Situating banal nationalism,the culture wars,and civil religion: governing localized geographies of national identity in Indiana

Various material forms of national identity have become ubiquitous features of the post-9/11 American cultural landscape. This research specifically examines the ‘In God We Trust’ (IGWT) license plate in the state of Indiana as a material expression and territorialized form of national identity. While conceptually anchored in banal nationalism research, exploring the spatial patterns of adoption or non-adoption of IGWT license plates by Indiana residents is only possible through situating this research through the mediating lens of the culture wars and civil religion. Although the IGWT license plate project legislatively materialized through the localized spatial networks of non-state actors in the context of a new and conservative state–citizen relationship firmly anchored in the culture wars, adoption behavior is also mediated through the much broader influence of civil religion. We conduct a quantitative analysis to determine license plate spatial distribution by county, but more importantly to explore the sociodemographic dimensions of IGWT license plate adoption and non-adoption. While our results generally mirror the sociodemographic findings of social issue-based electoral geography, the imbrication of banal nationalism, the culture wars, and civil religion as materially expressed by the IGWT license plate yields an ideologically different and broader dynamic when compared to culture wars defined by national identity.     

Catholic-Confucian Mortuary Practices in a Rural Manchurian Cemetery

Historical Archaeology - Catholic missionaries were active among rural populations in Manchuria, in northeast China, around the turn of the 20th century. Their presence influenced everything from...     

Cultural policy as development policy: evidence from the United States

Cultural policies and cultural projects in the United States have been reframed to emphasize their economic benefits to cities. New alliances between arts advocates and place promoters are apparent at all levels, but are most prominent locally. These new alliances are facilitated by the changing interests of local officials and business people, who have come to believe there is economic value in the arts and of arts administrators, for whom attracting broader public support has become imperative. In some cities, entirely new organizational structures have sprung up to plan and implement projects that serve cultural and economic development advocates simultaneously. Such new institutions are most prominent in more economically disadvantaged cities.     

A Tile Pavement from the Queen's Chamber,Clarendon Palace,Dated 1250-2

This article undertakes an object-focused study of a single work of art of great material and visual complexity: the Wallace Collection pax. This object stimulates an important discussion on how the making, materials and form of a work of art are fundamental to unravelling the object’s function and meaning for a contemporary audience. In placing at the core of the object a rare example of a late medieval amber Vera icon, the Wallace Collection pax also opens up a wider discussion on the nature and popularity of amber as a material of artistic expression in the later Middle Ages. In basing this article on the physical and material history of the work of art, I hope to illustrate the importance of going back to first principles when undertaking object-based research, and I intend to highlight the complex interaction between material and form in late medieval art.     

An Angel on the Wind: How Heroic Policy Narratives Shape Policy Realities

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and positivists, who contend that legitimacy is grounded in falsifiable claims. The central questions of NPF are: What is the empirical role of policy narratives in the policy process and do policy narratives influence policy outcomes? First, the contributions of NPF scholarship at three levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—are examined. Next, necessary conditions of a policy narrative are specified, accompanied by detailed discussion of the narrative components: narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. Finally, an empirical illustration of NPF—a case study of Cape Wind's proposal to install wind turbines off Nantucket—is presented. Although intercoalitional differences have long been studied in the NPF scholarship, this is the first study to examine intracoalitional cohesion or the extent to which a coalition tells the same story across narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. NPF is a new approach to the study of the policy process that offers empirical pathways to better speculating the role of narrative in the policy process.