Cultural Demarcation Research Articles

The importance of being diverse: Exploring the journey from Brexit to Belonging

In this position paper, I use auto-ethnographic approaches and case studies to explore the findings from the 2020 British Association for Music Therapy Diversity Report which highlighted the disturbing gaps in the diversity of music therapy in the United Kingdom. I focus specifically on racial issues in music therapy and the impact of Brexit as a cultural demarcation landmark in the political landscape of the United Kingdom. Throughout this article, challenging terminology and language are used to explore the systemic nature of prejudice and oppression. In the clinical examples, I attempt to denote when elements of therapeutic intervention framed by a prejudicial, Western lens can result in therapy which can be damaging. This article involves the critical discussion and use of some offensive language, including the explicit spelling of derogatory terms.

The Domical Frontier: Architectural Manifestations of Political and Cultural Demarcations in Nineteenth-Century North-Eastern Bosnia (Gradačac, Brezovo Polje, Tuzla)

The Domical Frontier: Architectural Manifestations of Political and Cultural Demarcations in Nineteenth-Century North-Eastern Bosnia (Gradačac, Brezovo Polje, Tuzla)

Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

This article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling the story of the hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in the formative decades of mass advertising in Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged in this period as a distinct property and a focal point of contestation over ways of seeing. Its meaning as a visual environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about the interaction between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture. Historical actors—among them the organized billposting trade, the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a civil society organization that took up the cause of protecting public spaces from advertising, governmental and local lawmakers, and citizens—enlisted private and public legal means to respond to these questions. This analysis draws on an expansive interdisciplinary archive to trace them. As it shows, legal means were engaged in cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing cultural boundaries, law defined the terms on which advertising became an integral element of daily visual experience, at once omnipresent and derided. The legal history of advertising thus offers deep insights for visual legal studies.

Tastes in music and art in the context of self-determination of youth

The subject of this research is analysis of the impact of tastes in music and art upon self-determination of youth. The key problem is to identify the specificity of formation of personal preferences of youth in the process of music consumption in the context of modern cultural industries. The scale and mechanisms of the impact of music as a sociocultural factor of socialization, identification, cultural demarcation and, most importantly, social differentiation and cultural diversity are insufficiently studied. The problem of studying sociocultural capacity of tastes in music and art consists in poor perception for the sociological research on cultural determination of the practices of within and outside the intergenerational semantic (symbolic) distinction and unity within the youth environment. The goal is to search the methods for formation and representation of tastes in culture, and namely, in music and art as the elements comprising semantic and value structure of identity of a young person.  The core of the strategies for creating semantic and value structure in the course of sociocultural socialization of a person are music and art patterns that manifest in Russian youth born between 1987 and 1997 in relation to various musical genres, practices, performers and those with different tastes in music and art. Music alongside tastes in music in the context of self-determination of youth fulfill a function of worldview, behavioral and ideological reference points, an instrument for postulating new values, as well as reconsideration and of the established preferences, attitudes and patterns.

‘Till we stand on the summit of yonder mountain’: literary geography and re-mapping place in Melville’s Typee

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between literary geography and the reconstruction of transnational places in Herman Melville’s Typee, originally published in 1846. This year of publication characterises the increasing American movement towards understanding exotic places and their cultural reflections on American society. Typee typifies this serious American identification with alien places as it is heavily devoted to the description of an American seafarer’s adventure on the island of Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands, an adventure which is believed to be partially based on Melville’s voyages in the Pacific Ocean. The article, however, is concerned with the geographic language of Melville’s narrator as it seeks to explain how the physical experiences of Typee’s narrator such as sightseeing, walking and escaping from the Island’s natives re-create a direct cultural mode of communication with the American public which departs from the old discourse of colonial maps. Notions of the American self and its spatial national identity must be reconsidered through the re-mapping of other distant places beyond the imaginative configurations of the American public. The article, thus, aims at decolonising the traditional meaning of maps that have always been geographically misrepresented for the cultural demarcation of the American identity.

Islam and Muslims as Elephants in the Interfaith Room: <i>Frame governance of dialogue and de-radicalisation</i>

Bringing together theories of media and policy frames of Norwegian Muslims as governance instruments, this article performs a microanalysis of the Norwegian 2015 de-radicalisation seminar Together against Radicalisation and Extremism as an instance of governance of religious diversity. The seminar was organised by an interfaith forum based in the conservatively Christian ‘Bible Belt’ of southern Norway and directed at local high school students who attended the seminar as part of their compulsory curricula. Analysing how Islam came to constitute a focal point to which the public presenters frequently related, this study explores how media and policy frames impact cultural encounters at the civic society level and points to how the seminar’s subtle workings reproduce significant religious, ethnic and cultural demarcations that stand in opposition to the seminar’s minority-inclusive objectives.

Should we stay or should we join? 30 years of Sovereignism and direct democracy in Switzerland

ABSTRACTSovereignism is on the rise. Defending a nation’s political autonomy, fortifying its international borders, preserving cultural identity and shielding the domestic economy from the adverse effects of globalization are core demands. Often contained within research on populism or Euroscepticism, this article conceptualizes Sovereignism as an ideology on its own. Three separate, yet connected, dimensions of Sovereignism are distilled: political, which negates sharing ultimate decision-making with supranational bodies; economic, which concerns market access and trade liberalization; and cultural, which regards foreign citizens as a threat to national culture. Empirically, we track the impact of sovereigntist arguments on citizens’ voting behaviour, by analysing all 68 referendums held in Switzerland between 1983 and 2016 concerning supranational integration, economic ties, immigration, asylum and/or cultural demarcation. We rely on a multilevel analysis of post-vote survey replies to show how the three dimensions interact with party politics, values and contextual factors. Our main finding is that all three dimensions of Sovereignism continue to matter, but that values and party politics have in the meantime absorbed a big part of their impact.

Minority Memories: Lost Language, Identity, and In-betweenness in Two Crime Novels by Mikael Niemi and Lars Pettersson

Th is paper discusses two Scandinavian crime novels, each of which contain characters who represent two diff erent perspectives on the phenomenon of being an outsider: one protagonist who comes from “the outside” is confronted by life in the North, while another group of protagonists, in the second novel, are members of a minority community, and hence also occupy a position as outsiders. Among the issues that these outsider-protagonists deal with is the forgetting or denial of their own roots. Th e novels I will analyse are Mikael Niemi’s Mannen som dog som en lax (Th e Man Who Died as a Salmon, 2006) and the fi rst novel in the series “Kautokeino” by Lars Pettersson: Kautokeino, en blodig kniv (Kautokeino, A Bloody Knife, 2012). In the narratives, the confl icts between the minority groups and the majority group and the confl icts among the members of the minority groups are dealt with, and provide the context in which the crimes take place. Other confl icts that refl ect in-betweenness relate to identity, language, and gender. Being able or unable to communicate in the minority language is one of the identity markers of the protagonists who struggle with their in-between identity. Th e paper thus addresses the question of choosing sides and deals with hybrid and/or fragmented identities and seeks to investigate if and how cultural demarcations are refl ected in the narratives of Niemi and Pettersson. I will draw on studies on ethnolinguistic nationalism and postcolonialism from minority and gender perspectives as a theoretical framework in this paper.

The Impact of Political Cleavages, Religiosity, and Values on Attitudes towards Nonprofit Organizations

Individual, micro-level attitudes towards nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can have many potential determinants. In this study, we explore the impact of three categories of potential determinants of attitudes towards NPOs: Political cleavages (the cultural integration vs. demarcation cleavage and the economic integration vs. demarcation cleavage); religiosity and spirituality; and values (the survival vs. self-expression value dimension). Based on a representative survey in Switzerland, we estimate the impact of those factors for five different attitudinal dimensions and six different NPO types. The Bayesian model estimates show that all three categories of determinants have small to moderate impact. The effects of religiosity, spirituality, the self-expression value dimension, and of economic integration are generally positive. The effects of the survival value dimension and of cultural demarcation are generally negative, with the exception of the NPO type of professional associations.

Structures of Social Exclusion, Dera Culture and Dalit Social Mobility in Contemporary East Punjab

Dalit social exclusion emanates from structures of cultural differentiation and spatial demarcation. The structures of cultural differentiation are entrenched in the oppressive social system of caste hierarchy. They are further fortified with the seamless social boundaries of segregated Dalit neighbourhoods. If graded caste hierarchy reduced Dalits to the lowest rung on the scale of social status, their segregated neighbourhoods ghettoized them within the socio-spatial boundaries of oppressive territorial demarcations. Until recently, segregated Dalit space used to be a submissive site of despair, dependence and helplessness. All public amenities and sacred domains of mainstream religions were/are housed within the well-guarded neighbourhoods of the upper/dominant castes. Dalit neighbourhoods were/are deprived of all such essential facilities and access to the sanctum sanctorum of the mainstream religious centres. However, embolden by the presence of a large number of Ravidass Deras, Dalits have come to muster enough strength to assert for their distinct and independent socio-cultural and religious identity, which in turn prompted them to ask for their long denied due share in the local structures of power. The mushrooming of Ravidass Deras and the concomitant rise of separate Dalit identity is an apt case for a critical study of Dalit social mobility in contemporary East Punjab.

The essence of Europe consists in pointing beyond itself

ABSTRACTThis article pursues the question of the essence of Europe. It does not lie in the religious, cultural and geographical demarcations, but in the openness towards the other. The particular contribution of religion in this could lay in its apocalyptic tradition. This must not be understood as a violent end of history beset by fear. Rather it means the end of all virtual images and identities which serve to mask the fundamental vulnerability of man.

Unconventional Prehistoric Worlds: Untangling the Later Bronze Age in Central Iberia

The Cogotas I culture (c. 1800–1150 cal. bc) is an unusual test case in Bronze Age Europe with its incomplete definition due to empirical and epistemological difficulties. The idiosyncratic materiality of those small-scale communities is poorly understood because of its unexpected nature. The characteristic evidence is limited to formal deposits and accumulations of secondary residues whose survival was decisively driven by prehistoric social practices. Thus, in the absence of intact activity areas or dwellings, normative burials and representative domestic equipment, alternative lines of enquiry are needed. However, standard interpretative models have proposed mismatching socio-economic accounts or misleading narratives envisioning these societies as regressive and isolated. This updated multi-scalar review covers from the high level of cultural demarcation and territorial representation to the micro-scale stories of human–things relationships. The lifestyles and worldviews in Cogotas I societies entailed the upholding of atavistic habits, a relational cosmology and a strategy of transient durability, which ultimately resulted in their characteristic archaeological invisibility.

Reading African Complexities Today: Generic Folding in Gaile Parkin's <em>Baking Cakes in Kigali</em>

This article examines a recent, internationally acclaimed popular novel from Africa, Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali (2009), to explore the ways the customary cultural demarcation between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” literature, between entertainment and critique, can be blurred so as to enable more efficacious interventions, whether conceptually or pedagogically, into the complexities of contemporary African societies. The article begins by interrogating the immensely suggestive paradigm of “entanglement” (Mbembe and Nuttall) with a view to proposing more adequate images of sociopolitical complexity via the notion of “folding” (Deleuze and others). It then offers examples of such modified paradigms by looking at the generic ambiguity of Parkin’s novel, matched by the complex strategies it brings to bear on such fraught and intractable issues as FGM. The article suggests that this fusion of lightweight and serious, popular and conceptually challenging, is both an index of contemporary sociopolitical complexity in Africa and the site of the text’s purchase on that very complexity.

A social role for churches and cultural demarcation: how German MEPs represent religion in the European Parliament

This study deals with the question of how German members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent the German model of religion–state relations at the European level. Based on a survey and interviews with German MEPs as well as a content-analysis of German MEPs’ speeches, motions and parliamentary questions during the seventh term of the European Parliament (EP), our study demonstrates that this model is represented in three dimensions. First, German MEPs reflect the close cooperation between the churches and the state in Germany, primarily on social issues, through largely church- and religion-friendly attitudes and relatively frequent contacts with religious interest-groups. Second, by referring to religious freedoms and minorities primarily outside the EU and by placing Islam in considerably more critical contexts than Christianity, German MEPs create a cultural demarcation line between Islam and Christianity through their parliamentary activities, which is similar to, though less politicised than, cultural boundaries often produced in public debates in Germany. Third, our study illustrates similar patterns of religious affiliation and subjective religiosity among German parliamentarians in both the EP and the national Parliament, which to some degree also reflect societal trends in Germany. Yet our data also suggest that European political elites are more religious than the average German population. If the presence of religion in terms of religious interest-groups and arguments is included, the EP appears to be more secularist than the German Parliament.

Shakespeare on Leadership, Communication and Management

Shakespeare has been widely recognized as a dramaturgist who through his intriguing pageantry of kings presents an effective text of leadership, communication and management that has inspired hosts of modern day business practitioners. Yet it is interesting to note that the management perspective which Shakespeare seems to espouse has emanated from the cultural ethos of his native country, Great Britain. Britain has been portrayed by prominent interculturists such as Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Edward T. Hall as a low power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance, low-context culture with high masculinity and individualism index, demonstrating achievement and inner-directed value orientations. Even Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) study in its cultural taxonomy identifies a ramification of Anglo-cluster leadership model with a distinct skill set which includes Great Britain. The character lineaments of Shakespeare’s king leaders present congruence with the leadership profiles defined for diverse cultural demarcations by these seminal works on cross-cultural management with remarkable fidelity thereby endorsing the view that culture and leadership are inextricably woven together in a symbiotic engagement. The article applies theories of intercultural management to the leadership, communication and management inferences that can be drawn from the literature of this bard of Avon to reach the conclusion that this master craftsman evinces a strong cultural affiliation to his native country in offering his sagacious exhortations which are designed for an English audience and hence, cannot be transplanted in the Oriental part of the world without indigenizing them in the process of transposition to fit into foreign cultural constructs. Thus, in order to be globally relevant an intercultural reading of Shakespeare has to be practised with systemic mutations in his scripts in order to offer an effective transnational discourse to management practitioners keeping in view the plurality of disparate socio-cultural business contexts.

How Leaders can Prevent Conflicts in International Joint Venture Teams: A Team Faultline Approach

International Joint Venture teams are often torn apart by factional faultlines – the cultural and organizational demarcation between delegates from partner organizations. We challenge the assumptio...

Women, House, and Home in Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Art: Hannah Claus, Rebecca Belmore, and Rosalie Favell

Women, House, and Home in Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal ArtHannah Claus, Rebecca Belmore, and Rosalie Favell Elizabeth Kalbfleisch (bio) While gender and feminism may support different values and find different expression in Aboriginal and settler cultures in Canada, these differences are not immutable, nor are they necessarily defined exclusively by the cultural demarcations that separate Aboriginal and settler people.1 Like settler women, Aboriginal women ascribe multiple meanings and values to gender, feminism, and female identity; the same applies to the spaces in which these identities are experienced, negotiated, and understood, including the home. Broadly speaking, the home can be understood variously as “a building, a style, a form of representation, an ideology, a material object, a symbolic representation.”2 Feminism and the academic discipline of women’s studies have shaped and given nuance to the meaning of the home; given Canada’s colonial past, so too has the intercultural history between Aboriginal and settler populations informed the home as site, symbol, and theme in literal and metaphorical ways. Despite cultural difference, and often because of it, the home remains a dense node of engagement for Aboriginal women artists, especially where it traverses concepts of identity, gender, colonialism, domesticity, family, community, and nation. A selection of works by three contemporary Canadian Aboriginal artists, Hannah Claus (Mohawk and European), Rebecca Belmore (Anishnabe), and Rosalie Favell (Métis), testifies to this range. No single view of the home can be associated with these artists; each considers the space, structure, or idea of home in a manner that invites a discussion of colonialism, nation, family, and identity, themes that intensify when dovetailed with gender and feminism. The various approaches Claus, Belmore, and Favell bring shed new light on seemingly tired discussions of the home, indicating both the need for Aboriginal women’s voices in feminist contexts and the dynamic and multifaceted nature of the home as a thematic site. A seemingly intractable association with separate spheres ideology and its related critiques limits discussion of the home and its creative or discursive [End Page 1] potential. This ideology codes interior, private, domestic space as female and exterior, public, political space as male. European feminist scholars like Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray argued that the home conceived by these terms created an environment that restricted and confined women, critiques that powerfully mobilized and coincided with popular Second Wave feminist movements.3 Subsequently, scholars have shown how separate spheres ideology and the constrictions it presented pertained to a limited community of white, privileged women. This same critique was leveled at other feminist attempts to salvage the home as site of comfort and refuge.4 Still, within this expression of the home’s racial and class politics, scholars articulate a spectrum of meaning. From her standpoint as an African American feminist and relative to her own family history, bell hooks writes about how despite the domestic labor many black women expended in the service of white families, their own homes, “homeplaces” as she calls them, were sites of refuge. These sites “belonged to women, were their special domain, . . . places where all that truly mattered in life took place—the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls. There we learned dignity, the integrity of being.”5 Scholars have made use of the model of gendered, binarized spaces of public and private to study other antagonistic relationships. Amy Kaplan points to the relationship between domestic and foreign as one that keeps the oppositional values of separate spheres alive through its inclusions and exclusions.6 Others have usefully considered how separate spheres ideology functions as an arm of imperialism in colonial settings, with regard to the imbrication of race and ethnicity with gender in the pursuit of public (or other high-status) office, and in terms of transnational migrancy and the global workforce.7 Elaborating on the relationship between home and transnational migrancy is beyond the scope of this essay; however, useful analogies may be drawn where it comes to home as a locus for identity. In the context of migrancy Sara Ahmed writes that “home is somewhere; it is indeed else-where, but it is also where the subject is...

Montagu’s Letters from the Levant: Contesting the Borders of European Selfhood

As many critics have pointed out, Montagu’s gender and class position gave her a certain authority to interrogate Western assumptions about the Levant in her Letters from the Levant (1716–18). Scholars, however, have overlooked her nuanced examination of Ottoman-European relations in part because she addresses European policies through an analysis of how they have permeated Europeans’ behavioral traits, attire, and social conventions rather than through a conventional or theoretical analysis of the policies themselves. Just as European countries were gaining territory and expanding their influence across the globe, they were also creating more nation-based divisions within European identity and, to Montagu’s disgust, signaling these boundaries more zealously the closer they were to Europe’s intercontinental border with Asia. As an aristocratic woman, she is expected to comply with these practices. Because she refuses to do so, Montagu challenges a world order that seeks to carve the world up into European-controlled territories. She understands the cultural demarcations that prescribe certain behaviors but chooses a “proteophobic” stance, or one that resists the “spirit of faction” that develops among colonizers in foreign lands and is exploited to construct borders in these territories. Yet when she circles back to Europe, her travels to Africa expose Montagu as unthinkingly imbibing racialized portrayals of Africans that reinscribe the boundary between Europeans and Africans, perpetuating the very ideological “border form” that she so often critiques.

Imaginary Nomads: Deconstructing the Representation of Mongolia as a Land of Nomads

AbstractMongolia is often depicted as a country of nomads roaming over unbounded land. This largely romantic projection essentialises Mongolia for both Western and domestic consumption. Serving the habit of outsiders to construct an imagined Other and the need of Mongolians for cultural demarcation, the Mongolian landscape and Mongolian herders have become a facade through which the portrayal of Mongolia as a 'nomadic nation' is widely constructed and perpetuated. This article problematises these essentialised projections of Mongolia and unbinds Mongolia from the reductive mould of a 'nomadic nation'. It further questions the very existence of 'unbounded land' and the notion of 'free-roaming nomads', both of which are intimately attached to the modern construction of Mongolian identity. It then seeks to explain the persistence of the nomadic myth despite its tenuous underpinnings.

The Class Basis of Switzerland's Cleavage between the New Left and the Populist Right

This article argues that a full grown cleavage has surfaced in Swiss politics, separating a libertarian‐universalistic (the New Left) from a traditionalist‐communitarian camp (the Populist Right). Based on survey data of Switzerland's parliamentary election 2007, it examines the cleavage's micro‐foundations and shows that the class constituencies of the New Left (the Social‐Democratic and Green Parties) and the Populist Right (the Swiss People's Party) present the almost exact mirror image of each other. The former draws disproportionate support from the salaried middle class, notably socio‐cultural professionals, whereas the latter is rallied by small business owners, production and service workers. Although anchored in the employment structure, this divide is not primarily about the economy and resources, but about culture and identity. It thus strongly correlates with opposing cultural attitudes. While small business owners and workers prefer cultural demarcation and defend national traditions, salaried professionals strongly favour international integration and multi‐culturalism.