Forms Of Cultural Expression Research Articles

Aportaciones al estudio de la sociabilidad coral en la España contemporánea

Choral song has been an element of collective identification for many European communities, characterizing their cultural expression and on many occasions contributing to the development of their historical destiny. The importance of choral associations has been a point of interest and research from a number of different angles and cultural realities. This article does not aspire to be a history of choral song in Spain, but to serve as a reflection on the paths taken so far in the study of the phenomenon and to channel new ideas and perspectives in the study of musical and choral sociability. Nineteenth-century Spain was, like contemporary Spain, the sum of different national realities with distinct cultural forms of expression, and therefore with different ways of seeing and understanding choral song, which took on different shapes in the different zones where it evolved. It experienced as many different forms of development as there were different social formations and cultures.

Cultural Production in Context

The Art of Transition, as its title indicates, offers an analysis of a broad scope of cultural production as it moves from conditions of dictatorship to democracy in the context of neoliberalism and globalization. It focuses primarily on the cultural production of Argentina and Chile, mainly in the fields of fictional narrative and poetry, though some references to the visual arts are included. Francine Masiello's book, without any doubt, is a complex, inspiring, and a very timely piece of work. In fact, it is undeniable that artand the process of creation and creativity it involves constitutes a key cultural artifact and form of cultural expression of any society. Also undeniable is the strong relationship between Latin American literary discourses and the sociohistorical context in which they are produced. This is clear, for instance, in the literature produced under repressive conditions in South America, which could be considered as a cultural response to dictatorship and authoritarianism. Likewise, given the dramatic economic and cultural changes we are experiencing under the aegis of neoliberalism and globalization, it seems imperative, now more than ever, to consider the relationship between cultural production and the socio-historical context, as well as that between the dominant mode of production and the mode of production of a literary text or a piece of art. For instance, one can consider some of the more recent literary production which, in some cases, seems to be strongly conditioned by the market and cultural industry policies, becoming little more than rhetoric for mass consumption. However, along with this kind of cultural production, there is another kind of literary expressions that doesn't forget that literature is a form of art and aesthetic experience, as much as it is a cultural expression of resistance to the market as the prevailing orientation.

From the Lungs of the Americas: The People Shout! Popular Communications on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast

Somos la garganta de America (We are the of the Americas) begins the chorus of a political song by Nicaraguan Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy that was during the early years of the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s. The insurrection that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Somoza put the small Central American country on the political as well as the geographic map, where it indeed appeared to be the of the western hemisphere. Like many other North American adult educators during that period, I was inspired by the tremendous energy unleashed by the revolution, nurturing a series of daring social experiments. From the throat of the Americas had come a unique environmental adult education development: the renowned Nicaragua Literacy Crusade, which had sent 100,000 brigadistas (volunteer literacy teachers) into the countryside to teach 400,000 peasants to read and write in a short five months (miller, 1985). I had fortuitously been present at the celebration of this Victory over Ignorance, when plans were announced to continue a process of democratizing education through education collectives taught by new literates. Then I was invited by the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education to offer workshops in photo-story production to new literacy teachers in 1981 and 1983. More a learner than a teacher during those forays, I uncovered an already rich tradition of education (Barndt, 1991) and a lesser known practice of popular (Nunez, 1999). Like education, communications works on behalf of the marginalized majority, drawing content from their daily struggles and putting the tools of communications in their hands. In contrast to the mass media which in the Nicaragua context had been state- and often foreign-controlled, media are locally produced and serve as catalysts for deeper social analysis and collective action. I became part of the first team to set up regional production centers and to train literacy teachers and community workers to gather their own stories, develop photos, and produce education materials, including masks, theatre, poetry, and silk screen posters, all forms of cultural expression in Nicaragua. We developed a conceptual framework for introducing this new approach to cultural production to the maestros populares, or teachers, as they were called. It compared the dominant media with alternative media, or communications, according to four categories: content (what are the stories told or messages transmitted?), form (through what mediums?), production (how are they produced and by whom?), and use (for what purposes?). This framework reminded us that transforming education and media from the practices of the dictatorship involved not only replacing the ideological content (that had previously denied the experiences and struggles of the poor), but also rethinking who produces communications tools, how, and for what. It was clear, for example, that dominant culture media was primarily aimed at selling, if not products through advertising, at least a way of life inaccessible to most Nicaraguans. We were particularly interested in emphasizing that the production process itself could be reclaimed for purposes. In contrast with mainstream media production, usually the exclusive domain of professionals, communications engaged ordinary people in collective production, tapping their creativity, and stimulating their learning through an active making process. In other words, we tried to turn the entire purpose of dominant media on its head; communications was, in fact, more concerned with process than with the final product. In the 20 years since we first developed this framework, I have used it many times, though primarily in northern contexts. I added a fifth category --context--which I came to see as the most critical factor. …

Other than Postmodern?--Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics

Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics Frank Palmeri In what might be understood as tracing a paradigm shift in postmodern culture (Kuhn), practicing an archaeology of the contemporary (Foucault), or reporting on the conditions of current knowledge (Lyotard), this essay suggests that a moment of high postmodernism dominant in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has been succeeded by two forms of cultural expression that have continuities with, yet depart from, this cultural mode and stand in contrast to each other. A new structure of thought and expression that I call other than postmodern remains the less prominent and popular mode, by contrast with a late postmodernism that has been the dominant form of production in the nineties and the first years of the new century.1 To define what is other than postmodern, the argument here focuses on the careers and works of Michel Foucault and Thomas Pynchon, noting briefly the works of others as well; by contrast, The X-Files will serve as an instance of the late postmodern, along with other works in the genre of conspiratorial science fiction. As I understand it, postmodernism—like modernism or romanticism—combines elements of both a period and a mode. If it is defined solely as a mode of cultural expression or a set of formal features, the result is an unmooring from historical circumstances. Conversely, if it is defined solely as a period, the result is a reifying of a zeitgeist that may have little or no empirical content, and whose boundaries may be arbitrary and debatable. Thus, postmodernism encompasses a set of concerns and formal operations—including a frequent use of irony, satire, and pastiche, an interest in the layering of historical interpretations, and a strong paranoid strand—while also signifying the period from the mid-sixties until perhaps the present when most, but not necessarily all, of these features have been prominent. For the purposes of the argument here, I will focus on the significant role played in many postmodern works by paranoid visions of history as controlled by powerful but nameless forces or conspirators. As Leo Braudy has pointed out, such visions inform the novels of Pynchon, Mailer, and Heller, and we might add films such as The Conversation (1974), and television series such as The Prisoner (1968). To such a list, Patrick O’Donnell and Timothy Melley have added works by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph McElroy, and Ishmael Reed. Despite the emphasis on paranoia in this essay, I do not define postmodernism solely by reference to the strength or prominence of a single element. Rather, a whole configuration of features and operations—including its relation to the cultural and political moment—is crucial in determining the cultural paradigm in which a work participates, whether modern, postmodern, or late postmodern. For example, Freud formulated an influential theory of paranoia, but his thought on the subject does not therefore become postmodern. The Freudian concept of paranoia designates a form of mental illness that has a personal, sexual etiology and meaning; by contrast, paranoia carries a central, social, and political import in the postmodern works of Pynchon, DeLillo, and others. The content of the concept differs in such cases, and so do the cultural configurations in which it plays a part. Similarly, I would not define the modern solely by reference to its reliance on the liberal humanist subject. When, for instance, works such as The X-Files and The Matrix attempt to recuperate an autonomous individual subject that has been dissolved in many ways by earlier versions of postmodernism, they do not therefore return to a modernist cultural moment; their attempted restoration takes place in the context of global conspiracy theories more powerful and ominous than the ordering structures envisioned in the narratives of Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner. Jean-François Lyotard has focused on the postmodern skepticism about master narratives and totalizing ideologies; Linda Hutcheon has stressed the parodic and ironic element that pervades postmodernism, as well as its interest in history as opposed to myth. Although the focus here on paranoia in postmodernism might appear to be at odds with Lyotard’s and Hutcheon’s understandings of the postmodern, I believe it...

Fashioning Selves and Tradition: Case Studies on Personhood and Experience in Nunavut

This past summer's dramatic confrontations between Mi'kmaq fishers of Burnt Church, Nova Scotia, and officers representing the Canadian government splashed the covers of Canadian newspapers and newsmagazines. Those reporting on the clashes did an excellent job in presenting the perspectives and interests of the different actors in the dispute. Despite such coverage, however, there continues to exist considerable confusion and ignorance about the struggles facing aboriginal groups in Canada as they battle to defend their cultures and traditions in public settings. Although clashes between the representatives of federal and provincial governments and First Nations are becoming more and more pronounced in Canadian popular culture, these clashes draw attention away from the much more subtle uses of culture and in more private, quotidian settings. In this essay, I focus on these more subtle and personal challenges facing aboriginal peoples throughout Canada today as they negotiate their own relations hip to their traditions and cultures. Specifically, I will show how tradition has become a focal point for the expression of self-identity in the of two very different individuals belonging to the same ethnic group. The first individual is a middle-aged man from Nunavut. I will show how traditions associated with hunting have given his life new direction and purpose. The second individual is an Inuit woman, also from Nunavut, who struggles with applying traditional Inuit ideals about parenting and the development of personhood in an increasingly urban setting, a setting radically different from what she experienced as a child. My reasons for choosing to focus on the life experiences of individuals are twofold. First, I am following a path well traveled by anthropologists, who continue to use the study of individual to render more familiar and intelligible what seem to be radically different forms of cultural expression and social experience. By insistently focusing on individuals and the particularities of their anthropologist Abu-Lughod argues, we may be better able to perceive similarities in all our lives (1993, 27). Second, by focusing on lived experience, I am arguing for a more critical approach towards the study of and culture in the of contemporary aboriginal peoples. Elsewhere I have argued that these are fluid and contingent categories that are interpreted differently in different contexts, but that nevertheless provide a stable foundation for the production and articulation of contemporary Inuit identities (Searles 1998a; see also Dorais 1997). Examining everyday experiences provides a sound model for understanding individuals as agents who both shape and are shaped by the world in which they live (Jackson 1989). Accepting the contingency and indeterminacy of experience also requires a complex definition of tradition. Tradition, as it is expressed and experienced by aboriginal peoples today, is more than just an inherited set of knowledge and practices. It is an intellectual, aesthetic, and political resource used in the building of lives, communities, and nations. Research Setting Research for this paper was conducted in Iqaluit (formerly Frobisher Bay), the capital of the Nunavut Territory, and Kuyait, a small outpost camp settlement nearly 160 miles away. Although in 1994 Kuyait consisted of one household, it continues to be a regular camping spot for many families living in Iqaluit, many of whom stop here while hunting in the outer reaches of Frobisher Bay. Iqaluit, by contrast, is the largest town in Nunavut, numbering 4,220 according to the 1996 Statistics Canada census. Despite its size and its political and economic importance, Iqaluit only came into existence in the 1940s, first as an air force base during the Second World War and then as a regional center for government services and programs beginning in the 1950s. On the other hand, Inuit have occupied Kuyait for hundreds if not thousands of years (Fitzhugh and Olin 1993). …

Singing and Selling Seeds

The Live Music Era on Rural Midwestern Radio Stations Gretta Woodson's singing career began on a hot summer afternoon in 1925. Employed as an office worker, Woodson and her sister had enjoyed a quick lunch in a downtown Oklahoma City restaurant. With some time left to kill on their lunch hours, the two women strolled through the downtown area, eventually passing the studios of Oklahoma City's new radio station, WKY. Neither woman had ever seen a radio station, so they decided to ask for a tour. Much to their bewilderment, however, the staff member on duty mistakenly thought the two women had stopped by to audition for a job: We just walked in (to the studio) and we visited with her a little... finally she said, "Do you play or sing?" I said, "Yes, I do." She asked me to sing something, so I did. When I got through, a man walked in and said, "Would you mind doing that (song) over again?"'. . . He put a microphone in front of me and he walked out of the studio... I went ahead and finished my song ... he came back in and asked, "Would you like to be on our Saturday night program?"1 Before she knew it, Woodson was a radio star. In fact, she worked at WKY for two years and enjoyed such popularity that she left Oklahoma in 1927 and moved to Chicago, where she became a recording artist for the Victor Phonograph Company and a performer on radio station WGN. Woodson's sudden rise to regional fame as a radio performer illustrates how broadcasters in rural Middle America turned to their cultural roots in radio's formative years to tap and develop a valuable natural resource, the local musician. From the early 1920s through the post-war 1940s, station executives combed their back yards searching for talented singers, yodelers, accordion players, fiddlers and guitar and banjo pickers. This was the heyday of radio's homegrown musician, when live music, albeit parochial and usually greenhorn in quality, dominated local program schedules. Stations always had plenty of air time to fill, and in a geographical region known as a breeding ground for country and folk music, the talent supply was equally plentiful, as Richard Lutz, a former musician for KFAL in Fulton, Missouri, explains: Here in Calloway County (Missouri) there's a lot of what we call "down home, back porch" musicians .... This county is full of fiddle players, banjo players, guitar players, mandolin players and some horn players, too ... it's only natural that radio would have reflected this culture.2 Live music was not unique to stations in the towns and cities of the rural Midwest; from radio's earliest days broadcasters in all regions of the country relied on local talent as a programming resource literally. But, as cultural geographers have noted, music is a unique form of cultural expression, and regional influences greatly impact the style and appeal of this art form. As a result, a given station's musical identity was largely shaped by native culture and custom, which was, in turn, based on the availability of local talent. Thus, instead of the civic orchestras, opera singers, or concert violinists commonly found on early day stations in the cities of the Northeast, radio in the rural Midwest thrived on homespun melodies from the KMA Cornpickers, the Ozark Ramblers, the Harmony Twins, Johnny White and his Sons of the West, the Pleasant Valley Gang, and "Happy Jack," the fiddling Irishman. Rural audiences loved this folksy fare because, if for no other reason, local radio's entertainers reflected the conservative, agrarian values that so typified the regional culture.3 The relationship that developed between local broadcasting and its indigenous cadre of entertainers bred a unique programming phenomenon that historians have mostly left unexplored. Consequently, little is understood about the lives of radio musicians, their career aspirations or the professional demands placed on them. Many broadcast histories focus on the media giants who built networks or major companies. …

Culture, conceptive technology, and nursing

Technology is a form of cultural expression, formed of and forming culture. A paradox about technological innovation is that, in addition to creating new human arrangements and possibilities, it often serves only to reinforce existing sociocultural practices, norms, and values. The technologically radical is often the culturally conservative. Conceptive technology has contributed toward the redefinition of patienthood, the multiplication of models of infertility, and the reinforcement of existing cultural norms. Nurses are well-positioned to conduct a kind of technology assessment that places culture and ethics at the center of inquiry. They are also well-positioned to assist women and their partners seeking technological assistance to reproduce to understand the controversies concerning conceptive technology that may account for their own ambivalence toward continuing or terminating medical treatment, societal ambivalence toward supporting expensive fertility treatments, and cultural ambivalence toward technological development.

Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in Jazz

This paper explores the relationship between place and processesof innovation in popular music, focusing on the example of the bebop styleof jazz. Bebop emerged during the 1940s both as a reaction against olderjazz styles and as an expression of artistic innovation within a communityof younger jazz musicians. The process of its creation and early developmentwas situated in a set of "nested'' locales centered in New York City. Thisanalysis examines the diverse nature of these locales and the distinctiveways in which they fostered interactions among bebop's creators and theirvarious audiences. The analysis reveals that different locales played dissimilarroles during specific stages in bebop's emergence, as it evolved into anincreasingly coherent form of cultural expression. Most importantly, certainjazz clubs in Harlem provided a setting for the early experimentation thatculminated in the bebop style, but the style's subsequent formalization andpopularization depended on its exposure in jazz clubs in midtown Manhattan,at first along 52nd Street and later on nearby sections of Broadway.These findings confirm the importance of place in understanding thedynamic nature of popular music and the processes of innovation integral toit.

Research Trends in the Study of Chinese Cities: A Review Essay

FOUR THEMES ARE evident in the studies of urban China (Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China) over the last thirty years: the relationship between state policy and economic development; the urbanization and transformation of Chinese society; socialism's impact on the urban infrastructure; and, more recently; the effect of market reforms on urban stratification, family composition and organization, and forms of cultural expression. This essay presents a bibliography of writings on urban China (1949–1998). Much of this literature is drawn from disciplines other than anthropology and is relatively recent, (51 percent or n=143 out of 240 were published in the last eight years). The essay also discusses the thematic topics and more recent writings representative of research in the field. [China, cities, market reform, social change]

Off the shelf: Language, literacy and forms of cultural expression in the Ottoman and Arab worlds

Off the shelf: Language, literacy and forms of cultural expression in the Ottoman and Arab worlds

Bhangra in Newcastle: Music, ethnic identity and the role of local knowledge

Originally a traditional form of Punjabi folk musk, bhangra has been radically transformed by British‐Asian musicians into a fusion style, which, in addition to retaining characteristic aspects of its folk heritage also incorporates elements of western popular music. There is currently very little research which deals with this adaptation of the bhangra style and which attempts to ascertain its cultural significance for Asians living in Britain. Moreover, in those studies which have examined these issues there has been a tendency to theorize unproblematically the role of bhangra in acting as vehicle for a common form of cultural expression amongst Asian communities in Britain whilst leaving aside any consideration of the influence of locality and local knowledges upon such musicalized forms of cultural expression. In this article I will argue that such essentialist explanations are insufficient to explain the nature of the cultural work performed by bhangra in this country. Drawing upon the results of empirical research which I have carried out in Newcastle upon Tyne, I will attempt to illustrate how the collective uses of bhangra music by different groups of Asians living in the city and the various statements and expressions of ethnic identity which such uses are intended to articulate are in each instance underscored by issues of locality, that is to say, by forms of knowledge and types of sensibility which are particular to Newcastle and the wider North East region.

The Strange and the Familiar: Intercultural Exchange between African and Caribbean Theatre

In the heart of the forest, Makak and his companions endeavour to come to terms with their blackness/Africanness before they can return to their Caribbean island purged of their sense of exile and alienation. The scene captures the psycho-physical pull which Africa exerts on most Caribbean peoples of African descent, an attraction which has coloured both the way of life and forms of cultural expression in the Caribbean. But more significantly, this play (and scene in particular) was my first contact with African-Caribbean theatre which I recognized as familiar, but also one mixed with a certain strangeness and foreignness. Here was a group of characters—black, of course—who spoke in a dialect of English that was very close to the pidgin of my Nigerian society, but who were very different from the Nigerian man in the street. Their racial anguish—the subject of much Caribbean literature and theatre—struck a responsive chord in me, but it definitely was not my anguish because the experience which had produced these characters was totally alien to me. However, beyond this mixture of strangeness and familiarity, was the strange familiarity of the form which Walcott employs in articulating this peculiar experience of slavery. Makak has embarked upon a journey home, albeit in his dream, with a group of other people to Africa. Symbolically, it is a rite of passage and a return to his origins and it is here that the curious mixture of foreignness and familiarity throws up a dramatic structure that is both African and Caribbean and which has led me on a search for the ‘own’ in the ‘foreign’.

Cries of Distress: Emily Dickinson's Initial German Reception from an Intercultural Perspective

Cries of Distress:Emily Dickinson's Initial German Reception from an Intercultural Perspective Walter Grünzweig (bio) In June 1898, a two-part commentary on Emily Dickinson appeared in the German-language Illinois Staats-Zeitung, containing what is considered to be the earliest translation of Dickinson's poetry into any language and most probably the first introduction to the author that was not in English.1 Interspersed in a text discussing Dickinson's work and oeuvre are four poems, "Much Madness is divinest Sense—," "The Heart asks Pleasure—first—," "If I can stop one Heart from breaking," and "The Soul selects her own Society—." The anonymous contributor is only referred to by her initials, "A.E." and "A.v.E." respectively. A little later in that same year, two of the poems were republished, with slight alterations, in the German naturalist periodical Die Gesellschaft, with the full name of the translator given as one "A. von Ende (New-York)."2 Although the achievement of Amalie von Ende for the international reception of Emily Dickinson has been noted several times,3 little is known about her extraordinary biography and extensive oeuvre. It is significant and indicative of Emily Dickinson's reception that a central figure such as Amalie von Ende was the first to introduce the non-American world to Dickinson. A brief summary of the biography and achievement of Amalie von Ende will place her commentary on and translation of Emily Dickinson in five cultural and intercultural contexts, making up her life and the many worlds of German-speaking America and German-American relations around the turn of the century: politics, gender, criticism, art, and interculturality.4 Politics: Amalie von Ende was, in today's political language, a liberal with a strongly leftist bent. Born in Warsaw as Amalie Kremper in 1856, she [End Page 232] spent her early childhood in Poland. The Krempers, who sympathized with the Polish liberation movement against the Tsar, eventually opted for emigration to the United States in the 1860s. Already in her youth, she worked as a journalist and wrote for two radical-socialist Milwaukee papers. There she came to know Henrich von Ende, a "radical journalist and publisher," as she herself put it, who served as associate editor of the paper. Amalie and Henrich moved to Cincinnati and, from 1876 until 1878, jointly edited a socialist daily there, the Ohio Volkszeitung. Her progressive political attitude is also reflected in her membership (and active work) on the board of directors of Horace Traubel's radical Walt Whitman Fellowship International. Throughout er life, Amalie von Ende demonstrated a strong committment to political, social and ethical change. Emily Dickinson, von Ende wrote, "had a strong sense of vocation. Her life work was to be a friend—counseling, consoling, and helping others." That sense of mission was also Amalie von Ende's. In addition to her journalistic activities, it manifested itself in a powerful educational impetus very much in the radical enlightenment tradition. After her husband's death in 1879, von Ende founded an educational institute for girls which followed progressive pedagogical principles. But what was it that interested this highly politicized and committed woman in Emily Dickinson? Gender: Amalie von Ende was, and defined herself, as a feminist. It was in the Frauen-Zeitung, the Staats-Zeitung's "section for women," that von Ende published her essay on Dickinson. In all of her work, she always placed special emphasis on women and women's contribution to American, German, and world culture. She also attended several international feminist and peace conferences prior to World War I and was well acquainted especially with those personalities active both in the women's and peace movement. In ending her articles on Dickinson with the celebratory line: "Emily Dickinson had to write to become what she is: the most original woman poet that America has yet produced," she celebrates the achievement as one of American women's literature. Criticism: Amalie von Ende was a critic. She dealt with literature, comparative literature, the fine arte, music, and many other forms of cultural expression, including popular culture. Her notion of culture is very broad, although she does accord special place and function to...

Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941.

During the 1930's, 23 million peasants left their villages and moved to Soviet cities, where they comprised almost half the urban population and more than half the nation's industrial workers. Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David L. Hoffmann shows how this massive migration to the cities--an influx unprecedented in world history--had major consequences for the nature of the Soviet system and the character of Russian society even today.Hoffmann focuses on events in Moscow between the launching of the industrialization drive in 1929 and the outbreak of war in 1941. He reconstructs the attempts of Party leaders to reshape the social identity and behavior of the millions of newly urbanized workers, who appeared to offer a broad base of support for the socialist regime. The former peasants, however, had brought with them their own forms of cultural expression, social organization, work habits, and attitudes toward authority. Hoffmann demonstrates that Moscow's new inhabitants established social identities and understandings of the world very different from those prescribed by Soviet authorities. Their refusal to conform to the authorities' model of a loyal proletariat thwarted Party efforts to construct a social and political order consistent with Bolshevik ideology. The conservative and coercive policies that Party leaders adopted in response, he argues, contributed to the Soviet Union's emergence as an authoritarian welfare state.

The Politics of Performance: From Theater Licensing to Movie Censorship in Turn-of-the-Century New York

THE MOVIES WERE BORN IN THE CITY. WHILE HISTORIANS OF EARLY film have begun to pay more attention to special issues such as technology, patent wars, industrial practice, and the movies' aesthetic debt to earlier forms of cultural expression, there has been little analysis of the specifically urban world that made motion pictures the most popular form of commercial entertainment by World War I. The political, legal, and economic wrangles surrounding the nascent movie business in New York City established the template for the ownership and control of the mature industry, as well as the basic pattern for film censorship. In the first center of movie production and exhibition during the early part of the century, the especially knotty issues involving the licensing and censoring of movies -who could show them and what could they show -were fiercely contested. These battles over the regulation of representation need to be understood against the historical backdrop of urban cultural politics. Movies reinforced and reconfigured a set of controversies that, since the mid-nineteenth century, had been fought out largely over the licensing and regulation of theatrical space. These issues included the alleged dangers commercial entertainments posed to children, disputes

Jewish culture and identity in the Soviet Union

Over 10 years ago, Benjamin Fain, a physicist now living in Tel Aviv, attempted to hold a conference on Jewish culture in Moscow, an effort that was foiled by the KGB. Many of the participants were eventually able to flee, most emigrating to Israel. In this book, these distinguished scholars and others from around the world present their personal and professional views of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. The book explores a wide range of topics, including underground literature, religious revival and the rise of a national Jewish consciousness. Some writers claim that the refuseniks are not the leaders of the Soviet Jews but rather an isolated minority, with most Jews being assimilated, acculturated, and uninterested in fleeing. Other essayists look at the ambivalent role traditionally played by the Soviet Union in both allowing some forms of cultural expression and at the same time suppressing any efforts at individual religious practice. Others explore the revival of Jewish culture as instanced by underground teaching of Hebrew. A major debate involves the nature of Jewish emigration, whether the Jews will go to Israel or to America.

American Anxiousness: Selfhood and Culture in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

ing effort to disguise its own emptiness. Within the novel, personal and communal anxiety is expressed in various forms of uneasiness about the authenticity of the self and in the fantasies of power and acts of domination that assuage that uneasiness: in Coverdale's fear of exposure, in the attraction of veiling and masquerading, in the fascination with occult access to the secrets-and thus to the selvesof others. The book's combination of interests-in the elaborately defended psyches of its characters, in the forms of cultural expression that manifest the shared anxieties of the community, and in the new emotions and experiences that belong to life in the city-reveals that in this romance Hawthorne is engaged in a striking act of cultural diagnosis. He is identifying what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling: a specific historical moment-here, the emergence of a careening market economy in the middle years of the nineteenth century-as it expresses itself in private feeling and in the cultural forms a community produces.'

Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750–1850 by Gay L. Gullickson

934 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the bloom was delivered. Successful iron smelting was also believed to require the active participation of supernatural forces, usually the spirits of ancestors, and much of the smelting procedure consisted of rituals designed to attract the support of these beings. The photography and editing of this film are excellent, while the commentary provides a lucid and convincing anthropological analysis of the actions captured by the camera. The film comes with a twentypage booklet by Herbert and Goucher that provides more detailed analysis, a summary of the known history of ironworking in Bassar, and a bibliography. While this would be an impressive documentary film by any standards, its value is increased by the fact that there are so few other films of bloomery iron smelting. It also lends strong support to the views advanced by Heather Lechtman and by some Africanists who argue that metallurgy is as much a form of cultural expression as any other, and that the development of metallurgy in many regions cannot be fully explained without an understanding of the societies in which they were developed. David Killick Mr. Killick is an archaeologist with a particular interest in the development of metallurgy, and is currently completing a Ph.D dissertation in the Department of An­ thropology at Yale University on bloomery iron smelting in Malawi, southeast Africa. He has done archaeological fieldwork on metallurgical sites in Malawi and South Africa and recently collaborated on studies of the beginnings of copper metallurgy in West Africa and of 19th-century steelmaking processes in England and the United States. Spinners and Weavers ofAuffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850. By Gay L. Gullickson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. x + 256; tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $34.50. The extensive archives of provincial France have proved an irre­ sistible attraction to historians for several decades now. First plumbed by France’s own annalistes, they have lately inspired a number of Amer­ ican scholars, many of whom also use the socio-quantitative approach pioneered by the annalistes to provide case studies of varying geo­ graphic, chronological, and topical scope. Gay Gullickson’s Spinners and Weavers of Auffay is a recent example. Drawing on departmental and municipal records, cahiers de doléances, and firsthand accounts, she creates a comprehensive picture of life in this Normandy village. Her secondary sources blend the literatures of women’s studies and eco­ nomic history to place this picture in a larger frame. Her objectives are in fact multiple, for, in describing how the people of Auffay and its surrounding area, the Caux, used and were used by the putting-out system of textile manufacture, Gullickson wishes TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 935 to stress the frequently ignored contribution that women’s wages made to family incomes, and to revise the generally accepted model for proto-industrialization advanced by Franklin Mendels, Rudolf Braun, and David Levine. This model holds that the large-scale cottage in­ dustries that preceded fully industrialized urban manufacture were most likely to develop in those areas in which a declining agriculture forced rural workers into the production of consumer goods for putting -out merchants. Attitudinal changes supposedly followed, causing reduced thrift, earlier marriage, and an increased birthrate. This in turn created a large population vulnerable to, but dependent on, a manufacturer’s response to the laws of supply and demand, so that workers competed first against one another for hand labor and then against the machines that replaced it. Gullickson finds that the Caux and its people differed from this model in almost every way, a “contrast . . . allowing] us to draw a more accurate and complex picture of the economic and demographic consequences of proto-industrialization” (p. 3). Perhaps most impor­ tant, her findings stress reciprocity rather than rivalry between ag­ riculture and cottage industry, with workers accepting both as seasonal employment and moving rationally between them. This is not to say that proto-industrialization did not affect the cauchois. Indeed, one significant change was in the division of labor: at the beginning of the period under investigation, spinning had been done...

Charles Willson Peale's Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum

The relationship of any single work of art to its culture is always problematic. As the act of an individual artist faced with the task of creating something on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas with line, shape, and space, with form and color, a painting belongs to the biography of the artist and to the history and criticism of art, a possible subdivision of which is the history and criticism of the art of a particular culture. Cultural critics and historians of a more comprehensive sort will examine a work for the ways in which it “reflects,” “illustrates,” or “expresses” shared experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the culture, directly or in some mediated fashion. If art historians tend at times to underestimate the interrelation between a painting and other forms of cultural expression in their preoccupation with the specialness of the medium, its tradition and methodology, the cultural critics often run the risk of ignoring or flattening out the special language of pictorial expression in their avid search for interconnections. At one extreme, they seem to posit some hypostatized notion of a “culture” in which individual acts seem almost to be assumed as automatic illustrations rather than formative shapes. To fashion a more adequate critical approach requires thus that we draw upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their pitfalls.

The African musician and the development of the Johannesburg entertainment industry, 1900–1960

This study is primarily concerned with the music and musicians of a selfconsciously urban community: Africans who were of Johannesburg and not merely in it. Its purposes are, firstly, to explore the role of certain forms of cultural expression in the emergence of urban African identity and social order, and secondly, to outline the nature of the conflict between the African performing community and white commercial and political agencies over control of these performances and the qualities of identity they expressed. It is not suggested that these processes have been characteristic of Johannesburg alone. The development of urban African performing arts and the struggle for cultural autonomy have involved all of South Africa's growing urban centres. But as the centre of South Africa's entertainment industry and the major location of my own research Johannesburg must serve as an example and a focus for the sociohistorical analysis that follows. In addition to over 90,000 male Africans working on the Rand as miners in 1896, 42,733 others, variously employed as clerks, domestics, teachers, artisans, and criminals, were reported living within a three-mile radius of the Market Square. I Their numbers daily swelled by new arrivals, most of these people were not migrant workers who intended returning to their homes in distant parts of southern Africa when their short-term contracts expired. They were, or soon became, aspiring townsmen who formed the core of Johannesburg's permanent African community, though they varied in degree of westernization from illiterate 'rickshaw boys' to the future editor of the Bantu World, R. V. Selope-Therma, and his associates. Journalistic accounts of the first quarter of this century2 regularly