Cultural Objectification Research Articles

O Feitiço do Império: a encenação do universo colonial português nas exposições de 1932, 1934 e 1940

This article focuses on the Estado Novo in the early 1930s and 1940s. The aim is to examine the Portuguese colonial imaginary, based on the visual narrative developed at three exhibitions: the Great Portuguese Industrial Exhibition of 1932, the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition in 1934, and the Colonial Section of the Portuguese World Exhibition in 1940. In all cases, the Empire was exhibi-ted in miniaturised form through groups of villages and dwellings characteristic of the different colonies, including indigenous people and specimens of local fauna. These visual communication forms provided a sensual immediacy that allowed access to the general public, inspired by the staging techniques of ethnographic environments that had been established in major exhibitions since the mid-1800s. The purpose is to analyse the expositive scenographic forms used, drawing on the resulting iconographic universe, of a propagandistic nature — mainly magazines and films — seeking to understand the process of cultural objectification to which the Portuguese colonial universe was subjected.

Presentation and Elaboration of the Folk Intangible Cultural Heritage from the Perspective of the Landscape

The folklore of intangible cultural heritage (FICH) is mainly expressed in folkloric activities, which include traditional festivals, living customs, production practices, folk beliefs, life rituals and folk costumes. The more reasonable and efficient ways to achieve conservation and transmission of FICH have become an urgent problem to be solved. Landscape presentation offers a potential method to address that by excavating the landscape characteristics of FICH based on its in-depth connotation and development history. This study aims to explore the cultural connotation of the FICH and extract the elements of landscape design, thus presenting and expressing the FICH using landscape as a carrier, to achieve the conservation and inheritance of the FICH. This research took the Taishun Hundred-family Feast culture, one of FICH in Sankui Town, Taishun County, China, as the study case, and extracted the landscape design elements in FICH after its content excavation and conducted presentation with cultural objectification, landscape narrative and contextualization. The results showed that the Hundred-family Feast culture contains rich landscape genes which can be divided into the ritual culture, food culture, festival culture and spiritual culture. Some of the elements in the Hundred-family Feast culture in terms of patterns, forms and colours for the content of activities, material carriers and spiritual places were also extracted for the landscape presentation. According to the different types and places of the Hundred-family Feast culture activities, the centre of Sankui Town is divided into four landscape thematic areas, namely the Hundred-family Feast cultural entrance experience zone, the food culture experience zone, ritual culture experience zone, and activity performance experience zone. The landscape element and spatial carriers were designed and illustrated for conserving and recovering the Hundred-family Feast culture, respectively. This study innovatively analyses the FICH from the perspective of the characteristics and constituent elements of the landscape and establishes a more reasonable framework system for the method of landscape presentation of the FICH in a structured and comprehensive manner. It enriches the theoretical system of intangible cultural heritage protection and its inheritance via landscape presentation methods for folklore activities.

Leadership in the margins

ABSTRACT This article explores the specific consequences of the male gaze on women in cinema leadership with particular attention on African American female directors. It explores ethics and ethical stance and has uncovered some preliminary conclusions about the standards of social behavior among cinema leadership that negatively interposes on the advancement and success of female directors in cinema, regardless of genre or artistic merit. The #Metoo and #Timesup movements have brought to light many unethical issues related to sexism, gender inequality, and objectification, and the ethical issues explored here pertain primarily to the expectation of autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. The content analyses exposed themes drawn from interviews and the literature that suggest a tradition of unethical behavior that the Hollywood industry has heretofore ignored at the expense of female industry participants in front of and behind the camera. This behavior has manifested in cultural disparities, objectification, and unethical social behavior, resulting in limited prospects for motion picture directorial leadership for women in cinema, particularly female directors of color.

The silent Tibetan women and their visual exclusions in Pema Tseden’s ‘Tibetan Trilogy’

It can be observed that Pema Tseden’s ‘Tibetan Trilogy’ is a series of male-dominant films. Men, at times, serve as ‘images’ used to represent Tibetan culture and ethnicity. Women in the trilogy can be considered silent and sometimes they are outside of the dichotomy of ‘image’ and the play of the ‘look’. This visual representation of gendered politics can be seen to differ from feminist film studies readings of ‘woman as image’ and ‘man as bearer of the look’ in traditional (Hollywood) mainstream cinema. Meanwhile, the trilogy rejects any objectification and exoticisation of Tibetan culture and landscape. This paper therefore takes into consideration a postcolonial feminist perspective to examine if it is possible to understand Pema Tseden’s refusal to include visually women in his ‘Tibetan Trilogy’ as one way in which he rejects the objectification and exoticisation of the Tibetan culture. In addressing this question, this paper will adopt the lines of inquiry, asking: can the ‘Tibetan women’ speak? If yes, from where can they speak? What can they speak? In this way, this paper raises questions for whether and how the permissible subjectivity of female characters in the trilogy can speak, be heard or be seen.

Anthropological Analysis of the Role of Personal Trainer in Fitness Teaching

Based on the theory of Thomas Csordas’s theory of anthropology of body, this paper records and analyzes the in-depth interviews with several experienced fitness enthusiasts and personal trainers. This study found that, in the teaching of fitness, the role of personal trainer mainly has two forms: one is cultural objectification, that is the role of cultural objectification expert, which is mainly for students to do physical examination, teaching and guiding fitness movements and making fitness plans, etc. The other is the preobjective function, which is reflected in the accompanying role of students in the process of fitness. In different consumption levels of gymnasium, the role of personal trainer is different.

Objetificação da música chope no quadro da “Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa” (Porto, 1934)

O processo de objetificação cultural é selectivo, pois, implica a recontextualização de determinados objectos culturais num outro contexto diferente daquele que os gerou, atribuindo-lhes novos sentidos e significados (Handler, 1984, p. 62). No quadro da Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa (Porto, 1934), esta atitude estava relacionada com os discursos de invenção do “outro”, onde as relações entre as sociedades são regidas por certas hierarquias. Mudimbe (2013, pp. 15-16) designa por colonos, aqueles que estabelecem uma região e ditam as regras; os colonizadores, aqueles que exploram um território pelo domínio da maioria local, com uma tendência para organizar e transformar zonas não europeias em construções fundamentalmente europeias. Acrescentaria no fim desta hierarquia, os colonizados, ou seja, aqueles que obedecem. No contexto da exposição colonial do Porto (1934), a música chope foi recontextualizada em Portugal, sendo-lhe atribuídos novos sentidos e significados, tornando-se em símbolo de identidade nacional portuguesa. Portanto, a música chope, durante a exposição colonial do Porto, foi transformada em práticas de rendição e submissão das comunidades moçambicanas, e os seus sentidos e significados foram reduzidos em atos de representação folclórica através de modelos performativos ocidentais e da imposição dos respectivos modelos estéticos e morais, incluindo uma comunicação vertical de cima para baixo.

Twofold Freedom and Contingency

The paper shows that the semantic complex of freedom assumes the form of a twofold freedom as horizontally differentiated realms of meaning gain autonomy: on the one side, individual and interpersonal freedom, and, on the other side, the freedom and self-determination of social fields or subsystems, both of which presuppose, stabilize, and destabilize one another. This co-constitution is proven with three exemplary thinkers. Simmel sees money as a decisive factor in the genesis of the modern social form of freedom and individuality. His argument is brought into systematic comparison with Constant’s prior work on individual freedom in European modernity, and with Luhmann’s later notion of contingency and constitutionally guaranteed freedom of communication as prerequisite for factual differentiation. It is demonstrated that in Simmel’s work, the modern variant of the social form of freedom is described as a specific interrelation that ties the objectification of culture to a depersonalisation of social differentiation as well as to a temporalization of dependencies.

“Fractured Light”: From Globalization’s Hyper-Illumination to Culture as Symbolic Exchange

This essay argues epistemic reduction and reification of indigenous cultures in imperial and colonial discourse underlies the fundamentally economic terms of representation of those cultures. The pursuit of cultural knowledge and forms of cultural exhibition for instrumental, including commercial, ends entails such reduction of culture to representation. Cultural self-representation changes the relations of producer and consumer in economic exchange, but does not change its essentially reductive notion of culture. With contemporary neoliberal globalization, agency, within market relations – like self-representation in a representational economy – ultimately risks assimilation to the global market in cultural difference. Two novels by Māori writers, Paula Morris's Rangatira (2011) and James George’s Ocean Roads (2006), point to contemporary commodification and consumption of indigenous cultural difference as the apotheosis of processes of cultural objectification, reification and commodification that began with imperial colonialism. While Rangatira is set largely between the 1860s and 1890s, and Ocean Roads between 1945 and 1989, both are published within the era of contemporary neoliberal globalization, and ultimately concern the critical stakes in relation to cultural decolonization. They contextualize the epistemic and genocidal violence that has been given an alibi in the valorization of (self-)representational images and performances. In refusing to objectify Māori culture – or by disarticulating such objectifications – the novels point to the potential for those un/signified spaces to evoke precisely the importance of culture as dynamic, unframeable “symbolic exchange”. I argue aspects of Baudrillard’s critical notion of “symbolic exchange” reveal both the stakes and the possibilities of (re)conceiving culture outside of market relations.

Women's Parliament: The Israeli Experience

The Women's Parliament in Israel is a platform for politics from a feminist perspective, established in November 1989. The article discusses the aims, activities and achievements of this framework on the background of political marginalization, economic discrimination, religious oppression, and cultural objectification of women. The Parliament strives to raise awareness of this reality; to change public discourse and policies; to support women competing over leadership positions. The article also addresses the financial and organizational barriers faced by the Women Parliament's endeavors to bring about fundamental change in the gendered power structure. Consequently, it examines the idea of establishing Women's Parliaments around the world, as a means for global gender change.

This role is also that of Science

It may seem redundant to address Sport as a development trigger but, sometimes, redundancy is necessary for someone to be heard.The commanding voices of Philosophy in the XXth century take sciences as trivial, by expressing the notion that Science has nothing to do with the ontological and metaphysical statutes of men.What is at stake is too much important, as the attack is not aimed at Sciences, organizations and institutions, nor at the people, but rather against Reason itself.We found ourselves immersed in irrationalities and superstitions in the most primitive form of belief. Worldwide there are three times more astrologists than there are physics. In Portugal, also in Sport, there are numberless stand-coaches and pseudo-writers, which all speak and write about exercise and appear as public opinion makers, stating banalities that discredit Sport and its professionals.In western science, what is axiomatic is not merely the concept of progress, but rather the concept of constant and unlimited progress. And we take for granted this lack of limits… Indeed, it seems …… In fact, it is a deeply enigmatic assumption, taking into account the metaphysical meaning of the term. And it is from these assumptions that we must analyse the role of Sport and Exercise. Biological life may be increased in duration, but death will come: and the challenge is therefore the quality of an extended life. In Sport and exercise, progress has more than a technical relevance, it has an ontological relevance: the enhancement of a life cycle.Sport is, therefore, an immeasurable asset and holds opportunity to induce peace and be a promoter of several social causes.Sport is one of the possible, perhaps the main, cultural objectification and historical form of movement. This is only possible by valuing the fundamental character of the body in motion, because it is upon it that the sports body is installed and merges. Even giving it a fundamental meaning, it has not yet found its value due to the failure in the evaluation of its return, whether educational, social, health, economic or structural.The importance of Sport and its institutions cannot be measured, as much as some state so, by performance indicators in an international setting (this leads to unfair, unproportioned comparisons among sports with different density and international coverage).A message that, unfortunately, has passed to general society, involving risks to lower even more the national sport involvement is: resources must be mainly focused in the few sports with international merit. With time, this will end up in an overall failure of national Sport, and subsequently a progressive underfinancing of the Sport will appear.Every organization that deal with Sport cannot deviate from what is its main mission, to organize, promote and spread the Sport for a permanent and constant demonstration that what is done and how it’s done fully respect the high public interest and, ultimately, serves the people.This role is also that of Science.

Carl Lumholtz y la objetualización de la cultura indígena en la Sierra Madre Occidental

The present article analyzes the context during which the expeditions of explorer Carl Lumholtz took place in the Western Sierra Madre between 1890 and 1905, supported by the American Museum of Natural History. This is done within the framework of the political, business and intellectal relations between Mexico and the US during the Porfiriato and the “Museum Era” in the history of anthropology, processes that merge in the indigenous question (“problema del indio”) in Northwestern and West Mexico. The Gran Nayar is taken as a particular example of an emerging historical-cultural region and anthropology laboratory to reflect on the role of ethnographic colectionism as practiced under the asumption of the inevitable dissapareance of indigenous societies in their incorporation as Mexican citizens within the modern Nation-State. I therefore adress the “objectification of indigenous culture”, alongside with the process of land expropiation and national education in Spanish, constructed as an ethnographic collection that is catalogued, preserved and consumed in the museum space.

Objectification and Social Aesthetics: Memoranda and the Celebration of “Badaga Day”

On 15 May 1989, the Badaga, the dominant peasant community in the Nilgiri Hills, organized a huge rally and handed over a memorandum to the government. On the basis of their culture they demanded tribal status, a guaranteed price for their agricultural products, and other privileges. I shall argue that the medium of a memorandum with its textual and material form requires and fosters the process of cultural objectification. Culture is turned into an object and becomes a form of currency in the political process. Later, 15 May was named Day, an annual context for self-representation. Performative acts like hoisting the Badaga flag, singing the Badaga hymn, and worshipping the bust of H. B. Ari Gowder contribute to an overall social aesthetics. Sounds, colors, proximity, and other culturally patterned sensory experienc[s]w (MACDOUGALL 2006, 98) contribute to the feeling of one-ness and underline the demand for cultural autonomy.

¿Hacia una “nueva época” en los estudios de memoria social?

Social memory is currently a central topic at both the rhetoric and the academic level. This has led to a remarkable theoretical and conceptual effervescence in this field. While for some authors such state of affairs suggests a lack of precision and clarity –terminologically as well as conceptually– and even warns us about the imminent ‘fatigue’ of the field, our analytical perspective is consistent with those authors who point to a reconfiguration of the manifestations of memory and the social arenas associated with it. Through an analytical historicization of terminological and conceptual developments in memory studies, this paper outlines a first and second ‘era’ of memory studies, towards the beginning and end of the last century. It also points to the emergence of a third period, a ‘new era’ in memory praxis and theory. As part of broader processes of globalization and transnational flows, as well as hypermobility of individuals and cultural objectification, fuelled by increasing technological capabilities and media literacy, unprecedented mnemonic modes, practices, and spaces develop. This scenario suggests a need for new perspectives, which can dialogue with existing ones, and an expansion of the theoretical and conceptual focus on the transformations and continuities of memory.

The Ins and Outs ofCultura: How Bands Voice Their Relationships to the State-Sponsored Music Scene in Recife, Brazil

This article compares two musical groups from Recife, the capital of the Northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The first group, which I call Banda Recifolinda is a professional, middle-class pop band that combines international styles, such as Afro Beat and rock, with Brazilian rhythms. The second group, Maracatu Afro, plays maracatu, a local carnivalesque genre. The groups integrate musical activities into their community outreach efforts that target young people in Maracatu Afro's marginalized neighborhood. Despite their apparent differences, both groups benefit from state sponsorship because they qualify as cultura, an official category that emphasizes artistic and especially musical expressions of regional identity. I demonstrate how each group constructs its relationship to the discourses of cultura during performances and rehearsals. Specifically, I address how band members’ voicing strategies (Bakhtin, Agha, and Silverstein) construe them as insiders or outsiders of cultura and within Brazilian society, more generally. While Banda Recifolinda primarily aligns to cultura discourses by rhetorically distancing themselves from the commercialized dance music styles which the state does not endorse, Maracatu Afro's alignment to Afrocentric, politicized discourses challenge the ostensibly inclusive premise of cultura, and express their perceived exclusion from Brazilian society. The contrasts between each groups’ voicing strategies reveal that cultura encompasses multiple paths for inclusion and exclusion that shape the ways in which these bands participate in the primarily state managed cultura scene. Since cultura is the combined result of national policies and cultural transformations from Brazil's redemocratization period, investigating how bands orient to cultura discourses not only offers analytic access into how contemporary actors negotiate the increasing objectification of culture (Comaroff and Comaroff, Dávila), but also how cultural participation influences how citizens interactionally envision, practice, and orient to democracy in Brazil (Avelar and Dunn, Moehn).

O conceito de mediação em Vigotski e Adorno

O trabalho discute o conceito de mediação à luz de Vigotski e Adorno, autores reconhecidos nas áreas de psicologia social e educacional. Embora influenciados pelo pensamento marxista e voltem seu estudo à cultura, suas abordagens se diferenciam. Vigotski delineia o conceito de mediação pela perspectiva sócio-histórica, enquanto Adorno analisa as contradições inerentes à mediação sob os fundamentos da teoria crítica frankfurtiana. Por sua vez, Vigotski compreende a mediação como processo cultural pela aprendizagem, tendo como aporte o referencial marxiano e a crítica à naturalização do desenvolvimento na aquisição das funções superiores. Em Vigotski a mediação estabelece uma ligação, o signo, a atividade e a consciência interagem socialmente. Para Adorno, a mediação, mitificada enquanto fruto da ação e da subjetividade, sobrepuja uma contradição: objetificação da cultura e da formação; risco de estabelecer uma falsa consciência. A discussão epistemológica vai além da sociologia e da psicologia, resvala na relação sujeito e objeto.

Cultural Performance and the Reconstruction of Tradition among the Bunun of Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article aims to understand the meanings and impact of the reconstruction of tradition and the objectification of culture among the Bunun, an Austronesian‐speaking indigenous people of Taiwan. It situates the revival of tradition in the contexts of state appropriation and the development of ethnic tourism, and shows how the Bunun attempt to control their relationship with the state and the dominant society by reconstituting tradition in the present. The culturally specific ways in which the Bunun sustain local identity and sociality by reproducing their concept of personhood are highlighted. In doing so, I seek to move the analysis beyond the use of reified tradition as a political and identity symbol to address the broader theoretical concern of understanding tradition as a culturally specific mode of change.

Immanent critique and Islam: Anthropological reflections

This article offers an anthropological outline of immanent critique in Islamic traditions. In addressing the question — what is immanent critique? — it dwells on the interrelationships amongst the Enlightenment’s notion of reason, critique, and Islam. My main contention is that to construe the Western notion of critique derived from Enlightenment’s specific conceptualization of reason as critique per se is misleading for there are non-Enlightenment modes of critique such as the Islamic one this article proposes for further discussion. I also discuss the objectification of culture, social distance and a new sense of temporality as significant factors facilitating the condition for critique to become particularly salient under modernity. Based largely on ethnographic-historical materials from South Asia, I argue why immanent critique is a useful analytical tool to understand the dynamics of Muslim cultures and societies in their diverse milieus.

Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka (review)

Susan Reed, Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, 328 pp. In many places in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, practices formerly associated with ritual have been secularized, severed from their ritual contexts, and transformed into performances of heritage. This transformation, whether described as folklorization, aestheticization, cultural objectification, or the invention of tradition, always involves assimilation to new values as the newly conceived performances are inserted into new contexts and new hierarchies of power. Susan Reed's historical ethnography of Kandyan dance clearly illustrates this process, documenting how a local ritual-based dance form was transformed into a symbol of Sinhala ethnicity and Sri Lankan culture. The anthropological importance of the book lies in its consideration of the effects of this transformation on the community of traditional dancers and on new groups of performers, particularly women. The book is based on the author's extensive field research, conducted for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including her own study of Kandyan dance with teachers from the traditional dancing community and stage performers. The book is accompanied by a DVD with extensive footage of a traditional kohomba kankariya ritual and demonstrations of Kandyan dance technique and performance. What is today known as Kandyan dance is derived from the kohomba kankariya, traditionally a post-harvest ritual performed to propitiate the local deities of the Kandyan region of Sri Lanka. As a ritual complex, the kankariya included not only dance, but singing, prose recitation, drumming, drama, and comedy, all based loosely on the central origin myth of the Sinhala people. The first chapter of Dance and the Nation details the kohomba kankariya ritual and the dances that traditionally took place as part of it. The second chapter describes the traditional community of dancers, the Beravas, who were one among a group of service castes, and their relationship to their traditional patrons, the Kandyan elites. The third chapter situates transformations of Kandyan dance in the political and cultural context of Sri Lanka in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, with particular regard to British colonialism and the cultural renaissance in Colombo, both of which began the process of defining and recontextualizing Kandyan dance apart from the ritual. The fourth chapter focuses on the history of the dance in Sri Lanka's post-independence period, when rising Sinhala nationalism spurred the redefinition of Kandyan dance as a specifically Sinhalese tradition, opposed to Tamil dance traditions. During this period, the state directly intervened in the transformation of the dance, becoming the most powerful patron and sponsoring the establishment of numerous dance schools. The last three chapters of the book consider the new contexts of the dance and their effects on groups of performers and the meaning of the dance itself. The fifth chapter considers the plight of the traditional Berava dancers in the new context of dance schools, cultural heritage performances, and international tours-contexts which are defined around middle-class values of respectability. Ironically, while Beravas have been recognized as bearers of national tradition, that recognition, by both Sri Lanka's middle classes and by the state, comes at a price: Berava dancers must conform to middle-class notions of respectability or risk being marginalized or forgotten. …

Immersive virtual worlds in university-level human geography courses

This paper addresses the potential for increased deployment of immersive virtual worlds in higher geographic education. An account of current practice regarding popular culture in the geography classroom is offered, focusing on the objectification of popular culture rather than its constitutive role vis-à-vis place. Current e-learning practice is similarly deemed insufficient, in particular its ability to promote social interaction among students. This paper argues that video games ought to be more thoroughly incorporated into the classroom experience so as to demolish the subject–object distinction between academic/popular knowledge and also to construct viable e-learning strategies. Adopting a constructivist perspective, video games are offered as a site for problem-based learning, noting that careful deployment for pedagogical purposes can harness the excitement and interest that many students already have for the medium. Within the genre, the educative potential of immersive virtual worlds such as Second Life is noted, particularly in regard to their radical openness, ease of social interaction and built-in student interest. Immersive virtual worlds are offered as particularly useful for promoting change within students’ conceptualizations of representation, narrativity and affect. A sample teaching strategy is offered for incorporation in the university classroom that can be adapted to many different geography courses.

Tourism that Empowers?

Turismo comunitario is a type of community-based tourism that focuses on achieving certain key objectives, such as ensuring that communities have control over tourist activity. This article analyses whether or not this mode of tourism really does strengthen and empower communities. Market, commodification, objectification and appropriation are the key concepts in the analysis. The communities of Tunibamba and Agua Blanca in Ecuador provide the ethnographic context for our reflections. This article looks at the way in which communities create their tourism products, how they are linked to these products and how they market them, how these processes fit in with everyday community life and the extent to which they transform it. Observations about the agency of communities in the tourism business and the dual process of appropriation-commodification of their products — through the objectification of culture and environment — reveal that turismo comunitario could potentially empower and strengthen communities, while at the same time helping to deepen our understanding of tourism in indigenous contexts.