Means Of Social Cohesion Research Articles

Nepalese Nation, Nationalism and Identities in Patriotic Songs

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the different aspects of Nepalese patriotic songs. Here, lyrics of patriotic songs are reviewed and their contents are analyzed. This study is focused on how these patriotic songs assist to promote Nepalese nationalism, national beauties, national identities and national unity. It is the representative expression of all national songs and patriotic songs all over the country. Music in the form of the national songs and patriotic songs were and remain essential components of national identity and national unity. These songs are popular and accepted by Nepalese citizens as a part of their national identity and such affinities are supported by the songs’ repeated broadcast and consumption on Radio Nepal, various other Radios, Nepal Television, private television channels and social media platforms. It is found form the research that patriotic music provides a means for social cohesion, not via the propagation of dogmatic patriotic content, but through the personal and intimate associations that such songs solicit from individual citizens.

MALAYSIAN MUSIC AND SOCIAL COHESION: CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO POPULAR PATRIOTIC SONGS FROM THE 1950s – 1990s

Upon its independence in 1957, Malaysia was in the process of becoming a modern nation and therefore required modern totems to bind together its diverse population. Malaysia’s postcolonial plural society would be brought under the imagined ‘nation-of-intent’ of the government of the day (Shamsul A. B., 2001). Music in the form of the national anthem and patriotic songs were and remained essential components of these totems; mobilised by the state to foster a sense of national cohesion and collective identity. These songs are popular and accepted by Malaysian citizens from diverse backgrounds as a part of their national identity, and such affinities are supported by the songs’ repeated broadcast and consumption on national radio, television and social media platforms. For this study, several focus group discussions (FGD) were conducted in Kuching, Kota Kinabalu and the Klang Valley. This research intends to observe and analyse whether selected popular patriotic songs in Malaysia, composed and written between the 1960s to 2000 could promote and harness a sense of collective identity and belonging amongst Malaysians. There exists an evident lacuna in the study of the responses and attitudes of Malaysians, specifically as music listeners and consumers of popular patriotic songs. The study finds that unlike initially hypothesised, patriotic songs – instead of commercial popular songs – are more popular and wide-reaching in appeal across different professions, ethnicities, religions and geographic locations of Malaysians. Patriotic music provides a means for social cohesion, not via the propagation of dogmatic patriotic content, but through the personal, intimate and affective associations that such songs solicit from individual citizens.

The impact of multiethnic cultural tourism in an Indonesian former mining city

ABSTRACT The inclusion of cultural features in a region's marketing to tourists is often seen as undermining the authenticity and sacred values of a culture; however, cultural tourism can have a constructive outcome by fostering cultural preservation. We examined the development of coal-mining heritage tourism in Sawahlunto, Indonesia, where the mining industry operated for more than a century before it ceased operations in 2001, threatening to push the city into extinction. Sawahlunto has been a distinctly multiethnic community ever since the mining industry attracted workers from various parts of Indonesia. Therefore, the development of mining heritage tourism in Sawahlunto has incorporated aspects of multiethnic cultural tourism, including the creation of various annual festivals. In the process, the cultural identity of local communities has been strengthened, and the common goal of sustaining the city has functioned as a means of social cohesion and integration. Thus, we show that commodification does not always erode the sacredness of a culture but can instead strengthen the cultural identity and social integration of local communities. In Sawahlunto, culture's dual roles—as part of the identity of local communities and as a unique attraction for tourists—have been intertwined, thereby influencing, complementing, and strengthening each other.

Religious Extremism and Youth Restiveness in Kaduna State: Issues and Prospects

This paper gives details of how religious extremism and youth restiveness intensify violent conflict in Kaduna state and beyond. The paper investigates how radical Christianity and Islamism destabilize the Nigerian states and challenge its secularity. It also examines the impact of religion extremist on youth restiveness in Kaduna state, issues and way forward. Data for this paper were drawn from both primary and secondary source, mainly from group discussion and the library. Historical-descriptive were also analyze via content analysis. Rawls theory of justice which was utilized is predicated on the notion that a good and peaceful society is characterized by a number of virtues. Justice is the first virtue of a good and peaceful society. The paper reveals that religion extremist and youth restiveness are caused by clash of different belief system, ignorance, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, and unhealthy communication among others. These issues creates avenue for vulnerability among the warring parties. The paper recommends among others the need for religion as agent of socialization and means of social cohesion and bond to bring about moral community in Kaduna state in particular and in Nigeria at large.

La revolución YouTube y su influencia en la construcción de las indentidades locales por medio de la Semana Santa

La presente propuesta tiene por objetivo evidenciar como la Semana Santa no ha sido ajena a la revolución tecnológica, digital y comunicativa que actualmente estamos viviendo. Un fenómeno que a priori parece anclado a formas de vida del pasado ha encontrado en las redes sociales y especialmente en YouTube, un medio de cohesión social y de construcción de las identidades locales.

Ecumenical Chronicle

Ecumenical Chronicle

Communication design for accessing cultural landscape

Nowadays the relationship between people, culture and territories is changing. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on the value of cultural heritage and local identity as means for social cohesion and economic growth. On the other hand, experience-based tourism is growing and, consequently, it increases the need of an experience-based communication strategy. This paper explores the contribution of communication design to tourism promotion and the enhancement of cultural identity. It will deal with the topic of communicative access, which is meant as the result of a visual translation of several tourist information. Therefore, it focuses on the design process of digital communication formats aimed at providing “experiential” representations of the territory and its identity. To explain the process, a research project carried out by the authors will be presented as a case study. Keywords: communication design, local identity, cultural landscape, experience-based tourism.

Understanding the Geographies of Transport and Cultural Heritage: Comparing Two Urban Development Programs in Oslo

This paper elaborates on how policies and strategies for sustainable urban development can be understood and shows how development programs can be strategically important and flexible tools in the creation of the modern city. We examine two typical contemporary cases for urban development, inner city/waterfront and modernistic suburbs, using the two areas of transport and cultural heritage as prisms to explore divergences or convergences between the two programs, and ask: How come two urban development programs within the same city turn out so differently? By comparing these programs, urban development trends relating to entrepreneurialism are highlighted. There are clear differences between the two programs under study, and the paper tries to grasp their internal logic in order to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses. While the city center program has much to do with realizing the commercial potential of the area and strengthening sustainable transport through large-scale changes in infrastructure, such means seem to be outside the scope of the suburban program. Meanwhile, cultural heritage is interwoven with entrepreneurial projection-strategies in the city center, whereas heritage sites and projects are used more as a means for social cohesion in the suburb. The paper concludes that the programs vary in the two policy fields in accordance with the institutionalized and anticipated potential of the urban areas in question.

The psychological functions of music listening

Why do people listen to music? Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed numerous functions that listening to music might fulfill. However, different theoretical approaches, different methods, and different samples have left a heterogeneous picture regarding the number and nature of musical functions. Moreover, there remains no agreement about the underlying dimensions of these functions. Part one of the paper reviews the research contributions that have explicitly referred to musical functions. It is concluded that a comprehensive investigation addressing the basic dimensions underlying the plethora of functions of music listening is warranted. Part two of the paper presents an empirical investigation of hundreds of functions that could be extracted from the reviewed contributions. These functions were distilled to 129 non-redundant functions that were then rated by 834 respondents. Principal component analysis suggested three distinct underlying dimensions: People listen to music to regulate arousal and mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of social relatedness. The first and second dimensions were judged to be much more important than the third—a result that contrasts with the idea that music has evolved primarily as a means for social cohesion and communication. The implications of these results are discussed in light of theories on the origin and the functionality of music listening and also for the application of musical stimuli in all areas of psychology and for research in music cognition.

POLARIZACION Y COHESION SOCIAL DEL SISTEMA ESCOLAR CHILENO

This research gives the magnitude, evolution and characteristics of academic and socioeconomic polarization in the Chilean school system. After examining the importance of the education system as a means of social cohesion, we analyze the implications of distribution processes of students in their education and the main background on the Chilean education system. Furthermore, the paper conceptualizes the notion of polarization, which is related to two aspects: the alienation or distance that students have with students different from them, and the identification or identity that individuals develop with others of similar characteristics. Using SIMCE databases from the last decade, we create and formalized three different indicators of polarization to assess the school system. The results show that the degree of academic and socio-economic polarization of the Chilean school system over the last decade has been constant, and in some cases increasing. Additionally, the measurement that determines the degree of polarization shows high levels socioeconomic and academic polarization, which is related to processes of fragmentation and clustering. These results show the necessity of analyzing the impact of educational policies on the processes of social cohesion and integration in the school system. This has to consider the importance of the school as a privileged place for these goals, as well as on the development of skills, values and cognitive thinking and noncognitive skills for all children. These results have been questioned from recent conflicts that have occurred in the education sector.

INTEGRATION – WHAT INTEGRATION?

ABSTRACT Since the founding of the European Union, religion has become an increasingly important aspect in shaping European identity and thereby social cohesion in Europe. Social cohesion depends to a high degree on a successfully established distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Religion became one important marker of such boundaries. However, religion works both as an individual-level and an EU-level property. In order to take religion into consideration on the level of individual religiousness and as an institutionalised framework, we combine an analysis of key documents of the European Commission with a quantitative analysis of individual attitudes towards Europe. This combination of methods enables us to track the ‘discovery of religion’ by the European Commission as a means for social cohesion and the potential of religion to create Europeanness among the EU-citizens. We focus on the crucial period between 1990 and 2000 in which the major system transformation from EEC to EU took place. The quantitative analysis is conducted as a multi-level analysis on the basis of the European Value Survey 1990 and 2000. The data reveal that in fact over a 10-year period, the European integration project has begun to evolve towards an identity project with religion as a key factor on both levels.

Immigration and language education in Catalonia: Between national and social agendas

Most analyses of the sociolinguistic aspects of immigration focus on contexts where a single language is official and widely used. In bilingual Catalonia, newly arriving immigrants find themselves in a situation where the administration seeks to treat Catalan as a fully functional public language while large sectors of the local population still treat it as a minority language not adequate to be spoken to strangers. Popular language practices and discourses often seem to suggest that Catalan serves to assert identity while Spanish serves for practical communicative purposes, thus contradicting the official narratives over language and integration. Thus, what we find is that immigrants are required to adjust to different, competing, often blatantly contradictory linguistic ideologies and practices. In this article, I will seek to describe these contradictions and historical changes together with their implications for the local political economy of intergroup relations. I begin with a brief theoretical grounding of the concepts uses. To this follows a historical account of educational language policies addressed to immigrants since the mid-1980s. A change in official discourses from language as national symbol to language as a means for social cohesion is documented. Language policies are contrasted with ethnographic data on linguistic practices in everyday life in various settings. To conclude, I reflect on the significance of these phenomena for a general understanding of the role of languages in the construction of social difference in contemporary societies.

Religious Fundamentalism and Mental Illness: A Group Analytic Exploration

This article applies group analytic thinking to the relationship between religious fundamentalism and mental illness. Religion is explored as a means of social cohesion, and religious fundamentalism as a regressive response to globalization. Extrinsic and intrinsic religious attitudes are compared, with evidence of mental health within the latter. Clinical examples are offered to explore the potential heightening of mental distress for those presenting with culturally liminal attitudes within fundamentalist communities. Within contemporary society, it is proposed that the inclusion of psychoanalytic thinking within religious practice and the secular acceptance of the religious function could enable the emergence of a self-reflexive, and therefore more humane, spirituality.

Is Knowledge-Based Society a Relevant Strategy for Civil Society?

Governments today tend to see the importance of knowledge, information, education and solidarity through instrumentalism. They are elements of modernity that have a selective use value. Modernization has also increasingly been reduced to technology that is supposed to change the structure of industries and to provide citizens with new means of social cohesion and participation. Both the ideas of the information society and civil society, however, aim at strengthening the competitive elements of efficiency and control, where the collective capacity for action is limited. On the political level, the knowledge-based society has been transformed into the information society, where the techno-economic paradigm is expected to function in a socially neutral and progressive way. Due to a rise of new hierarchies and exclusions it has become necessary to ask why efforts for developing a socially inclusive information society have not been successful. Due to conflicting goals between instrumentalism and democracy, the distinction between the state and civil society is unclear. The partners are also uncertain about their roles and responsibilities. To develop the information society towards an inclusive society, the concept of collective responsibility should be redefined, otherwise the danger of growing neo-exclusionism increases. Aside collective responsibility, the conditions of collective morality should also be discussed.

Croyances religieuses en milieu urbain : Ouagadougou

The author gives the provisional results of a survey carried out in Ouagadougou, the capital of Upper Volta. Using the degree of religious culture as the basic variable, it can be seen that the attitude of the young people differs considerably from that of the adults. The adults appear more concerned about death and a future life, while the characteristic note of the young people is that of a certain rebellion against religious precepts of Christianity and Mohammedanism. The adults' socio-economic values are centred on children and security; the young people, on the other hand, seem more interested in their profession and their personal development. There is little connection between these notions and religion as a whole. However, religion gives the adults a certain feeling of security. For the young people it often tends to be a moral frame or a help for some immediate problem (examinations), which very often leads them to a radical questioning of all belief. The role of religion in development is seen, above all, as a contribution to the fields of literacy and health, as well as being a means of social cohesion among its adherents. Because the majority of the 'elite' are Christians, one must not overlook the unfavorable situation of the ani mists and the Moslems. The author concludes with a warning against a possible oversimplification with regard to the role of religion in devel opment.