Cultural Ethos Research Articles

The gendered division of space and access in working class areas of Lahore

Lahore has undergone a profound transformation in the century since Rudyard Kipling popularized it to the West. During the British Raj, most inhabitants lived within the old Walled City, a quintessential Muslim working class enclave which formed the foundation of Lahore's cultural ethos. Here, too, a gendered division of space was constructed which, while limiting women's physical mobility, allowed them meaningful personal interactions and the evolution of fictive kinship relationships between neighbors. In the last decade, developers have virtually swallowed up the Walled City, demolishing ancient neighborhoods and old havelis and bringing about an unprecedented plethora of new working class communities in physically distant locales. Waves of long‐term residents and migrants from rural areas have been settling in these areas, ultimately causing the very notion of a cultural ‘center’ in Lahore to break down. This paper seeks to understand the gendered division of space in the Walled City and looks at ways in which the allocation and use of physical space translates into differential gendered access in newer working class neighborhoods of Lahore. It then considers ways of modifying existing spatial constructions so as to replicate acceptable cultural notions of gendered space.

MUSLIM ACCOMMODATION IN THAI SOCIETY

Theravada Buddhism, along with other early Brahmanic and animist spiritual practices, is accepted by about 95 per cent of the approximately 62 million citizens of Thailand. Muslims comprise the largest religious minority in Thailand, approximately 6 per cent of the population. About 4 million Thai citizens profess the Islamic faith and maintain over 2,700 mosques. The Muslims in Thailand comprise two broad self-defined categories consisting of 'Malay Muslims', who speak the Malay language and reside primarily in south Thailand in a number of provinces bordering on Malaysia, and 'Thai Muslims' or Thai Isalam, who reside in central and north Thailand. The Malay Muslims of south Thailand make up over 70 per cent of the population in that region. In contrast, the Thai Muslims of central and north Thailand reside as smaller ethnic and religious minorities in those regions. Historically, the Muslims of south Thailand resided in a cultural region imbued with a Malay-Indonesian Islamic political and religious cultural ethos, whereas the Muslims of central and north Thailand have been influenced by the political-religious culture of Brahmanic, animist, and Theravada Buddhist traditions. Recently, however, because of the administrative practices and policies of the Thai state during the twentieth century, all Muslims in Thailand have been greatly affected by the dominant Buddhist-Brahmanic-animist political and religious culture. This essay will focus on how Muslims in Thailand have accommodated to the dominant political culture that has circumscribed the Islamic beliefs and practices in this South-East Asian country.

Ethiopians and the Hmongs

There is a growing recognition that family therapy has an obligation to meet the unique needs of ethnic minorities within a given population by offering services which arc culture-sensitive. This becomes even more critical when the minority clients are governed by fundamentally different cultural ethos from those that drive the dominant culture. The United States and Israel (each an embodiment of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-cultural society) offer interesting possibilities for a comparative study. The Ethiopians in Israel and the Hmong in the United States are two distinct cultural entities whose unique needs necessitated that the professionals question the efficacy of the existing therapy methods. The article has two overlapping themes. Firstly, it explores some basic characteristics which the two groups share in common and as such validate the case for a comparative study. Secondly, it offers guidelines for creative culturally-grounded narrative approaches.

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry

Written in a fine and lucid prose style, T. S. Eliot and American Poetry presents a critical study of Eliot's major poems as it examines what America means to its poets. Eliot's contribution to a poetic dialogue on this subject with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and other literary figures plays a significant role in this groundbreaking study. Investigating Eliot's literary inheritance through his familial traditions, represented particularly by his mother, Charlotte Eliot, and in terms of the American Renaissance, Lee Oser addresses all phases of Eliot's career as a poet. Following an introduction that reevaluates the importance of Poe and Whitman for Eliot and modernism, the discussion proceeds from Eliot's reaction against the progressive ethos of late Puritan culture, to the appearance in his writing of numerous figures of exile and disinheritance as an expression of lost American patrimony, to his flight from the realm of history, and his eventual return to the spiritual and cultural traditions of New England. A final chapter weighs Eliot's impact on Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop. Through its dialectical view of American literary and intellectual history, T. S. Eliot and American Poetry constructs a practical methodology for comparing Eliot with other American poets. Juxtaposing Eliot's poems, lectures, and essays (including generous excerpts from Eliot's uncollected prose) with landmark texts by Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and many others, Oser engages in a deeper analysis of Eliot's Americanness than has hitherto been possible. In addressing Eliot's treatment of America as symbol and topos, the work presents a multifaceted chronicle of Eliot's development that enriches formalist and historicist approaches alike. T. S. Eliot and American Poetry makes numerous original contributions to the field of literary history. No previous work has so richly pursued Eliot's literary and familial inheritance, as well as his legacy to American poetry; the result is a highly nuanced perspective on contemporary debates about poetry, criticism, and culture.

An Afrocultural Social Ethos: Component Orientations and Some Social Implications

Two studies explored an Afrocultural social ethos: its component orientations of spirituality, affect, and communalism; and their connections with psychosocial functioning among inner-city African American youth in Grades 5 through 7. Positive endorsement and moderate positive correlations among the orientations were found in each study. In Study 1, an Afrocultural social ethos was predictive of more cooperative and more competitive academic attitudes and lower levels of a Machiavellian attitude. When orientations were examined, spirituality emerged as a positive predictor of two academic attitudes. In Study 2, an Afrocultural social ethos was predictive of empathy and a more altruistic view of human nature. At the level of orientations, affect was a unique predictor of these variables. Gender-not cultural ethos or orientations-was predictive of peer-ratedprosocial behaviors. Discussionfocuses on implicationsforfuture research on culture and the social development of African American youth.

Lethal violence: A comparative analysis of the natural accoutrements of culture

The rates of homicide are higher in the south than in any other region of the country. Some criminologists maintain that a greater propensity for lethal violence is rooted in structural reasons, while other criminologists posit that subcultural (or regional cultural) ethos are the cause. Criminologists who support the cultural interpretation have examined natural artifacts of culture including music. As much a quintessential Southern music, Southern rock, as epitomized by Lynyrd Skynyrd, will be analyzed in relationship to a comparable rock music that has northern origins, as represented by Bruce Springsteen. Themes of violence are analyzed in terms of how violence is portrayed. The results are intended to elucidate the argument of a regional culture of violence. In addition, conclusions are made regarding the relationship of music to culture and the direction of that relationship as the twenty‐first century approaches.

Infect one, infect all: Zulu youth response to the aids epidemic in South Africa

The province of KwaZulu‐Natal leads South Africa in HIV/AIDS infection, with over two‐thirds of the currently estimated 1.8 million cases. Recent studies show that the spread of HIV is accelerating, especially among young people under the age of 25. For Zulu township youth, HIV infection has come to be accepted as a new and inevitable part of growing up. Ongoing political violence and high levels of crime characterize the townships, from which has emerged a youth culture where young people who suspect they may be infected with HIV will avoid a definite diagnosis while at the same time seek to spread the infection as widely as possible. This response to the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic is examined against the cultural ethos of ubuntu and the strategies once used by youth to forge solidarity in their struggle against the former white regime. The social impact of this response, which may include increasing rape incidence, is discussed.

Chronic Homelessness Among Working-Age Adults: Personal Problems and Public Assistance

As rapid changes have occurred in the economic and cultural structures of society, some have found themselves more disadvantaged than others. The mismatch between income and the cost of housing means that some of the poor will inevitably become homeless. Given the economics of the situation, prevention of homelessness is a non-issue; more germane is the question of chronic homelessness. This paper takes the position that determining who is most likely to be chronically homeless is related to the cultural ideology of individualism and, more specifically, that the situations likely to create the greatest vulnerability are problems for which individuals are seen as personally responsible. The distress brought about by societal-level changes is manifested in the “personal” problems of individuals. The social welfare system, acting as a substitute for failed social institutions, recreates their failures by relying on a cultural ethos that blames individuals for occupying positions to which the society has relegated them.

The Crisis of Black Theatre Identity

We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes. We done sold ourselves the white man in order be like him. Look at the way you dressed ... that ain't African. That's the white man. We trying be just like him. We done sold who we are in order become someone else. We's imitation white men. (Toledo, in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 417) For the record, and in case the obvious has passed by unnoticed, as we enter the next millennium, Black Theatre suffering an identity crisis, an inability define its ideological purpose and performance practice. Unclarity has encouraged uncertainty, even an ambivalent indifference about whether or not the experience should be designated African American (the conservative practice, in form and content, of petit bourgeois Negro imitations of Euro-American domestic dramas) or reflect the conscious-raising ritual enactments of radical Black Theatre (which should not be confused with the misapprehension of those observers who claim have sighted a New Black Theatre, the enterprising, commercial exploitation of Gospel music staged as popular entertainments that do not own the slightest pretense of pursuing the enlightened aspirations of ritual enactment, an exercise uncharitably labeled Chittlin' Circuit [see Gates 44]). Black Theatre might even be consigned the hybrid status of the new performance orthodoxy that agglutinates race, gender, and gay/lesbian social and philosophical issues into a newly marginalized Other designated by the dominant culture as Multicultural Theatre. The unique, particularized, cultural expression that informs Black Theatre has been restrained by an historically passive response by blacks the hierarchical authority of a dominant culture that subordinates the Afrocentric ethos into conformity with its popular standards of entertainment. As Tejumola Olaniyan so aptly points out in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, the impediment an Afrocentric theatre practice in Black Theatre cannot be fully discerned without an appreciation of the European hegemonic domination that has bridled the authentic impulses of black aesthetics: The Eurocentric discourse on black drama thinkable only within the materiality of the rise of Europe, the conquest and enslavement of African peoples, colonialism, neocolonialism, and ongoing aggressive capitalist imperialism (11). Historically, the consequent subordination of the African American cultural ethos found support among influential authorities in defense of slavery, as President Dew of William and Mary College demonstrated in 1832: ... slavery had been the condition of all ancient culture, ... Christianity approved servitude, and ... the law of Moses had both assumed and positively established slavery.... It the order of nature and of God that the being of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore of superior power, should control and dispose of those who are inferior. It as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that other animals should prey upon each other. (qtd. in Dodd 53) During his courageous challenge mainstream American Theatre hegemony at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group Conference at Princeton University, August Wilson laid bare the fact that Black Theatre is a target for cultural imperialists who ignore the abundant gifts of black humanity, and he characterized the gross exploitation of black social practices for the purpose of white consumption as being a reflection of the House Slave being trotted out to entertain the slave owner and his guests. In his disavowal of the values upon which the standards for American Arts and Letters are erected, Wilson declared: We cannot share a single value system if that value system consists of the values of white Americans based on their European ancestors. …

The cultural costs of a globalized economy for India

This article has examined the changes that have occurred in India, triggered by the liberalization and globalization of the country's economy, through which India has become an inseparable part of the world capitalist system.43 The cultural costs of the rise of the middle class, blatant consumerism, escalation in corruption, burgeoning cities with associated problems, rising contradictions between cities and villages, the rise of fundamentalism and the radically transforming cultural ethos are alarming and are likely to give rise to political instability in the “largest democracy” of the world. The main danger is the political swing to the right and rising fascist tendencies.

Social morality and cultural ethos

Social morality and cultural ethos

Stranger in Paradise: The Life and Adventures of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

It is axiomatic that any organism will be affected by environment in which it dwells whether those surroundings be nurturing, neutral, or hostile. Thus, given nature and type of organism, environment in which it is placed will determine whether it will flourish, merely survive, or die. That exotic and beautiful creature, quetzal bird, will, legend tells us, languish and die when removed from its jungle home in Central America and locked in a cage. This analogy is obviously not confined to a study of nature and environment in wilds, but can be superimposed on virtually every aspect of life, whether animal or human, urban or rural, commercial or academic, athletic or artistic. The Los Angeles Chamber orchestra (LACO) is, among other similar world-class ensembles, a rare and beautiful organism which must adapt to survive in an environment infatuated with ethos of pop culture: accessibility, popularity, and, often bigness. Unlike its counterparts in New York City and St. Paul, Minnesota, LACO operates in Los Angeles, center of entertainment industry, where virtually everyone, if not actually involved in it, is related to (usually distantly) or knows someone in the industry. The industry is omnipresent, and its influence is pervasive. Among those commercial measuring sticks that Hollywood has raised to stratospheric levels is system, by which actors, directors, producers, and even agents are evaluated as to their power, bankability, and influence. Though system has always been part of business of classical music, because of depth of its penetration in a city whose image is often defined by glamour of Hollywood, core audience in Los Angeles is largely devoted to glamour attached to a large symphony orchestra with star maestros: Los Angeles Philharmonic and its recent spate of high-profile music directors, including Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini, Andre Previn, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Although

Hart Crane et les nouvelles anatomies new-yorkaises

This article focuses on New York's urban features in Hart Crane 's poems and locates Crane 's poetics in the context of the city's technological transformations and new cultural ethos of modernity in the 1920s.

Gender and the funeral industry: the work of citizenship

The popularity of White Lady Funerals is an indication that taboos on women organising funerals are breaking down and that changes are taking place in the Australian way of death. This paper sets out to examine the factors contributing to the changing role of women in the funeral industry. It is argued that women's participation is symbolically important because funerals are an area of public ritual in which appropriate gender relations are affirmed in ways that have implications for women's citizenship. More is at stake than equal opportunity in the workplace. As Kearl puts it, the funeral 'not only serves as a rite of passage for the survivors and the dead but it also reflects the cultural ethos and entire social order' (1989: 170).

The Delicate art of turn-of-the century literary networking

The Delicate Art of Turn-of-the-Century Literary Networking Craig Stroupe (bio) Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson. Mary Mapes Dodge. Twayne’s U.S. Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1992. The publication of Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson’s Mary Mapes Dodge marks a new chapter in the recognition of Dodge as one of the most significant figures in middle-class American culture around the turn of the century. The authors use the familiar format of the Twayne United States Authors Series to present a prospectus of Dodge research, providing not only the first full-length critical study of Dodge, but suggesting a variety of scholarly and critical approaches to her as an influential writer, editor, and cultural icon. While Dodge is remembered today primarily for her novel Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865), much of her contemporary, cultural authority was exerted through her role as the founding editor and “conductor” of the celebrated St. Nicholas Magazine for children, from 1873 to her death in 1905. Due largely to the personal presence and vision of Dodge herself, St. Nicholas combined editorial innovation, the deep pockets of Scribners and Company, and access to the literary circles of New York to become what many still regard as the best children’s magazine ever published. Because so much of Dodge’s importance lies in her editorial work and cultural ethos, Gannon and Thompson’s task in Mary Mapes Dodge is twofold: to demonstrate a significance and style that eludes conventional literary analysis, and to frame that significance for a number of audiences and critical perspectives. Because Dodge never elaborated her ideals of writing and publishing for children in a book of her own, Gannon and Thompson’s synthesis of her correspondence, editing, fiction writing, and other activities will [End Page 114] resonate especially among readers interested in the “golden age” of children’s literature around the end of the last century. Indeed, the authors show that the gild on the writing for children of this period was derived, in the case of St. Nicholas, from the magazine’s close financial, editorial, and cultural relationships with its powerful parent company, the publishing firm of Scribners, and its sister magazine, Century. With her background in editing, writing for children—and, not least, her personal connections among the literati of New York and Philadelphia, among whom she had grown up—Dodge was uniquely qualified to practice what Gannon and Thompson call the “delicate art of literary networking” necessary not only to attract the best children’s writers and editors of the era, but to recruit some of the most prestigious nineteenth-century authors for adults to St. Nicholas and to coach them in the new challenge of writing for the young (2). “You shudderingly say our special public is particular to distraction,” Dodge wrote to Rudyard Kipling, after he had sent his first submission to what he termed Dodge’s “most stern inspection,” “but you cannot conceive what a terror the . . . children become if an author who once pleases them . . . dares stop. In short, why go back to the old folks at all? Any dry bones will do for them” (137). As this sample of her persuasiveness suggests, Dodge’s networking was part of her more general crusade on behalf of the independence and importance of children’s tastes in reading. Gannon and Thompson’s book is particularly useful in tracing this philosophy through their chapters on Dodge’s early journalism, The Irvington Stories, Hans Brinker, Donald and Dorothy, as well as on her assorted verse and articles on games and celebrations. Together with two chapters on her role at St. Nicholas, what emerges in the course of this survey is a portrait of an editor and writer grounded in the genteel, Victorian tradition of the nineteenth century who is, nonetheless, remarkable for her “readiness to listen to her young readers, her respect for their views, her orientation toward the future and her openness to experiment” (156). Given the subtlety of this balance, it is hardly surprising that Dodge claimed that a “magazine for children can have no policy. . . . Influence springs from something deeper than opinion” (113). Rather than arriving...

Some thoughts on the past, present and future of American Jewry

Jewry in America is exceptional among the world’s Jewrys, much as the United States is an exceptional country. Jews won acceptance as fully equal citizens here earlier than elsewhere. They have been exceptionally successful in intellectual, business and political endeavors. The dominant ethos of American culture has been congruent with Jewish values. However, success here and in Israel seemingly undermines the conditions for survival, encourages intermarriage and cultural assimilation.

The need for organizational change in seaports

interest In and dlscusslon of the need for organlratlonal reform In the seaports of the world. After surveying the present ownershlp structure of the lndustry and revlewing the principal organlzatlonal deflclencies In public sector port authorities. the consequences of these deficiencies on the management culture and corporate ethos of the organlzatlon are then examlned. The article then proceeds to an examination of the principles of good management and domlnant bellefs and attrlbutes of successful port authorities. It concludes by conslderlng the contribution that tralnIng can make to changing the management culture and contributing to organlzatlonal reform.

Feminist ethics and cultural ethos: revisiting a nursing debate.

In this article the author re-examines from a feminist perspective the now well-known debate between Yarling and McElmurry and Bishop and Scudder. The central point of this critique is that a feminist ethics requires we attend to the social and institutional form of life in which given practices exist. The endorsement of a single concept, even the extremely important one of care, is insufficient for a nursing ethics. Without attention to the institutional factors, which support or reform care, we have only a feminine ethics. In this author's view, nursing needs a feminist ethics.

US health care reform and the economy of prevention.

The current dialogue on reform of the US health care system is conspicuous for the absence of an epidemiologically driven framework that focuses on the prevention of disease. Review of epidemiologic and demographic trends in the American population illustrates that if reform fails to advance the point of intervention to earlier in the course of disease, a restructured health care system is unlikely to provide comprehensive services with universal access. Sustainable reform warrants a preventive orientation and greater balance between primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of intervention. This report considers trends that may render economically driven reform rapidly obsolete, as well as cultural obstacles to the development of a prevention ethos in US health care and culture. The economy of prevention is described in the context of leading causes of US morbidity and mortality. Elements of a national disease prevention strategy are considered that include changes in mechanisms of physician/provider reimbursement, the orientation of private-sector biotechnology/health care research, tertiary medical centers and academia, and improved abilities to reduce the concentration of preventable morbidity and mortality in high-risk communities and to use epidemiology in formulating health policy.

A Conference on Culture and Chronic Illness in Childhood: Conference Summary

A focus on disability and chronic illness within the disciplines of health, education, and social services has usually assumed a dominant cultural ethos grounded in European-American values. Indicators of social and psychological competence, normative behavior, response to stress and to illness, and even adaptation to life have been assumed to comprise a relatively homogeneous pattern. "Abnormal" has usually been defined as deviation from this pattern. For the most part, there has been a failure to take into account the reality that there may be many different processes of adaptation utilized by different cultural and ethnic groups. Such adaptation patterns should not be viewed as deviant, but rather as different and comprising strengths, resources, and advantages, as well as potential problems and disadvantages. Unfortunately, the continuing prevalence of racism in our society has contributed to equating different with deviant. Just as children from different cultural, ethnic, and racial groups are too often marginalized by society and experience restricted access or denial to important resources needed for optimal physical, psychological, and social development, so too, children who experience disability and chronic illness are too often marginalized by the attitudes and behaviors of others. The parallels between these two sources of exclusion—minority status and disability status—as well as the interaction of the two factors has received very little attention in research, service delivery, or policy formation. Even though pluralism is inherent in the history of the United States, our orientation has been homogenization—"the great melting pot." This is changing. With awareness of the growing proportion of ethnic minorities comprising tht US population and with a new positive value and emphasis being placed on ethnic diversity, there is renewed interest in cultural variation.