Local Cultural Milieu Research Articles

Historical Development and Literacy Transmission of the Poya Songbook

The Poya Songbook, an integral part of Zhuang traditional culture, embodies rich music and folklore passed down through generations. This study aims to examine the historical development and literacy transmission of the Poya Songbook for education and literacy studies in Funing County, Wenshan Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. Drawing upon a combination of ethnographic methods and semiotic analysis, the research delves into the intricate journey of the Poya Songbook, contrasting its state before and after the pivotal year 2006, when it received official recognition as an intangible cultural heritage. Three key informants, deeply rooted in the local cultural milieu, provide valuable insights into the songbook’s transformation, its role in education, and the challenges of preserving its authenticity amidst modern influences. The data analysis discerns shifts in transmission methods, content, and performance, shedding light on the evolving relationship between tradition and cultural identity. The findings underscore the importance of balancing preservation with adaptation to ensure the continued vitality of this cherished cultural heritage. Suggestions for the sustained safeguarding of the Poya Songbook include innovative educational initiatives that integrate its teachings into contemporary curricula, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of Zhuang cultural identity.

Race, gender, and place: How judicial identity and local context shape anti-discrimination decisions

AbstractWhile federal anti-employment discrimination laws have helped diminish inequality at work, discrimination persists, in part perhaps due to unequal handling of equal employment lawsuits. Prior research demonstrates that the definition of discrimination can vary based on local normative ideas, while another line shows that a judge's race or gender can shape how related lawsuits are handled. In this article, I draw on a set of EEOC workplace discrimination cases prosecuted in Federal Court and combine it with locality data, to analyze: (1) the impact of local context, specifically rurality, local political context, and southerness and; (2) how judges' race and gender interact with the local cultural-milieu. Findings reveal that plaintiffs of colour in race discrimination cases fair worse in rural courts or before white judges. Meanwhile, white judges in conservative areas are more defendant friendly than those outside the in more liberal areas. Black judges, in comparison, are more plaintiff friendly in conservative areas when compared to black judges in more liberal areas. While female judges are generally more plaintiff friendly than male judges in sex cases, location has no discernible effect.

Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Adults Aged ≥18 Years - United States, 2015-2019.

Problem/ConditionSuicidal thoughts and behaviors are important public health concerns in the United States. In 2019, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death among persons aged ≥18 years (adults); in that year, 45,861 adults died as a result of suicide, and an estimated 381,295 adults visited hospital emergency departments for nonfatal, self-inflicted injuries. Regional- and state-level data on self-inflicted injuries are needed to help localities establish priorities and evaluate the effectiveness of suicide prevention strategies.Period Covered2015–2019.Description of SystemThe National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) is an annual survey of a representative sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized U.S. population aged ≥12 years. NSDUH collects data on the use of illicit drugs, alcohol, and tobacco; initiation of substance use; substance use disorders and treatment; health care; and mental health. This report summarizes data on responses to questions concerning suicidal thoughts and behaviors contained in the mental health section among sampled persons aged ≥18 years in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This report summarizes 2015–2019 NSDUH data collected from 254,767 respondents regarding national-, regional-, and state-level prevalence of suicidal thoughts, planning, and attempts by age group, sex, race and ethnicity, region, state, education, marital status, poverty level, and health insurance status.ResultsPrevalence estimates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors varied by sociodemographic factors, region, and state. During 2015–2019, an estimated 10.6 million (annual average) adults in the United States (4.3% of the adult population) reported having had suicidal thoughts during the preceding year. The prevalence of having had suicidal thoughts ranged from 4.0% in the Northeast and South to 4.8% in the West and from 3.3% in New Jersey to 6.9% in Utah. An estimated 3.1 million adults (1.3% of the adult population) had made a suicide plan in the past year. The prevalence of having made suicide plans ranged from 1.0% in the Northeast to 1.4% in the Midwest and West and from 0.8% in Connecticut and New Jersey to 2.4% in Alaska. An estimated 1.4 million adults (0.6% of the adult population) had made a suicide attempt in the past year. The prevalence of suicide attempts ranged from 0.5% in the Northeast to 0.6% in the Midwest, South, and West and from 0.3% in Connecticut to 0.9% in West Virginia. Past-year prevalence of suicidal thoughts, suicide planning, and suicide attempts was higher among females than among males, higher among adults aged 18–39 years than among those aged ≥40 years, higher among noncollege graduates than college graduates, and higher among adults who had never been married than among those who were married, separated, divorced, or widowed. Prevalence was also higher among those living in poverty than among those with a family income at or above the federal poverty threshold and higher among those covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program than among those with other types of health insurance or no health insurance coverage.InterpretationThe findings in this report highlight differences in the adult prevalence of suicidal thoughts, plans to attempt suicide, and attempted suicide during the 12 months preceding the survey at the national, regional, and state levels during 2015–2019. Geographic differences in suicidal thoughts and behavior varied by sociodemographic characteristics and might be attributable to sociodemographic composition of the population, selective migration, or the local cultural milieu. These findings underscore the importance of ongoing surveillance to collect locally relevant data on which to base prevention and intervention strategies.Public Health ActionUnderstanding the patterns of and risk factors for suicide is essential for designing, implementing, and evaluating public health programs for suicide prevention and policies that reduce morbidity and mortality related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. State health departments and federal agencies can use the results from this report to assess progress toward achieving national and state health objectives in suicide prevention. Strategies might include identifying and supporting persons at risk, promoting connectedness, and creating protective environments.

Immigrants’ socio-economic achievements and cultural diversity

PurposeAn interest in social transmission as a source of welfare and income inequality in a society has re-emerged recently with new vigour in leading economic research (see Piketty, 2014). This paper presents a mixed Bourdieu-Mincer (B-M) type micro-economic model which provides a testable mechanism for culturally biased socio-economic inter-generational transmission. In particular, the operationalisation of this mixed B-M type model seeks to find evidence for individual and local cultural capital effects on the economic achievements, in addition to the human capital effect, for both migrants and locals in the Netherlands. The purpose of this paper is to examine two sources of wage differential in the local labour market, namely: individual cultural capital (approximated by immigrant background), which affects schooling results; and the local cultural capital (approximated with the cultural milieu), which directly biases the selection of employees.Design/methodology/approachThe study utilises the 2007-2009 data set for higher professional education (in Dutch termed HBO) graduates registered in the Maastricht database. The Mincer-type equation is augmented with a control variable for the local cultural milieu. The authors cope with this model empirically by means of 2SLS and 3SLS methods.FindingsThe authors find convincing evidence for the existence of both an individual cultural capital and a local cultural capital effect on schooling and wage differentials. This can be interpreted as a migrant background effect leading to a disadvantaged position on the labour market due to less frequently attending high-quality secondary schools.Originality/valueMore importantly, the authors find evidence for a classical Myrdalian effect of self-fulfilling prophecy, in which graduates with second-generation migrant background have a disadvantaged position due to access only to poorer quality of schooling.

The Difficulties and Possibilities of Cross-Cultural Communication: A Case Study of the Global Development of the Confucius Institutes

Cultural communication is rooted in fusion: multicultural fusion requires that incoming cultures participate in various cultural activities at their place of arrival, such as cementing collaboration with local universities, reinforcing cooperation with local social groups, and strengthening collaboration with civil forces and local governments, and so on, thus allowing the incoming culture to become an important component of the local cultural milieu. The successes and difficulties that the Confucius Institutes have encountered in the course of their establishment can serve as illustrative examples of this process.

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Social capital and local cultural milieu for successful migrant entrepreneurship

This paper investigates the cultural gravity mechanism behind the bonding and bridging effects on the performance of migrant entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. The culture-based development gravity approach – suggesting a joint interaction of individual cultural capital and local cultural milieu as a critical factor for local development – will be operationally translated into a model on bonding and bridging preferences of migrant entrepreneurs. A logit model is employed to estimate a culturally augmented standard production function, in which the dependent variables are alternatively a high-profit or increased turnover and in which the independent variables are – in addition to the standard input factors – also the interaction terms of, respectively, bonding and bridging with local cultural milieu. Different specifications of the estimated model, controls for clustering effects and two modifications of the data-set are used to achieve the best extraction of information from the available data-set and to cope with its limitations. We find that bonding is positive in the context of a culturally closed local milieu; yet, this approach secures mostly profits, but is less likely to generate economies of scale for the enterprise. The most interesting result is that the choice to be rather ethnically locked in (i.e. a bonding preference), due to heuristically following the ‘role model’ imposed by the choice of the other migrant entrepreneurs in the locality, has a significantly negative association with the success of the migrant entrepreneur.

Identity Formation of American Indian Adolescents: Local, National, and Global Considerations

A conceptual model is presented that approaches identity formation of American Indian adolescents according to 3 levels of social contextual influence—local, national, and global—relative to types of identity, dynamics of identity, and sources of influence. Ethnic identity of American Indians is embedded within the local cultural milieu and encompasses an array of dimensions organized around identification, connection, and culture/spirituality. The national or societal level brings additional complexities according to bicultural, multicultural, and hybrid types of identity. There is little known about the global implications of identity formation for American Indian adolescents, but a review of the construct of indigenous identity provides some guidance along with examination of identity formation of indigenous youth in other parts of the world. Suggestions for research are provided throughout the paper, and theoretical implications for the broader topic of American Indian identity formation are provided with particular discussion of indigenous psychologies.

Remembering Two of Montreal's Yiddish Women Poets: Esther Segal and Ida Maza

Esther Segal and Ida Maza were Yiddish poets active in Montreal’s literary milieu from the 1920s through the 1960s. While both were recognized by their contemporaries as significant voices in Yiddish poetry, they have been remembered in very different ways. This study presents the careers and writings of Segal and Maza as well as their roles as cultural figures in Montreal’s Jewish immigrant community. It examines how their work has been disseminated and how they have been remembered. In the process, it raises questions of posterity in Yiddish literature: Who is remembered and included in the canon of Yiddish Canadian letters, and why? During the formative period of Montreal’s development as a Yiddish cultural center in the 1920s, the several women poets active in the expanding local literary milieu included Esther Segal (1895–1974) and Ida Maza (Maze/ Massey, 1893–1962). 2 Both immigrated to Montreal at a young age during the mass Jewish immigration to Canada from Eastern Europe. Both made their literary debuts in the early 1920s, and both wrote lyrical verse influenced by Yiddish modernist poetry. Both published primarily in literary journals and anthologies, and their writings were well received by their peers, locally and internationally. Yet Segal has fallen into obscurity, while Maza has been widely written about as a poet and activist. Still known in Canadian Yiddish cultural history as di mame (the mother), Maza hosted a literary salon where writers, artists, Jewish immigrants and refugees gathered to share their work and find support. Segal took no public role within the local cultural milieu, and her work has not been translated, nor has she been the subject of academic or popular discourse. In short, how these two poets have been remembered seems to have less to do with their poetry than with the roles they assumed in the local Yiddish cultural milieu.

Teesri Duniya Theatre: Diversifying diversity with relevant works of theatre

Teesri Duniya Theatre produces politically relevant theatre about a number of uncommon and contentious issues. Its plays rely on everyday cultural experiences acquired within the local cultural milieu. This approach involves a deliberate distancing from the culture of origin and, at the same time, a resistance to cultural homogenization. A dialogic exchange ensues that includes an examination of critical social issues and relationships with the dominant culture(s), as well as a questioning of cultural orthodoxy from within diverse cultural communities. This paper discusses the material conditions (funding and company structure) that affect Teesri Duniya's work. It also addresses the relationship between art and society through a discussion of selected images and texts from Teesri Duniya productions. Teesri Duniya Theatre has demonstrated that a politically engaged theatre that examines critical and contentious issues, and builds solidarity among cultures, can represent the cultural identities of visible minorities as well as express the relationships between cultures.

Indigenization of Illness Support Groups in Haiti

This paper examines the process of indigenization within peer support groups for Haitian women living with the chronic physical impairment of lymphatic filariasis. Five support groups established in a coastal community were studied over a period of three years to understand the adaptation of the Western illness support group model to the local cultural milieu. Unlike most support groups in affluent settings, the Haitian women showed minimal interest in talking about illness-related issues. The groups developed a distinctly Haitian style characterized by emphasis on religion and spirituality, artistic and expressive components, and acquisition of practical skills that offer income-generating opportunities. Members directed the greatest energy toward developing microenterprise activities. This pattern of adaptation is discussed in terms of indigenous traditions of mutual aid in rural Haiti, the compelling material needs of families living in stark poverty, and the ongoing challenge of coping with political ...

Popular Culture in the Making of Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Sentiments in Sichuan

Existing Western scholarship on the rights recovery movement in Sichuan mainly focuses on the role played by elites. This article argues that popular culture, in the form of folk stories, songs, and children’s primers, also contributed to that movement by shaping and expressing popular anti-imperialist attitudes. Its analysis of primers available in late Qing Sichuan and popular stories about the activities of foreigners prevalent in the early 1900s serves to reveal a rich local cultural milieu of time-nurtured anti-imperialist sentiment among common people, which broadly influenced local political action. The protests over the Jiangbei mining concession encompassed both elite and ordinary people, although each group understood the issue differently.

Between "Crockery-dom" and Barnum: Boston's Chinese Museum, 1845-47

This essay considers the relativistic ethnographic possibilities offered by Boston's Chinese Museum (1845-1857) within its local cultural milieu and international political context. Impelled by the diplomatic milestone of the Treaty of Wanghsia (1844), the museum in its inception and layout argued for improved relations, based upon mutual understanding, between Americans and the Chinese, in the name of trade. The argument unfolded in a larger discursive environment in which civilization and savagery were dichotomized, but this was complicated by a centuries-old, self-conscious Chinese civilization ambiguously positioned between these opposite poles. The museum's setting at Marlboro' Hall, so intimately associated with reform movements and especially Garrisonian abolitionism, contributed another strain of meaning, inviting visitors to radicalize their visualization of the Chinese racial Other beyond the fragmentary knowledge available through, on the one hand, the fantasy-laden "crockery-dom" represented in pictorial porcelain and other imports, and, on the other, the not always flattering Celestial Empire delineated in the period's several popular books by Westerners. Furthermore, this new construction of ethnographic knowledge about the Chinese Other had to counter omnipresent simplications of the exotic, sensationalized, and ultimately Barnum-ized Oriental. The visual discipline of the museum's devolutionary interior organization from Imperial court life to common people's everyday culture, along with the richly contextualizing catalogue and, above all, the two dignified Cantonese "ethnographic informants," encouraged a museum experience that blended the recognition of cultural difference with the celebration of human commonality. The fragility of that blend would be underscored when the museum ultimately fell into P.T. Barnum's hands where, absent the informants, crass commercialization of the exotic reigned in an ethnocentric manner that would characterize Sino-American intercultural relations for the rest of the century and beyond.

Educational material for the patient with leprosy.

This paper addresses the need for suitably written and illustrated material for the patient with leprosy with emphasis on the effective administration of WHO recommended multiple drug therapy (MDT) and the prevention of deformities. The successful implementation of MDT strategy for leprosy control calls for attention to a package of activities, amongst which the education of the patient regarding the disease and its modern treatment may be of crucial importance. Attention is drawn to the steady improvement in educational and literacy levels in many developing countries and to the potential of clearly written instructions for use by patients and staff. The importance of development of educational material in the context of the regional and local cultural milieu is stressed. Eight major 'messages' related to the causation of the disease, the importance of regular clinic attendance for monthly supervised drug administration, compliance to the daily domiciliary drug intake and action for prevention of disability, are proposed. These 'messages' are accompanied by outline drawings which can be used by staff for patient education both at the onset of chemotherapy and on the subsequent clinic attendances. The paper describes broad approaches but underlines the importance of local development of educational material for this purpose.