Cultural participation in Europe: shared problem or shared problematisation?

Europe has a ‘problem’; it is becoming a ‘less cultural continent’ as fewer Europeans are ‘engaging in cultural activities’. This conclusion has been reached due to the findings of the latest cross national cultural participation survey. This paper questions the existence of this ‘problem’ and instead suggests that there is a shared problematisation across Europe sustained by common discursive archaeology that employs various discursive strands in relation to a dominant institutional discourse. The argument is that the ‘problem’ of ‘non-participation’ legitimates a ‘solution’ that predates its emergence: the state subsidy of arts organisations. The paper recaps the comparable problematisations that the researchers have previously identified in the policy texts of their respective countries. It progresses to consider three distinct but interwoven discursive strands upon which the problem representation in both countries, and potentially across Europe, appears to rely.     

Cultural policy through the prism of fiction (Michel Houellebecq)

Cultural policy studies tends to talk about fiction without actually using it. A typical move is to place it in an aesthetic realm to be protected, situated and/or critiqued. This is an eminently worthwhile activity. However, this paper explores some ways in which works of fiction may, following their own dynamic, yield significant perspectives upon the world of cultural policy itself. In what ways do fictional works offer us prisms through which to reappraise the worlds of cultural policy? What are the effects of the reconfigurative imaginative play to which they subject the institutions of that world? How are the discourses of cultural policy reframed when redeployed by novelists within free indirect style or internal monologue? The article begins by distinguishing four broad modes in which fictional works refract the world of cultural policy, and then analyses in more fine-grained detail two novels by the leading French writer Michel Houellebecq.     

Access to culture in Croatian cultural policy: moving towards explicit policies

In this paper through the analysis of the access to culture issue in the Croatian cultural policy agenda, we illustrate the current cultural policy developments in Croatia in the broader European context. Taking the differentiation between explicit and implicit policies at both macro and micro level we analyse discourses on access to culture in the Croatian cultural policy at the constitutional level, parliamentary political parties’ level, the governmental level and the level of cultural organisations. On the one hand the policies regarding access to culture remain mostly implicit and revolve around traditional models connected to instruments dating back to socialism; while on the other selected cultural organisations develop instruments for fostering it where European projects have an influence. The orientation more towards cultural production issues and less to access to culture and cultural participation issues draws similarities of cultural policy developments in Croatia with the general European cultural policy framework.     

POSTMODERNISM,SOCIAL SCIENCE,AND HISTORY: RETURNING TO AN UNFINISHED AGENDA

Recognizing that the vogue of postmodernism has passed, Simon Susen seeks to assess whatever enduring impact it may have had on the social sciences, including historiography. Indeed, the postmodern turn, as he sees it, seems to have had particular implications for our understanding of the human relationship with history. After five exegetical chapters, in which he seems mostly sympathetic to postmodernism, Susen turns to often biting criticism in a subsequent chapter. He charges, most basically, that postmodernists miss the self‐critical side of modernity and tend to overreact against aspects of modernism. That overreaction is evident especially in the postmodern preoccupation with textuality and discourse, which transforms sociology into cultural studies and historiography into a form of literature. But as Susen sees it, a comparable overreaction has been at work in the postmodern emphasis on new, “little” politics, concerned with identity and difference, at the expense of more traditional large‐scale politics and attendant forms of radicalism. His assessment reflects the “emancipatory” political agenda he assigns to the social sciences. Partly because that agenda inevitably affects what he finds to embrace and what to criticize, aspects of his discussion prove one‐sided. And he does not follow through on his suggestions that postmodernist insights entail a sort of inflation of history or historicity. Partly as a result, his treatment of “reason,” universal rights, and reality (including historiographical realism) betrays an inadequate grasp of the postmodern challenge—and opportunity. In the last analysis, Susen's understanding of the historical sources of postmodernism is simply too limited, but he usefully makes it clear that we have not put the postmodernist challenge behind us.     

THE TRUTH HURTS: VERA SCHWARCZ'S HEARTFELT QUEST

Vera Schwarcz offers a penetrating examination of the concept and meaning of “truth” in China (antiquity to contemporary) and elsewhere (primarily in the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible to contemporary thinkers). Highly critical of the sharp turn toward cultural relativism which abandons the search for truth in the name of everyone having his or her own situated truths, she examines in particular how scholars, philosophers, and writers living in dark times have sought to cut through the enforced amnesia of oppressive regimes, especially that of post‐1949 China. This broad‐ranging search brings numerous great minds into a kind of transtemporal, transcultural conversation, voices rarely, if ever, discussed between the covers of the same book.     

“Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the cultural politics of agency, and explores the relationship between cultural form, migrant experience and social change. It traces the emergence of a range of literary forms in south China and how these new cultural forms provide hitherto unavailable space to contest the state- and market-driven narratives, which tend to link dagongmei’s (rural migrant women’s) sexuality with inexperience and vulnerability on the one hand, and criminality, immorality and incivility on the other. The paper suggests that these newly emerging cultural forms present alternative perspectives on the practical circumstances, moral rationalities and emotional consequences that condition and shape migrant women’s sexual experience, and for this reason, they constitute important points of intervention.     

Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases

For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the Supreme Court. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the Court's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer an adaptation of the jurisprudential regimes framework as a device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying Reed v. Reed (1971) as the cut point of such a regime, I then use Reed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.     

Cultural Worldview and Preference for Childhood Vaccination Policy

In the face of the reemerging threat of preventable diseases and the simultaneous vaccine risk controversy, what explains variations in Americans’ policy preferences regarding childhood vaccinations? Using original data from a recent nationwide Internet survey of 1,213 American adults, this research seeks to explain differing public opinions on childhood vaccination policies and related issues of governance. As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky's grid‐group cultural theory of policy preference formation suggests, cultural biases have a significant impact on the formation of preferences toward various vaccination policies. Hierarchs are in support of mandatory vaccination, oppose religious and philosophical exemption, and believe the government should preside over vaccination‐related decisions. Fatalists strike a bold contrast in their opposition to mandatory vaccination policy and support for religious and philosophical exemptions and the role of parents in deciding on vaccinations. Falling between hierarchs and fatalists, egalitarian support for vaccinations is stronger than individualists‘.     

The Icelandic medieval monastic garden - did it exist?

In the multidisciplinary project presented here, 12 known monastic grounds in Iceland were surveyed by a group of medievalists from different fields in the summers of 2009, 2010 and 2011. The aim of the survey was to increase knowledge of the Icelandic monastic garden and of the plants that were known and used there; to look for possible medieval cultural relict plants; to observe continental influence on the island; and to vitalize discussion and research. Landscape and plants were surveyed at the 12 monastic sites, and full botanical investigations made. Many of the plants found have a medieval past as medicinal and utility plants, and some of their properties may have been common knowledge to medieval Icelanders. An investigation of written sources and archaeological and archaeobotanical findings from excavated sites added to the investigators’ knowledge. So were there monastic gardens in Iceland in the Middle Ages? The answer is a rather confident yes. With all the evidence combined, the investigators were able to trace the deliberate use of medicinal, food and utility plants in the monastic contexts. Whether they were cultivated, tended in situ, gathered growing wild or imported is another matter. Continental influence was more evident than has previously been observed.