Discourse Of Decline Research Articles

Everyday Scandals: Regulating the Buddhist Monastic Body in Thai Media

AbstractAlthough allegations of monastic financial embezzlement and sexual misconduct are the most frequent and outrageous monastic scandals reported in Thailand's media outlets, this article discusses a separate category of scandal I label ‘everyday scandals.’ This type of scandal describes the phenomenon of monks committing bodily transgressions, including inappropriate behaviours outside the temple and unacceptable presentations of the body. For Thai Buddhist laity, photos of monks taking trips to the mall and working out at a gym can be indicators that their religion is in decline. A proper male monastic body enacting acceptable behaviour signals the difference of the monastic life from the lay life, ensuring the efficacy of merit and ritual performance. The regulation of everyday monastic life is a fertile topic in Thai media. Because the Buddhist monastic institution is interconnected with the Thai nation-state, the male monastic body is a site of evaluation and critique. At stake is national Thai heritage and pride in Thailand's majority religion: Buddhism. Besides the strength of contemporary Thai Buddhism, everyday scandals also reveal continuity in the discourse of decline and anxiety over monastic behaviour, which began with the earliest Buddhist communities. The threat of Buddhism's decline is part of a continuum of debates within monastic texts and Buddhist history regarding proper monastic behaviours in public.

Decline, Adaptation or Transformation: New Perspectives on Demographic Change in Resource Peripheries in Australia and Sweden

Many sparsely populated resource peripheries in developed countries are perceived to suffer from periods of demographic decline due to loss of employment opportunities and services, youth out-migration and population ageing. While these trends tend to apply at broad regional scales and for particular time periods, diverse patterns of demographic change may be apparent if different spatial, temporal and social scales of analysis are taken into consideration. Comparing the experiences of two case study regions in northern Sweden and inland South Australia, this paper proposes an alternative conceptual framework to the “discourse of decline”, which could be used to examine the nuances of demographic change within resource peripheries. The framework includes spatial scale considerations that contrast broader regional demographic patterns with the experiences of sub-regions and individual settlements. It also includes temporal scale aspects, examining demographic change over different time periods to understand the pace, duration and frequency of population growth and decline. The framework finally includes social unit considerations, emphasising that demographic change affects different social groups in different ways. The results of the case studies suggest that considering demographic change as adaptation or transformation rather than decline may be more useful for identifying new – and qualitatively different – demographic pathways that emerge over time.

Decline and Renaissance

From images of major transport infrastructures and housing blocks, to drug rehabilitation centers, vacant lots, and abandoned industrial warehouses, the City of Detroit has been one of the most photographed of all cities since the 1940s. Although much has been written about the historical legacies of urban change in Detroit and beyond, far less is known about the photographic collections that participated in the redevelopment of Detroit since the postwar period. This article therefore seeks to chart and unravel photographic depictions of two cycles of decline and renaissance: urban renewal (1940s–1960s) and city-center renaissance (1970s–1990s). How photography participated in these two cycles of production, reproduction, consumption, and display of photographs will be analyzed by focusing on citywide groups such as the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Committee of Detroit (1940s), Mayor Coleman Young’s image-led campaigns produced by the Department of Public Information (1970–1994), and social documentary photographer Camilo José Vergara’s ruin park proposal (1995). In their search for a community of shared interest to manipulate how the Detroit citizen had to look at their city, the Citizens’ Council of Detroit, the author argues, embodies Vergara’s discourse of decline as well as Young’s renaissance vision. In sum, this article offers a history of an overlooked factor in the redevelopment of Detroit, namely the role played by and given to photographs, and as such contributes to the current debates on Detroit’s photographic image exemplified primarily by ruin porn.

SCALES OF TIME AND THE ANTICIPATION OF THE FUTURE: GIBBON, SMITH, PLAYFAIR

This essay shows how Adam Smith addressed concerns about economic decline not only by proposing quantifiable categories through which relative decline could be measured, but also by characterizing the century as the proper timescale in which such quantities could be observed. What sometimes appears up close to be a process of decline and fall, Smith suggested, could, with a shift to a more distant long view, be explained instead as part of a normal business cycle. William Playfair then used Smith's emphasis on quantification to develop elaborate graphic techniques—what we now call the time-series line graph and the pie chart—to visualize more easily the patterns Smith sought to identify. Collectively, the reordering of temporal scale by Smith and Playfair helps us to rethink not only discourses of decline, but also our understanding of the temporalities of political economy as a problem of historical distance that needs to be thought about beyond temporal terms.

Making and remaking multicultural arts: policy, cultural difference and the discourse of decline

Currently, a discourse of decline shadows multiculturalism, claiming it is ‘no longer’ viable as a governmental technique to manage present-day social complexity. This article revisits multiculturalism as an intervention in the discourse of decline, shifting the terms of the multiculturalism debate from the abstract struggle between competing political ideologies, to the minor material processes through which multiculturalism was enacted. Through a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality, we examine in particular the invention and evolution of multicultural arts over the last 30 years. We attend to the multiple ways in which cultural difference has been mobilised and understood by policy-makers and the constituents they served; how these various framings of cultural difference informed the shifting objectives and constituencies of multicultural arts; and how these shifts were influenced by the dispersed nature of policy formation, crossing multiple sites and stakeholders, each subject to, but also resisting and reshaping, the discursive parameters of this category. Such an approach dismantles the coherence and stability of multiculturalism upon which the discourse of decline is premised, but also anticipates the way multiculturalism is presently transforming in response to a transnational, neoliberal cultural imaginary.

Discourse of Decline: Local Perspectives on Magic in Highland Jambi, Indonesia

Discourse of Decline: Local Perspectives on Magic in Highland Jambi, Indonesia

Discourse and dystopia, American style

This paper examines the recent growth in the popular media of new discourses of decline focused on the American suburb. This new discursive twist, which appropriates language traditionally reserved for inner cities, is rooted in both the city/suburb dialectic, which has long dominated American urbanism, and the empirical realities of the foreclosure crisis and changing geographies of poverty in the American metropolis. Scholars should be concerned about the rise of this new discourse, as it reinforces a dialectic long since outdated, roots decline in a particular geography rather than examining the root causes of the crisis, and has potentially deleterious effects on communities already facing social and economic struggle in the wake of foreclosure. Linked as this discourse is to academic research on the suburbanization of poverty, it gives pause to those scholars who would speak in terms of ‘suburban decline’.

Performing youth: ageing, ambiguity and bodily integrity

This paper addresses the relationship between ageing, gender, cultural norms, and the constitution of gendered body-subjects. It briefly discusses three conceptual approaches which have been used to understand ageing, gendered body-subjects: postmodernist/social constructionist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist feminist. It is argued that the first two approaches are entrenched in dualistic modes of thinking, and therefore can never construct ageing gendered body subjects as other than through the dualistic discourse of decline and cultural devaluation in Western consumer cultures. The third, however, appears to hold some promise for a more just and flexible way of accounting for the integrity of, and culturally valuing, the gendered body-subject in old age. Examples from writings on dance are used to illustrate this argument.

Resisting the Global in Buddhist Nationalism: Venerable Soma's Discourse of Decline and Reform

This article examines Buddhist nationalism as an effort to resist the intrusion of globalizing forces into local religious and cultural heritage. By analyzing the discourse, persona, and life of Venerable Gangodawila Soma (1948–2003), a renowned and controversial Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, the author demonstrates that Buddhist nationalism is largely a discursive formation that affirms an essential relationship between Buddhism and nation over against external forces that threaten their existence. A charismatic and skillful preacher, Venerable Soma employed a variety of media to reverse the perceived decline of Buddhism and the nation in the face of what he saw as immoral and hostile interests—including corrupt politicians, Tamil separatists, Evangelical Christians, and nongovernmental organizations. Venerable Soma's discourse, which privileges local forms of knowledge and morality, shows how globalization stimulates both new possibilities and new contradictions in contemporary forms of Buddhist nationalism.

Translating Policy: Power and Action in Australia's Country Towns

In its present condition, rural Australia is characterised by a discourse of decline that sees country towns and regions as places of demoralisation and despair. From a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, those who live in these spaces are not so much 'powerless' to the demands of urban‐based governments and global capital, as rendered governable according to the socio‐political ambitions of late capitalism. While important insights have been derived from such analyses, it is argued in this paper that excessive attention is often paid to the power of the state with little concern for the various ways in which local people engage with, and transform the strategies and effects of state power. Rather than utilising the concept of resistance to make sense of these interactions, a sociology of translation is adopted from the Actor Network Theory literature. Applied to two case examples, it shows how governmental policies and programmes are frequently the outcome of the interactions and negotiations that take place between all those enrolled in the actor‐network.

Ways of Whiteness: Harlemising Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern

The inner Sydney Aboriginal settlement known as The Block has been monitored by police, the media and welfare organisations since its inception in the early 1970s. The Block is the subject of an ongoing commentary, a ‘discourse of decline’ about a place that is commonly considered to be Australia's own Harlem‐like ‘black ghetto’. In stark contrast, the predominantly non‐Aboriginal suburbs of Darlington, Redfern and Chippendale, which surround The Block, are undergoing gentrification. Within this zone of gentrification there are complex and seemingly confused responses to the presence of The Block. The responses challenge and/or embellish the official (‘white’) narrative that The Block is imploding in a sea of drugs, crime and cultural inferiority.