Nothing but Propaganda? Historians and the Study of Early Modern Royal Ritual

This essay traces the history of the ‘propagandist idiom’, a form of discourse that has come to exercise considerable influence over historical writing on political rituals. According to this idiom, state rituals such as coronations, royal entries and funerals were authentically instrumental, self-conscious exercises in power management within the state. The idiom necessarily restricts historians' conception of the meaning of early modern state rituals. After a brief introduction to the historiography of early modern royal rituals, this essay focuses on English and French historiography from the middle of the twentieth century to trace the origins of the propagandist idiom, measuring the impact of anthropology and the social sciences. The essay does not claim to be conclusive. It is intended to offer a guide to a neglected aspect of the historiography, and to stimulate debate.     

Shaping the Public House, 1850–1950: Business Strategies,State Regulation and Social History

Much cultural and social history fails to engage fully with business history, resulting in an impoverished view of central institutions such as the public house. Using the twin concepts of control and interpretation, and with a particular focus on managed houses, the article suggests that the degree of control exercised by companies over the character of public houses during the period has been exaggerated. While there was an increasing degree of control over public houses in terms of ownership and product range, this control was not necessarily used to influence the character of the house. Many companies left such concerns to their tenants, viewing their pubs as distribution points rather than retail outlets. Changes to the pub, such as the ‘improved public house’, were as much about the respectability of the trade in response to regulatory pressures as about meeting customer needs. An appreciation of contrasting business strategies can give a richer picture of the public house and its place in popular culture.     

‘It’s in the Blood,isn’t it?’ The Contested Status of First World War Veterans in Second World War Civil Defence

This article examines how ex-servicemen’s memories of the First World War shaped their experience of working in civil defence during the Second. In response to ongoing public criticism of civil defence as a whole and a dismissive attitude towards veterans in particular, these men expressed a distinct form of ‘useful masculinity’, rooted in their combat experience and developed within the particular context of civil defence. I will argue that through the group setting in which remembering took place, veterans were able to oppose dominant cultural narratives and to develop and express these alternative narratives about their value.     

New Zealand as Middle Earth: Local and Global Popular Communication in a Small Nation

The shift of the research gaze from First World concerns and research questions to the different imperatives of a small nation such as New Zealand enables scrutiny of many conventional assumptions made about globalizing processes, children's evolving public spaces, and commodified culture. New Zealand provides an invaluable site to explore the processes creating the postmodern cultural experiences of globalized popular communication. Children in New Zealand respond as joyously as children in San Jose and Sheffield to the pleasures of global popular communication, but we argue that the global can only be tracked in the ways it emerges in a variety of local/ities. Researching the particular experiences of children in a small South Pacific nation also highlights the range of challenges faced by public intellectuals in a period of rapid global technical, economic, and cultural change.     

Almost under the same sky: reclaiming urbanity beyond an epidemic

Abstract

This essay deals with the social and political after‐shock introduced by SARS, which is considered here as both a public health outbreak and an urban cultural crisis. In Hong Kong, several years after the epidemic episode, the people’s voice regarding urban spatial politics, governance, and the media has not only grown louder, but has also been profoundly transformed into collective effervescence. This essay is based on over 50 interviews of ordinary Hong Kong residents from a wide spectrum of demographics. A particular focal point of the interviews was, inevitably, the participants’ reformulation of their identity as a function of urban crisis. Chiefly a documentation of the vernaculars of public criticism offered by the citizens of Hong Kong, this essay relates post‐SARS public sentiments to the (somewhat fiddly) development of democratic ideals that is animating our urban imagination today.     

Cultural policy indicators: reflections on the role of official statisticians in the politics of data collection

Cultural policy indicators are being constructed in many countries today as a consequence of reforms in public governance aimed at increasing cost-effectiveness and general efficiency as well as transparency and accountability. Drawing upon a project of the Finnish Ministry of Education, the article discusses the responsibilities of official statisticians in regard to the collection and processing of data to be used as “evidence” of the outcomes of cultural policies. Official statisticians are bound by an ethical code that emphasises the objective and independent production of information on different aspects of the economy and society. Direct involvement with the construction of cultural policy indicators may threaten the integrity of official statisticians, because such work would require close collaboration with administrators and decision makers who have their own particular interests in the cultural field. Moreover, the system of cultural statistics, which was established internationally at the turn of the 1970s, has a history of providing justification for public cultural policies. The Finnish project, in which two officials from Statistics Finland functioned in the role of commissioned experts, was officially about societal effectiveness indicators but was extended to encompass arguments for cultural policy. The final report even went as far as to propose that cultural considerations could be mainstreamed through indices and evaluation schemes covering all policy sectors. The article shows how easily official statisticians are drawn into the politics of data collection in the field of culture even when precautions are in place. The article concludes that the code of ethics of official statisticians serves as an indispensable buffer against partiality, but, to put this ideal fully into action, cultural statisticians need to develop reflexive practices that combine an applied approach and critical discourse. Such practices are similar to those outlined recently by cultural policy researchers.     

‘Don't be Mute!’

ABSTRACT

Polish immigrants arrived in the United States familiar with the culture of public letter-writing to the press, in which they participated through the periodicals for peasants circulating in the Polish countryside at the turn of the twentieth century. The article analyses public letters published in over thirty Polish-language newspapers printed in the United States between 1880s and 1960s, and demonstrates that the editors used them to support important functions of the ethnic press: creation of a national as well as diasporic immigrant community; formation of readers' networks loyal to particular newspapers; and adoption of personal service journalism, which guided the immigrants in their adaptation in the new country. The immigrants who arrived in subsequent decades continued the practice of letter-writing to the press, strengthening and expanding it to include the entire Polish Diaspora.     

Beijing,a garden of violence

Abstract

This paper examines the history of Beijing in relation to gardens — imperial, princely, public and private — and the impetus of the ‘gardener’, in particular in the twentieth‐century. Engaging with the theme of ‘violence in the garden’ as articulated by such scholars as Zygmunt Bauman and Martin Jay, I reflect on Beijing as a ‘garden of violence’, both before the rise of the socialist state in 1949, and during the years leading up to the 2008 Olympics.     

Illegitimate and Legitimating Passions in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Political Discourses

In the small, face-to-face society of Renaissance Florence, members of the ruling group were complexly entwined in multiple networks of kinship, neighbourhood and instrumental friendship entailing obligations to mutual support which rendered both ‘public’ and ‘private’ behaviour politically significant and impossible to separate. Consequently, in order to establish trust and to gain political advantage, men were constantly obliged in their contacts with others alternatively to perform or to dissimulate their personal passions, depending upon whether the particular social context defined these as legitimating or illegitimate.     

Objectives of arts funding agencies often do not map well on to societal benefits

The paper addresses in some detail the possible societal benefits of state expenditure on the arts, as opposed to the intrinsic or personal benefits. Three broad categories of societal benefit are posited, namely identity and social cohesion, experimental/innovative work and economic spill-over effects. The goals/objectives of the key funding agencies in Australia, England, Ireland and New Zealand are then examined, with a view to ascertaining to what extent they map on to societal benefits. The goal of equal access for all to the arts in particular is questioned. The paper concludes by addressing the issue of how evidence can, it at all, be provided for the existence of societal benefits from public funding of the arts.     

The Todd Carney “bubbling” social media scandal

In June 2014, Australian rugby league player Todd Carney had his contract cancelled with the Cronulla Sharks and received a lifetime ban from the National Rugby League after a photo in which he appears to drink his own urine in a public restroom went viral on social media. This article performs a critical analysis of the image at the centre of the Todd Carney bubbling scandal, as well as discourse surrounding it—on two contrasting forums, SharksForever and JustUsBoys. The analysis uncovers various insights into this particular image and the unspoken codes and unseen homoerotic rituals and bonding boy cultures of Australian team sportsmen and their “mates.” The argument is made that the image itself, along with its widespread publication on social media and construction through discourse, points to the limits of “proper” masculinity and, ultimately, perversion of the expectations placed on league males as heterosexual hero icons.     

Voicing their presence: Postrevolution Iranian female vocalists in context

Abstract

Contemporary female musicians and vocalists in Iran represent a challenging and inspiring musical trend as a part of a dynamic and reflexive artistic and cultural wave. This trend could be compared to a trend in the first half of the 20th century in Iran, which opened the first chapter in the history of women asserting their presence and their voice as female musicians in public spaces, exemplified in the work of Qamar al-Moluk Vaziri. This article analyzes these two trends in their social and cultural contexts and explores the efforts of postrevolution female vocalists to assert their presence in musical realms. Addressing these issues in the context of political, religious, and cultural constraints, the article examines the agency of female musicians and vocal performers in the long history of women’s struggles for self-expression and voicing their presence in public spaces and on the national stage.     

The Local: A History of the English Pub. By Paul Jennings.

ABSTRACT

The period between 1950 and 1975 marked a dramatic shift in food retailing in Britain with the introduction of self-service stores and supermarkets. It also witnessed a significant rise in shoplifting, which many contemporary observers blamed on the introduction of self-service retailing. Using material from the retail trade press, newspaper reports, contemporary academic and marketing studies, and the publications of consumer associations, this article reflects on the fractured nature of the public discourse surrounding shoplifting in the early post-war period and looks at the factors that made self-service food retailing such a potentially problematic innovation. We argue that an ambivalence arose because shoplifting was regarded as a ‘housewives' crime’, and because of some of the specific characteristics of the self-service innovation. The introduction of self-service retailing not only fundamentally altered the relationship between consumers and retailers, and between consumers and goods, but had the effect of throwing into question existing definitions and perceptions of consumer crime. This article will show that there was considerable public debate and disagreement over who was to blame for the sudden surge in the crime, over what could be done to prevent it, and over how to treat those accused and convicted of shoplifting. Some of the ambiguities in public responses to shoplifting evident in our period were witnessed in the earlier experiences of the nineteenth-century department store. Then, as in the 1950s, public debate on the causes of shoplifting occurred within the context of broader critiques of consumerism.     

The red thread and the white kimono: Japanese women, omote and ura

A portrait of modern Japanese middle class urban woman is presented from a dual perspective: Omote, public outside self, and Ura, private inside self. An almost Stereotypic outward submissive presentation is correlated with a special inner strength commanded as the Japanese woman satisfactorily fulfills the role of home manager. This strength is understood to be a particular characteristic of Japanese women which supports the existence of the well known “psychology of dependence.” Data from interviews with 30–50 year old Japanese women, collected over a four year period, is placed within the historical context of women 's traditional role in Japan.     

Measuring the Size and Concentration of Business Funding of Culture in the UK: Closing the Gap between Advocacy and Theory

In the past few years, UK public bodies have increased their calls for cultural leaders to diversify even further their funding sources and exploit the dynamics of the mixed-economy. So far only major cultural organisations in London have been able to successfully diversify their funding portfolio. A drop in public funding is likely to make it even more challenging for a large proportion of cultural organisations to close their income gap. To ensure the successful development of policies of funding decentralisation and inform organisational strategies, more theory-based empirical research on trends, drivers and motivations, and models of funding sustainability is needed. One of the many factors preventing the development of this line of research is a wide gap between research conducted for advocacy purposes and academia in the UK. This paper illustrates the extent and implications of this gap by providing a brief summary of the academic literature in the field and reviewing methods and results of existing data collection efforts by advocacy organisations, in particular the Private Investment in Culture survey by Arts & Business UK (A&B). The scope of this paper has been limited to business funding in the form of cash and in-kind sponsorship, donations and membership, since there is relatively more cross-sectional time series data and academic and advocacy studies of this form of funding than of individual giving and trust and foundation support. The paper proposes recommendations on ways of closing this gap, in particular by improving existing sampling methodology for this type of data collection and expanding and strengthening the existing academic research on motivations, market dynamics and concentration of business funding.     

From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd

ABSTRACT

This article traces the changes and continuities in fictional stories of serial murder in London from the late-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, it shows how changes in the primary audience for metropolitan popular culture necessitated dramatic shifts in the tale of serial killing and narratives of violence. Thus, by the nineteenth century, as the lower classes had become the main supporters of both traditional and new genres of entertainment in popular culture, their experience of and fears and anxieties about urban change became intertwined with myths about serial killing and reflected in a new character of the public nightmare, Sweeney Todd, the barber of Fleet Street, who set out to effectively depopulate the capital with his ghastly murder machine.     

People's security: Okinawa's anti-bases movement

Abstract

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross‐comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based on the socio‐political context of each country and its current concerns. Although the youth involved in both cases are marginalised male Malays, the framing of their alleged deviance and criminality permits, in the case of Singapore, only a limited possibility for moral panic creation given the conservative socio‐political governance that limits allegations such as ‘Satanism’. In the case of Malaysia, where a ‘large‐scale’ moral panic involving black metal emerged in 2001, the recent trend towards Islamisation gave fodder for the condemnation of black metal based on the allegations of the anti‐Islamic behaviour of Muslim youth involved in the black metal scene. In both cases, such groups were exploited by parties claiming to defend the social fabric of the moral majority, but in the latter case it took on grave implications due to the extent of the state and public response. This paper thus argues that the framing of these moral panics is an important component determining the relative ‘success’ of the panic or its ability to capture public and state imaginings.     

‘Of lost fathers and broken sons’: Farish Noor on the politics of love and the new thought in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper addresses the polemical and intimate writings of one of Malaysia’s leading public intellectuals, Farish Noor. Straddling secularism and Islamism, Noor’s ideas are informed by a compassion that seeks to bypass monotheism and an ethnically informed nationalism. An advocate of a multiethnic and plural society, Noor does not merely reject Islamism; rather, his thinking seeks to reconcile and transcend what he perceives as a false dichotomy between a system of reason and a system of belief. The achievement of this transcendence is a fraught one for it sometimes seems that Noor involuntarily contradicts himself. To resolve this contradiction I turn to Gille Deleuze’s work, Pure Immanence, which, I argue, provides a key in‐road into understanding the complexivity of Noor’s thought, in particular his valorization of love and his canny and novel attempts to interpret what he calls an ‘other Malaysia.’     

Under the gaze of the state: policing literature and the case of Taslima Nasrin

Abstract

This article situates Taslima Nasrin, the controversial writer from Bangladesh, in a particular political and religious moment in the history of Bangladesh, to analyse the difficult relationship the postcolonial state shares with a writer whose work deliberately unsettles the issues of minority and of women and/in religion. The complex mosaic of Nasrin’s work, comprising as varied genres as newspaper columns, poetry and popular novels, has engendered, in the last ten years, unprecedented responses both for and against her writing. This has brought the issue of literature and its uneasy negotiation with state politics to the forefront of national debate. Despised by Islamists and fundamentalists, equally loved and loathed by the reading public, considered with caution by secular intelligentsia and fellow feminists, and ultimately banned by the state, Nasrin is a unique case in point. Her work, written under the gaze of the state defying the fundamentalist fatwa demanding her death, hence invites discussions on state censorship invoked using religious sensibility as a marker of literary judgement and the associated perils of women writing on women in a postcolony like Bangladesh.     

The relationship of competitiveness motive on people's happiness through education

This paper applied data from 32 countries to find out the relationship between competitiveness motive and happiness, and results showed that competitiveness motive negatively predicted happiness through public education expenditure. Public education expenditure was found to have a mediation effect between competitiveness motive and happiness. Different variables were used, such as happiness score of 2000-2008, public health expenditure as percentage of GDP in 2001 and 2004, public education expenditure as percentage of GDP in 2001 and 2004, and competitiveness motive score. Overall, countries with high competitiveness motive had low public expenditure on education and thus countries had low happiness scores.