Cultural Council Research Articles

Testing the Waters of Democracy

On the local level, I tended to do what most poets, writers, artists, and professors dared not: test the waters of democracy and thereby risking the loss of teaching opportunities, invitations, publishing possibilities, and ostracizing, not to mention subscriptions to the magazine I edited. Over the years, the subjects of my experiments had mostly been poets, writers, editors, publishers, cultural-council bureaucrats, teachers, professors, and librarians. In general, they had proven closed to freedom of expression and vigorous debate, cornerstones of democracy. Even PEN New England, which boasted as its prime purpose defending freedom of expression, had proven closed regarding the defense of my freedom of expression in New England.As publisher of a small-press 501 c3 nonprofit magazine, devoted to literature, democracy, and dissidence, I had been knocking on the doors of public libraries over the past decade in an attempt to build a subscriber base. To date, I managed to obtain only 16 libraries, including only a handful of public ones (Concord, Lincoln, Newton, Iowa, Lincoln Parish, Arlington, and Gleason). The rest consisted of university libraries like Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins, Brown, Buffalo, and Wisconsin. One might compare that paltry number of institutional subscribers to the over 500 possessed by Agni or Poetry Magazine.In general, my knocking on doors, that is my experimentation, had shown that public libraries (and university libraries as well) tended, perhaps contrary to public belief, not to be bastions of free speech and free expression at all. One of them even issued a no-trespass warrant against me without due process several years ago, though I had not disturbed patrons, used four-l etter words, talked about sex, or made threats. What I'd done was simply persist in my attempt to get it to subscribe.More recently, I was sitting in the public library that my tax dollars helped fund in Barnstable, Massachusetts, Sturgis Library, one of the oldest in America. There, I overheard a brief discussion: putting in good They're Andersen! Then the discussion arrived next to me: Let me take a look at these nice windows! I was sitting next to those windows. Unable to resist, I interjected, noting the library could afford expensive windows, but not a $20 subscription to a nonprofit journal devoted to democracy published right in the neighborhood. The man and woman didn't quite seem to understand what I was talking about. My experience underscored that most citizens didn't really care about democracy. Most would not lift a finger to protest against censorship, unless it had to do with a friend or family member.Six months before, I'd tried to interest the director of Sturgis, who was also the director of the Cape Cod Cultural Council. But she'd argued the library did not have the money, and that I could donate a free subscription. Yet, I'd thought, why should I donate when the only magazine on the library shelf publishing literature, Poetry Magazine, had a $100-million endowment? I read through the library's Collection Development Policy, which included the American Association's Library Bill of Rights, in particular: Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.The point I then made to the director was as clear as a bell, at least to me. The magazine I published presented poetry as socio-politically engaged and highly critical of poetry as a form of high-brow intellectual entertainment, the kind favored by the established-order poets highlighted in Poetry Magazine. In other words, by rejecting my magazine and its critical point of view and only featuring one point of view regarding poetry, Sturgis was in clear violation of its own Collection Development Policy. It was in clear violation of democracy. …

Institutionalization and change in cultural policy: CONACULTA and cultural policy in Mexico (1988–2006)

This paper analyses the process of institutionalization of Mexican cultural policy and its evolution after the political alternation of 2000. It demonstrates that since its institutionalization with the creation of the National Council for Culture and Arts in 1988, the objectives, definitions and bureaucratic organization of the cultural policy have not known important changes in the period studied (1988–2006). The inertia observed in Mexican cultural policy can be explained by the institutional structures’ constraints inherited from the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (The Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) and by the actors’ resistance to change.

The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential by N.T. Wright

287 Book Reviews more dissenting voices are making themselves heard, most recently Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture and much respected for his dialogue with the arts. With particular reference to Massimiliano Fuksas’s church in Foligno, the Cardinal has spoken about the inadequacy of such buildings for Catholic worship. The renewal of church architecture that is happening today needs to be supported by a more robust theological reflection on the sacred in Christianity, which will help architects to design buildings that are fitting and truly functional for the liturgy. With Duncan Stroik, we are fortunate in having a practitioner who is himself able to contribute to this conversation. Uwe Michael Lang Heythrop College University of London, UK N.T. Wright The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential New York: HarperOne, 2013 200 pages. Hardcover. $16.58. At the beginning of this light but substantive meditation on the Psalms, Wright asks his readers to take a broad view of the Psalter’s Christological character. In this poetry, which forms “the great epic account of the creator and covenant God” (33), we encounter not just particular verses that function typologically or allegorically with reference to Christ, but “the great complex narrative that, with hindsight, Christians have discerned as the story of Jesus himself” (32). As Irenaeus would say, Jesus is the recapitulation of Israel, and so what latter Rabbinic commentators claimed of David, the Christian community claims of Christ: “Everything which [the Son of] David said in his book was said of himself, of all Israel, and of the past and future of Israel” (MidTeh 17.1). In the Emmaus pericope we see, of course, that the same is true of the entire Old Testament: in Novo patet. Wright judges, however, that the Psalms occupy a unique role in this regard. They give voice to that “epic” which is sacred history, and in doing so, they adopt our voices as their own. That is to say, the poetry of the Psalter is meant to be prayed and to be sung. As such, it opens the possibility for an identification with that sacred history 288 Antiphon 17.3 (2013) about which it speaks. In taking to our lips the words of prayerful Israel—chief among whom is the prayerful Christ—we “inhabit” the world of the Psalter, allowing it to form our vocabulary, our imagination, and—since “you become like what you worship” (27)—our very selves. It is with an eye to this vision, to the Psalms understood as the (re)entry point to the Biblical “worldview” (16ff), that Wright encourages Christians to rediscover the Psalter as the essential hymnbook of the Church. They possess a particular efficacy in countering the prevalent Epicureanism of modernity which, in its garb of scientific fundamentalism, would have us think that “Our world and our own lives were simply part of an ongoing self-developing cosmos...cut off [from] any long-term or ultimate hope” (18). The heart of the book Wright structures around the themes of time, space, and matter. Summarizing the theological outlook of the Psalter, he writes: “Time: the past of creation, the future of judgment, and the present of celebration are drawn together. Space: what was promised for the Temple is now promised for the whole world. And now matter: we find ourselves standing at the fault line between the original material of creation and the new, restored, glory-filled material of the world that is to be” (144). The reader will not find in this book a treatment of any one given psalm in its entirety. Much less is there an effort to treat all 150 of the psalms. Rather, as suggested by thematic structure, Wright engages the Psalter as a unified book, which, notwithstanding moments of tension, speaks with a unified theological voice. In working to sound this voice to his audience, he draws judiciously from the Psalter and, with an eye to the canon as a whole, makes use of a wide range of texts from both Testaments. The effect is not so much a clear understanding of the structure and contents of the Psalter as it is an understanding of Israel...

Religiose Indifferenz als Herausforderung und Chance. Zur konfessionellen Situation in den neuen Bundeslandern Deutschlands.

W 2004 r. Papieska Rada Kultury wydała dokument Gdzie jest twój Bóg? Wiara chrześcijańska wobec wezwania indyferentyzmu religijnego. W dokumencie tym zwrócono uwagę na dramat duchowy naszych czasów, polegający na cichym odchodzeniu całych grup ludzi od praktyk religijnych i utracie ich związku z wiarą. Sytuacja ta powoduje, że Kościół jest współcześnie bardziej konfrontowany z indyferentyzmem i praktyczną niewiarą niż z ateizmem, który znajduje się w defensywie. W związku z tym jego zadaniem jest poznanie przyczyn i skutków tego zjawiska oraz poszukiwanie właściwych sposobów reagowania. Kwestia ta jest szczególnie aktualnym problemem w nowych krajach związkowych Republiki Federalnej Niemiec.O ile zjawisko ateizmu, które jest rozpowszechniane za pomocą różnych akcji i publikacji oraz jest stosunkowo łatwe do zidentyfikowania, a konfrontacja z nim jest możliwa dzięki całemu arsenałowi argumentów, to zjawisko indyferentyzmu religijnego stanowi dla teologii poważniejszy i bardziej złożony problem, jak dotąd słabo opracowany. Niniejszy artykuł ukazuje zagadnienie indyferentyzmu religijnego z perspektywy nowych krajów związkowych Niemiec. W trzech punktach autor dokonuje charakterystyki zjawiska indyferentyzmu religijnego w Niemczech Wschodnich oraz ukazuje, w jakim sensie może ono być szansą i wezwaniem dla działalności misyjnej Kościoła, przedstawiając możliwe strategie podejścia do niego, zarówno ze strony teologii katolickiej, jak i przepowiadania.

"Religion and Culture" and "Faith and the Renewal of Society" in Christopher Dawson and Pope Benedict XVI

CULTURE FIRST FOUND a place in the Church's magisterial teaching during the Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes in particular contains an entire chapter on culture. (1) The document strongly states that is a feature of the human person that it can achieve true and full humanity only by means of culture, that is, through the cultivation of the goods and values of nature. Whenever, therefore, there is a question of human life, nature and culture are intimately linked together. (2) The importance placed on culture by Vatican II ensured its place in the writings of the pontiffs following the Council. (3) particularly important moment in the promotion of culture as a central facet of the Church's life came with Blessed John Paul II's establishment of the Pontifical Council for Culture. He gave nearly annual addresses to the Council from 1983 to 1999, during which he deepened Vatican II's teaching on culture by placing it centrally within the task of the New Evangelization. The following demonstrates John Paul's firm conviction on the crucial role of culture: On the eve of the Third Millennium, the apostolic mission of the Church commits her to a new evangelization in which culture assumes fundamental importance. (4) And further: A faith that does not become culture is not fully accepted, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived. (5) Thus, a further investigation of culture and its significance has been placed by the Church as a central task today. In order to take up this challenge, I will explore the importance of culture for the Church and theology today by examining the connections between the thought of Pope Benedict XVI and the historian of culture, Christopher Dawson. (6) Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) has consistently focused on the themes of religion and culture throughout his scholarly career, themes that formed the very basis of Christopher Dawson's career as a historian, social scientist, and lecturer in Catholic Studies. Though there are many links between their thought, to my knowledge, Benedict does not make any explicit reference to Dawson in his writings. (7) Nevertheless, Dawson's thought provides compelling depth to Benedict's account of culture and religion, and furthermore climaxes in a theme very dear to Benedict: the spiritual renewal of Western civilization. Dawson engaged in a project of cultural history that began in the very origins of culture and stretched throughout history until what he saw to be a defining moment within our own time. Dawson recognized that Western civilization embarked on a new and dangerous project by explicitly eliminating religion from culture. Without religion to provide a moral vision, he warned that the West faced an overwhelming threat in the rise of a powerful and uncontrolled technocratic civilization. His thought provides the background necessary to bolster Benedict's call to recognize the necessary role that religion plays in any culture and more specifically the need for the Christian faith, in relation to reason, to renew the waning, secular West. This article will examine their common ground in these areas and offer concrete suggestions on how Dawson can provide assistance in the Church's task of cultural renewal. I. Religion and Culture Though both Dawson and Benedict predominantly focus on a renewal of Western culture through a return to its Christian roots, to turn immediately to this point would be to move too quickly. The foundation for this focus is based more foundationally on their view of the general relation between religion and culture, of which Christianity's role in the West is a particular example. Therefore, we must begin by examining the phenomenon of religion and its relation to culture in both Dawson and Benedict. THE NATURE OF RELIGION Turning first to the nature of religion, both thinkers agree that human nature is intrinsically ordered toward something beyond itself. Dawson sees religion as a recognition of a superhuman Reality of which man is somehow conscious and towards which he must in some way orient his life. …

Stone Arabia, and: A Servant's Prayer, and: Sand Shark, and: Opening the Hive, and: Prayer for a Journey by Sea, and: Cat Lying in the Grass

Stone Arabia, and: A Servant's Prayer, and: Sand Shark, and: Opening the Hive, and: Prayer for a Journey by Sea, and: Cat Lying in the Grass Mark Wunderlich (bio) Stone Arabia Mark Wunderlich (bio) The horses bisect the fieldpull the cutting plow, guided burden, churning a soil-fold, wave of earth turned up for the gulls to pick; theyfollow the farmer, cut the April air with hollow-boned wings scurrying beetles, grubs and red worms the wages for following the plow's wake.The field turns from tan and green-flecked to uniform brown, lowliest color on the wheel offset by a fencerowwhere the wren's syrinx bursts with the air-blast of a tiny lung—wind thimble muscle-trill—warbling with the sexual urge to build. Black cows punctuatethe green page of pasture, move in cued diagrams, knee-deep in spring-flush mouths bent to grass, growing the soft bones of fetal calves on alfalfa, white clover [End Page 167] which they pullfrom the fallow field while the whiff of their sweet-smelling shit is wound in the spool of this sentence. [End Page 168] Mark Wunderlich "Two of the poems here are in the form of prayers. A couple of years ago, while visiting my family in Wisconsin, I came across an old Lutheran prayer book, written in German and published in St. Louis in 1876. The book was small, meant to be carried in a pocket or reticule and consulted during times of need. The prayers are notably specific: prayer to be said before setting off on a journey by sea, prayer to be said in the first hour of a deathbed watch, prayer for a birthday, prayer to be said during a time of drought. I found these pleas addressing mostly harrowing circumstances to be psychologically compelling. By begging for the attention of an all-knowing, distant father, they seemed to me an interesting model for poems, but quickly my own versions took on new and contemporary contexts. "I began writing these poems some time ago and resisted showing them to anyone or sending them out to journals. I felt embarrassed to be writing poems with religious underpinnings, and, as a queer agnostic, I felt exposed. Of all the poems I have written, these—mostly devoid of autobiographical detail—are the most personal. The other poems here have animals as their subjects. Having grown up on a farm and having been around various domestic and wild animals my whole life, I developed a particular aversion to the sentimentalization of animal life and the morally specious mistake of equating animal deaths with those of humans. The relationship between domestic animal species and humans is long, complex, intertwined. They are, quite literally, a part of our biological makeup, and we owe our survival as a species to them—and they owe theirs to us. The poems are my way of thinking about some of these complexities." Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), which received the Lambda Literary Award; Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004); and The Earth Avails, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2013. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Amy Lowell Trust. His work has appeared in numerous journals, and his poems have been widely anthologized. He is a member of the Literature and Writing Seminars Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in the Hudson River Valley. Photo by Nicholas Kahn A Servant's Prayer Mark Wunderlich (bio) Oh Tenderhearted, O Kindhearted,you who have spared us from eternal servitude, by torturing and killing your only child,we know what you can do. Only you can spare usfrom a world in which the Creature presses his stinking hoof to our neck,the tyrant who supervises a petty bureaucracy rich with oil and other filth, covers his sow-bride'sfat Bahama-tanned paw with a crust of diamonds. You have chosen to keep me in a stateof service, beholden to a mustachioed czarina isolated and confused and grandiose,which is, I confess, a...

La reforma cultural en Chile: un ejemplo de polarización en la gestión de una Política Pública

This article seeks to explain the different dynamics and issues which led to the creation of the Chilean National Council for Arts and Culture. Using the creation of a new public institution as a case study, the paper seeks to analyze the changes the project experienced during its initial stages. It is argued that public institutions currently suffer from a permanent tension between two different paradigms in the execution of public policy (cultural and global).

Lectores y formación de ciudadanías en México. Observaciones sobre el Programa Nacional Salas de Lectura del Conaculta

Este artículo presenta un panorama sobre el estado actual de las Salas de Lectura en México. Proviene de un diagnóstico realizado por el Centro de Investigaciones Culturales–Museo de la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, durante el año 2009, a petición del Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y la Artes (Conaculta). El objetivo primordial fue elaborar un ejercicio de identificación, caracterización y análisis de ciertos aspectos constitutivos de las Salas de Lectura en el país, a fin de establecer planes y estrategias de desarrollo cultural más eficaces. Es decir, quiénes son los promotores de lectura en México, dónde se localizan, en qué condiciones realizan sus labores y cuáles son sus experiencias en este ámbito. El presente texto se centra en la problemática de los mediadores de salas, los usuarios y los contextos en los que se desenvuelven dichos actores.

Organización de fondos fotográficos en México

The paper presents an overview of the organization of photographic archives of different institutions in Mexico, taking as a basis for its identifying, the "Directory of archives, photograph collections and specialized centers in photography" (Directorio de archivos, fototecas y centros especializados en fotografía), published by the National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA) = Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Add information about institutional identification data, date of establishment of the fund, or photographic section area, budget, needs, personal and schooling. It also notes data cataloging rules and classification systems used for organizing photo collections, as well as resolution and rules used for scanning.

Every Boy, Every Blood

Every Boy, Every Blood Lisa Olstein (bio) Sometimes we worship with guns.Sometimes we need guns to stand by us while we worship.At dawn we killed the killers then we washed our hands.The clouds were like swimmers dragging their arms across the sky.Our dreams reassemble. Sometimes all the goats lie down.The fallow field, the shattered bridge, each has its fragrant say.Within these equations there's nothing we can't calculate:my broken fingers for your broken fingers, this anguish for that faceten thousand rivers away. [End Page 171] Lisa Olstein Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, and Lost Alphabet, named one of the nine best poetry books of 2009 by Library Journal. Cold Satellite, an album of songs based on her writing, was released by singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault in fall 2010. A new collection of poems, Little Stranger, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Centrum. Copyright © 2011 Lisa Olstein

Structural and functional fractionation of right superior parietal cortex in bistable perception

SummaryWhen faced with ambiguous sensory input, conscious awareness may alternate between the different percepts that are consistent with the input. Visual phenomena leading to such multistable perception, where constant sensory input evokes different conscious percepts, are particularly useful for investigating the processes underlying perceptual awareness [1]. Understanding the role that high-level brain regions outside early visual cortex play in perceptual alternations could elucidate how top-down processes modulate conscious perception [2]. In two studies [3,4] published recently in Current Biology, different combinations of the present authors used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to disrupt activity in human superior parietal cortex, and reported seemingly contradictory results [5] concerning the effect of disrupting the normal function of this area on bistable perception. Here we join forces to resolve this discrepancy.

You Ask

You Ask Sharon L. Howell (bio) Last night stayed up talkingto the dead, only later to wake upat threeish to noises afoot but faintrustles in the anteroom, visited by this thought: Am I about to have one of those momentswith a ghost I mean, I don't believe this, butmaybe I'm wrongSouls must be wavering about this placebeing not exactlyrestless but not exactly at rest—and—at rest from whatthey had nothing to rest against and I look toward the doorthinking: this is how it happenshow you meet the crowds of the deadand curious whose room was it with this whiteplanked floor who in winter are they coming Sharon L. Howell Sharon L. Howell is a Lecturer in History and Literature and Dean of Adams House at Harvard University. Her poems have appeared in publications including Notre Dame Review and Colorado Review, and she is the winner of a 2010 artist fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. slhowell@fas.harvard.edu Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Cultural citizenship and real politics: the Dutch case

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, politics and everyday life in the Netherlands became polarized, under the influence of several conservative and populist movements that reflected a growing distrust of government and ‘politics as usual’, and a xenophobic and cultural conservative attitude towards migrants and migration, more specifically of Muslims and Islam. Politics took on the shape of a cultural war. This article studies the ways in which Dutch government policy tried to cope with this polarized condition by reshaping its cultural policy. The article focuses on the reorganization of the Council for Culture that advises the government on issues of culture and the arts. In a series of advisory reports the Council introduced new conceptions of citizenship in which the cultural dimension is highlighted and the role of new media and of transnational cultural developments is put forward as crucial and unavoidable. It is shown how this new cultural policy tries to do justice to the new cultural condition by covering five changes in the field of cultural policy: the shift from edification to participation; the shift from an instrumentalist to an more intrinsic definition of culture; a shift from multiculturalism to a politics of difference and experiment; the transnationalization of national politics; and the redefinition of the concept of Dutch culture.

A new English–Arabic parallel text corpus for lexicographic applications

Bilingual lexicographers, translation specialists and English teachers in the Arab world do not have access to computerized corpora of parallel texts for the English–Arabic language pair. This project has been carried out to meet this requirement by establishing the first general parallel corpus of English texts and their Arabic translations. The first phase of the project involved the selection of general source texts having appropriate lexical and stylistic features. The chosen source texts deal with a variety of topics such as the environment, globalization, psychology, history, politics, drama, etc. Their Arabic translations were taken from The World of Knowledge series published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Kuwait. Keywords: parallel corpus, lexicography, translation, bilingual dictionary, collocations, alignment, synonyms, derivatives, antonyms, glossary, frequency

Book Review: Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Promoting Norms, Institutionalizing Solutions

Ulf Engel and Joao Gomes Porto, eds. 2010. Africa's New Peace and Security Architecture: Promoting Norms, Institutionalizing Solutions, London: Ashgate, pp. xix+179.The book is a part of a series of books brought out by Ashgate on global security in the changing world. The series is an attempt to comprehend the dynamics and implications of security and the dramatic changes that the contemporary world is experiencing due to globalisation. This process has thrown up many new security concerns that include poverty, the consequences of inequality, climate change, terrorism and bio-warfare. The edited book in its eight chapters aims to understand these changes and the responses that have evolved in the African continent in the new millennium, especially after the formation of the African Union. The editors were part of the process that tried to develop an early warning system for the continent, thereby having a ringside view of the changing architecture.In 1963, Organisation of African Unity was established. Amongst its different mandates it was also expected to promote the various anti racial and liberation struggles that were being waged in the continent. It also took upon itself the responsibility to ensure the preservation of independence of these newly independent colonies. The principle of equality, respect for national sovereignty, non interference, and territorial integrity became the foundations that guided the organisation's actions. Despite its initial successes in achieving complete decolonisation of the continent, the last decade of the last millennium saw an unprecedented increase in violent conflicts and their intensity. These conflicts caused massive casualties and refugees and disrupted the developmental process in the region. This increasing disruption, the editors argue, led to a steady disengagement from the continent of different international players. This disengagement got significant impetus in the aftermath of the crisis in Somalia where a newly assertive American efforts to act as the global policeman ended in a major embarrassment. This pushed the international players to disengage and reached its nadir in Rwanda in 1994. The world allowed the genocide to unfold without paying any serious attention or call for action.The growing inability of the OAU to act and adapt to changing conditions and provide continental leadership resulted in a series of moves amongst the African leadership. These efforts in the latter half of the 1990s fructified and resulted in formation of the African Union. As a consequence, discussions and negotiations led to the decision to overhaul the entire organisation and evolve new norms and rules to deal with peace, security and development. These resolves found legal and institutional expression in a meeting in September 1999 in Sirte in Libya where the African leadership agreed to transform the OAU. This was followed by the 36th Ordinary Summit of Heads of State of the OAU at Lome where the Constitutive Act of African Union was adopted following a long and difficult negotiation process.The Constitutive Act was more than just a change of nomenclature, it encompassed a radically new vision and mission. It set for the new organisation a clear set of defined objectives and responsibilities. It envisaged an expansion of the sources of authority rather than limit it to just the political heads. Apart from the Assembly of the Heads of State and Governments, a new judicial pillar meant the establishment of the Court of Justice for the continent. The next basis of expansion of authority was the democratic pillar envisaging the formation of the Pan African Parliament. The executive wing of the organisation was given more precise substance by the creation of the African Commission along with a recognisable political mandate. Another basis for enhancing the authority of the African Union was the creation of a civil society pillar namely the Economic, Social and Cultural Council. …

Imagining and Consuming Cultures: Nostalgia and Domestic Tourism Development in Taiwan

This paper looks at the Jenju community at Ilan in Taiwan to examine how community cultures are invented for the purpose of identity building and domestic tourism development. These community cultures are constructed by the efforts of several parties, including government officers at the Council for Cultural Affairs, the County Cultural Council, intellectuals, business people, cultural workers, and residents. The representative objects of the local community are reworked and portrayed as art and commodities for commemoration and for sale. I examine the process involved in creating a nostalgic past and building a community niche for tourism development.

Tarekat Naqsyabandiyah di Pontianak (Study Naskah Nukilan Tarekat Naqsyabandiyah)

This manuscript studies using historical approach and hermeneutic analysis. As for who becomes the object of study is the script tariqat Naqsyabandiyah (NTN), one script that provides information about teaching in Naqsyabandiyah tariqat in Pontianak. Tariqat Naqsyabandiyah, becoming known by the people of West Kalimantan, Pontianak, especially since the Dutch colonial period (ca. 1919), after the return of Ismail Jabal from Mecca. Manuscript NTN is a private collection H. Zahry Abang Abdullah Al Ambawwi, one of the Indigenous Cultural Council board Melayu (MABM) West Kalimantan. Manuscript provides clues about the teaching of the doctrine Naqsyabandiyah tariqat Repentance, Remembrance and Makrifat Concept. Keywords: Tariqat Naqsyabandiyah, Manuscript, Dhikr, Repentance

Popular Participation and Africa's Development Agenda: Projecting a Citizen-Based United States of Africa

The discourse on the formation of a Continental union government and subsequently, the United States of Africa (USA) is the most contemporary regional agenda in Africa. This is rooted in the Pan-African idea, which sought to promote the unity, solidarity and integration of African states as a basis of facilitating their development and gaining voice and power in the international arena. However, a major obstacle in the consummation of any union government agenda or United States of Africa is the active involvement of the people in the continental initiative and their ownership of it, without which the project cannot be enduring, sustainable and people-driven. If people are the means and the end of development, they should be in the foreground of Africa's regional economic and political integration project. The paper takes both a retrospective and a prospective view on the issue of popular participation in Africa's development agenda especially regarding the current discourse on a union government and the United States of Africa. The paper argues that while popular participation and citizen involvement was a major cliché and rallying point in the anti-colonial struggle, this has not been a reality in postcolonial governance. In fact, the continent is witnessing disengagement between state and society in national as well as regional development projects. For meaningful regional economic and political integration to take place in Africa, people must be made the focus of the debate, institutions, processes and policy agenda of the evolving regional integration architecture. This needs to extend beyond the current superficial engagement through the advisory organ of the Social, Economic and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) of the African Union.

The Limits of Cultural Zionism in America: The Case of Hebrew in the New York City Public Schools, 1930–1960

The atmosphere at New York City's Textile High School was positively electric on Sunday, October 17, 1937, as students from six public high schools gathered for a mass rally celebrating the Hebrew language and Jewish culture. Sponsored by the Jewish Culture Council, a federation of Hebrew and Jewish culture clubs in the city's public high schools, the rally was punctuated with song, dance, and dramatic performances by various school Hebrew clubs participating in an interscholastic competi tion. First prize, a copy of the Jewish Encyclopedia, was presented to the troupe representing Brooklyn's Thomas Jefferson High School. But for many of those assembled, the climax of the day was the awarding of gold ayin pins to the top achievers in each of the schools' Hebrew classes (Ayin is the first letter in the word Ivrit, meaning Hebrew). A total of sixty-four pins were presented by a beaming Israel Chipkin, educational director of the Jewish Education Association, who was instrumental in pleading the cause of Hebrew before the city's Board of Education and worked indefatigably to increase the number of public schools offering Hebrew as a foreign language elective.1 For cultural Zionist educators committed to facilitating a Jewish renascence in the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century, the effort to introduce Hebrew into public schools was only one part of a longstanding agenda to promote the burgeoning of an American Hebraic culture. Arenas such as public education had become more cen tral to their campaign, however, after a series of frustrating experiences working within the more conventional setting of Jewish educational institutions. Bucking opposition from Jewish communal leaders and par ents, these educators had worked assiduously to promote the teaching of Hebrew as a spoken language in afternoon supplementary schools using the natural method, a foreign-language teaching technique designed to imitate primary language acquisition through immersion. But despite their zealous efforts, very few students emerged from the supplementary

Svante Beckman and Sten Månsson (ed.)

According to recent European statistics, Swedish cultural policy has succeeded remarkably well in achieving its original objective: to promote popular interest in the Arts. Sweden (closely followed by our Nordic neighbors) tops the list when it comes to participation in cultural activities. The figures are included in a body of statistics that, together with commentary by Sten Månsson of the Swedish Cultural Council, make up the greater part of Kultursverige 2009.