá tumult, which brought new attacks on the Church, serves to nünimize popular sociopolitical factors Ui the disorders.WhUe detailing archdiocesan preparations for the papal visits ofPaulVI andJohn Paul II in 1968 and...

“Culture [Wars]” and the African Diaspora: Challenge and Opportunity for U.S. Museums

At the close of the twentieth century, we are witnessing across the globe competing, frequently cataclysmic discourses about identity. These discourses are literally erupting into activities that reshape the meaning of “national culture.” Simultaneously, many of these cultural confrontations are giving visibility and voice to transnational cultural communities. Within this world-wide context, U.S. cultural and educational institutions are at the national frontline of a related volatile, but potentially promising, debate frequently referred to as “cultural wars.” Museums in particular have become a flash point on the cultural landscape of what cultural conservatives Arthur A. Schlesinger and Patrick J. Buchanan accurately, although shrilly, formulate as “a struggle to redefine the national identity.”

The Scholar Minstrels of Andalusia: Deep Oratory, or the Carnivalesque Upside Down

This is a study of the estudiantil or 'scholarly' genre of sentimental versification performed during Andalusian carnival a time normally associated with comic inversions, political protest and raucous social satire. Until recently, many pueblos in southern Spain boasted a serious aesthetic performance style that coexisted and interpolated with the 'normal' burlesque and billingsgate of carnival. This analysis employs insights from Bakhtin and others to explore the textual meanings of this paradoxical gravity and cultural conservatism during a liminal period of ritual reversal among the lower classes in Andalusia. Especially of note are the anomalous idealization of womanhood, sentiments of universal brotherhood and contextualization of Christian virtues associated with Spain's Great Tradition.

Die verband tussen skeppingsordinansies en kulturele vormgewing by A. Kuyper

The relationship between creational ordinances and cultural formations (as seen by A. Kuyper). The central statement of this article is that Abraham Kuyper does not make a clear enough distinction between divine normative creational ordinances on the one side, and human cultural structures on the other. Kuyper defines this relationship in a semi-deterministic (organistic) way. The reason for this semi-deterministic approach can be found in Kuyper’s neo-Platonic logos-speculation and his Romantic-Idealistic use of the organism metaphor. Such a semi-deterministic approach can easily lead to cultural conservatism (for example political conservatism). The proposed answer to Kuyper’s problematic approach implies the following:• Cultural activities should always be seen as free formative action and should not be regarded in a semi-deterministic way.• Cultural activities should always be seen as being partially the result o f the brokenness o f man. Consequently, our knowledge o f divine ordinances as reflected in these activities will always be provisional.• Cultural activities should always be seen against the background of the divine facilitating structure o f the creational ordinances.