Suchergebnisse

Argues that early Greek & Roman terminology & attitudes regarding blacks were not colored by racism. Although the first European accounts of African peoples often used a color-term to designate blacks, it is contended that the term "Ethiopian" carried no stigma of inferiority. The circumstance in which Greco-Romans encountered blacks was frequently within the military arena &, therefore, the image of the black as a warrior (vs savage) was reflected in the literature from Homer to the sixth century AD. It is argued that many scholars have misinterpreted the classical artist's interest in Negroid types in failing to accept that Greek & Roman artists regarded skin color as nothing more than a geographic accident. It is asserted that blacks faced no institutional barriers within the Greco-Roman world & were welcomed as priests & Monks in both Isiac & Christian worship. 34 References. M. Greenberg

Considers urban spaces that tend to support & define community interaction at the boundary between the physical & the virtual world, drawing on the secondary literature. It is suggested that urban forms, eg, the shopping mall & TV, promote a kind of disjunctured space-time relationship that supports the phenomenological experience of virtual reality. A prior form of community space, the Greek agora, is considered as an appropriate metaphor for assessing the nature & significance of cyberspace. Like the agora & the modern shopping mall, cyberspaces are simulated & temporal & can be viewed as sites of cultural seepage. The construction of space in a particular mall, the West Edmonton Mall (Alberta), is compared to similar processes at work in the virtual habitat created by Lucasfilm & Quantum Computer services. It is argued that such marginal urban spaces already constitute virtual environments whose elements have recently been transplanted into the virtual realm. The conclusion to be drawn is that if cyberspace is ever to produce a true communal space, it must develop a proper balance of interaction, leisure, & commerce. 39 References. D. Ryfe

The idea of progress has in recent years increasingly been put into question. The key experience contributing to disengaging the idea of progress from the idea of rationality has been the ecological crisis. This crisis has made modern culture look like it fosters a way of organizing social life that is self- destructive. The crisis has nourished cultural movements counter to modernization. There are groups and discourses, everyday ones and intellectual ones, that plead for reenchantment as opposed to disenchantment. Modern culture has started to react to this experience by putting into question its key concepts: rationalization and rationality. Modernization based on rationality appears to be only one of many alternative ways of organizing modern social life. It appears to be nothing but the social form forced upon the majority of societies in the world by a dominant European culture and its American and Russian derivatives. Modernity is a cultural force that has imposed upon us a form of social evolution that cannot control its own consequences. New, alternative ideas and movements are increasingly being directed against this type of modern rationality. These counterprocesses are not adequately described as antimodern or traditionalistic regressions. Instead, they represent another type of rationality and rationalization within the legacy of modern culture. The increasing concern with nature that we experience today is symptomatic of a fundamental cultural cleavage within the culture that underlies, accompanies and regulates the development of highly complex societies in European-type modernization processes. This cultural cleavage is traceable to the Semitic and Greek origins of modern culture. Two conflicting traditions, one of bloody sacrifice and one of unbloody (vegetarian!) paradise, still define the cultural universe within which we live. Expanding the notion of cultural traditions constitutive for the European experience of modernization and conceptualizing it as the manifestation of competing codes of modern culture, we are able to identify not one but two types of relationships with nature in modern society. Thus we arrive at two types of rationality encountered in modern culture: utilitarian rationality and communicative rationality, and at two types of culture within modern culture: culture as profit and culture as communication. Ultimately, we have the outline of a new theoretical notion of progress. It is one that puts into question any social theory premised on its own progressiveness in terms of the European version of progress. The current ecological crisis has destroyed the last bastion of the belief in natural progress, the mastery of nature. Social theory should continue the task of de-illusioning this self-ascription, of disengaging European-style progress from the notion of modernity.