Cultural Self-determination Research Articles

Student's Linguistic Personality and Multicultural Self-Organization through Foreign Language Teaching

Abstract. The article traces the features of linguistic personality’s formation in the context of globalization processes in the world. Multicultural self-organization is notable for students’ ability to build up the dialogue of cultures in their professional occupation and considered to be a triune person’s educa-tion, arising as the result of integration of cross-cultural linguistic personali-ty’s sphere, global attitude to foreign culture and cultural self-determination. The inclusion of the term “linguistic personality” in the process of foreign language teaching enables integrating the synergetic capabilities of linguistic training to arise the dynamics of multicultural self-organization, which pro-vides the humanization of national and language relationship. The author con-siders the process of foreign language teaching as the mechanism, which ena-bles to mobilize and structure the qualities of linguistic personality. The study shows intercultural approach as the main one; within it one can use the toolkit of activities, which help to implement the idea of multicultural self-organization of student’s linguistic personality in foreign language teaching.

Aesthetic Grounds of Realization of Person-oriented Model of Education

Complexity and dynamism of the development of socio-cultural situation require constant transformation of the educational paradigm, elaboration of the person-oriented approaches, models, and technologies of its realization, based on the principles of humanistic-oriented pedagogy. The principle of integral development of the anthropological characteristics, self-realization of the person as a holistic subject of both social and spiritual culture acts as the priority purposes and values of humanistic paradigm of the person-oriented education. The author emphasizes the urgency of formation and establishment of the conditions for realization of the open models of educational practices as a socially-anthropological project of the human potential development. The principle of aesthetization of communicative interaction of the subjects of educational process, based on the development of the ability to reproduce aesthetically-reflexive interaction between its participants, is one of the conditions of productivity of realization of personally-oriented model of the educational practice. Establishment of dialogically open systems of subject-subject interaction in educational space should be realized in the context of institutionalization of existential and cultural self-determination and self-development of personality. The author comes to a conclusion about the necessity of development of productive pedagogical technologies, directed at formation of aesthetic culture of designing and realization of individually-oriented educational trajectories of development of personality potential of the subjects of the educational process.

Ambedkar’s paradox of differentiation: Language, nation and recognition of states in post-colonial India

Set against the backdrop of the linguistic states movement in the Telugu-speaking regions that would eventually come to form the state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956, this article explores Ambedkar’s views on state formation as articulated during the worst periods of unrest. Apparently driven by language, the Andhra movement of the first half of the twentieth century was an exercise in the self-definition and empowerment of an increasingly self-conscious political community. Ambedkar viewed the demand for linguistically defined states as comparable to the Muslim League’s demand for a separate Pakistan in the manifest desire for cultural recognition and self-determination. His proposed resolution against the potential threat to national unity posed by recognising language as a factor in state formation was twofold. One, he emphasised the idea of ‘one state, one language’ originally proposed by the States Reorganisation Commission, arguing that multiple states sharing a common language would be less likely to see themselves as a ‘nation’, with the added advantage that the majority-to-minority ratio would remain reasonable. Two, the language of administration should be common irrespective of the linguistic identity of the state, and that this should be English until Hindi became universally acceptable. As he saw it, the thoughtful implementation of such a solution that compromised on certain notions of the ideal could paradoxically facilitate the unity of the post-colonial republic, by recognising anxieties of minority groups, whether religious, linguistic or of another kind, and protecting them.

Section 235 of the Constitution: Too Soon or too Late for Cultural Self-Determination in South Africa?

Section 235 of the Constitution acknowledges the right of cultural groups to selfdetermination. Giving practical effect to s 235 is a task to be undertaken by a future Parliament. This article explores the concept of non-territorial, also called cultural autonomy, whereby culture groups can establish a legal person clothed with public law powers as an organ of government to make decisions about the protection and promotion of their culture, language and customs. Several case studies where cultural autonomy is applied are referred to and recommendations are made for future consideration in South Africa.

Šuolaikinė sąmonė globaliajame diskurse: tarp sekuliarumo ir tradicijos

Global processes include the religious and the secular changes of modern consciousness. Their study implies new theoretical approaches. The depth of global processes is interpreted in the form of various theoretical concepts. It is clear that modern reality in its global expression and actualization – this is an absolutely new philosophical and cultural studies phenomenon. Theoretical approaches of global events are very important in relation with the different experience of modern events that represent new forms of awareness in the global discourse.Global perspective makes it possible to identify diverse sociocultural approaches which appear in common human context of social activity and interpretation of experience. For reflection of global consciousness and new technological thinking the standard methodological divisions prove to be of no use, since the new mental constructs appear not in traditional but in virtual spaces.The situation lacks systemic theoretical discourse, which could define new technological effect on modern code switching in cultures and their shift to secularity. Historically new experience of global cultural changes reflects new experience of technology and the changes call for new criteria and valuation.Religious cultural self-determination and world view in globalized European and world setting is a priority for fundamental and applied research. This new interdisciplinary area requires definition of the newly emerging consciousness within the global modernity, its shifts and the crucial features it demonstrates.This paper analyzes the peculiarities of the modern global consciousness and the new phenomena of global secularism. V. Kavolis theoretical paradigm analyzes the genesis of the secularity and the structural relationships between symbolic structures and the global environment.

Unpredictable Consequences of Sámi Self-determination: Rethinking the legal protection of Sámi cultural heritage in Norway

Sámi cultural heritage is protected in Norway by the Cultural Heritage Act. A 1978 amendment to this Act provides automatic protection to all Sámi cultural heritage sites and buildings older than 100 years. Strong legal protection has in a very positive and constructive way contributed to Sámi identity and cultural self-determination for more than 30 years. This article discusses the current level of protection and different scenarios for future management of Sámi cultural heritage sites and buildings. Background material includes The Norwegian National Sites and Monuments Record, relevant policy documents, and interviews with Sámi cultural heritage management and three Sámi municipalities. Our results demonstrate that strong legislation for protection of Sámi cultural heritage, and thus in favour of Sámi cultural rights, can contribute to severe restrictions on future planning and development in local communities. The intent to protect Sámi cultural heritage sites, paradoxically, may in future threaten traditional Sámi land use. Keywords: Sámi, cultural heritage, cultural heritage management, Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act (1978), protected sites, Nordland, Troms, Finnmark.Citation: Arctic Review on Law and Politics, vol. 3, 1/2012 p. 30–50. ISSN 1891-6252

Review: <em>Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes</em> by Arturo Escobar

Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes by Arturo Escobar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 456 pp. ISBN 978-0- This work investigates forms of alterity, difference, and heterogeneity that emerge through the dynamics of postcolonial development and modernization along the Pacific coast of Colombia. Escobar’s work looks specifically at the Process of Black Communities (Proceso de Comunidades Negras, PCN), a political organization that represents the larger community of Afro-Colombians who had been geographically, politically, and economically isolated until the 1990s. With the advent of efforts to integrate these communities into the mainstream Colombian and global economy, Escobar documents the ways in which PCN attempted to transform this integration process in their own terms. Escobar’s ethnographic account of PCN’s efforts elegantly traces the continuity between the activists’ practices of economic and cultural self-determination and the larger theoretical discourse of alterity, difference, and heterogeneity. This continuity between practice and theory provides a sense of globalization and economic integration as an epistemological encounter in which the Afro- Colombian communities’ ways of knowing and acting in the world are wholly threatened. Escobar’s work is thus largely motivated by identifying possibilities for exit out of this epistemological encounter; that is, possibilities for exit out of a modernization and rampant capitalism that leaves little room for alternate forms of being. On the whole, his work provides an ambivalent response to this overarching question; nevertheless, this is an important work for scholars interested in understanding the epistemological and power dynamics within the global political economy of environmental activism and conservation. By looking specifically through the prisms of place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks, Escobar analyzes the various forms of alterity, difference, and heterogeneity that occur through the work of biodiversity conservation among the PCN activists. For example, traditional Western accounts construct the concept of place as a territorial configuration. Escobar demonstrates instead how concepts of place for the Afro-Colombian activists are inclusive of notions of history, culture, environment, and social life. This distinction, he argues, is one of the epistemological fault lines around which the political debates of place and environment form. Through his inquiry of alterity, difference, and heterogentity through the additional tropes of capital, nature, and development, Escobar makes several broad arguments. First, Escobar argues that capital and forms of economic organization should been seen as fundamentally heterogeneous and diverse in order to prevent the universalizing tendencies in economic frameworks. Second, he asserts that Western models of science are based on culturally specific

Sins of Objectification?: Agency, Mediation, and Community Cultural Self-Determination in Public Folklore and Cultural Tourism Programming

Critics claim that by objectifying culture, public folklorists limit or deny the agency of the practitioners of traditions whom they represent. This article analyzes how public folklorists engage dialogically with community members to mutually shape frames of representation, while facilitating community cultural self-determination. Arguing against a view of objectification as categorically exploitative, I demonstrate how agency is pursued and accomplished through cultural representations that may entail objectification but generate benefits for community members as well as for folklorists.

Sins of Objectification? Agency, Mediation, and Community Cultural Self-Determination in Public Folklore and Cultural Tourism Programming

Abstract Critics claim that by objectifying culture, public folklorists limit or deny the agency of the practitioners of traditions whom they represent. This article analyzes how public folklorists engage dialogically with community members to mutually shape frames of representation, while facilitating community cultural self-determination. Arguing against a view of objectification as categorically exploitative, I demonstrate how agency is pursued and accomplished through cultural representations that may entail objectification but generate benefits for community members as well as for folklorists.

Toponymies of lesser-used languages in the North: Issues of socio-linguistic conditions among Inuit and Sámi

Both Inuit and Sámi have experienced the expansion of colonial state systems and immigrant populations from the south into their territories in Arctic Canada and northernmost Europe respectively. These historical processes have resulted, among other socio-economic conditions, in the superposition and often displacement of their aboriginal toponymy by external interests introducing other languages and place names. In the introduction this paper discusses the socio-linguistic conditions of aboriginal languages in Canada and in Europe. Both situations differ with regard to the legal protection of lesser-used, minority or aboriginal languages. In Europe the linguistic rights of minorities or aboriginal peoples are protected under conventions and by laws on the international and national level. In fact, the framework of the European Union has enhanced the position of languages in general. In the Canadian confederation, with English and French as official languages, specific legal provisions for aboriginal languages exist at the provincial and territorial levels. Still, the levels of protection are considerably weaker for these languages. As case studies the socio-linguistic conditions among the Inuit and Sámi are analyzed by focusing on the maintenance and development of their aboriginal toponymy as cultural and linguistic heritage and expression of human environmental relations. The paper explains recent practical efforts by both Inuit and Sámi to counteract the process of linguistic displacement by developing programs to enhance the development of their integral place name systems. Both Inuit and Sámi institutions have established programs to record and document their oral and historical toponymy, using modern technologies to produce maps and gazetteers. These programs are presented and discussed in the light of cultural self-determination and human and linguistic rights. In conclusion, the question is discussed if communities of lesser-used languages are able to maintain the functional space needed for the security of their languages within a multicultural and multilingual context.

Partisans of Nation-States: Comparing the Role of Minority Identities in New Zealand and Finland

Cultural diversity and the decentralisation of cultural self-determination are principal aims in the cultural strategies of modern western countries. However, there is no general agreement as to which groups should be granted such autonomy, or about who should be regarded as the authentic spokesmen for their groups. This article asks how two smallish but developed countries, Finland and New Zealand have historically arranged the status of their cultural minorities. The comparison is based on the cultural differences between these two countries, which have similar views on political rights and share a similar dependence on a limited number of economic sources. The chief guides of my reasoning have been Michael Volkerling's notion of cultural policies as ‘difference-engines’ and Alessandro Pizzorno's conception of ‘partisan identities’. The analysis showed that the State has, in both cases, actively interfered with the construction of sub-identities. This was done by carefully creating the channels of negotiation, and specifying the individuals actually involved in the negotiations about minority rights. These ‘appropriate national sub-identities’ have ensured a stability for the state, but have simultaneously led to enormous social concentrations of power within and between the groups themselves.

Living on the ground: The “Culture Woman” and the “Missus”

Synopsis In “Living on the Ground” I investigate the cultural interactions between White and Indigenous people in a remote Indigenous settlement in Australia's Great Sandy Desert. Drawing on my own experience as a White Irish-Australian woman living in an Indigenous domain, I distinguish between the “Culture Woman” and the “Missus” as the difference between two worlds. The “Culture Woman” was formed in the gynocentric Indigenous environment of a women's Tjilimi (camp), where I lived with 13 women elders as they apprenticed me in their ways, their rituals and every-day customs. This contrasted starkly with the “Missus” — a conduit constructed by the elders to facilitate their access to resources tightly controlled by a hegemonic White society. The “Missus” is the nexus between Indigenous peoples' cultural needs and the demands of an inflexible White bureaucracy. These paradigms are created in a context of acute cultural clash where two societies are divided by even seemingly innocuous issues such as dirt and “mess”. This article is a call to White and Other-than-Indigenous researchers, consultants and community service providers to find ways of working which respect and advance Indigenous cultural self-determination. NB: This article strongly draws from Zohl de Ishtar's PhD thesis and her upcoming book Holding Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women's Law, Spinifex Press, 2005.

How Not to ‘Question Scotland’

There have recently emerged a number of strongly-worded critiques of a malaise which is allegedly widespread amongst those who pronounce on Scottish culture. The sickness is called 'essentialism', and its symptoms are many, even though the pathogen is identical. The doctors who have diagnosed this disease have found it in the work of (amongst others) Tom Nairn, Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, and Cairns Craig. A striking recent diagnosis is provided by Eleanor Bell in her monograph Questioning Scotland (Bell 2004) a book which is largely an assault on alleged essentialism, and which will provide a focus for my discussion* There have also been a number of other, more ad hoc criticisms from a variety of authors. A recent collection of cultural essays, Beyond Scotland, captures the mood well. We have all been stuck in the essentialist parish too long, implies the title; we need to get out more. The editors of this volume refer in their introduction to 'the damage wrought by an over-determined, self-defeating essentialism fostered by Scottish criticism's overweening desire for cultural self-determination' (Carruthers, Goldie, & Renfrew 2004, p. 14). The essentialist sin is 'to mistake a complex, forward-looking, heterogeneous identity for one that is narrow and reductive in its nativism' (Carruthers et al 2004, p. 15).

Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France

Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France. By Phyllis Taoua. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002. Pp. xxv, 268. $24.95 paper. In a rich, well-researched essay, Phyllis Taoua examines discourses of liberation by writers from France and the former colonies throughout the twentieth century. Critics tend to tie African and Caribbean writers' political commitment and use of realism during colonialism and early independence to the influence of French literary movements on their writing. Revisiting the issue of agency in political and cultural self-determination, Taoua rectifies some of the misperceptions about the African, Caribbean, and French literary innovations and avant-garde movements, and demonstrates the existence of a dialogue among them. To do that, Taoua focuses on canonical works and authors. The essay is divided into three parts and six chapters. The first two parts consider dominant trends in resistance to the colonial rule: vanguard primitivism, Surrealism, and Negritude during the interwar period, and Existential humanism and new forms of realism, including the African point of view, as part of the postwar debates. The third part analyzes the impact of decolonization on experimental fiction, including the New Novel. In Chapter 1, going back to the interwar years, the influence of Picasso, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris, the author records the link between vanguard primitivism and Surrealism. Taoua's examination of Leiris's L'Afrique fantome enables her to point out the change of attitudes toward non-Western objects. This new interest, she remarks, prompted museums to reorganize their space, but also signaled a commodification of aesthetics and a pillaging of cultural artifacts. Taoua argues that vanguard primitivism did not correspond, contrary to James Clifford's proposition, to a decentering of European cultural authority (p. 4), but remained, like Surrealism, a Eurocentric idiom. Taoua retraces the Surrealists' Revolution in French culture, with their dissension with the establishment but also their own tensions and limitations. In particular, she highlights the inner contradictions of the movement, notably, its appeal for dissidence and revolution and yet its gradual retreat from reality and therefore from history. Taoua demarcates the increasing divide between ethics and aesthetics, how the intended subversion of conventional modes of representation ends up in arbitrariness of decisions. Taoua identifies Andre Breton's lack of engagement through his criticism of class consciousness and his refusal to act collectively; likewise, his lack of interest, at the time, in African and Caribbean matters. His discovery of Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal will corne much later. Chapter 2 recontextualizes the significance of Negritude as an anticolonial movement. In that regard, the author advocates for the need of a critical reassessment through the historical lenses. She shows how the Caribbean writers, students, and authors of Legitime Defense in fact pushed their claims further than the Surrealists and challenged the colonial order. Despite a detailed reading of Senghor's Woman and innovative remarks about both Damas and Aime Cesaire's works and significance for the movement, Taoua's query could have been pushed further. Benetta JulesRosette's work, Black Paris, and her analysis of the Negritude generation might have helped to draw a more dynamic picture. As is, the reader is left with three iconic figures without getting a real sense of a generation or dialogue with the other intellectuals in Africa and the islands. Chapter 3 examines the aesthetic shift toward politically engaged realism and the novel, in opposition to Surrealism and its experimental poetics. Taoua closely analyzes the contradictions in the positions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus vis-a-vis the anticolonial struggle. …

The Rehnquist Court and Indigenous Rights: The Expedited Diminution of Native Powers of Governance

The U.S. Supreme Court has long played a prominent role in defining, critiquing, and, in some cases, rearranging the political relationship between indigenous peoples and the states and the federal government, and in enlarging or reducing the inherent sovereign status of native peoples. This article assesses the most recent Supreme Court opinions that are systematically, and without reference to judicial precedent, redefining the political status of tribal nations by reducing their heretofore acknowledged sovereign authority from an internal perspective and especially from an intergovernmental standpoint. Although the U.S. Congress still adheres to a policy of tribal self-determination, the Court is dramatically and permanently minimizing the rights of tribes to practice political, economic, and cultural self-determination because in the opinion of a majority of the justices, there are only two sovereigns in the United States: states and the federal government. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

Revisiting the Black Struggle

This article critically examines the cumulative successes and failures of the African American struggle for liberation and equality, and it hints at the future direction of the Black movement in the United States. Specifically, it demonstrates how the Black movement legally dismantled direct institutional racism and why it failed to eliminate indirect institutional racism. This article also explains why the objectives of cultural self-determination and fundamentally transforming Black America were not successful. By looking at the major problems of the Black community today, this article emphasizes the need to learn critically from the past struggle and leaders in order to incorporate the best experiences in the future struggle for economic development, self-determination, and multicultural democracy.

Cultural pain vs. Political gain: Aboriginal sovereignty in the context of decolonization

Deep-seated divisions exist between Aboriginal organizations and leaders in North America and elsewhere, over how best to further the cause of Aboriginal sovereignty. These divisions raise a number of difficult questions, including what it means to be true to one's cultural heritage, how to defend against continuous pressure towards assimilation, and what is the role of non-Aboriginal traditions and people on the road towards indigenous cultural, political and economic self-determination. This article draws on selections from the work of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire in an effort to trace the genesis of these divisions as they become manifest within the context of North American Aboriginal communities. Doing so reveals how the necessity of being true to both a rich cultural heritage as well as a long and distinguished history of attempts to overcome entrenched processes of colonization, establishes a paradoxical and potentially debilitating dialectic between cultural and political imperatives.

Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1946.

From the time of its emergence in the United States in 1852, the Young Men's Christian Association excluded blacks from membership in white branches but encouraged them to form their own associations and to join the Christian brotherhood on but equal terms. Nina Mjagkij's book, the first comprehensive study of African Americans in the YMCA, is a compelling account of hope and success in the face of adversity. African American men, faced with emasculation through lynchings, disenfranchisement, race riots, and Jim Crow laws, hoped that separate YMCAs would provide the opportunity to exercise their manhood and joined in large numbers, particularly members of the educated elite. Although separate black YMCAs were the product of discrimination and segregation, to African Americans they symbolized the power of racial solidarity, representing a light in the darkness of racism. By the early twentieth century there existed a network of black-controlled associations that increasingly challenged the YMCA to end segregation. But not until World War II did the organization, in response to growing protest, pass a resolution urging white associations to end Jim Crowism. From previously untapped sources, Nina Mjagkij traces the YMCA's changing racial policies and practices and examines the evolution of African American associations and their leadership from slavery to desegregation. Here is a vivid and moving portrayal of African Americans struggling to build black-controlled institutions in their search for cultural self-determination. Light in the Darkness uncovers an important aspect of the struggle for racial advancement and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of theAfrican American experience.

Federal Indian Policy: A Framework for Evaluation

Unlike many agencies of the United States government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has not developed a coherent set of standards for evaluating the impacts of specific actions on reservation-based Native Americans. Nor, many would claim, have the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government offered clear policy directives to the implementing agency. It is argued here, however, that three dominant policy objectives can be abstracted from the corpus of federal laws, regulations, and court decisions. These objectives are: tribal sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural self-determination. After definining these objectives, I suggest operational measures which may serve as guides for evaluating specific programs. I then illustrate the framework with a review of residential leasing programs on reservations, and examine the effects of exogenous factors on the implementation of these three objectives of federal Indian policy.

Female Circumcision: A Critical Appraisal

The introductory section of this article on female genital mutilation (FGM) briefly describes the historical and geographic extent of FGM and the main arguments supporting and rejecting it. The second section describes the four basic types of FGM as well as the conditions under which it occurs and takes a closer look at its origins. The third section examines the rationales presented for continuing FGM including achieving sexual control over females religious dictates reproductive myths and tradition. The fourth section counters these arguments by relaying the effects of FGM on health (immediate and short-term complications long-term complications and psychological trauma) and on female sexuality by debunking attempts to assign religious significance to the practice and by exposing the arguments used to support the practice as myths arising from misinformation rather than reality. The fifth section reviews the occurrence of FGM in Western culture and the sixth section considers arguments that pit claims of cultural self-determination against human rights. The seventh section makes a distinction between voluntary and involuntary participation in an act of cultural self-determination and the eighth section argues for the universal applicability of human rights principles. The article concludes with a review of measures against FGM including legislation religious education health education and consideration of the example of Chinese foot-binding. It considers the prospects for change arising from international efforts health education the influence of role models legislation and a multidisciplinary approach.