North American Culture Research Articles

Consequences of joint action: Entanglement with your partner.

Primates are expert tool users because they can adapt their body schemas to form a hand-tool joint representation that affords effective wielding. Here we extend the scope of this mechanism by proposing that humans are experts in social tasks because they can adjust their body schemas to incorporate the kinematics of partners, thus forming an interpersonal joint body schema. Participants engaged with a confederate in a 2-handed sawing task requiring each to use 1 hand. After active movement coordination, an interpersonal body schema was demonstrated in 2 ways. First, there was interference between visual stimulation near 1 person's body and vibrotactile localization on the other person's body. Second, after active movement coordination, the motor output of 1 partner (attempting to draw straight lines) was affected by the viewed actions of the other partner (drawing ovals). This adaptation of the body schema may underlie the formation of cultural groups. In fact, participants with interdependent self-construals (typical of Asian cultures) form a stronger interpersonal joint body schema than do participants with independent self-construals (typical of North American and Western European cultures).

Exploration of the USA Culture by Mexican Language Students through Reading Chicano Literature

Language students are expected to be conscious of the fact that the target language is an expression of the culture of those societies where it is used in everyday communication. Using literary texts is an important means of fostering and developing the learners’ intercultural awareness. Chicano literature (written by those authors of Mexican origin who permanently live in the USA) can be of special help in this process. Chicano writers’ experiences in their daily encounters with the North American culture can make it easier for language learners in Mexico to explore and understand this foreign culture, and to overcome their own prejudices and stereotypes towards it. Thus, a study was conducted among Mexican university language students to examine the possibility of increasing the learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) through reading literary texts. The survey participants responded to a questionnaire related to the concept of culture and their knowledge of the target culture. They also read and discussed a short story written by a Chicano writer paying special attention to different cultural topics covered in them. On the whole, the study has shown that the learners’ sociocultural characteristics and experiences have an enormous impact on their perceptions of the North American culture. The results can help to optimize the process of choosing and elaborating didactic materials in English as well as class planning and methodology that would develop the learners’ intercultural competence.

Undeniable Forensic Evidence

What constitutes “evidence?” In exploring how queer studies may be equipped to respond to Ferguson and beyond, especially in light of the verdict to not indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, I want to leave the realm of the legal-juridical, knowing this system has a historic and continuing role in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating the lived realities of racism. I wish to conceive of other modes of evidence as prompted by the genealogy of speculative thought and utopian aspirations of queer theoretical scholarship. To do so, I revisit three trailblazers of (queer) critical race critique before I make a “sideways reading,” to riff on Siobhan Somerville’s tactic for unsettling the too-often segregated discussions of homophobia, sexism, and racism, to make a geographical move from Ferguson, Missouri, to Columbia, South Carolina, where I witnessed three separate but interlocking events in the lead-up to the decision on Michael Brown’s murder that demand to be counted as proof. In moving sideways across race, gender, and sexuality, and regionally from the Midwest to the South, I intend to continue the work of dislodging sexuality as the only privileged site of queer inquiry and to cast the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, and Columbia, South Carolina, as synchronic, pertinent, and interconnected. In 1991 Julie Dash’s avant-garde film Daughters of the Dust introduced the “speculative fiction” of South Carolina as the turn-of-the century setting for queer Gullah counter-communities. For Dash, “speculative fiction” describes a narrative mode with the capacity to promote deeper, more complex, and yet truer understandings of black queer populations and their precarious position in North American cultures. I want to return to Dash’s term, to nod at the historic

Economic and social benefits of hunting in North America

Hunting is an integral part of North American cultures, providing a powerful connection to the outdoors for millions of people and generating billions of dollars to local and national economies. Socially, hunting has been part of hominid cultures since very early in the fossil record; a tradition that contemporary North American hunters tend to pass down to subsequent generations through family and community networks. The 13.7 million American hunters and 2.1 million Canadian nature-recreationists spend more than $38.3 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, on non-commercial hunting-related expenses each year. Hunting activities also yield hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in tax and other revenues in both countries. The contributions of hunters serve as the fundamental foundation for a social and economic support system for conserving wildlife and habitats for future generations.

At the Intersection of Modernities: Migrants as Agents of Economic and Cultural Change

This article analyzes the infusion of North American ideas, culture and experience into the Soviet society, and depicts immigrants as agents of social and cultural change. Having embodied North American representations of modernity, they introduced new working methods, values and routines, as well as novel forms of labor organization to Soviet Karelia. With the help of imported machinery, tools, and equipment, immigrants drastically increased the production rates at Karelia’s industries. Glorified and publicized by the Karelian government and the media, their labour shops, and farm communes became models to be emulated in Karelia and throughout the Soviet Union. North American Finns also came to play an important part in Soviet elites’ attempt to modernize the Soviet society, both economically and culturally. Although they were agents of cultural and technological change in their own right, immigrants’ social and ethnic identities were subsumed and appropriated by the Soviet state and Karelia’s cultural producers in attempts to promote a Soviet version (an alternative) of economic and cultural modernity. Their physical and intellectual movement across national borders shaped and reconstituted the Soviet path to modernization, even if for a short period of time. In the process, concepts of the local, the national and the modern (that is, the global), became increasingly entangled.

What Drives Information Security Policy Violations among Banking Employees?

Employees' information security policy (ISP) violations are a major problem that plagues organizations worldwide, particularly in the banking/financial sector. Research shows that employees use neutralization techniques to rationalize their ISP violating behaviors; it is therefore important to understand what leads to and influences these neutralization techniques. The authors' study draws upon social exchange theory to develop a set of factors that drive employees' neutralization of ISP violations. The model specifies previously untested relationships between job satisfaction, organizational commitment, role conflict, role ambiguity, and neutralization techniques. Using a sample of Malaysian banking employees, the authors found a positive relationship between role conflict and neutralization of ISP violations, whereas organizational commitment was negatively related to neutralization in this context. The authors' findings offer fresh insights for scholars and practitioners in dealing with the problem of employees' intentional ISP violations while extending the reach of neutralization theory beyond North American and European cultures.

Highland Lake Workshop Conversations about Critical Action

On December 6, 2014, Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace (ESJP) co-hosted a one-day workshop with Critical Stage and the University of Western Australia titled “Conversations about Critical Action.” The workshop was hosted at the North American Cultural Lab in Highland Lake, New York. An interdisciplinary group of 14 participants from Australia, England, Canada, and the United States met, representing academics, artists, actors, directors, film-makers, activists, teachers and engineers whose common interest is in making a difference both individually and as a community.The conversation focused on critical reflections of past, present and future actions with the goal of enhancing social justice in discussing the workshop’s main theme: How might I be the person I would most like to be and contribute to making the world more socially just?Using an Open Space Technology format and Talking Circle processes with an interactive approach, the workshop participants developed self-organized sessions.

Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History

Book Review| October 01 2014 Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History. Ed. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Pp. xl + 360, acknowledgments, illustrations, contributors, index.). Yvonne J. Milspaw Yvonne J. Milspaw Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2014) 127 (506): 478–480. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.127.506.0478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Yvonne J. Milspaw; Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2014; 127 (506): 478–480. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.127.506.0478 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Uvas e crepes: a paródia a partir da arquitextualidade

This article analyzes the Simpsons' reframing of the book The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck. Parody is discussed as an effect of language and the article also raises questions about animation as a means to redefine, subvert and challenge orthodox views of the human experience in different cultures and, in this case, especially applied to the North American culture. This Simpsons episode, which aims to parody the lifestyle of a North American middle class family, satirizes aspects of that society through subtle jokes and puns. In the referred episode, The Crepes of Wrath, there is an intertextual relationship with a novel by John Steinbeck and then it is possible to ask: How is such intertextual relationship constructed?

Race, gender, and the exotic in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees

Focusing on Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald’s critically acclaimed Fall on Your Knees (1996), this essay argues that the figure of the Arab in the novel represents an ethnic otherness whose strategic exoticization exposes a highly racialized and gendered early twentieth-century North American culture, one that has historically been informed by a latent, economically motivated exoticism. It is in fact this underlying exoticism that has persistently structured the experiences of several generations of racial and sexual minorities in North America and relegated those minorities to the margins of social life. MacDonald’s novel thus deserves renewed attention precisely because it traces critically the historical continuum along which exoticist constructions of race and gender have shaped the experiences of many immigrants in North America. Only by attending to the cultural politics of the exotic, I want to suggest, can we open up discourses of race and gender to productive and transformative cultural critique.

Attitudes toward rape and attribution of responsibility to rape victims in a Norwegian community sample

There has been a steady increase in the number of rapes reported to the police in Norway during the past two decades. In this paper we examine factors associated with attitudes toward rape (as measured with 11 items from the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale) and attribution of responsibility to rape victims using a community sample of Norwegian women and men. Analyses of 475 returned questionnaires (32.6% response rate) suggest that men's attitudes toward rape were moderately less disapproving than women's, and that men attributed slightly more responsibility to rape victims than did women. Analysis showed that classical sexism was the strongest predictor of attitudes toward rape, followed by acceptance of intimate partner violence toward women and that rape attitudes were the prime predictor of attribution of responsibility to rape victims. Although Scandinavian countries are consistently ranked among the World's most gender egalitarian societies, the findings from our study do not differ from those from the North American culture with regard to the strengths of known group differences and attitudinal correlates to rape attitudes and attribution of responsibility. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A re-analysis of the relationship between “parasite stress” and authoritarianism

A re-analysis of the relationship between “parasite stress” and authoritarianism

Holistic Versus Analytic Expressions in Artworks

Previous research has documented systematic cultural variations in adults’ cognitive processes. In particular, research on culture and aesthetics suggests that East Asian adults’ aesthetic expression tends to be holistic and context-oriented, whereas North American adults’ aesthetic expression tends to be analytic and object-oriented (Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan, & Nisbett, 2008). However, research focusing specifically on the developmental processes of such cultural differences in children’s artworks is lacking, with the notable exception of an empirical study conducted by Rübeling et al. (2011). Our current research examined whether school-age children in Grades 1 through 6 exhibit these culturally unique patterns of expression, and if so, when. Children were asked to produce either landscape drawings (Study 1, n = 495) or landscape collages using ready-made items (Study 2, n = 376). The results indicated that children in both cultures gradually develop expressions unique to each culture. Although Grade 1 children’s artworks were still similar across cultures, artworks in Grade 2 and higher showed substantial cultural variations. Japanese children were more likely than their Canadian counterparts to place the horizon higher in the visual space and to include more pieces of information. The higher placement of the horizon is linked to the context-oriented visual attention style seen in adults’ drawings and historical paintings in East Asian cultures, as opposed to object-focused drawing styles commonly seen in North American cultures. We also report culturally similar patterns in the developmental trajectory and discuss the internalization process of culturally dominant patterns of perception.

Christianity and the Climate Crisis: Theological Assets and Deficits

This essay examines the complex relationship between Christianity and the climate crisis. It first looks at theological convictions found in statements made by church leaders meant to advance Christian engagement. It then examines the now legendary acerbic attacks made by historian Lynn White in the late 1960s, criticizing these same theological convictions for actually disabling environmental engagement. Centrally, it then turns to the progressive, eco-theology of Sallie McFague who, while echoing White’s concerns, offers more recent and thorough criticisms of tradition-based Christian theology, focusing especially on its propagating an outdated anthropology and earth-fleeing spiritualities. Finally, the essay focuses on the tragic immediacy of the climate catastrophe, suggesting that a North American culture of optimism and consumerism is causing millions to respond with indifference and denial, and that an activist-oriented pessimism may be a more mature and constructive response to the dire situation we now face.

What's so feminist about garters and bustiers? Neo-burlesque as post-feminist sexual liberation

The performance art of burlesque is gaining popularity in North American culture, but with many ‘neo-burlesque’ performers, critical reflection or commentary on the politics of female sexuality is glaringly absent or summarily dismissed. Neo-burlesque could be a feminist rewriting and reclaiming of a Western dance form, which showcased women simpering sexily for her audience. However, in order for neo-burlesque to have a feminist tone, it needs to do more than incorporate women of various ethnicities and body types to transcend patriarchal scripts of female sexuality. Some neo-burlesque includes disruptions of traditional scripts regarding female sexuality that demand the audience think about the complexities of desire, sexuality, and identity, often through a feminist lens. However, these critiques often do not go far enough in their interrogation of power structures and the politics of sexuality. This article makes the argument that the popularity of neo-burlesque in mainstream culture serves to oppress female sexuality in very traditional ways instead of what it purports to do: empower women to celebrate their sexuality through performance.

“A child is being beaten”: Peter Pan, Peter Grimes , and a Queer Case of Modernism

PHILIP BRETT ARGUES THAT THE INTERVAL OF A MINOR THIRD, with its evil and foreboding affect, signif[ies] (Allen 280) in the work of Benjamin Britten, thereby suggesting that the queer eyes we've devoted to straight guys may have unfairly plugged our queer ears. (1) However strange or unlikely it is to find that the empire of Gaydar (that contemporary version of Sedgwick's reign of the telling secret [67]) has extended its reach even to the auditory realm, this queer code cracking begs for a more radically queer departure from the mundanely (Allen 280) or biographical readings of Britten's work. Interpretations rooted in biography are not without precedent in Britten criticism. Stephen Arthur Allen, for instance, claims that Britten was addicted to schoolboy puns, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that phonetic interpretations of pitch-classes such as Bb=Be flat! ... [or] codes and signals were not lost on him (280). I contend that using Britten's alleged personality and interests as an interpretive code to his work conceals or at least diverts us from a more unsettling queer reading, one that does not merely add homosexuality to the picture but instead critiques the emotional economies of heteronormative attachments to children. To extend Brett's intriguing, if perhaps too easy, argument about Britten's homosexual thirds, might we instead look to the literal minors of this opera? title character of the opera is a fisherman whose former apprentice, the young boy William Spode, has been previously lost at sea. In the opera, Grimes reboards his craft, The Boy Billy, with a new young apprentice, John. traumatic history repeats, as John too dies in Grimes's care. Grimes, realizing something, although it is unclear precisely what, about the inevitability of this repetition, kills himself in the end of this opera. In all of these cases, Grimes's is far more foreboding when we take it literally. To radicalize rather than to reject a particularly contentious gay stereotype, this article asserts that Grimes's fixation and indirect termination of children is not at all unrelated to homosexuality. Indeed, as Lee Edelman suggests in his book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the figure of the child in North American culture, which is neither coeval nor completely distinct from any actual children, is the anti-queer (Bruhm and Hurley xiii) in its implied valorization of the future over the present and in its prioritization of the family over any other kind of human coalition. Edelman describes the responsibility of the modern queer in that describes our man Grimes all too literally: what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively--to insist that the future stop here (29-31). Edelman's definition of queerness implicitly follows and reignites Foucault's famous claim (a claim we need to hear more in a culture of increasing homonormativity) that homosexuality people as a 'way of life' rather than as a way of having sex (Friendship 310). Edelman's turn to negativity is a ghostly revision of Foucault as well: for him, queerness threatens people as a way of life cum a way of death. genre of Britten's Peter Grimes is central to its reception and our understanding of it, given not only that opera is associated in various ways with queerness but, moreover, that the opera is such a high art form. Because of its genre and milieu, this opera's refiguring of the (underage) itself constitutes another kind of minor: a minor literature (16), in Deleuze and Guattari's phraseology. If a literature, as they claim, doesn't come from a language, it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language (16), then we have a new way to understand why an opera--a rare opera in the English language, at that--has more and not less potential to undo major and modes. …

Ageism, Language and the Law

Many aspects of North American culture perpetuate ageism, yet as a society we have been so conditioned by the prejudice and discrimination against old age that we often fail to acknowledge its existence. One of the common ways that ageism is reflected and reinforced in culture is through the use of ageist language. Ageist language includes any and all stereotypes or beliefs about aging. These stereotypes can be found in the media, healthcare and education system, workplace, and even regular, everyday conversations. The purpose of this paper is to describe how ageist language permeates one aspect of culture: written judgments.

Technology and international orientation: sectoral differences in home‐region orientation

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to shed light on recent debates in this journal on differences in home‐region orientation depending on type of company and the home region in which they are based.Design/methodology/approachThe paper looks at the structure of trade (imports and exports) across different types of goods in order to shed light on differences between sectors and types of technology. The paper also explores structures across regions in order to shed light on regional differences.FindingsThis research indicates that there are major differences in structures of trade between different types of goods. However, these differences do not necessarily conform to a clear pattern across different technological levels and differ between regions and the direction of trade. The fact that Asian cultures have greater psychic distance from European and North American cultures is not reflected in higher levels of home‐region orientation.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper helps to clarify some of the hypotheses on home‐region orientation recently identified in this journal and, thus, helps to advance theories about why this orientation is so prevalent. The main limitations are related to the methodology. Using trade data, the paper cannot define the boundaries of the firm and, therefore, can only make conclusions at the macro level. These conclusions can, nevertheless, help to orient work at the micro level to further explore the key questions which recent work has raised.Originality/valueLimited comparative work across sectors or technologies has been undertaken in the context of the debate on home‐region orientation. Differentiating between different types of goods can help to give us insights into why so many companies tend to focus so consistently on their home region, while others are more global.

Challenge and Contribution of Cultural Psychology to Empirical Legal Studies

Empirical legal studies can benefit from the research findings of cultural psychology to understand the fundamental principles of law. Research findings in cultural psychology have shown that Eastern Asian cultures and North American cultures differ significantly in value orientations, moral judgments and cognitive styles. East Asian values emphasize collectivism and North American values emphasize individualism. East Asians moral reasons are centered on the principles of duties and responsibilities whereas North American moral reasons are centered on the principles of autonomy and justice. East Asian cognitive styles tend to be more holistic, focusing on context, backgrounds and relations and the North American cognitive styles tend to be more analytic, focusing on objects, categories and dispositions. Such cultural differences have profound implications in legal understanding and legal practices, as laws are human machinery and are subject to the influence of human values, moralities and cognition. Mounting evidence in cross-cultural legal studies has shown East and West differences in causation inquiry, responsibility judgments, contract formation and mediation practices. Research indicates that East Asian causal reasoning is less likely to make the fundamental attribution error as North Americans do. East Asians’ responsibility judgments, compared with North Americans’, involve more contextual information (such as moral judgments) than the law actually warrants. East Asians’ contract formation may be more based on relational obligations than the North Americans’, which are rule based. The compensation judgments by East Asians appear to be based on the consequence whereas judgments made by North Americans seem to be based on intention judgments. East Asians also prefer mediation in conflict resolutions while North Americans prefer litigation in conflict resolutions. We argue that these differences could influence people’s understanding, construction and use of laws in fundamental ways. As the law attempts to further understand people, and as theorists continue to evaluate how human life and law influence each others, scholars in both psychology and law must challenge themselves to reflect on the law’s substantive and procedural standards being applied in different cultural groups.. We hope our paper can generate enough interests among Chinese psychologists and legal scholars to start the journey towards finding solutions that both considers cultural psychology’s empirical findings and effectuates our legal ideals. The cross-culture empirical legal studies hence not only provide a new paradigm for legal scholarship but also provide theoretical guidance for advancing Chinese legal studies in global stages as well as in resolving international legal disputes between people from China and other countries.

Attention to Eye Contact in the West and East: Autonomic Responses and Evaluative Ratings

Eye contact has a fundamental role in human social interaction. The special appearance of the human eye (i.e., white sclera contrasted with a coloured iris) implies the importance of detecting another person's face through eye contact. Empirical studies have demonstrated that faces making eye contact are detected quickly and processed preferentially (i.e., the eye contact effect). Such sensitivity to eye contact seems to be innate and universal among humans; however, several studies suggest that cultural norms affect eye contact behaviours. For example, Japanese individuals exhibit less eye contact than do individuals from Western European or North American cultures. However, how culture modulates eye contact behaviour is unclear. The present study investigated cultural differences in autonomic correlates of attentional orienting (i.e., heart rate) and looking time. Additionally, we examined evaluative ratings of eye contact with another real person, displaying an emotionally neutral expression, between participants from Western European (Finnish) and East Asian (Japanese) cultures. Our results showed that eye contact elicited stronger heart rate deceleration responses (i.e., attentional orienting), shorter looking times, and higher ratings of subjective feelings of arousal as compared to averted gaze in both cultures. Instead, cultural differences in the eye contact effect were observed in various evaluative responses regarding the stimulus faces (e.g., facial emotion, approachability etc.). The rating results suggest that individuals from an East Asian culture perceive another's face as being angrier, unapproachable, and unpleasant when making eye contact as compared to individuals from a Western European culture. The rating results also revealed that gaze direction (direct vs. averted) could influence perceptions about another person's facial affect and disposition. These results suggest that cultural differences in eye contact behaviour emerge from differential display rules and cultural norms, as opposed to culture affecting eye contact behaviour directly at the physiological level.