Cultural Intimacy Research Articles

Whose Public, Whose Authority? Reflections on the moral force of violence

AbstractIn this Afterword I argue that public authority in South Asia is produced in a dynamic interplay between ever-more segmented publics and the ubiquity of highly performative violence. Drawing on Indian examples, I suggest that the success of vernacular publics in producing a sense of cultural intimacy within language communities in turn has prompted a new segmentation of publics. This has occurred along lines of caste and community, defined by social experience and symbols, rather than language as such. The concomitant routinization of violence in public life—whether as physical destruction of public property, attacks on other communities, or as symbolic elevations of victims of violence to the status of martyrs—indicate that today valorization and experiences of violence, however incommensurable, have emerged as a universal medium, or general equivalent, in public and political life in India.

Bridging Ethnic Differences for Cultural Intimacy: Production of Migrant Care Workers in Japan

Unlike other Asian host countries, Japan has been hesitant to open up the employment of migrant domestic helpers or caregivers until very recently. Focusing on the recruitment of migrant nurses and certified care workers through Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), this article examines how the host society and migrant workers negotiate care culture and ethnic differences in the production of “ideal migrant caregivers.” The EPA program associates professionalism with intimate knowledge about Japanese culture, and it emphasizes the capacity to perform bridgework and enhance cultural intimacy for Japanese elders. While migrant care workers are expected to assimilate culturally, the Japanese workplace offers them little cultural intimacy but an eroded sense of value and skills. In response, they highlight their “warm” disposition and “authentic” feelings as a superior alternative to the “cold” professionalism among Japanese coworkers, but such essentialist rhetoric of ethnic differences downgrades their professional abilities to a natural endowment.

Dancing with children in the field: on the relevance of embodied knowledge and its methodological consequences

ABSTRACTIn contexts where dancing proves a relevant daily practice, dancing with children may provide an extremely interesting strategic option for education ethnographers. Drawing from my empirical material, I describe how dancing was accidentally introduced as a role in the field (dance teacher) before later becoming an unexpectedly great ethnographic tool. Through a series of different breakdowns, I found this constituted the key to gaining better access to complicated domestic fields and thereby also attaining a closer cultural intimacy with participants, getting more easily integrated into educational contexts, overcoming communication problems and issues with reluctant informants. From this methodological insight, I here reflect on the theoretical aspects involved: should we overlook practices deemed irrelevant from the school agent point of view but essential to domestic contexts, we risk reinforcing symbolic violence through research. Therefore, I conclude by stressing the importance of focusing on apparently ‘irrelevant’ forms of domestic embodied knowledge transmission.

Two Identity Narratives

Specific populations with fluid identities are subject to external construction of their particularity and rarely expose their own commitments in public arena. Their identity-related feelings and loyalties are built up in correlation of personal intimacy, cultural intimacy and various inputs stemming from the sphere of identity. Varieties of storytelling play significant role in displaying identity-related intimacy and are used in elaboration of identity-inputs that are externally served to such populations. Based on superficial, genristic storytelling, interplay of various flaws of consciousness enables for the playful mixture of emotional precepts. Two types of storytelling on particularity of guest workers (gastarbeiter) are examined, in order to explore their formative potential and transformation through time. Literary narrative, as represented in the novel by Darko Markov Twilight in Viennese Hallway (Sumrak u Bečkom haustoru), and publicist narrative, as represented in The World in Shadows (Svijet u sjeni), a book by Nenad Popovic, are also interpreted as valuable sources for the understanding of identity troubles, especially as sources of representation of guest workers as living in-between geographical and social worlds.

Cultural Intimacy and Othering through Narrative Culture: Folktales about the Finnish Roma

Cultural Intimacy and Othering through Narrative Culture: Folktales about the Finnish Roma

Mediating the presence of others: Reconceptualising co-presence as mediated intimacy

Drawing insight from queer and media studies, this article analyses data from the UK study Adults’ Media Lives. The authors claim that this study reveals the significance of people’s intimate relationships to their media practices, highlighting in particular how people’s media practices mediate the ‘presence’ of others. The authors put forward the concept of mediated intimacy to capture both the cultural intimacy people have with media and the mediation of intimacy by media practices. Mediating intimacy has implications for normative conceptions of intimate life, including the significance of ‘time’ to the values of ‘home’ and ‘work’.

Modernization in the film “Dear Video” – anthropological analysis

The subject of this paper is a Serbian feature film Dear Video from 1991. Two brothers, one who is living in Germany and the other who is living in Serbian village and their families are communicating through VHS video tapes. Instead of facilitating their communication, the VHS video tapes actually reveal all that was suppressed and hidden from surface relationships (dishonesty, jealousy, deceptions). Thus, this paper combines two approaches: film ethnography (its diegesis) explained by Kovačević and Herzfeld’s cultural intimacy applied in Serbian film analysis by Naumović. Feature films, as part of pop cultural phenomena, interpret and give comments on socio-cultural phenomena and therefore can serve also as cognitive tools for understanding the world around us. The aim of the paper is to examine how this film solves the issue of unsuccessful modernization of Serbian villages, in other words, why guest workers did not have greater and more important influence on modernization on their places of origins. The film shows discord between the two brothers, discord among cousines, discord among villagers and discord among different nationalities in Yugoslavia. At the same time, discord can be interpreted as a self-defiant inner voice of the Serbs, and thus as the example of cultural intimacy and part of Serbian cultural identity. Consequently, these disharmonies can be understood as the answer of failed modernization.

Sharing Oral History With Arctic Indigenous Communities: Ethical Implications of Bringing Back Research Results

This article discusses ethical implications when sharing results in oral history research. We look at a case study of an Arctic community in Russian Lapland dealing with boarding school experiences. Bringing back research results about this topic provoked diverse reactions. We examine how the social life of stories and the social life of research are interconnected. By questioning the strict applicability of preformulated ethical research principles, we conclude that bringing back research results poses an opportunity to negotiate an appropriate form of reciprocity in research and to gain a deeper understanding of social processes in the communities under study. We identify principles of long-term engagement, collaborative methodologies, and inclusion into the cultural intimacy of the participating community as preconditions for a robust ground for ethics in oral history research.

Cultural Intimacy in the Practice of Sound Post-production in Turkish Yeşilçam Cinema

This article looks into the practice of sound post-production in the Turkish Yesilcam cinema during the 1960s and 1970s through the work of sound designers and sound engineers. There has been a reluctance to study these films as culturally valuable sonic artefacts because they have not been seen as of aesthetically high quality or products of meticulous design. During this so-called ‘high Yesilcam era’, budgets were scarce and production timetables tight. These films are nevertheless part of the sonic understanding of cinematic storytelling and are part of the mediated soundscape competences of listener-viewers. The aim is to understand sound design practices as cultural production of acoustic epistemologies in music, re-voiced dialogue and Foley, and how these epistemologies resonate with cultural intimacy. As additional research material the study uses interviews with sound engineer and director Necip Sarici (born 1934, present head of Lale Films) and his four-part documentary, Dublaj Tarihi/The History...

Beyond cultural intimacy: The tensions that make truth for India's Ahmadi Muslims

ABSTRACTHow should anthropologists write about the public self‐presentation of minority groups? In the Indian town of Qadian, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community—a marginal group with a long history of persecution in South Asia—uses visual media to counter hostility and produce images of its members as exemplary Muslims. That such images are artificially produced is an intimate secret shared by the town's residents. Understanding this secret without undermining the political struggle that Ahmadi Muslims are engaged in means moving beyond the idea that truth must be located in either the everyday or the public. For Ahmadis in Qadian, the disjuncture between these realms is a space of possibility that reveals truth. [cultural intimacy, visual media, exemplarity, self‐representation, Ahmadiyya, Islam, India]

Europe at the End of the Chunnel: Malcolm Bradbury’s and Tim Parks’s Eurosceptic Albion

ABSTRACTThe outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld addresses the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state.

Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora: Rethinking Transnationalism, edited by Wanning Sun and John Sinclair. London: Routledge, 2016. xvi + 229 pp. £95.00 (cloth); also available as an eBook.

<i>Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora: Rethinking Transnationalism</i>, edited by Wanning Sun and John Sinclair. London: Routledge, 2016. xvi + 229 pp. £95.00 (cloth); also available as an eBook.

Picturing Intimacy

Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we addressing the limits and potential of montage. We argue that the multi-vocality and multi-temporality of social networks can be incorporated into the linearity of a narrated film. We discuss how editing found footage into the film Christmas in August (2013, http://christmasinaugust.altervista.org/) was a way to explore the assemblages of diasporic identity and cultural intimacy for Boston’s Italian Americans. We focus specifically on the significance of social networks as mediators, and of montage as a tool to capture the virtual narratives and identities performed in the Facebook Group Page of St. Anthony’s Feast. We look at the Internet as both an archive source and a field of performance for acts of commemoration and remembering, and argue that montage is the most suited editing technique to reproduce the intimacy and irony expressed by the protagonists in their performance of Italian-ness.

Syrian Refugees and Cultural Intimacy in Istanbul: 'I Feel Safe Here!'

This paper derives from the findings of a recent qualitative and quantitative study conducted by the Support to Life Association among Syrian refugees in Istanbul to make their vulnerability assessment with a particular focus on their strong attachment to this city. The research question to be answered in this paper is to what extent Istanbul provides Syrian refugees with a space of cultural intimacy, where they feel safe and secure despite the difficulties of everyday life. The main premise of the paper is that historical, cultural and religious forms of affinity are likely to particularly attach the Sunni-Muslim-Arab-Syrians originating from Aleppo province to Istanbul. However, this sense of safety is not free from various sources of exploitation. This paper is expected to contribute to the discipline of Refugee Studies by shedding light on the historical elements and the agency that are often neglected in such analysis.

How Balkan Am I? Translation and Cultural Intimacy Through an Albanian-Greek Lens

Historiographers, anthropologists and cultural studies experts have shown that discussions of identity in or about the Balkans have been traditionally linked to a sense of ‘deficiency.’ Given the history of conflict, the drive towards greater European integration and the effects of the current economic crisis in the region, there is an urgency to deconstruct such ideologies. This article shows how Herzfeld’s (2002; 2005) approach to Balkan marginality may be productively extended to cover cultural and translation critique. Thus his concept of cultural intimacy is applied to stories of migration. Two Greek works are examined: Gazmend Kapllani’s semi-autobiographic novel A Short Border Diary (2006), translated into English by Marie Stanton-Ife, and Filippos Tsitos’ film Plato’s Academy (2009), subtitled into English. Both works have set a precedent in terms of audience reception and as documents of a historical cycle, the migration of thousands of Albanians to Greece after the collapse of communism. Translation and subtitling into English respectively show that the written and the audiovisual medium present different opportunities for conveying Balkan otherness.

Intangible Delicacies

The intention of the author of this article is to worry away at the limits of the concept of intangible culture. In pursuing this line of critique, he wonders how an international organization such as UNESCO, which is not only composed of nation-states but depends on their cooperation to get its work done, can address the status of cultural practices that are central to national self-recognition but that these nation-states do not want to admit to each other. These are the practices that he associates with the concept of “cultural intimacy” – the “dirty laundry” that every nation-state confronts, denies, and yet, for the most part, guiltily enjoys. The space of cultural intimacy includes all those aspects of cultural and social life that are locally recognized but externally suppressed. In virtually every country, there are deeply embedded and widely popular practices that do not seem to conform to a largely Western-inspired and globally dominant canon of respectability. These practices arguably represent the most intractable challenge to formal, state-led representations of culture.

Irony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)

In this essay I address the crucial role of irony and joking in anthropology with a focus on the ethnographic relationship. My starting point is field research carried out from 2001 to 2004 on Santo Antão island (Cape Verde), specifically Ponta do Sol. In Cape Verdean practice, jokes and irony represent customary communicational modes and important tools for building relationships: the ultimate means of achieving “cultural intimacy”, they are used almost as rites of initiation to bring newcomers into the community and at the same time to manage ambiguities. Indeed, it was precisely through irony that my interlocutors were able to perfectly capture my ambiguous insider/outsider position. In this specific ethnographic context, the ironic relationship is understood as both a key communication tool in the ethnographic encounter and an unusual rite of passage: although strangers/anthropologists can only be accepted if they become Cape Verdean to some degree, in reality they are never really able to complete this passage. The essay briefly reviews irony and joking in anthropology and focuses on aspects of ironic interactions in Cape Verde that are linked to intercultural relations in the ethnographic context as a site of uncertain communication. I stress how, especially in intercultural contexts, the ambiguity of irony represents not a barrier to communication but rather a key element of understanding between anthropologists and informants as well as a significant heuristic device.

Beyond the nation-state Polish national identity and cultural intimacy online

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the debate on ‘new patriotism’ in a Polish online discussion forum. We study the ways in which national identity is constructed in this setting. Digital communication contributes further to expanding discourse on national identities beyond nation-state borders. We analyse close to 6000 posts from a large Polish Internet discussion forum through the methods of quantitative concept mapping and qualitative close readings. Our results show that patriotism is negotiated beyond strictly national frameworks. It is not merely a question of national interest as it also connects people through a process of establishing and maintaining of cultural intimacy.

The Nation and its Sermons: Islam, Kemalism and the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey

This article will attempt to develop an in-depth examination of the pivotal role of Islam in the articulation of Turkish nationalism and Turkish official identity by examining the sermons authorized and imposed by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA), the state agency regulating religion, and how the their cosmologies of social, moral and political order are entwined. We will further argue that this role involves a twofold process; firstly, the Muslim identity was imagined as a prerequisite for being considered as a Turk and a Turkish citizen and, secondly, the ‘cultural intimacy’ of Turkish nationalism is grounded on the ‘root paradigms’ inherited and attained from the Islamic tradition and theology. These arguments are particularly pertinent at a time when Islamist JDP (Justice and Development Party) consolidated its power and began to instrumentalize PRA for its priorities and visions of Islam. This, however, does not bring a radical reshuffling of PRA. On the contrary, the continuity from the Kemalist-monitored PRA to the JDP-monitored PRA can be attested not only in its organizational features but also in its ideological make up; especially in terms of its perceptions of society, state and social order.

‘Do You Respect Me?’ Drinking as a Social Catalyst in the Reindeer Herding Communities of European Russia and Western Siberia

This paper 1 analyses alcohol consumption amongst the indigenous communities of reindeer herders in the Russian North. It introduces the metaphor of the social catalyst to interpret a broad range of effects and motivations linked with drinking practices and discourses associated with alcohol. An anthropologi- cal fieldwork methodology allows entry into the sphere of cultural intimacy in order to understand morally suspicious practices usually hidden from the outside world. A non-normative approach is suggested to escape the moral trap of the 'social problem' discourse. Two main patterns of drinking practices, the 'losing face together' and the 'competitive drinking' spree are identified. Whereas the first can be associated with local traditions, the second is linked with male inter- action with and within the settler communities. Transgressive practices causing loss of control are examined for their social function and the different notions of 'strength' associated with drinking practices. All of them serve either to confirm, to transcend or to abandon social boundaries, status roles and relationships, which allows us to speak about alcohol as a social catalyst.