The branch of evolutionary theory known as signaling theory attempts to explain various forms of communication. Social scientists have explained many traditional rituals as forms of communication that promote cooperative social relationships among participants. Both evolutionists and social scientists have realized the importance of trust for the formation and maintenance of cooperative social relationships. These factors have led to attempts to apply signaling theory to traditional cultural rituals in various ways. This paper uses the traditional ritual of (...) mumming in small Newfoundland fishing villages to evaluate alternative hypotheses about the connection between rituals, communication, trust, and cooperation. Mumming is found to be most consistent with the hypothesis that it is a ritual of trust wherein participants take a specific type of risk: the risk of harm at the hands of other participants. Individuals who take this risk actively signal their trust. Conversely, individuals who restrain themselves from inflicting harm on other participants actively signal their trustworthiness. (shrink)

Many today agree that philosophy, as an academic discipline, must, for the sake of its very survival, become more inclusive of a wider range of perspectives, coming from a more diverse pool of philosophers. Yet there has been little serious reflection on how our very idea of what philosophy is might be preventing this change from taking place. In this essay I would like to consider the ways in which our ideas about philosophy's relation to tradition, and its relation to (...) other dimensions of human culture, influence efforts to promote greater diversity in the field. (shrink)

The Appeal to Tradition, often considered to be unsound, frequently reflects sophisticated adaptations to the environment. Once developed, these adaptations are often transmitted culturally rather than as reasoned argument, so that people mayor may not be aware of why their traditions are wise. Tradition is more likely to be valid in a stable environment in which a wide range of variations have been available for past testing; however, traditions tend to become obsolete in a rapidly changing environment.

The thesis explored here is that ?image technologies? prominent in today's communications technologies are acidic to traditional cultures. I parallel examples from the history of early modern science and its optical instrumentation with the rise of cinema and television and other audio?visual technologies to show a similar history and effect. One dominant contemporary phenomenon which occurs through image technologies is the appearance of pluriculture, a unique mediation of the multi?cultural. The challenge of pluriculture vis?à?vis the contemporary forms of reaction (...) to the phenomenon is also examined. (shrink)

The study of traditional cultures is supposedly the business of the social sciences. Philosophy too has methodologies and viewpoints that can make positive contributions to their study.

Against the background that the top-level semantic framework of Chinese traditional culture is not comprehensive and unified, this study aims to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage information about Chinese traditional culture through the development of a domain ontology which is constructed from ancient books. A combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches was used to construct the ontology for Chinese traditional culture. An investigation of historians’ needs, and LDA topic clustering model were conducted, understanding the (...) specific needs of historians, collecting the topic, concepts and relationships. CIDOC CRM was reused to construct the basic framework of CTCO. Ontology structure and function were adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of CTCO. Evaluation results show that the ontology meets all the quality criteria of OntoMetrics, and the experts agreed on content representation. CTCO contributes to the organization of traditional Chinese culture and the construction of related databases. The study also forms a common path and puts forward proposals for the construction of domain ontology, which has great social relevance. (shrink)

Though the globalization of economics has provided us a posttraditional perspective to understand the traditional culture, it doesn’t mean that tradition has lost its special value of existence. In order to interpret Chinese traditional culture on the background of globalization, we need to re-identify its value properly to realize the combination of traditional spirit and modern idea, and then we could make the modern transformation of Chinese traditional culture possible. During the process of (...) traditional culture’s modern transformation, the most important thing is to make the choice of seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages. (shrink)

Despite the fact that management programmes provided by African universities are based on Western ontology, there exists a philosophy of management that is uniquely African. It is necessary to discover, understand and nurture this philosophy in order to explain why African managers behave in the ways they do. The African philosophy of management is premised on African traditional cultures, which have a strong influence on the organisational culture of African organisations. For example, despite many Africans undertaking university degrees (...) based on Western ontology at home and overseas, they inadvertently revert to African management philosophy in their (African) organisations. Consequently, the African philosophy of management significantly affects how African managers manage African organisations. The location of the author’s research for this paper is the neighbouring East African nations of Kenya and Tanzania. Although the limitation of the research to these two countries means that the research findings cannot be generalised to other African economies, it may nevertheless point to possible patterns of African management philosophy to be found in other economies of sub-Saharan Africa. Arguably, African management philosophy plays a key role at different levels in African organisations, with both positive and negative consequences. This paper explores such a role and its consequences. It also examines its implications for socio-economic development and social advancement for African peoples. It is widely accepted, for example, that African institutions and organisations are very corrupt. Africans do not have a monopoly on corruption, but a question of interest for this paper is whether the African philosophy of management contributes to corruption in the two countries on which this paper focuses, and what inferences may be drawn for other economies in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper includes both conceptual and field research in its exploration of the African philosophy of management. It is premised on the view that, while the Western world may not recognise or even think about an African philosophy of management, such a philosophy does exist. The effective management of African private and public organisations is not possible, if the African philosophy of management is not understood and accommodated in the management of African organisations. An understanding is critical for socio-economic development and social advancement, especially for Africans in Kenya and Tanzania, and also for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. (shrink)

The authors consider in detail the features of the socio-cultural design of ethnocultural activities based on the actualization of traditional values and heritage in the Aginsky Buryat district. Since the end of the twentieth century, there has been an intensification of activities for the development of ethnic culture in the district, and often the initiative comes from the people, and it is implemented in the form of socio-cultural projects of cultural institutions, education, non-profit organizations. In connection with these (...) features, it becomes relevant to analyze the value core of the Buryat culture, which becomes the object of socio-cultural design at the present stage. To study this issue, methods of external and included observation, content analysis of ongoing socio-cultural projects were used; scientific literature on the topic of socio-cultural design and values of Buryat culture was analyzed. The research material was social practices and projects implemented in the Aginsky Buryat district. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the socio-cultural processes emerging in the social environment, initiated by tribal communities and social groups of peers, are studied. In the Agin Buryat district, these social groups are the subjects initiating innovative social practices aimed at actualizing and reviving the cultural core of the people. On the basis of these practices that have arisen in the popular environment, social projects of government bodies and institutions of the social sphere, culture, and education are being created and implemented. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that socio-cultural design at the present stage actualizes the values of the native language, the continuity of the family and tribal community, love for the native land, strengthening friendly ties with fellow countrymen and peers during the implementation of socially significant practices. (shrink)

Resumen: La cultura filosófica tradicional china se refiere al pensamiento filosófico y las tradiciones culturales de la antigua China que incluye diferentes escuelas filosóficas y sistemas de pensamiento como el confucianismo, el taoísmo, el mohismo y el legalismo. Como sistema de pensamiento único en la antigua China, la cultura filosófica tradicional china es una herencia acumulada por la nación china. La cultura Han Fu es un componente importante de la cultura tradicional china, que abarca orígenes históricos, características morfológicas, materiales y (...) técnicas, costumbres, connotaciones culturales y valores espirituales. Puede aplicarse y heredarse en la sociedad contemporánea, así como integrarse e interactuar con otros elementos culturales tradicionales. Como importante portadora del pensamiento filosófico tradicional chino, la cultura Han Fu es también una manifestación concreta de la cultura nacional china y del espíritu humanista moderno. Como forma de heredar y exhibir la cultura de la vestimenta tradicional china, la representación de la cultura Han Fu ha recibido cada vez más atención y afecto y ha desempeñado un papel importante en la larga historia, y su evolución y desarrollo también han sido influenciados y moldeados por la cultura filosófica tradicional china. Por tal motivo, este artículo utilizó el enfoque hermenéutico, el materialismo dialéctico y el materialismo histórico, explorando las manifestaciones de la cultura filosófica tradicional china en la cultura Han Fu, con el fin de comprender y heredar mejor la cultura Han Fu. El artículo presenta primero los pensamientos filosóficos tradicionales chinos, que incluyen principalmente el confucianismo, el taoísmo y el pensamiento budista; luego se elaboraron varios conceptos importantes en el pensamiento filosófico; luego, consideraremos y analizaremos las ideas filosóficas contenidas en la cultura Han Fu, y señalaremos la encarnación y aplicación de las ideas filosóficas de “unidad del cielo y el hombre” y “neutralidad” en la cultura Han Fu; Finalmente, el valor del desempeño de Han Fu se elabora a partir de dos aspectos: su expresión de valor, forma de expresión y contenido. Mediante el estudio, se descubrió que la cultura Han Fu puede presentar y expresar sus ideas centrales de una manera específica para demostrar mejor el pensamiento filosófico tradicional chino, lo que ayuda a instar mejor a las personas a utilizar la cultura Han Fu como herramienta y utilizarla para publicitar. sus ideas y conceptos relevantes. (shrink)

The military humiliation of China by the West in the 19th century was slight in objective terms but lethal to late-imperial political culture. This was partly because prestige structures, such as that of China, are unusually susceptible to humiliation, and partly because the western impact revitalized and reshaped existing subversive elements. Traditionalists and would-be reformers agreed that there was a crisis, but offered conflicting solutions, especially with respect to the desirability or otherwise of modern technology and some form of (...) democracy. Eventually the interpretation of Chinese history was recast in terms of international intercultural competition, and policy reformulated on this basis so as to lead toward a kind of Sino-western synthesis with China politically and culturally on top. (shrink)

Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. (...) We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of enquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation, and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel “cultural action framework” bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework. (shrink)

The Law has always been an instrument to exorcise different kinds of fear, primarily the fear of differences, through the distribution of shares of power. Perhaps, this system, inherently conflictual, is behind the failure of the multicultural policies of many countries, that have divided the society in as many separate communities as are the elements that differentiate each human being. The Law has also recognized to men a total power over Nature, feeding its illusion of control, that in recent decades (...) has shattered in front of several natural disasters. Ecuador, Buthan and South Africa have introduced in their Constitutions ideas belonging to the indigenous cultural tradition (buen vivir, buddhism and ubuntu), which express harmony between men and Nature. The paper analyzes these experiences in order to propose a new model of eco-friendly constitutionalism. (shrink)

Contradicting our earlier claims of American moral exceptionalism, recent self-replication evidence from our laboratory indicates that implicit puritanism characterizes the judgments of people across cultures. Implicit cultural evolution may lag behind explicit change, such that differences between traditional and non-traditional cultures are greater at a deliberative than an intuitive level. Not too deep down, perhaps we are all implicit puritans.

As a traditional clothing symbol that is unique to the Chinese nation, the dragon symbol combines the distinctive features of the Chinese nation, reflecting the depth of mental changes and the historical context of Chinese culture. The image of the dragon has formed a kind of dragon pattern as a certain set of ideas about the culture that encoded all its changes. Therefore, in national clothing the dragon image has been one of the most favorite patterns for (...) thousands of years. With the interweaving of world cultures and the deepening of the concept of clothing design, the dragon pattern will incorporate fresh elements of Western culture while maintaining the essence of traditional Chinese culture, and show a new design image through the utilization of various innovative ideas and design methods. The following methods were used for the study: literature review, field research, analysis of design cases, analysis of fashion trends. Using these methods, the specifics of using dragon designs in the fashion industry in different seasons and years are analyzed, and the trend of their evolution in the field of high fashion is studied. In the article we analyzed modern trends of clothing design and gave their characteristics. The results of the study showed that even in modern youth fashion this national symbol is actively used, which indicates that the patterns and images of the dragon have real applicability and wide prospects of application in modern fashion design. Modern clothing design provides a rich cultural heritage for modern clothing to retain the characteristics of civilization on the basis of continuous innovation. The use of dragon motifs in modern clothing not only meets the aesthetic concepts of modern people, but also adds vitality to clothing design. (shrink)

UNESCO in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development establishes respect for the environment and sustainability education as key elements for the challenges of society in the coming years. In the educational context, physical education can have a vital role in sustainability education, through Traditional Sporting Games. The aim of this research was to study from an ethnomotor perspective the different characteristics of two different groups of TSG in the Canary Islands, Spain. The corpus of this investigation was made up (...) of 513 TSG, identified by two analysis techniques and collected in a database. The categories corresponding to the variables of the internal logic of the game were the type of motor interaction, related to space, relationships with time, and relationships with objects. The study also examined the variables of external logic or sociocultural conditions such as the protagonists, playing areas, and game moments. The data analysis was carried out using descriptive and inferential statistics: cross-tables, effect sizes, classification trees, and the identification of frequency areas. Of the total number of playful activities identified, most were physical activities. These activities were Quasi-games without rules and TSG as well as activities with Objects and without material. This research confirms that the TSG in the Canary Islands is a mirror of traditional culture and, from a pedagogical approach, shows great potential for material and social sustainability. (shrink)

The UK's personal financial services sector has been the site of controversy over alleged professional malpractice. Financial advisers’ status as professionals is in question, and their claim to knowledge and expertise is apparently challenged by an extensive consumer literature on personal finance. This article analyses a corpus of seventeen consumer guides to personal finance and money management published in the UK, together with a range of financial material available on the internet. These guides urge readers to give high priority to (...) their finances, given the irreversible global retreat of the state from welfare provision. They argue that expert professional advice is indispensable. They prepare readers to play their part as clients in mutually profitable collaboration with professional advisers. They offer reassurance about the effectiveness of industry regulation and consumer protection. The guides are reflexively implicated in the promotional culture of personal financial services. They support financial advisers’ claim to professional standing, and contribute to the cultural work of creating a clientele for them. (shrink)

The cultural element is the minimum unit of a cultural system. The systematic categorizing, organizing, and retrieval of the traditional Chinese cultural elements are essential prerequisites for the realization of effective extracting and rational utilization, as well as the prerequisite for exploiting the contemporary value of the traditional Chinese culture. To build an objective, integrated, and reliable classification method and a system of traditional Chinese cultural elements, this study takes the text of Taiping Imperial Encyclopedia in (...) Northern Song Dynasty as the primary data source. The unsupervised word segmentation methods are used to detect Out-of-Vocabulary, and then the segmentation results by the THULAC tool with and without custom dictionary are compared. The TF-IDF algorithm is applied to extract the keywords of cultural elements and the Ochiia coefficient is introduced to create complex networks of traditional Chinese cultural elements. After analyzing the topological characteristics of the network, the community detection algorithm is used to identify the topics of cultural elements. Finally, a “Means-Ends” two-dimensional orthogonal classification system is established to categorize the topics. The results showed that the degree distribution in the complex network of Chinese traditional cultural elements is a scale-free network with γ = 2.28. The network shows a structure of community and hierarchy features. The top 12 communities have taken up to 91.77% of the scale of the networks. Those 12 topics of the traditional Chinese cultural elements are circularly distributed in the orthogonal system of cultural elements’ categorization. (shrink)

This paper aims at analyzing the distinctive features of the western and Chinese philosophies, which underlie the western and Chinese cultures. Westerners focus on the form, and they are deeply influenced by geometry and materialized philosophies. Meanwhile, Chinese people focus on connotation, and they are greatly influenced by the yin-and-yang principle.

Education of Chinese cultural traditions has been endorsed by the central government in Mainland China in recent years. The article presents a study which examined how nationalism advocated in the policy text has been interpreted at the localized level by primary school teachers in Beijing. The study draws on discourse theories as the primary point of reference. The qualitative coding methods and textual analysis were employed to interpret the meanings of 52 interview transcripts of public primary school teachers. The findings (...) reveal a discrepancy between the discourse on nationalism presented by the policy and the discourse used by the respondents. The former exhibited a strong nationalist aspiration. The latter made a discourse of cultural nationalism more explicit, which cherishes the intellectual and esthetic aspects of Chinese cultural heritage, and considers them important in cultivating students’ cultural taste and moral characters. Teachers’ lack of knowledge of the original policy text mi... (shrink)

Experiments may contribute to understanding the basic processes of cultural evolution. We drew features from previous laboratory research with small groups in which traditions arose during several generations. Groups of four participants chose by consensus between solving anagrams printed on red cards and on blue cards. Payoffs for the choices differed. After 12 min, the participant who had been in the experiment the longest was removed and replaced with a naı¨ve person. These replacements, each of which marked the end of (...) a generation, continued for 10 – 15 generations, at which time the day’s session ended. Time-out duration, which determined whether the group earned more by choosing red or blue, and which was fixed for a day’s session, was varied across three conditions to equal 1, 2, or 3 min. The groups developed choice traditions that tended toward maximizing earnings. The stronger the dependence between choice and earnings, the stronger was the tradition. Once a choice tradition evolved, groups passed it on by instructing newcomers, using some combination of accurate information, mythology, and coercion. Among verbal traditions, frequency of mythology varied directly with strength of the choice tradition. These methods may be applied to a variety of research questions. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Dislocating Cultures takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas.

Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, by John Clifford Holt. University of Hawai’i Press. 2017. 391pp. Hb. $68, ISBN-13: 978-0-82486-780-5.

This paper traces back the sources of our present legal system and of market economy to Medieval Europe which itself benefited from Hellenistic and Roman legal culture and commercial practices. Roman provinces placed Rome in the wider Greek cultural and commercial world. If Aristotle was already transcending the narrow polis-based conceptions of his predecessors, after him Hellenistic Civilization saw the emergence of a new school of philosophy: Stoicism. The legal thought in the Latin West will hence be characterized by (...) Cicero’s writings and its Stoic sources. The Roman legal system was similar to the later northern European customary law and the English common law; Roman law was evolutionary and customary. The rise of Western individualism, whether it dates back to St. Augustine in the fifth century, or to the two Papal Revolutions of Gregory I (establishing the nuclear family as the core of individualism) and of Gregory VII, also played a crucial role in shaping the western legal tradition. The paper describes the main forces that led to this second (Gregorian) revolution. Monasticism is one of them. Benedictine monasticism plaid a leading role in the Peace of God Movement. Hence collective oath-taking by groups in the name of peace was essential in the founding of cities and in the formation of guilds. Europe’s economic resurgence in the Eleventh Century was on the basis of the creation of the rule of law by the Peace of God movement. This movement also allowed for Europe’s agricultural economy to progress. Indeed, the European Middle Ages is one of the major periods of technological innovation in the history of the world. The Gregorian Revolution itself was supported and financed by the Commercial Revolution: Italian bankers sustained Papal reformers against the Emperors. The independence of the Italian cities and provinces reveals one of the most important consequences of the Gregorian Revolution: the polycentricism of Western Europe. This Revolution also witnessed the first large number of political pamphlets in European history; the Gregorian clergy emphasizing a compact theory of government. Soon after, the order of Cistercians was founded (1098) and underwent spectacular growth during the next two centuries. The Cistercians accepted no rents or labor services from feudal donors but would take only full possession of land to do with it as they wished.These monasteries were the most economically effective units that had ever existed in Europe, and perhaps in the world, before that time. Finally, the Magna Carta (1215) that will be so influential on modern political thought can be seen as a direct consequence of the Gregorian Revolution. (shrink)

Some cases of countries and cultures in which traditional Catholicism has played a major role in defining public culture are undergoing accelerated secularization processes; the result should be relevant for the diagnoses underlying contemporary post-secular proposals. It is argued, first, that in these countries (Spain has been taken as a main example), where the Catholic Church lost its institutional power, it is also losing its ethical hegemony. While public and political debates still retain the sense of symbolically laden, (...) communal ethical accord, they are no longer understood with religious overtones. It is suggested, second, that laïcité — a non-aggressive stance concerning religion — could adequately describe this predicament, though it retains a trait of self-defence vis-à-vis the Church that is normally attached to the term ‘laicism’. It is proposed, third, that secularization takes place at the ethical level, in which no sense of loss can be attached to the secular citizen. It is at this level, where the conflicts around meanings and values, which can be framed in religious or secularized terms, set the agenda for legal and political discussions, and where the equal standing of religious and secular interpretations should be assessed. (shrink)

in a very different sense, to refer to the cultural community, or cultural structure, itself On this view, the cultural community continues to exist even when its members arc free to modify the character of the culture, should they find its traditional ...

The relationship between religion and education in the Minahasa community still receives inadequate attention. One local wisdom that has experienced degradation of its noble values over the years is the mapalus culture. Therefore, it is imperative to construct and manage Christian Religious Education (CRE) in Minahasa due to its ability to properly accommodate religious values and issues or local culture. This study tries to determine the right management values in mapalus culture that can contribute to CRE development (...) in Minahasa. Data were descriptively collected from articles, books, and interview information from community leaders. The result showed that solidarity and discipline management are elements of mapalus that have the potential to be synergized with CRE management. Contribution: The research's main contribution is to offer mapalus values to the CRE management development. This finding could be a formula for other context and future agenda that could bring together education, religion and culture. (shrink)

This research aims to study art and religious philosophy by analyzing the significance of Aboriginal dot painting, Sichuan opera makeup, Chinese traditional sculpture and Shu embroidery. A particular emphasis is placed upon their crucial importance for understanding the essence of various societies as well as their main spiritual and cultural tenets. The data for this study was gathered using a qualitative approach, targeted toward online museums and cultural websites, focusing on images of artworks to determine the parameters of symbolic (...) elements in terms of culture and religion. Purposeful sampling was used to identify pieces of art that not only have meaningful religious symbolisms but also different cultural backgrounds. Such sampling assures that the study embodies a wide representation of religious semiotics and a better understanding of the interaction between art and spirituality. This study shows that irrespective of culture, one can identify an analogy of how signs and icons work with the message from the divine, which is further preserved from the sacred. These art symbols embody theological metaphors on ethical, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions and express semantic meanings across cultures. Since the data for the study was limited to only online sources and predefined cultural artefacts, it may lack the field intensity of first-hand observation across cultures. Future research should identify multiple data sources and conduct additional cross-cultural comparisons of more cultures and other forms of art. (shrink)

This paper challenges the idea that there are essential and unbridgeable differences that separate the cultural traditions of China and Europe. The focus is on the belief that there is no transcendence in Chinese thought and the cluster of notions around this thesis, which have often been used in support of the thesis of essential differences. The conclusion is that this thesis is mistaken and that the multifarious traditions of China and Europe share many central features and can also mutually (...) enrich one another. Together, they offer rich resources to a global ethic suited for the needs of our time. *. (shrink)

This paper discusses thepractical impact of a non-materialistic cultureon sustainable farm management.Two elements are discussed: first, how deeplyrooted religion is in this culture; second,the feasibility of using both human knowledgeand experience, so-called tradition and divineguidance in management. Finally, theimplications of the fusion of these twoelements are drawn. The outcome is thecapability of man to integrate ethical valuesinto decisions and actions. This integration,when applied by skilled farmers, leads to amanagement of natural resources in analtruistic fashion and not merely to economicends. (...) Moreover, it makes agriculture meaningfuland sustainable. (shrink)

Introduction In September of 1973, I defended my doctoral thesis in the field of European cultural history. I was two months shy of my twenty-seventh ...

Istanbul is home to a multimillion dollar transnational music industry, which every year produces thousands of digital music recordings, including widely distributed film and television show soundtracks. Today, this centralized industry is responding to a growing global demand for Turkish, Kurdish, and other Anatolian ethnic language productions, and every year, many of its top-selling records incorporate elaborately orchestrated arrangements of rural folksongs. What accounts for the continuing demand for traditional music in local and diasporic markets? How is tradition produced (...) in twenty-first century digital recording studios, and is there a "digital aesthetics" to contemporary recordings of traditional music? -/- In Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul's Recording Studio Culture, author Eliot Bates answers these questions and more with a case study into the contemporary practices of recording traditional music in Istanbul. Bates provides an ethnography of Turkish recording studios, of arrangers and engineers, studio musicianship and digital audio workstation kinesthetics. Digital Traditions investigates the moments when tradition is arranged, and how arrangement is simultaneously a set of technological capabilities, limitations and choices: a form of musical practice that desocializes the ensemble and generates an extended network of social relations, resulting in aesthetic art objects that come to be associated with a range of affective and symbolic meanings. Rich with visual analysis and drawing on Science & Technology Studies theories and methods, Digital Traditions sets a new standard for the study of recorded music. Scholars and general readers of ethnomusicology, Middle Eastern studies, folklore and science and technology studies are sure to find Digital Traditions an essential addition to their library. (shrink)

Pay equity is not only a manifestation of social behavior but also a reflection of gender attitude. In view of the close interactions between pay equity, gender attitude and cultural value, it is necessary to examine the social-psychological connotations behind the pay equity concept and to seek its theoretical basis and support at the philosophical level. By examining the main ideas in Chinese philosophy, this paper claims that traditional Chinese culture contains rich connotations related to the pay equity (...) concept and the pursuit of gender equality. These ideas can not only shape implicit nondiscriminatory gender attitudes but also inhibit the male superiority and intergroup prejudice through the self-regulation mechanism. The collision between traditional ideological insights and the modern pluralistic society will certainly promote the renewal of gender equity and concomitant changes in social attitude and employment behavior. (shrink)

_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which the (...) flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)