Contemporary Chinese TV Serials: Configuring Collective Memory of Socialist Nostalgia via the Cultural Revolution

Using China's Cultural Revolution as a representative historical event, this article examines how the collective memory and popular history revolving around it are manufactured and interpreted in televisual media narratives. The collective memory of the Cultural Revolution, as I will show, is constructed and not preserved, and the collective framework of memory, as the predominant thoughts and the governing ideological rhetoric of society, configures people's memories of past events. A textual analysis of the TV drama, The Place Where Dreams Start [Meng kaishi de difang, 1998], a typical revolutionary nostalgia text, will expose the process of collective memory concerning the Cultural Revolution for what it is—cultural amnesia that is misleading and regressive.     

Indices of Sociocultural Development and Cultural Accumulation: An Exponential Cultural Growth Law and a "Cultural Surgency" Factor

Cameiro's Index of Cultural Accumulation related exponentially to the author's Index of Sociocultural Development. The relationship follows mathematically, as an "exponential cultural growth law," from the assumption that cultural traits diversify at a constant proportional rate with successive increments of sociocultural development, though the rate may vary from one society to another. This variation is hypothetically dependent upon a factor of Cultural Surgency, such that relative over-elaboration of a culture is associated with freedom of emotional cathexis permitted by its norms. Statistical tests on a number of cultural traits supported the hypothesis.     

Immigrants' Cultural Identities as Sources of Civic Engagement

Immigrant parents (first generation) and adolescents (second generation) from El Salvador and India (N = 80) took part in interviews on civic engagement. The immigrants were almost unanimous in regarding civic engagement as important. They also were engaged themselves, more so at the community than the political level. One third of immigrants were engaged in community activities that specifically had a cultural focus or occurred through cultural organizations, and the comparable number for political activities was 25%. Cultural motives (i.e., a cultural or immigrant sense of self) were twice as likely to be mentioned as sources of engagement rather than disengagement. Qualitative analyses of these cultural motives revealed seven engagement themes (e.g., cultural tradition of service) and three of disengagement (e.g., ethnic exclusion).     

A Mutual Interest? Ethnography in Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Anthropology and cultural studies share a concern with ethnographic method. Cultural studies increasingly uses ethnography in its analyses of popular culture as it seeks to balance earlier preoccupations with text. Where cultural studies diverges from anthropology is in its encompassment within an oppositional paradigm which embeds a political agenda deep in its ethnographic work. This paper uses the area of media to explore the ways in which ethnography has been adopted and developed in cultural studies. Ethnographic focus has shifted interest in media from the text to the reception of media products. At the same time, the oppositional legacy from cultural studies' earliest days has tended to produce rather romanticised findings of a subaltern audience using media products to resist dominant cultural and political structures. It is suggested that anthropology should pay attention to cultural studies use of ethnographic method, first taking seriously the ground of popular culture as a challenge for anthropologists' more extended use of ethnography. But second, we should pay attention to the problem silences in cultural studies' ethnographies—silences like racism in audiences—since these may well have at least part of their basis in the method itself.     

Is multiculturalism the solution?

As far as multiculturalism is at stake, three kinds of question arise at the more or less confusing meeting point of sociology, political science and political philosophy: What are the sources and meanings of cultural difference in our societies? In what way do institutions and policy-makers in some countries deal with multiculturalism? Why should we favour or not favour multiculturalism? This article tackles these questions in turn and seeks to answer them. Cultural differences are not only reproduced, they are in the constant process of being produced which means that fragmentation and recomposition are a permanent probability. In such a situation, the problem is how to broaden democracy in order to avoid at one and the same time the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minorities.     

Cognizing "Cognized Models"

In his later work Rappaport acknowledged that his earlier efforts had overemphasized organic and ecological functions in the explanation of cultural phenomena. He then distanced himself from both idealism and reductive materialism and set out to understand the complexities of cultural understandings and ritual. Specifically, he shifted from functionalism to formalism in an effort to understand ritual and its language in relation to cultural norms. Ultimately his analysis was implicitly structural, understanding the part as a constituent of an overarching arrangement and in terms of what Althusser would have called "structural causality." Although his work benefited from this shift from function to structure, Rappaport did not use it to explore the political dimension. However, a holistic ecology such as the one Rappaport essayed must ultimately embrace both political ecology and historical ecology, [cognized models, ritual, political ecology, structural causality-]     

Chinatown UK v. Colonial Hong Kong: An early exercise in transnational militancy and manipulation, 1967–1969

In the late 1960s, Hong Kong was hit by a wave of social and political unrest, an echo in the colony of China's Cultural Revolution of 1966–69. The unrest spread to parts of Britain's Chinatown, where a leftist movement emerged in sympathy with the Hong Kong agitation. Among the Chinatown leftists were former supporters of the Communist anti-Japanese guerrillas in Hong Kong's rural New Territories. The colonial authorities reacted to these developments in Britain by drawing up plans to protect and assist overseas Hong Kong residents in an attempt to win their political approval and stymie the pro-Communists. The Hong Kong Government Office [HKGO] in London started providing materials for Chinese-language schools and set up various other communal services. Later, it launched a campaign to foster the emigrants’ “Hong Kong identity”. The scheme was in many ways successful. Chinatowners were usually happy to make use of the facilities on offer. However, there is little evidence that the HKGO succeeded in winning their political allegiance.     

Lumbee Indian cultural nationalism and ethnogenesis

Conclusions In both cultural and political nationalism we find people attempting to make their own history from within, but at the same time seeking to move beyond the conditions imposed upon them. Because oppression is not just political and economic, but cultural as well, cultural nationalism is a liberating force. Through cultural nationalism, the Lumbee seek to generate their own culture, in contradistinction to the culture that flows from their oppressed position.But the liberating potential of cultural nationalism is only partial in the presence of political and economic exploitation. Cultural nationalism provides an abstract cultural unification of the Lumbee, and it calls for political and economic equality between Lumbee and Whites. Implicit in Lumbee cultural unification is internal socio-economic equality, but as their cultural nationalism seeks to move from self-definition to self-determination, it says nothing explicit about this.The absence of a specific program for internal social and economic transformations, in the direction of establishing equality, makes it possible for cultural nationalism to be based on an alliance between the emerging Lumbee elite and the Lumbee working class. The rise of the Tuscarora movement points to the likelihood that this alliance will be short-lived.A contradiction has appeared: at the same time that cultural nationalism, by generating not just pride but collective pride, functions to hold the Lumbee together culturally, it also functions to widen class divisions. It is too early to predict how this contradiction will be resolved, but its centrality indicates that the future political development of the Lumbee will lie in its resolution. Either cultural nationalism will move in the direction of a program of social equality, which would yield cultural unification and enhance the sense of political and economic reality, or it seems likely that cultural nationalism will do what white oppression could not — it will split the Lumbee apart and reinforce the penetration of the Lumbee community by national and multinational corporations.An alliance between cultural and political nationalism, based on the collectivization of Lumbee resources and the expansion of the cultural content of cultural nationalism to include recognition of the dynamics of class formation, seems to be necessary to permit the Lumbee to enjoy the right to make their own history. Such an alliance would entail a greater transformation of the cultural than the political nationalist position. This could occur with the ethnic elite backing cultural nationalism, since the elite witness the continual looting of their people under the aegis of the large corporations that they help bring in, and/or it could occur as their political power is eroded by the continual attacks of the political nationalists. As the only significant accumulators of capital among the Lumbee, however small, their role in an alliance would then lie in their participation in the initial founding of a socialist sub-economy. It could well be argued that this is asking the ethnic elite to commit suicide as a class. Yet the choice seems to be between that outcome, however arrived at, and abandoning communal identity.The split between cultural and political nationalism is basically a class antagonism. If the cultural nationalists win this struggle, the only answer — paradoxically — to the pressing material needs and problems of the poorer Lumbee may well turn out to be an abandonment of their cultural identity as Lumbee in a straightforward lower class alliance within the larger nation-state. Should the political nationalists become the dominant power among the Lumbee then perhaps sufficient economic and political self-determination might be established to provide the basis for a nontrivialized Lumbee Indian culture. The poignancy of this inversion of the intent and the effect of cultural nationalism can only be realized by appreciating the deep and genuine cultural concern — whether also opportunistic or not — of most Lumbee cultural nationalists.There are, in the usual view, two options open to a people such as the Lumbee. The first is stagnation, clinging to their roots and changing as little as possible: preservation with continued impoverishment as the likely price. The second is progress or economic development, with the attendant major increase in assimilationist pressures brought about by the increased penetration of the dominant state: modest material betterment at the price of major cultural decline. Cultural nationalism resists the first option as an obvious affront to collective pride. It also, however, eventually resists the second option, being opposed not just to the debasement of culture but also to its destruction. Whatever its present strength, it thus has no future.The absence of ethnogenesis from this usual array of options reflects not just a limited anthropological or ethnic nationalist vision, but the real limitations of capitalism. Fundamental to capitalist economic processes are regional inequalities. As has been well demonstrated, these regional inequalities generate nationalism, they do not, however, create nationalities. The precondition for the ethnogenetic formation of viable nations from submerged and dominated minority peoples — for a world that culture not only symbolizes, but creates — is the kind of regional equality and communal material foundation conceivable under socialism.Gerald Sider is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Richmond College, City University of New York.

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Transnational cyberpublics: new political spaces for labour migrants in Asia

This article offers a cultural interpretation of transnational solidarities that Asian political activists are generating through electronic telecommunications networks. Its focus is on the experiences of the Migrant Forum in Asia [MFA], a network of non-government organizations that question issues of human rights, citizenship and working conditions of labour migrants in the Asian region. MFA's networking activities are being transformed as email enables daily conversations across multiple national borders, and new 'imagined' communities of political action have emerged. English has been chosen as the language of solidarity, and photographs have become important in communicating activities and ideas. These media are innovative modes of transnational communication and shape political spaces that exist in symbiotic relation to the 'real'. Attention to these practices, spaces and the symbolic meanings activists attach to these communities helps to illuminate a cultural politics of transnational activism in this region.     

Human rights and the environment

This issue of Human Ecologyfocuses on the interrelated nature of crisis in human and environmental systems and argues that the right to a healthy environment is a fundamental human right. In this article I present a conceptual framework for the human rights and environment special issue, followed by a brief review of significant insights offered by each contributor. Collectively the cases presented in this issue explore connections between international and national policy, government action or sanctioned action, and human environmental crises. Cultural notions are seen to play a key role in influencing social relations, legitimizing power relations, and justifying the production and reproduction of human environmental crises. And finally, these cases explore the ways in which political, economic, and cultural forces influence and at times inhibit efforts to respond to human environmental crises.     

Pluralizing the Costeños—Reflections on Michael Schroeder’s cultural geographies of grievance and war: Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region in the first Sandinista revolution, 1927–1934

In this response article to Michael Schroeder's contribution "Cultural Geographies of Grievance and War: Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast Region in the First Sandinista Revolution, 1927–1934", the author argues that Sandino's limited success in the region was not mainly the result of an erroneous view of the local situation. His main difficulty was the absence of a coherent Atlantic Coast society and culture. In view of the mosaic of heterogeneous groups involved in long-standing rivalries or recent conflicts immersed in the racist environment of the enclave economy, a political project that could have integrated all major population groups was impossible. Sandinista propaganda did not merely consist of lofty nationalist and spiritualist jargon. There were also efforts to address the concrete problems of the people on the Atlantic Coast, such as economic depression and unemployment, and the Moravian missionaries’ attempt to enforce strict sexual morals in indigenous and Creole settlements.     

Cultural traits as units of analysis

Cultural traits have long been used in anthropology as units of transmission that ostensibly reflect behavioural characteristics of the individuals or groups exhibiting the traits. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of an individual's cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss or partial alteration within an individual's mind. Cultural traits are analogous to genes in that organisms replicate them, but they are also replicators in their own right. No one has ever seen a unit of transmission, either behavioural or genetic, although we can observe the effects of transmission. Fortunately, such units are manifest in artefacts, features and other components of the archaeological record, and they serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity over how to define and measure the units that underlie this inheritance process.     

!Kung nutritional status and the original "affluent society"--a new analysis

The theme of the 2011 meetings of the German Anthropological Society, "Biological and Cultural Markers of Environmental Pressure", provides the entree to revisit one of Anthropology's most enduring canons - hunters and gathers are well-nourished and healthy. The Dobe !Kung foragers of the Kalahari Desert often serve as a model of hunter-gatherer adaptation for both extant and Paleolithic humans. A re-analysis of food intake, energy expenditure, and demographic data collected in the 1960s for the Dobe !Kung finds that their biocultural indicators of nutritional status and health were, at best, precarious and, at worst, indicative of a society in danger of extinction. Hunting and gathering is the lifestyle to which the human species was most persistently adapted, in terms of the biological, cultural, and emotional meanings of the word 'adapted.' However, the few remaining foraging groups studied in the 20th Century are unlikely to serve as the ideal models of that ancient way of life.     

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism

The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Muslims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims. This article suggests that we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners, I question the very tendency to read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those politics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter. Cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues. Thinking of individuals from "traditional" cultures in authentic and original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. This article places the terror of September 11 in a historical and political context. Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project. [Keywords: Muslims, culture talk, Islamist politics, political identities, terrorism]     

Cultural niche construction in a metapopulation

Cultural niche construction is the process by which certain evolving cultural traits form a cultural niche that affects the evolution of other genetic and cultural traits [Laland, K., et al., 2001. Cultural niche construction and human evolution. J. Evol. Biol. 14, 22-33; Ihara, Y., Feldman, M., 2004. Cultural niche construction and the evolution of small family size. Theor. Popul. Biol. 65, 105-111]. In this study we focus on cultural niche construction in a metapopulation (a population of populations), where the frequency of one cultural trait (e.g. the level of education) determines the transmission rate of a second trait (e.g. the adoption of fertility reduction preferences) within and between populations. We formulate the Metapopulation Cultural Niche Construction (MPCNC) model by defining the cultural niche induced by the first trait as the construction of a social interaction network on which the second trait may percolate. Analysis of the model reveals dynamics that are markedly different from those observed in a single population, allowing, for example, different (or even opposing) dynamics in each population. In particular, this model can account for the puzzling phenomenon reported in previous studies [Bongaarts, J., Watkins, S., 1996. Social interactions and contemporary fertility transitions. Popul. Dev. Rev. 22 (4), 639-682] that the onset of the demographic transition in different countries occurred at ever lower levels of development.     

Cultural Orientation and Its Associations with Alcohol Use by University Students in China

Cultural orientation is defined as an individual’s cultural preferences when encountering imported culture while still living in the native culture. Data was analyzed from 1305 Chinese university students attending universities in Beijing, Kunming, and Wuhan. Cultural orientation was assessed with the Chinese Cultural Orientation Questionnaire, which assesses both Western and Traditional Chinese cultural orientations. The analysis used hierarchical logistic regression with nondrinkers as the reference group and controlling for demographic factors (age, gender, and urban/rural background). Western cultural orientation was found to significantly increase the odds of recent drinking. The results indicated that higher Western cultural orientation was, after gender, the second most important factor associated with Chinese college student drinking frequency. Traditional Chinese cultural orientation was not associated with drinking frequency. This study highlights an unexpected outcome of globalization on students who have not left their home cultures.     

Biocultural linkages--cultural consensus, cultural consonance, and human biological research

Cultural consensus analysis tests for shared models of behavior in various cultural dimensions. Cultural consonance is used to assess the degree to which individuals behave in a way that is consistent with these cultural models. Results are presented from two studies using cultural consensus and consonance analysis (CCCA) on health risk in an African American population and on diet in a mixed sample from West Alabama. In the African American case study, cultural consonance in lifestyle and social support are demonstrated to have a significant effect on blood pressure. In the diet study, significant differences in cultural consonance on the health dimension of diet between groups espousing different dietary preferences were demonstrated in spite of all groups sharing the same model of healthy foods. These studies are used to argue that more sophisticated measures of culture in human biological research are readily available and accessible for most studies.     

Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest

Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn. eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 280 pp.     

What a Little Hate Literature Will Do: "Cultural Issues" and the Emotional Aspect of School Change

Describing a class entitled "Cultural Issues," this article is drawn from an ethnographic study of an affluent, predominantly white high school responding to recent neo-Nazi incidents. I argue that in focusing on cultural issues around the world rather than those close at hand, the course depoliticized ethnic difference and left unchallenged white privileging at the levels of classroom, school, and community. This neutralizing urge is traced to collective emotions of shame and guilt, which prompted well-intentioned efforts to bolster the school's reputation but prohibited critical exploration of inequity and conflict.