Cultural Stories Research Articles

Kiviuq and the Mermaids by N. McDermott

McDermott, Noel. Kiviuq and the Mermaids. Illus. Tom Feizo Gas. Inhabit Media, 2016.Following his previous works on Inuit culture including Akinirmut Unipkaaqtuat: Stories of Revenge (2006), and Unikkaaqtuat: Traditional Inuit Stories (2015), Noel McDermott, a retired professor of literature at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, Nunavut, focuses on one of the greatest and most important characters appearing in traditional stories of Inuit culture, Kiviuq, in Kiviuq and the Mermaids, a book for young readers.The story begins with a Grandfather speaking directly to the reader, introducing Kiviuq and his wandering life to newcomers and then getting directly into the action, wherein Kiviuq narrowly survives a storm during a seal hunt and is left alone at sea. Here he meets a tuutalik (mermaid) but it doesn’t go well at all as it begins to taunt Kiviuq and what begins as a strange encounter quickly becomes a matter of life and death.The story is an excellent introduction to one of the key figures in traditional Inuit stories, and the action, brought to life by Illustrator Toma Feizo Gas is both entrancing and sometimes quite frightening. Themes of personal responsibility, self-reliance and man versus nature work to introduce the reader to the character and promises of further stories may even have readers doing their own research into other stories of Kiviuq. A glossary of Inuktitut terms at the end of the book include a pronunciation guide and the story itself would work well for young students interested in the traditional stories of Canada’s Inuit peoples.Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Kirk MacLeodKirk is the Open Data Team Lead for the Government of Alberta’s Open Government Portal. A Life-Long reader, he moderates two book clubs and is constantly on the lookout for new great books!

Acceptability of an Adapted HIV Prevention Intervention for Native American Adolescents.

Relatively few HIV evidence-based interventions (EBIs) among Native Americans have been developed, adapted, evaluated, and/or published in the scientific literature. An adolescent HIV EBI was adapted in three phases: (1) securing input from a Native American Advisory Board; (2) modifying the EBI to be more consistent with Native American culture; and (3) conducing a pilot with 14 Native American adolescents to examine acceptability and cultural congruence between the adapted intervention and the youth's culture based on Likert-scale ratings and a focus group. The adaptations included diverse Native American social and cultural stories that assisted with responsible decision-making skills. The adolescents consistently rated each intervention session as highly acceptable. A difference in knowledge from pre-survey (M = 13.93, SD = 3.08) to post-survey (M = 17.14, SD = 2.25) was statistically significant; t(13) = 4.166, p < .0005. The adapted curriculum did appear culturally responsive based on the pilot test results.

A Coffee Culture Story: Café and Warung Kopi as Representation of Trans-Cultural Encounters in Dewi Lestari’s Filosofi Kopi

A Coffee Culture Story: Café and Warung Kopi as Representation of Trans-Cultural Encounters in Dewi Lestari’s Filosofi Kopi

Rachel Bowlby, Everyday Stories

IN this book, Rachel Bowlby examines representations of ‘many ordinary days and their smaller and larger shaping cultural stories’ (2). She studies works in which ‘the mission of art—and it is a mission—is to represent what is ordinary and down-to-earth’ (10). This leads her to collate a wide variety of both literary and non-literary examples, prompting some intriguing and unusual links. For example, in the chapter entitled ‘A Single Man and a Single Day’, she places Homer’s Odyssey, Isherwood’s A Single Man, and Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child side by side, tying all three together via comparisons to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The texts for examination in ‘Numbered Days and Diaries’ are even more diverse; here, Bowlby looks at the diaries of Leonard Woolf and of Boswell, as well as Bridget Jones’s Diary, and considers them alongside an analysis of ‘“Wearable technology” such as the fitbit’ (49). As she does so, she makes numerous fascinating observations. For instance, in ‘Numbered Days and Diaries’, she notes that ‘[l]ike the digital confirmation of a PIN, the numbers of a four-digit date seem to provide an assurance of objectivity and precision’ (56). Throughout the chapter, she explores this idea, writing carefully about our impulse to exert control and order over a chaotic world. The chapter on ‘Commuting’ is especially interesting. Here, Bowlby collates examples from Great Expectations, Arnold Bennett, George Gissing, Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot in order to consider the representation of the commuter as a ‘plain man’ who, ‘almost by definition … lacks individuality’ (29 and 26). Having painted a series of careful vignettes of this character in his or her various literary forms, Bowlby concludes the chapter with a charming description of her own experience commuting, from which she realizes that ‘in reality no two journeys, even commutes, and no two days in the city, are ever the same’ (39–40).

Global Capitalism and the Novel

What if global modernism is a “selective tradition” that through its critical predilections and textual investments creates a world in its own image? What if, as a result, it completely misses the bigger story of global culture in the last four decades: namely, the persistence and development of realism? And, what if, finally, in order to both understand and critique the rise of global capitalism and its deeply consequential cultural effects a critical re-tooling is necessary, away from cultural ambivalence and toward the structural inequalities of social class?

Historias de siempre para lectores de hoy: la recepción infantil de la fábula de La Tortuga y los Patos

La fábula ha sido tradicionalmente uno de los géneros destinado a los niños por su sencillez, sus protagonistas y sus posibilidades didácticas. Desde sus orígenes, ha ido cambiando para acomodarse a nuevos contextos de recepción. Los relatos más famosos en Occidente proceden de dos tradiciones: la clásica (Esopo principalmente) y la india (que arranca de los jataka budistas, se consolida con el Panchatantra y se transmite gracias a Calila y Dimna). En la Edad Media relatos de ambas procedencias fueron ampliamente conocidos por su presencia en distintas colecciones y, en los siglos posteriores, debido a su popularidad, frecuentemente interfirieron entre sí, dando lugar a falsas atribuciones, contaminaciones y versiones. En el siglo XVII el género se revitalizará gracias a La Fontaine, que conoció ambas tradiciones y popularizó muchos relatos con versiones propias. Después, otros autores tradujeron, adaptaron y versionaron a su vez estas historias. En este trabajo nos ocupamos de cómo afectaron todas estas acciones a una fábula concreta, La tortuga y los patos, comenzando por un breve repaso histórico a su origen y continuando con su recepción en traducciones, versiones y adaptaciones en castellano. Finalizaremos con el análisis de algunas reescrituras recientes destinadas específicamente al público infantil y juvenil.

Local culture-based picture storybooks for teaching English for young learners

This paper reports the theoretical perspectives underlying the development of local culture-based picture storybooks for teaching English for young learners. It is a library research which derives from three main sources, journal articles, reference books, and internet articles. Local culture-based picture storybooks are kinds of printed materials which basically contain stories adapted from local culture stories accompanied with visualization in the forms of pictures telling the characters and the settings to help young learners easily understand the stories. They are developed considering the good criteria of storybooks [1, 2]. The benefits of its development are (1) to improve reading skill of young learners, (2) to build children English literacy through listening to the story read by the teachers and communicating interactively with them through dialogic reading, (3) create a fun learning atmosphere which enhances motivation and participation to take part in understanding and using the language, and (4) to preserve local culture. The books are developed using a combination of model [3, 4] which has 5 main steps namely need analysis, developing product, expert validation, and quality assessment by experts and users (teachers), and main product revision.

Las políticas educativas en la producción y distribución de materiales didácticos digitales / Educational policies in the production and distribution of digital didactic materials

This article is an essay that analyzes the changes or mutations that are taking place in the characteristics and functionalities of educational materials in the context of the digital society. It is based on the thesis that the hegemonic didactic material of the modern school (specifically textbooks) responded to the logic of printed culture characterized by packaging knowledge and a standardized and mass curriculum development model. In this S. XXI educational materials are affected by digital transformation whose mutation is described in terms of five dimensions or areas: artifactual or technological, pedagogical, teaching functionality, learning functionality, and production processes, distribution and consumption. It concludes by pointing out that the metamorphosis of the didactic material does not consist only in a change of the technological format, but it must be fundamentally of the cultural story and of the pedagogical functionality of the material.

La metamorfosis digital del material didáctico tras el paréntesis Gutenberg / The digital metamorphosis of didactic material after the parenthesis Gutenberg

This article is an essay that analyzes the changes or mutations that are taking place in the characteristics and functionalities of educational materials in the context of the digital society. It is based on the thesis that the hegemonic didactic material of the modern school (specifically textbooks) responded to the logic of printed culture characterized by packaging knowledge and a standardized and mass curriculum development model. In this S. XXI educational materials are affected by digital transformation whose mutation is described in terms of five dimensions or areas: artifactual or technological, pedagogical, teaching functionality, learning functionality, and production processes, distribution and consumption. It concludes by pointing out that the metamorphosis of the didactic material does not consist only in a change of the technological format, but it must be fundamentally of the cultural story and of the pedagogical functionality of the material.

DID ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS RECORD A SIMULTANEOUS ECLIPSE AND AURORA IN THEIR ORAL TRADITIONS?

We investigate an Australian Aboriginal cultural story that seems to describe an extraordinary series of astronomical events occurring at the same time. We hypothesise that this was a witnessed natural event and explore natural phenomena that could account for the description. We select a thunderstorm, total solar eclipse, and strong <italic>Aurora Australis</italic> as the most likely candidates, then conclude a plausible date of 764 CE. We evaluate the different factors thatwould determine whether all these events could have been visible, include meteorological data, alternative total solar eclipse dates, solar activity cycles, aurorae appearances, and sky brightness during total solar eclipses. We conduct this study as a test-case for rigorously and systematically examining descriptions of rare natural phenomena in oral traditions, highlighting the difficulties and challenges with interpreting this type of hypothesis.

The Application Analysis of Traditional Handcraft Carving Based on Tick Rhinoceros Art in Jiangzhou

Through the analysis of the historical tracing and aesthetic attributes of tick rhinoceros art in Jiangzhou, this paper summarizes the current dilemma of its development and excavates the influence factors of Jiangzhou traditional culture to tick rhinoceros. The innovation of this article is to form the internal rules of the theory support system through the analysis of the success stories of the traditional culture of Japan from the view of global cultural environment and explores the application methods and cultural inheritance strategies of tick rhinoceros in the field of the environmental design in order to make some contribution and provide theoretical supports to the inheritance.

On Being a Teacher-Ethnographer: Nestling the Ethical and Logistical Dilemmas among the Joys of Insiderness

This paper relates to an ethnographic study of a group of eighteen-year-old girls, in their final school year, in a secondary school in Ireland. The ethnography explored social class and gender discourses that presented in the girls’ various relationships in the school and in broader peer culture. This paper outlines the methodological phenomena I experienced as the ethnographic researcher and a teacher in the school. In this paper, I explore my insider positionality as a teacher-ethnographer from perspectives such as: access, ethics, power and relationships, within the specific context of this girls’ Catholic school in Ireland. The paper makes a specific contribution to the particular and contextualised insider-outsider positionality of the teacher-ethnographer. This dual role required me to transition back and forth between the roles of teacher and researcher, in order to access the cultural stories of the girls’ lived experiences. This dual role was informed by my strong reflexive stance throughout the process. This paper argues that despite significant existing research on the insider-outsider methodological debate, there are benefits to exploring and reviewing new contexts and varied approaches to teacher-insider research. The teacher-ethnographer is a role fraught with ethical and logistical dilemmas, but this paper offers some contextualised generalizability to other practitioners considering this insider approach.

Daystar/Rosalie Jones, ‘Dancing the Four Directions’

Abstract Dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy introduces Daystar/Rosalie Jones, who created the first Native contemporary dance company, DAYSTAR Dance Drama of Indian America, in 1980 (and who describes her recent work Dancing the Four Directions in this special issue). Shea Murphy first situates her professional relationship with Daystar/Rosalie, which spans over two decades. She then situates Daystar/Rosalie’s work in the context of this special issue, giving a brief overview of some of the dances she has made over nearly half a century, dances centred within Indigenous cultural story and mythic image, and grounded, directly or indirectly, in relation to place.

The myth of individualism: From individualisation to a cultural sociology of individualism

ABSTRACTThis article proposes an alternative to theories of individualisation such as those by Beck, Giddens, and Bauman, and in other forms of subject-oriented sociology that assume a sharp opposition between individual and civil society. Instead, a more cultural-sociological perspective on the individual as a shared value in an individualist culture is elaborated. I follow the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg who analyses multiple concrete cases to illustrate the nature of contemporary individualism but who is to date not particularly well known to an English-speaking audience. Ehrenberg develops a sociology of individualism that surpasses a ‘realist’ interpretation of the individual-as-actor who constructs his own biography, and instead focuses on the cultural stories or ‘myths’ explaining our view on individuality. Broadening this view beyond this particular sociologist, the article suggests a sociology based on late Durkheimian insights that stress the social nature of our perception of the individual, as well as those of his student, Marcel Mauss. Finally, this also brings us to the fundamental question of the essence of sociological analysis in a time of enhanced emphasis on subjectivity.

Anamnesis: Intertextual Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease

This essay develops and performs a theory of intertextual memory; and uses this concept as a heuristic to re-conceptualize identity for people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. This work emerges from three key sites of personal and cultural inquiry. At the center is my engagement with my matrilineal ancestry; which is haunted by the specter of memory loss: my mother’s mother (my Nanny) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in 2002 when she was 73; and my mother was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s in 2012 when she was 51. By telling stories about my mother and my Nanny which rely on intertextual memory; I hope to broaden the poetic space of remembering and to challenge the Western humanistic conception of identity as inherent; atomistic; and highly dependent on successful memory performance. Secondly; I examine the rhetorical discourse circulating Alzheimer’s disease in the popular cultural imaginary; where illness metaphors deleteriously situate the forgetting body within narratives of failure; fear; and loss of personhood. I argue that an intertextual approach to memory performance can help us reimagine Alzheimer’s patients outside the stigmatizing parameters of these broader cultural stories. Lastly; I draw on empirical research related to communication failure in AD in order to consider the ways caregivers might approach Alzheimer’s patients with the kind of linguistic and interactional flexibility subtended by an intertextual approach to identity; in order to forge improved relationships both with Alzheimer’s patients and with the disease itself.

Manifesting maturity: Gendered sexual intimacy and becoming an adult

In this article, I explore how 28 class-advantaged, young “emerging” adult women and men in the USA utilize understandings of their own intimate lives to make sense of themselves as adults in progress. Young adults who envision normative relationship futures (monogamous marriage) use a cultural story of coming to realize the importance of emotional monogamy over sex in order to make sense of themselves as becoming mature (getting closer to marriage). However, women’s accounts reveal difficulty in the implementation of this dominant understanding in their own lives. Since women are always expected to be naturally emotional, regardless of age or personal preferences, realizing the importance of emotions in relationships does not apply well to their experiences. In an attempt to reconcile the conflict between gender and the dominant cultural story, women simultaneously police other women’s sexual activity and frame their own casual sex experiences in emotional terms. Dominant understandings of coming to maturity through realizing the importance of emotions work best for men only, leaving questions as to how women might make sense of themselves as mature (or not) through their relationships.

The Epicureans on Human Nature and its Social and Political Consequences

Based on certain passages in Colotes, Hermarchus, and Horace, the Epicureans may be thought to defend a social contract theory that is roughly Hobbesian. According to such a view, human life without the social contract is solitary and brutish. This paper argues that such a reading is mistaken. It offers a systematic analysis of Lucretius’s culture story in On the Nature of Things v as well as the Epicurean passages that at first sight seem to contradict the Lucretian account. The conclusion of such an analysis is not only that all extant evidence is internally consistent, but also that Epicurean social contract theory relies on a ‘dynamic’ conception of human nature: On the Epicurean view, agents have very different psychological motivations when coming together to form societies and when coming together to form political and legal states.

A story of culture and teaching: the complexity of teacher identity formation

ABSTRACTResearch in teacher education repeatedly suggests that the background and underlying beliefs held by pre‐service teachers about teaching and assessment act to shape their interpretations of ideas, powerfully influencing their praxis and their developing teacher identity. This paper explores how a young New Zealand secondary science teacher, raised and educated in Māori‐medium and then English‐medium New Zealand schools, develops his identity as a teacher as he navigates a range of educational contexts and experiences. His views on assessment provide a focus. The paper presents a case study drawn from a two‐year longitudinal study, comprising a series of interviews with the teacher, as he transitioned from a university graduate to a qualified science teacher working in his first school. The complexity of teacher identity development is highlighted, particularly for teachers for whom cultural identity and indigenous world view is important. It suggests that beginning teachers need more time in their pre‐service teacher education to reflect on the influence their formative educational experiences have on who they are becoming as a teacher.

The performative space for city identity narrative: A case study of Suzhou Museum

This article takes Suzhou Museum as a case to analyze various aspects of its narrative constitution, narrative time, and narrative voice. The analysis reveals that the new museum building tells a story of tradition and modernity, the local and the world, personalization, and customization. The museum’s exhibition with “Wu” leading the story of local tradition and historical culture provides resources for the city identity of Suzhou. Visitor’s narratives, aided by new media technologies, infiltrate, fuse, and reconstruct the museum narrative. This case study makes clear the following theoretical points. First, by dealing with the relation between narrative time and space, the museum as a medium displays its uniqueness in the city communication system. Second, through visitors’ appropriation, production, and reproduction, the museum as a built environment presents its openness, fluidity, and inconsistencies. Third, the constitutive power of new media technologies facilitates the intervention of visitors’ subjectivity in the museum narrative and makes the meaning construction of the narrative more interactive. And finally, the communicative practices activated by the narrative construction in the museum as a mediaspace in the city contribute to the liminal experiences that bear traces of both ideological regulation and the city’s identity, turning the proposition that “citizens create the city” into a real possibility.

La impronta bíblica de Laudato Si’. Diálogo a dos voces entre la encíclica y los inicios del Génesis

The ecological awareness of contemporary society, though has indeed increased during last years, frequently finds disagreement of some people, who might even deny global warming and its severe consequences. Aware of this situation, and of some others that are related to, Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’ aims for developing awareness among us of the care of our common place. One of his arguments is the recovery of the wisdom of life that is found within ancestral stories of different people and cultures, among which he includes the story of creation of the Book of Genesis. The latter was written by Jewish communities approximately during the 5th century b. C. and later included within Christian tradition. To respond to the challenge posed by the Pope, the authors of the article -a Jewish and a Catholic- present a biblical hermeneutical exercise to find the guidelines of life included in the sapiential wisdom. These kinds of writings are an invitation to every inhabitant of the planet to make responsible decisions based on civic ethics and their own experience of faith, but committed to a civilization capable of creating scenarios of coexistence, solidarity, justice, and peace.