Cultural Imagery Research Articles

Reality as Image-Making: Collective Kulturbilder and Subjective Perspective in C. F. Meyer's Historical Novella Die Hochzeit des Mönchs

This article interprets the use of images and visuality as interplay between subjective perception and collective imaginary in C. F. Meyer's realist novella Die Hochzeit des Monchs . I argue that Meyer's novella employs the art historian Jacob Burckhardt's notion of Kulturbild as an epistemological model to discuss both the construction of modern subjectivity in Renaissance art and its crisis in the nineteenth century due to the re-emergence of excluded bodily desire. Like Burckhardt, Meyer uses images as both source and medium for historical analysis, but shows the subjective gaze (and consequently its objective fi eld of vision) in Renaissance style to be complicated by ambiguity, multivalence, and inauthenticity: the text demonstrates that subjectivity is predetermined by collective cultural imagery and limited by the non-representational mythical space of the body. Thus, while Meyer, as has been previously suggested, celebrates the self-assured power of the Renaissance man, he also demonstrates the illusionary quality of his vision which does not offer unadulterated access to 'nature,' instead revealing the subjective perspective to be an uneasy patchwork of confl icting cultural visions on the verge of breakdown.

The Angst of Youth in Contemporary Art Practice

The resurgence of the theme 'teenage angst' has become increasingly popular among contemporary artists, universally depicting aspects of alienation, loneliness, depression and even unrequited love. This paper will argue that Japanese manga and anime has become a major influencing factor in both Western and Eastern contemporary art practice as it bridges the gap between reality and fantasy. Arguably, this interface underlines how popular cultural imagery of the East, particularly Japan, has impacted upon both Eastern and Western artists worldwide. Masami Toku argues that Japanese manga allies' youth's identity construction with popular culture by creating an underlying narrative based on the interplay between fictional characters fantasising about their aspirations and desires, and echoing adolescent social rites of passage. My paper will reference and critically analyse the work of American artist Charlie White,Chinese artists Cao Fei and Chen Ke, and Japanese artist Aya Takano. It will show how, by adopting and reinterpreting this distinctive Japanese aesthetic, the artists create a reality that functions as a means of escape from socio-economic restraints while, at the same time, exploring other adult narratives in their work. It will highlight how childlike pictorial qualities provide an avenue for darker adult tropes to be investigated in a format more easily accepted by society.

Sensation-seeking, performance genres and substance use among musicians

Popular cultural imagery has long assumed that musicians routinely use both licit and illicit substances for recreational purposes, to enhance creativity or to cope with the vicissitudes of an artistic lifestyle. To date, however, there has been little empirical examination of the presumed links between drugs and musical performance. In this analysis, we examined relationships among personality, musical performance genres, and the use of substances both licit (tobacco and alcohol) and illicit (marijuana and other drugs). Drawing on self-report survey data from a sample of 226 Western New York professional and amateur musicians, we used hierarchical regression analyses to test the simultaneous effects of sensation-seeking and performance genres on eight substance use outcomes, controlling for gender, age, race, and ethnicity. All forms of substance use were positively associated with sensation-seeking. Substance use outcomes were positively associated with Intense/Rebellious genres (e.g., rock) and to a lesser extent with Energetic/Rhythmic genres (e.g., rap/hip-hop), but negatively associated with Upbeat/Conventional genres (e.g., pop) and Reflective/Complex genres (e.g., jazz). The relationships between performance genres and both smoking and alcohol use were gender-specific.

A Heart Made of Knotty Pine: The Cigar Store Indian in American Cultural Imagery

A Heart Made of Knotty Pine: The Cigar Store Indian in American Cultural Imagery

Imagining the Other in Cosmetic Surgery

This article considers matters of narration and intersubjectivity in cosmetic surgery by drawing from interviews with 80 British and American women who have had an aesthetic procedure and 16 British and American cosmetic surgeons. It explores constructions of the ‘surgical other’ — that is, the woman who has cosmetic surgery with little consideration of its risks, is motivated by vanity rather than need, has unreasonable expectations regarding its outcome and/or is obsessively concerned with her appearance. It shows that constructions of surgical otherness are deeply contextual and interactive. They involve the production of narratives that reflect individual experience, are shaped by cultural imagery and incorporate narratives provided by other people. They also function as a form of identity work, as patients and surgeons draw upon them (and assist in reproducing them) in their performances of self. As part of that process, physicians not only confirm the patient’s self-presentation as a ‘good surgical candidate’, but also aid in producing her as such. Practitioners too engage in their own presentations of self; their negative commentary on surgical others implies a criticism of — and thus an effort to differentiate themselves from — the surgeons responsible for their production.

Cultural Imagery and Statistical Models of the Force of Mortality: Addison, Gompertz and Pearson

SummaryWe describe selected artistic and statistical depictions of the force of mortality (hazard or mortality rate), which is a concept that has long preoccupied actuaries, demographers and statisticians. We provide a more graphic form for the force-of-mortality function that makes the relationship between its constituents more explicit. The ‘Bridge of human life’ in Addison’s allegorical essay of 1711 provides a particularly vivid image, with the forces depicted as external. The model that was used by Gompertz in 1825 appears to treat the forces as internal. In his 1897 essay Pearson mathematically modernized ‘the medieval conception of the relation between Death and Chance’ by decomposing the full mortality curve into five distributions along the age axis, the results of five ‘marksmen’ aiming at the human mass crossing this bridge. We describe Addison’s imagery, comment briefly on Gompertz’s law and the origin of the term ‘force of mortality’, describe the background for Pearson’s essay, as well as his imagery and statistical model, and give the bridge of life a modern form, illustrating it via statistical animation.

The Engineer as Landscaper and Cultural Warrior

In 1910, American philosopher William James called on governments of all nations to eschew fighting each other, and instead jointly pursue “the moral equivalent of war” – a war against nature. Believing the world to be fundamentally hostile to the human struggle for survival, James was inspired by the projects of the great 19th century engineers. He saw their work as a grand cultural endeavour, transcending merely building infrastructure to solve local practical problems. Pipelines, railways, roads, tunnels, bridges and canals tie formerly separate places and people together, creating new political, economic and population zones. The engineers of the Victorian and Edwardian era literally reshaped the landscape and redrew the maps, changing forever the ways we experience, conceptualise and understand the environment. In the context of the British Empire, impressive engineering works were articulated to enhance the credibility of the imperial enterprise. The visual impact on the physical landscape was controversial, but the new spatial and cultural reality they created is reflected in landscape art and popular national imagery. The fame and drama that surrounded C. Y. O’Connor in Australia and New Zealand, and his international peers, made them significant cultural figures in their own right, as influential as literary or visual artists in creating cultural imagery and sense of place.

‘They Light The Christmas Tree in Our Town’

Sport occupies a prominent space in the public lives and private identities of US adolescents. Using the retrospective reflections of college students, this analysis explores two questions about sport-related identities during high school: Are 'athletes' and 'jocks' distinctly separate identities? Are these identities explicitly gendered? In four gender-segregated focus groups conducted in early 2005, 32 student-athletes from two upstate New York colleges discussed their high school experiences of sport, status, gender, and identity. Three primary themes developed with regard to differences between the 'jock' and 'athlete' archetypes: academic focus, teamwork, and cockiness/aggression. Examining the intersection of gender, high-status/high-profile sport, and identity in both popular cultural imagery and the personal experiences of the focus group discussants provided support for the thesis of a 'toxic jock' phenomenon.

Japan Brand Strategy: The Taming of 'Cool Japan' and the Challenges of Cultural Planning in a Postmodern Age

The production of a new and attractive ‘Japan Brand’—one that resonates with the emerging global image of ‘Cool Japan’ associated with Japan's popular culture—is a national project incorporated in the Japanese Intellectual Property Strategy promoted by the state since 2002. This article critically examines the Japan Brand Strategy as a government-owned production site of Cool Japan imagery and as a cultural policy designed to promote a specific sense of cultural identity. Detailed reconstructions of the selective appropriation of cultural products in order to create a new cultural imagery for Japan, of the meanings attached to this imagery and of the tactics devised to spread it, highlight how problematical it is to appropriate market-made images of Cool Japan for national ends. Furthermore, by examining the various functions attributed to this national strategy, I show that while it is primarily promoted as a means for enhancing Japan's industrial policy and cultural diplomacy, it is also devised as a mechanism to mobilize the nation during unsettled times. Through examining the Japan Brand Strategy, this article highlights the challenges faced today by cultural policy makers, questioning the contemporary relevance of the modernistic approach to the state as a regulatory cultural planning apparatus.

Youth protection and the prevention of juvenile delinquency

The year 1926 marked the passage of Germany’s Law to Protect Youth from Worthless and Obscene Publications. In combination with the Reich Motion Picture Law of 1920, this legislation sought to shelter minors from the corrupting forces of cultural narrative and imagery. As the discourse surrounding these laws attests, the terms of Germany’s so-called ‘cinema debate’ were ambivalent, and discussions about films thematizing crime were especially complex. Whereas many detective and crime films were condemned for glorifying delinquency, brutalizing the senses and exposing youth to excessive details about criminal activity, educational films and films that sounded a warning were viewed by reformists as ideal means to teach moral responsibility and good citizenship. This paper explores the purported connection between visual imagery, sensual—psychological stimulation, crime and censorship during the early years of the Weimar period.

Taking Custody of Motherhood: Fathers' Rights Activists and the Politics of Parenting

What makes a good in contemporary American society? And more important, can good fathers effectively mother their children? Without a doubt, over the past several decades, the cultural imagery surrounding what it means to be a fully participatory has shifted dramatically (Burgess 1997; Coltrane 1989; Hobson and Morgan 2002; Ranson 2001). Instead of the ideal being simply the breadwinner of the family, this father - with commentators primarily spotlighting the desired behavior of the white male - combines both earning a living with the day-to-day care of his children (Pleck 1987). In other words, not only does he work full time, but he also is present at his children's birth, goes to school conferences, does their laundry, and prepares their meals. He is fully connected and essential to his children's well-being (Farrell 2001). This father is, in fact, just like any other modern mother. While this recent paternal imagery has been extremely powerful, scholars have also noted that fathers' actions have yet to meet this emerging ideal.1 While their contributions to child care have been increasing over time, particularly since the 1980s, fathers still lag behind mothers in the amount of parental work they perform on a regular basis (Ahmeduzzaman and Roopnarine 1992;Aldous, Mulligan, and Bjarnason 1998; Sandberg and Hofferth 2001; Sayer, Bianchi, and Robinson 2004). In fact, in one of the most recent and comprehensive studies that explored this division of responsibility issue, in 2000, Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie (2006, 116) found enormous gaps in paid and unpaid work between the sexes, with women allocating 12.9 hours a week to child care, and men only completing 6.5 hours on this task. Nevertheless, despite the fact that real world practices have yet to catch up to the new cultural ideal of fatherhood, fathers' rights groups have seized upon this compelling imagery in making their political claims. More specifically, these fathers' rights organizations, composed primarily of white, middle-class men, have grown in number in recent years in order to challenge the legal system that they must confront when their families dissolve. One of their most prominent assertions is that the family law system, specifically through its child custody procedures that tend to physically place children with their mothers, denies them the opportunity to effectively personify their father roles. In this essay I explore precisely how fathers' rights groups have tapped into the cultural symbolism of the father in order to buttress their claims. RESEARCH CONTEXT The fathers' rights movement began to grow quite rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. With some estimates placing them at ten thousand members in total (Crowley 2008, 37), fathers' rights activists across the board charge that once their families break up, they lack certain parental rights (Clatterbaugh 2000; Coltrane and Hickman 1992; Fineman 1991;Williams and Williams 1995). Their grievances revolve around two critical areas: child support and child custody policy (Crowley 2003). For fathers' rights groups, these two issues are highly interlinked. Activists complain that policy makers force them to pay exorbitant amounts of child support to the mothers of their children, who typically receive primary physical custody. However, these payments would not be necessary at all, argue these men, if the child custody system were reformed in a way to automatically give fathers equal time with their children. Across the United States, judges make custody determinations for dissolving families.There are two types of joint custody at stake Jomi legal custody refers to a partnership between parents over the major decisions that they must make regarding their children's weH-being; joint physical custody refers to equally shared living arrangements for the involved children. Although joint legal custody is fairly common in the United States, joint physical custody is not and therefore is the focus of fathers' rights groups' concerns. …

Occidentalism and accountability: constructing culture and cultural difference in majority Greek talk about the minority in Western Thrace

Drawing upon the notion of occidentalism, developed within cultural theory and critical ethnography, this article explores ways in which explicit and/or implicit assumptions about the West and Western self are implicated, in their conversational mobilization, to accountability management. The data analysed come from a study in Western Thrace (Greece), which included interviews and focus group with majority Greek educators about the Muslim minority historically residing in the region. The analysis presented employs tools from critical discursive social psychology. Building upon discourse analytic treatments within social psychology on the mobilization of national categories and accountability management in talk, it is argued that the banal indexicalization of national categories in talk opens the space for a critical interrogation of the banal indexicalization of an occidentalist cultural imagery that posits a hierarchical distinction between cultures of the West and the Rest.

Ethnicity, Health and Health Care: Understanding diversity, tackling disadvantage ‐ Edited by Ahmad, W.I.U. and Bradby, H.

<i>Ethnicity, Health and Health Care: Understanding diversity, tackling disadvantage</i> ‐ Edited by Ahmad, W.I.U. and Bradby, H.

Review Essay: Museoloy as Cultural Studies

I read this collection of 33 essays on museum studies with one large question in mind: does anthropology still have anything to contribute to this burgeoning field? I hoped that this collection might supply an answer, in part because several of the contributors are anthropologists, but mainly because its editor, Sharon Macdonald, is one of the best ethnographers of museums there is. Her interest in museums began through studying cultural heritage. In her case, it was fieldwork in the Scottish HighlandsFa place whose people are often in the business of representing themselves to others and who are therefore quintessentially reflective about the self-conscious nature of cultural production in a museumified world. Macdonald went on to do a wonderfully nuanced ethnography of a science museumFof how the experts and professionals in the museum decide on what stories to tell and how to tell them, and of how the visitors to such a museum respond to its messages. It is of course, the ethnographic approach to a topic that I would suggest anthropology can and does contribute to this or any field. But the collection is not primarily a compendium of the work of ethnographers. The group of scholars Macdonald brought together reflects the current makeup of museum studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Some of them work in museums. Most teach in museum studies departments or offer courses that cross over from their particular disciplines into museum studies, and while they are from different disciplines, they teach museum studies from the shared perspective that has come to be known as cultural studies. The central theme of cultural studies is that societies produce representations that have political implications. RepresentationFmaking a display, a film, a bookFhurts some people and helps others by naturalizing certain visions of the world and by privileging certain voices. It is the goal of cultural studies not only to bring into conscious awareness the extent of misrepresentation that occurs, but also to create representational space for silenced voices to be heard. Cultural studies is self-consciously democratizing. It exposes representation as elitist or exclusionary. As it stresses exaggeration and erasure in dominant cultural discourses and imagery, it encourages or even ventriloquizes the voices of the silenced. Needless to say, the desire for democratization, plus a queasy reflexivity about elitism via (mis)representation, are guiding concerns in what often is called ‘‘the new museology’’Fas Macdonald outlines in the Introduction. And the new museology is an extension of what those in the education departments of museums pretty much everywhere have been trying to do since they gained a foothold in museums. For a long time now, educators have thought of themselves as populists or reformersFin favor of opening up the museum; in favor of making it more relevant; opposed to closing it to all but the most enlightened, or to using it to protect and store treasure however such treasure is defined. So the agendas of education dovetail with those of cultural studies, but it also happens that cultural studies has also inserted itself into art and art history. There are many converging paths leading to the fact that museum studies itself might even now count as a branch of cultural studiesFa site for the practical and reflexive application of cultural theory. The chapters in the first section of the Companion, ‘‘Perspectives, Disciplines, Concepts,’’ lay out the basic themes. Rhiannon Mason’s essay on the basic premises of cultural theory, and how those premises are also basic to museum studies, is among the most succinct and accessible synopses I have encountered. Gordon Fyfe follows with a deft 51

Narrating Descent: Popular Science, Evolutionary Theory and Gender Politics

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.

蘇軾〈寒食雨二首〉析論

At Hanshi Day in Yuanfeng fifth year in 1082, Su Shi wrote two poems named ”Rain at Hanshi Day” with whole sorrow, when it was also the third year he got banished from the imperial court to Huangzhou. These two pieces reflected how he lived at that hardship: cold sprain with biter rain, illness with solitude, and poverty with hunger. In the first poem, poet materialized his spiritual and emotion of the sense of life by the writing of Chinese flowering crab-apple, and strengthened the attraction through the improvement of techniques. The second one expressed strongly the contradiction between reality and ideal, in which the poem illustrated what he had been in the dilemma through the imagery in the raining day. When it comes to the artistic characteristic, these two poems use specific tonal end-rhyme of ”ru sheng” and ”shang sheng” to carry poet's depressed mental state. All lines catch the theme of the convention in Hanshi Day with tight structure and half-fiction. The to poems of ”Hanshi Rain” not only show the culture of a season in Sung Dynasty, but also reflect Su Shi's mental statement in Huangzhou by the special cultural imagery in Hanshi Day which has highly connection to poet's life and experiences.

Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture by Helena Goscilo , Andrea Lanoux (review)

REVIEWS 723 more explicit narrative causation', which in turn sheds light on Tarkovskii's choice of scenes to be excluded from the second edit (p. 35). Hence, for example, the disappearance of a number of Andrei's flashbacks and visions, which had given the film a more complex and ambiguous narrative point of view. Reading thisbook, one is impressed by its refreshing openness and avoid ance of closed interpretations ofwhatever ideological hue. In achieving this, Bird both respects Tarkovskii's own dislike of 'completedness' and communi cates to the viewer something of the spirit inwhich Tarkovskii's filmscan be best appreciated. UCL SSEES Chiara Mayer-Rieckh Goscilo, Helena and Lanoux, Andrea (eds). Gender andNational Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2006. x + 257 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $22.50 (paperback). In thisvolume, an analysis of the traditional association ofwomen with nation and men with state helps to contextualize the interplay between gender and national identity ? as well as the gendering of national identityand its implications for the population as a whole ? against the backdrop of the major events of the twentieth century in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The ten articles in the collection cover a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, literature, linguistics, film studies and music history. In their introduction, Goscilo and Lanoux argue that '[c]ultural memory has preserved a corresponding arsenal of gendered representations of Russianness for the rhetorical needs of the moment' (p. 24). Valentina Zaitseva explores theways inwhich language impacts identity and at once unifies and divides men and women. Grammatical gender, according to Zaitseva, influences 'cultural imagery', including metaphors and personifica tions in folklore, poetry, and everyday language use' (p. 31). Focusing on the key female concepts of baba and rodina-mat' and their respective negative and positive associations, Zaitseva analyses the resultant implications for a reading of Russian national identity. In the second chapter, Helena Goscilo argues that 'Russia's habit of troping national identity as female has rendered Russian widowhood an infinitely richer, more complex, and more rhetoric-swathed genre than in the West' (p. 56). Goscilo identifies and analyses several variations on individual and collective widowhood, including the widow as a 'shadow' of her dead husband and the widow as curator and publicity agent, with special attention to Nadezhda Mandel'shtam as recognizing and expanding the possibilities of widowhood. Goscilo's analysis focuses on women without men but defined in relation to them; Elizabeth Jones Hemenway's chapter, meanwhile, highlights mother-martyr revolutionary figures who have separated themselves from their biological families in the interest of serving the Great Family. The 724 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 memorial literature commemorating these women may be read as a modern variant of Orthodox saints' lives, and its subjects are depicted according to several conventions of the genre, including the denial of private life, the rhetoric of self-sacrifice, and an emphasis on themoral superiority of women. While the preceding chapters discuss women separated frommen, Lilya Kaganovsky evaluates the converse in her essay on the depiction of Soviet masculinity inNikolai Ekk's 1931filmThe Road toLife, a 'narrative of conver sion' that addresses the problem of bezprizorshchina in hindsight. Kaganovsky asserts that 'bodily discipline and linguistic control' are presented in the film as the true path toNew Soviet Manhood in a male collective society devoid ofwomen (p. 96). In the fifthchapter, Suzanne Ament argues that the songs ofWorld War Two 'played a significant role in stabilizing identities in a time of crisis' (p. 115).These songs tended to reinforce existing gender roles and valorize feminine passivity despite changing roles in society, ultimately supplying 'a balance between projected ideals and the daily realities of life' (p. 127). By the time of the Brezhnev era, Elena Prokhorova states, therewas a need to 'reestablish masculinity' by idealizing the past. She examines two types of Brezhnev-era mini-series, the spy thriller/detektiv and thehistorical melodrama, stating that 'both are engaged in theprocess of rearticulating Soviet national mythology by linking it to complementary aspects of representations ofmas culinity' (p. 135).Although male heroes exemplified Soviet achievements on a larger level, they were to a certain degree rendered impotent by 'the...

El imaginario del vino en la literatura medieval : la dualidad vida-muerte

El vino en el imaginario de la cultura medieval se asocia con las dos caras de la existencia humana: la vida y la muerte, siendo por ello objeto de una doble valoración. Dentro de esta dialéctica hay una visión positiva del vino y del beber por su asociación real y metafórica con la vida y el buen vivir, generando imágenes reconfortantes de alegría y exaltación. La visión negativa asocia el vino con la embriaguez, la enfermedad y la muerte dejando imágenes de decadencia física, económica y espiritual porque, como claman las voces de clérigos y moralistas, la embriaguez es un pecado (muerte del alma) ligado a la gula, y fuente de otros como la lujuria, la infidelidad, la ira. Así pues, la ambivalencia y la ambigüedad rigen el imaginario del vino medieval, aunque en ocasiones la antífrasis opera el cambio (el mundo al revés) y la vida se cuela por las rendijas de la muerte instaurando otra forma de existencia dichosa: la inmortalidad.

The Paradigm of the Hebrew Prophet and the Russian Tradition of Iurodstvo

This paper proceeds from the premise that Russian iurodivye—or fools for Christ—display a remarkable resemblance to the Hebrew prophets. As it explores the genealogical link between these two cultural paradigms, the paper shows that, during the various stages of the developmental history of holy foolery, the figure of the Old Testament prophet served as the holy fool’s literary and behavioural model. The influence of the prophetic paradigm on the cultural phenomenology and hagiographic imagery of iurodstvo was exercised through the prominence assigned to the prophet in the written, visual and audible texts available to the Eastern Slavs from the beginning of Christian era. On the literary level, this enduring influence is discernable in the prophetic topoi that reached holy foolish hagiography directly and indirectly. While the direct venues are confined to Old Testament texts, which described the lives and acts of the Hebrew prophets, the indirect ones include New Testament texts and hagiographies. When the holy fool finds his place in the urban setting, his paradigm undergoes crucial changes, losing its ascetic aspects and acquiring the prophetic ones. This shift of emphasis defines Russian hagiography and cultural tradition, where the iurodivyi often emerges as the Russian version of the Hebrew prophet.

Changing men, transforming culture: inside the men's movement

The men's movement is a fascinating and vexing phenomenon that is part of the important history of gender change in the United States and the world. Men are finally engaging the challenges of feminism and rethinking what it means to be a man in today's society. At stake in this crisis of masculinity is the future of the family, the economy, and the society as a whole. This book examines the cultural imagery and the actions of the men of the mythopoetic men's movement in particular, examining their ideas, goals, and behavior. The book innovates theoretically by synthesizing cultural sociology with an interest in power as well as social psychology. Using ethnography as its primary research method, the study explores hegemony and microlevel power on the interactional level. The result is a dynamic look at the social construction of cultural discourse and the action that follows in this curious and unusual social movement.