Rethinking participation in the Aarhus as European Capital of Culture 2017 project

This paper examines the relationship between cultural participation and regional development with reference to the European Capital of Culture in 2017. From the bidding stage, Aarhus 2017 claimed it put “participation” at the heart of its strategic plans, through consultation at roadshows and exhibitions. In addition, it aspired to use culture as a catalyst for development not only in the city of Aarhus but across the region of Central Denmark. This paper, therefore, examines how participation is defined and implemented to address regional development in the Aarhus 2017 process through textual analysis of documentation from Aarhus 2017 and delivery partners as well as over 20 interviews with managers and participants involved in a range of 2017 projects. The paper argues against the common prioritisation of urban and professional cultural institutions and makes the case for decentralised cultural provision that supports both amateurs and professionals through a regional networked structure.     

Culture and conflict: Understanding, negotiating, and reconciling conflicting constructions of reality

The paper explores the relations between culture and conflict that emerge when parties with differing constructions of reality come into contention regarding the distribution of power, control, and influence. While differences in the construction of reality do not necessarily mean conflict, and while conflict does not necessarily lead to violence, differences in the construction of reality that are codified and embedded in “unassailable” belief systems, such as those associated with fundamentalist political, economic, and religious systems, can elicit and sustain serious forms of violence, including ethnic and religious cleansing, genocide, and torture. This paper argues that we must recognize the power of culture in constructing our realities, and the reluctance we have as human beings to tolerate challenges to these realities because they introduce unacceptable levels of uncertainty and doubt. The consideration of culture in the mediation of conflict broadens options for resolution by introducing possibilities outside the limits of one's own cultural spectrum, including an improved understanding of the role of history and life contexts in generating shared meanings and behavior patterns. Following a discussion of various examples of cultures in conflict associated with political and religious fundamentalism, the paper advances a series of recommendations for understanding, negotiating, and mediating conflict via the use of cultural understanding, learning, and the development of cultures of peace.     

The camera in pain: memories of the Cold War in East Asian independent documentaries

Abstract

This article begins with a discussion of the changing topography of cultural production in East Asia over the last 25?years, especially as it concerns the genre of independent documentary film, and then it turns to three independent documentaries filmed in Japan and North Korea, South Korea and Japan, and China, respectively: Yang Yong-hi's Dear Pyongyang (2005 Dear Pyongyang. 2005. Directed by Yang Yong-hi. Busan International Film Festival. [Google Scholar]), Mun Jeong-hyun's Grandmother's Flower (2007 Grandmother's Flower. 2007. Directed by Mun Jeong-hyun. Busan International Film Festival: [Google Scholar]), and Wang Bing's He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2006). Erased from the official historical record and excluded from public commemoration, the alternate history of pain traced by these documentaries resubmits the Cold War to examination from deep inside its most private wounds. In the process, the filmmakers encounter not only the memories of the earlier generation that lived through the most violent episodes of the Cold War, but also come to question their own history and identities within the process of the Cold War's decomposition.     

Special Needs,Cheerful Habits: Smoking and the Great War in Britain, 1914–18

This article applies an interpretive anthropological and phenomenological approach to the Great War in Britain, 1914–18, focusing on the cigarette as a cultural artefact and material commodity, and smoking as a cultural motif and social practice. The primary material featured includes personal correspondence from soldiers and civilians, newspaper articles, advertising and fictional literature. The fundamental task carried out by this study is the connection of developments in technology and distribution accelerated by the Great War, with smoking as a practice bound up with the social, cultural and material conditions in which those on the front found themselves.     

Culture and the Scottish Household Survey

In 2007 the Scottish Government introduced an outcomes based approach to culture set within a National Performance Framework. One of the main data sources to measure “culture” in Scotland is the Scottish Household Survey (SHS). In this article, the SHS and its “Culture and Sport” Module are explored to show how useful the data is within the Scottish Government's economic agenda. This way, the paper reflects on the usefulness of the main data source used to understand cultural activity within Scotland. There are general difficulties measuring “culture”, but overall the SHS provides adequate national data for Scotland on cultural participation and attendance. However, the SHS cannot provide in-depth local level information and provides limited data on non-participants. Other surveys in Scotland and England give some example practices that could be incorporated to improve survey outcomes. Overall, the SHS is a useful policy tool but more could be done to utilise the data it can provide on the Scottish cultural sector.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

Johnnie To's “northern expedition:” from Milkyway Image to Drug War

Abstract

After the Regulations on the Administration of Movies came into force in 2002, Johnnie To became famous for sticking with the Hong Kong market while Hong Kong filmmakers rushed north. In Drug War, his 50th film, he decided to bring his unique genre to the Mainland for the first time. Drug War was the first Johnnie To gangster film to be shot entirely in the Mainland. Despite its outstanding box office record in the Mainland, some Johnnie To fans would lament that his typical style is missing in Drug War, a film that has become “realistic.” This paper argues that Johnnie To's “northern expedition.” backed up by a tradition of translations between business and pleasure, has to be interpreted against the backdrop of his production company Milkyway Image (HK) Ltd. Johnnie To, as a migrant crossing the border, brought with him the long tradition of cultural translations from Milkyway Image, which acted as a “seed of the untranslatable” in Homi Bhabha's term. It was this untranslatability of Milkyway-cum-Hong Kong flavour that distinguished To from other Hong Kong directors who were assimilated into the Mainland market as a simple mélange. To capture the rich inter-textual allusions to not only Milkyway Image but also to Hong Kong in Drug War helps one to understand how Hong Kong cinema can move on in the age of Chinese cinema.     

Collages of Memory: Remembering the Second World War Differently as the Epistemology of Crafting Cultural Conflicts between Russia and Ukraine

This essay critically examines the current duality of Russian-Ukrainian intercultural relations and explores the subject of politics of active and selective memory as the claimed root of current controversies and military tensions. Through rhetorical analysis of historical and contemporary national narratives, it demonstrates how culturally defining experience of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War is remembered, rethought, and reused by respective parties to reinvent the Self and the Br/Other, as well as rethink ones positionality on the world arena.     

The Persuasive Influence of Nollywood Film in Cultural Transmission: Negotiating Nigerian Culture in a South African Environment

The popularity and viewership of Nollywood films have expanded across African and Western cities especially those with considerable Diaspora population. This study seeks to investigate whether watching Nollywood films is likely to lead to cross-cultural transmission of Nigeria’s cultural heritage to audience members in South Africa. Data for the study were collected using observation and surveys with Likert-type scales involving participants from a South African college. Results show that watching Nollywood films was significant in increasing participants’ knowledge and appreciation of Nigerian culture. Observed patterns indicate that a small portion of participants could mimic or reproduce some common Nigerian expressions and exclamations while a negligible percentage of participants could actually speak a smattering of Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major languages.     

Culture as commons: theoretical challenges and empirical evidence from occupied cultural spaces in Italy

ABSTRACT

What happens when we try to understand art as a commons? Elinor Ostrom [(1990/2012). Governing the commons. Cambridge University Press] challenged Hardin’s “The tragedy of the commons” [(1968). Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248] demonstrating that the governance of common pool resources is not always destined to failure. Ostrom’s analysis was initially applied to the management of shared natural resources; however, over time the term “commons” has also been used to describe non-tangible resources, specifically knowledge. Can Ostrom’s theory of the commons inform artistic practice? This article investigates some challenges presented by these research questions and their implications for cultural policy. In order to provide an empirical ground for the discussion of this topic, this paper will analyse the case studies of two cultural spaces in Italy, Teatro Valle (Rome) and Asilo Filangieri (Naples), which were occupied by groups of cultural professionals and managed as commons between 2011 and 2016; the outcomes of these occupations indicate possible ways to develop a commons-oriented approach to culture.     

Fear and Rumour in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The article explores the nature of popular fears during the early years of the People's Republic of China by examining two types of rumour: those of a ‘secular’ type that told of China's defeat in the Korean War, a third world war or an imminent nuclear attack; and those of a ‘supernatural’ type that told of demons out to snatch vital organs or the end of the world. These rumours testified both to the resilience of ancient cosmological beliefs and values and to their capacity to fuse with elements of ‘modern’ politics. The article asks what they tell us about the relationship of the party-state to the populace.     

Politics,Pauperism and Power in Late Nineteenth Century Ireland. By Virginia Crossman.

ABSTRACT

Food and military identity were inextricably linked in the British Army: rations were a thrice daily indicator of the men's separation from their civilian selves. The soldiers were what they ate, but they were also where and how they ate; the grubby rapacity of the barrack dining hall, the absence of civilizing cutlery and the unfamiliar food delineated their new role as clearly as any uniform. Institutional feeding facilitated the erasure of self, an unhelpful attribute in the military world. Men's accounts indicate the conflict between their appetites and what they all too often regarded as oppression in a dietary form.     

Patterns of inequality in private funding of culture across the UK

By calculating an additively decomposable inequality measure following the lines of Shorrocks (1980; see Econometrica, 48(3)) we are able to evaluate regional disparities in private funding of cultural enterprises in the UK in a novel way. The country-wide index of inequality separates funding differences across regions from disparities within regions. Using data on private investment in UK cultural organisations, we consider three datasets: the first includes 139 organisations between 1993 and 2005; the second includes 573 organisations between 2002 and 2005; the third includes 898 organisations between 2005 and 2006. Differences among the 12 UK regions account for between a quarter and a third of overall funding inequalities. The largest contributor to funding inequality of cultural institutions in the UK is the degree of heterogeneity among cultural organisations within each region. We find that successful private fundraising is not significantly associated with the region where the organisation operates or with the particular cultural expression object of its activity. These are significant findings for cultural policymakers working on addressing issues of regional concentration of culture and diversifying sources of funding for the sector.     

Culture and counseling in the Philippines

An examination of experiences as a counselor in the Philippines suggests at least three important domains of difference in the counseling process: the content of problems, modes of relationships and presumed causes of difficulties. Filipino counselees in a university setting struggled with family control, and rebelled against a double standard of morals. They found it difficult to trust a counselor who was not part of the extended family and they attributed their difficulties to external, social rather than intrapsychic factors. In light of these cultural differences counselors must respond to their problems as Filipinos perceive them and explore ways of changing the social environment of the client. This is in contrast to the strategy of North American counselors who seek to change the client's methods of dealing with himself.     

Refugee,returnee, borderland: the accidental activists and Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

ABSTRACT

Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.     

Cultural clusters and cultural industries in China

Through examining the development and the nature of the new cultural districts in China, namely, “clusters of Beijing,” this paper attempts to identify the characteristics of, and critically evaluate, the existing models of culture clusters in China. Obviously, these cultural clusters are seen as a united and state effort to assist, develop and boost the so-called cultural industries, including game, animation, comic, software, science and technology and so forth. However, with the clusters of Beijing as a case study, in this paper we argue that in the course of development, the state interests and the authorities' local (e.g. district) interest are often prioritized over the culture or the local interest. There are also tensions and contradictions among various interest groups on different levels of operations of these cultural clusters. In sum, apart from enhancing the private creative industries, developing the national cultural economy, or revitalizing the old industries as in the cluster models of many western countries, economic interests, political powers of the districts and soft power of the nation can be the overriding interests behind the booming cultural clusters in China.     

Department of Culture,Media and Sport's Peer Review Pilot

April 2009 saw the publication of the documents generated by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport's museum Peer Review Pilot. This Policy Review offers both an overview of the process and a conceptual critique both of the Peer Review Pilot and the McMaster Review criteria on which the pilot was based. It is argued that the McMaster Review is grounded on a reading of excellence as “life-changing experiences” predicated on an imagined transformative aesthetic moment and that it is only by defining excellence in this way that McMaster could secure peer review as a legitimate means of identifying excellence. When transferred for the purposes of the Peer Review Pilot to the museum sector – with its long traditions of pedagogic and civic reform – this narrow reading of “changing lives” is no longer sustainable. The dislodging of the McMaster grounding assumption within the practice of the Peer Review Pilot creates conceptual fissures that can be traced throughout the Pilot's documentation. Specifically, a reading of the Pilot suggests both a need for a more careful reading of “peer”, a recognition of museums' multiple lines of accountability (including to the public) and the ongoing need for methodologies that might allow for an understanding of “life changing” within a much border frame.     

The United States of America: “A culture of war”

Following a discussion of the concept of war – its definitions, historical origins, 20th–21st century examples, and immediate and legacy costs and consequences – the question of the United States as an empire is explored. The evidence indicates the United States meets all qualifications to be considered an “empire,” specifically a global empire seeking hegemonic economic, political, and cultural control of the world. This evidence includes a worldwide system of military bases, an extensive military–industrial–congressional complex that shapes domestic and foreign policies and actions, and an extensive national security system that now endangers and threatens the legal rights of its own citizens. At the core of U.S. pursuit of empire is a historic commitment to the beliefs in “manifest destiny” and American “exceptionalism.” It is proposed that the process and consequences of much of this are rooted in the existence of a U.S. “culture of war” that dominates U.S. domestic and foreign policies, and their destructive implementation across the world. A “culture of war” is an interlocking system of national meanings, beliefs, behaviors, institutions, and identities that consider violence and war necessary and justifiable in the pursuit of U.S. hegemonic global interests. Given the continuous pursuit of violence and war by the U.S. in the clear absence of security and survival threats, popular views that human beings are instinctually programmed to engage in war appears untenable. A general systems model of the socialization of a “culture of war” in the United States is presented to demonstrate the critical elements and processes involved in its development. The possibility of countering the building of a “culture of war” with building a “culture of peace” is shared in the article's closing section.