On Fallen Nature and the Two Cities

Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology, 2007

2011

Cultural Interaction is a complex process, involving different human beings within different formations. It is an interactive process between two or more partners. This chapter is intended to describe how this process works-as a process of knowledge with its possibilities, contradictions and boundaries. The forms of knowledge are described, the forms of interaction or cultural exchange and the distribution of cultural products, the frames and the perspectives of cultural interaction in a world being transformed by new technologies and possibilities. This chapter shows that cultural interaction provides the basis for a rich future. Its opposite is social conflict, in which culture as a construct is used as an excuse for violence and war and as an instrument for creating enemies. It will also be shown here that these oppositions are not the reality of cultural processes. The reality is the so-called "silk road," the mixed languages and the richness of cultures brought about by the process of cultural exchange.

2011

Cultural Interaction is a complex process, involving different human beings within different formations. It is an interactive process between two or more partners. This chapter is intended to describe how this process works – as a process of knowledge with its possibilities, contradictions and boundaries. The forms of knowledge are described, the forms of interaction or cultural exchange and the distribution of cultural products, the frames and the perspectives of cultural interaction in a world being transformed by new technologies and possibilities. This chapter shows that cultural interaction provides the basis for a rich future. Its opposite is social conflict, in which culture as a construct is used as an excuse for violence and war and as an instrument for creating enemies. It will also be shown here that these oppositions are not the reality of cultural processes. The reality is the so-called " silk road, " the mixed languages and the richness of cultures brought ab...

people, 2017

The point that is stressed by definitions of culture, which rely on its authenticity and considerations that it entails individuality (diversity), is its diversity. Being diverse and acknowledgement of authenticity of the diversity, involves forwardness in itself. Though the acknowledgement of diversity and the impression of integrity formed by the acknowledgement seem to pose a coherence, yet it bears a negative aspect internally. Despite so-called acknowledgement of diversity, coherence and integrity formation seem to be more important. Since coherence of the integrity is based on measures of the seeking subject, forwardness aims to preserve things that are available or to simply fill the gaps. Hence complexity and diversity bear a negative meaning for available things. Because of centered approach which basically is putting familiar things into a closer circle while putting others aside. It brings concretization to the culture. To the extent of concretization endeavor, it leads us to study culture as belonging to a society (the privatization aim here even breaks down culture to a subculture level). Concretization of culture itself might seem as understanding and acknowledgement of culture, however, the aim for making a definition involves detaching the existent from existence forms and from the environment that it exists in. This article is to discuss, with philosophical terms, how different cultures embrace sincerity in exposing themselves while interacting with other cultures given our definitions of culture and the seeking for multiculturalism. Thanks to developments in transportation and means of technology, different cultures and societies meet and interact easily. Though we have a heritage of drawing borders, these borders hardly preserve their existence. The issues under discussion have evolved from the endeavor to build a common identity-culture-society to acknowledgement of diversity and difference.

Sidewalk Labs http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/2454, 2018

The Culture Creates Bonds study defines key drivers, scenarios, and conditions that create natural human bonds, those of cultural activities and practices, in a residential or immediate neighbourhood. Historical and contemporary research indicates that cultural contexts, content, and activities act as mechanisms and factors that create a sense of identity, engagement, and relationships within and between communities. Research explores constraints as well as conditions that lead to successful bonding. The study applies a mixed methods approach that includes a literature review; interviews with stakeholders; an analysis of the data and results from the 2017 Culture Track Canada report (Cohen et al., 2018); and a series of case studies. The following are the conclusions and recommendations of the report: 1. Maintain a broad definition of arts and culture: Include food, festivals, popular culture, classical music, Big C culture, to small c culture. Combine activities for impact. Support professional and amateur. Place value on cultural activity as a means to enhance communication, community resilience and social capital. 2. Engage communities through arts and culture. Arts and culture bring civic benefit. Mobilize residents to respond to their own realities through the creation of arts and culture. Co-design, inclusive design, and working with difference are essential to effective community planning and design when creating cultural infrastructure. Strengthen communities’ creativity by developing coordinated partnerships among a range of stakeholders and organizations with diverse skills that can generate powerful cultural products. 3. Professional artists, curators, programmers and creative makers are essential. Integrate arts and cultural workers into communities and rely on their professional skills to enable inclusive activities and formalize emergent activities within a community. 4. Diversity. Recognizing diversity results in a more exciting, engaged, and healthy culture that traverses diverse languages and cultural formats and represents contemporary Toronto. Resilience results from the ability for individuals and groups to feel confident in their own identities and reach across their cultures and boundaries. Place value on Indigenous strategies and attitudes towards communities, including relational interaction, careful preparation, trust, and respect for a common set of emergent rules and values. 5. Scale Matters. Create cultural hubs as part of neighbourhoods, and support cultural activity in a range of infor-mal, flexible locations. Adopt critical considerations of scalability that consists of key principles, ethics, and knowledge that inform how initiatives can grow. At the same time, large-scale initiatives can galvanize and transform neighbourhoods and bring residents together. 6. Human-centric Digital: Integrate digital technology in subtle ways that augment and support people’s every-day social and physical interactions. In this way, the digital and physical are layered onto cultural activities to support community identity and social bonding. 7. Planning for well-being: Expand the view of care and wellness to include a broader understanding of human engagement (trust, mental health, joy, aesthetic pleasure, sharing, community safety, life affirmation, and some-times healing) and provide support in diverse ways. Strengthen evaluation processes to assess the impacts of arts and culture in relation to health and well-being. 8. Investment: Include support through monetary investments in arts and culture spaces at all scales through flex-ible funding programs. Organize coalitions to develop local cultural resources.

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2018

This essay aims to critically reassess and, ultimately, rehabilitate exoticism, understood as a particular mode of cultural representation and a highly contested discourse on cultural difference, by bringing it into dialogue with cosmopolitanism. It offers a theoretical exploration of exoticism and cosmopolitanism alongside associated critical frameworks, such as the contact zone, autoethnography, authenticity and cultural translation, and brings them to bear on two awardwinning films that aptly illustrate a new type of exoticism in contemporary world cinema. Using Tanna (Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, 2015) and Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015), both made in collaboration with Indigenous communities, as case studies, this essay proposes that exoticism is inflected by cosmopolitan, rather than colonial and imperialist, sensibilities. It therefore differs profoundly from its precursors, which are premised on white supremacist assumptions about the Other which legitimised co...

Social Thinking and Interpersonal Behavior, 2012

Culture is often construed as a set of static schemas or concepts shared by people. Intuitively appealing as it may be, this conception of culture fails to bring out its dynamic making and remaking. This paper outlines a theory of cultural dynamics that puts interpersonal processes as the engine of microgenesis of culture. Taking neo-diffusionist culture metatheory as its starting point, it regards the transmission of cultural information between people as a central mechanism of cultural evolution. In this view, most of the cultural transmission occurs as an unintended consequence of a joint activity; culture acts as a tool for interpersonal coordination, which enables and constrains the performance of the joint activity. The paper has two main objectives. First, I will bring out what may be called fluency-perturbation dynamics in which interactants perform a fluent joint activity using culture as a coordination device, by illustrating the dynamic process that ensues when this fluent interpersonal process is perturbed even by a minor culture inconsistent event. Second, I will postulate a representational structure of "we-intention" (Tuomela, 2007) for a joint activity and an ideomotor theory of social coordination (Prinz, 1997), which is designed to account for the fluency-perturbation dynamics.

Intellectica, 2007

« L'anthropologie, même sociale, se proclame solidaire de l'anthropologie physique, dont elle guette les découvertes avec une sorte d'avidité. Car même si les phénomènes sociaux doivent être provisoirement isolés du reste et traités comme s'ils relevaient d'un niveau spécifique, nous savons bien qu'en fait et même en droit l'émergence de la culture restera pour l'homme un mystère tant qu'il ne parviendra pas à déterminer, au niveau biologique, les modifications de structure et de fonctionnement du cerveau, dont la culture a été simultanément le résultat naturel et le mode d'appréhension » Claude Lévi-Strauss, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, 1960 INTRODUCTION 1 For most anthropologists, culture covers different kinds of phenomena, ranging from habits to institutions. Culture, as Edward Tylor put it, "is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (Tylor, 1958, p. 1). Far from the evolutionary definition of culture as well-adaptative information transmitted through nongenetic means among members of a group (Boesch & Tomasello, 1998), the anthropological view of culture sees variation as going beyond anything that might arise from the course of biological evolution (Carrithers, 1997, p. 99). Cultural anthropology, in particular, insists on the "superorganic" dimension of culture and on the complexity of representational, human-specific creations (i.e. myths, rituals, symbols). This being so, such emphasis on cultural variation as the main characteristic of socio-cultural phenomena is not shared by all anthropological perspectives (for a review, see Atran et al., 2005). Contrary to cultural anthropology, indeed, social anthropology, which dwells on the social dimensions of human groupings (i.e. kinship, political organization, economic exchange), tends to emphasize the organizational aspects of the socio-cultural phenomena that are recurrent-not to say universal-in any society.

American Journal of Sociology, 2003

How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as "collective representations"-vocabularies, symbols, or codes-that structure people's abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of "group style," showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is "culture in interaction," which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life.