Cultural Ontology Research Articles

Exploring Conceptualisations of Disability: A Talanoa approach to Understanding Cultural Frameworks of Disability in Samoa

Purpose: The concepts of disability are explored from a Samoan cultural frame. The impact of disability conceptualisations on identity development and cultural inclusion was assessed through the Samoan language. The study also evaluated the extent of endorsement of global policy initiatives at a local level. Methods: Through facilitating a Talanoa approach, which is a rich cultural tradition of sharing knowledge, space emerged for dialogue around the lived experiences of members of the disability community in Samoa. Results: Incongruous conceptualisations of disability were identified as a contributing factor in the persistence of stigmatising attitudes and beliefs. Borrowing concepts and terms from moral, medical, and social disability models, this disparity of conceptualisation is reflected in Samoan disability terminology. It was also found that while global policy initiatives are generally politically embraced, they engage more effectively with the community when they are underpinned by Samoan cultural ontologies. Conclusion: The findings suggest that multiple ideologies regarding rights, capabilities and experiences, challenge the development of identity, self-worth, and inclusion. There is significant value in merging cultural concepts with a social disability model framework. It is important to future development that people with disability can express a sense of cultural identity without risking the right to inclusion and equality.

“A Whole Way of Life”: Ontology of Culture from Raymond Williams’s Perspective

An overall understanding of culture, both the culture of community one lives in and the culture of communities one communicates with, seems to be important for people to live their lives under the shelter of peace. This study hands over and foregrounds what people should notice when they face with their own and other nation’s culture in order to understand it better and prevent probable problems. Knowing about the essence of one's own culture, the person can protect it while it is being attacked by other cultures. It is predicted that by being aware of all the criteria just mentioned, people can both protect their own genuine culture and communicate with other communities, with different cultures, without facing with or creating crucial problems; as a result, they can live peacefully and help the matter of globalization. The main goal of this study is to present ontology of culture through which people would be able to get how to know their own and other's cultures. This knowledge helps them to communicate properly by knowing about what aspects of culture they should focus on when facing other cultures in order not to create any crucial problem.

Buttery Flies: On the Alien Permanence of the InvAsian Irony of Permanent Aliens

Abstract This piece revisits this old Asian American trope, “the perpetual foreigner-stranger over there and here,” by showing how and why irony, “invAsian” irony in particular, becomes the constant in the cultural ontology and phenomenology of Asian Americana, where the Asian American subject still figures as encroaching builder or unbuilding resident, a transfigurative threat to the narrative coherence of the nationalist US imaginary. These particularly “InvAsian,”1 dangerous and honorary “CauASIAN,” characters—however outdated and yellowing they may seem in the year 2015—still seem real enough; they are downwardly mobile noodle delivery men or upwardly mobile medical overachievers, riding up and down on the Great Chain of American Being, except that they are not laterally mobile, for they are still a little too strange, stupidly or smartly. So, the alien permanence of the “invAsian” irony of permanent aliens: how does this diehard cliché of fascination and fear, this contradictory object of condescension and condemnation, exist or subsist? The economized, i.e., selective and “invested”2 performance and mobilization of ethnoracial stereotypes captures the invAsian irony of America, which mirrors the deeper and wider Euro-American irony of identitarian anxieties over mythologized reality or territorialized origin. America, come on, really, where is your originality from?

Buttery Flies: On the Alien Permanence of the InvAsian Irony of Permanent Aliens

Abstract This piece revisits this old Asian American trope, “the perpetual foreigner-stranger over there and here,” by showing how and why irony, “invAsian” irony in particular, becomes the constant in the cultural ontology and phenomenology of Asian Americana, where the Asian American subject still figures as encroaching builder or unbuilding resident, a transfigurative threat to the narrative coherence of the nationalist US imaginary. These particularly “InvAsian,”1 dangerous and honorary “CauASIAN,” characters—however outdated and yellowing they may seem in the year 2015—still seem real enough; they are downwardly mobile noodle delivery men or upwardly mobile medical overachievers, riding up and down on the Great Chain of American Being, except that they are not laterally mobile, for they are still a little too strange, stupidly or smartly. So, the alien permanence of the “invAsian” irony of permanent aliens: how does this diehard cliché of fascination and fear, this contradictory object of condescension and condemnation, exist or subsist? The economized, i.e., selective and “invested”2 performance and mobilization of ethnoracial stereotypes captures the invAsian irony of America, which mirrors the deeper and wider Euro-American irony of identitarian anxieties over mythologized reality or territorialized origin. America, come on, really, where is your originality from?

Creative Work of A. N. Vertinsky in the Context of the “Silver Age” Cultural Epoch as a Laminar Culture

On the basis of A. N. Vertinsky’s creative work - a precedent phenomenon of the “Silver Age” Epoch - the article analyzes key features of this cultural ontology, both exceptionally culturological and philosophical ones (perception of death, ratio of elite and mass, ethic and esthetic problems, etc.). Having analyzed the synchronous and diachronous cultural dynamics, the authors build an original conception of cultural ontologies allowing to draw some practically significant conclusions. Also, in the context of the research, the problems of disposition “the Ego - the Other” are investigated, as well as the questions of inter-stratum cultural syncretism and intertextual interactions.

The ontological practices of child culture

This article asks questions about the ontology of child culture. It aims to position the concept of child culture at the forefront of theoretical research without creating a ‘true’ or singular definition of the concept. It is rather a conceptual exploration of partial consistencies of child culture in and through practices. The focus of the analyses is on five institutional cultural practices created for children: two children’s museums, a science centre, a theme park and an amusement park. A cross-analysis of these practices provides the empirical material for proposing the notion of ‘child culture multiple’.

Two Modes of Contemporary Pragmatist Aesthetics

This paper identifies two central modes of discourse in contemporary pragmatist aesthetics: Cultural Emergentism and Experiential Somaesthetics. Whereas Cultural Emergentism focuses on developing a non-reductive ontology of culture, Experiential Somaesthetics preserves the traditional pragmatist emphasis on embodied experience and examines the place that the care and cultivation of the living soma has in improving our aesthetic transactions.

The Nature of Knowledge Power in Communicative Information Society

Development of communicative information society is described as a process of spreading the applied scientific knowledge converted into information all over the fields of sociality. The idea of “power shift” in the process of development of communicative information sociality is important conceptually. This idea includes disintegration of the existing power structures and rising the new ones, drastic change in the balance of social forces in the power structure, redistribution of power. Development of communicative information sociality is shown to be connected with transformation of knowledge: knowledge converted into information (applied knowledge) gets the ability to transform the socio-cultural ontology. It becomes the most important power resource, transforming the structure of power relations. The key feature of the proposed approach is the intent to study the phenomenon of knowledge transformation under social and philosophical context of society, where the knowledge converted into information gets ontological status of the phenomenon that changes the system of power relations within the framework of communicative sociality also. The positive feedback is shown to be formed during the functioning of such a society: the need for spreading the knowledge stimulates the development of communication system, which in its turn opens the new ways to distribute the knowledge. As a result this society operates as a self-developing system, where communications manifest themselves as the ontology of culture. Communication development acts as a culture-forming factor, generating processes of social and cultural transformations.

Ontologia kulturowa: Kulturowość bycia

Constructing a cultural ontology I reject the primordiality of everydayness, presupposed by Heidegger, in order to reveal the cultural constitution of all ways of being, from everyday life to the most unusual activities of individuals and communities. The cultural constitution of being is displayed with the help of the idea that meanings, i.e., references, senses and values (that are a special type of senses), are structures of all ways of being. In the following exposition the cultural constitution of being is analyzed in its interrelations with the commonality of being, its temporality, and historicity.

Shaping the Grammar of Security.

In Australia, practices of preemptive deterrence construct the political identity of asylum seekers as the ‘illegal other’, and as a threat to national security and to national identity. At the core of the state's illegality regimes lies the endorsement of exclusionary norms through the grammar of security. Who is responsible for the endorsement of these norms and how do they (re)produce illegality regimes? How are securitization moves legitimized and sustained through illegality regimes? How may they be resisted? A case study of Sweden illustrates how the securitization discourses mobilizing illegality regimes may be resisted through norm circles in the political sphere that endorse norms of egalitarianism, justice and equality.
 This paper focuses on the ‘critical realism’ associated with the works of Dave Elder-Vass and Roy Bhaskar. Elder-Vass draws on the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar to examine the ontology of language, discourse, culture and knowledge and their contribute to the construction of social reality, thus synthesizing aspects of realism and constructionism. Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of the social sciences has aimed to crystallize a transcendental realist framework incorporating a form of critical naturalism and also critical hermeneutics.

Ontologia kulturowa: zarys konstrukcji

My project of cultural ontology aims at a specific modification of Heidegger’s ontology of being, which enables the analysis of historical communal being and the cultural nature of all ways of being. In the first part I shall consider: the motives for using an expression ’cultural ontology,’ arguments for the necessity of overcoming phenomenological analysis toward ontological philosophizing, and reasons for going beyond the analytic of Dasein toward ontological analysis of communities and human history. A sociohistorical ontology must be, finally, transformed into a cultural ontology because all ways of being, human and non-human alike, are cultural in their constitution. As a starting point for the ontological exposition of culture I also discuss pre-ontological, e.g. scientific, views of culture and take up the question whether a cultural ontology can be useful for them.

Transmutating beings

Forms of thought, from what Levi-Strauss called the systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses, to the causal theories studied by Evans-Pritchard in witchcraft, have generally been interpreted as an expression of a specific language or culture. In this paper, I discuss this way of defining thought. Three classic objections are examined: (1) societies sharing the same system of may speak different languages, and vice versa; (2) if a relation between language and thought exists, it is an indirect and controversial one, and we should never take it for granted (or infer qualities of thought from language structures) without further investigation; (3) the languages that we use to qualify different kinds of thought are constantly translated. Through a discussion of the context of translation, I argue that instead of seeing the possibility of translation as a theoretical difficulty for defining thought, we could, on the contrary, consider the ethnography of translation as a chance to observe the dynamics and structure of thought processes, and to study how they operate in different contexts. Using three Amazonian examples, I will try to describe the kind of cognition involved by the form of translation that Jakobson calls transmutation . I will argue that from this ethnographic analysis, we can not only derive a better (both wider and more precise) idea of some, rarely studied, translation processes, but also draw from it a new way to define the concept of cultural ontology, both for Amazonian cultures and in more general terms.

Understanding Administrative Culture: Some Theoretical and Methodological Remarks

The article highlights five aspects of administrative culture. It first describes different ways of conceptualizing administrative culture. The second aspect is the ontology of administrative culture, two views of which are presented. The first of these sees organizational culture as a dependent variable that can be manipulated and altered to reflect management and leadership preferences; the other views organizations as miniature societies reflecting broader societal culture. Change is more path dependent than rationally arranged at will. The third aspect of administrative culture concerns epistemology, focusing on how knowledge about culture is created, how a researcher may carry out inquiry, and what the inquiry is about. The fourth aspect – the axiology of administrative culture – concerns the appropriate administrative norms and ethical standards of public officials. Finally, the methodological aspect points to how to study and capture different aspects of administrative culture.

Scientific realism and philosophical naturalism in Šmajs’ evolutionary ontology

Abstract J. Šmajs’ concept of evolutionary ontology has attracted much attention in recent years especially in Czech and Slovak academic circles, yet it remains, as some of its proponents claim, undervalued in Britain and the US. Even in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, there are, in addition to its strong supporters, several authors who almost a priori reject the concept, pointing to several questionable, contradictory or even mutually exclusive or self-refuting arguments. In this paper, mainly based on a comprehensive analysis of the first part of Šmajs’ book, Evoluční ontologie kultury a problém podnikání (2012) [Evolutionary Ontology of Culture and The Issues Of Business], we attempt to demonstrate that the opponents of Šmajs’ concept are closer to the truth, since the concept, we believe, is just another variation on the extreme escalation of philosophical naturalism.

Evolutionary ontology of culture and the issues of business

Evolutionary ontology of culture and the issues of business

Limit within image, image within limit

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the state of dependency between the tableau and the image. The proposed ideas go against the normal understanding, usage and function of the image and follow instead a particular ontological understanding of the image. This ontological analysis of the image is irritated by the presupposition that the ontological difference and distinctness of the image is not fixed and secure; on the contrary, it is conditioned by change, as is the case with all beings, being or beingness. This ontological difference exists and is only in its ontic manifestations. Furthermore, the article underlines the fact that the image, as a mode of being, is a plastic being that can be blocked in an ontological and ontic malady. The artistic image is interpreted through an analogy that tries to resist a reifying, objectifying or mechanical relation with an artwork, and one that acknowledges its distinctness, differentness, separateness, and rends, and that accepts the threat of semiotic collapse and its incomprehensible kernel. The intellectual context that is addressed and disrupted at the same time is oriented around the writings on the image of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's (*1940), the existential and clinical term of a ‘divided self’, the subject of research in R. D. Laing's book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, and the thinking of a cultural ontology by the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica's (1909–1987).

On the ontology based representation of cell lines.

Cell lines are frequently used as highly standardized and reproducible in vitro models for biomedical analyses and assays. Cell lines are distributed by cell banks that operate databases describing their products. However, the description of the cell lines' properties are not standardized across different cell banks. Existing cell line-related ontologies mostly focus on the description of the cell lines' names, but do not cover aspects like the origin or optimal growth conditions. The objective of this work is to develop an ontology that allows for a more comprehensive description of cell lines and their metadata, which should cover the data elements provided by cell banks. This will provide the basis for the standardized annotation of cell lines and corresponding assays in biomedical research. In addition, the ontology will be the foundation for automated evaluation of such assays and their respective protocols in the future. To accomplish this, a broad range of cell bank databases as well as existing ontologies were analyzed in a comprehensive manner. We identified existing ontologies capable of covering different aspects of the cell line domain. However, not all data fields derived from the cell banks' databases could be mapped to existing ontologies. As a result, we created a new ontology called cell culture ontology (CCONT) integrating existing ontologies where possible. CCONT provides classes from the areas of cell line identification, origin, cell line properties, propagation and tests performed.

The Modern Culture's Ontology based E-Learning System

The modern culture has changing its type, characteristic and genre by the times. And the modern culture has providing good resources to reader that he/she can see the times. Recently, the modern culture has changed the providing method for reader. That is, the attempt is to provide the various and many literary works to reader as the digital devices or the types of content. In this paper, we propose e-learning system based on a modern literary work's ontology. And we provide this system to reader for supporting easy and diverse process to reader. The modern literary work's contents in this system is processed by SCORM, and we construct LMS and LCMS. In order to evaluate this system, we construct the test group by 80 people, and we show the efficiency of this system process with modern literary work by the test.

Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange

This article takes the form of a debate between the two authors on the social ontology of propositional culture. Archer applies the morphogenetic approach, analysing culture as a cycle of interaction between the Cultural System and Socio-Cultural Interaction. In this model, the Cultural System is comprised of the objective content of intelligibilia, as theorized by Karl Popper with his concept of objective World 3 knowledge. Elder-Vass agrees that culture works through an interplay between subjective belief and an external objective moment, but argues that the external moment cannot take the form of ‘objective knowledge’ as this is understood by Popper. Instead, the external moment of culture takes the form of normative pressures exerted by groups of people: norm circles. Ultimately both authors share a commitment to a similar critical realist ontological framework, while offering alternative accounts of the nature of culture within that framework.

Towards an ontology of culture

Towards an ontology of culture