Social_Theories

Modernity of Media

2005-05-05T12:22:00.000+08:00

In Garnham (2000), he said that we are now in a new battle between the Ancients and the Moderns where the old Moderns have become the Ancients and the new Moderns are the post-modernists. To extremely simplify what makes the transition to modernity, we include:

1. Increased specialization or division of social labour in all social spheres, not just economic - although economic specialization may have made the other forms possible;

2. The development of generalized structures of social coordination, particularly those called by Habermas, following Parsons, the media of money and power;

3. What is sometimes called secularization but is more accurately described as the rise to dominance of culture of critical rationalism and scientific world view, and declining tradition and religious world view.

Now with the market as a general mechanism for social coordination and economic development, the media also offer a challence to thinking how they should be regulated. The basic assumption is the neo-classical model of the market: no agent is powerful enough to determine either the price of factors of production, consumers have a choice of substitutable utilities, market entry and exit are costless, and cost of production can be passed on to consumers.

This model of markets produces demand and supply curves. This model is being critiqued as:
1. Assuming falsely that information is a cost-free good and all economic agents are rationally fully informed.
2. Assuming falsely that factors of production and products are homogenous, and therefore investment shifting is relatively costless.
3. Assuming falsely that both investment and purchasing decisions are discrete/divisible and each can be made in isolation of market information.

As for media as technologies, the discussion on technological determinism is done within the framework of: Is technology the prime mover in social change, a fate which we simply have to accept and adapt to, whether we judge its results to be positive or negative? In response to this, on page 69, Garnham said that "ironically the social shaping has nothing to shape". A closely related approache to the relation between the two is Path Dependency, but it operates in a lower level of generality such as standard for electrical current, computer operating system, etc.

Stoicism, Realism & Nominalism

2005-05-05T11:07:00.000+08:00

In Abraham (1966), a discussion on Sociology before Comte analysed among others the Roman and the Greek, where the first was more legalistic and regarded law as a destination, and the latter regarded it as a tool towards a moral purpose.

Stoicism, where people with moral obligation to serve the interest of others or the "greater good" of humanity in order to overcome the outside world and find peace within themselves, influenced the Middle Ages' brotherhood of man.

Plato and Aristotle held an organic theory of society, with the division of the society into ranks. In Classical Greece, man came first and then society, but in Middle Ages, society came before man. The ruling doctrine was Realism. It believes that the reality of a thing does not reside in the particular thing itself, but in the universal or abstract idea of which that particular thing is an imperfect reflection. A particular man is only an imperfect, unimportant reflection of the real man.

Nominalism emerged as a critique of Realism, that the name given to a thing or a man is about that thing or that person, and it is such particular things or persons which are real and not the abstract ideas of them. If Realism reflected the more static, conservative, rigid attitude of mind, Nominalism did the more progressive, dynamic and scientific attitude.

Data Collection & Data Analysis in Ethnographic Research

2005-04-21T10:37:00.000+08:00

Data collection methods:
1. Spradley's questions: descriptive, structural, contrast questions.
2. Gatewood's systematic data collection: free-listing, pile sort, triadic comparison.
3. Handel's Life History interviewing: Freudian psychoanalitic, Mead and Blummer's symbolic interactionist, Gergen's (and Blummer?) aleatoric.
4. Ethnographic decision tree interviewing (lead to yes/no answers)

Each data collection method relates to the below data analysis method in the same order:
1. Domain analysis:
a. Spradley: taxonomic analysis, componential analysis.
b. Ryan: cutting and sorting, word lists and keywords in context, word co-occurence/collocation, metacoding*.
2. Gatewood's consensus analysis (somewhat quantitative)
3. Handel's Life History analysis
4. Ethnographic decision tree modelling (yes + no answers flow in formation resembling a tree and its branches).

*explanation:
Cutting and sorting: cut out each quote and pile the similar ones together.
Word list: identify all the unique words in a text and count the number of occurence.
Keyword in context: piling up together words in similar meaning.
Word co-occurence: piling up together words that represent a similar meaning.
Metacoding: examine and matching data with a priori themes.

Don't forget to look for both the explicit as well as the tacit!

Now Ryan and Bernard give tips in selecting which method to employ, because some techniques are more effective under some conditions than others. There are five dimentions to evaluate:

1. Kind of data: textual/non-textual, verbatim/non-verbatim, long/short.
It is not effective to look for transitions, metaphors, lingueistic connectors, theory-related material, missing data, in shorter and less complex text.

2. Expertise
Metaphors, linguistic connectors, indigenous typologies, missing data is suitable to be done by ethnographers fluent in the language of text. Alternatively those who are not, can employ cutting and sorting, repetitions, transitions, similarities and differences, theory-related materials, word-list, and co-occurence. Those who are good at matrix/visual can go for word co-occurence and metacoding, otherwise we can opt for scrunity techniques, cutting and sorting, word-lists and keywords in context.

3. Labour: scrunity techniques is out, computer generated word-listing is in!

4. Number and kinds of themes: some are more productive than others.

5. Reliability and validity: some are more clear and objective than others.

Figure 1 (p.102):
Textual data?
No. Easy: repetitions, similarities and differences, cutting and sorting. Difficult: missing data, theory-related material, metacoding.
Yes. (Continute to verbatim text)

Verbatim text?
No. Easy: repetitions, similarities and differences, cutting and sorting.
Yes. (Continute to rich narratives)

Rich narratives?
No. (Continute to brief descriptions)
Yes. Easy: repetitions, transitions, similarities and differences, cutting and sorting. Difficult: indigenous typologies, metaphors, linguistic connectors, missind data, theory-related material, word-list and keyword in context, word co-occurence.

Brief description? (1-2 paragraphs only)
No. Easy: repetition, similarities and differences, cutting and sorting. Difficult: indigenous typologies, word-lists and keyword in context, word co-occurence.
Yes. Easy: repetitions, similarities and differences, cutting and sorting. Difficult: indigenous typologies, metaphors, missing data, theory-related material, word-lists and keyword in context, word co-occurence, metacoding.

Qualitative Analysis from Ezzy (2002), Kirk & Miller (1986), Ryan & Bernard (2003)

2005-04-21T07:48:00.000+08:00

Qualitative research provides general enlightenment on particular contexts, structures and issues. It contributes in a broader function to social policy process, to shed a light in the formulation, implementation and evaluation stages. Policy formulation involves defining the problem, reviewing previous responses to the problem, and evaluating current options. Policy implementation involves translating policies into programs of action, while at the same time monitor the changes in the problem. Policy evaluation examines the changes in understandings and interpretations, monitor changes in the condition of problem, and desribe the organisational workings of particular programs that may have affected the outcomes.

Rigourousness of qualitative analysis deals with choice of correct method, and ethics deals with correct moral conduct. Therefore when conducting qualitative research, there are three models to follow:
1. Natural science model: theory, novelty, empirical consistency, credibility, transferability/reliability, reflexivity/clarity.
2. Interpretive model: scepticism/common sense, close scrunity/noticing details, thick description, focus on process, appreciation of subjectivity, tolerance for complexity.
3. Political model: positionality (influenced by the author's standpoint), community as arbiter of quality, voice on behalf of the silenced or marginalised, critical subjectivity/reflexsive self-awareness, sacredness (respect to dignity and justice), sharing the privileges for the good of the participants and community.

All research has some digree of bias because all research is integrally political. Feminism, postmodernism, and hermeneutics all reject the ideal of identifying one true unbiased interpretation.

Objectivity itself is an ambiguous concept because it refers to the heuristic assumption that everything can be explained in terms of causality. It has two components:
1. Reliability
2. Validity.
There are three kinds of validity:
a. Apparent validity: this can be done by looking beyond the apparent and ask less sensible/silly questions to fish for more elaborative and personal information.
b. Instrumental validity: to look beyond the "obvious", refrain from taking basic knowledge for granted, and label our variables appropriately. This often comes up in the study of gender and conformity.
c. Theoretical validity: this is usually rooted from misunderstanding of the concepts because the survey researcher does not really know his/her variables are and therefore affects the whole result of the study.

When analysing text, steps to take are:
1. Discovering themes and sub-themes: through inductive approach (data) or apriori approach (prior understanding)
Things to note: this is the basis and most crucial, must be explicit about it for easy assessment, and in jargon-free vocabulary.
2. Winnowing themes to a manageable few (decide which are the important ones)
3. Building hierarchies of themes of code books
4. Linking themes into theoretical models

Scrunity techniques when looking out for a theme:
1. Repetitions
2. Indigenous typologies or categories (unfamiliar local terms)
3. Metaphors and analogies, e.g. our marriage is like "the rock of Gibraltar"
4. Transitions: pauses, changes in voice tone, presence of particular phrases might indicate shifts in topic/theme
5. Similarities and differences (similar to Spradley's contrast questions)
6. Linguistic connectors: "since", "because", "as a result" indicate causal relations. "if", "rather than", "instead of" indicate conditional relations. "is" indicates taxonomic categories, e.g. a liat is a kind of cat, etc. (Ryan & Bernard, p.92)
7. Missing data, because people tend to leave out information that "everyone knows" (Spradley calls it abbreviating process)
8. Theory-related material (bringing in a priori approach)

Narrative Analysis by Catherine Kohler Reissman (1993)

2005-04-20T13:46:00.000+08:00

There are three practical models when studying narration:

1. Life Story (first done by anthropologist Ginsburg in 1989)

- Narrative explosure through which informants construct their positions, is to be compared linguistically and substantively.
- Stories give shape to "disorderly" experiences
- People do not always begin at the beginning
- Pay attention to sequence!
- Assumption: translation from spoken (conversation) to written language (personal narratives) is not a problem. Language is a transparent medium.
- Diversity displayed not so much by the constrasting themes different individuals choose to emphasize, but by the contrasting ways individuals choose to put their accounts together, that is, the form of telling.
- Conclusion: people make meaning through sequence

2. Linked Stories (first done by sociologist Bell in 1988)

- Approach: listen with minimum interruptions, ask open ended questions using the informants' own words (repeating their words)
- Meaning is produced through the interaction of two speakers (interpersonal context)
- Reduce narratives to a core narrative: useful at the first analytic stage when looking for gaps/holes to clarify, but may exclude other important features that are essential to a fuller interpretation.
- By studying the sequence of stories in an interview, and the thematic and lingustic connections between them, an investigator can see how individuals tie together significant events and important relationships in their lives.
- The analyst identifies narrative segments, reduces stories to a core, examines how word choice, structure, and clauses echo one another, and examines how the sequence of action in one story builds on a prior one.
- Emphasis is on language: what people say what they do and who they are
- Narrative (rhetoric) is synonymous with story (limited genre)
- Each story have a recognizable beginning and end (coda) and consists of linked categories (episodes) connected to each other temporally and/or causally
- An analysis of the process of attunement in social interaction

- Conclusion: people make meaning through what is said and how it is said. Really focusing on the narratives/language

Poetic Structures (first done by Riessman in 1990)
- Stanza form of speech
- To see how emotional difficulties voiced
- Through dialogue, text created within a text (a multivoiced narrative)
- Discourse is more "felt" and "sounded" like a narrative and therefore difficult to code
- Narrative is framed with a metaphor that binds the beginning inextricably with its conclusion
- The metaphor lends structural coherence to the narrative and suggets how it is bounded (where it begins and ends)
- Dilemmatic: the actual vs the possible, the real vs the wished-for (use of hypothetics)
- Narration does not resolve the dilemmas
- Note: Really focussing on the narratives/language

Each raises a set of questions:
1. How is talk transformed into a written text and how are narrative segments determined?
2. What aspects of the narrative constitute the basis for interpretation?
3. Who determined what the narrative means and are alternative readings possible?

Culture... One Step at a Time by J B Gatewood (1999)

2005-04-16T13:53:00.000+08:00

Four data collection techniques:

1. Free-listing: ask informant to name or write all the items they can think of that match a given description.

Advantage: simple and generally well understood by informants, do not impose preconceived response categories, it works well with non-literate as well as literate informants, their results enable interesting comparisons both across domains and across informants.

Problems: the usual free-listing task is virtually unconstrained, such that it is not always clear when informants are finished. And informants would seldom enjoy free-listing tasks, because of regular synonymity, it is difficult to know how many different items appear in the sample's list.

Solution: included an explicit time limit, specify a mazimum number of items to be identified, hierarchical relations among items in a domain are not captured by a listing task, after completing the task, ask each informant to list alternative names for each item in his or her list, compile an initial aggregate table, then ask several of the more knowledgable natives to judge the distinctiveness of the items.

2. Pile-sorts: to ask informants to group items based on their overall similarity, group similar items in a same pile.

Constraints: there must be more than one pile, not every item can be in a pile by itself.

Advantages: the task is easy to administer and informants enjoy doing it, the task can be done with relatively many items.

Problem: have limited utility with respect to comparing individuals.

Solution: imposing uniform constraints

3. Triadic comparisons: present items three at a time and ask informants to pick the one that is most different from the other two. It is important to randomize the presentations, both among and within the triadic sets.

Advantages: informants are quick to understand this task, the resulting data enables comparisons among individuals.

Problem: with the number of items goes up, the number of triads required increases dramatically.

Solution: using balanced incomplete block design (BIB) - each informant only work on a fraction of the total number of triads.

4. Consensus analysis: to find a "common culture" between two people, the thing that they express in the same manner, is the true culture.. "it assumes that the correspondence between the answers of any two informants is a function of the extent to which each is correlated with the truth".

Assumptions: common truth(the informants all come from a common culture), local independence (informants' answers are given independently of other informants), homogeneity of items (questions are all the same difficulty).

Limitation: the battery of questions must be a single type (all multiple-choice, all similarity matrices, etc), the questions must ask informants for conventional truth or judgements, not their personal preferences or histories.

(Thanks to Guilan for her handout).

Last Chapter of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-06T16:58:00.000+08:00

Now we come to the final process of doing ethnographic research: writeing an ethnography. It is a translation process that requires a deep understanding of both cultures as well as the ability to communicate the meaning of the studied culture to the readers.

Always remember:
- A good ethnographic translation shows, a poor one tells.
- The only way to learn to write it to write.

The translation process is a dual tazk:
1. Enter the cultural scene
2. Render the cultural meaning that reader will understand (the impression of being there)

Levels of ethnographic writing from the most general to the most specific:
1. Universal statement
2. Cross-cultural descriptive statements
3. General statements about a specific culture
4. General statements about a specific cultural scene --> theses
5. Specific statements about a cultural domain
6. Specific incidents statements --> ethnographic novels

Steps to write:
1. Select an audience
2. Select a thesis
3. Make a list of topics and creat an outline (structure)
4. Write a rough draft for each section
5. Revise the outline, creat subheads
6. Edit the rough draft
7. Write introduction and conclusion
8. Reread the manuscript and add examples if the text is too dense
9. Write the final draft

(Ed note: Thanks to Genevieve for her handout).

Chapter Fourteen of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-06T15:24:00.000+08:00

Now let's examine in greater details what we have had so far, through Inventory Approach. It means we are going to identify all the different domains in a culture, perhaps dividing them into categories like kinship, material culture, and social relationships. However, there is a need to go beyond inventory to discover the conceptual themes that people use to connect domains.

Morris Opler introduces the concept of Cultural Theme: we could better understand the general pattern of a culture by identifying recurrent/repetitive themes.

The characters of Cultural Themes can be of:
- High degree of generality
- Can be detected by examining the dimensions of contrast from several domains
- When a single idea recurs in more than one domain, it suggests the possibility of a cultural theme
- Appear as fol sayings mottos, proverbs, recurrent expression
- Usually tacit

If we spend more time in the informant's environment, the chance of discovering them is better. The list of all cultural doains are called Cultural Inventory.

Ways of identifying the themes are:
1. Search for similarities among dimensions of contrasts, e.g. "urban nomads".
2. Identify organizing domains, e.g stages in the directory assistance call.
3. Make a schematic diagram of the cultural scene (visualization of relationship among domains).
4. Search for universal themes: social conflict, cultural contradictions, informal thechniques of social control, managing impersonal social relationships, acquiring and maintaining status, solving problems.

Then we write a summery overview of the cultural scene, and make comparisons with similar cultural scenes. The summary helps to pull together the major outlines of the cultural scene that we are studying, by condensing everything we know down to the bare essentials, and focusing our attention on the relationships among the various parts of the culture.

Chapter Thirteen of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-06T14:21:00.000+08:00

What is componential analysis?
Componential analysis is the systematic search for the attributes (components of meaning) associated with cultural symbols. If we look for similarities, we do a domain and taxonomic analysis, but when we look at differences, we do a componential analysis. The contrasts among the members of a category as best thought of as the attributes or components of meaning for any term.

It is useful to extract meaning, more dimensions, completion, classify/structure, cros-checking/confirming --> this all to identify missing data, get the holistic descriptive view, formulate formal cultural analysis and cultural theory (e.g. "How do domain like "negara" pass on? They did not exist 200 years ago!) --> which will lead to our thesis.

The goal is to map as accurately as possible, the psychological readlity of our informant's cultural knowledge. There are two approaches for this:
1. Discovering prychological reality: discovering attributes that are conceptualized by informants.
2. Discovering structural reality: investigators make free use of their own concepts without being concerned whether their analysis feflected the attributes salient to those who knew the culture.

The steps in making a componential analysis:
1. Select a contrast set for analysis
2. Inventory all contrasts previously discovered
3. Prepare a paradigm worksheet
4. Identify dimensions of contrast which have binary values
5. Combine closely related dimensions of contrast into ones that have multiple values
6. Prepare contrast questions to elicit missing attributes and new dimensions of contrast
7. Conduct an interview to elicit needed data
8. Prepare a completed paradigm

Chapter Twelve of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-06T11:42:00.000+08:00

After we are done with descriptive questions, we move on to asking contrast questions. There are a number of discovery principles underlying various methods of ethnography, i.e:
1. The Relational Principal: harps on finding the relation of a symbol to all other symbols.
2. The Use Principle: emphasis on asking how a symbol is used rather than asking what it means. The purpose is to discover tacit meaning which exists in every culture.
3. The Similarity Principle: the meaning of a symbol can be discovered by finding how it is similar to other symbols. E.g. graveyard and bathtub (totally different but both serve as flops or place to sleep by homeless people).
4. The Contrast Principle: by finding out how a symbol is different from others, the meaning of the symbol coul dbe discovered. E.g. by saying something, we draw attention to what a sthing 'is' but that also suggests what 'it is not'.
5. Unrestricted: means a folk term contrasts with all other folk terms in a language. E.g. a house is not a book, man, nor woman.
6. Restricted: means a folk terms belongs to a set of terms which are both alike and different.
7. Contrast Set: operates in the background. At the cait level of awareness, these sets of symbols enable us to understand the meaning of our culture.

There are 7 types of contrast questions:
1. Contrast Verification Question: the ethnographer has identified difference between two folk terms; and then he asks the informant to veryfy whether that difference btween the two is confirmed or not. This one has to use more than two folk terms.
2. Directed Contrast Questions: requires familiarity with at least one known characteristic of one folk term. And then the question asks if the informant knows any other terms that contrast on that characteristic.
3. Dyadic Contrast Questions: presents informants with two folk terms and ask for any difference btween the two. E.g. "Can you think of any other differences between .. and ..?"
4. Triadic Contrast Questions: based on the fact that differences always imply similarity. It presents the informant with three folk terms and asks which two are alike and which ine is different from others.
5. #3 and 4 are followed by Contrast Set Sorting Questions: the informant is asked to sort (using cards) all the folk terms in a contrast set in two or more categories in terms of their similarities or differences.
6. Twenty Questions Game: this game is played and instead of 'people', 'animal', 'mineral' a folk term from a contrast set is picked by the ethnographer.
7. Rating Questions: those which ask the informan to make contrasts on the basis of rating criteria like very easy, difficult, boring, exciting, etc.

(Ed note: Thanks to Manjari for her handout)

Chapter Eleven of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-02T22:54:00.000+08:00

How to do a taxonomic analysis?
First, select a tentative focus. For example which part of the sailing trip do we want to find out more, like kinds of storms, ways to pass time on watch, parts of the ship, etc. It takes either:
1. Surface analysis: to find out as many domains as possible. Aim: holistic view of a culture.
2. In-depth analysis: to find out as many information as possible on a few selected domains. Aim: to unpack the complexity of a culture.

Development research sequence steps begin with a wide focus then narrow down in this flow:
1. Locating an informant
2. Interviewing an informant
3. Making an ethnographic record
4. Asking descriptive questions
5. Analysis ethnographic interviews
6. Making a domain analysis
7. Asking structural questions
8. Making a taxonomic analysis
9. Asking contrast questions
10. Making a componential analysis
11. Discovering cultural themes
12. Writing the ethnography

How to decide on particular domain(s)?
1. From informant's suggestions (don't directly ask him/her to suggest!)
2. Theoretical interest (which side of the story you want to know), e.g. kinds of teachers, kinds of groups in school.
3. Strategic ethnography (goal of study), e.g. to find out the extent to which the jail was a dehumanizing experience for inmates.
4. Organizing domains: what comes up naturally - perhaps the most suitable for first timers?

Folk Taxonomies
A folk taxonomy is a set of categories organized on the basis of a single semantic relationship (it actually works like common sense). For example, the categorization of parts of a police department. That it consists of Patorl, Administrative, Investigative, Chief, and Internal Affairs. And that to report a bike stealing, is to report to Juvenile which is under Crimes against Property (not the Crime against People) together with Auto Theft, and Burglary.

Steps in doing Taxonomic Analysis:
1. Select a domain for taxonomic analysis: start with the one we have the most information of.
2. Identify the appropriate substitution frame for analysis. Substitution frame is the tool that organize all included terms into Subset. For example, bull's barber (included terms) is a kind of barber (subset), inmate's barber is a kind of barber, head trusty is a kind of trusty (p.145).
3. Search for possible subsets among the included terms (see above example).
4. Search for larger domains (bigger hugger to give title to all the subsets), e.f. kinds of people in the bucket.
5. Construct a tentative taxonomy.
6. Formulate structural questions to verify taxonomic relationships and elicit new terms.
7. Conduct additional structural interviews (when necessary).
8. Construct a completed taxonomy.

Chapter Ten of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-02T22:32:00.000+08:00

When asking structural questions, they should be adapted to each individual informants, and employ the following principles:
1. Concurrent Principle: ask structural questions concurrently with descriptive questions with alternation.
2. Explanation Principle: asking question in the most extended version.
3. Repetition Principle: 'Can you think of any other "..."?'
4. Context Principle: summarizing and confirming what we have known and want to ask - as part of the question.
5. Cultural Framework Principle: always start with lighter questions about the informant's personal life first.

Kinds of structural questions (p.126-131):
1. Verification questions
a. Domain Verification questions: "Are there different kinds of ...(cover term).. ?"
b. Included Term Verification questions: "Is ..(cover term).. is a kind of ..(domain).. ?"
c. Semantic Relationship Verification questions: "Would (person A) say ..(cover term).. is a kind of ..(domain).. ?"
d. Native-Language Verification questions
2. Cover Term questions
3. Included Term questions
4. Substitution Frame questions
5. Card Sorting Structural questions

Chapter Nine of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-02T21:05:00.000+08:00

To find other kinds of domains through a more systematic procedures, we do domain analysis. Once we have tentatively identified domains in a culture, we must test it with the informants to confirm or disconfirm them. Semantic relationship would make an efficient way to identify domains because number of semantic relationships in any culture is quite few and they appear to be universal.

Informants usually express themselves by using terms that are linked together by means of semantic relationships, only the semantic relationships are hidden by the more apparent folk terms for things and actions. For example: how would we know the status of relationship between one man and one woman who walk together? Are they mother and son, or husband and wife, or friends, or cousins, etc?

Oswald Werner suggested semantic relationships can be categorized into:
1. Taxonomy or Inclusion: e.g. an oak is a kind of tree.
2. Attribution: e.g. an oak has acorns.
3. Queueing or Sequence: e.g an oak goes through the stages of acorn, seedling, sapling, mature tree, etc.

There are two kinds of semantic relationships:
A. Universal Semantic Relationships
1. Strict inclusion: X is a kind of Y.
2. Spatial: X is a place in Y, X is a part of Y.
3. Cause-effect: X is a result of Y, X is a cause of Y.
4. Rationale: X is a reason for doing Y.
5. Location for action: X is a place for doing Y.
6. Function: X is used for Y.
7. Means-end: X is a way to do Y.
8. Sequence: X is a step/stage in Y.
9. Attribution: X is an attribute/characteristic of Y.

B. Informant-Expressed Semantic Relationships
For example when a waitress-informant says: The worst kind of hassle is when people pay separately. Semantic relationship found: Paying separately (is a kind of) hassle.
When there is little ambiguity about the underlying relationship, the ethnographer can proceed by using one of the universal relationships.

Steps in domain analysis are:
1. Select a single semantic relationship.
2. Prepare a domain analysis worksheet (p.113).
3. Select a sample of informant statements.
4. Search for possible cover terms and included terms that appropriately fit the semantic relationship.
5. Formulate structural questions for each domain.
6. Make a list of all hypothesized domains.

Chapter Eight of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-02T09:52:00.000+08:00

Ethnographic analysis is the search for the parts of a culture and their relationships as conceptualized by informants. It involves a way of thinking that can be viewed from more than one way. An informant's cultural knowledge is more than random bits of information: this knowledge is organized into categories, all of which are systematically related to the entire culture. The aim of this analysis is to discover this organization of cultural knowledge, therefore we have to avoid imposing categories from outside.

The usual squence is:
1. Selecting a problem. Same general problem is: What are the cultural meanings people are using to organize their behavior and interpret their experience? Same typical narrowed-down question would be: What are the cultural meanings people are using to organize their kinship behavior and interpret this aspect if their experience? We do not do ethnographic study for the sake of doing an ethnographic study. There should be a problem that we want to solve/find out.
2. Collecting cultural data (this is where it differs from typical social science research which fornulate hypotheses first).
3. Analyzing cultural data.
4. Formulating ethnographic hypotheses.
5. Writing the ethnography. Remember: writing is a refined process of analysis.

Relational theory of meaning (p.95-99):
1. Cultural meaning systems are encoded in symbols.
2. Language is the primary system that encodes cultural meaning in every society. Language can be used to talk about all other encoded sysmbols.
3. The meaning of any symbol is its relationship to other symbols in a particular culture.
4. The task of ethnography is to decode cultural symbols and identify the underlying coding rules. This can be accomplished by discovering the relationships among cultural symbols.

Symbols (things that we can perceive or experience) have referential meanings.

Domains (p.100-105)
A domain is any symbolic category that includes other categories is a domain. It names things in the informant's world, and consists members that share at least one feature of meaning. It has the below elements in its structure:
1. Cover Term
2. Semantic Relationship: e.g. (x) is a way to (y)
3. Included Terms
4. Boundary

To arrive to decision of "domains" we must first:
1. Select a sample of verbatim interview notes.
2. Look for names for things.
3. Identify possible cover terms and included terms from the sample.
4. Search through additional interview notes for other included terms.

Chapter Seven of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-02T09:35:00.000+08:00

Processes within ethnographic interviewing are:
1. Developing rapport: proceeds through Apprehension, on to Exploration (listening+observing+testing, by repeating explanation+ restate+ask for use), on to Cooperation (of the informant), then Participation (of the informant).
2. Eliciting information: by asking ethnographic questions.

There are 3 main ways to discover questions:
1. Record (typical) questions heard in everyday life in the environment.
2. Dig for the question from the informant (what would be an interesting question about .., etc).
3. Descriptive questions (in the most expanded way of asking it to gain expanded answers):
a. Grand Tour questions (Typical, Specific, Guided)
b. Mini Tour questions (Typical, Specific, Guided, Task-related)
c. Example questions
d. Experience questions
e. Native language questions (Direct, Hypothetical-interaction, Typical-sentence)
(p.86-91)

Chapter Six of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-01T19:09:00.000+08:00

An ethnographic record consists of field notes, tape recordings, pictures, artifacts, and anything else which documents the cultural scene under study.

Everytime we make "Ethnographic discovery" it will lead into our "Ethnographic record" and in turn will lead into "Ethnographic description". These steps shapes and reshapes each other because each time we confirm and reconfirm feedback from the previous steps (p.70).

Two pinciples to be kept in mind when making an ethnographic record:
1. Language identification principle: to have an ethnographic record that reflects the same differences in language usages as the actual field situation.
2. Verbatim principle: to complement language identification principle. How? Take a tape recorder, introduce it slowly, and watch for opportunities to tape record even small part of an interview.

There are four kinds of field notes (consider it as a place to think outlout):
1. The condensed account: the scribbles taken on the spot. Its value comes when it is expanded after completing the interview or field observation.
2. The expanded account: transcription of the recorded interview.
3. Field work journal: diary-like record of experiences, ideas, fears, mistakes, confusions, breakthroughs, and problems that arise during field work. Each journal entry should be dated.
4. Analysis and Interpretation: a link btween the ethnographic record ant the final written ethnography.

Chapter Four & Five of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

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Everyone can become an informant. But to select a good informant there are at least five criterias:
1. Thorough enculturation (at least 1 year in the new environment).
2. Current involvement (still in the environment).
3. Unfamiliar cultural scene (thoroughly enculturated informant vs thoroughly unenculturated ethnographer = perfect!).
4. Adequate time (alternatively try "tandem informants" or other people in the same situation).
5. Nonanalytic (to find tacit relationships and patterns).

Three most important ethnographic elements when interviewing informants are:
1. Make clear of explicit purpose so that the interviews can go the more formal direction.
2. Constantly make ethnographic explanations on what the project is all about, on writing things down or taping, not to use translation competence (in native language, please!), what method of interview will be used this time (if it takes many days), and which kind of question you are going to use.
3. Ethnographic questions: Descriptive (grand tour.., typical day..), Structural (what are all the kinds of.., ways to..), Contrast questions (comparative).

Elements of an interview would be like this:
1. Greetings
2. Giving ethnographic explanations
3. Asking ethnographic questions
4. Asymmetrical turn taking
5. Expressing interest
6. Expressing cultural ignorance
7. Repeating
8. Restating informant's terms
9. Incorporating informant's terms
10. Creating hypothetical situations
11. Asking friendly questions
12. Taking leave

Chapter Three of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-01T16:47:00.000+08:00

Informants are native speakers (of a particular culture or sub-culture) and to understand them we have to let them to be our teachers. Informants will speak in their own language and privide model for the ethnographer to imitate before they become a source of information. Our informants are ordinary people with ordinary knowledge. Don't confuse them (or let them confuse us) with traditional roles such as friends or relatives. Because then they would assume you have already known them and what they experience and not go into details. We must also not be confused with social science roles like subjects, respondents, and actor. Because we will then formulate such questions that take a different stance (more superior, hypothesis testing, etc) than simply an ethnographer interviewing an informant.

Some principles to bear in mind:
1. Consider informants first.
2. Safeguard informants' rights, interestes, and sensitivities.
3. Communicate research objectives.
4. Protect the privacy of informants.
5. Don't exploit informants.
6. Make reports available to informants.

Chapter Two of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-01T15:58:00.000+08:00

Ethnographers deals with both the language they speak and the language spoken by their informants. Through understanding their language, we Discover, and Describe.

What to be aware of?
When interviewing, listen closely and look for specific terms they use even if they appear to be identical to our window of reference. Semantic differences exist, and by acknowledging it we would discover how the natives categorize experience. When doing ethnography in our own society, we must first seriously study the way people talk and understand their "translation competence". Understanding towards this competence will greatly handicapped when relying on interpreters.

How about the "culture scenes"?
So not every Indonesian businessman opens a flower shop. Within the same cultural groups in complex societies, there are cultural scenes known to some but not to others. When interviewing them within their capacity, they tend to translate things for you (the outsider). They will try to spoon-feed you with the concept not of their own, but the concept they think you'd understand. This needs to be tactically anticipated. But then again, every ethngraphic description is a translation.

Types of descriptions depending on the level of insider vs outsider's meanings:
1. Ethnocentric descriptions: Very much outsider's language, very less insider's language.
2. Social science descriptions: Much outsider's language, less insider's language.
3. Standard ethnographies: in the middle.
4. Monoligual ethnographies: 45% outsider's language, 55% insider's language.
5. Life histories: less than 40% outsider's language, more than 60% insider's language.
6. Ethnographic novels (e.g. Return to Laughter): 25% outsider's language, 75% insider's language.

Chapter One of The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley, 1979)

2005-04-01T13:34:00.000+08:00

Culture:
The culture concept comes down to behavior patterns associated with particular groups of people, that is to 'customs' or to a people's 'way of life' (Marvin Harris). This behavior patterns, customs, and a people's way of life can all be defined, interpreted, and decribed from more than one perspective. That is why to gain the native's (insider's) point of view is crucial. This shared system of meaning is learned, revised, maintained, and defined in the context of people interacting.

Culture as a system of meaningful symbols has much in common with Symbolic Interactionism (a theory which seeks to explain human behavior in terms of meanings). Facts that this theory plays on are:
#1. Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them.
#2. Meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows.
#3. Meanings are handled in, and modified through, and interpretive process used by the person dealing with the things he encounters.

What do ethnographers do? Making cultural inferences.
Because culture cannot be observed directly, we need to "get inside their heads" by observing other people, listening to them, and then making inferences (efforts to arrive to a logical conclusion of reasons from factual evidence). The evidence derived from what people say, the way people act, and the artifacts people use.

How to do it?
We start by outlining a hypothesis (from initial interview) and test it over and over again to be certain a particular system of cultural meaning is shared by these people. It's not generalization because each person may have different attitude towards one cultural meaning in the system. E.g. the act of surveillance in the kampongs (example provided by Dr Thompson) one person may find it as the benefit of living in such a close-knit society, but another may hate it. The theory (findings/result) is built from the ground up.

What to find?
The initially aimless interviews, will take its shape as new information adds in. Explicit cultural knowledge is easy to find because it's usually expressed in a direct manner. The challenge is to learn about the tacit cultural knowledge. Just as Malinowski said: we cannot expect to obtain a definite, precise and abstract statement from a philosopher, belonging to the community itself. The native takes his fundamental assumptions for granted. E.g. the way a cook does certain routine (example provided by Dr Rao) as his inexplainable trick to do the traditional dishes his mother used to do. He never realized he needed to do such manouver on the dough until an observant asked him why he did so.

What is ethnography for? Systematic understanding.
Comparative work in anthropology could be ruined if you impose Western concepts into non-Western cultures. To describe and explain the regularities and variations in human social behavior that provides people with a way of seeing the world. But to learn other people's culture we are usually imprisoned by our own taken-for-granted reality and be "culture-bound". Therefore before you impose your theories on the people you study, find out how these people define the world! Forget your assumption that in this day and age the world is a melting pot.. because we do not share a homogeneous culture.

Cultural Industry

2005-03-11T16:02:00.000+08:00

Cultural Industry (as viewed from the elitist point-of-view), is production of cultural goods in the manner of industrial assembly-line manufacturing, with profit as the main objective. The production operations has became standardized repetitive operations, resulting in standardized, passive consumption patterns.

The influence of this "turn" among others are commercial marketing of "popular" culture (dumbing down the high arts), and domination and manipulation of indifferent masses consuming homogeneous "mass culture". This enjoyment is deliberately created to have a soporific effect.

Soporific effect refers to regressive kind of consumption that leads to repressing natural thinking process, that leads to pacific and escapic behavior, which in turn provides the chance for authorianism to rule.

Vertical & Horizontal Integration

2005-03-11T15:54:00.000+08:00

Vertical integration involves the consolidation of processes occuring at different levels of an industry. It means a company will have a product/service to offer along the consumption chain, e.g. Disney Company owns film production studios, film distribution networks, and cinemas, along with video production companies, distribution outlets, and television channels. This enables the company to monopolize different stages of the production-distribution process.

Whereas horizontal integration refers to a process whereby one company acquires and integrates into its operations numerous firms that are producing the same product for more efficiency and reduce cost, e.g. a newspaper company buying a paper mills, or to monopolize the market, e.g. EMI owned 65 record companies in 37 countries around the world including Virgin, Chrysalis, and Capitol record labels. (du Gay, et. al., 1997).

Pseudo-Individuality

2005-03-11T15:35:00.000+08:00

According to Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), pseudo-indivituality is the way that the culture industry assembled products that made claims to originality but which when examined more critically, they exhibit lille more than superficial differences. That a movie or novel book will usually starts with a character, meets someone, falls in love. That any part of an orchestra symphony can be plucked out, changed the key, and fitted perfectly into another. "The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale-locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of milimeters".

Synergy

2005-03-11T14:51:00.000+08:00

Synergy is the interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their cobined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects, e.g. 1+1 not equals to 2, but equals to 3 or 4.

In business strategy, it refers to forging new links between cultural texts, by bringing together what the company currenty has in order to mutually enhancing each other through one new product. For example, Sony tried to do a synergy through Last Action Heroes (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) where the soundtrack be produced into an album, sung by a rock star from a Sony Music label. The rock star to appear in the movie and the movie star to appear in the music video. The movie star to use a Sony cellular phone in the movie. The movie itself will be made into video game, amusement ride, and a virtual reality version - to show in a theatre chain owned by Sony. Prints of the film would be produced with Sony's new digital sound system, etc.

Freudian Psychoanalytic & Symbolic Interactionist

2005-03-11T08:28:00.000+08:00

There are different approaches of interpretive methodology. Two of the approaches which are considered as polar opposites are the Freudian Psychoanalytic and the Symbolic Interactionist.

Freudian Psychoanalytic view
In Philip Rieff's summary of Freud's approach (which lacks optimism) he explained that Freud took development for granted, that he looked for the sameness, the static, and latent pasts in emergence, dynamic, and the present. He believes that childhood experience determines the forms of later experiences. To him, sameness and latent pasts were more important than emergence. People from this school of thought: 1) Erikson (1950) and Levinson (1978) regard the person passing through a series of predetermined stages and that the life course consists of a series of built-in stages. 2) Gergen (1980) established two theories of the life course: the stability account and the ordered change account, both are also deterministic.

But then he moves on, proposing an alternative called "aleatoric" that focuses on the flexibility of developmental patterns, and view the person as an active agent, capable of self-direction and change. A statement of Brim (1974) of this view is that any man can change in any way, at any time. Among the two most influential theorists are: George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer (Mead's student).

Symbolic Interactionist view
On the concept of emergence, Mead presented that: 1) the novel, leads to: 2) expression through emergence, that leads to: 3) reorganization, that leads to: 4) reconstruction through reaction. And it goes round in circle. The fact that a person has to act in a certain common fashion, doesnot deprive them of originality. Blumer confirmed the argument that it is not what to interpret, but how to interpret it. That the combination of psychological equipment (intentions, whishes, feelings, attitudes) and social organization (norms, values, group prescriptions) does not necessarily result into a certain (predetermined) interpretation. Therefore every new human interaction brings a unique novelty, emergence, reorganization, and reaction.

However, Blumer (1969) also said that social action, since it has a career, is recognized as having a historical dimension which has to be taken into account in order to be adequately understood.

Conclusion
The gap between the two polars is not as deep as it first appeared. Every life course contains threads of continuity, and historical dimension adds complexity and qualification to the concept of emergence in it.
(Handel, G., 2000)

Commodification & Appropriation

2005-02-22T13:29:00.000+08:00

Despite the enormous efforts made throughout the production process (among others through design and marketing processes) to create markets, profit are always dependent upon the ability of producers to interpret the changes in meaning that products undergo throughout their consumption. In this sense, production and consumption are not completely separate spheres, but rather mutually constitutive or one another.

Cycle of Commodification is where producers make new products or different versions of old products as a result of consumers' activities. Whereas Appropriation is where consumers make those products meaningful, sometimes making them achieve a new register of meaning that affects production in some way. In this sense, the meanings that products come to have are constructed in this process of dialogue - even though it is rarely an equal one in terms of power relations between production and consumption. (du Gay, et. al., 1997).

Consumption of Culture, Habitus

2005-02-22T12:56:00.000+08:00

There are at least 3 different approaches in the subject. First, the perspective of Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man, 1964, talked about "true needs" vs "false needs". Second, Jean Baudrillard argued that meaning does not reside in an object, but in how that object is used. Thus needs are cultural. Akio Morita of Sony also members of this school of thought. Third, Pierre Bourdieu and Thorsten Veblen who came from similar thought on Social Differentiation.

Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, argued that the consumption of goods acted as a primary index of social status. That no matter how poor people may be, their consumption practices always tend to have identity value and not simply use value. Whereas Bourdieu talked about consumption being both material and symbolic activity at the same time. This is what expressed in what he terms Habitus.

Habitus is the unconscious dispositions, the classificatory schemes and taken-for-granted preferences (continuous active discrimination) which are evident in an individual's sence of the appropriateness and validity of his or her taste for cultural goods, and which not only operarte at the level of everyday knowledge but also inscribed onto the individual's body. Different social classes can be seen to have a different habitus and hence to operate each with a distinct taste structure and lifestyle. (du Gay, et. al., 1997).

Culture Industry

2005-02-22T12:38:00.000+08:00

The term "culture industry" was used by the first time by Horkheimer and Adorno in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947. Originally they had wanted to use the term "mass culture" but decided to change it because they want to exclude something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art.

They connected the idea of industry to culture to make the point that the growth of cultural production was drawing on methods adopted and used in industrial manufacturing.

The technique of the culture industry is from the beginning one of distribution and mechanical reproduction and remains external to its object, unlike technique in works of art which is concerned with the internal organization of the object itself.

The irony in the relationship between individuals as consumers and the culture industry, is that although culture industry supply them with prescribed fun, individuals consciously regard it as blessings. This is discussed further in "Consumption".

Mercantilism

2005-02-13T06:10:00.000+08:00

Iberian mercantilism is a doctrine which was developed back in Egypt era. The primitive version of Mercantilism defined as the idea that exports should always exceed imports in order to accumulate gold for the greater power of the state. This is later on known as "bullionism" as named by Shepard B. Clough.

The modern version of the doctrine was developed in the Netherlands, UK and France. It works together with Nationalism - complemented each other - bringing together kings and people and created a "we - they" attitude with regard to foreign nations.

Public Sphere

2005-02-04T17:38:00.000+08:00

Public sphere is a concept where one is interacting with others and with society at large. Much of the thought about the public sphere relates to the concept of identity. One's identity in the public sphere and one's identity in the private sphere can become dissonant.

In the spirit of post-modernism, questions about the public sphere have turned to questions about the ways in which hegemonic dictate what discourse is and is not allowable in the public sphere, and in turn dictate what can and can't be formulated as a part of one's identity.

According to Jurgen Habermas, it was the development of competitive market capitalism that provided the conditions in 18th century Britain for the development of both the theory and practice of liberal democracy. Within where public sphere was protected from the power of both Church and State. Cost of entry for each individual was dramatically lowered by the growth in scale of the market. However, this space for a rational and universalistic politics was destroyed by the very forces that had brought it into existence. The development of the capitalist economy in the direction of monopoly capitalism led to an uneven distribution of wealth, to rising entry costs to the public sphere and thus to unequal access to and control over that sphere.

Pseudo-Individualization

2005-02-03T22:45:00.000+08:00

Theodor Adorno who believes that capitalism has become more entrenched, is best known for his critique of mass culture in contemporary societies. He argued that culture industries manipulated the masses. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive, because the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content.

Pseudo- individualization is a phenomenon he saw of mass-produced culture to be a danger to the high arts which is more difficult to understand. This false needs in the culture industries was created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs are freedom, creativity or genuine happiness.

Bernard Gendron (1986) asserts that pseudo-individualization is the "indisputable capitalist complement to part-interchangeability". Marketing industry refers this term as "product differentiation".

Circuit of Culture

2005-02-03T16:39:00.000+08:00

Any social analyses of cultural goods, begins and ends with these interelated processes that consists of: Representation, Identity, Production, Consumption, and Regulation. Taken together, they complete a sort of circuit - which is termed Circuit of Culture. Because this is a circuit, a study will not be complete before one whole round of study is completed.

The key is in the articulation or unification of a number of distinct processes whose interaction can and does lead to variable and contingent outcomes. Therefore, rather than priviledging one single phenomenon - such as the process of Production - in explaining the meaning that an artefact comes to possess, only in a combination of processes that the beginnings of an explanation can be found.

This approached was studied by Richard Johnson (1986) and Paul du Gay (1997) separately.

Cultural Imperialism, Assimilation & Integration

2005-02-02T07:41:00.000+08:00

Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting the culture or language of one nation in another. It is usually the case that the former is a large, economically or militarily powerful nation and the latter is a smaller, less affluent one. That means one dominating culture forces its existance and practice on one or more other culture(s).

Cultural assimilation is a term referring to a different phenomenon. It is a process where there is one dominating culture and there are incoming foreign cultures that blends into the dominating culture. Although the process is voluntary, the term has a negative connotation.

Cultural integration is another different process that relates to various of cultures co-exist with one another with significant individual presence, features and characters. The preservation of individual cultures is done in community level, and traditional laws each carries lay below the state laws.

Symbolic Analyst & Transitional Organization Man

2005-02-02T07:29:00.001+08:00

In "Varieties of transnational experience", Ulf Hannerz puts forward an argument that the nation is in decline and that transnationalization of culture is of growing significance.

Robert Reich (1991) defined three main categories of advanced societies: production services (doing endlessly repetitive tasks), production services (a must, external as well as internal, such as retail sales people, waiters, janitors, etc), and symbolic-analytic services (doing non-standardized manipulation of symbols to identify and solve problems, such as research scientists, engineers, lawyers, teachers, etc).

The latter, Symbolic Analysts, are linked to global webs of enterprise, no longer particularly dependen on the economi performance of other categories of people in their national context, and have been seceding from the rest of the nation. Eric Hobsbawn called this "nation retreating" where people build convention centers, research parks and international airports, only to withdraw into their own private habitats (with security guards if necessary).

More attached to its organization, there is also this Transnational Organization Man. Kenichi Ohmae describes him as not being autonomous in relation to every organizational contect, and although quite mobile and his sense of identity is bound up with the life of that corporation.

Fordism & Sonyism

2005-02-02T07:28:00.001+08:00

Fordism is a term coined after Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company be the first to apply assembly line manufacturing to the mass production of affordable automobiles in 1913. He is credited with the creation of a middle class in American society. Factory workers worked 8-hour days, paid daily, and offered an innovative profit-sharing plan.

This industrial-bases system of production and consumption known then, shifted into an information-based system that operates through more flexible methods of exploitation, accumulation, and control in the 1980's. This is known as Post-fordism, or more popularly, Sonyism.

Sony which was founded by Akio Morita of Japan, is a global company. Its operations, including production processes, research and developmend, and marketing, were not subject to any geographical boundary. They unify products and packaging with simultaneous entrance to markets in different countries, while at the same time customize their products in shape, colours, and function, to target to different segmented markets. Advertising agency plays an important part in creating different images to suit different target markets.

Sonyism is also more or less the kind of manufacturing industry happening today. With different parts of a product being subcontracted to other factories or other countries. This is what is known as offshoring.

Modernism

2005-02-02T07:27:00.000+08:00

The term Modernism was originally applied to the forward-looking architects, designers and artisans who from 1880's on forged a new and diverse vocabulary principally to escape Historicism, the tyrany of previous historical styles. It emphasized on crystallization of international style and developed various regional trends, such as Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Brutalism.

The Modern Movement gained momentum after World War II when its theories were influential in the planning and rebuilding of European cities. The work of Le Corbusier is perhaps most representative of the underlying principles of the movement; other notable early modernists include Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.

Modernism, while a Western movement, has been both influenced by, and influential upon, other societes. One example is the absorption of the styles of Japan towards a taste for horizontality in domestic structures, functionalism, and tectonicity, as well as spareness of vocabulary and the use of line rather than ornament to create style. The translations of Japanese and Chinese literature showed to many Western artists that there was a long, continuous and consistent tradition which was not based on the norms they were used to.

Currently, architectural postmodernism, a reaction to the movement, is developing alongside such modernist styles as high-tech.

Nationalism

2005-02-02T07:25:00.000+08:00

Nationalism is a movement with conscious aim to unify a nation. A nation is an imagined community of people, sharing same ideology and emotional sense of belonging to same cultural identity. Nationalists fight to preserve the features of identity, the independence, the wellbeing, and the glory of one's own nation.

Nationalist movements became an important factor in European politics during the 19th century; since 1900 nationalism has become a strong force in Asia and Africa and in the late 1980s revived strongly in Eastern Europe.

Nationalism is not bounded by political legitimacy nor certain geographical boundaries. For example: Palestine is a nation, but not yet a state. Nation-state is a political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by people sharing a common culture, history and language.

Glocalization

2005-01-26T22:08:00.000+08:00

The term 'glocalization', which first started appearing among academic circles during the late 1980s, combines the words 'globalization' and 'localization'. The idea is to overcome the current ideological gridlock facing advocates and critics of globalization by having local officials mitigate the effects of global pressures on local conditions.

This is also understood as the application of global-local nexus - due to financial, technological or political reasons - which is usually significan in marketing strategies. The goal is to establish a link between the benefits of the global dimension - in terms of technology, information and economics – and local realities. "Local" not only refers to a particular country, but also the larger confines of locality such as ASEAN and European Union (EU).

Glocalization contributes to a more pluralistic and integrated governance of globalization, striving to correct the shortcomings of market dynamics through a double movement: on the one hand, bringing the benefits of globalization to local levels; on the other supporting and empowering local realities so that they can contribute with their perspectives, options and demands to the global decision-making process.

Creolization

2005-01-26T17:27:00.000+08:00

Creolization is a term coined by Ulf Hannerz which derived from 'Creole'. It was originally used to explain Hybridization. Hybridization is the process of cultural interchange where language, literature, food, dress, and social relations are all affected by the interplay of cultures.

Creole itself is the expansion of a simplified Pidgin into treated as a native language with consistent, obligatory grammatical structure. Pidgin is a simplified form of speech that is usually a mixture of two or more languages, has a rudimentary grammar and vocabulary, is used for communication between groups speaking different languages, and is not spoken as a first or native language, for example what happens in Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, Réunion, Hawaii, Pitcairn, etc.

Only recently, scholars fully begun to understand Creolization as a mutual exchange rather than the acculturation of colonized peoples to a dominant culture.

Focusing on diverse settings and different aspects of culture, David Buisseret, Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Mary L. Galvin, Richard Cullen Rath, and J. L. Dillard examine the process of Creolization such as: its origins, historical and modern meanings of the term, and the various manifestations of the complex, continuing process of cultural exchange and adaptation that began when Africans, American Indians, and Europeans came into contact with each other.