Distant Cultures Research Articles

From online to offline: Getting ready for in-person fieldwork through social media ethnography

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on finding solutions to continue academic research in light of closed borders. The inability to travel has prompted academic researchers to reconsider their approaches to fieldwork, with a particular focus on utilizing modern technology effectively to conduct accurate ethnographic research even while working remotely. This has entailed navigating the vast expanse of the internet carefully and acquiring additional tools in the field of ethnography. The primary concerns surrounding conducting remote fieldwork and ensuring the proper selection of data can be summarized by exploring strategies to overcome the challenges imposed by restrictions, as well as leveraging modern technology to study distant cultures without compromising comprehension. Taking into consideration my research on the Japanese experimental noise music scene and the necessity to collect information about the response and activities of these artists at the brink of the pandemic, I challenged my need to collect data by practising through the internet and modern technologies new ways to undertake ethnographic research through distance. In this sense, social networks demonstrated how modern ethnographic methods can be effectively applied to conduct functional social media ethnography, mitigating the challenges brought about by physical distance constraints. Specifically for my research, Reddit’s feature of organizing communities into subtopics named “subreddits” provides me with the possibility to keep in touch with reliable users and information by selecting specific subreddits related to Japan and music topics (e.g. “r/japaneseunderground”, “r/noisemusic”). Along with the existing literature and the constant online research for news related to my project, social media ethnography played a functional role not only in collecting relevant data but also in providing me with more clarity about how to further move my fieldwork once I can travel to Japan. By emphasizing the potential of social media as a valuable avenue to enhance research strategies in times of crisis, this paper aims to consider how online fieldwork created to overcome the impossibility of fieldwork travel can result in a profitable social media ethnography not only to collect data by distance but also to gain appropriate preparation for following in-person fieldwork by relying on our primary findings. By retracing step by step my research project on Japanese noise music, I will explain how undertaking online research provided me with further ideas to achieve more findings and add clarities to my research intent once I had to switch to offline fieldwork.

The Human Settlement: Erwin Anton Gutkind's fascination with Africa and critique of modern design

ABSTRACT In the immediate aftermath of the devastation and frustration of the Second World war, several architects and planners in Europe and North America took on the task of expanding their disciplinary boundaries and providing accounts of ‘others’. As they investigated various understandings of human life and the social dimension of the built environment, the interest shifted from the paradigms of modern design to the complexity of distant cultures and the variety beyond the Western tradition. Among those who challenged narrow perspectives was Erwin Anton Gutkind, a planner, architect, and theorist of German origin. Examining his unpublished manuscript, entitled The Human Settlement, and its long chapter on Africa, this article demonstrates how Gutkind pushed the theoretical and geographical limits of the historical research on architecture of his time to develop a project that offered a strong critique of modernist attitudes, internationalist models, and nation-state narratives. The essay also reflects on both Gutkind's exposure of colonial and neocolonial strategies of modernization and westernization on the continent and his problematic representation of local and non-colonial architecture in Africa. The manuscript's merits and limits reveal the significant friction that arose between Gutkind's strategies for including underrepresented voices and his reliance on biased perspectives.

Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures

Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions. Music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and cluster structures were similar for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music were consistently associated with the emotion ratings and music-induced bodily sensations across cultures. These results highlight the importance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrate consistent associations between musical features, music-induced emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures.

Refusing Invitations: A Contrastive Pragmatic Study of Jordanian Arabic and Castilian Spanish

Objectives: The study aimed at examining the use of refusals by Jordanian Arabic and Castilian Spanish speakers when declining invitations from their friends, focusing on similarities and differences in terms of head strategies, adjuncts, order, and frequency. Methods: A discourse completion task (DCT) comprising various situations were designed to elicit refusals from the participants. Drawing on Beebe et al’s categorization (1990), the data were categorized into head acts (subdivided into direct and indirect strategies) and adjuncts to refusal. Results: Although the Jordanian and Spanish participants belong to two distant cultures (eastern and western), the findings revealed that they were more similar than different in their refusals. They both showed a stronger tendency for indirectness in refusing invitations, with the Jordanians being more indirect. Both groups commonly utilized the strategies of statement of regret, giving reason, and negative ability, with different degrees of preference and frequency. As for adjuncts, both groups were inclined to employ a high percentage of adjuncts either before or after head strategies of refusal. While the Jordanians preferred the adjuncts of gratitude and swearing, the Spanish participants preferred gratitude and positive opinion. Both groups showed predilection to combine the same typical components in their refusal responses but differ in the order in which these components appeared. The employment of indirect refusal strategies and adjuncts in the Jordanian and Spanish responses pragmatically served to mitigate potentially negative effects of refusal on the inviters. Conclusion: Further research on Jordanian and Spanish refusals in other situations is recommended.

Investigating the Iranian Translators’ Subtitling and Dubbing Strategies in Translation of Allusions in the Animated Movies from English into Persian

The allusions are cultural terms and the translation of them in AVT is a difficult task for translators, especially in distant cultures such as English and Iranian. Because, the translators needed to be analyzed allusions according to the ıts type and the categorization to which they belong. The present study aimed to identify the allusions, in particular PNs and KPs, based on Leppihalme’s (1997) classification model in animated movies. It tried to investigate Iranian translators’ strategies for subtitling and dubbing the allusions in four animated movies including Mr. Peabody and Sherman (2014), Shrek 2 (2004), Rio (2011), and The Simpsons (2007) based on Leppihalme’s (1997) model and to determine the differences between the strategies used in the dubbing and subtitling of the allusions. For this purpose, the researcher adopted a quantitative method with a comparative descriptive approach. Then, the mentioned animated movies were examined to collect and classify allusive elements. After analysis, the results showed that there were found 60 allusions including 30 KP and 30 PN based on Leppihalme’s (1997) taxonomy. As well as, the findings of strategies analysis related to subtitling indicated that the Retention Name and Literal Translation were the first and second most frequent strategies with 38.3% and 36.7% respectively. While Omission was the least frequent strategy with 3.3%. Furthermore, the findings of strategies analysis related to dubbing illustrated that the Omission name was the first and most frequent with 21.7% while Recreation was the least frequent strategy with 1.7%. The findings of this study can provide a pedagogical implication for translation students so that they can recognize the translations of allusions with subtitling and dubbing strategies and can be utilized as a guideline for fans in the subtitling and dubbing industry.

Public space in different cultural conditions: The cases of Glasgow and Poznań

Public spaces are among the most important components of the contemporary city. They are supposed to be places of vibrant social life, where a broad set of activities and behaviours can be observed. However, the role of public spaces as well as their spatial features can differ in various societies. The built environment, as a human creation, is affected by many social factors and one of them is culture. Thus, cultural conditions can have an impact on how urban space is created, perceived, and used. Those differences are most clearly visible in distant cultures, but they may occur to a greater or lesser extent within a single culture circle. Public spaces, because of their accessibility, egalitarianism, and wide range of users are especially useful as an area of research on the relationship between space and culture. This paper presents differences between Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Poznań (Poland) in the perception and attitude towards urban public space concerning cultural conditions. The theoretical background of the relations between space and culture, and the contemporary views of public space are discussed. Afterwards, the results of the survey study conducted in both cities are presented. The research results are discussed in the context of cultural differences derived from the cultural models and show that cultural dimensions can be used to explain the activity of users of urban public spaces. They also indicate that the variety in behaviour patterns and approaches to public space can be observed within the European cultural circle.

Od języka podstawowej komunikacji do języka edukacji szkolnej - zarys procesu nabywania polszczyzny w warunkach szkolnych na przykładzie nastoletnich chińskich uczniów

The article presents the reflection and the data gathered for the Ph.D. thesis “Chinese students in the Polish educational system – from basic communication to cognitive academic language proficiency skills” presents the specificity of teaching Polish as a second language to young people (12–13 years old) who come from the distant culture and countries. The first part is a brief outline of the Chinese migration in Poland, with particular emphasis on the youngest generation of migrants. The second part of the paper showed the methodology and analysis of the conducted research with conclusions that enabled to answer the research questions. The article the examples of suggestions that may presumably enforce the process of teaching Polish in school conditions by students with experience of migration.

Bridge among Cultures and Worlds

The relations between the Arab world and Hungary have a long history, in which the role of such influential personalities like István Zimony is of paramount importance. In case of two distant cultures, where there is not any common ground for effective communication, these people can make the missing bridges to construct links. Prof. Dr. István Zimonyi is the head of the Department of Medieval Studies at the University of Szeged, a well-known researcher of Hungarian early history and the medieval Turkic speaking nomads living in Eastern Europe, as well as the director of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Cairo between 2007 and 2011. Nevertheless, Zimonyi is also an Orientalist with a deep knowledge of the Arab world, language and culture. In his work as a researcher the collection and translation with commentary of Arabic sources has an important role. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of diplomatic and cultural relations between the Arab world, in which there is a special focus on Egypt, and Hungary, as well as to demonstrate the role of István Zimonyi's work in this context.

Indirect translation in Dutch-Russian cultural transfer

This is the first review of the existing research on the topic of indirect translation in Dutch-Russian language pair. Both theoretical justifications for the study of this problem (H. Pięta, M. Ringmar, C. Dollerup, etc.) and the results of empirical research (I. E. Kuznetsova, H. van der Tak, I. M. Michajlova, etc.) are presented. The paper includes observations on the influence of the mediating language on the creation of the first dictionaries, translation of scientific works, legal documents and fiction, and separately highlights the issue of using English as a “pivot language” in popular online translators. The main problem in this case becomes the translation of personal pronouns and homonyms. In recent years, on the one hand, researchers have been fighting the stigmatisation of mediated translation as a priori inferior and proving that mediated languages link distant cultures and play an important role in the dissemination of literature. On the other hand, textual analyses of different types of indirect translations reveal errors and inaccuracies that could have been easily avoided in direct translation. An intermediary translation can be seen as a translation made with the help of a language other than the source language, but not necessarily from a “third language”: when translation plurality occurs, we can often speak of intralanguage indirect translation. This paper uses Multatuli’s novel Max Havelaar as an illustration, in particular the 1959 Russian edition, where German and Russian translations mediate. Resorting to the help of their predecessors, the Russian translators omit the same fragments, use similar paraphrases, and repeat lexical and phonetic distortions. The use of mediating texts is certainly related to extra-linguistic factors: lack of translators, demand for texts, publishers’ desire to reduce costs or speed up the translation process. The study of specific cases of indirect translation and further systematisation of the identified distortions allows us to track negative trends, and the novel Max Havelaar and its translations into different languages can serve as material for identifying these patterns.

„QUESTI SCHIAVONI”: ITALIJANSKA RENESANSA I SLOVENI U DELU RASTKA PETROVIĆA

This paper explores Rastko Petrović’s last essay entitled Questi Schiavoni, which represents a trilogy about Italian Renaissance artists of Slavic origin. In his recognizable genealogically fluid manner, Petrović shapes three essayistic-documentary texts with historical-novelistic ele- ments, with the aim of illuminating the key features of the brightest era of European art, but also to point out the Slavic participation and importance in building the Italian cultural herit- age. Rastko Petrović’s two major themes, Slavism and Renaissance art, intertwine in this essay, created during his stay in America, a fact which activates another narrative and semantic com- plex in the text: alienation and immigrant experience as a universal ontological quality of the artist’s being. This paper tries to point out the poetic stimuli that came to the avant-garde writer precisely from the Renaissance, and to indicate the intercultural connections and permeations, the importance of which the avant-garde artist emphasized in both his explicit and implicit poetics, proving that intensive communication of ethnically, religiously, geographically distant cultures can be achieved through art. The last segment of the paper follows the so-called Slavic messianism as an idea that Rastko Petrović built upon during his entire creative engagement, mainly dealing with Slavic tribes at cultural and historical epochs turning points.

Suspended Lives

Lucy Caldwell’s 2016 adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters relocates the play into Belfast in the 1990s. This paper examines Caldwell’s adaptation in the context of Irish and Northern Irish rewritings of Chekhov’s dramatic works, paying attention to the motives behind appropriating the Russian works for Irish audiences. Inspired by the perceived affinity between the two seemingly distant cultures, Irish authors have tended to adapt Chekhov (and other Russian classics) to reflect on their own social, cultural, and political environment, often with the aim of shaping the cultural-political landscape of their present. Similarly to earlier Chekhov adaptations, Caldwell’s play engages not only with the original Russian work, but, most importantly, with the cultural-political context of its setting—the five hopeful years preceding the Belfast Agreement (1998), as well as the post-Agreement context of its writing. The play allows its audience in 2016 a complex, retrospective, re-evaluative view of the achievements of the peace process from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. (ZSCS)

Robert D. Miller II. Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God

Robert D. Miller II. <i>Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God</i>

Style of life and dwelling

The 14th Dalai Lama Lhamo Dondrub said that one can achieve happiness in two ways. The first way is external. By acquiring a better dwelling, better clothes, nicer friends, we can achieve happiness and satisfaction to a greater or lesser extent. The second way is the way of spiritual development...&#x0D; But for the architect, spiritual development is inextricably linked to the dwelling, its arrangement and appearance. Probably, only the place where one is happy can be called home. At home even the walls help, my home is my fortress, there is no place like home... The dwelling that a person calls home reflects and preserves his or her image and style of life.&#x0D; Interior painting is an ancient and everlasting way to make a dwelling cosier, friendlier and closer, that is to make it a home. Especially in the case of mass housing, when the houses are initially standard and impersonal. Builders can provide people with square meters of housing, but the houses are often seriously transformed by landlords after their occupancy. How should we deal with these processes? Alejandro Aravena’s projects welcome the self-activity of tenants. Are the standard designs which are now replicated in mass construction ready for this?Our view on a happy house is supplemented by comparing standard housing with unique projects of talented architects (the article about the manor designed by Totan Kuzembaev). Comparing traditions and customs of different and distant cultures helps to see the complex nature of a happy house. It includes not only walls and furniture but also methods of protection against climate extremes, the music playing in the house and the role that the ancient element of fire plays in the house.Not humant hills that oppress the individual, but Houses – stable, worthy of a long life span of generations, and renewable. Like in our favourite books by the Strugatsky brothers, where the most diverse people, regardless of age, education or worldview, find their own, intimate thoughts, we want everyone in our cities to find a place to live and fulfil themselves, a place to be happy.

Różnice w kulturze i organizacji pracy na planie filmowym w Indiach i w Polsce. Przypadek tamilskiego filmu pt. Mersal

Tamil Mersal in Gdańsk. Differences in the culture and organisation of work on a film set in India and Poland (case study) In 2017, the author of the article was the production manager for the shooting of a Tamil film entitled Mersal, which was partially filmed in the Tricity. In the movie, Gdańsk was supposed to imitate Paris. Half of the film crew responsible for production were Poles and half were Indian. Based on his own observations and analysis of the literature, the author describes the differences between filmmakers from two very distant cultures: both in terms of the general understanding of cinema, but also in practice and the approach to the filmmaking process.

Ethnographic movies as artistic memory An ethnosemotic study for the Jewish character in the Iraqi short movie (Venice of the East)

Usually, cinematic research and critical studies combine documentary movie and ethnography, as the movie that deals with reality and reformulates it in an artistic way, and refers to the ethnographic movie as an artistic memory that aims to reveal an aspect of the tragedy of minorities, and presents an aspect of their culture and traditions. “Ethnographic movies enable us to draw attention to the tragedy of persecuted minorities, and thanks to ethnographic movie it has become possible for thousands of viewers in the West to learn about marginal and distant cultures,” says Jean-Paul Colin. This study came to put forward the hypothesis that the ethnographic movie is not limited to documentaries, but the narrative movie, despite being fictional, can be an ethnographic movie, and an artistic memory that indicates what the other suffers from, in case a number of conditions are met. Our interest in the ethnographic movie came from the fact that it represents a visual memory documenting a people separated from others, whether by religion, nationalism or cultural customs and traditions. The ideal model for discussing and proving this hypothesis was the Iraqi short movie (Venice of the East) by addressing the character of the Iraqi Jew, that character that was absent from Iraqi cinematic works, especially movies after the year 2003, which witnessed a greater boom in the production of cinematic movies, especially short ones, but it attended the short movie, subject of this research. The movie (Venice of the East 2018) by screenwriter Mustafa Sattar Al-Rikabi and the director Bahaa Al-Kazemi, which we chose for technical reasons, due to the quality of the cinematic language that the director used to express what he wants in this movie, whose only hero is the character of the Jewish man who does not have a name, whose role was played by the Iraqi actor (Sami Kaftan), as well as many of the signs contained in the visual text that provide signals that may be conscious or unconscious of the situation of this segment of Iraqis, and this will become clear in the course of the research, and other non-technical reasons we have mentioned above from the fact that the Iraqi fictional cinema did not address this segment of the Iraqi citizens. We proved the hypothesis of the research in the first topic, which is a theoretical topic entitled (Ethnographic movie between documentary and fiction), in which we discussed two subjects: (The definition of the ethnographic movie) and (Can the feature movie be considered an ethnographic movie?!). The second topic, is applied and critical, in which we presented the research method (the ethnographic approach) followed by (a critical view of the movie), then we touched on (the customs of the Jewish community in the movie) and finally how it expressed all this through the signs contained in the cinematic language in which the movie was presented. We concluded the research with the most important findings. It is worth mentioning that this research is a founding research and a first study on the ethnographic movie and its importance lies in that, it presents for the first time the hypothesis that the feature movie can be ethnographic and proves this. This research was followed by a second unpublished study entitled (( Forced displacement of Jews and manifestations of return in the movie (Venice of the East)) .

Hardware and software complex for the detection and identification of informative features in images of means of nonverbal communication

Subject of study. Techniques for identifying informative features in dynamic images (video) of means of nonverbal communication of operators during a joint constructive activity were the subject of this study. Aim of study. This study aimed to develop methods for detecting and identifying significant features of nonverbal communication in the received dynamic (video) images of faces of partners, i.e., key features in the joint activity of partners upon disabling the verbal communication channel. Method. A technique for interaction was developed, with a hardware and software complex designed for identifying communication markers in images of facial expressions and eye movements of partners during a joint play activity, in which nonverbal communication is a key aspect and the speech communication channel is disabled. The joint activity involved one partner searching for a hidden target in the perceived image using a nonverbal clue from the second partner, who views the target position on his screen. Partners were chosen among representatives of two geographically distant cultures—Russian and Chinese. The interactions of the partners during their work with images of the object of activity received via simultaneous video communication in two research centers located in western and eastern Eurasia were evaluated through simultaneously recorded physiological parameters. Main results. A new algorithm for investigating images as a means of nonverbal interaction for ensuring the achievement of a shared goal without the speech communication channel was designed. The effectiveness of eye movements of the partners, which are the key features of nonverbal communication, was demonstrated during the constructive joint activity. The task was presented to Chinese and Russian test subjects in the form of English text. Based on the performed measurements, nonverbal interaction in the task of looking for the target position functions similarly for representatives of both cultures and depends on the roles of the partners and the type of executed task. The correlation between the activities of different neural networks of the brain that ensure the recognition of images during the target search in nonverbal communication was identified. An analysis of the images of eye movement during the communication isolated a classic pattern of eye capture for guided and guiding partners. Constant switching occurs between the assessment of images of partners’ eyes and the target search in the entire image. The obtained results suggest that 1) the cognitive process of recognition of facial expressions is probably the most complex visual cognitive process, and 2) universal behavioral algorithms exist when a common joint activity understandable to both partners is performed. Practical significance. A hardware and software complex for detecting significant features of nonverbal communication in the images of faces was designed. The working capacity of the proposed method for detecting features was demonstrated using clear basic signals of nonverbal communication, thus enabling new methods of training artificial neural networks to ensure intuitive nonverbal communication between machines and humans via the recognition of hidden markers of nonverbal communication.

MIGRANT HERITAGE: A Dialogue of Objects and Memories in a Barcelona Ethnographic Museum

ABSTRACTThis article describes the “Dialogues with Africa” project of the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures, which consisted of workshops using personal objects of African guests residing in Catalonia, and objects from the museum's African collections. The dialogues revealed the existence of both a migrant memory connected with objects chosen for their capacity to evoke origins and a museum memory linked with artifacts that were chosen as representing distant cultures. The main aim is to describe this migrant memory in relation to the objects and analyze how it connects with the museum's institutional memory in order to contribute to the discussion of the role of ethnographic museums in a plural society. We suggest that incorporating migrant memory will make possible an opening up to new meanings for objects that have been turned into heritage from an exoticizing standpoint, and that this is in keeping with a more inclusive anthropological museology.

Obca: Ballady oraz inne wiersze [The other: Ballads and other poems

<i>Obca: Ballady oraz inne wiersze</i> [The other: Ballads and other poems

Identifying ELF programs in Italian University websites: what gaps need to be filled

Abstract The present paper stems from an awareness that English has become the most widely used means of intercultural communication on a global scale. Therefore, intercultural communication is more likely to occur through English used as a lingua franca than in any other language used as a lingua franca. English has transcended boundaries and has allowed people from distant cultures to come closer and find common grounds. If, on the one hand, the rise of English has been criticized as a threat to minority languages and cultures, on the other, English has been the means by which people are connected across national and international borders. European Universities and University Language Centres are known to be multicultural environments that provide students with opportunities to familiarise with diverse cultural backgrounds and experience non-native English speech. If therefore, university staff and professionals engage regularly with a multilingual population, they have to be prepared to deal with and respond to their different needs. Within this framework, University degree programs need to be able to cope with a changing cultural and linguistic environment where multilingual speakers increasingly interact in English with other non-native English speakers. In the light of these considerations, this small case study intends to raise awareness of the need to integrate academic degree programs with courses which specifically address Intercultural Communication and English as a Lingua Franca. A sample of Italian university websites has been analysed with a view to identifying the extent to which the aforementioned issues are incorporated within the course programs observed. Preliminary results will be described and considerations suggested.

Temporality of social care in the pandemic context of urbanism and culture of inclusion

The article presents the results of the sociological analysis of the temporal aspects of social care in the new conditions of the pandemic reality. The pandemic is considered as a set of conditions and factors that determine the specific dynamics of societal transformations that affect almost all aspects of the life of society including its temporality - the present and future. Digital technologies, distant models of social relations, mobility and cohesion become priorities for social policy and social care. The pandemic, on the one hand, exacerbates social inequality, on the other hand, levels it out in the ways of self-realization (network technologies), ways of obtaining benefits, primarily from the state (digital social, financial and other services). The pandemic has a binary impact on the practices of social care, programs and technologies for social services, social support, social assistance, and social protection. These practices are most effectively carried out in urbanized areas, where the quality of social care is partly determined by the quality and availability of the relevant urban infrastructure. Based on the results of the new Russian and foreign research presented at the conference under review, the forms, values and resources of social care in the pandemic society are described together with the specifics of distant culture and social inequality in the contemporary city, barriers to mobility (digital, social-perceptual, social-legal), challenges, actors and discourses of social work, lockdowns of social life.