Cultural Subsystem Research Articles

Liminal ao liminoide: em brincadeira, fluxo e ritual - um ensaio de simbologia comparativa

A partir da discussão da simbologia comparativa, que não deve ser confundida com a antropologia simbólica, ficando dela distante, objetiva-se tomar o símbolo como evento, e não como coisa, pois ele tem mais a ver com uma dimensão semântica, que remete ao significado na linguagem e no contexto. Desse ponto de vista, o símbolo ritual torna-se um fator de ação social, com um potencial criador ou inovador da ação humana. As ações de cultura expressiva possuem caráter de sistemas semânticos dinâmicos, ganhando e perdendo significados, pois “viajam através” de um rito ou obra de arte. Entre fenômenos liminares e liminoides, ritos e brincadeiras, pensam-se os subsistemas da cultura expressiva para refletir sobre as experiências de communitas e de flow (fluxo), quando observamos o envolvimento total da pessoa naquilo que ela faz.

Cultural Contact and Cultural Transfer in Medieval Western Eurasia

This essay deals with cultural contact, exchange, and transfer at the eastern margins of medieval Europe where interactions between different cultures of European and Asian origin have, over the centuries, shaped a unique cross- cultural zone. As the western part of a Eurasian highway for peoples from Central Asia since ancient times, whose western migration became a crucial factor for early state formation in Europe, this intersection resulted mainly from eastward Slavic migration and the Varangian expansion to southern lands that brought the Norman Rus’ into contact and conflict with the Byzantines and the emerging steppe empires of the Desht-i Qipchaq. Evidence is given to support the view that cultural exchange is a concept not precise enough to explain how cultural goods were adapted and integrated in this cross-cultural zone which I prefer to call Slavia Asiatica. A more complex approach to culture transfer is needed to explain acculturation processes in medieval times, comprising many cultural subsystems: language and writing, law and religion, knowledge, values and norms, practices and socio-political institutions.

Why does cultural policy change? Policy discourse and policy subsystem: a case study of the evolution of cultural policy in Catalonia

Culture has come to play a fundamental strategic role in the territorial development that seeks to integrate knowledge economy with social cohesion, governance and sustainability. However, cultural policies have been unable to respond to the dilemmas and expectations that this new order presents. In order to appreciate the consequences of this process, it is essential to gain a better understanding of cultural policy change dynamics. This article develops a framework for analysing cultural policy stability and change and applies it to the evolution of cultural policy in Catalonia. Both policy continuity and change are conditioned by the evolution of policy discourse on culture and the characteristics of the cultural policy subsystem. Within this framework, this article also takes into account the role of factors that are exogenous to the cultural domain. Lastly, this article addresses particular characteristics of cultural policy change in regions or stateless nations.

A dimensão cultural da imigração

The aim of this work is to analyze aspects of the cultural dimension of immigration in conformity with ethnicity. It focuses an exemplary case in the context of European colonization in the Brazilian State of Santa Catarina - colonia Blumenau - during a historical period distinguished by the institution of the Republic (1889), and by the significant expansion of the entry of foreigners in Brazil, amidst a world system resulting, among other things, from imperialist expansion. This case shows how forms of circulation of cultural goods, including ideas, values, and ethnic ideologies, have contributed to the construction of some German-Brazilian ethnicity, indicating the long duration of transnationalism. The constitution of cultural subsystems in the historical situation where the National Republican State was being established shows the difficulties in conciliating nation and cultural diversity resulting from immigration.

Construction Site Management Team Working: A Serendipitous Event

Despite the pervasive appeal of team working in the construction industry, the empirical relationship between team effectiveness and task performance continues to be generally overlooked. Recognized team performance appraisal remains one of the last frontiers of performance management. This paper sets out to challenge the conventional discourse of team working and test the hypothesis that construction site management team working and project performance is unrelated. The explanatory case-study research method utilizes a variety of data-gathering techniques. An attitude statement questionnaire evaluates team efficacy. A customized suite of key performance indicators sympathetic to project performance is used to measure project success. Statistical examination of the data demonstrates a marked correlation between the two variables. Although the results authenticate the universally acclaimed wisdom; teams and performance are inextricably linked, secondary analysis expose widespread contradictions between the rhetoric of team working and the action of practice. Obstacles to team working include management indifference towards substantive team building, organizational barriers to communication, and the absence of team rewards. A paradigm of individualism predominates, abetted by organizational structures and cultural subsystems that uphold individual answerability at the expense of collective responsibility.

HCI and Society: Towards a Typology of Universal Design Principles

The task of this article is to focus on aspects of design from a theoretical perspective that works out a general framework of techno-social design that is grounded in the notion of the participatory, cooperative, sustainable information society. The approach is normative in that it is based on the judgment that not just any information society is needed, but one that has specific qualities that this article tries to identify. Methodologically, the article works out a conceptual framework that synthesizes general social theory and human–computer interaction. Design is seen as a social process that shapes society and techno-social systems. First, a model of society that is based on the dialectical interaction of economic, political, and cultural subsystems is introduced. Then, the notion of the the participatory, cooperative, sustainable information society is introduced. This theoretical definition is then used for classifying design principles of techno-social information systems from a social theory perspective.

Nakedness and Movement Culture

Nakedness and Movement CultureThe paper deals with a topic which is not very frequent in kinanthropology; it concerns the phenomenon of the naked body in the environment of movement culture. Within the individual aspects of this cultural subsystem (sport, movement education, movement recreation, movement therapy, and movement art), it points out a variety of meanings and contexts adding sense to nudity on a continuum ranging from naturalness and functionality through erotization and sexualization to pornoization of particularly sport environment. The author prefers a functional naturalness of nudity and rejects the instrumentalization and changing human body into a thing and, thus, exceeding the characteristics of the sphere of movement culture.

The socio-symbolic function of language

The article starts from the premise known since antiquity that speech indicates something of the speaker. Language as action is regarded not only as a medium to convey lexical or semantic information but also of social meaning. This raises the question: How can we get access to the social meaning of linguistic structures? This is the main question dealt with throughout the paper, which sets out with carefully defining the notion of symbolic meaning on the grounds of social semiotics. It then develops the sociological concept of group (or community) as a cultural sub-system of society, in order to understand better the relationship between language variation as options of linguistic choice and 'sociolect' as a group specific linguistic variety. Within this conceptual framework, the contours of a socio-grammar are outlined, which describes the socio-symbolic functions of phonetic, prosodic, morphological, lexical, syntactical, textual, and pragmatic elements of linguistic structure. The perspective then broadens to the level of discourse on which the relationship of language and prestige or language and power is dealt with, notabene with a side view on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the symbolic order of significant difference (in his opus magnum La distinction).

Phenomenon of medical culture Part 3. Praxiological aspect of medical culture

Medical activity, which always includes the necessity to solve a system of logical, gnoseological, axiological, and praxiological problems associated with the process of diagnostics and treatment of a patient, can be successful only with high culture of a specialist. It is a moral obligation of a medical practician to become a man of culture. Based on a systematic approach, the paper presents medical culture as a specific subsystem of general culture, whose mastering starts in childhood, develops in university, and continues for the whole life, demanding colossal mental energies. Part 3 Part 3 is devoted to analysis of the praxiological aspect of medical culture, namely, culture of medical activity and communication, in particular, between doctor and patient, legal aspects of their interaction, and wider understanding of culture as a measure, to which anybody masters his or her health potential and is responsible for it.

La cohesion social y la teoria de la congruencia: Latinoamérica una región dividida

The lack of social cohesion in Latin America is the subject of this paper. Several indicators of this phenomenon are presented here, such as the chronic political instability, the wave of criminality and the emigration to more developed regions. It is argued that the principal cause of the phenomenon is the systemic incongruence between the cultural sub-system in one hand and the political and economic subsystems in the other. At the beginning of the XXI century this incongruence entered in a critical point. Many countries of the planet are in the process of solving this incongruence, being Russia the most emblematic country of this process. In Latin America the process has also began, being Cuba and Venezuela the leaders of this new revolutionary movement.

Phenomenon of medical culture Part 2. World outlook component of medical culture

Medical activity, which always includes the necessity to solve a system of logical, gnoseological, axiological, and praxiological problems as sociated with the process of diagnostics and treatment of a patient, can be successful only with high culture of a specialist. It is a moral obligation of a medical practician to become a man of culture. Based on a systematic approach, the paper presents medical culture as a specific subsystem of general culture, whose mastering starts in childhood, develops in university, and continues for the whole life, demanding colossal mental ener gies. Part 2 reveals the content of world outlook and philosophic-anthropological aspects of medical culture, grounds the necessity of the revise of the existing anthropological paradigm.

Phenomenon of medical culturePart 1. Methodological aspect of medical culture

Medical activity, which always includes the necessity to solve a system of logical, gnoseological, axiological, and praxiological problems associated with the process of diagnostics and treatment of a patient, can be successful only with high culture of a specialist. It is a moral obligation of a medical practician to become a man of culture. Based on a systematic approach, the paper presents medical culture as a specific subsystem of general culture, whose mastering starts in childhood, develops in university, and continues for the whole life, demanding colossal mental energies. In Part 1, the emphasis is at methodological culture of a doctor, and logics of description, definition, and explanation of a studied object or process is presented.

The Emperor and His Councillor: Laozi and Han Dynasty Taoism

During her lifetime, Anna Seidel (1938-1991) was much appreciated by her anglophone colleagues, and her ideas continue to exert a profound influence on Taoist studies in the English-speaking world today. In this light, it is surprising that her most important book-length publication, La divinisation de Lao-tseu dans le taoïsme des Han, published in 1969, has never been made available in English. This is not for want of an intention to do so, at least indirectly. After Anna Seidel's premature death, Hubert Durt and Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, two colleagues with whom she had worked closely, prepared to compile a volume of her collected writings, which Princeton University Press initially showed a strong interest in publishing. At the time, some of Anna's friends, myself included, translated her French and German publications. These translations remained unpublished when, for reasons unknown to me, the book project was abandoned. The never-realized book was to include two articles originally published in 1978, in which Anna Seidel, at the behest of her former teacher Herbert Franke, presents the gist of La divinisation in her native German. Published in Saeculum, a self-described "Annual Review of Universal History" widely read in academic circles at the time, they are directed at an audience that was highly educated yet unfamiliar with things Chinese to a degree that is hard to imagine today. This explains a somewhat generalizing tone and occasional digressions on Western comparanda familiar to the intended readership. I was assigned to translate the first of these two articles, which covers the different stages in the transformation of the philosopher Laozi into a divine figure, leading up to a commented translation of the "Inscription Honoring Laozi," a key Eastern Han document used in Anna Seidel's study. (The second, shorter article is concerned with the rise of a Taoist "church" at the end of the Han period.) Rereading the article today, I find that it has lost none of its freshness and lucidity. Even though additional evidence has become available (including Warring States-period manuscripts of apparent forerunners of the Laozi texts that would surely have been of great interest to Anna Seidel), and even though a huge amount of secondary scholarship has been published, Anna Seidel's core ideas still hold up very well, as does her method of analysis, in which religious thought is taken as a barometer of socio-political history and yet religion is kept intact as an internally consistent subsystem of Chinese culture. As the article resonates on many levels with the other contributions to the present volume, I decided to include it as a salut d'outre-tombe from Anna Seidel to her old friend Lothar Ledderose. I hope it will remind readers of the enduring importance of her work and perhaps trigger the publication in this journal of the other translations prepared for the abortive volume, if they can still be found. Rather than giving a literal translation, I have aimed to bring out Anna Seidel's ideas as clearly and readably as possible. In doing so, I took considerable liberties with the wording, freely adding, eliding, and rearranging text passages. I have, moreover, corrected a few minor inaccuracies and provided some additional Chinese characters and references to classical texts. However, I have refrained from updating the references to secondary works, which in any case are few as Anna Seidel directs the serious reader to the French version of La divinisation for a full scholarly apparatus. In rendering passages from Chinese texts, rather than quoting from a published translation, I have endeavored to render the article's original formulations. The romanization (except for "Taipei" and words related to "Tao") has been changed to Hanyu Pinyin.

The Self-Organization of the Cultural Subsystem of Modern Society

This paper tries to link self-organization theory and Cultural Studies. Its approach can be described as a dialectical Cultural Materialism that integrates aspects from semiotics and systems theory in order to describe culture as an integrative, dynamic, complex, evolving system. Subjective theories conceive culture as opinion, ideas, beliefs, a state of mind of human beings, objective theories consider it as symbolic content stored in objects of the human being's environment or as collective ideas and world-views and a totality of collective meaningful practices in society, dualistic theories consider it as having independent subjective and objective forms. Culture is a social process that produces common meanings that signify certain entities in a self-organizing system, this process is based on a mutual productive relationship between the subjective culture of a human being (his ideas, norms, values, beliefs) and objective cultural structures (meaningful cultural artefacts with symbolic content, and collective norms, ideas, values, rules, traditions, world-views (Weltanschauung) ethics, morals). Knowledge is a threefold dynamic social process of cognition, communication, and co-operation, an active productive relationship between knowledgeable human beings. Collective norms, values, rules, world-views, traditions, morals, and ethics as well as cultural products store knowledge about the social world and reduce the complexity of the social world, they are objective cultural knowledge. Objective cultural knowledge and subjective cultural knowledge (individual ideas) produce each other mutually. All social realities are interpreted in cultural processes by which they gain certain meanings. Hence the cultural subsystem is related to and structurally coupled to all other subsystems of society. Peircian semiotics enables us to interpret signification as a dialectical social process, in contrast to deterministic (Adorno, Horkheimer) and indeterministic (Baudrillard, Luhmann) assumptions a dialectical concept of meaning production argues that each social reality allows different meanings and that material and symbolic social struggles constitute antagonistic relationships between different meanings that can be dominant, negotiated, or oppositional in nature. Such a view can be elaborated based on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and representatives of British Cultural Studies such as Stuart Hall. The fact that the production of meaning is social and contested means that the relationship of object and meaning is not linear, but complex and nonlinear. Due to the influence of social struggle and social conditions each object of social reality has a conditioned variety/plurality of meanings. Culture is a relatively autonomous system that is in constant interaction with the other subsystems of society. The superstructure is a complex, nonlinear creative reflection of the base, the base is a complex, nonlinear creative reflection of the superstructure. Cultural development is based on a dialectic of enculturation and deculturation, continuity and variation. Fundamental cultural change is the result of class struggles that aim at the accumulation of economic, political, and cultural capital. Cultural development is related to the whole capital structure and the related whole ways of struggle of modern society. Symbolic capital accumulation is an active ideological process of struggle that determines dominant meanings and social groups.

AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO CULTURAL (AND LINGUISTIC) CHANGE

“Society” and “culture” are defined as mutually constitutive in an agent-based framework. Culture is the learned, shared knowledge of actions, relations, emotions, attitudes, values, and so forth that enable people in social units to behave in ways that others can understand—whether cooperatively, competitively, or in avoidance of one another—and to understand and interpret the behavior of others. Society is the panoply of groupings or communities of people within which culture is shared; these groupings are delineated by shared culture, and it is shared culture that enables members to be recognized. Societal groups and their attendant culture can be explicitly and overtly recognized or can be only implicitly recognized. Within this frame the ways in which culture and language (as either a major cultural subsystem or a closely parallel system) are understood, transmitted, and learned by members of communities are explored. The role and nature of flexibility and its attendant requirement of productivity and thus systematicity are considered. The ways in which learners construct systematic representations of cultural systems on the basis of imperfect and incomplete experience, the role of salience and frequency of experience, and a psychological disposition toward simplicity are seen as factors in the imperfect (but systematically repeated) transmission of cultural and linguistic systems that allows culture to adapt and that results in culture change and linguistic drift.

Former GDR Historians in the Reunified Germany: An Alternative Historical Culture and its Attempts to Come to Terms with the GDR Past

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949 and existed for just over 40 years as a self-consciously socialist German state which defined itself in stark contrast to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Following Germany's total defeat in 1945 and Allied occupation, the country was divided into zones of occupation. In the ensuing Cold War, the three western zones eventually formed the FRG while the Soviet zone became the GDR. Both Germanies developed their own economic, political and cultural sub-systems after 1949, although close ties existed between the two countries in a variety of different areas well into the 1950s. As far as German historiography was concerned, a separate GDR historians' association was only founded in 1958, following complaints by East German historians about discrimination against themselves at the biennial historians' conference of the all-German historians' association in Trier. The institutional separation of FRG and GDR historiography continued apace thereafter, and historians on both sides of the divide eyed each other with suspicion and ideological enmity. While the historians of the FRG built fruitful contacts with American, British, French and generally western historiographies, GDR historians oriented themselves towards the perceived model of Soviet historiography. A rapprochement between the two Germanies and their historiographies only took place in the context of Neue Ostpolitik from the second half of the 1960s onwards. Just before the GDR came to its inglorious end, Alexander Fischer and Giunther Heydemann, in their extensive review of GDR historiography, distinguished between three phases of its development: only the third and final one was described as a 'phase of increasing scientificity (Verwissenschaftlichung), which started in the early 1970s and was characterized by a genuine dialogue between party and historians as well as a remarkably extended theoretical and

What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: Apes, people, and their genes: Marks, J.

What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: Apes, people, and their genes: Marks, J.

Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings

Of the many factors that may lead to misreadings in translation, cultural presuppositions merit special attention from translators because they can substantially and systematically affect their interpretation of facts and events in the source text without their even knowing it. This paper attempts to pinpoint the relationship between cultural presuppositions and translational misreadings. The author considers major elements in the four subsystems of culture and examines how these elements help breed presuppositions that inadvertently affect the translator's decoding of the original message.

A postmodern culture of grief? On individualization of mourning in Germany

There have been remarkable changes in the culture of mourning in Germany. Grief aid and grief counselling have been institutionalized in many ways. Thus we face a neo-institutionalization of mourning and funeral culture at a formal, organizational level. A heterogeneous cultural subsystem of self-help groups, with and without professional guidance, counselling centres, workshops and seminars ranging from life aid to death education, has been established during the past 20 years. The question is to what extent can this be described as the development of a new culture of mourning? Do we really face a break with the cultural basics of modern, Western societies as increasingly assumed? Basically the supposed change is described as emerging from a so-called postmodern culture. Its characteristics are a higher quota of self-determination and consideration of individual interests instead of following technical guidelines. My hypothesis is that the quintessence of modern mourning culture is its individualization. But individualization of mourning already had its substructures in the 19th century: how to express grief is part of a civic culture based on private emotionality. The emotionalization of mourning was the basis for the re-institutionalization of mourning on a symbolic level. Even today a complex of reciprocal, socially established expectations defines mourning as a specific emotion of sorrow and grief. This process is generated within the new organizations for death aid and grief counselling. Thus the present changes are not the result of a break with modern culture.

A postmodern culture of grief? On individualization of mourning in Germany

There have been remarkable changes in the culture of mourning in Germany. Grief aid and grief counselling have been institutionalized in many ways. Thus we face a neo-institutionalization of mourning and funeral culture at a formal, organizational level. A heterogeneous cultural subsystem of self-help groups, with and without professional guidance, counselling centres, workshops and seminars ranging from life aid to death education, has been established during the past 20 years. The question is to what extent can this be described as the development of a new culture of mourning? Do we really face a break with the cultural basics of modern, Western societies as increasingly assumed? Basically the supposed change is described as emerging from a so-called postmodern culture. Its characteristics are a higher quota of self-determination and consideration of individual interests instead of following technical guidelines. My hypothesis is that the quintessence of modern mourning culture is its individualization. But individualization of mourning already had its substructures in the 19th century: how to express grief is part of a civic culture based on private emotionality. The emotionalization of mourning was the basis for the re-institutionalization of mourning on a symbolic level. Even today a complex of reciprocal, socially established expectations defines mourning as a specific emotion of sorrow and grief. This process is generated within the new organizations for death aid and grief counselling. Thus the present changes are not the result of a break with modern culture.