The cultural paradiplomacy of Barcelona since the 1980s: understanding transformations in local cultural paradiplomacy

This article seeks to explain the conditions for the emergence and institutionalization of the cultural paradiplomacy of the city of Barcelona and its local effects. The recognition of the city as an active participant on the international stage is based on its evolution from an industrial to a service economy. Against this backdrop, Barcelona’s city council, in common with many other city authorities operating in the world’s metropolises during the 1980s, initiated its own cultural paradiplomacy as a strategy for attracting capital and promoting local development. This policy became established as part of a new multilevel system of governance. This article analyzes the causes of the institutionalization of this activity from an intergovernmental perspective. It concludes that in the context of economic globalization, the emergence of cities’ cultural paradiplomacy is strongly related to the restructuring of the State and its external administration and to the intensification of the ‘cultural branding’ of cities as a tool for global competition.     

Positivism as cultural policy: art and social change in the works of Comte and Saint-Simon

When discussing positivism today, it almost systematically falls into the realm of epistemological discourse. This discursive turn is primarily the by-product of the social sciences’ now-traditional approach to positivism—a turn which has been seen as largely dismissive of positivism for its antiquated and reductionist approaches to research. Without trying to make an apologetic account of positivism, this article reframes it in its broader social and historical dimensions. In particular, this article aims to illustrate how positivism—as a social and political movement—conveyed a cultural policy. In other words, this article attempts to re-engage with the intellectual legacy of positivism to resituate its significance in cultural and artistic terms in French culture, society and beyond. By drawing on the notion of implicit cultural policy, this article retraces the steps of positivism and specifically builds a case for its influence on French cultural policy in the Third Republic.     

Policing paternity: historicising masculinity and sexuality in early-modern France

In early-modern working communities, masculinity for young lower-rank men was embedded in particular performances and practices of licit intimacy. This essay analyses the specific expectations and parameters for men as well as women through which communities acknowledged and validated expressions of youth sexuality while marking and policing boundaries beyond which youthful courtship could become threatening to household and neighbourhood stability. Young men and women were the focus of these efforts just as they themselves participated in the assessment of appropriate behaviour. These issues suggest an on-going negotiation and contestation about what was appropriate for single men and women in terms of intimacy, and a clear sense that a violation of the community norms carried consequences for men as well as women.     

Invincible blades and invulnerable bodies: weapons magic in early-modern Germany

In the world of the occult, as in other realms, the tools and methods chosen by women and men reflected acceptable ways of ‘doing’ gender. This paper will concentrate on magical spells and blessings intended to give men an advantage in sword fights, make them invulnerable, or turn them into perfect marksmen. Because magical practices associated with guns and blades were related to early-modern thinking about masculine power and performance, they were less harshly treated than the kind of magic more often associated with women. Many of these hypermasculine spells drew on contemporary medical beliefs about natural sympathies, including the idea that sympathies existed between the dead and the living. For this reason, invulnerability and weapon spells usually included materials from male corpses (for example, body parts, moss growing on dead men's skulls, and so on). As learned belief in natural magic waned during the Enlightenment, stories of magic blades and bullets retreated from courts and battlefields into the world of fiction and fantasy.     

The pit: landscape scars as potential cultural tools

A huge and continuously growing pit is about to divide the Swedish mining town of Malmberget into two halves. What once was the town centre is now a 200 metres deep hole, and private homes and key buildings like the old school and the church have had to be demolished or moved. The pit is a human imposed ‘landscape scar’ epitomising the town’s lost golden age of mining, its present situation of decline and uncertain future prospects – despite a recent recovery in the mining industry. Although the pit is decisively present in the local community, it is not articulated as significant, especially not from a heritage perspective. Why is this so? In this article, we examine the pit as a potential cultural tool for heritage processes, and find that it is indeed used by individuals in this respect, but not in collective memorialisation. We conclude that landscape scars definitely can constitute critical cultural tools, although they may not always need to be labelled as belonging to an ‘authorized heritage discourse’. Instead, the potential of the landscape scar is to enhance the amount and recognition of shared memories in the local community.     

Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open up opportunities for larger and more diverse alliances, and therefore new opportunities for Aboriginal people’s participation, activism and expression.     

Diversity and cultural policy: cultural citizenship as a tool for inclusion

At the crossroads of citizenship, cultural and diversity studies, I enter in the emerging debate on cultural citizenship. Culture is seen as a channel for diversity inclusion, and cultural policy carries the function of enhancing citizenship. My reasoning will follow two steps. First, in overviewing the recent literature, I identify two main drivers making cultural citizenship: the democratic/equality and the identity/national drivers. However, I will note that the debate is concentrated in the plurality of meanings of ‘culture’, and not, as I will argue as a second step, in the plurality of citizenship traditions: a liberal, a communitarian and a republican one. This view is at the basis of different approaches of cultural policies when we focus on them as enhancing cultural citizenship in diversity contexts. At the end, I will also contend that this can ground an interpretative framework capable of distinguishing current social practices and policies.     

EU media policy and/as cultural policy: economic and cultural tensions in MEDIA 2007

This article is an examination of the cultural and economic tensions that arise in the formulation and implementation of media policy in the European Union. Through an analysis of the MEDIA 2007 MEDIA Desk Germany. 2007. Interview with Aviva Silver, head of the MEDIA Programme, European Commission carried out by MEDIA Desk Germany in preparation of the Programme launch at Berlinale 2007 [online] Available from: http://www.mediadesk.co.uk/usr/images/news_images/interview_with_aviva_on_media_2007.doc [Accessed 17 May 2010] [Google Scholar] program, the authors investigate how the priorities of cultural policy and media policy interact and conflict. EU policy goals from the mid‐2000s onwards have emphasized attention to the economic potential of the creative and cultural industries, which complicates the cultural potential of audiovisual media. MEDIA 2007 MEDIA Desk Germany. 2007. Interview with Aviva Silver, head of the MEDIA Programme, European Commission carried out by MEDIA Desk Germany in preparation of the Programme launch at Berlinale 2007 [online] Available from: http://www.mediadesk.co.uk/usr/images/news_images/interview_with_aviva_on_media_2007.doc [Accessed 17 May 2010] [Google Scholar] in particular demonstrates these tensions, as the design of this policy mechanism emphasized audiovisual media’s potential for European economic growth as a precondition for achieving cultural objectives.     

The business relations,identities and political resources of Italian merchants in the early-modern Spanish monarchy: some introductory remarks

Abstract

This article offers a preliminary approach to the special volume entitled Business Relations, Identities, and Political Resources of the Italian Merchants in the Early-Modern Spanish Monarchy. It discusses the major issues and debates addressed in the five contributions collected here about the central role played by the Genoese, Florentine and Milanese commercial networks in the framework of a polycentric imperial structure as was the Spanish Monarchy.     

Protecting contemporary cultural soundscapes as intangible cultural heritage: sounds of Istanbul

This paper aims to evaluate culture and traditions of everyday life from a sonic perspective and to suggest ways for protecting characteristic sounds and soundscapes. This multidisciplinary research, having roots in such fields as soundscape studies, intangible cultural heritage (ICH), museum studies and sensory studies, explores the larger contemporary cultural soundscape of Istanbul. This paper also draws on the project The Soundscape of Istanbul (https://soundscapeofistanbul.ku.edu.tr/), which is archiving the contemporary elements of the cultural soundscape of Istanbul that were determined by public contribution, and outlines examples from this collection. Sounds constitute an inevitable part of daily life and are therefore very important as ICH. Thus, they deserve to be protected to strengthen cultural memory. However, sonic culture is twice endangered due to the physical characteristics of sound itself and the dynamic structure of intangible culture. Therefore, urgent protection of contemporary cultural soundscapes in the context of ICH is crucial for transferring the present sonic environments to following generations in order to maintain cultural identity.     

The dhow as cultural icon: heritage and regional identity in the western Indian Ocean

Dhows, the traditional sailing ships of the western Indian Ocean, are currently used in museums, heritage sites and popular culture as a symbol of a regional culture in the western Indian Ocean. While scholars have embraced the notion of seas as cultural or historical units, this type of ‘basin thinking’ is a recent phenomenon in the Indian Ocean. Over the last 150 years the dhow has gone from being a despised symbol of the slave trade and economic underdevelopment to representing a romanticized past and a regional identity. This article traces the parallel development of the idea of the dhow as a symbol of regional identity and changing perceptions of both the vessels and the region it is taken to represent. It argues that recent representations of dhows as cultural heritage represent a new and developing notion of regional identity within the western Indian Ocean.     

Place, national identity and post-socialist transformations: an introduction

This paper serves as an introduction to this theme issue on the topic of post-socialist identity politics surrounding nation building, national identity and nationalism. It presents an overview of the key processes of post-socialist identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) in order to contextualise this collection of papers. This introduction outlines the key processes of identity formation and the treatment of nationalism under conditions of state-socialism, and then identifies the main processes of identity formation which have emerged in discourses surrounding nations and nationalities in post-socialist CEE and the FSU. A short account of each of the papers in the theme issue is then presented to identify the common strands of their analyses of post-socialist nationalisms.