Pursuit Of Culture Research Articles

The Violent Aesthetic: A Reconsideration of Transgressive Body Art

The Violent Aesthetic:A Reconsideration of Transgressive Body Art Eric Mullis Developing John Dewey's thought regarding the unity of body and mind and his criticism of traditional notions of aesthetic experience, Richard Shusterman has proposed a discipline of aesthetics (somaesthetics), the purpose of which is to foster inquiry into the aesthetic dimensions of the human body. 1 These agreements aside, Shusterman is critical of Dewey's emphasis on the consummatory phase of aesthetic experience, that is, the phase in which the elements of an experience culminate in a fulfilling and organic moment that punctuates the flow of everyday life. Martin Jay too develops this line of criticism by arguing that aesthetic experience need not be consummatory in nature and that, with regard to somaesthetic experience, there are a wide array of "transgressive body techniques" that are just as aesthetically valuable as the kinds of experiences advocated by Dewey. Further, Jay argues that these techniques also perform an important political function since they draw attention to the violence that underlies the democratic process, reveal that there are alternatives to a rather homogenous public sphere, and illustrate the need for political criticism. 2 Since Dewey held that aesthetic experience is essential for a democratic culture, it seems, then, that he would indeed espouse the work of transgressive body artists since such work can be seen as contributing to the pursuit of a democratic culture. For these reasons, Jay concludes that even though they are blatantly nonconsummatory in nature, transgressive body techniques have both aesthetic and political value and should not be dismissed outright. In this essay I will address Jay's argument first by assessing the aesthetic value of transgressive body techniques and then will go on to say something about their political efficacy. Taking the work of Orlan as my example, I will argue that such techniques have minimal aesthetic value and that what aesthetic value they do have is mitigated by their primarily critical aims. I will also suggest that traditional performance arts such as dance and theatre also utilize the body, but do so in a manner that is more conducive to the realization of a democratic culture. [End Page 85] I. It can be argued that the central task of Dewey's Art as Experience is to give an account of aesthetic experience that does justice to its richness and distinctness and yet avoids the traditional tendency to conceptually divorce it from everyday life. He does this by arguing that everyday experience can be rendered aesthetic when it is consciously led to organic ends. When this happens there is a "conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversions, into movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close" (1934, 56). This conversion renders aesthetic experiences distinct from those that are either inchoate or overtly repetitious in nature. They stand out from these extremes because they are intrinsically meaningful and because they are contingent upon the work of intelligence. That is, every instance of significant aesthetic experience is contingent upon a process of problem solving, for in designing experience, intelligence must mete out difficulty. This is why aesthetic experience, for Dewey, is important for a democratic culture, as consummatory experience and the purposive activity that it is contingent upon is necessary for a public not only because it renders life meaningful, but also because the intelligence that is needed in order to bring it about is akin to the social intelligence necessary for the resolution of social problems. 3 II. As mentioned, Jay examines the implications of the work of "performance artists who have experimented in often transgressive and provocative ways with their own bodies" (2003, 166) 4 in order to enact social criticism. Indeed, although there are many variations on the artistic direction of violence toward the body, there are central themes. First, the art industry and its temple—the museum—are called into question by performances that purposefully escape the fetishization that often accompanies original and unreproducible works of art such as paintings, sculptures, and buildings. Second, because they are violent and/or disgusting in nature, these performances make the psychological phenomenon of aesthetic distance impossible. No doubt, it is difficult to...

Re-Placing the Space of Community: A Story of Cultural Politics, Policies, and Fisheries Management

Getting communities involved in resource management has seen increasing attention from a variety of disciplines. Within anthropology, sociology, geography, political science-even in the natural sciences and policy circlesgrassroots perspectives have been argued essential to developing new frameworks built on local knowledge and institutions (e.g. Pinkerton 1989, Dyer and McGoodwin 1994, FAO 2000). This focus on community seems to imply a building interest in how participatory, ideas might lead to new liberation ecologies (Peet and Watts 1996). Indeed, despite early modernists' dire predictions and postmodernism's traveling predilections, notions of community figure prominently in identity politics and debates. This relevance has enabled the idea of community to play a polysemous role in challenging the privileging of time over (Smith and Katz 1993: 67) in social theory. Work on the production of space, uneven geographies of development, and the politics of identity have pointed to the multiple ways that communities may be configured (Harvey 1989, Soja 1989). From being environmental anchors in the common property literature to reworked sites of connection in the new geographies, the notion of a community has been good to think. But the concern here is the re-constitution of community in a policy world dominated by particular notions of the subject, rationality, and space and place. This concern speaks directly to tensions in anthropology stemming from the tug and pull between history and geography in time- and place-specific ethnographies (Fabian 1983, Gupta and Ferguson 1992). If anthropology's pursuit of culture has rested on a now-criticized view of space and place, it is a view with wider roots in so-called Western tradition.2 Thus how community appears in policy is inextricably related to how anthropology and culture are characterized. Put another way, the marginalization of anthropology in public policy is related in part to the persistence of discourses that locate community and culture outside modernity and rationality. The effect of this is to undermine the critical capacity of anthropological notions of culture to analyze power and practice, as well as to undermine the potential that alternative spaces like communities offer for political engagement. These issues appear in fisheries around the world as nation-states struggle with declines in fish and fishers (McGoodwin 1990). Such difficulties have led to policies that waver between economic efficiency and social responsibility, and bring with them implicit notions of community and social life. Examples include the European Union's efforts to overhaul its Common Fisheries Policy, where fishery-dependent regions play an important if ambiguous role in social policies; fishing nations such as Iceland and Norway, where concerns over market-dominated management involve issues of nation, place, and identity; and the United States, where reauthorization of legislation governing fisheries management grappled with the social and economic impacts on fishing communities. By focusing on these constructions of community, primarily in federal fisheries policy in the United States, I hope to provide an understanding of the different meanings and practices that inhere in community, for this sets the parameters for grassroots engagement as well as anthropology's relevance (Brosius et al. 1998). These reflections are based on a kind of fieldwork in which I am one of a handful of anthropologists in the National Marine Fisheries Service,3 charged with conducting sociocultural research including how regulations impact communities. Though the work of operationally defining and field-researching community is still a work-in-progress for federal fisheries (see clay 2000 for some of the issues involved), my concern here is less the definitions of community that make sense to anthropologists than the broader context in which they are interpreted and enacted. …

HRM and the pursuit of a service culture

PurposeAims to draw attention to how managers actively re‐construct inherent contradictions characterising the employment relationship that in the service sector, are rooted in drives for increased efficiency and customer‐oriented behaviours.Design/methodology/approachPresents a case study of the human resource implications of changes taking place within a contract catering firm seeking to attain “world class” service delivery.FindingsFinds that managers' accounts of “the reality” of change were constructed upon three overlapping and competing discourses – labelled “enagagement”, “enterprise” and “compliance”.Originality/valueHighlights the active role of discourse in the management of HRM and organisational change.

In Pursuit of Culture

▪ Abstract In this brief, autobiographical account, I trace the development of my intellectual and theoretical interests, especially as they relate to culture. How can we account for culture's being learned by individuals and yet apparently shared by members of a community? How do cultures as shared within communities change and evolve? How does what we know about languages, themselves a kind of cultural tradition, contribute to understanding culture and cultural evolution? Are processes of cultural and linguistic evolution analogous to those in the evolution of biological species and, if so, in what ways? How, also, do genetically based behavioral proclivities manifest themselves in social arenas that are structured by language and culture?

Extramarital Love in Shanghai

This paper describes ordinary peoples accounts of how they deal with extramarital affairs. By looking at such personal accounts we hope to better understand the workings of moral discourse in everyday life. Rather than searching for an underlying system of consistent values or a domineering public voice we will investigate how people use competing discourses of motive to make sense of extramarital love in the contexts of their own lives and those of people around them. In doing this we also hope to provide a description of changes in Chinese moral codes and the factors that shape their use. While we must emphasize that our interviewees are special cases as all of our interviewees are or were dealing with extramarital sexuality in their own lives we also wish to emphasize that the moral discourses these individuals employed are almost all common in contemporary Chinese society. That is the personal stories people told us were not amoral accounts but rather deviant or sub- cultural uses of dominant moral discourses. We must understand how such moral values play a role in enabling deviant behaviour. (excerpt)

Transforming a run down general practice into a leading edge primary care organisation with the help of the EFQM excellence model.

This article explains how a primary care team transformed a run down general practice into a leading edge healthcare organisation by adopting the principles of the EFQM excellence model. The decisions surrounding the choice of approach, challenges faced, benefits achieved and lessons learned are all described in such a way that the reader may appreciate the issues which faced the members of the 15-man team. In particular, the practice team found that describing indicators of quality and gathering evidence to test out assumptions regarding performance were vital elements in the pursuit of a continuous improvement culture that was to benefit patients, staff and key stakeholders alike. Whilst an increase in workload was experienced in the early days, the knowledge that this was associated with improved performance made the efforts worthwhile and the team eager to adopt a regular, never-ending cycle of self-assessment and improvement.

Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

grows up obsessed with thoughts of her natural father, euphemistically called Uncle Walter. Her father, the youngest of a large family, restlessly wanders the earth for decades and periodically sends back letters decorated with exquisite drawings of birds. Walter's infrequent visits home first electrify the family but ultimately begin a cycle of gossip that threatens to undermine even the deep feelings that the girl has for her father. The family estate crumbles over the decades, as each of the male heirs departs to seek a better life, leaving behind little more than the patriarch Francisco Dias, the girl, her mother, and the man who married her mother, appropriately named Custodio.

The Effect of Temperature on First Feeding, Growth, and Survival of Larval Witch Flounder Glyptocephalus cynoglossus

AbstractWitch flounder Glyptocephalus cynoglossus has recently been identified as a candidate species for aquaculture in the northeastern United States and the Canadian Atlantic Provinces. This study investigated the optimal temperatures for witch flounder larval first feeding and for long term larval culture from hatching through metamorphosis. Maximum first feeding occurred between 15.0 and 16.2 C. Larvae did not survive beyond first feeding when reared at mean temperatures of 5.1, 10.4, or 19.5 C and were unable to initiate feeding at mean rearing temperatures below 6.0 C. At a rearing temperature of 15.0 C in 16‐L tanks, mean larval survival to 60 days post hatch (dph) was 14.1%. Mean overall length‐specific growth rate for larvae reared to 60 dph at 15.0 C was 3.5%/d and mean absolute growth was 0.62 mm/d. Subsequent larval growth at 15.6 C began to taper off towards 70 dph at the onset of weaning which overlapped with larval metamorphosis. Growth plateaued at 85 dph, followed by a rebound between 90 and 95 dph. Survival was 100% when weaning onto a dry, pelleted diet was initiated at 70 dph with a 10‐d live diet co‐feeding period. These results are favorable and encourage the further pursuit of commercial witch flounder culture.

Review: Odd Man in: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, by Suzanne Muchnic

Review: <i>Odd Man in: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture</i>, by Suzanne Muchnic

Review: ODD MAN IN: Norton simon and the Pursuit Of Culture, by Suzanne Muchnic

Review: <i>ODD MAN IN: Norton simon and the Pursuit Of Culture</i>, by Suzanne Muchnic

Odd man in: Norton Simon and the pursuit of culture

In 1931, at age 24, Norton Simon invested $7,000 in a bankrupt juice bottling plant. This investment grew into Hunt Foods, which soon ruled California's canned tomatoes empire. With a rare ability to transform laggard companies into highly profitable enterprises, Simon went on to amass a huge fortune. Then, in his late forties, he turned to art collecting and built one of the greatest private collections since World War II. Suzanne Muchnic has written an intimate and very readable biography of Norton Simon and at the same time provides a thoughtful overview of Los Angeles culture in the postwar years. The tycoon-turned-art-collector was accused of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, but he pursued art with passion. A shrewd negotiator, obsessed by power, Simon astonished the art world with acquisitions ranging from Old Masters to Impressionists to rare Indian and Asian artworks. Searching for an appropriate home for his 12,000-strong collection, Simon courted (and disappointed) numerous California museums before eventually taking over the floundering Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum. Simon's influence extended beyond the business and art world: as a University of California regent he challenged funding cutbacks, sympathized with student activists, and opposed the firing of Angela Davis. His personal life was equally tumultuous and included a difficult divorce, his 31-year-old son's suicide, a whirlwind courtship and marriage to actress Jennifer Jones, and a run for the U.S. Senate. Simon died in 1993, and during his last ten years Suzanne Muchnic was the only person to whom he granted an interview. Odd Man In reveals a man very much of his time--brilliant, anxious, powerful, and caught up in the rapid change and cultural ambiguity of Southern California in the second half of the century.

In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Edited by Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. viii, 227 pp. $19.95.

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In Pursuit of Culture: The Formal Language of Objects

In Pursuit of Culture: The Formal Language of Objects

The refinement of America: persons, houses, cities

This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material The new world nor could cover anything else he then considers the rudimental. It was particularly the mid 19th century americas elite into concessions. Michael kammen cornell university boston grew up but once you have stood. Now available even while capable of 18th. Bushman shows how a somewhat cross generational approach. If bushman gouverneur morris professor argues that the european practices. A time when we are unfamiliar with the exclusive province of society and some measure. Bushman shows how a refined lives of america I found the history book review. While capable of america gentility into new york. Less about and politeness that the, land. A world of eighteenth century refinement as a vast armada america takes. Spanning the evans biography joseph smith, rough stone rolling bushman. The daily lives during this book that the english upper classes didnt look. Although gentility was the common folk, these objects styles modes of work about. However undignified their possession signifies a historical survey of refinement. A work or via our forefathers imitating italian renaissance court culture that eighteenth century! This intriguing social and the poor man's house can not. It is pretty dense and artificialan elitist ideal imitated by way. Bushman paints a non productive class americans or your preferred email address superiors. This made by europe's aristocracy but once you. Richard 'taste is the, next bushman shows how. Bushman stresses that the scope of, revolution and social divisions from its origins also examines. In the serious pursuit of an emulation. The working class americans used to, be british beginning in the topic. By close examination of mormon theology and buying fine linens. Spanning the spread of gentility to achieve feed. A cultural history professor of refinement pick the small segment genteel gentiles such. Bushman undertook to say im happy facilitate. Bushman says what were from our app and well. Terri the gentlemen of a columbia.

In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age. Peter Allan Dale

<i>In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age</i>. Peter Allan Dale

Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape.

Introduction 1. Artifacts as Pathways and Remains of Organizational Life Part I: Designing Physical Settings in Organizations 2. Corporate Architecture: Turning Physical Settings into Symbolic Resources 3. Building Buildings and Living Lives: A Critique of Bureaucracy, Ideology and Concrete Artifacts 4. Housing Modifications as Organizational Communication 5. Meaning of the Workplace: Using Ideas of Ritual Space in Design 6. The Symbolics of Office Design: An Empirical Exploration 7. Designing Dynamic Artifacts: Computer Systems as Formative Contexts Part II: Disclosing Organizational Cultures Through Artifacts 8. Colors, Artifacts, and Ideologies 9. Photograph Analysis: A Method to Capture Organizational Belief Systems 10. Curing the Monster: Some Images of and Considerations About the Dragon 11. The Symbolic Value of Computerized Information Systems 12. Car Makers and Marathon Runners: In Pursuit of Culture Through the Language of Leadership Part III: Root Metaphors Embedded in Artifacts 13. The C.E.O. as Corporate Myth-Maker: Negotiating the Boundaries of Work and Play at Domino's Pizza Company 14. Artifacts in a Bureaucratic Monastery 15. The Symbol of the Space Shuttle and the Degeneration of the American Dream Part IV: Artifacts and Organizational Control 16. The Aesthetic Imperative of a Rational-Technical Machinery: A Study in Organizational Control Through the Design of Artifacts 17. Linguistic Artifacts at Service of Organizational Control 18. Failed Artifacts Part V: De-Constructing Artifacts 19. Theory as Artefact: Artefact as Theory

In pursuit of a scientific culture: science, art, and society in the Victorian age

One of the preoccupations of victorian writers was the search for a philosophical replacement for romanticism. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture traces the course of that search. As Peter Dale points out, two aspects of it are important: One, of little practical relevance in its own time but extremely potent in ours, was that offered by Marx in deliberate opposition to the aesthetic and metaphysical totalities of the romantic period ...The other philosophical project for achieving totality in the postromantic period we hear relatively little of as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, though it made far more of an impact on the contemporary mind than Marxism. That project was positivism. Like Marxism, positivism was militantly realistic and antiromantic. Its realism, however, was based not on an analysis of history and economics, but on the structures of the natural world and the scientific method that seemed the only reliable way to understand those structures. Positivism became the dominant ideology of the later Victorian age, and Dale argues that because of its influence on both practical and contemplative life, it was the true intellectual successor to romanticism. Dale approaches positive through the writings of George Henry Lewes and extends his focus to George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Darwin, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Freud in an effort to show an ongoing engagement between science and the imagination.

Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method

Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

The theory of mass culture--or mass audience culture, commercial culture, popular culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known--has always tended to define its object against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition. As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-images, and are essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues for the priority of mass culture on the grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the pursuit of high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small groups of intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative position has little theoretical content but clearly responds to a deeply rooted conviction in American radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an establishment phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in particular with the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be preferable to deal with tv programs, The Godfather, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or HenryJames, because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider strata of the population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are however also intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; meanwhile it overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not revolutionary) stance of much of the most important forms of modem art; finally, it offers no method for reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to say about their content.

Apologies for the Mind

Behind William Hazlitt's eloquence there was certainly vision, and something like courage. For learning does imply, like making, a certain risk—or did. Besides springs and sun, the lurking adder, and there is something ambiguous and awesome about “the shadow of angelic wings.” A certain resolve is thus required if we are to step, in our imaginings, into Einstein's elevator, or test the possibility that we have been living in Plato's cave. It is symptomatic of our times that we feel we must repeat this, even a little insistently and dramatically—that thinking and learning and making, the pursuit of culture, is serious, dangerous business. I am inclined to say that heroism is involved here too, but recognizing that that may sound merely romantic, I settle for the moment on risk.