Cultures in Process
Encounter and Experience
1st Edition
Published on 22. September 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
X, 172 pages
978-3-89528-753-4 (ISBN)
Description
Cultures in Process: Encounter and Experience is a wide-ranging collection of essays from the more traditional areas of literary, cultural, and linguistic scholarship, but also from the performance arts, ethnography, gender studies, musicology, sociology, and psychology. The first section deals with the central question of process, and provides examples of how it may be seen as evolving. The second set looks at forms and experiences of cultural encounter that shape social practices and modes of cultural expression, be they those of expatriates in India and Spain, musical traditions in China and performance art in Brazil, or the clash of tradition and modernity in sexual practices in the Arabian Gulf region. This followed by cultural encounter from the vantage point of linguistics: language and culture in intercultural encounters, code-switching among first and second generation bilinguals, and the connections between identity, language, and culture in translation. The analysis of literature is at the center of the fourth selection of contributions: encounter and identity formation in the Indian diaspora, conflicting memories of home and cultural heritage with the new cultural memory, and identity formation in the context of socially dictated racial prejudices. The final papers provide case studies of cultural processes at multifarious levels - including the ways in which South African concepts and practices of "indigenous" culture have been subject to (re-)definition in a changing political context, but also the meaning of personhood and identity when normative concepts are called into question by illnesses such as Alzheimer's, and, finally, two possible concepts of dynamic process in culture as we read Carlyle against the foil of Warburg.
More details
Persons
Stephan Gramley, senior lecturer at the English Department of the University of Bielefeld, where he has taught and published on the English language with a special emphasis on varieties of English and contact between the English language and its neighbors; currently work on a history of English with emphasis on language contact.
Ralf Schneider, professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bielefeld. Research interests and fields of publication include cognitive approaches to literature, literary sociology, and war in British literature and culture. His current work focuses on the narrative reconstruction of experiences of migration.
Content
Preface
Conceptualizations
Editors' comments
Heinrich Schäfer: The Praxeological Square as a Method for the Intercultural Study of Religious Movements
Sabine Coelsch-Foisner: Evolution and Metamorphosis: Two Contradictory Concepts of Change in H.G. Wells' Work
Encounter and Experience
Editors' comments
Nadia Giguére: Experiences of Cultural Encounters among Western Expatriates in India: Three Modalities of Negotiation Processes
Béatriz López Medina: Spanish Castles in the Air as a Cultural and Writing Experience: Time to Talk about a New Travel Literature Subgenre?
Hon-Lun Yang: The Manifestation of Cultural Processes in the Chinese Symphonic Tradition
Cristina F. Rosa: Neguinho & Negão: Performances of Masculinity within the Afro-Brazilian Practice of Capoeira
Annemarie Profanter and Stephanie Ryan Cate: Tainted Love - Shades of Gray: Sex, Marriage, and Family in the Arab World of the Gulf. Anal Sex, Kissing, Oral Sex - Gradients of Deviancy
Alan Thompson: How Culture is Brought into International English Interactions
Malgorzata Mas: Grammatical and Phonological Outcomes of Bilingual Encounter: Principles of Code-Switching (CS) in English and German with a Polish Substrate
Sabine Strümper-Krobb: Translation as Cultural Metaphor
Sissy Helff: From India to Australia: Multicultural Australian Literature in Process
Nadia Butt: 'Strange Encounters': Negotiating the Ambivalence of Transcultural Memory in Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain
Lee Moore: The Social Impact of Non-Convergence in William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust
Heike Hartung: First Person, Third Person, No Other Person? - The Cultural Dynamics of Dementia and Old Age
Andrea M. Lang: Negotiations about Culture - Defining 'Tradition' in South Africa
Felix Sprang: Carlyle and Warburg - the Dynamics of Culture as a 'Process of Devastation and Waste'
Notes on the contributors