Cultural Ontology Research Articles

Cultural Ontology of Muslim Male Homosexuality: An Anthropological Analysis

Cultural Ontology of Muslim Male Homosexuality: An Anthropological Analysis

A clustering-based semi-automated technique to build cultural ontologies

This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semiautomated approach merges distributed a...

A clustering‐based semi‐automated technique to build cultural ontologies

AbstractThis article presents and validates a clustering‐based method for creating cultural ontologies for community‐oriented information systems. The introduced semiautomated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce “cognate” ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of “fluid” ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, US). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semiautomated solution best optimizes among issues of interoperability and scalability, deemphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.

Boundary-work and the human—animal binary: Piltdown man, science and the media

The infamous Piltdown hoax offers an excellent opportunity to study how a figure that straddled the human—animal boundary (both figuratively in its positioning as a “missing link,” and literally given its post-hoax status as a modern human skull and a modern orangutan jaw) was made to fit dichotomous understandings of it. The process of making this figure human reveals how scientific claims in the disputed border zone between humans and non-human animals are shaped by the cultural themes upon which the division stands. Nationalism, race and species classification became enmeshed in the efforts to lead Piltdown from its liminal position to more conceptually stable ground. The result was a stretching of human-ness, that brought Piltdown closer to us whilst modern-day “savages” were moved further away. The paper's theoretical framework shifts Gieryn's boundary-work model from an ontology of culture to an ontology of nature. Transplanting Gieryn's model in this way is useful not only because of the parallels specifically between the science—culture and human—animal boundaries, but also as it serves as a reminder of the strong relationship between the categorization of the social and natural worlds.

Reclaiming Peace in International Relations

What is peace? This basic question often appears in contemporary orthodoxy to have been settled in favour of the `liberal peace'. Yet, this has, in many post-conflict settings, proved to create a `virtual peace'empty states and institutions which are ambivalent about everyday life. In this context peace is widely referred to but rarely defined. Though the concept of peace is often assumed to be normatively irreproachable, formative in the founding of the discipline, and central to the agendas of liberal states, it has rarely been directly approached as an area of study within IR. This essay endeavours to illustrate how developing accounts of peace helps chart the different theoretical and methodological contributions in IR, and the complex issues that then emerge. These include the pressing problem of how peace efforts become sustainable rather than merely inscribed in international and state-level diplomatic and military frameworks. This also raises issues related to an ontology of peace, culture, development, agency and structure, not just in terms of the representations of the world, and of peace, presented in the discipline, but in terms of the sovereignty of the discipline itself and its implications for everyday life. In an interdisciplinary and pluralist field of study — as IR has now become — concepts of peace and their sustainability are among those that are central. This raises the question of what the discipline is for, if not for peace? This paper explores such issues in the context of orthodox and critical IR theory, methods, and ontology, and offers some thoughts about the implications of placing peace at the centre of IR.

The Spirit, Religions, and the World as Sacrament: A Response to Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Assist

AbstractThis article responds to Amos Yong’s critique of the author’s Introducing Radical Orthodoxy by focusing on two themes: (1) his analysis of the tension between my creational, participatory or sacramental ontology and my more antithetical assertions regarding the Church as a unique polis; and (2) the question of apologetics, dialogue, and interreligious engagements. In response, I develop an intensity account of participation that applies to both ontology and theology of culture.

Knowledge‐based mobile learning framework for museums

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to propose a knowledge‐based mobile learning framework that integrates various types of museum‐wide content, and supports ubiquitous, context‐aware, personalized learning for museums.Design/methodology/approachA unified knowledge base with multi‐layer reusable content structures serves as the kernel component to integrate content from exhibitions for education and collection in a museum. The How‐Net approach is adopted to build a unified natural and cultural ontology. The ontology functions as a common and sharable knowledge concept that denotes each knowledge element in the unified knowledge base, and associates each learner's learning context and usage with a content and usage profile respectively. Data mining algorithms, e.g. association mining and clustering, are applied to discover useful patterns for ubiquitous personalization from these content and usage profiles.FindingsA pilot project based on the proposed framework has been successfully implemented in the Life Science Hall of the National Museum of Natural Science (NMNS), Taiwan, demonstrating the feasibility of this framework.Originality/valueThis study proposes a mobile learning framework that can be replicated in many museums. This framework improves learners' learning experiences with rich related content, and with ubiquitous, proactive and adaptive services. Museums can also benefit from implementing this framework through outreach services for educational, promoting and usability needs from combining mobile and Internet communication technologies and learning services.

Magical Realism and the Legacy of German Idealism

This article explores the relations between Novalis's idealism and modern literary magical realism. It demonstrates how the Latin American writers Miguel Ángel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alejo Carpentier selectively adapted and transformed idealist modes of thought in the service of their literary and cultural projects. Borges, it is argued, uses idealist tenets for epistemological purposes, and remains faithful to an absolute idealism. Asturias and Carpentier are concerned with cultural ontology, and, like Novalis, they temper the subjectivist tendencies of idealism by finding a place within it for realist conceptions of the world.

Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture

Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture

Gay bashing--a rite of passage?

Most of what is known about the perpetrators of anti-gay violence is reported by victims of such violence. None the less, it is obvious from such reports that 'gay bashers' are overwhelmingly young men who operate in groups, sometimes at gay cruising sites or near gay bars. Drawing on finding from interviews with 30 gay bashers in the Netherlands--whose cooperation was mediated by the police--this paper analyses gay bashing as a rite of passage into masculinity. Most interviewees, regardless of their ethnic background, shared a common psychological habitus and cultural ontology. All were poorly individualized, lacked autonomy and often their self-esteem was low or highly exaggerated or both. What they feared most was to become the object of desire for gay men, whom they considered to be dishonourable, weak and effeminate. Interviewees believed themselves to have acquired a masculine status, which above all meant that they were strong. The suggestion is made that with its growing visibility, homosexuality plays an increasingly problematic role in male socialization.

An Ontology-Based Approach to Inter-organizational Knowledge Transfer

The explication of value systems of the subsidiaries involved in the knowledge transfer process is the necessary condition for its success. The term cultural ontology is introduced to refer to such explication. Using a framework that is based on a modified version of Gupta and Govindarjan's model of the knowledge transfer between subsidiaries in Multi-National Corporation, and De Long and Fahey's framework for studying the cultural influences on knowledge transfer process, the elements of cultural ontology are specified. The cultural ontology specification document includes its domain, purpose, level of formality, scope, possible sources of knowledge, competency questions and the possible reusable ontologies.

Ontology of Culture and the Study of Human Behavior

AbstractIt is here argued that 'culture' is a universal in the philosophical sense of the term: it expresses a general property. It is not a singular term naming an abstract entity, but rather a singular predicate the intension of which is 'cultureness.' Popper's view of the ontology of mathematics is used as an analogous example in the light of which the ontology of culture is analyzed. Cultures do not have an independent existence (realism), they are not mere names (Nominalism), and neither do they exist as fixed entities in the mind (conceptualism). Cultures are abstractions made by the mind, which yet are not reducible to the mind. They exist in the form of certain mental operations creating a new level of reality. Scientific study of culture involves both explaining how cultural phenomena are constructed in minds and how these constructions function in cognition and communication.

The Ontology of Culture—Way-markers

The Ontology of Culture—Way-markers

Greek Cypriot Narratives of History and Collective Identity: Nationalism as a Contested Process

In this article I consider the appeal of "grand" historical narratives of nationalism by focusing on the ways in which history and identity are contested in the context of Greek Cypriot society. I pay particular attention to diverse expressions of nationalism formulated by the state, political parties, and individual social actors. By examining how nationalism is articulated on these different levels, I propose an understanding of the dialectical process between "above" and "below" that accounts for the appeal of specific constructions of nationalism. I investigate this process by looking at how individual social actors discuss the past in ways that blend elements of personal, local, and national political history. Such an approach provides an alternative to theories that hold that nationalism's appeal lies in proposing a new kind of community as the local community collapses under the dislocating impact of the forces of modernity. In contrast, theories of nationalism phrased in terms of broad cultural ontologies are problematic for explaining the presence of multiple models of nationalism within a community, and the ways in which nationalisms can be internally contested, [nationalism, history, identity, narrative, Cyprus]

Critical Thought, Institutional Contexts, Normative Projects

While we welcome Gergen's (1997) comments, we dispute a number of his criticisms. First, actor-network theory (ANT) does not reduce persons to autonoma. Rather, its prime aim is to account for the emergence of persons within a network. Similarly, ANT does not draw back from attributing responsibility; rather, it examines how the responsibility of actors (whether they be `bad' decision-makers or `entrepreneurial' scientists) is established. Next, contrary to Gergen's view of institutional pressures as `occupational hazards', we reassert the importance of seeing these as partially constitutive of academic (postmodern psychological) activity. Finally, while we agree with Gergen that all academic `tellings' privilege some form of ontology, we argue that this does not warrant an exclusively cultural ontology.

The social course of epilepsy: chronic illness as social experience in interior China.

Findings are reported from a collaborative research project on the experience of epilepsy and treatment among patients and family members in Shanxi and Ningxia Provinces in China. Family, marriage, financial and moral consequences of the social experience of epilepsy support the conceptualization of chronic illness as possessing a social course. Beyond traditional concern with stigma, application of concepts of delegitimation, sociosomatic processes, coping as resistance, contestation in the evaluation of efficacy and compliance, and the cultural ontology of suffering illustrate other ways that social theory is useful in research on chronic illness and disability.

Bakhtin's Legacy and the History of Science and Culture: an Interview with Anatoli Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler

Bakhtin’s Legacy and the History of Science and Culture: An Interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler Daniel Alexandrov and Anton Struchkov1 Daniel Alexandrov: Let me begin with the following introductory remark. You, Vladimir Solomonovich [Bibler], have been schooled as a historian. However, it is philosophy, not history, that has turned out to be your vocation and creative destiny. You, Anatolii Valerianovich [Akhutin], were educated in chemistry. Then you devoted much time to the history of science, especially to its philosophical aspect. Thus, your professional interests also concentrate, first and foremost, upon philosophy in the classical sense. Neither of you specializes in the history of science per se, still less in Bakhtinian scholarship. Your own cultural and historico-scientific studies proceed from the logic of your philosophy and belong to the latter’s context. Accordingly, the work of Bakhtin is significant for you not as a neutral “object of research,” but as an occurrence of philosophically congenial thought. For a long time such “philosophical congeniality” has been-and it continues to be—the “adhesive” that binds together the members of your group specializing in diverse fields: historians, culturologists, philologists, psychologists, teachers. The logical foundations of that philosophy, which you name “the logic of the dialogue of logics” or “the dialogic ontology of culture,” are explicated in detail mainly in your own works, Vladimir Solomonovich. [End Page 335] But one may also conceive of all the group’s work over many years, including highly specialized studies, as the detailing and thematic trial of its common conception. Therefore, before we turn to the main topic of our conversation, I would like to ask you, Anatolii Valerianovich, for a brief account of the history of your circle. Anatolii Akhutin: We do indeed shoulder a rather long history-nearly thirty years. Notwithstanding that our present-day (official) status—that of an independent creative group entitled “Dialogue of Cultures”—has been conferred on us quite recently, the history of our circle actually begins with seminars that go back (as a noticeable social phenomenon) to the so-called thaw in the days of Khrushchev. In this respect, we share the common destiny of a number of trends formed in those days that maintained the vitality of philosophical thought under the conditions of its methodical suppression. After the Czechoslovakian events of 1968, all these seminars dispersed and retreated into...private kitchens, or smoking-rooms of certain institutions (such as, for example, the State Lenin Library), or even into back-streets. 2 The seminar conducted by V. S. Bibler also shifted to conditions of domestic, almost underground, existence. At that time, its membership was somewhat different than now. Thus, Lina B. Tumanova was among us, a remarkable philosopher whose works still remain unpublished. (An active member of the movement for the defence of human rights, she was arrested by the Committee for State Security [KGB] in 1984; afterwards, however, when it became known that she was incurably ill, they set her free several months before her death.) The distinguished culturologist Leonid M. Batkin (well-known today as a political scientist) has actively participated in our seminar for many years. A student of Descartes’s philosophy, Yakov A. Lyatker (now in the USA), has also been the seminar’s longtime member (and its “chronicler”). Two disciples of Mikhail B. Turovskii, Vladimir V. Silvestrov (died in 1990) and Leonid S. Chernyak (now in the USA), have been in close collaboration with us. In other words, as usual in Russian history, “already some are not, and others are far off....” Parenthetically, this history of “back-street circles” and “kitchen seminars,” i.e., the real history of philosophical thought in the post-Stalin USSR—a rich and by no means insipid story that harbors [End Page 336] many surprising discoveries—has not been written as yet and is not likely to be written in the foreseeable future. We “insiders” are unlikely to do this, for our time is devoted to other commitments or simply devoured by the humdrum of life here. On the other hand, the perverted logic of Soviet life is too cunning for an objective view from without. The point is not so much the lack of relevant documents...