Portrayal Of Community Research Articles

Societal narratives in a Vietnamese rap song

This study explores the cultural and moral narratives in the contemporary Vietnamese rap song “Nau an cho em” by Den Vau. The research employs a corpus-based linguistic analysis to dissect the song’s lyrics, uncovering themes and messages that resonate with broader societal issues in Vietnam. The analysis reveals four key themes: the resilience and hope of children in Vietnam’s mountainous regions, the empowerment through education and self-improvement, the juxtaposition of natural beauty with hard realities, and the portrayal of community and collective identity. These themes highlight the song’s portrayal of the challenges faced by marginalized communities, the transformative power of education, and the importance of communal support and unity. The study demonstrates how contemporary Vietnamese music, particularly Den Vau’s work, transcends entertainment to offer profound insights into social commentary and moral reflection. It underscores the role of music as a medium for cultural expression and societal discourse in contemporary Vietnam.

The German Village as Site of Ethnographic Knowledge

In Germany, the disciplines of folkloristics (Volkskunde) and sociology had such different origins and divergent trajectories between 1933 and 1945 that it is both surprising and instructive to discover so many commonalities in their postwar studies. Before commenting on possible reasons for similarities among ethnographic portrayals of community in the German state of Hesse, I will briefly review prewar and Nazi-era developments in the two disciplines in order to situate these studies in their historical and intellectual contexts. The Zeitgeist of the founding periods of folklore (nineteenth-century Germany) and sociology (Weimar Germany after the First World War) could not have been more different. From its nineteenth-century beginnings, Volkskunde emerged as a conservative social science. Since the time of Johann Gottfried Herder and the Grimms, the Volk had been equated with the peasantry. Romantic nationalists assumed the peasantry embodied the purest aspects of German culture. Nazi ideology and Volkskunde converged in their orientation toward the traditional, the national, and the belief that the peasantry constituted the foundation of the German folk-nation. Both the material and the

‘‘I wish you a land'': Hawai'i Short Story Cycles and aloha ′aina

The artistic appropriation of place ranks among the central concerns of Asian American writing. Place in literature, a simultaneous geography of space and imagination, has the potential to represent communal formation and preservation as it highlights the identity that binds its members in a shared sense of purpose and a common sense of belonging. For first-generation writers, the portrayal of the land of the past often blends with that of the present, offering a vivid depiction of how immigrants perceive the physical and emotional journey from the geographic and temporal past to the present, as they struggle to establish themselves in the new surroundings. For second-generation Asian Americans, place often acquires another meaning, that of a definition of self in the place of birth, as they shift between visions of their parents' past location and their own cultural differences. Third-generation writers engage a wide spectrum of negotiations with the land that was a protagonists of their growing up, and that of their increasingly complex personal and community history. Consequently, a sense of place becomes one of the most significant elements the Asian American writer can manipulate to condition self-representation and the portrayal of community.

Heartland community: Economic restructuring and the management of small town identity in the central U.S.

The representation of small‐town United States as a heartland of traditional values is a perennial image in national political rhetoric, bearing a dynamic relation to locally generated ways of portraying rural life. This paper examines transformations in the ways small‐town solidarity and local identity were promoted and represented by chambers of commerce in North Dakota communities undergoing rapid industrial expansion. Prior to boom development, “boosters” represented small‐town communities in locally significant terms, but as economic restructuring reconfigured the character of community life, identity politics were relocated within an insider/outsider conflict that reshaped the significance of localness and rurality. Portrayals of community reinvented for a new audience invoked elements of the nationally familar heartland myth, but lost much of their integrative function. This account of the processes of social change and changes in social representations reveals linkages between local and national levels of power and identity production.