Cultural Contact Research Articles

Morphometric and husbandry changes among livestock in ancient North Africa from c. 1000 BCE to c. 700 CE

Assessment of zooarchaeological data for the principal livestock (i.e., cattle, sheep, goats and pigs) reveals regional and cultural variability in how animals were manipulated, marketed, bred, and utilized over the course of antiquity. This paper focuses upon those developments, as reconstructed through zooarchaeological frequency and morphometric data for the period from c. 1000 BCE to c. 700 CE. Regionally, North Africa encompasses a vast territory, from Egypt, in the East, to Mauretania, in the West. Ecologically, there are variations within each of these zones. Culturally, moreover, these regions witnessed the introduction and influence of different social and economic agents and factors over the timeframe under investigation. This paper examines patterns in these components in a broad synthetic manner, using zooarchaeological data across the entire expanse of Roman North Africa—from Egypt to Mauretania. Focus centers upon the nature and degree of size and shape changes within the principal livestock, modifications that were in part influenced by aspects such as the scale and pattern in trade, dietary appeal for animal products (notably fatty meats), market demands, ecological adaptations, as well as economic and cultural contact among areas. Key similarities and differences in faunal patterns, across time and space within ancient North Africa, and the links these share with changes in animal husbandry schemes are outlined.

User Experience Design of Text Creation Products Based on Human-Computer Interaction System

This paper investigates the use of human-computer interaction in the user experience design of cultural and creative products. Based on human-computer interaction, a human-computer system model of user experience design is constructed, and human-computer interaction is used to clarify the relationship between "user-cultural product-cultural environment". In addition, the cultural contact points of users are identified from the cultural experience layer, and finally, the feasibility of the method is verified through design cases. With the purpose of strengthening users' cultural experience, it analyzes users' cultural experience process using human-computer interaction, defines experience points from it and then completes the design. Starting from the source of users' initial contact with culture experience, the process of cultural experience of users before contacting physical products is deeply explored, and the design points of user experience are sorted out and optimized by taking Tujia brocade cultural and creative products as an example (products include Internet products and physical products). Ultimately, the Tujia brocade cultural service website is used as a carrier to deliver the user experience design of cultural and creative products for the purpose of optimizing cultural experience.

Culture Contacts in Ancient Worlds: A Review of Theoretical Debates and Practical Applications

Culture Contacts in Ancient Worlds: A Review of Theoretical Debates and Practical Applications

Local food diversity in Minangkabau

The Minangkabau tribe in West Sumatra is rich in local foods developed from the raw materials derived from various flora and fauna found in Minangkabau. The existence of Rumah Makan Minang, which can also be called Rumah Makan Padang spread throughout Indonesia and even abroad is the reflection of the wealth of various local Minangkabau foods. The diversity of local Minangkabau food can be seen in the variations of food and culinary in Minangkabau society and even in Rumah Makan Padang. In this regard, this study attempts to investigate and map how local Minangkabau food diversity is created. The data for this study are collected in West Sumatra. Interviews and discussions are done in the field to identify the model of food diversity. The result of the study shows that the wealth of natural resources in Minangkabau greatly contributes to the development of local Minangkabau foods. Two models of food diversity are developed. The first model is the food diversity derived from certain parts of the main ingredient only. The second one is the food diversity derived from many parts of the main ingredient. The result of the study also indicates that local food diversity is related to the appetite of both the cook or producers and consumers. Cultural contact and technology are two main aspects triggering the food diversity in Minangkabau.

Образ человека в нижнеколымских старожильческих говорах Якутии

Lower Kolyma sub-dialects are a monument of Russian old-timers’ culture, which is a result of interethnic and cultural contacts of the newcomers and the local population, as well as the influence of natural conditions. The processes of globalisation, integration and industrial development of the Arctic accelerate the assimilation of Russian Lower Kolyma old-timers, which actualises the issue of preserving their ethnocultural identity. The study aims to describe the structure and composition of the lexico-semantic group “Man” in the old-timers’ sub-dialects of Yakutia. The study is novel in that it is the first to present the image of man in the dialectal linguistic worldview of Lower Kolyma old-timers. Man is considered as a biological, spiritual and social being with a certain set of characteristics. As a result, it has been found that the structure of the lexico-semantic group includes physical, personal and social characteristics of man. Intra-group systemic relations are defined by the presence of various paradigmatic relations, such as word-formation synonyms, inflectional variants, phonemic doublets, antonymic and synonymic pairs, hypo-hyponymic and hyper-hyponymic relations, derivational series. The main body of the vocabulary has an all-Russian origin. Individual culture-specific words reflecting local specifics are recorded.

Acculturation and Local Dominance: A Study in the Context of Rabaris of Gujarat

A person or group can become more or less accustomed to particular beliefs and practises of a culture that is not their own through the process of cultural contact and exchange known as acculturation. When one group moves from one place to another, this process becomes functional. In such a circumstance, it is inevitable that immigrant groups will progressively acquire cultural aspects of the host culture while retaining parts of their own. This illustrates the extent of their integration into a new community and the preservation of their distinct culture. Acculturation has been a social phenomenon for several migrant populations in India. The Rabaris were originally a nomadic tribe prominently inhabiting the regions of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Punjab in India. They were engaged in camel and cattle herding. The origin of Rabaris is often traced from Iran via Afghanistan and Baluchistan. It is believed that they migrated to India in the 4th century. The belief of Rabaris about their origin takes a mythological turn and reflects the actual impact of adaptation of cultural traits of Hinduism, which is inherent in their belief and overall culture. The Rabaris of Gavviyar Village in Surat are a small settled group engaged in pastoral pursuits. This paper attempts to highlight the extent of acculturation among Rabaris and the impact of the local dominance on their lives.

Almgren 236 Fibulae from Poiana (Romania)

Among the numerous Early Roman fibulae discovered at Poiana (Galaţi County, Romania) there are also some specimens of the Almgren 236/237 type, also called Norican-Pannonian fibulae (Germ, Doppelknopffibeln). Three of them (figs. 1 and 2) are still preserved today in collections from Tecuci and Bucharest. Three other specimens were probably lost during 2nd World War, but their existence is attested by Radu Vulpe’s sketches drawn in his field journals (fig. 3). One fibula was discovered in the funeral pyre of the “Movila Hartop” tumulus in Poiana (fig. 2/2). All the others come the protohistoric settlement on the “Cetăţuie” site, but their contexts were insufficiently documented. The Almgren 236/237 type fibulae from Poiana exceeds the number of similar specimens found so far in other sites dated before the conquest of Dacia by Trajan on the territory of today Romania (fig. 4). The presented fibulae from Poiana indicate the close cultural contacts with the Alpine provinces in the early period of Roman Principate. The typological and chronological framing of the fibulae from Poiana are deficient due to their fragmentary state of preservation. However, the reception of Norican-Pannonian fibulae in local cultural milieus since the Augustus-Claudius time is suggested by a local imitation on silver discovered in the Remetea Mare hoard (fig. 5).

The Efforts of the KGB to Use the Emigree Organisation Santara– Šviesa to Maintain Contact with Occupied Lithuania

Legitimacy at the international level was important for the Soviet occupation regime in Lithuania and they also wanted to achieve it with the help of the emigrants. Cultural relations were dilemma question for soviets and emigration. Culture had to attract emigrants to their side, to distract from resistance activities, to set emigrants against each other and thus to undermine all Lithuanian liberation activities. However, emigrants were seen as a danger due to the possible influence on the locals, but at the same time they were considered an opportunity to achieve political and propaganda goals. Also it influenced negatively relationship with other emigree organizations, but KGB could not make damage to their relationship remarkably. This publication reveals how and by what means Soviet security sought to use the plans of the liberal emigrants to establish personal and cultural relations with Soviet Lithuania for propaganda, agency, and political purposes of the Soviet regime. It is also important to evaluate whether the KGB has achieved its goals. Official cultural contacts were under full control of the soviet side. They were a cover for the KGB agency and propaganda activities. Despite huge efforts soviet security only partially managed to take advantage of closer contacts between emigrants and Lithuania. It can be said that emigrants only partially knew and evaluated the capabilities and methods of the KGB. They did not know how widely the KGB sought to use these connections to harm emigrants. It is believed that personal contacts were safer for emigrants’ organizations. Perhaps the KGB was most fortunate to use these contacts while performing discreditation and promoting the achievements of the soviet regime.

The Contact of Cultures in History and Politics

___

The Making of Bikini Glass in Bida, Nigeria: Ethnography, Chemical Composition, and Archaeology

This paper discusses the process, prospects, and challenges of making bikini glass in Bida (Nupeland), central Nigeria. The Masagá glassmakers of Bida provide the ideal case study for investigating the production of bikini. Nineteenth-century Arab and European writings have described glassmaking in Nupeland; however, with the exception of the study carried out by Peter Robertshaw and his colleagues in 2009, there is no work that identifies the raw materials and formula used to produce bikini glass. Our recent ethnographic work at Bida provided the opportunities to collect raw glass, beads, and unfused raw material for bikini glass as well as vitrified furnace wall fragments for analysis. We present results of binocular observation and chemical compositional analysis conducted on the raw materials, glass products, and furnace remains to understand the mineralogical and chemical characteristics of various materials connected with the production of bikini. From the manufacture of glass to that of glass ornaments, bracelets, and beads, the documentation of the work of Masagá glassmakers provides new data for the history of glass and its techniques. This information is relevant for understanding glassworking in the past. The paper also addresses issues relating to migration, technology transfer, and culture contact between Nupeland and its neighbors in the Lower Niger region. It argues that the investigation of the production of bikini glass in Bida is essential for expanding our knowledge of the archaeology of glassmaking and glassworking in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

The Estonian “Little Singing Revolution” of 1960: From Spontaneous Practices to Ideological Manipulations

Abstract The article covers the 15th General Song Festival “20 Years of Soviet Estonia,” held in Tallinn in July 1960, with about 30,000 participants. During the festival, the choirs started to sing popular songs and banned songs on their own initiative, leading to the festival being called “a small singing revolution”. It was a time of changes when both the authorities and the people were testing the limits of what was allowed and forbidden. As the message of songs plays an important role in influencing the people, the authorities hoped to exploit the song festival tradition in their own interest. The goal of Khrushchev’s new cultural policy was to promote the Soviet model for success to the West and to activate foreign relations. The intermediation of cultural contacts required breaking the anti-Soviet attitudes prevailing among the Baltic exiles, and for this purpose diverse tactics were applied. The article analyses the different manifestations of the people’s will both in Estonia and among the exile community as well as the measures and manipulations of the authorities. Thus, diverse practices of social control unfolded in the context of 1960 from initiatives to support each other to against state surveillance and exclusion.

Introduction: The Production and Distribution of Sino-European Intercultural Books in China (1582–c.1823)

Abstract A unique characteristic of the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the intercultural circuit of books that was established: European books travelling to China, and in return Chinese books travelling to Europe. Within this circuit, a large number of intercultural books was translated and published in Chinese or in European languages, thus becoming the source material for new publications. This special issue of EAPS focuses on the Chinese pole of this cross-continental textual exchange, where the printing of Sino-European books was facilitated by the presence of a well-established print culture. By analysing a unique collection of these Sino-European books, the following two articles investigate their production and distribution from the late Ming until the mid-Qing period (1582–c.1823). As such, they provide insights into the emergence of an intercultural ‘book world’. The following introduction sets the scene for the two articles.

The diverse genetic origins of a Classical period Greek army

Trade and colonization caused an unprecedented increase in Mediterranean human mobility in the first millennium BCE. Often seen as a dividing force, warfare is in fact another catalyst of culture contact. We provide insight into the demographic dynamics of ancient warfare by reporting genome-wide data from fifth-century soldiers who fought for the army of the Greek Sicilian colony of Himera, along with representatives of the civilian population, nearby indigenous settlements, and 96 present-day individuals from Italy and Greece. Unlike the rest of the sample, many soldiers had ancestral origins in northern Europe, the Steppe, and the Caucasus. Integrating genetic, archaeological, isotopic, and historical data, these results illustrate the significant role mercenaries played in ancient Greek armies and highlight how participation in war contributed to continental-scale human mobility in the Classical world.

Focalization and Embodied Viewing Experience in Exhibition Narrative: Asia > Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum

This article shows the importance of focalization in understanding potential ideological undertones and subjective interpretations of museum exhibitions. Focalization is conceived here as both a narrative device that denotes the perspectival filtration of a museum presentation and an analytical tool that can explicate the potential ideologies behind an exhibition. To illustrate facets of focalization often manifested in the interplay between exhibition designs and viewing experiences, I provide a close reading of the arrangement in Asia > Amsterdam (2015), a temporary exhibition on cultural contact hosted by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Drawing on cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s conception of focalization, I call attention to an instance of internal focalization in a gallery that juxtaposed Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) with seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes. This juxtaposition, along with the specific visual order of the showpieces, promoted an embodied spectatorship that is filtered by the subjective sensory impressions of the Dutch artists: a viewing experience that drew audiences into seeing the visual and material qualities of Ming porcelain as if through the eyes of Golden Age Dutch artists. In this way, the lens of focalization also offered a framework for examining the exhibition’s subtext regarding the Dutch domestication of Asian goods.

“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

Phonetic and lexico-morphological particularities of Homeric poems in Turkish versions

The following pages are a sample of possible directions for analysing translations from an ancient and very special language – the Homeric Greek – into a modern language. Even if the two languages are genealogically and typologically related, any translation, naturally, is a challenge in terms of mentality and the linguistic approach. When differences imposed by the genealogical and structural-typological criterion interfere between the two languages brought into cultural contact, the difficulties in rendering the original text increase very much. However, the new versions may be very well done, because, as it is known, any natural language has compensating virtues for rendering particularities in the source language. The corpus of texts selected for our little excursion into the diachrony of Turkish translations from the Iliad and the Odyssey has been extracted from the most representative Turkish version, “Erhat-Kadir”. In order to render the texts in Romanian, we have used the best-known version in this cultural-linguistic area, the “Murnu version”.

When Creole and Spanish Collide: Language and Cultural Contact in the Caribbean , by Glenda-Alicia Leung & Miki Loschky (eds.)

When Creole and Spanish Collide: Language and Cultural Contact in the Caribbean , by Glenda-Alicia Leung & Miki Loschky (eds.)

Specific nature of the forms of address found in contemporary Polish-language newspapers released in Ukraine (against the Polish standard)

This article analyses the nominal as well as attributive and nominal forms of address found in Polish-language newspapers released in Ukraine in the 20th century. The research material concerns the forms of address the structures or functions of which are specific compared to the Polish standard. The discussion focuses on the causes of their formation in the circumstances of language and cultural contacts and their functional and pragmatic peculiarities in the Polish language in Ukraine. The scale of the acceptability of the analysed forms of address in the Polish-centric communication community in Ukraine is identified by means of cultural and linguistic criteria for the evaluation of linguistic devices (while taking into consideration also a more extensive research material than the one found in newspapers).

Transmission and innovation on gold granulation: the application of tin for soldering techniques in ancient China

Granulation, an ancient metal processing technique mainly applied to gold, has originated from West Asia, and later appeared at many different archaeological sites across the Eurasia. The distribution of granulated gold ornaments bearing diverse soldering techniques reveal the long-distance human interaction across the Eurasia. This paper presents the scientific analysis of the surface morphology and elemental composition of two granulated gold ornaments from Tushan Tomb No.2 pit in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, which approximately dated to the first century CE of Han Dynasty. Multiple non-destructive analytical methods including Ultra-Depth Three-Dimensional Microscope, Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (XRF) and Scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive X-Ray spectrometer (SEM-EDS) were conducted to obtain analytical data. The result indicates that tin-participated soldering technique has been adopted to accomplish the granulation. Although the usage of tin has been mentioned in a former study as “a secret of Etruscan granulation”, the lack of quantitative analyses leaves this assumption unconvinced. Our findings on Tushan ornaments throw light on this issue by illustrating the regular distribution pattern of the tin content at the joints, which appears to be intentionally added for certain amount. Although tiny in size, the gold granules record the secret of soldering techniques used in China and many other regions across the Eurasia during the ancient time, complementing the study of granulation techniques and reflecting the transmission and innovation along with the technological and cultural contacts.

Cross-Cultural Psychology à la française: An Overview of Interdisciplinary Intercultural Studies and Intercultural Psychology

The paper aims to show the international impact of 50 years of cross-cultural psychology on interdisciplinary intercultural studies and intercultural psychology, as developed in French-speaking countries. An original overview of the most prominent research carried out by Association pour la Recherche Interculturelle (ARIC, Association for Intercultural Research) and the research team Interculturation Psychique et Contacts Culturels (IPCC, Psychological Interculturation and Cultural Contacts) is suggested, while tending to cover the worldwide research related to the individual in intercultural situations. ARIC’s main topics are education, socio-political aspects and identity, individual, and cultures. This international association focuses on the articulation of research and practice to propose better policies to multicultural societies. In this perspective, it has carried out research about the immigration challenges considering the immigrants as well as the host societies. As it concerns intercultural psychology, it develops according to interculturation, that is, the psychological process that allows to overcome the cultural differences. It shapes intercultural personality and identity and the cognitive, affective and behavioral reactions of individuals or groups in any cultural contact. The various fields of application of both underline the undoubtable influence of cross-cultural psychology and the possibilities for further in-depth collaboration due to mutual contributions.