Cultural Identities In Relation Research Articles

Maternal racism experience and cultural identity in relation to offspring telomere length

Racism is a determinant of individual and offspring health. Accelerated telomere shortening, an indicator of cellular aging, is a potential mechanism through which parental experience of racism could affect offspring. Here we longitudinally evaluated the relationship between maternal lifetime experience of an ethnically-motivated verbal or physical attack, as reported in pregnancy, with offspring telomere length in 4.5-year-old children. We also explored the potential association between positive feelings about one’s culture and offspring telomere length. Data come from a nationally representative, multi-ethnic birth cohort in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) (Māori N = 417, Pacific N = 364, Asian N = 381). In models adjusting for covariates, including socioeconomic status and health status, Māori mothers who experienced an ethnically-motivated physical attack had children with significantly shorter telomere length than children of Māori mothers who did not report an attack (B = − 0.20, p = 0.01). Conversely, Māori mothers who had positive feelings about their culture had offspring with significantly longer telomeres (B = 0.25, p = 0.02). Our results suggest that ethnicity-based health inequities are shaped by racism, with impacts for clinical care and policy. Future research should also evaluate the potential protective effects of positive cultural identity.

Decolonization, popular song and Black-Pacific identity in Melanesia

Melanesians were pejoratively labelled the dark-skinned islanders by European explorers in the 1830s, an act that has shaped understandings of the region and its peoples down to the present day. In this brief essay, we attempt to demonstrate that since the new millennium, aided by digital tools and the Internet, young Melanesians have localized Black Atlantic music forms in order to assert agency, no matter how limited, in relation to their experiences of rejection and marginalization within the global system. The musical creation of new identity spaces is briefly considered through three condensed case studies that exemplify core contemporary Melanesian social concerns: (1) Pacific climate change, (2) Melanesian cultural identity in relation to pressures of modernity and globalization and (3) independence for West Papua. Increasingly, we propose, such expressions are becoming a significant factor in the ongoing reshaping in Melanesia of what it means to belong in the world while remaining culturally distinct.

Identification with ancestral culture is associated with fewer internalizing problems among older Naskapi adolescents.

The manifestations of externalizing and internalizing behaviors among minority adolescents might best be understood by examining their relation to culturally specific factors, such as cultural identity, as well as to factors that seem to be relevant across cultures, such as age and gender. In this study, we examined the roles of age and gender in moderating the relation between self-reported cultural identity and externalizing and internalizing problems and the interaction between Indigenous and Mainstream cultural identity in relation to problematic behaviors. The participants included 61 students (32 female) with a mean age of 14.5 years (SD = 1.69) from a Naskapi reserve in Quebec, Canada. Age moderated the relation between identification with Indigenous culture and internalizing symptomatology. Indigenous and Mainstream cultural identity did not interact in predicting internalizing or externalizing problems. Consistent with the available evidence regarding the centrality of identity in adolescent development, the magnitude of the inverse relation between identification with Indigenous culture and number of clinical internalizing symptoms appears to increase in significance later in adolescence. The lack of an interaction between Indigenous and Mainstream cultural identity in relation to internalizing and externalizing problems suggests that it is the need to consider both cultures individually without the assumption that one negates the other.

Cultural Identity Among Afghan and Iraqi Traumatized Refugees: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Mental Health Care Professionals

Cultural identity in relation with mental health is of growing interest in the field of transcultural psychiatry. However, there is a need to clarify the concept of cultural identity in order to make it useful in clinical practice. The purpose of this study is to unravel the complexity and many layers of cultural identity, and to assess how stress and acculturation relate to (changes in) cultural identity. As part of a larger study about cultural identity, trauma, and mental health, 85 patients from Afghanistan and Iraq in treatment for trauma-related disorders were interviewed with a Brief Cultural Interview. The interviews were analysed through qualitative data analysis using the procedures of grounded theory. The analysis resulted in three domains of cultural identity: personal identity, ethnic identity and social identity. Within each domain relationships with stress and acculturation were identified. The results offer insight into the intensity of changes in cultural identity, caused by pre-and post-migration stressors and the process of acculturation. Based on the research findings recommendations are formulated to enhance the cultural competency of mental health workers.

MULTI-VARIED REALITIES OF MALAY CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN POPULAR TV FICTION

This paper discusses readings on Malay cultural identities in Malaysian context. While previous research on Malay cultural identity has presented a broad understanding, this paper attempts to frame this discussion based on three perspectives- elite constructions, socio-cultural worldviews, and resistance to Malay world. By placing Malay cultural identities in relation to the Malaysian context, it explores the dynamics concerning what is distinctive and worthwhile about Malay cultural identities. In addition, this study forms some of the bases for a renewed understanding and interests on Malay cultural identities in light of the burgeoning industries of popular TV fiction.

POPULAR TV FICTION, MEDIASCAPE, AND MALAY CULTURAL IDENTITIES

In Malaysia, a number of issues have transpired concerning the proliferation of TV fiction. Many of these complications include, but are not limited to concerns regarding feminism, patriarchy, economic imbalance, equity, power, social inequity, and religion. In this paper, we aim to locate TV fiction and Malay cultural identities across mediascape. Two primary objectives are central; firstly, this review embodies contextualization of TV fiction through examining some trajectories in which many popular TV fiction have been established. Secondly, this paper places Malay cultural identities in relation to the development and progress of mediascape. By examining these two central questions, we explore some of the many possibilities in which Malay cultural identities are explored, preserved, contested, and blurred in times of changing and challenging realities of Malaysian mediascape.

Tolerant Values and Practices in India: Amartya Sen’s ‘Positional Observation’ and Parameterization of Ethical Rules

In explaining the reasons for sustained existence of tolerance in Indian philosophical mind and continuation of tolerant practices in socio-political life, Amartya Sen argues that tolerance is inherently a social enterprise, which may appear as contingent, but for all intents and purposes is persistent. Basing his thesis that is opposed to Cartesian dualism, which makes a distinction between mind and body, Sen submits that Indian system of universalizing perception finds a subtle form of connection between mind and body. He expands the ancient core worldview, Vasundhara kutumbakam (entire world as one family) as a secular tolerant civil code,1which makes a connection between the transcendental and the pragmatic planes of consciousness, and reconstructs a thesis about tolerance around human consciousness, which is collectivized and anchored in an acknowledged public space in society that is joined together psychologically as well as philosophically. Tolerance as consciousness can be regarded a necessary condition for playing the role of intentionality as stipulated by classical philosophy (Advaita Vedanta; buddhi, or intelligence as in Samkhya and Yoga). Aware of this ancient wisdom that accepts relativism as an impasse over some evaluative matter, Sen avoids the pitfalls of cultural relativism in tolerance by offering an argument that is based on the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta and other religious and secular literature, and epitomizes an internationalizing virtue in tolerant traditions. I would examine some interconnected issues, such as the ethical “perimeter” of Sen’s philosophical observation of totalized value system and Indian tolerant attitudes in real life, etc., raising the broader question about the location of cultural identity in relation to supranational state organization. My chief argument is that Sen has been able to observe a connection between the Advaita Vedantic moral philosophy that informs that viewed from the Brahmanic perspective of absolute knowledge in unity, the apparent subject of duality is not the ultimate subject. My conclusion is that valuing of tolerance, individual liberty as well as civil rights is a particular contribution of Western thinking and philosophy; the Western advocates of these rights often provide ammunition to the non-Western critics of tolerance and human rights.

Critical Sámi Research as the Means of Finding Ways of Seeing

The Sámi form a small indigenous people living in four countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The situation of the Sámi populations in these countries is challenging mostly because of colonial history, and new ways of researching and developing their conditions are greatly needed. The purpose of this article is to contemplate the potentials that the critical theory and research could offer to Sámi research and to indigenous research in general. The problems of cultural identity in relation to the mainstream society and within the indigenous community are discussed as the target of critical research and reflection. The value of critical research as the enhancement of emancipation and empowerment are evaluated.

Paralympic Cultures: Disability as Paradigm

This is an article about the Paralympic Games of summer 2012 and the experience of watching them. It rehearses the use of disability as political and cultural identity in relation to theatre and performance studies. Disability identity is not an identity based on similitude, but is a complex and nuanced relationship between singularity of embodied social experience and glimmers of common ground. Taking the works of Rod Michalko and Petra Kuppers as a representative foundation of disability studies, the article offers disability as an epistemological standpoint, a way of thinking, and not an object of thought. The argument works through close readings of three examples to introduce the theatre and performance studies reader to the notion of disability as a paradigm for the consideration of ideas of difference, similitude and identity. The process of reading the Paralympics from the perspective of a disabled person, bike riding sports fan and disability performance scholar gestures to the scope and potential of disability performance studies. The article accumulates three examples of one disabled person navigating a complex set of positions, all of which are iterations of disability. Whilst this critical approach might imply solipsism, the article also considers disability as community.

“Who Are You?”: Exploring Adolescent Girls’ Process of Identification

We used ethnographic methods to examine the ways that adolescent girls (n=9) defined and understood themselves as individuals and in relation to cultural identities. We utilized Cook-Sather’s (2002, 2006, 2007) theory of translation to make sense of their identification as an unfixed process of negotiation by centering their voices and revelations. While the girls struggled to articulate cultural identities in relation to themselves, they had clear notions of those identities and the social expectations associated to them. They noted the ways cultural identities could be both empowering and constricting. Moreover, we found that they understood and discussed cultural identities in relation to themselves and others in ways that both resisted and maintained social categories.

Reduced Ratings of Physical and Relational Aggression for Youths With a Strong Cultural Identity: Evidence From the Naskapi People

Minority youth in general, and Aboriginal youth in particular, are at increased statistical risk for being perpetrators or victims of aggression. We examined the potential protective aspect of cultural identity in relation to peer ratings of physical and relational aggression and factors typically associated with each among almost the entire cohort of Naskapi youths from Kawawachikamach, Québec. Hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that a strong identity with their own Native culture predicted less perceived physical and social aggression by their peers. These findings are discussed in the context of the role of a positive affiliation with ancestral culture for the diminishment of adolescent aggression and for general adaptive development and well-being.

Negotiating Chinese Identity in the Internet Age

The advent of the internet has led to the globalization of cultural images of Chinese identity. Online Chinese immigrants’ associations, in conjunction with Chinese-language electronic media, offer various and often competing images of Chinese ethnic and cultural identities. The multiple representations of Chinese identity in the various media formats provide options for individuals to negotiate their identity and belonging in different contexts. This paper examines the roles that the internet plays in influencing ethnic identity among Chinese immigrants in the province of British Columbia, Canada. I argue that the array of images offered by online Chinese-language media websites and virtual communities create more options for individual Chinese immigrants to negotiate and redefine their ethnic and cultural identities in relation to other Chinese and non-Chinese immigrant groups.

Ben Jelloun, Jean Genet, and Cultural Identity in The Street for Just One: Alberto Giacometti

Contemporary Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and Jean Genet, the provocative postwar writer of France, have intertwined biographies, both in their personal lives and their work. Ben Jelloun, born in Morocco in 1944, went to France to pursue doctoral studies in social psychiatry in the late sixties. While completing his degree, he began what has become a distinguished career in both fiction and non-fiction. A highly prolific author, he is best known for his narrativeand gender-bending novels, Sandchild (L'Enfant de sable, 1985) and its sequel, Sacred Night Nuit sacree, 1987), winner of the prestigious French literary award, the Prix Concourt. Ben Jelloun has also published numerous essays, many on the political and social difficulties of Arabs in the Middle East, the Maghreb, and France, ranging from The Highest of Solitudes1 (La plus haute des solitudes, 1977), treating the plight of North African immigrants in France, to Racism Explained to My Daughter (Le Racisme explique a ma fille, 1998).Ben Jelloun's first meeting with Genet came about in 1974 after Genet had published an article on several neglected Maghrebine authors, Ben Jelloun among them. Genet, by this time in his life, had moved from the period of most of his major literary works, novels such as Lady of the Flowers and Thief's Journal and plays (The Maids, Blacks, Screens), to one of greater involvement in political causes. He worked, for example, with the Black Panthers in the US and, most importantly to him, with the Palestinians and other Arab groups. Genet's and Ben Jelloun's friendship, which lasted until Genet's death in 1986, was grounded in their common concern for Arab people, including immigrant workers in France. During those years, Ben Jelloun asked Genet to contribute to journals on the subject of the Palestinians, wrote about Genet, and interviewed him for the French newspaper Le Monde and other periodicals.Considering the importance of political issues in the relationship between Ben Jelloun and Genet, it is interesting that their connection surfaces in an essay by Ben Jelloun on a quite different subject: artistic creation. His Tahar Ben Jelloun & Alberto Giacometti, first issued in 1991,2 was reprinted four years later in smaller format as Street for Just One Rue pour un seul): Alberto Giacometti. As the title indicates, it treats the Swiss sculptor and painter, Giacometti, who lived and worked in Paris from the 1920s until his death in 1966. In his essay Ben Jelloun describes his reactions to the artist, one of the major forces in postwar modernism, with his trademark thin, majestic figurative sculptures and intense portraits and still lives. In addition to Giacometti, however, Jean Genet also occupies an important place in the piece. Genet had published a seminal essay on the artist, Studio of Albert Giacometti (L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti), in 1957;3 and Ben Jelloun, in his exploration of Giacometti some thirty-five years later, makes frequent reference to his predecessor. He quotes liberally from Studio, stating on the back cover of the 1995 edition, I was led to Giacometti by Jean Genet.The inclusion of Genet in Ben Jelloun's text is significant in biographical terms as a sign of the friendship of the two authors. In addition, it permits one to see and investigate another, more complicated question: that of language and cultural identity in relation to Ben Jelloun's work. Ben Jelloun writes in French, the language in which he was educated. much-discussed issue of writing in the tongue of the colonizer is especially pertinent and complex in Ben Jelloun's case because he has lived mainly in France for the past several decades and become a celebrated personality there. As a result of both his social journalism and his writing of fiction and poetry, he is a prominent spokesman on political and cultural aspects of France as well as issues pertaining to his country of origin. …