Cultural Truths Research Articles

(De)constructing Nationalism: Understanding Irony in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929)

ABSTRACT In the background of the European era of nationalism, Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929) reveal the authority of narrative in the discursive construction of identity. By analysing the interrelation of Mann’s characteristic irony and productions of discourses of racialization, this essay draws attention to the constructed nature of German national identity. This identity is revealed to be underpinned by colonial tropes of difference which simultaneously structure internal European hierarchies. Yet, far from simply affirming a naturalistic or fixed hierarchy of cultural authority, irony at a narrative level elucidates how norms are both socially and textually constructed, and, by extension, unstable. In this way, troubling the distinction between cultural truths and social fictions, this essay explores the way in which the works problematize to what extent norms are, in fact, normative.

The Cultural Worldview of Filipinos through Philippine-English Proverbs

Proverbs are linguistic expressions of cultural truths about people’s values and beliefs handed down from generation to generation. Thus, for cross-cultural communicative competence and effective social interactions with Filipinos, understanding their proverbs would be essential for those working or interacting with Filipinos. This study investigated Filipino proverbs written in the Philippine English language to find the most prevalent proverb themes or topics that reflect the Filipino cultural worldview. The data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, using content analysis. The quantitative results showed that Filipinos tend to believe in Heaven, Life and Death, and Evil, respectively. The proverbs also depicted the robust worth of family relations and friendships. Qualitative results showed that some Filipino proverbs have corresponding ones in British English whereas a number of them do not, for they have culture-specific denotations and/or connotations. Additionally, reconsidering the genres or topics of certain proverbs was recommended. The findings also led to implications to teaching English as an International Language, a Lingua Franca, or a Foreign Language, including cross-cultural communication.

Elegant conservation: reimagining protected area stewardship in the 21st century

We present an approach to the conservation of protected areas that aligns cultural truths with scientific truths to increase community capacity for conservation. This alignment, which we call elegant conservation, asks protected area managers to reimagine how conservation can be inclusive of cultures and subcultures whose members value protected areas, but not in the same way. Reimagining how protected area managers approach conservation requires them to observe closely and holistically, with fresh eyes, human consciousness and behavior as well as relationships between people and between people and nature. Our approach connects the humanities, Western sciences, and other forms of knowledge, including Indigenous knowledge, in a manner that more sustainably builds social support for conservation. We first offer a heuristic of seven conditions that protected area managers can analyze when sizing up conservation issues and the people involved. We then propose a heuristic of five human tendencies—elements of human consciousness—that can help protected area managers and their partners organize constructive responses to any conservation issue. Our model of elegant conservation offers a pragmatic, holistic, inclusive alternative to top-down, reductive management approaches and is an outgrowth of modern American intellectual history, especially since the end of the Cold War, ca. 1989–1990. Elegant conservation presents an opportunity to help people find common ground and move protected area management beyond its origins in settler colonialism at a time of national and planetary crisis.

Consensus of Local Knowledge on landslide Hazard in Depopulated Mountain Communities in Japan – A Case Study on Matsunoyama Village

Rural depopulation in mountain communities is now well acknowledged as one of the salient challenges faced by Japan which made them more susceptible to landslide disasters with intense weather conditions. The degradation of the traditional culture due to the rapid depopulation in mountainous areas leads to the permanent disappearance of the best local knowledge for landslide disasters. This study attempts to investigate the community’s landslide hazard knowledge. The research applied structural questionnaires and informal interviews for data collection. Firstly, the analysis has been conducted for identifying the main components in local knowledge on landslide disasters. Based on the component’s results, the questionnaire was developed to measure awareness on those components within the community. Finally, the cultural consensus modelling was utilized in discovering the cultural truths not in individual responses but the degree of sharing of these responses. The research outcomes suggest how the local knowledge-based practices and the consensus of local knowledge had improved the level of disaster adaptation among the community members. Moreover, the findings revealed the impact of depopulation and aging on the sustainability of the mountain community in a landslide disaster environment.

Extreme freshwater events, scientific realities, curriculum inclusions, and perpetuation of cultural beliefs

The purpose of this research was to explore and open dialogue about possible connections between the scientific realities of extreme freshwater events (EFWE), a lack of EFWE-related curricular content in schools, and future teachers’ awareness and perceptions of EFWE. In phase one, an analysis of existing weather data demonstrated ongoing moderate to severe EFWE in the two regions under investigation, Queensland, Australia and Saskatchewan, Canada, at the time of data collection. In phase two, a content analysis of school curricula in the two regions shows a dearth of mandatory content related to EFWE, though Queensland, Australia had slightly more mandated content than did Saskatchewan, Canada. In phase 3, a survey of pre-service teachers in the two regions showed a demonstrable lack of recognition of undergoing moderate to severe EFWE at time of data collection, along with a general satisfaction with the current level of curricular coverage of the topic. While respondents’ overall concern was low, there were consistent regional differences. Queenslanders were more likely to recognize their lived experience with EFWE and perceived it to be a more important inclusion in school curricula than their Saskatchewanian counterparts. Taken together, results suggested that learned cultural truths were reflected in and perpetuated by school curricula. Results highlighted cultural denial of EFWE severity and a need to change false truths by increasing visibility of EFWE in mandated school curricula. The authors propose that results warrant further research and discussion as it relates to public policy and prioritizing EFWE in formal school curricula.

The incapacity to work as moving target. Exploring the possibilities of praxiography for analysing realities of disability in history

While acknowledging the discursive meaning of bodies, both gender and disability scholars try to overcome a strict nature–culture or medical model–social model divide. This article explores the possibilities of praxiography for disability history to overcome this divide. Praxiography, as introduced by Annemarie Mol, approaches the body and gender as something that is made up in encounters between people, objects, and practices. Mol has shown that, although a singular term may suggest there is coherence, this coherence is managed in practice. This article provides a practice-focused analysis of appeal cases in which incapacity to work was contested in the context of the first disability benefit act in the Netherlands (1901–1921) and shows how incapacity to work was made up as incapacity to earn a living and shifted to meticulous descriptions of the functioning of individual body parts. Although the topic of power remains to be explored, by looking at incapacity to work as a site of interaction, we can challenge perceptions of disability and gender as a biological or a cultural truth and incorporate matter into the historical analysis of the making of social categories.

Live by the sword, die by the sword: Measuring belief in a just world with popular sayings

Popular sayings express some cultural truth and indicate how individuals are integrated with their social environment. We have proposed that some popular sayings express belief in a just world (BJW) and so they can be a good measure of this belief. We conducted five studies in which we developed a new scale based on the idea that endorsing such popular sayings can measure individual differences in expressing BJW. In studies 1 and 2, we developed a scale of the BJW based on popular sayings (BJWPS). We analyzed its factorial validity by showing that these sayings share the same basic idea: the expression of belief in a just world. Study 3a addressed the convergent validity of the BJWPS, since it correlated positively with other BJW scales and went further by showing their incremental validity by predicting secondary victimization. In addition, Study 3b examined the discriminant validity between the BJWPS and individuals' attitudes regarding an unvictimized target. In Study 4, we experimentally addressed the predictive validity of the BJWPS in the context of victimization. In summary, the results we presented in the studies provide evidence of validity and reliability in using the popular sayings proposed to measure BJW.

Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition by Derek Maus

Reviewed by: Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition by Derek Maus Maria Bose MAUS, DEREK. Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. 172 pp. $59.00 hardcover; $14.99 e-book. "I think I just don't want to do the same thing over and over again," novelist Colson Whitehead muses in a 2013 interview. And that allows me to just challenge myself: can I do a book that has less plot? Can I learn the rules of a horror novel, and adapt it to my own concerns about the world? Can I do a coming of age novel that doesn't remind me of all the stuff I hate about coming of age novels? So I'm trying to keep it fresh for me. I'm just trying to not bore myself. And if I can do a detective novel, and if I can do a horror novel, then why do it again? (2) Derek Maus's Understanding Colson Whitehead opens with this anecdote and, by and large, takes it on trust. For Maus, 'understanding' Whitehead amounts to making sense of his intentional "flirt[ation] with genres and their conventions"—something Whitehead himself describes as "wearing genre drag" (1)—by finding ways to unify his extraordinarily diverse "subjects, settings, narrative voices and styles; his sweeping command of both popular culture and literary history; and his oft-stated resistance to overarching concepts" (8). Yet having acknowledged that resistance, as well as Whitehead's own leeriness of conceptual designation, Maus proposes two such concepts as consolidators of Whitehead's ranging formal enterprise: "historiographic metafiction," which he draws from Linda Hutcheon's influential theory of postmodern reflexivity, and "the postsoul aesthetic," which he borrows from Mark Anthony Neal's account of contemporary Black artists' disaffection for the authenticating cultural injunctions of their Civil Rights-era forbears. Doubling down on his 2014 thesis, Maus reasons that, although Whitehead's novels resist generic pigeonholing, their unities might yet be glimpsed through Hutcheon's and Neal's critical lenses, both of which "allow for (or possibly even demand) a great diversity of expression while still meaningfully clustering groups of authors and their works together according to common artistic and rhetorical techniques in the first instance and a particular generational zeitgeist in the second." Both, he adds, are also "critical discourses that are not so arcane as to require a highly specialized vocabulary—beyond the names of the terms themselves—or an advanced degree in literary analysis to understand." And while "[n]umerous scholars have applied one or the other of these approaches to individual works by Whitehead," he notes, "none have yet combined them, much less used that combination to consider Whitehead's entire output" (9). The chapters that follow offer lucid accounts of that output, examining The Intuitionist (Chapter 2), John Henry Days (Chapter 3), Apex Hides the Hurt (Chapter 4), The Colossus of New York, Sag Harbor, and Zone One (Chapter 5), and The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys (Chapter 6, new to the 2021 edition). But because they unfold as essays in the application of 'historiographic metafiction' and 'the postsoul aesthetic'—less as arguments about Whitehead's novels and nonfiction than as a single, sustained argument on behalf of the explanatory power of these concepts' conjuncture—Maus's own commitment to these concepts' critical purchase inadvertently undermines the 'great diversity of expression' he imagines this approach to Whitehead's work preserves. [End Page 319] What's lost, then, and somewhat curiously, in Maus's account of Whitehead's generic diversity is both a deep engagement with genre—with Whitehead's calibrated motivation of the terms and problematics through which each genre he chooses to 'wear in drag' mediates a distinct set of ideological transformations—and a historical attention to the contemporary conditions of production—and of literary production in particular—out of which Whitehead writes. To be sure, The Intuitionist's Lila-Mae is understandable as a figure for the meta-historiographer skeptical of "accepted cultural truths about race and gender" (37). But doesn't Whitehead also exploit the detective genre's literary traditions the better to address economic, juridical, and ideological shifts...

LGBTQ cultural competence for pharmacists

LGBTQ cultural competence for pharmacists

Seeking indigenous consensus on the impacts of oil sands development in Alberta, Canada

This paper presents the results of a Cultural Consensus Analysis (CCA) that was conducted to determine the degree to which Indigenous residents of the Peace and Athabasca oil sands regions of Alberta, Canada share cultural knowledge about the associated impacts of oil sands development. We found that 87% (64/75) of respondents believe that oil sands development has contaminated the Peace and Athabasca Rivers, as well as the fish in them. These responses indicate the existence of a cultural truth regarding the negative impacts of oil sands development, with respondents demonstrating a higher than average probability for knowing the culturally correct answer. However, we also found that there was regional variability between Indigenous residents of the two regions, with more respondents from the Peace River region believing fish are safe to eat and scientific information concerning oil sands development to be trustworthy. The results of this study provide a more informed understanding of the variable experiences Indigenous peoples may have with regard to oil sands development in Alberta.

New Practices of Cultural Truth Making: Evidence Work in Negotiations with State Authorities

AbstractThis article looks at negotiations with state authorities and the evidentiary criteria they create in culturally contrasting contexts when phenomena deal with elements that for the dominant society are conceptualized as “supernatural.” We draw from the level of experiences of other‐than‐human beings, especially spirits and “ungraspable” presences, as social practices in and of themselves as well as acts of mobilizing those which are meaningful for knowledge production in Indigenous Amazonia and North European contexts. Our two cases show how in state territorial protection debates and health services, visibility, quantification, measurability, Euro‐American dominant, mainly binary, and bounded concepts are employed to create the grounds of validity. Yet, for actual individual or collective experiences, new types of evidence work can emerge in collaborations. Thus, this article sheds light on the needs for contextual and communicative actions to overcome contrasting onto‐epistemologies in the context of the state.

Toward a Black (and Diverse) Psychology: The Scholarly Legacy of Joseph White

Dr. Joseph White was affectionately referred to as “the father of Black psychology.” His seminal article “Toward a Black Psychology” articulated a strengths-based conceptual description toward understanding Black behavior and culture. He challenged the White orthodoxy in psychology while also serving to empower other non-White racial and ethnic groups to speak their unique psychological and cultural truths. In this article, we discuss his impact and scholarly legacy and how he used Black psychology as a bridge to build multicultural alliances and to support the professional development of students and young professional across race and ethnicity.

Globalization and the Question of African Cultural Identity

This paper engages in the debate between cultural modernists and cultural traditionalists concerning the importance of cultural fidelity as faced by African people via globalization and its alleged homogenizing tendency. Central to this debate is the issue of cultural truths and its use, that is, development. The paper therefore argues that African peoples do not need to “essentialize” their cultures. This is because the “truths about reality” with which they intend to employ in this quest for development are not exclusive to any particular cultural society. The implication of the foregoing is the paper’s insistence that Africans adopt a complementarist attitude in their determination for cultural fidelity. It maintains that this attitude will make Africans avail themselves of ideas from elsewhere. Ultimately, the paper posits that this new disposition of Africans to their cultures and those of non-African societies will set her beleaguered states on a solid developmental trajectory.

Good kid, m.A.A.d city: Kendrick Lamar's Autoethnographic Method

ABSTRACT In characterizing his second studio album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, as a “short film” Kendrick Lamar offers something of a public declaration: We, the listening audience, are not hearing another hip-hop album, just another “autobiography” or slice of one person's life, but, rather, something else; we are hearing a mixture of social, cultural, and personal narrative truth in what will be termed “autoethnography.” In doing so, Lamar offers us a new way of thinking about hip-hop as a whole, not simply as a capitalistic enterprise or as a “black news” channel but as a distinct method for collecting data and understanding the experiences and existence of black people. While autoethnography is not a new method for research, it has been underutilized in philosophy as an approach to reading “texts” of all sorts, in particular Africana texts. This article analyzes Kendrick Lamar's second album to demonstrate why autoethnography is important as both a way of understanding reality and an expression of reality and also why it is centrally important for “doing” Africana philosophy.

Private development-based forest conservation in Patagonia: comparing mental models and revealing cultural truths

Serenari, C., M. Nils Peterson, Y.-F. Leung, P. Stowhas, T. Wallace, and E. Sills. 2015. Private development-based forest conservation in Patagonia: comparing mental models and revealing cultural truths. Ecology and Society 20(3): 4. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07696-200304

The production format and ambiguity of principal in improvised entertainment interaction

This investigation utilizes interactional sociolinguistics to consider the role of principal in fictionalized improvised entertainment. We explore how improvised contexts can offer an ambiguity of principalship. The animator could in fact be the principal, offering the performer the potential to articulate cultural truths. The possibility that he/she may not be provides a freedom from responsibility for what is being said, a space that performers may exploit to animate controversial beliefs without the normal interactional repercussions.

Teaching the Bible at public universities in South Africa: A proposal for multidisciplinary approach

How should the academy teach the Bible? I noted two challenges to this endeavour. Firstly, the Bible has been used as superstructure to justify and to solidify colonialism and apartheid in South Africa which resulted in people to mistrust the way the Western missionaries interpreted the Bible. It also gave birth to the inception of African Independent Churches (AIC) and an urgent need to reinterpret the Bible from the experiences of Africans. However, the initial question remains how the academy should teach the Bible. The complexity of this question is that despite the Bible’s association with a colonial legacy, the ordinary people did not stop reading the Bible and to make meaning of their lives from it. This study justifies the place of the Bible in public universities in South Africa and proposes ways the academy should teach the Bible. This study suggests a two-pronged approach to Biblical Studies at public universities. Firstly, the academy should critically engage the ideological presupposition underlying the theories used in the academy. Secondly, the academy must be open to the fact that the Bible is part of popular culture; hence, the academy should critically reflect how the Bible is used in public space. Therefore my hypothesis is that the academy should further focus on critiquing ideological inclinations that underline established truths in addition to focusing on the historical meaning of the Bible and establishing contextual similarities. Teaching the Bible should focus on analysing cultural, political and economic ideological truths that find support from the Bible. I propose that this line of thought is possible through cultural studies and/or interdisciplinary methods.

Do We Still Have Postcolonialism?

About a year ago Biodun Jeyifo told me of a conversation he had with one of his Ph.D. students. She had come to his office in a panic, informing him that her advisor had told her that retaining postcolonialism in her project would only hinder her job search, and that it ought not to play a significant role in her dissertation. We were in the throes of asking where the profession was going, how global studies have now become sine qua non for those seeking to teach non-Western literatures. The fragile place of African literary studies was once again called into question: what would it belong to now? And for those wishing to study and teach it, where would it figure in a job application? BJ straightened out the student and her advisor, but we remain confronted with the issue as has become widely adopted as the rubric under which the students of non-Western literatures are asked to become expert.The study of African literature within the academy has moved from an original Areas Studies approach to a contemporary World Literature approach. We should begin by asserting that both approaches are so seriously flawed as to call into question the very inclusion of African literature in the curriculum,; if that is the only way it is to be taught.For Area Studies, the risk lies in imposing a vision of Africa created by an underlying anthropology of the early 20th century. It called for understandings generated by experts in indigenous cultures and languages, and which identified native values which informed cultural texts and gave them meaning. This is the true curse not only of Orientalism in African dress, but of authenticity detectives who prescribe the attributes of what is essentially frozen cultural truths for people viewed as natives, that is, objects for experts, rather than as subjects with subjectivity.For Global Studies, the notion is equally pernicious. World Literature flattens out all cultures in the quest to find universal patterns of thought and creativity, and even more, to accept as representative texts those whose self-reflexive, postmodern postcolonial markers are highlighted within the stylistics of the current Creative Writing University Curriculum.The former approach dignifies its knowledge under that heading of Objec- tivity as the quality that provides it with its claims to truth. The latter dignifies its value under the heading of Subjectivity as the value that enhances its aesthetic claims to universal worth. The former can be said to sell the value of education; the latter to sell books and movies. Both ultimately displace a global south perspective by privileging the dominant flows of global north ethnoscapes and financescapes.Figures that give us access to the issues involved in moving toward our contemporary situation might be seen in the cell phone of Pius Adesanmi's palm winner tapper. In Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir it is his use of the term kimay and a disk of benga music.Wainaina ends his recent, hot memoir, One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011) by referring to the creation of a new Anglo-Kenyan culture, and to a noteworthy CD and documentary on benga music. He evokes how it corresponds to what he calls the sounds of languages without the languages; how it relates to a new world context for Kenyans of today, one without the past.World literature and world music are now manifestations of Jameson's definition of postmodernism as a cultural moment so fixated on the present as to erase any grounding in the past, occluding history from our readings, and resulting in what he calls pastiche.2 It is a view of culture as reduced to the bits and tracks of a video and cd.Wainaina speaks English, and sees Anglo-Kenyan as the new identity being created at independence. He also speaks Swahili, and thus fits with the audiences of the two Kenyan radio stations he had when growing up. General Service is anglicized, like the Muslim singer Abdul Kadir Mohammed who changes his name to Kelly Brown and sings world pop. …

Competence, Agreement, and Luck

The cultural consensus model (CCM) is a frequently used model of cultural diversity, which predicts how individuals from a common cultural background would share knowledge in a specific domain. Cultural competence, or the degree to which an individual agrees with a local cultural truth, is a central concept in CCM, and many uses of competence estimates rest on the assumption that they reflect real variation among individuals in their knowledge of a cultural truth. However, Weller has shown that even in situations where there are no real differences among individuals in their underlying competences, the CCM will still estimate individual competences that appear to vary, sometimes substantially. To address this issue, we describe a test of the null hypothesis that there is no real difference in competence among individuals. We also present tables with specific cutoffs for this test across a range of data set characteristics. These can help researchers decide whether a specific set of data warrants further analyses of individual differences in competence.

Cultural Consensus Theory: Comparing different concepts of cultural truth

Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) is a model-based approach to aggregating the responses of informants (respondents) to questions (items) about some domain of their shared cultural knowledge. The purpose of CCT is to allow a researcher to discover consensus knowledge in cultural groups. This paper compares and contrasts two CCT models for items requiring a dichotomous, true/false answer. The first model is the General Condorcet Model (GCM). A special case of the GCM is already in wide use, especially in cultural anthropology, and this paper generalizes that version and provides new mathematical and statistical results for it. The character of the GCM is that of a general signal detection model, where the item-trial type (signal or noise) as well as the respondents’ hit and false alarm rates, are latent rather than observable. The second model, the Latent Truth Model (LTM), is a new model that allows cultural truth to assume continuous values in the unit interval rather than the two-valued truth assumption of the GCM. Both models are compared analytically, and hierarchical Bayesian inference for each is developed. A posterior predictive model check is established for both models that bears directly on the assumption that there is a single consensus truth. In addition, the similarities and differences between the models are illustrated both with mathematical and statistical results, as well as by analyzing real and simulated data sets, and a second posterior predictive check that tends to differentiate the models is also provided.