Suchergebnisse

The 'honour-shame syndrome' is an anthropological model originally developed in the sixties to describe Mediterranean cultural unity. The model came under heavy criticism, producing a veritable 'anti-Mediterraneanist' backlash. There is, however, a renewed interest in the regional paradigm. This article attempts an analysis of concepts of 'honour' in Malta, contextualising it within the broader ethnographic and linguistic evidence from the region. The author argues that 'honour' is a salient moral concept, and in fact, Maltese has a rich and highly nuanced discourse of honour, which includes both sexualised and nonsexualised aspects. While the author criticises the simplistic 'honour-shame syndrome' paradigm, he argues that honour needs to be considered in its own right as an important key to analysing the contemporary Maltese moral economy as it engages with 'modernity'.

The city has featured as a central image in utopian thought. In planning the foundation of the new and ideal city there is a close interconnection between ideas about urban form and the vision of the moral good. The spatial structure of the ideal city in these visions is a framing device that embodies and articulates not only political philosophy but is itself an articulation of moral and cosmological systems. This paper analyses three different utopian moments in three different historical epochs – Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602), the Choson dynasty foundation of the city of Seoul (1395) and the modernist utopian urbanism of the controversial Le Corbusier (1887–1965). In this analysis attention is drawn to the cosmological and moral visions articulated in these three 'images of the city' (Lynch). The opposition between rationalistic/mechanistic and religious/traditional urban design can prove to be an oversimplification that obscures the complex interrelations between the moral geometry and the natural alignments of the ideal urban form.

Social dancers thrive on the communication generated by improvised dance, inspired by the partner and the music, unpredictable and ever changing. ; peer-reviewed

"Contemporary life across the globe is awash with activities, enterprises, and programs that purport to enable self-transformation. But how easy is it for people to alter themselves? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores cross-cultural processes of self-change, as well as their related existential dilemmas. Focusing on projects, practices, and contexts of self-alteration, the authors in this volume create models for cross-cultural analysis of self-change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the "self" itself. Its essays begin with social processes that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. This volume shows that, once self-alteration becomes an explicit focus of study, exciting new themes appear for investigation. The essays identify a number of modalities, methods, and mechanisms through which people seek to alter themselves. These include self-alteration via engagement with religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; self-alteration through embodied participation in therapeutic programs, including gendered care services; self-alteration by involvement in political activism; and self-change through relationships with the "more-than-human.""--

'May you live in interesting times' was made famous by Sir Austen Chamberlain. The premise is that 'interesting times' are times of upheaval, conflict and insecurity - troubled times. With the growing numbers of displaced populations and the rise in the politics of fear and hate, we are facing challenges to our very 'species-being'. Papers in the volume include ethnographic studies on the 'refugee crisis', the 'financial crisis' and the 'rule of law crisis' in the Mediterranean as well as the crisis of violence and hunger in South America

Abstract
English-language studies of Korean drama (Korean TV serials) have tended to focus on the transnational consumption of drama in the context of the 'Korean Wave' (Hallyu). Analysing the classification and reception of Korean drama and its interaction with Korean audiences, this paper argues that there has been a significant shift both in the dramas produced and in the audience expectations and interactions with these texts. Building on twenty-one in-depth interviews and ethnographic data, the authors analyse the gendered structures of identification with the characters of dramas. Korean dramas are increasingly held to a standard of realism wherein audiences expect them to represent 'reality' rather than a fantastical escape from it. The authors argue, therefore, that dramas are also fulfilling a social function in being able to represent and generate dialogue over social problems in contemporary Korean society.