Modern Ethos Research Articles

An apology for utopia: on the return of utopian constructions to the mainstream sociological theorizing

Utopian thought, the aspiration toward idealized conditions, and the progression toward advancement have historically constituted a cornerstone of the modernist ethos. Sociology, as an intellectual offspring of the modern epoch, has inherently engaged with utopian constructs – directing its gaze towards conceivable societal futures. In the current era where global challenges – such as climate change, social inequality, and populist political movements – present complex social problems, the relevance of utopian thinking in sociology is underscored as a tool for envisioning transformative solutions. Nonetheless, contemporary developments within the discipline signal a marked attenuation of utopian fervor. This paper scrutinizes the factors contributing to the diminished enthusiasm for utopian speculations within sociological theory. The decline is largely attributed to a shift towards postmodern paradigms, characterized by skepticism towards grand narratives and a pervasive mid-20th-century critique of utopianism. Despite this, the heuristic value of utopian thinking as a methodological instrument for social analysis remains substantial. The central thesis advocates for a resurgence of utopian thought within sociological inquiry, proposing that its restoration functions as a potent critical apparatus. Amid pressing societal crises, sociological engagement with utopian ideals is not merely an academic exercise but a practical imperative. It empowers the discipline to envision alternative social configurations, articulate social aspirations, and pragmatically approach their realization. Utopian thought can stimulate innovative policy-making, encourage societal engagement, and help construct resilient social systems in the face of adversity. Presently, Russian sociology, reflective of broader global sociological trends, does not proffer a societal ideal, hence it navigates without direction, merely mapping and interpreting the existing social landscape. This trajectory has practical implications, potentially limiting the discipline’s ability to be prescriptive and proactive. Confronted with this reality, Russian sociologists – and the discipline more broadly – are urged to rekindle the utopian imagination as a pivotal component of their intellectual endeavor. In doing so, they may foster a renewed sense of direction and purpose in the discipline of sociology, making it all the more pertinent in addressing the multifaceted complexities of today’s world.

Chromatic Symbolism in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) employs colors to depict various shades of emotions of the post-World War I in Europe in his ‘The Waste Land’ (1922). On the one hand, the poetic treatment of colors indicates the plight of the world; on the other, the colors embody the myths of the ancient world and help deepen the meaning of the text. The poetic genius employs Tiresias as the persona who can travel through time and space bringing together different hues of the world into a single collage. Eliot’s choice of color reveals to the modern audience the deeper schema that he builds to represent the devastated state of Europe after World War I. Having lived the life of both a woman and a man, the protagonist has been blessed with the power to foresee things despite his blindness. The seer weaves a garland of colors in ‘The Waste Land’ to represent the damage the War had in the soul of the people, in the value system of the society, and in the changing socio-political reality of the time. In this paper, I contend that Eliot uses color symbolism in the poem to enforce the modernist ethos of the fragmented world where the lynchpins are missing. Through close reading of the text, I analyse the language to arrive at the conclusion that Eliot’s use of colors reveals a whole, new spectrum of meanings.

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985

Askesis and Critique: Foucault and Benjamin

While Foucault referred to Benjamin just once in his entire corpus, scholars have long noticed affinities between the two thinkers, mainly between their conceptions of history: their emphasis on discontinuity, their historiographical practices, and the role of archives in their work. This essay focuses, rather, on their practice of critique and, more specifically, on their conception of the relation of this practice to exercise or askesis. I examine the role of askesis as a self-transformative exercise in Foucault’s late work and how this concept reverberates throughout his idea of critique as the exercise of an ethos demanding arduous work. Against this background, the role of exercise (Übung) in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Traeurspiel, his interest in ascetic kinds of exercise or schooling, and its ties to critique are discerned. This comparison reveals significant similarities in Foucault’s and Benjamin’s conception of philosophy, as well as different emphases in their inheritance of the Kantian critical project: critique as an exercise of an attitude attentive to possibilities for transformation in the present vs. critique as involving an attitude-transforming exercise; critique as a modern ethos that needs to be reactivated vs. critique as propaedeutic, as a preparation for a modern tradition.

Dichotomy between Modernity and Nepalese Education System: A Qualitative Analysis

This paper aims to critically assess the impact of modernism upon Nepalese local and indigenous knowledge systems. The paper highlights that modernism is a challenge, as well as an opportunity for the indigenous community and their knowledge systems. This is a challenge because of its potent threats to collapsing the originality and knowledge tradition the local communities have. And, this is an opportunity because of extending and widening its scope and recognition in the global market with a societal or national space. The paper was based on the qualitative research methodology in which numbers of Focus Group Discussion were carried out to generate the data. The paper explores that there is no need for indigenous communities and local knowledge holders to turn back to their tradition by entirely giving up their interests to become a modern one. Nor has there been a compulsion to abandon their oral traditions and wisdom to become an updated modern one. One of the impacts of modernity on Nepali education is privatization which has devalued the local or indigenous knowledge system. The paper, therefore, advises us on an education system that adapts some theoretical concepts that work as a bridge between local/indigenous knowledge system and modern knowledge system enriching local/indigenous knowledge and grasping good ethos of modernity.

Philosophy and the Future of Human Being

Social Philosophy is a discipline that deals with social behaviour and interprets society and its institutions according to ethical values instead of empirical relations. Bearing this in mind, I decided to explore the phenomenon of the crisis regarding the modern ethos of postmodern culture in the context of the history of classical philosophy. I have done so by relating it to new theoretical and epistemological frameworks of social, philosophical ontology on the one hand, and to the attempt to find an appropriate linguistic paradigm though philosophical semantics on the other hand that would have the potential to create an alternative ethical category. The ultimate goal is to show that philosophy becomes philosophy through the human being himself.

The Great Idea is Dead, Long Live the Great Ideas

Abstract The “Asia Minor Catastrophe” cast its heavy shadow over Greek interwar era developments in two fundamental ways: first, there was the terror of the ideological void after the bankruptcy of the Hellenic “Great Idea” due to the military defeat in Asia Minor; and second, the physical arrival in Greece of an almost 1,500,000 refugee population after their expulsion from Turkey. This paper argues that against this background, the issues of national reconstruction and a new cultural orientation for the Greek nation were strongly connected. Moreover, it argues that various projects and discourses emerged in search of the new Great Ideas that would successfully replace the irrevocably lost one. They had as a common denominator the “modernist ethos” of a “new beginning” which was necessary for the nation’s and society’s regeneration to be achieved. Thus, in exploring these projects, it attempts to identify their convergences, their mutual exclusions, as well as their cultural, ideological and political imprints.

‘Art of confinement’: Samuel Beckett, Alberto Burri

The essay attempts to draw a parallel between the ascetic, negative late modernist aesthetics of Samuel Beckett and Alberto Burri, tracing their post-humanist poetics and artistic practices of impoverishment, achievementlessness and their responses given to the crisis of humanist European culture and of a modernist ethos of mastery in the wake of WW2. It attempts to show how Burri’s works in the late 1940s–1950s converge with the articulation of Beckett’s visual aesthetics in his coeval essays on art, and how the artistic procedures of both move from prewar modernist models toward an embodied aesthetic of finitude, toward an ethical rupturing, scarring of frameworks and structures of mastery, by privileging a material imagination of indigence that is grounded in detritus, and finally, by creating forms of an art of melancholia that stage the ongoing disaster of contemporary history.

Early experiences using bromelain-based enzymatic debridement in a tertiary burns centre in the United Kingdom: A retrospective case series review

The modern ethos of burn care requires a holistic approach that helps patients to not only survive but also maintain a good quality of life. Bromelain-based enzymatic debridement with Nexobrid™ (NXB) has been shown to selectively debride burnt tissue and allow dermal preservation, which has the potential to reduce surgical burden and improve scarring. In this study, early experience with the use of Nexobrid™ at a tertiary burns centre between July 2016 and December 2019 is presented. In particular, the study assessed whether NXB had changed the acute care delivered to this cohort. A retrospective analysis of the patients' records was performed. Results were analysed and presented in the context of current literature. Twenty adult patients (17 male, 3 female) underwent enzymatic debridement with NXB. Median age was 42.5 years. Mean total burn surface area (TBSA) on admission was 20%. Twelve patients were admitted to the intensive care unit, and eight were admitted to the adult burns ward. Mean TBSA treated with NXB was 8.2%, usually within 24 h of admission (mean). All patients had anaesthetist-led analgesia. NXB debridement was successful in 55% of patients, obviating the need for escharotomy in some patients. Sixty percent of all patients required further surgery, and 80% of facial burns treated with NXB required further surgery. Inotrope support was associated with NXB failure (p = 0.015). Mean length of stay was 29 days. Current evidence, including our own findings, cannot justify replacing the current surgical standard of care with NXB, but it certainly solidifies enzymatic debridement as a useful adjunct that should form part of the modern burn surgeon's armamentarium.

In the Shadow of the Public: Enlightenment and the Pitfalls of Modernity

Abstract The Enlightenment has often been presented as the ideological programme of modernity, the set of ideas and values from which modern, democratic and secularized Western societies have emerged. This reading, however, fails to account for the diversity and polyphony of the Enlightenment. Another reading, that of Michel Foucault, insisted on the ethos of modernity that the Enlightenment would have brought: a critical relationship with the present and current events. Conversely, this interpretation neglects the militant and collective dimension of the Enlightenment that favoured emancipation through knowledge. This article suggests, rather, seeing in the Enlightenment a way of problematizing modernity, of thinking about its contradictions. It develops this argument from a case study: the philosophes’ reflections on the public and its ambivalences. The optimism of the Enlightenment’s fight against prejudice was counterbalanced by a more pessimistic analysis of the new public space and of the media obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge and critical thinking.

In Fortune Fair and Foul

This article focuses on the idiosyncratic conception of happiness Sir Kenelm Digby develops in the letters he wrote after the death of his wife in 1633. It contextualises Digby’s vision of happiness through an examination of the different traditions he revisits and appropriates to develop his personal and subjective ethics of self-care, mainly Renaissance Neoplatonism, the idealisation of conjugal love, the idealism of Italian poetry, and an ascetic model of widowhood linked to the tradition of spiritual mourning. It analyses how Digby’s conception of happiness, through its vindication of subjectivity and excess, challenges the early modern ethos of consolation and speculates on the reasons that may have led Digby to present his readers with such an extraordinary self-portrait.

The Modern ethos: Changing Face of the Classrooms in the Present Pandemic of Covid-19: A Study

The Modern ethos: Changing Face of the Classrooms in the Present Pandemic of Covid-19: A Study

Original

This text is in reaction to Samuel Huntington's celebrated piece on Clash of Civilisations, especially the discourse after the Twin Towers attack in 2001 (9/11) and subsequent commentaries and explanations on contemporary terror, especially by David Rapoport and the Wave Theory. The principal arguments are providing critiques on both Huntington and Rapoport, the former viewing the rising tide of contemporary organised terrorism as civilisational conflicts (in a historical sense of super cultures) and the latter, as generation wide waves at a global scale starting from Anarchism in late nineteenth century Europe. Here the genealogical enquiry refers to social--psychological perspectives from prehistoric times, shaping modern minds and the explanation around the disconnects between modern institutions like the nation states, (post French Revolution) and the exclusivistic perspectives of the little culturesthat refuse to forgo its identity in the nation state and democratic ethos of modernity and the modern world.

Prawda jako narzędzie transgresji. Parezja a postawa nowoczesności w filozofii Michela Foucaulta

In the article I analyze the idea of the Enlightenment in Michel Foucault’s philosophy. Also, I analyze a few possible practices of parrhesia which Foucault has been studying during his career. I try to show up the connections that in my opinion exist between these two issues. I describe the idea of ethos of modernity as the „methodological frame”, which can be analyzed as a kind of „clue” for the subjective action in modernity. Parrhesia, then, can be a specific action that we can practice as the ethos of modernity.

Decolonizing the Modern? Art and Postcolonial Modernism in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

Decolonizing the Modern?Art and Postcolonial Modernism in Twentieth-Century Nigeria Okechukwu Nwafor (bio) Despite attempts by scholars to investigate modernism's multi-farious manifestations within academic discourse, it is still impossible to reach any definitive set of ontological or strategic pointers that define the term "modernism." More tenable in the face of these numerous positions is the stance that consistently reverts to the "modern" as a condition of the human experience in a contemporary and rapidly changing world. In his review of the history of Western Modernism, Pinkney (3) notes that the term "modernism" is "the most frustratingly unspecific, the most recalcitrantly unperiodizing, of all the major art-historical 'isms' or concepts." This is precisely what sits at the back of one's mind when considering any text on modernism. Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism, Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, however, takes another line. Okeke-Agulu situates modernism as a specific (artistic) condition of the anticolonial nationalism and decolonization struggles that took place in Nigeria prior to independence. Published in 2015 by Duke University Press, the 357-page book with 129 color images has been declared the winner of 2016 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism and the 2017 African Studies Association (ASA) Joost Fontein award. Okeke-Agulu, a leading scholar of African art, as well as a curator, artist, and associate professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, becomes the third Black scholar to win the Frank Jewett Mather Award since its establishment in 1963.1 Okeke-Agulu's aims are significantly more ambitious than what Pinkney proposes in his critique of modernism. These are to present new discursive categories through which to locate and understand [End Page 189] postcolonial modernism in art and to map a clear intersection of the conditions of art and politics under the rubric of cultural nationalism in the years preceding Nigeria's independence. Okeke-Agulu's greatest contribution to global postcolonial discourse lies in recasting the established theoretical, formalistic, and thematic concerns of Nigerian art formally entrenched by the colonialists: that modern Nigerian, and African, art of the mid-twentieth century were weak copies of the work of Europeanists and that Africans are incapable of naturalistic representation. He also highlights how Nigeria played a key role in the intellectual movement that heralded the postcolonial and modernist ethos in the African continent during the mid- and late twentieth centuries. Finally, Okeke-Agulu effects a re-reading of the methods, techniques, and conventions of Nigerian art history, redrawing its conclusions and extrapolating the less-researched work of the early twentieth-century Nigerian pictorialist Aina Onabolu to postcolonial modernism. It is possible to argue that part of this book's mission is to acknowledge an "irreducible plurality in our own experiences of historicity" (Chakrabarty, 108). The book suggests that postcolonial art forms are products of "colonial histories of disruption, migration, engagements" and reinforces the view that the "post" in "postcolonial" ultimately specifies a "co-articulation of colonial and postcolonial histories, not a self-serving separatism and isolationism" (McCarthy and Dimitriadis, 233). As the author argues, the book's methodology is advisedly chosen to expose not just the "visual intelligence but also how they [the works of art] relate to the world of the artist and his society" (Okeke-Agulu, 15). By recognizing certain vestiges of intertextual dialogue in areas of art history, anticolonial nationalism, colonial history, and African political economy, the book remarkably situates modern Nigerian art within a global and broader intellectual context. In chapter 1, Okeke-Agulu astutely pinpoints one of the crucial problematics of colonialism that eludes most colonial literature on Africa: the suspicion with which colonial administrators viewed the literary education of the natives. Colonialists, as Okeke-Agulu argues, were skeptical of literary education because they believed that the rise of pervasive literary education would ultimately breed intellectual dissidents among colonized subjects, who would oppose constituted colonial authorities. This point is a timely reminder of how paradigmatic colonial disdain for Africa's intellectual development could be and [End Page 190] how important it is actually to reinsert such discourses in postcolonial debates. Okeke-Agulu thus...

Genealogies of Queerness on the Modernist Stage: But Where's the Performance?

Genealogies of Queerness on the Modernist Stage:But Where's the Performance? Joseph Cermatori (bio) Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan. Oxford University Press, 2017. 154 pp. Cloth $99.00, paper $34.95. In this slender, often handy volume, Penny Farfan charts notable instances of performance from 1890 to 1930 to argue that queerness, broadly construed, was a central, animating force to the broader modernist ethos of the period. At the same time, she also demonstrates that modernist performance helped disseminate queer ideas of gender and sexuality among its audiences, acting as a form of discourse in Foucault's sense. In under ninety pages, excluding endnotes, Farfan looks at a wide range of materials, including commercial stage plays by Arthur Wing Pinero and Noël Coward, landmark instances of modern dance by Loie Fuller and Vaslav Nijinsky, and less mainstream playwriting by Djuna Barnes. She builds on recent scholarship by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Nick Salvato, among others, who have sought to uncover queer genealogies of modernist literature and drama. Farfan's desire to focus on performance, however, sets her apart from most of these forerunners, with the exception of Salvato, whose Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (Yale 2010) receives passing mention in a pair of footnotes. Still others have trained a more formalist or conceptual lens onto the relationship between queerness and modern aesthetics—for example, Leo Bersani in his essay "Is There a Gay Art?" and [End Page 417] his writings on Proust, Genet, Henry James, and so on. By contrast, Farfan's work is more empirical: she draws on eyewitness testimonies, critical reportage, archival documents, and a substantial, though sometimes unwieldy, amount of secondary criticism. Full of astute observation, Performing Queer Modernism is most innovative in its sections on dance. In a chapter on Loie Fuller's 1897 Fire Dance, for example, Farfan attends to Fuller's conspicuous butchness, her unusual upper-body strength, her noted resemblance to Oscar Wilde, her tortoise-shell spectacles, and her "burned-out eyes," damaged by overexposure to phosphorescent lights (37). In this analysis, Fuller's queerness results less from her costumes' campy, art nouveau extravagance, replete with "feminized natural themes, sensuous flowing lines, and shimmering colors" (36), than from her uncanny ability to inhabit certain liminal spaces, between "the homely and the frightening, the abstract and the real, masculine and feminine, past and present, onstage and offstage" (38). The chapter admirably incorporates Fuller into a larger context of modern Salomes (e.g., Wilde, Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, Maud Allan), noting Fuller's special appeal to female and gay male spectators. Similarly, in her chapter on Nijinsky and Afternoon of a Faun (1912), Farfan concentrates on the ballet's final image, in which the titular faun gradually lowers himself onto a scarf he has seized from a fleeing nymph. For other critics, this movement has implied both sexual fetishism and a preference for masturbation over sexual intercourse. Farfan reads it instead, alongside the famous bas-relief-style flatness of Nijinsky's choreography, as throwing "autonomous, nonreproductive male sexuality into relief on the modernist stage" (48). Surveying the erotics of Nijinsky's face, eyes, body, and rumored bisexuality, she shows that Nijinsky's performances helped fuel the spread of dissident sexualities in the time of modernism. These analyses are persuasive and extensively supported. The same is true for the chapters on drama, which are also illuminating, though they deal noticeably less with embodied performance in the usual sense. Instead, Farfan borrows W. B. Worthen's notion of "dramatic performativity" (23) to illuminate the ways dramatic texts can enact their own performative departures from heteronormative narrative conventions. As a result, the studies of Pinero, Coward, and Barnes's plays concentrate more on dramaturgy than on how these works transpired physically on the stage. At times Farfan does reconstruct aspects of the plays' onstage lives, though these details are not always foregrounded. For example, [End Page 418] with Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing the role of Paula Tanqueray in Pinero's 1893 society drama The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she touches on a few elements of staging as they were recorded in artist sketches and publicity photographs, noting Campbell's ineffable "aura of fin...

Spatial Delight and Environmental Performance of Modernist Architecture in London – Golden Lane Estate

This paper investigated the spatial delight and environmental performance of the open spaces and two selected apartments in the modernist buildings at Golden Lane Estate built after the 2nd World War, between 1952 and 1961. This estate is a Grade II listed, high density, low cost housing complex designed by three young architects: Peter Chamberlin, Geoffrey Powell and Christof Bon. It was built over a bombed site and well embraced the post-war modern architecture ethos, environmental considerations and inclusion of social facilities and landscaped communal spaces. Selected communal open spaces and two apartments in different building blocks with similar attributes were chosen for this study. However, one apartment has been refurbished with internal insulation and secondary glazing for improving the comfort conditions. Through fieldwork, which included subjective observation of the spatial quality of both outdoor and indoor spaces, on-site monitoring and interview of the building occupants, first-hand information on the environmental and comfort conditions inside the apartments were obtained. Through performance based theoretical analysis, archival research and observations, the spatial quality and comfort conditions in the apartments and their energy demand were critically assessed. The research findings indicate that the design of the communal outdoor spaces in the Golden Lane Estate were well thought through and the spacing between the building blocks responded well to the requirements of spatial delight, solar and daylight access and outdoor environmental comfort. Through selective enhancement of the thermal property of the building envelope, the original naturally ventilated and well day-lit living environments were maintained while energy demand was reduced by 30%, and the overall comfort level was significantly improved. This paper presents the feasible strategies to tackle the environmental challenges in the post-war Grade II listed residential buildings in the UK.

Kierkegaard and the Relation of Hermeneutics and Cultural Criticism

Hermeneutics and cultural criticism are usually regarded as discrete enterprises by most theologians. However, in Kierkegaard's authorship the exploration of the conditions for an edifying reading of Scripture inspires and informs a very stringent critique of modernity. Although Kierkegaard claimed that apt readings of Scripture are difficult under any circumstances, he was convinced that each culture had its own particular forms of hermeneutic foolishness that impede an upbuilding engagement with Scripture. Because Kierkegaard was most concerned about the unique forms of “inwardness” or “pathos” that a transformative reading of Scripture presupposes, he exposed the ways in which the ethos of modernity discourages the cultivation of those essential passions. Most particularly, he argued that many of the cultural dynamics of the “present age” subvert the development of the habit of critical and sustained self-evaluation that engaged readings of Scripture require. Modernity encourages a deferral of meaning that inhibits decisive appropriations of texts, shifts self-critique to the critique of “others,” subverts self-evaluation through the proliferation of distracting stimuli, glamorizes paralyzing doubt, and fosters an illusory interpretive self-reliance. As a result, the meanings of basic Christian concepts are obscured as they are amalgamated with the ideology of the nation, the race, the family, and the marketplace. Without the appropriate forms of pathos, a hermeneutic vacuum ensues and the meaning of the texts is determined by the loudest cultural voices. This simply reinforces the power of the status quo and its various populisms. Consequently, any effort to understand Christian discourse rightly must expose and resist these pernicious cultural impediments.

La herida colonial en el cuerpo de la mujer ind�gena: an�lisis del discurso del ethos moderno en el

The article proposes to analyze -through the use of semiological resources-, the colonial modeling that the modern ethos inflicts on the bodies of indigenous women in the mexican constitutional text. From the perspective of the Crítica Jurídica understood as discoursive analysis, the article intends to reveal the manifestation of said wounds produced thanks to the make-do-saying of the legal discourse, wounds that the discourse of the law conceals under a veil of legal equality, human rights, and pluriculturality.

Práticas de trabalho da cultura popular no agreste de Pernambuco: entre o moderno e o tradicional

This article has as a research question the following: how the hybridity between traditional and modern ethos are present in the work practices of the popular culture in the Agreste of Pernambuco?” In this sense, we aimed to understand the traditional-modern hybridism in the work practices of the popular culture in the Agreste of Pernambuco and the answers given to these hybridisms, from the study of two cultural organizations: a band of pifano and the bumba-meu-boi group. In order to achieve such, a theoretical understanding matrix was proposed, which adds the practice notion of Practical Based Studies, and more specifically, the ethnomethodology, to the Weberian notions of ethos and social action, in order to understand what hybrid practices are. Through the epistemology of Practical Based Studies, of ethnomethodological method, and a qualitative approach, we conducted and recorded semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and participant observations. Through analysis of ethnomethodological orientation, considering as analytical categories the notion of practice, member, language and meanings, we identified seven existing practices in the work context of popular culture organizations. Using the proposed theoretical understanding matrix, which has as analytical categories the notions of ethos and social action, several hybridisms have been identified in each practice, mainly because some practices have ethos in whose orientation is essentially traditional, but financial resources are necessary for the maintenance of these practices, resulting in the need to elaborate cultural projects, official documents, laws, etc., for specific purposes. Responses to the hybridisms have been observed, among them, the action of the leaders of popular culture groups, who walk between the traditional and the modern ethos, using modern means to maintain the traditional, evidencing the existence of an interdependence between these elements. As the main contribution of the present research, we highlight the proposed multi and interdisciplinary approach in order to understand complex phenomena such as the work with popular culture.