Journal articles: 'Jerusalem International Cultural Center for Youth' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

AbstractThe ninetieth anniversary of the World Union enables us to highlight our achievements. In 1973 we moved the international headquarters from New York to Jerusalem and built a magnificent cultural/educational centre there. We pioneered the development of a dynamic Reform/Progressive movement in Israel consisting of congregations, kibbutzim, an Israel religious action centre and educational, cultural and youth programmes. We became active leaders in the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization. We established synagogues and educational programmes in the Former Soviet Union, Europe, Latin America and the Far East, thus fulfilling our mandate to perpetuate Jewish life wherever Jews live. We formulated an ideology of Reform Zionism as an antidote to the contracting Jewish identity induced by contemporary diaspora conditions. Whereas we encourage aliyah for Jews who want to live in Israel, we are adamantly opposed to those who advocate aliyah as a positive response to anti-Semitism. Instead, we demand that European democracies guarantee equal rights and full security to Jews as well as to all other groups in society.

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In the days after the Israelis ended their siege on 18––19 April 2002, a veritable army of visitors descended on Jenin refugee camp——journalists, human right activists, NGO representatives, international aid workers, parliamentarians, UN personnel, solidarity delegations——for visits of varying length and objectives not always clear to the residents. My own mandate was very specific: As a psychologist who had worked in Palestine for a number of years, I was to help put together a preliminary evaluation of mental health needs and mobilizable human resources, mainly through "debriefing" sessions both with residents most directly affected by the events (e.g., the newly homeless and internally displaced) and with local personnel (e.g., medical and paramedical teams, teachers, youth workers). I was part of a team that included representatives of UNICEF and the Jerusalem Coalition for Psychology (Palestinian Counseling Center, Women's Center for Legal and Social Counseling, Spafford) sent to help UNRWA and local NGOs working in the psychosocial field.

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Emboldened by American partiality for the Israeli occupation and the feeble Arab-Islamic support for the Palestinian cause, Israel has been taking advantage, over the last five years, of the current events and changing conditions prevailing in the regional Arab system. The Israeli occupation authority employs the two contingent devices of education and the economy in occupied Jerusalem as a base for counter-action in its desperate effort to hit the collective political consciousness that demands terminating occupation, liberation and self-determination. The occupation authority in occupied Jerusalem has employed a systematic scheme to isolate the city from the rest of the West Bank territories. Their aim is to destroy its trade movement in order to tighten the loop of hegemony around the vital economic and social sectors, and to deprive the Palestinian Authority from returns of tourism. Life for the residents of the city has become complicated in every possible way, prompting them to abandon their city. All this would be a part of a ‘voluntary immigration’ policy as a prelude to Judaizing the city, evacuating its residents, replacing them with settlers and, ultimately, dropping the city off the partition claims. The measures adopted by the occupation authorities take advantage of the educational and economic dimensions and employ them as leverage for penetrating the articulating points of the resisting Jerusalemite society. This goal is being achieved by shaking the foundations of the educational system and by obstructing endeavours seeking to improve and propagate it. The occupation authority continued to perpetrate its scheme of ‘displacement/settlement’ when it recently expelled 100,000 Jerusalemites from their city. In light of the aforesaid, this research examines, as its main theme, the impact of putting the educational and economic dimensions to use in the Israeli project against occupied Jerusalem, on the fate of the city, and on the equation of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The paper also argues that it would be natural that a popular youth movement emerging in the face of Israel’s intransigence will nominate its own political leadership, dissociated from the political leadership of the Palestinian factions, so that insurrection can continue.

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This article is dedicated to an overview of the International Youth Forum “Russia and the Turkic World: The Outlook of Youth from Russia and Kyrgyzstan” through the lens of relevant problems of international cultural and humanitarian cooperation in the space of former Soviet Union. This event, organized by the Saint Petersburg Society of Russian-Turkish Relations in the Area of Science and Culture with the support of the Presidential Grants, can be rightfully considered the first relations international event of such format in history of modern Russian-Kyrgyz relations. The Forum was held for two days (April 26-27, 2019) on the platform of Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University named after Boris Yeltsin (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In the center of authors’ attention are the key issues, priorities and objectives of the foreign language and cultural policy of the Russian Federation in Central Asia. The indicated problematic deserves careful attention of the global expert-analytical community in the conditions when the region in question has become an intersection of foreign policy and strategic interests of an entire number of states that hold leading positions in the modern system of international relations.

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This essay provides a close study of the international horizons ofKallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such asbideś(the foreign) andāntarjātik(international), as opposed tobilāt(England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.

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Education is an area of social and cultural human’s life, which is made becoming spiritually mature, highly moral person, able to defend the universal, common cultural values. Education is impossible without accomplishment, and accomplishment should be targeted. Multicultural component in the educational system of any educational institution at the moment is vital, especially in our multinational country. A special place in the education of children and adolescents take humanities, and in particular the study of foreign languages by children. At the present stage in the conditions of intercultural communication is becoming increasingly common model of multilingual education. In this regard, the fundamental purpose of education should be training people in the new model of development of the international community based on universal, global values, the formation skills in children and teens to communicate and interact with representatives of neighboring cultures and in space. Educational institutions not only provide the necessary general and professional knowledge, but also to translate socio-cultural values form the patterns of behavior and skills of intercultural communication, contribute to the formation of an international, multi-cultural identity of the individual.

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The article assesses archival materials on the festival movement in the Soviet Union in 1950s, including its peak, the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students held in 1957 in Moscow. Even now the Moscow festival is seen in the context of international cultural politics of the Cold War and as a unique event for the Soviet Union. The article is to put the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in the context of other youth festivals held in the Soviet Union. The festivals of 1950s provided a field for political, social, and cultural experiments. They also have been the crucible of a new way of communication and a new language of design. Furthermore, festivals reflected the new (althogh relative) liberalism in the Soviet Union. This liberalism, first of all, was expressed in the fact that festivals were organized by the Komsomol and other Soviet public and cultural organisations. Taking the role of these organisations into consideration, the research draws on the documents of the Ministry of culture, the All-Russian Stage Society, as well as personal documents of the artists. Furthermore, the author has gained access to new archive materials, which have until now been part of no research, such as documents of the N. Krupskaya Central Culture and Art Center and of the central committees of various artistic trade unions. These documents confirm the hypothesis that the festivals provided the Komsomol and the Communist party with a means to solve various social, educational, and cultural problems. For instance, in Central Asia with its partiarchal society, the festivals focuced on female emancipation. In rural Central Asia, as well as in other non-russian parts of the Soviet Union, there co-existed different ways of celebrating. Local traditions intermingled with cultural standards prescribed by Moscow. At the first glance, the modernisation of the Soviet society was succesful. The youth acquired political and cultural level that allowed the Soviet state to compete with the West during the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students. During the festival, however, it became apparent, that the Soviet cultural scheme no longer met the dictates of times. Archival documents show that after the Festival cultural and party officials agreed to ease off dogmatism and to tolerate some of the foreign cultural phenomena.

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This article is based on the executive summary of a book in the Arabic language, The State of the Arab Nation 2014–2015, edited by Ali E.Hillal Dessouki and published by the Center for Arab Unity Studies. The book analyzes events in the Arab region from 2014 to the first part of 2015. The chapters examine the international order, the Arab regional system, and domestic conditions in the Arab states and neighbouring countries, such as Turkey and Iran. There is also particular focus on the countries of the Arab Spring and the remaining Arab countries, as well as the outlook for the youth in Arab countries and their role in future. Other chapters consider economic developments and their link to political developments and issues relating to science, technology and digital technologies. The final chapters cover the major political hotspots in the region, namely Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. The conclusion points to the main challenges facing the Arab nation in 2015.

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By means of an empirical survey, this article analyzes the decision-making process of the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in order to establish how they evaluated the bids to host the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Three bid-winning models were identified. These consisted of offers from a total of seven bid-winning subjects: the Olympic village for accommodating the athletes, transportation facilities for all the visitors to the Games, the sports arenas, the finances of the Games, telecommunications, information technology, and the media center. Offers, which had little or nothing to do with the Olympic Winter Games, were on average graded “important” by the majority of the IOC members. However, offers that referred to the performance of the Games were considered, on average, more important than other offers. The individual IOC members did not share the interest of the IOC in bids offering cultural events, environmental care (opening, closing, and prize) ceremonies, a youth camp for young athletes, and accommodation for all the athletes in a single Olympic village. No bid messenger was considered “very influential” by a majority of the IOC members in their bid choices. “The visits of the IOC members to the bid cities” was the only channel for communicating bid offers that was perceived as “very influential” by a majority of the IOC members. Every fourth IOC member stated that it was not important to their bid selection that the bidders followed IOC's bidding rules. Fifteen bid offers (17%) were evaluated differently by the IOC members due to their cultural and demographic differences.

Abstract:

Introduction:In the southern Philippines, human-induced disasters, such as terrorist attacks, have caused unprecedented damage to the economic, social, and political life of the attacked and nearby areas. More gruesome is the direct impacts to human life and wellbeing. This study focuses on the 2017 Marawi armed siege, the longest urban battle in the Philippines. The 154-day siege took a heavy toll, including 1,132 deaths among militants, soldiers, police, and civilians, and caused the displacement of some 400,000 local inhabitants. The city is in total ruins leaving its economic center as “Ground 0.” The aftermath of the siege demands major interventions to address physical and economic damages, but more importantly, to ameliorate the human impacts caused by the brutalities of war. The displaced peoples need to recover from health impacts – psychological trauma, as well as social, environmental, and cultural. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) 2015-2030 states that DRR requires society-wide engagement. Everyone, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or socio-economic position, should be involved in thinking, planning, and deciding about DRR. Studies on youth participation in disaster recovery are still scarce.Aim:This current research aims to help fill this gap and to contribute to providing the much-needed evidence base for the formulation and implementation of future policies to enable and improve youth participation in post-disaster initiatives in the Philippines.Results:Initial findings reveal that the following are crucial factors for youth mobilization: (1.) avenues for volunteering, (2.) access to adequate resources and support including information, funds, manpower, and social capital, (3.) opportunities for the youth to participate in the form of events or activities, (4.) legal mandate for youth participation in local, national, and international policies and frameworks. The study also looked at barriers or challenges to youth participation and their motivations.

Abstract:

Background: The Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center Questionnaires on Health Problems (OSTRC-H) and Overuse Injury (OSTRC-O) have shown a greater ability to identify athletes with health problems and to estimate the severity of those problems compared with traditional surveillance methods. Despite the numerous language adaptations of these questionnaires and their extended use, some of their measurement properties remain unknown. Moreover, these questionnaires are not available for Spanish-speaking athletes, and the validity and reliability of these questionnaires in youth athletes are unknown. Purpose: To cross-culturally adapt and investigate the measurement properties of the second version of the OSTRC-H (OSTRC-H2) and OSTRC-O (OSTRC-O2) questionnaires in Spanish youth athletes. Study Design: Cohort study (diagnosis); Level of evidence, 2. Methods: Following international guidelines, we developed Spanish cross-cultural adaptations of the questionnaires, including a comprehensibility analysis with 30 participants from the target population. In the second phase, 73 athletes (age range, 12-18 years) were invited to participate in an 11-week prospective study. The reliability (internal consistency and test-retest reliability) of both questionnaires was assessed through use of Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement Instruments recommendations. The construct validity and responsiveness of the OSTRC-H2 were evaluated using the convergence of the OSTRC-H2 severity score and the number of days of time loss. The response rate after 11 weeks was calculated as a feasibility indicator. Results: Equivalent Spanish versions were developed. A total of 63 athletes (age range, 12-17 years) participated in the prospective study. The Cronbach alpha was 0.93 (95% CI, 0.92-0.94) for OSTRC-H2 and 0.88 (95% CI, 0.86-0.90) for OSTRC-O2. The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.87 (95% CI, 0.79-0.92) and 0.85 (95% CI, 0.81-0.89), and the Cohen kappa was 0.80 (95% CI, 0.71-0.89) and 0.87 (95% CI, 0.78-0.96), respectively, for OSTRC-H2 and OSTRC-02. Correlations between the severity score and time loss (Spearman rho = 0.61) and between the changes in both scores over time (Spearman rho = 0.78) were within our expected range. The response rate was 95.5% for the OSTRC-O2 and 99.6% for the OSTRC-H2. Conclusion: These results present equivalent, reliable, and feasible Spanish versions of both questionnaires as well as evidence of the validity and responsiveness of the OSTRC-H2.

Abstract:

Due to the fact that in 2020 the whole world celebrates the 175th anniversary of the birth of I.I. Mechnikov, in order to preserve and promote the spiritual culture of Slobozhanshchina and to create a chronicle of unknown pages of the history of our region that is the small motherland of the great scientist, a number of events have been held. At the initiative of Dvorichna Children and Youth Creativity Center in 2015 the museum “Our great countryman I.I. Mechnikov — the Citizen of the World “ was established and a strategic plan for its development was developed. In the process of researches a fund of museum objects and museum collections of historical and cultural content was created in accordance with the tasks set for the museum. The museum has almost 400 exhibits of the main fund. The museum offers tours for visitors of all ages. In recent years we have intensified cooperation with many higher education establishments. We are supported by scientists-followers of I.I. Mechnikov from Israel, the USA, France, Great Britain, Latvia by holding international Internet conferences. It has become a tradition to hold annual Mechnikov readings.

Abstract:

Conflicts over extractive development often center around predicting future profits and economic growth, and estimating industrial pollution. How these projections are understood and seen as legitimate and trustworthy depends on social actors' environmental imaginaries and timescapes. Thus, I examine the temporal and cultural dynamics of natural resource politics, particularly how affective connections to the past and future mobilize support and opposition to new mining. I use the case of proposed copper mines in the rural Minnesota Iron Range region to explore the different environmental imaginaries and timescapes that mining opponents and proponents use to understand the potential socio-environmental impacts, and to legitimate their positions. Proponents, including long-time and working class Iron Range residents and mining corporations, view the region as an industrial landscape built by mining and hope new proposals will renew the past to create a prosperous future. Meanwhile, environmental groups who oppose mining view the region through an environmental imaginary based on outdoor recreation, and draw on collective memories of family and youth trips to understand new extractive projects as a rupture to their vision of the future. I show that resource extraction is understood through temporalities that differ across intersections of class and region, and that emotional meanings of the past and visions of the future animate contemporary political action.Keywords: Resource extraction, mining, environmental imaginaries, timescapes, collective memory, environmental politics, emotions

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the life, work and documentary legacy of the well-known abroad, but little-known in Russia historian and archivist Boris Moiseevich Sapir. B.M. Sapir lived a long life (1902–1989), full of various events. Born in 1902 in the city of Lodz in the Kingdom of Poland (that then belonged to Russia) into a Jewish Russian-speaking family, B.M. Sapir did not always voluntarily find himself in the center of major political events and even wars of the first half of the 20th century. Already in 1914, he and his parents came to Moscow. There, Sapir became interested in the social democratic movement and joined the Menshevik Party. However, not being an enemy of the Soviet state, he joined the Red Army in 1919 at the age of 17, being demobilized only in 1921. Soon, however, B.M. Sapir was arrested, imprisoned and deported until 1926. In 1926, he managed to escape to Germany (then the Weimar Republic). There, he became an activist of the International Youth Social Democratic Movement. However, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Sapir’s long ordeal began in different countries. It was the Netherlands, where he began to actively study the history of Russian Populism and Menshevism (that topic became the main issue in his scientific work). Later his fate led him to Cuba, where he started researching the history of the local Jewish community, then – to the United States. It was only after the Second World War, and even then not immediately, that Sapir managed to come to the Netherlands, where he finally began to study the history of the revolutionary movement in pre-Soviet Russia. There he found not only his favorite occupation, but also his family happiness. B.M. Sapir did not survive his rehabilitation. He died in 1989, and was officially rehabilitated in the USSR only in 1991. Boris Moiseevich’s relatives received the relevant documents only in 1992. The most significant part of B.M. Sapir’s documents is kept in the United States, in one of the Russian archives – the Bakhmetyev archives (at Harward University). A copy of the scientific reference apparatus for the collection (Fund) of B.M. Sapir was digitized and made available to Internet users. However, a detailed study of B.M. Sapir’s documents is a matter for the future.

Abstract:

Sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.Sustainable development is advanced as the answer of achieving a more equitable balance and synergic relationship between social, environmental and economic needs. It is a holistic approach that considers social, ecological and economic dimensions, recognizing that all must be considered together to find lasting prosperity. According to that, sustainable development law has been described as an intersection between three fields of international law: international environmental law, international economic law and international human rights law. In this paper the relationship between human rights and sustainable development is explored. The notion of social equity is taking into consideration when analyzing the rights – based approach to sustainable development. Social equity refers to a fair and just distribution of economic and environmental costs and benefits, community services like health care and education, the ability to participate in decision-making processes. Applying social equity means paying attention to disadvantaged group in society: women, youth and children, the elderly, indigenous groups and ethnic minorities. In considering the relationship between human rights and sustainable development, the best starting point is the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. At the center of the Agenda are the sustainable development goals (SDGs), a set of 17 goals and 169 targets across social, economic and environmental areas of sustainable development. The 2030 Agenda for sustainable development is grounded in human rights. The 17 SDGs directly or indirectly reflect human rights standards. When analyzing the human rights anchorage of each sustainable development goal and its corresponding targets, an interrelated web appears: 92% of the 169 SDGs targets are linked to international human rights instruments (such as the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), as well as other international and regional instruments and documents relating to human rights). In other words, the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and human rights are interwoven and inextricably tied together. The respect for and enforcement of human rights is a precondition for sustainable development. That implies that without acknowledging and acting to defend the rights of people, sustainable development is not possible. On the one hand, human rights provide guidance and a legally-binding framework for tackling the multidimensional goals of the 2030 Agenda. On the other hand, the SGDs can serve as a results-oriented roadmap for the realization of human rights.

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The article presents a historical overview of Israeli studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS in the first two decades of the 21st century. The paper demonstrates the main research fields and publications of the Department for the Study of Israel and Jewish Communities, as well as the list of its heads and research fellows. The article shows how, having successfully overcome the difficulties of the 1990s that were rather hard on Russian Academy as a whole, the staff of the Israeli Studies Department in their numerous publications, speeches at Russian and international academic forums tried to respond to the new challenges in a scholarly way. In the 2000s the number of works published on the history of relations between the USSR / Russia and Israel increased, and this trend continued in subsequent years. Access to the archives for the first time made it possible to analyze the formation and development of Soviet-Israeli relations before the break (in 1953). The department expanded the directions of its academic activity. Its topics included such directions as the study of the collective memory of Jews in modern Russia, cultural identity, cultural memory, religious and secular identity of Russian Jews, attitude towards disability and people with disabilities, study of youth communities in Israel, Russia and Europe, the impact of the US-Israeli relations on the US Jewish community. Development of basic methodology for researching the state of Jewish charity in Moscow was one of the new tasks for the fellows of the Department to solve. The novelty of the tasks also included new methodology of researching the economic and socio-political development of Israel using social networks data. The Department continued to study all aspects of the life of the State of Israel — economic, socio-political and cultural processes developing in the Israeli state, including new features in regional policy and the concept of Israeli security. At present, members of the department’s, in addition to their current activities, are implementing a number of promising projects aimed at strengthening the department’s position as the leading center of Israeli studies in the post-Soviet space.

Abstract:

The article deals with investigation into the conditions of the defection of the national Soviet party-state functionaries to opposition in the USSR (late 1980s – early 1980s) that is an important indicator of the loyalty of the national elites towards the central government. The analysis is based on comparing two contrastive cases – the Soviet elites of Latvia and those of Kazakhstan in their interactions with the central government as well as local population. Despite seemingly obvious cultural and historical differences, both cases are similar regarding some important aspects such as socio-demographic, economic as well as cultural dynamics in the late Soviet period. In both republics, the proportion of migrants in the whole population as well as in the elites was relatively high. The intensive migration in the post-war period was a result of the rapid industrialization and the Virgin Land campaign in the case of Kazakhstan. The Soviet elites both of Latvia and of Kazakhstan were loyal to the Union center, Russian-speaking and more international than national oriented. Besides, the national movements in both republics were practically nonexistent at the beginning of the perestroika. Nevertheless, many Latvian national ruling cadres joined the opposition in the late 1980s – early 1991s whereas Kazakh national elites remained mostly loyal to the Union center up to the dissolution of the USSR (Kazakhstan declared its independence only on 16 December 1991, as the last republic to leave the USSR) – although Kazakh national party-state functionaries did not have less reasons to get rid of the tough control from Moscow than national elites of Soviet Latvia. As the theoretical basis the author applies the R. Collins` state-centered theory of ethnos elaborated in the framework of the Weberian paradigm. The analysis showed that decreasing loyalty of the Latvian national elites in the late 1980s – early 1991s was due to the success of the protest movement in this republic including the violent confrontation with its rivals in January 1991 (“The Barricades”). A broad support of the protest movement striving for the reestablishment of the independence from the Soviet Union was based on anti-immigration ideological alternative to official Soviet internationalism attracting different social and ethnic groups of Latvian population. A relatively high level of the loyalty of the Kazakh national elites to the central government was caused by the effective suppression of the Kazakh youth riots in December 1986 that triggered the purge of the national ruling cadres in Kazakhstan initiated by Moscow. A relatively low social support of the protest movement in the republic was due to the lack of a broad ideological basis that could create solidarity between different social and ethnic groups that made up the population of Kazakhstan. Besides, the protest of 1986 with Kazakh students as the main participants was perceived by local population in the logic of ethno-territorial conflicts very common in the late Soviet Kazakhstan and evoked therefore not solidarity but fear and anger.

Abstract:

Introduction. The relevance of the problem of forming and strengthening the Russian identity in various aspects is not in doubt today. In this regard it is important to study the various factors that affect this process. The purpose of this research is to analyze the influence of the Republic of Mordovia’s participation in the Finno-Ugric movement on the process of forming Russian identity. Research objectives: to characterize the involvement of the Republic of Moldova in the Finno-Ugric movement in the Russian and international directions; to show this participation in realization of state national policy in the Republic; to identify opportunities and risks the further participation of Mordovia in Finno-Ugric movement for the formation and strengthening of the Russian identity. Materials and Methods. The choice of research methodology is dictated by the strategic goals of the state national policy of modern Russia, aimed at creating civil unity under the condition of mandatory preservation and further development of the country’s ethnic and cultural diversity. The combination of civil and ethno-cultural components in the formation and consolidation of Russian identity implies an organic methodology of the nation-building process, which denies the unification of ethnic diversity. The research uses materials from the websites of the Advisory Committee of Finno-Ugric peoples and “The information center of Finno-Ugric peoples”, as well as scientific works of Russian scientists containing data on various aspects of the participation of the Republic of Mordovia in the Finno-Ugric movement. Historical, phenomenological, institutional approaches, and document analysis were used to solve the tasks set in the article. Results and Discussion. The results of the study showed that the Finno-Ugric movement, aimed primarily at solving ethno-cultural problems, actively participates in the process of preserving and developing the ethno-cultural specificity of the peoples of the Russian Federation, implementing the strategic line of state national policy at the present stage. The Republic of Mordovia has made a significant contribution to the organizational and ideological design of the Finno-Ugric movement. At the IV and V congresses of the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia held in Mordovia, the strategy of the movement was defined – the strengthening of all-Russian civil unity as a condition for the successful development of the ethnic identity of the Finno-Ugric and other peoples of Russia within the framework of a single state. The viability of ideological and institutional approaches to the development and implementation of the state national policy of the Russian Federation in the Republic, aimed at preserving cultural diversity, has been recognized throughout the Finno-Ugric world. The documents of the world Congress of Finno-Ugric peoples indicate the role of the Finno-Ugric movement in understanding the ethno-cultural specifics as great opportunities for countries and regions in cultural and socio-economic development. However, the implementation of ethnic policy, including through participation in the Finno-Ugric movement, there are the problems (insufficient use of the potential of ethno-tourism, youth participation in the development of Finno-Ugric peoples, the dependent position of some public Finno-Ugric organizations, the prevalence of threats and weaknesses over strengths and development opportunities of ethno-national space of modern Russia). Conclusion. The participation of the Republic of Mordovia in the Finno-Ugric movement, included in the implementation of the state national policy, is a factor in the formation of Russian identity. Recognition throughout the Finno-Ugric world of Mordovia’s positive experience in implementing state national policy has made the Republic its “heart”. Positive experience and unresolved problems in the field of Ethnopolitics point to the opportunities and risks of further participation of the Republic of Moldova in the Finno-Ugric movement for the formation of Russian identity. Opportunities are associated with the use of diverse cooperation within the Finno-Ugric movement to increase the ethnic identity of the Mordovians, and threats are associated with politicization and dependence on anti-Russian forces that weaken the all-Russian civil unity. Strengthening opportunities and preventing threats is possible on the basis of an organic methodology of nation-building, which means strengthening all-Russian civil unity as a condition for the successful development of the ethnic identity of the Finno-Ugric and other peoples of Russia within a single state.

Abstract:

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”. Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality. I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vagin*s because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion. During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory! To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness. When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH. With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments. When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment. In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France. My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work. In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures. Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on: - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions) - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception. Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14). There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies. In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no hom*ogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion. Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions. There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda. Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks. New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, hom*o/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated. We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive: Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence. 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments. 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic had a dangerous impact on early-childhood education, lost learning in almost all aspects of child development. The house-to-house learning, with the name Moving Home Learning Program (MHLP), is an attractive offer as an emergency remote teaching solution. This study aims to describe the application of MHLP designed by early-childhood education institutions during the learning process at home. This study used a qualitative approach with data collection using interviews, observation, and documentation. The respondents involved in the interview were a kindergarten principal and four teachers. The research data were analyzed using the data content analysis. The Findings show that the MHLP has proven to be sufficiently in line with the learning needs of early childhood during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although, the application of the MHLP learning model has limitations such as the distance from the house that is far away, the number of meetings that are only once a week, the number of food and toy sellers passing by, disturbing children's concentration, and the risk of damage to goods at home. The implication of this research can be the basis for evaluating MHLP as an adaptive strategy that requires the attention of related parties, including policy makers, school principals, and teachers for the development of new, more effective online learning models. Keywords: Moving Home Learning Program (MHLP), Children Remote Teaching References:Abdollahi, E., Haworth-Brockman, M., Keynan, Y., Langley, M. J., & Oghadas, S. M. (2020). Simulating the effect of school closure during COVID-19 outbreaks in Ontario , Canada. BMC Medicine, 1–8. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-020-01705-8 Arends, R. I., & Kilcher, A. (2010). 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Abstract:

In my Reviewing Policy section of this journal I have often analyzed a number of significant books that focus on other nations. Such an international agenda is important. Analytically such a wider perspective provides fresh insights into the lenses we employ to understand crucial sets of social relations that are created by and create educational and larger dynamics. This international view has now taken a very interesting turn with the publication of Paul Willis’s newest book, Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today. At the center of his analysis is the public school and especially the power of the national examinations in China as both structures that divide populations but also as powerful devices that embody identities both now and in the future. But it is much more than this. With its primary focus on both commodified and lived youth cultures, the book constitutes a substantive contribution to the questioning of the orthodox view of economic determinism within the political economy of education. Given this, it is definitely worth reading the book, but it is important to remember that this is indeed a “western” analysis.

Abstract:

Partiendo de la riqueza histórica, cultural, paisajista y actividades económicas de la provincia de Santa Elena, el autor analiza la gran riqueza ancestral de la Península y las posibilidades para desarrollar un programa de voluntariado internacional denominado “Peninsula Volunteers”, basado en su experiencia como ex voluntario del programa de intercambio “Canadá Word Youth” y ex participante del programa “Center for Cultural Interchange” en USA; está dirigido a estudiantes extranjeros que deseen aprender español, vivir la interculturalidad desde una comuna y tener una experiencia laboral en los paisajes de la fascinante Península. Palabras Clave: interculturalidad, voluntariado, experiencia laboral. ABSTRACT Based on the historical, cultural and landscaped and economic activities of the province of Santa Elena, the author analyzes the vast ancestral wealth of the peninsula and the possibilities for developing an international volunteer program called "Peninsula Volunteers" , based on his experience as former volunteer exchange program " Youth Canada Word " and former participant of the " Center for Cultural interchange " program in the USA; It is aimed at foreign students who want to learn Spanish , live interculturality from a commune and have work experience in the fascinating landscapes of the Peninsula. Keywords: multiculturalism, volunteer work experience. Recibido: noviembre de 2015Aprobado: febrero de 2016

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All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Offord, Baden. “Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of Belonging and Sites of Confluence.” Transformations 2 (March 2002): 1-5. Oshlak, Al. Interview. 27 Mar. 2013. Partridge, Christopher. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2006): 3-5. Perkins, Charlie. “Charlie Perkins on 1965 Freedom Ride.” Youtube, 13 Oct. 2009. Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair. Greenwood: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Roberts, John. Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Roberts, Cecil. Interview. 6 Aug. 2012. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: University of California Press,1969. St John, Graham. “Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian culture.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 8 (1997): 167-189. Smith, Sherry. Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stell, Alex. Dancing in the Hyper-Crucible: The Rite de Passage of the Post-Rave Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of Westminster, London, 2005. Stone, Trevor Bauxhau. Interview. 1 Oct. 2012. Wedd, Leila. Interview. 27 Sep. 2012. White, Paul. “Aquarius Revisited.” 1973. Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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PurposeThis paper aims to assess the proper built heritage preservation and management as important steps toward sustainability for the case of village Battir. In particular, the historic village core and its surroundings were elaborated. Battir is a Palestinian village located to the south of Jerusalem, famous for landscape terraces traditionally used in their authentic form since the Roman time. Because of its outstanding universal values, Battir was inscribed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage list (WHL) in 2014.Design/methodology/approachTo present the potentials of Battir to become a sustainable asset, the results of the Sustainable Plan have been used in this paper. Among the proposed strategies of the Plan methodology for the historic core conservation was emphasized. Referring to the same methodology, key findings about the current state of conservation are elaborated as well as proposals for the village core enhancements.FindingsAs a result of an on-site survey, the Plan outlines several strategies, which are summarized in this paper. Within each strategy, the role and benefits for the inhabitants are evaluated along with the overview of the proposed interventions for the historic tissue preservation.Originality/valueChallenges of the village's heritage preservation have been elaborated under the comprehensive Sustainable Plan that was initiated, prepared and lead by International Peace and Cooperation Center (IPCC). Here, sustainability refers to the better managing of available natural and cultural resources and features, while at the same time, creating new socio-economic opportunities for inhabitants.

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Fernando Casás: a note about the artist.www.fernandocasas.es Fernando Casás [Vigo, Spain, 1946], lives between Brazil – where he spent most part of his life – and Spain, where he is professor of Sculpture at the University of Vigo. He is also professor in Doctorate courses at ESAD Escola Superior Artística do Porto, Portugal. He began working and investigating with Art and Nature [Land Art, Eco Art, Earth Works] at the end of the sixties, influenced by the tropical environment. Since then he works in different, paralell and recurrent streams: a de-materialized side [like the Idiotic Projects, the capture of a fleeting moment]; the ephemeral works [like the Wanderer Project or the Earth 100 / Latex, where he makes small and intimate incursions at random in the natural environment] ; and finally what we could call the formal works, where evidenciation of the passing of time and investigation of new ways are the major concerns, and where he works with different techniques, procedures and materials, ranging from worn out raw material to new technologies, which result in works that can be seen in exhibitions, collections or public places [The Termite Cycle, Trees as Archaeology or Act / Impact]. Nowadays he is considered by art critics as a pioneer in the Art and Nature field. Among public works: Lamed Vav / The 36 Justs together with R.Morris, R.Long, Hamilton Finlay. Island of Sculptures, and Memory of the River, both in Pontevedra, Spain, 1999 and 2006.Two Stones two University Botanic Graden, Jerusalem, Israel. 2000.Amazonia / Roots. Catacumba Sculpture Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. 1989.Wood. Burgo das Nacións Square, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. 1994.Big Snake. Seeff & Marks Community Center, Jerusalem, Israel. 1989.Threes as Archaeology together with R. Long, S.Armajani, U.Rükriem, D.Nash. Monegros Desert, Huesca, Spain. 2003.Ashé / The Curve of the 9 over Bayona sea, in the road that unites Galicia and Portugal. 2005.Apple trees for Carrazeda. Carrazeda de Ansiães, Portugal, 2009. Selected exhibitions:Solo Termites tunnels at Centro Cultural dos Correios. [Río de Janeiro, 2009]Intervention Blue in Tifariti Sahara Desert, during the International Encounters of Art in the Free Territories of Sahara. [Argelia, 2009].Retrospective solo exhibition in the series Great Galician Artists [Caixanova, Vigo, 2006]Naturally Artificial. [Museo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, 2006]Archaeology of the non site. [Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, 2004]A wood in works: Spanish vanguards in wood. [Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia y Sala de las Alhajas, Madrid, 2000]XXIª International Beinnial of São Paulo [Säo Paulo, Brasil, 1991]Brazilian work: 1964 – 1984 [Retrospectiva en la Fundación Luís Seoane, A Coruña, 2000]Fragments of America [Convento de San Francisco de la Habana Vieja, Cuba. 1999] Possible Dimension [Museu de Arte Moderna de Säo Paulo, Brasil, 1991]Manuscripten van de Amazon Rivier [EKWC Europees Keramisch Werkcentrum, den Bosch, The Netherlands, 1994]Amazonas, Série Negra [Galería Ibeu-Copacabana y Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, Río de Janeiro; Galeria Aquarela y Espaço Unicamp, Säo Paulo, 1988 y 1989]Camouflaged Earth [Municipal Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel y Centre Culturel Bresilien, Ginebra, Suiza, 1987]De Huid van de Witte Dame [Phillips Headquarters, Eindhoven, Holanda, 1996]Intervention for Ecology [Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1984). El Proyecto Errante fue llevado a Suiza, Francia, Israel, Holanda, entre otros países

Abstract:

Fernando Casás: a note about the artist.www.fernandocasas.es Fernando Casás [Vigo, Spain, 1946], lives between Brazil – where he spent most part of his life – and Spain, where he is professor of Sculpture at the University of Vigo. He is also professor in Doctorate courses at ESAD Escola Superior Artística do Porto, Portugal. He began working and investigating with Art and Nature [Land Art, Eco Art, Earth Works] at the end of the sixties, influenced by the tropical environment. Since then he works in different, paralell and recurrent streams: a de-materialized side [like the Idiotic Projects, the capture of a fleeting moment]; the ephemeral works [like the Wanderer Project or the Earth 100 / Latex, where he makes small and intimate incursions at random in the natural environment] ; and finally what we could call the formal works, where evidenciation of the passing of time and investigation of new ways are the major concerns, and where he works with different techniques, procedures and materials, ranging from worn out raw material to new technologies, which result in works that can be seen in exhibitions, collections or public places [The Termite Cycle, Trees as Archaeology or Act / Impact]. Nowadays he is considered by art critics as a pioneer in the Art and Nature field. Among public works: Lamed Vav / The 36 Justs together with R.Morris, R.Long, Hamilton Finlay. Island of Sculptures, and Memory of the River, both in Pontevedra, Spain, 1999 and 2006.Two Stones two University Botanic Graden, Jerusalem, Israel. 2000.Amazonia / Roots. Catacumba Sculpture Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. 1989.Wood. Burgo das Nacións Square, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. 1994.Big Snake. Seeff & Marks Community Center, Jerusalem, Israel. 1989.Threes as Archaeology together with R. Long, S.Armajani, U.Rükriem, D.Nash. Monegros Desert, Huesca, Spain. 2003.Ashé / The Curve of the 9 over Bayona sea, in the road that unites Galicia and Portugal. 2005.Apple trees for Carrazeda. Carrazeda de Ansiães, Portugal, 2009. Selected exhibitions:Solo Termites tunnels at Centro Cultural dos Correios. [Río de Janeiro, 2009]Intervention Blue in Tifariti Sahara Desert, during the International Encounters of Art in the Free Territories of Sahara. [Argelia, 2009].Retrospective solo exhibition in the series Great Galician Artists [Caixanova, Vigo, 2006]Naturally Artificial. [Museo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, 2006]Archaeology of the non site. [Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, 2004]A wood in works: Spanish vanguards in wood. [Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia y Sala de las Alhajas, Madrid, 2000]XXIª International Beinnial of São Paulo [Säo Paulo, Brasil, 1991]Brazilian work: 1964 – 1984 [Retrospectiva en la Fundación Luís Seoane, A Coruña, 2000]Fragments of America [Convento de San Francisco de la Habana Vieja, Cuba. 1999] Possible Dimension [Museu de Arte Moderna de Säo Paulo, Brasil, 1991]Manuscripten van de Amazon Rivier [EKWC Europees Keramisch Werkcentrum, den Bosch, The Netherlands, 1994]Amazonas, Série Negra [Galería Ibeu-Copacabana y Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, Río de Janeiro; Galeria Aquarela y Espaço Unicamp, Säo Paulo, 1988 y 1989]Camouflaged Earth [Municipal Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel y Centre Culturel Bresilien, Ginebra, Suiza, 1987]De Huid van de Witte Dame [Phillips Headquarters, Eindhoven, Holanda, 1996]Intervention for Ecology [Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1984). El Proyecto Errante fue llevado a Suiza, Francia, Israel, Holanda, entre otros países. Selection of books and catalogues:Wagensberg, Jorge; A.Ruiz de Samaniego et.al.: Fernando Casás: Archaeology of the non site, Hércules de Eciciones and Círculo de Bellas Artes. Madrid, 2004.Parreño, José María; Pignatari, Décio: Fernando Casás: Retrospective at Caixanova. Vigo, 2006.Duque, Félix; Katz, Renina: Brazilian Works. Fundaçäo Luís Seoane, La Coruña, 2000.Maderuelo, Javier: Natürgeist. Diputación de Huesca, 1997.Garraud, Colette; Boël, Mickey: L’Artiste Contemporain et la Nature. Parcs et paysages européens. Éditions Hazan, Paris, 2007

Abstract:

Fernando Casás: a note about the artist.www.fernandocasas.es Fernando Casás [Vigo, Spain, 1946], lives between Brazil – where he spent most part of his life – and Spain, where he is professor of Sculpture at the University of Vigo. He is also professor in Doctorate courses at ESAD Escola Superior Artística do Porto, Portugal. He began working and investigating with Art and Nature [Land Art, Eco Art, Earth Works] at the end of the sixties, influenced by the tropical environment. Since then he works in different, paralell and recurrent streams: a de-materialized side [like the Idiotic Projects, the capture of a fleeting moment]; the ephemeral works [like the Wanderer Project or the Earth 100 / Latex, where he makes small and intimate incursions at random in the natural environment] ; and finally what we could call the formal works, where evidenciation of the passing of time and investigation of new ways are the major concerns, and where he works with different techniques, procedures and materials, ranging from worn out raw material to new technologies, which result in works that can be seen in exhibitions, collections or public places [The Termite Cycle, Trees as Archaeology or Act / Impact]. Nowadays he is considered by art critics as a pioneer in the Art and Nature field. Among public works: Lamed Vav / The 36 Justs together with R.Morris, R.Long, Hamilton Finlay. Island of Sculptures, and Memory of the River, both in Pontevedra, Spain, 1999 and 2006.Two Stones two University Botanic Graden, Jerusalem, Israel. 2000.Amazonia / Roots. Catacumba Sculpture Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. 1989.Wood. Burgo das Nacións Square, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. 1994.Big Snake. Seeff & Marks Community Center, Jerusalem, Israel. 1989.Threes as Archaeology together with R. Long, S.Armajani, U.Rükriem, D.Nash. Monegros Desert, Huesca, Spain. 2003.Ashé / The Curve of the 9 over Bayona sea, in the road that unites Galicia and Portugal. 2005.Apple trees for Carrazeda. Carrazeda de Ansiães, Portugal, 2009. Selected exhibitions:Solo Termites tunnels at Centro Cultural dos Correios. [Río de Janeiro, 2009]Intervention Blue in Tifariti Sahara Desert, during the International Encounters of Art in the Free Territories of Sahara. [Argelia, 2009].Retrospective solo exhibition in the series Great Galician Artists [Caixanova, Vigo, 2006]Naturally Artificial. [Museo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, 2006]Archaeology of the non site. [Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, 2004]A wood in works: Spanish vanguards in wood. [Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia y Sala de las Alhajas, Madrid, 2000]XXIª International Beinnial of São Paulo [Säo Paulo, Brasil, 1991]Brazilian work: 1964 – 1984 [Retrospectiva en la Fundación Luís Seoane, A Coruña, 2000]Fragments of America [Convento de San Francisco de la Habana Vieja, Cuba. 1999] Possible Dimension [Museu de Arte Moderna de Säo Paulo, Brasil, 1991]Manuscripten van de Amazon Rivier [EKWC Europees Keramisch Werkcentrum, den Bosch, The Netherlands, 1994]Amazonas, Série Negra [Galería Ibeu-Copacabana y Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, Río de Janeiro; Galeria Aquarela y Espaço Unicamp, Säo Paulo, 1988 y 1989]Camouflaged Earth [Municipal Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel y Centre Culturel Bresilien, Ginebra, Suiza, 1987]De Huid van de Witte Dame [Phillips Headquarters, Eindhoven, Holanda, 1996]Intervention for Ecology [Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1984). El Proyecto Errante fue llevado a Suiza, Francia, Israel, Holanda, entre otros países. Selection of books and catalogues:Wagensberg, Jorge; A.Ruiz de Samaniego et.al.: Fernando Casás: Archaeology of the non site, Hércules de Eciciones and Círculo de Bellas Artes. Madrid, 2004.Parreño, José María; Pignatari, Décio: Fernando Casás: Retrospective at Caixanova. Vigo, 2006.Duque, Félix; Katz, Renina: Brazilian Works. Fundaçäo Luís Seoane, La Coruña, 2000.Maderuelo, Javier: Natürgeist. Diputación de Huesca, 1997.Garraud, Colette; Boël, Mickey: L’Artiste Contemporain et la Nature. Parcs et paysages européens. Éditions Hazan, Paris, 2007.

Abstract:

The theme of this conference is "Being Muslim in a Disrupted Millenial Age". The conference was motivated by the real challenges of the millenial generation and era. Indonesia is predicted to get demographic bonus in 2020-2045. According to the calculations of the National Family Planning Board (BKKBN) RI, in the decade, as many as 70 percent of Indonesian citizens are in the productive age, which is between 15 to 64 years. Only 30 percent are unproductive, for instance under 14 years and over 65 years old. Of course, demographic bonuses have an impact on the increasing number of young people, or more specifically, millennial generation.According to Neil Howe and William Strauss in the book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000), millennial generation are those born between 1982 and 20 years later. This means that this year, they are between 15 to 35 years old. Neil and William call the millennial as the generation that determines the future. In Indonesian context, the millennial lifestyle has had a profound influence on various aspects of personal and public life; social, cultural, economic, political and even religious. The most noticeable aspect is the increasing role of social media, which is mainly driven by the millennial generation. The role of social media, for example, has far-reaching impacts on the creative economy, with the increasing variety of digital entrepreneurship-based professions utilizing online sites, youtube, instagram, twitter and facebook. While in politics, social media becomes the personal space of branding and attention seekers that characterize millennials. Interestingly, in many parts of the world, research on millennial generation has grown considerably. In addition to the above books, some of the more popular ones were the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and University of Berkeley research in 2011 about the millennial generation of America; The Pew Research Center Review entitled Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next (2010). Similarly the Texas-US based Center for Generational Kinetics through the intense genhq.com site is doing recent research on Millennial and Z generations.Similar research focusing on Muslim millennials is done by the Tabah Foundation of the United Arab Emirates entitled Muslim Millennial Attitudes on Religion and Religious Leadership (2016); The work of British Muslim writer Shelina Zahra Janmohamed Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World (2016) is also interesting. In Indonesia, research and publications on millennial generations begin, but it is still difficult to find specific references to Muslim millennials. In fact, Indonesia is a country with the largest Muslim population in the world. According to the latest data of the Cetral Intelligence Agency, the number of Indonesian Muslims reaches a range of 225 million, far beyond Muslim countries such as Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and countries in the Arabian Peninsula. The proportion of Indonesian Muslims is also very significant, namely 87.2% of the total population of Indonesia. Given that fact, Muslim millennial of Indonesia has a very strategic position in the future. Millennial Muslims in this country can lift the image of Indonesian Islam to become a world reference in realizing a peaceful and harmonious society. Actually, the image has been recognized world widely. Two decades ago, various international media praised Indonesian Islam as an ideal portrait of Muslim society. Newsweek in 1996 labeled Islam Indonesia as "Islam with a smiling face". Newsweek is so fascinated with the style of religious people in Indonesia, calling it: everyone was kind; everyone was moderate; everyone respected humanistic values and a harmonious life. Interestingly, six years ago, precisely in 2011, Indonesianist Martin van Bruinessen reviewed the label in his paper with a question: What happened to the smiling face of Indonesian Islam? Martin seemed restless with the Indonesian Islamic movement, which was originally identical with the vision of nationality and humanity, into a movement that tends to be more political and partisan.This is where Muslim millennial Indonesia can take on the role. Today, around us, the narrative of hatred seems so real. It is laid out clearly through utterances, arguments, and comments on the mass lines crammed with verbal and visual violence. With such great potential, Indonesian Muslim youth are given a choice: To let the hate narrative expand its space, or to present a counter-narrative, through viralization of virtues as the part of millennial-style. This is the significance of organizing this annual conference.

Abstract:

The theme of this conference is "Being Muslim in a Disrupted Millenial Age". The conference was motivated by the real challenges of the millenial generation and era. Indonesia is predicted to get demographic bonus in 2020-2045. According to the calculations of the National Family Planning Board (BKKBN) RI, in the decade, as many as 70 percent of Indonesian citizens are in the productive age, which is between 15 to 64 years. Only 30 percent are unproductive, for instance under 14 years and over 65 years old. Of course, demographic bonuses have an impact on the increasing number of young people, or more specifically, millennial generation.According to Neil Howe and William Strauss in the book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000), millennial generation are those born between 1982 and 20 years later. This means that this year, they are between 15 to 35 years old. Neil and William call the millennial as the generation that determines the future. In Indonesian context, the millennial lifestyle has had a profound influence on various aspects of personal and public life; social, cultural, economic, political and even religious. The most noticeable aspect is the increasing role of social media, which is mainly driven by the millennial generation. The role of social media, for example, has far-reaching impacts on the creative economy, with the increasing variety of digital entrepreneurship-based professions utilizing online sites, youtube, instagram, twitter and facebook. While in politics, social media becomes the personal space of branding and attention seekers that characterize millennials. Interestingly, in many parts of the world, research on millennial generation has grown considerably. In addition to the above books, some of the more popular ones were the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and University of Berkeley research in 2011 about the millennial generation of America; The Pew Research Center Review entitled Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next (2010). Similarly the Texas-US based Center for Generational Kinetics through the intense genhq.com site is doing recent research on Millennial and Z generations.Similar research focusing on Muslim millennials is done by the Tabah Foundation of the United Arab Emirates entitled Muslim Millennial Attitudes on Religion and Religious Leadership (2016); The work of British Muslim writer Shelina Zahra Janmohamed Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World (2016) is also interesting. In Indonesia, research and publications on millennial generations begin, but it is still difficult to find specific references to Muslim millennials. In fact, Indonesia is a country with the largest Muslim population in the world. According to the latest data of the Cetral Intelligence Agency, the number of Indonesian Muslims reaches a range of 225 million, far beyond Muslim countries such as Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and countries in the Arabian Peninsula. The proportion of Indonesian Muslims is also very significant, namely 87.2% of the total population of Indonesia. Given that fact, Muslim millennial of Indonesia has a very strategic position in the future. Millennial Muslims in this country can lift the image of Indonesian Islam to become a world reference in realizing a peaceful and harmonious society. Actually, the image has been recognized world widely. Two decades ago, various international media praised Indonesian Islam as an ideal portrait of Muslim society. Newsweek in 1996 labeled Islam Indonesia as "Islam with a smiling face". Newsweek is so fascinated with the style of religious people in Indonesia, calling it: everyone was kind; everyone was moderate; everyone respected humanistic values and a harmonious life. Interestingly, six years ago, precisely in 2011, Indonesianist Martin van Bruinessen reviewed the label in his paper with a question: What happened to the smiling face of Indonesian Islam? Martin seemed restless with the Indonesian Islamic movement, which was originally identical with the vision of nationality and humanity, into a movement that tends to be more political and partisan.This is where Muslim millennial Indonesia can take on the role. Today, around us, the narrative of hatred seems so real. It is laid out clearly through utterances, arguments, and comments on the mass lines crammed with verbal and visual violence. With such great potential, Indonesian Muslim youth are given a choice: To let the hate narrative expand its space, or to present a counter-narrative, through viralization of virtues as the part of millennial-style. This is the significance of organizing this annual conference.

Abstract:

The theme of this conference is "Being Muslim in a Disrupted Millenial Age". The conference was motivated by the real challenges of the millenial generation and era. Indonesia is predicted to get demographic bonus in 2020-2045. According to the calculations of the National Family Planning Board (BKKBN) RI, in the decade, as many as 70 percent of Indonesian citizens are in the productive age, which is between 15 to 64 years. Only 30 percent are unproductive, for instance under 14 years and over 65 years old. Of course, demographic bonuses have an impact on the increasing number of young people, or more specifically, millennial generation.According to Neil Howe and William Strauss in the book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000), millennial generation are those born between 1982 and 20 years later. This means that this year, they are between 15 to 35 years old. Neil and William call the millennial as the generation that determines the future. In Indonesian context, the millennial lifestyle has had a profound influence on various aspects of personal and public life; social, cultural, economic, political and even religious. The most noticeable aspect is the increasing role of social media, which is mainly driven by the millennial generation. The role of social media, for example, has far-reaching impacts on the creative economy, with the increasing variety of digital entrepreneurship-based professions utilizing online sites, youtube, instagram, twitter and facebook. While in politics, social media becomes the personal space of branding and attention seekers that characterize millennials. Interestingly, in many parts of the world, research on millennial generation has grown considerably. In addition to the above books, some of the more popular ones were the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and University of Berkeley research in 2011 about the millennial generation of America; The Pew Research Center Review entitled Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next (2010). Similarly the Texas-US based Center for Generational Kinetics through the intense genhq.com site is doing recent research on Millennial and Z generations.Similar research focusing on Muslim millennials is done by the Tabah Foundation of the United Arab Emirates entitled Muslim Millennial Attitudes on Religion and Religious Leadership (2016); The work of British Muslim writer Shelina Zahra Janmohamed Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World (2016) is also interesting. In Indonesia, research and publications on millennial generations begin, but it is still difficult to find specific references to Muslim millennials. In fact, Indonesia is a country with the largest Muslim population in the world. According to the latest data of the Cetral Intelligence Agency, the number of Indonesian Muslims reaches a range of 225 million, far beyond Muslim countries such as Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and countries in the Arabian Peninsula. The proportion of Indonesian Muslims is also very significant, namely 87.2% of the total population of Indonesia. Given that fact, Muslim millennial of Indonesia has a very strategic position in the future. Millennial Muslims in this country can lift the image of Indonesian Islam to become a world reference in realizing a peaceful and harmonious society. Actually, the image has been recognized world widely. Two decades ago, various international media praised Indonesian Islam as an ideal portrait of Muslim society. Newsweek in 1996 labeled Islam Indonesia as "Islam with a smiling face". Newsweek is so fascinated with the style of religious people in Indonesia, calling it: everyone was kind; everyone was moderate; everyone respected humanistic values and a harmonious life. Interestingly, six years ago, precisely in 2011, Indonesianist Martin van Bruinessen reviewed the label in his paper with a question: What happened to the smiling face of Indonesian Islam? Martin seemed restless with the Indonesian Islamic movement, which was originally identical with the vision of nationality and humanity, into a movement that tends to be more political and partisan.This is where Muslim millennial Indonesia can take on the role. Today, around us, the narrative of hatred seems so real. It is laid out clearly through utterances, arguments, and comments on the mass lines crammed with verbal and visual violence. With such great potential, Indonesian Muslim youth are given a choice: To let the hate narrative expand its space, or to present a counter-narrative, through viralization of virtues as the part of millennial-style. This is the significance of organizing this annual conference.

Abstract:

Introduction Many anthropologists and other academics have attempted to argue that the spread of technology is a global hom*ogenising force, socialising the remaining indigenous groups across the planet into an indistinct Western "monoculture" focussed on consumption, where they are rapidly losing their cultural distinctiveness. In many cases, these intellectuals -– people such as Jerry Mander -- often blame the diffusion of television (particularly through new innovations that are allowing it to penetrate further into rural areas, such as satellite and cable) as a key force in the effort to "assimilate" indigenous groups and eradicate their unique identities. Such writers suggest that indigenous groups can do nothing to resist the onslaught of the technologically, economically, and aesthetically superior power of Western television. Ironically, while often protesting the plight of indigenous groups and heralding their need for cultural survival, these authors often fail to recognise these groups’ abilities to fend for themselves and preserve their cultural integrity. On the other side of the debate are visual anthropologists and others who are arguing that indigenous groups are quickly becoming savvy to Western technologies, and that they are now using them for cultural revitalisation, linguistic revival, and the creation of outlets for the indigenous voice. In this school of thought, technology is seen not so much as a threat to indigenous groups, but instead as a remarkable opportunity to reverse the misfortunes of these groups at the hands of colonisation and national programmes of attempted assimilation. From this perspective, the rush of indigenous groups to adopt new technologies comes hand-in-hand with recent efforts to assert their tribal sovereignty and their independence. Technology has become a "weapon" in their struggle for technological autonomy. As a result, many are starting their own television stations and networks, and thus transforming the way television operates in their societies -– away from global monocultures and toward local interests. I hypothesise that in fact there is no correlation between television viewing and acculturation, and that, in fact, the more familiar people are with the technology of television and the current way the technology is utilised, the more likely they are to be interested in using it to revive and promote their own culture. Whatever slight negative effect exists depends on the degree to which local people can understand and redirect how that technology is used within their own cultural context. However, it should be stated that for terms of this investigation, I consider the technologies of "video" and "television" to be identical. One is the recording aspect, and the other the distribution aspect, of the same technology. Once people become aware that they can control what is on the television screen through the instrumentality of video, they immediately begin attempting to assert cultural values through it. And this is precisely what is going on on the Cheyenne River Reservation. This project is significant because the phenomenon of globalisation is real and Western technologies such as video, radio, and PCs are spreading throughout the world, including the "Fourth World" of the planet’s indigenous peoples. However, in order to deal with the phenomenon of globalisation, anthropologists and others may need to deal more realistically with the phenomenon of technological diffusion, which operates far less simply than they might assume. Well-meaning anthropologists seeking to "protect" indigenous groups from the "invasion" of technologies which will change their way of life may be doing these groups a disservice. If they turned some of their effort away from fending off these technologies and toward teaching indigenous groups how to use them, perhaps they might have a better result in creating a better future for them. I hope this study will show a more productive model for dealing with technological diffusion and what effects it has on cultural change in indigenous societies. There have been very few authors that have dealt with this topic head-on. One of the first to do so was Pace (1993), who suggested that some Brazilian Indians were acculturating more quickly as a result of television finally coming to their remote villages in the 1960s. Molohon (1984) looked at two Cree communities, and found that the one which had more heavy television viewing was culturally closer to its neighboring white towns. Zimmerman (1996) fingered television as one of the key elements in causing Indian teenagers to lose their sense of identity, thus putting them at higher risk for suicide. Gillespie (1995) argued that television is actually a ‘weapon’ of national states everywhere in their efforts to assimilate and socialise indigenous and other ethnic minority groups. In contrast, authors like Weiner (1997), Straubhaar (1991), and Graburn (1982) have all critiqued these approaches, suggesting that they deny subjectivity and critical thinking to indigenous TV audiences. Each of these researchers suggest, based on their field work, that indigenous people are no more likely than anybody else to believe that the things they see on television are true, and no more likely to adopt the values or worldviews promoted by Western TV programmers and advertisers. In fact, Graburn has observed that the Inuit became so disgusted with what they saw on Canadian national television, that they went out and started their own TV network in an effort to provide their people with meaningful alternatives on their screens. Bell (1995) sounds a cautionary note against studies like Graburn’s, noting that the efforts of indigenous New Zealanders to create their own TV programming for local markets failed, largely because they were crowded out by the "media imperialism" of outside international television. Although the indigenous groups there tried to put their own faces on the screen, many local viewers preferred to see the faces of J.R. Ewing and company, and lowered the ratings share of these efforts. Salween (1991) thinks that global media "cultural imperialism" is real -– that it is an objective pursued by international television marketers -– and suggests a media effects approach might be the best way to see whether it works. Woll (1987) notes that historically many ethnic groups have formed their self-images based on the way they have been portrayed onscreen, and that so far these portrayals have been far from sympathetic. In fact, even once these groups started their own cinemas or TV programmes, they unconsciously perpetuated stereotypes first foisted on them by other people. This study tends to side with those who have observed that indigenous people do not tend to "roll over" in the wake of the onslaught of Western television. Although cautionary studies need to be examined carefully, this research will posit that although the dominant forces controlling TV are antithetical to indigenous groups and their goals, the efforts of indigenous people to take control of their TV screens and their own "media literacy" are also increasing. Thus, this study should contribute to the viewpoint that perhaps the best way to save indigenous groups from cultural eradication is to give them access to television and show them how to set up their own stations and distribute their own video programming. In fact, it appears to be the case that TV, the Internet, and electronic 'new media' are helping to foster a process of cultural renewal, not just among the Lakota, but also among the Inuit, the Australian aborigines, and other indigenous groups. These new technologies are helping them renew their native languages, cultural values, and ceremonial traditions, sometimes by giving them new vehicles and forms. Methods The research for this project was conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation headquartered in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Participants chosen for this project were Lakota Sioux who were of the age of consent (18 or older) and who were tribal members living on the reservation. They were given a survey which consisted of five components: a demographic question section identifying their age, gender, and individual data; a technology question section identifying what technologies they had in their home; a TV question section measuring the amount of television they watched; an acculturation question section determining their comparative level of acculturation; and a cultural knowledge question section determining their knowledge of Lakota history. This questionnaire was often followed up by unstructured ethnographic interviews. Thirty-three people of mixed age and gender were given this questionnaire, and for the purposes of this research paper, I focussed primarily on their responses dealing with television and acculturation. These people were chosen through strictly random sampling based on picking addresses at random from the phone book and visiting their houses. The television section asked specifically how many hours of TV they watched per day and per week, what shows they watched, what kinds of shows they preferred, and what rooms in their home had TVs. The acculturation section asked them questions such as how much they used the Lakota language, how close their values were to Lakota values, and how much participation they had in traditional indigenous rituals and customs. To assure open and honest responses, each participant filled out a consent form, and was promised anonymity of their answers. To avoid data contamination, I remained with each person until they completed the questionnaire. For my data analysis, I attempted to determine if there was any correlation (Pearson’s coefficient r of correlation) between such things as hours of TV viewed per week or years of TV ownership with such things as the number of traditional ceremonies they attended in the past year, the number of non-traditional Lakota values they had, their fluency in the Lakota language, their level of cultural knowledge, or the number of traditional practices and customs they had engaged in in their lives. Through simple statistical tests, I determined whether television viewing had any impact on these variables which were reasonable proxies for level of acculturation. Findings Having chosen two independent variables, hours of TV watched per week, and years of TV ownership, I tested if there was any significant correlation between them and the dependent variables of Lakota peoples’ level of cultural knowledge, participation in traditional practices, conformity of values to non-Lakota or non-traditional values, fluency in Lakota, and participation in traditional ceremonies (Table 1). These variables all seemed like reasonable proxies for acculturation since acculturated Lakota would know less of their own culture, go to fewer ceremonies, and so on. The cultural knowledge score was based on how many complete answers the respondents knew to ‘fill in the blank’ questions regarding Lakota history, historical figures, and important events. Participation in traditional practices was based on how many items they marked in a survey of whether or not they had ever raised a tipi, used traditional medicine, etc. The score for conformity to non-Lakota values was based on how many items they marked with a contrary answer to the emic Lakota value system ("the seven Ws".) Lakota fluency was based on how well they could speak, write, or use the Lakota language. And ceremonial attendance was based on the number of traditional ceremonies they had attended in the past year. There were no significant correlations between either of these TV-related variables and these indexes of acculturation. Table 1. R-Scores (Pearson’s Coefficient of Correlation) between Variables Representing Television and Acculturation R-SCORES Cultural Knowledge Traditional Practices Modern Values Lakota Fluency Ceremonial Attendance Years Owning TV 0.1399 -0.0445 -0.4646 -0.0660 0.1465 Hours of TV/Week -0.3414 -0.2640 -0.2798 -0.3349 0.2048 The strongest correlation was between the number of years the Lakota person owned a television, and the number of non-Lakota (or ‘modern Western’) values they held in their value system. But even that correlation was pretty weak, and nowhere near the r-score of other linear correlations, such as between their age and the number of children they had. How much television Lakota people watched did not seem to have any influence on how much cultural knowledge they knew, how many traditional practices they had participated in, how many non-Lakota values they held, how well they spoke or used the Lakota language, or how many ceremonies they attended. Even though there does not appear to be anything unusual about their television preferences, and in general they are watching the same shows as other non-Lakota people on the reservation, they are not becoming more acculturated as a result of their exposure to television. Although the Lakota people may be losing aspects of their culture, language, and traditions, other causes seem to be at the forefront than television. I also found that people who were very interested in television production as well as consumption saw this as a tool for putting more Lakota-oriented programs on the air. The more they knew about how television worked, the more they were interested in using it as a tool in their own community. And where I was working at the Cultural Center, there was an effort to videotape many community and cultural events. The Center had a massive archive of videotaped material, but unfortunately while they had faithfully recorded all kinds of cultural events, many of them were not quite "broadcast ready". There was more focus on showing these video programmes, especially oral history interviews with elders, on VCRs in the school system, and in integrating them into various kinds of multimedia and hypermedia. While the Cultural Center had begun broadcasting (remotely through a radio modem) a weekly radio show, ‘Wakpa Waste’ (Good Morning CRST), on the radio station to the north, KLND-Standing Rock, there had never been any forays into TV broadcasting. The Cultural Center director had looked into the feasibility of putting up a television signal transmission tower, and had applied for a grant to erect one, but that grant was denied. The local cable system in Eagle Butte unfortunately lacked the technology to carry true "local access" programming; although the Channel 8 of the system carried CRST News and text announcements, there was no open channel available to carry locally produced public access programming. The way the cable system was set up, it was purely a "relay" or feed from news and channels from elsewhere. Also, people were investing heavily in satellite systems, especially the new DBS (direct broadcast satellite) receivers, and would not be able to pick up local access programmes anyway. The main problem hindering the Lakotas’ efforts to preserve their culture through TV and video was lack of access to broadcast distribution technology. They had the interest, the means, and the stock of programming to put on the air. They had the production and editing equipment, although not the studios to do a "live" show. Were they able to have more local access to and control over TV distribution technology, they would have a potent "arsenal" for resisting the drastic acculturation their community is undergoing. TV has the potential to be a tool for great cultural revitalisation, but because the technology and know-how for producing it was located elsewhere, the Lakotas could not benefit from it. Discussion I hypothesised that the effects if TV viewing on levels of indigenous acculturation would be negligible. The data support my hypothesis that TV does not seem to have a major correlation with other indices of acculturation. Previous studies by anthropologists such as Pace and Molohon suggested that TV was a key determinant in the acculturation of indigenous people in Brazil and the U.S. -– this being the theory of cultural imperialism. However, this research suggests that TV’s effect on the decline of indigenous culture is weak and inconclusive. In fact, the qualitative data suggest that the Lakota most familiar with TV are also the most interested in using it as a tool for cultural preservation. Although the CRST Lakota currently lack the means for mass broadcast of cultural programming, there is great interest in it, and new technologies such as the Internet and micro-broadcast may give them the means. There are other examples of this phenomenon worldwide, which suggest that the Lakota experience is not unique. In recent years, Australian Aborigines, Canadian Inuit, and Brazilian Kayapo have each begun ambitious efforts in creating satellite-based television networks that allow them to reach their far-flung populations with programming in their own indigenous language. In Australia, Aboriginal activists have created music television programming which has helped them assert their position in land claims disputes with the Australian government (Michaels 1994), and also to educate the Europeans of Australia about the aboriginal way of life. In Canada, the Inuit have also created satellite TV networks which are indigenous-owned and operated and carry traditional cultural programming (Valaskakis 1992). Like the Aborigines and the Inuit, the Lakota through their HVJ Lakota Cultural Center are beginning to create their own radio and video programming on a smaller scale, but are beginning to examine using the reservation's cable network to carry some of this material. Since my quantitative survey included only 33 respondents, the data are not as robust as would be determined from a larger sample. However, ethnographic interviews focussing on how people approach TV, as well as other qualitative data, support the inferences of the quantitative research. It is not clear that my work with the Lakota is necessarily generalisable to other populations. Practically, it does suggest that anthropologists interested in cultural and linguistic preservation should strive to increase indigenous access to, and control of, TV production technology. ‘Protecting’ indigenous groups from new technologies may cause more harm than good. Future applied anthropologists should work with the ‘natives’ and help teach them how to adopt and adapt this technology for their own purposes. Although this is a matter that I deal with more intensively in my dissertation, it also appears to me to be the case that, contrary to the warnings of Mander, many indigenous cultures are not being culturally assimilated by media technology, but instead are assimilating the technology into their own particular cultural contexts. The technology is part of a process of revitalisation or renewal -- although there is a definite process of change and adaptation underway, this actually represents an 'updating' of old cultural practices for new situations in an attempt to make them viable for the modern situation. Indeed, I think that the Internet, globally, is allowing indigenous people to reassert themselves as a Fourth World "power bloc" on the world stage, as linkages are being formed between Saami, Maya, Lakota, Kayapo, Inuit, and Aborigines. Further research should focus on: why TV seems to have a greater acculturative influence on certain indigenous groups rather than others; whether indigenous people can truly compete equally in the broadcast "marketplace" with Western cultural programming; and whether attempts to quantify the success of TV/video technology in cultural preservation and revival can truly demonstrate that this technology plays a positive role. In conclusion, social scientists may need to take a sidelong look at why precisely they have been such strong critics of introducing new technologies into indigenous societies. There is a better role that they can play –- that of technology ‘broker’. They can cooperate with indigenous groups, serving to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and technology between them and the majority society. References Bell, Avril. "'An Endangered Species’: Local Programming in the New Zealand Television Market." Media, Culture & Society 17.1 (1995): 182-202. Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change. New York: Routledge, 1995. Graburn, Nelson. "Television and the Canadian Inuit". Inuit Etudes 6.2 (1982): 7-24. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Molohon, K.T. "Responses to Television in Two Swampy Cree Communities on the West James Bay." Kroeber Anthropology Society Papers 63/64 (1982): 95-103. Pace, Richard. "First-Time Televiewing in Amazonia: Television Acculturation in Gurupa, Brazil." Ethnology 32.1 (1993): 187-206. Salween, Michael. "Cultural Imperialism: A Media Effects Approach." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.2 (1991): 29-39. Straubhaar, J. "Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity". Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.1 (1991): 39-70. Valaskakis, Gail. "Communication, Culture, and Technology: Satellites and Northern Native Broadcasting in Canada". Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1992. Weiner, J. "Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics." Current Anthropology 38.3 (1997): 197-236. Woll, Allen. Ethnic and Racial Images in American Film and Television: Historical Essays and Bibliography. New York: Garland Press, 1987. Zimmerman, M. "The Development of a Measure of Enculturation for Native American Youth." American Journal of Community Psychology 24.1 (1996): 295-311. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steven Mizrach. "Natives on the Electronic Frontier: Television and Cultural Change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php>. Chicago style: Steven Mizrach, "Natives on the Electronic Frontier: Television and Cultural Change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steven Mizrach. (2000) Natives on the electronic frontier: television and cultural change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Introduction – Polish GrungeThe main objective of this article is to examine the grunge scene of the 1990s in Poland in the context of acculturation and assimilation processes. Polish grunge was, on the one hand, the expression of trends that were observable in music industry since the late 1980s. On the other hand, it was symptomatic of a rapid systemic transformation. Youth culture was open for the diffusion of cultural patterns and was ready to adopt certain patterns from the West.Thus, we suggest that the local grunge scene was completely modelled on the American one: the flow of cultural practices and subcultural fashion were the manifestations of the assimilation processes in Poland, observable not only in art (i.e. rock music), but also in the domains of politics and economy, as well as in the broader social sphere. We explore how young people were ready to adopt only the surface level of the phenomenon as they were familiar with it through the media coverage it received. Young people in Poland circa the early ‘90s primarily wanted to gain access to an imaginary Western lifestyle rather than learn about real living conditions in capitalist societies, and they could do this through their involvement in grunge culture.Grunge as a Cultural PhenomenonGrunge as a popular music trend arose in the USA during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. Grunge was initially opposed to consumerism and capitalist values. Nevertheless, A&R scouts recognised the commercial potential of this music: for example, Nirvana’s Nevermind was released by Geffen Company, and Pearl Jam’s Ten by Epic. As Grzegorz Brzozowicz and Filip Łobodziński put it (313),the success of Nirvana was a post-mort triumph of punk rock and, more importantly, it indicated the potential of alternative music, which suddenly stepped outside an aesthetic ghetto and became a hot stuff. This influence was also visible as regards fashion and customs – Dr. Martens’ shoes, flannel shirts, frayed jeans, and wool caps became an outfit common for the young (…). Grunge influenced visual art, film and photography.In Poland, grunge as a subculture and sub-genre of rock music emerged in the early 1990s following the international commercial success of bands such as those listed above, and it entailed the assimilation of the Western cultural patterns. Although assimilation processes were typical primarily for youth culture, they were observed in the wider context of the changes and adaptations that Polish system underwent after the fall of the centrally planned economy and subjugation to the communist party power after the Yalta agreements (1945-1989/1990).In this context, the concept Centre/Periphery (Gopinathan, Saravanan and Altbach; Hannerz; Langholm; Pisciotta) appears as the field for the dissemination of popular culture. Popular culture is a battlefield for creating and negotiating the meanings that are inherent within cultural practices (Barker). Cultural practices play a double role in the dissemination of ideas or objects. Firstly, they come as a result of adaptation in a defined culture, and secondly, they make new cultural patterns stabile, visible, and easy to practice by people as flexible patterns of behaviour. This point is clearly visible in the context of the East European states that underwent rapid acculturation processes in which new patterns of economic and social solutions were established in centre-planned economies: the tensions of the “old” and the “new” patterns dominating in the political and social systems of those countries (e.g. Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) were visible and affected societies to a considerable degree (Pisciotta). Thus, the practices generated in cultural Centres tend to disseminate easily and to “conquer” other cultural systems, especially in the Periphery.In the case of popular culture, the flow of influences usually takes a one-dimensional form and is disseminated from the Centre to the Periphery. As Marek Jeziński (162-163) argues, both Centre and Periphery are functional systems. These systems have generated their own mythology, which separates one from another. However, as in the case of mythological systems in general, Centre and Periphery tales overlap frequently, and there are evidence that the bands that originated in the Periphery were assimilated by the Centre. For example, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were both successful in market terms and both built their own status based on the Peripheral components that were skilfully overtaken by the Centre narrative. While the Peripheral narratives are concentrated mainly on the undermining of the definition of situation and present dysfunctional character towards cultural system as such, the Centre narratives aim to maintain the definition of situation supporting mainstream values and their prevailing position in a system (Jeziński 164). Grunge is the epitome of such an implementation of cultural patterns. That is, grunge started as a fringe peripheral cultural phenomenon. The major records companies, however, recognised its potential and provided the space in the music market to support the new bands. Most of the groups in the US started as independent local acts related to independent record companies that built their status.In relation to the assimilation of grunge culture in Poland, we can distinguish two key phenomena. The first is concerned with the adaptation of general subcultural components, e.g. fashion and group identification. Here, the acculturation processes run as a primary form of mimicry, as the Polish grunge scene adopted elements typical of the grunge subculture, such as oversize sweaters, flannel shirts, Dr. Martens shoes or Converse trainers, long hair, and beanies. A newly formed subculture was different from the others popular in the 1990s. For example, punk and metal subcultures implied strong group identity, style hom*ogeneity, rigid group limitations, and firm membership rules. Conversely, it seems that the grunge subculture was based more on a level of liquid and fragmented patchwork identity than on very inflexible group values and internal ideology or political attitudes (cf. Muggleton). Such patchwork identity formation was a result of a rapid clash between the adaptation of grunge cultural patterns from the West and the Polish economic transformation of the early 1990s.Poland underwent rapid changes that were also visible in the politics, culture and social domain, joining liberal democracies and liberal free market economies of the West. These changes resulted from a transformation of the system as a whole: from a central planned system to decentralisation of the power at both local and state levels (Sarnecki). Equally important were the changes in the political culture of Poles and their value system: they accepted the democratic changes but simultaneously, the mentality of Poles remained traditionalist (which is visible in surveys— the most important values for them were “family” and “work”), and their attitude towards the processes of cultural and institutional changes was impermanent (Garlicki; Jasińska-Kania).During the transformation, the changes were visible in the everyday lives of Polish citizens: examples include the shortages in the market that were evident after the socialist regime ended, and the easy availability of Western clothes such as jeans, shirts, denim jackets in ordinary stores. Consequently, the economic rates in the 1990s were higher in comparison to the previous decade (Bałtowski and Miszewski). Those changes resulted in a phase shift in the modernisation process, where patterns of economic and cultural development and were faster than the enculturation and socialisation processes.On the one hand, the free market allowed for almost unlimited commodification with unprecedented access to goods and services. On the other hand, the low cultural capital and economic possibilities of the citizens evolved rapidly. The communist-shaped social division fell apart, and the new class designations based of consumption/commodification patterns were established (Jeziński; Wojtkowski). Those factors resulted in high cross-generational mobility, lower entrance barriers, and higher openness indicators (cf. Polska klasa średnia; O ruchliwości społecznej w polsce).Hence, in cultural conditions based on capitalist consumption practices, the grunge subculture evolved with a commodified sense of style rather than with a firm identity. Yet, in the case of grunge style, relatively high costs of subculture commodities (e.g. Dr. Martens shoes, Converse trainers, or band t-shirts) led to DIY practices such as buying cheaper no-name shoes, and sewing badges with the names of bands and albums on jackets or backpacks.The second phenomenon encompasses the adaptation of music patterns. The Polish grunge scene was not as diversified in terms of genre variations as its US counterpart. In the beginning, the Polish grunge scene was more distressed geographically, with no specific Centre-Periphery relations. However, one of the most important bands, Hey, was established in the Northwest. When one looks at Polish grunge evolution as a ‘clash’ of American genre and the specific character of a time and place where Polish bands were recording, she or he will notice multiple similarities with the US scene.Firstly, we could name two approaches to grunge music among Polish performers: ‘intellectual’ and ‘rebel’. The ‘intellectual’ approach encompasses the group Hey. This band was established in Szczecin (the Northwest Poland), but after the success of their first album – Fire (1993), they moved to Warsaw. Hey released 11 studio records, but only the first three could be classified as “grunge” (cf. Sankowski). On the level of musical references, Fire sounds like a mixture of early Pearl Jam combined with Alice in Chains. With English lyrics and song topics that were typical for grunge— e.g., The Choice (“You’ve got a gun/You can use it now”)—similarities with Pearl Jam, in particular, are striking. The band evolved, and on their second album, Ho! (1994), Hey mixed equally Polish and English lyrics with the dynamic and specific Seattle sound (cf. Prato). Hey’s most distinctive feature comparing with other Polish grunge bands is its highly developed melodic approach to music and the poetic, sensual style of its lyrics. The third record, ? (1995), closes the band’s early stage. The next album, Karma (1997), opens the period when the amalgamation of electronics, hard rock and grunge dominated Hey’s music, with the album [sic!] (2001) representing the turning point in the group’s music style. The band suspended their work in 2017 and will probably never reunite.Over time, Hey gained one of the most dedicated audiences in Polish rock music. The music industry and critics have acknowledged Hey as one of the best Polish groups in the post-communist period. Hey has received the most nominations in the history of Fryderyki, the key Polish music awards. The group and Nosowska have won twenty-three times in multiple categories. As the longest-operating grunge-origin band in the country, Hey could be considered as a most important trend setting and scene-forming group.The more “rebellious” approach to grunge encompasses bands such as Illusion (1992-1999, 2014-present) and Houk. The former was based on the grunge and hardcore mixture of influences from Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Rage Against the Machine (especially in terms of rap-oriented lyrics). With the preservation of certain consistency, the band named first three albums: Illusion (1993), Illusion II (1994), and Illusion III (1995). Illusion marks the band’s aggressive style and lyrics simplicity but the studio production flattens the whole and gives an impression of a post-punk DIY venture rather than a coherent composition. The second record, however, is entirely conceptualised and thought out in terms of music and lyrics. Sharp riffs, hard rock tuning of instruments and aggressive lyrics that were focused on Polish life gave the album a needed consistency. The band’s third record is the most varied stylistically and politically engaged in their history. The harder-edged tunes from previous releases are accompanied by more psychedelic compositions (Wrona) that recall Alice in Chains’ slow songs and Layne Staley’s voice.Houk’s music similarly to other Polish grunge bands was the amalgamation of various genres and their style evolved in time. Initially, the band was regarded as an example of alternative rock music. The first album Soul Ammunition (1992) was named by music monthly Tylko Rock as a debut of the year (polskirock.art.pl). The combination of grunge, hardcore, hard rock, reggae and socio-politically engaged lyrics helped the group to establish a strong fan base. The band’s unique style was recognised internationally and Houk supported New Model Army and Bad Brains during the performances in the mid-1990’s (polskirock.art.pl). The band’s second studio release Generation X (1995) was recorded prior the multiple membership reorganizations that finally ended the grunge-orientation period of Houk’s history. One of the songs, Sleep, was dedicated to Kurt Cobain and reflected Nirvana’s approach to songwriting, which can be heard in songs such as “Lithium” (1991). Such a commemoration of Cobain’s figure is characteristic of Polish grunge culture’s establishment of strong ties with the American equivalent. Here and in many similar cases, Cobain serves not only as a grunge hero (or even a martyr) but also as a commodified pop culture figure (cf. Strong). Concerning both spheres - that is, the adaptation of grunge subculture and a development of the music scene -Polish grunge follows a different pattern to the US genre. Grunge was introduced to Poland after it was popularised and commodified by the major labels and media industry in the USA, so the adopted version was the mainstream one rather than the underground movement. Hence, the simplistic dichotomy between “underground” and “mainstream” culture does not function in terms of the Polish grunge culture, and probably is misstated even when it comes to the American phenomenon. Grunge could be perceived in Poland as both the first and the last “true” subcultural trend. At the same time, though, it was an affirmation not of ‘the rebel’ and ‘the underground’ but of capitalism and the cultural values of the West. Indeed, the Polish grunge culture couldn’t be fully aware of what grunge was warning us against while Polish society faced the rapid market and cultural transformation that allowed for its opening to Western trends.Conclusion – Is Grunge Really Dead?Although the popularity of grunge phenomenon in Poland was relatively short, the most important groups of this sub-genre - Illusion, Hey, Ahimsa, Houk, and Kr’shna Brothers - widely contributed to the emergence of the new wave of fashion for rock and hard-rock music in Poland in the mid-1990s. The most successful group of the era, Hey epitomises the transformation of grunge in Poland. Starting as a typical grunge band (modelled heavily on the US groups), they underwent a serious transition, substantially changing their music into more mainstream-oriented rock (that is, as music that was considered acceptable by rock music and AOR-focused radio stations). At the same time, grunge as a rock sub-genre underwent the contrary changes: it broke into the mainstream relatively quickly in the first half of the 1990s, establishing new rock stars of the scene (Illusion, Houk, Ahimsa, Hey), but in the late 1990s it went back to being a rock niche again. It seems that today grunge serves as a point of reference (in fact, it was an important period of rock history) for the new bands that intentionally use this sub-genre as a form of commodified, media-friendly nostalgia.ReferencesBałtowski, Maciej, Miszewski, Maciej. Transformacja gospodarcza w Polsce. Warszawa: PWN, 2006.Biografia Houk. 25 Nov. 2018 <https://www.polskirock.art.pl/houk,z346,biografia.html>.Brzozowicz, Grzegorz, and Filip Łobodziński. Sto płyt, które wstrząsnęły światem: Kronika czasów popkultury. Warszawa: Iskry, 2000.Domański, Henryk. Polska klasa średnia. Wrocław: FNP i W. Wrocławskie, 2002.Domański, Henryk. O ruchliwości społecznej w Polsce. Warszawa: IFiS PAN, 2004.Garlicki, Jan. “Tradycje i dynamika kultury politycznej społeczeństwa polskiego.” Dylematy polskiej transformacji. Ed. Jan Błuszkowski. Warszawa: DW Elipsa, 2007. 155-174.Gopinathan, Saravanan, and Philip G. Altbach. “Rethinking Centre–Periphery.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 25.2 (2005): 117-123.Hannerz, Ulf. “Culture between Center and Periphery: Toward a Macroanthropology.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 54.3-4 (1989): 200-216.Houk. Soul Ammunition. 23 Nov. 2018 <https://www.polskirock.art.pl/soul-ammunition,houk,3051,plyta.html>.Jasińska-Kania, Aleksandra. “Dynamika zmian wartości Polaków na tle europejskim: EVS 1990-1999-2008.” Polska po 20 latach wolności. Eds. Marta Bucholc, Sławomir Mandes, Tadeusz Szawiel and Joanna Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2011. 225-239.Jeziński, Marek. Mitologie muzyki popularnej. Toruń: WN Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2014.Jeziński, Marek, and Łukasz Wojtkowski. “Nostalgia Commodified: Towards the Marketization of the Post-Communist Past through the New Media.” Medien und Zeit 4 (2016): 96–104.Langholm, Sivert. “On the Concepts of Center and Periphery.” Journal of Peace Research 8.3-4 (1971): 273-278.Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture. The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Pisciotta, Barbara. “The Center-Periphery Cleavage Revisited: East and Central Europe from Postcommunism to Euroscepticism.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 22.2 (2016): 193-219.Sankowski, Robert. “Hey, czyli któtka historia polskiego popu.” Wyborcza.pl, 3 Nov. 2012. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,12788097,Hey__czyli_krotka_historia_polskiego_popu.html>. Sarnecki, Paweł. “Od kumulacji do podziału władzy.” Transformacja ustrojowa w Polsce 1989-2009. Eds. Maria Kruk and Jan Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2011. 37-58.Strong, Catherine. Grunge and the Memory. London: Routledge, 2016.

Abstract:

In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn this article, I set out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to map coffee and cafés in Mainland China in different historical periods. The second is to focus on coffee and cafés in the socio-cultural milieu of contemporary China in order to understand the symbolic value of the emerging coffee/café-scape. Cafés, rather than coffee, are at the centre of this current trend in contemporary Chinese cities. With instant coffee dominating as a drink, the Chinese have developed a cultural and social demand for cafés, but have not yet developed coffee palates. Historical Coffee Map In 1901, coffee was served in a restaurant in the city of Tianjin. This restaurant, named Kiessling, was run by a German chef, a former solider who came to China with the eight-nation alliance. At that time, coffee was reserved mostly for foreign politicians and military officials as well as wealthy businessmen—very few ordinary Chinese drank it. (For more history of Kiessling, including pictures and videos, see Kiessling). Another group of coffee consumers were from the cultural elites—the young revolutionary intellectuals and writers with overseas experience. It was almost a fashion among the literary elite to spend time in cafés. However, this was negatively judged as “Western” and “bourgeois.” For example, in 1932, Lu Xun, one of the most important twentieth century Chinese writers, commented on the café fashion during 1920s (133-36), and listed the reasons why he would not visit one. He did not drink coffee because it was “foreigners’ food”, and he was too busy writing for the kind of leisure enjoyed in cafés. Moreover, he did not, he wrote, have the nerve to go to a café, and particularly not the Revolutionary Café that was popular among cultural celebrities at that time. He claimed that the “paradise” of the café was for genius, and for handsome revolutionary writers (who he described as having red lips and white teeth, whereas his teeth were yellow). His final complaint was that even if he went to the Revolutionary Café, he would hesitate going in (Lu Xun 133-36). From Lu Xun’s list, we can recognise his nationalism and resistance to what were identified as Western foods and lifestyles. It is easy to also feel his dissatisfaction with those dilettante revolutionary intellectuals who spent time in cafés, talking and enjoying Western food, rather than working. In contrast to Lu Xun’s resistance to coffee and café culture, another well-known writer, Zhang Ailing, frequented cafés when she lived in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1950s. She wrote about the smell of cakes and bread sold in Kiessling’s branch store located right next to her parents’ house (Yuyue). Born into a wealthy family, exposed to Western culture and food at a very young age, Zhang Ailing liked to spend her social and writing time in cafés, ordering her favourite cakes, hot chocolate, and coffee. When she left Shanghai and immigrated to the USA, coffee was an important part of her writing life: the smell and taste reminding her of old friends and Shanghai (Chunzi). However, during Zhang’s time, it was still a privileged and elite practice to patronise a café when these were located in foreign settlements with foreign chefs, and served mainly foreigners, wealthy businessmen, and cultural celebrities. After 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China, until the late 1970s, there were no coffee shops in Mainland China. It was only when Deng Xiaoping suggested neo-liberalism as a so-called “reform-and-open-up” economic policy that foreign commerce and products were again seen in China. In 1988, ten years after the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy, the Nestlé coffee company made the first inroads into the mainland market, featuring homegrown coffee beans in Yunnan province (China Beverage News; Dong; ITC). Nestlé’s bottled instant coffee found its way into the Chinese market, avoiding a direct challenge to the tea culture. Nestlé packaged its coffee to resemble health food products and marketed it as a holiday gift suitable for friends and relatives. As a symbol of modernity and “the West”, coffee-as-gift meshed with the traditional Chinese cultural custom that values gift giving. It also satisfied a collective desire for foreign products (and contact with foreign cultures) during the economic reform era. Even today, with its competitively low price, instant coffee dominates coffee consumption at home, in the workplace, and on Chinese airlines. While Nestlé aimed their product at native Chinese consumers, the multinational companies who later entered China’s coffee market, such as Sara Lee, mainly targeted international hotels such as IHG, Marriott, and Hyatt. The multinationals also favoured coffee shops like Kommune in Shanghai that offered more sophisticated kinds of coffee to foreign consumers and China’s upper class (Byers). If Nestlé introduced coffee to ordinary Chinese families, it was Starbucks who introduced the coffee-based “third space” to urban life in contemporary China on a signficant scale. Differing from the cafés before 1949, Starbucks stores are accessible to ordinary Chinese citizens. The first in Mainland China opened in Beijing’s China World Trade Center in January 1999, targeting mainly white-collar workers and foreigners. Starbucks coffee shops provide a space for informal business meetings, chatting with friends, and relaxing and, with its 500th store opened in 2011, dominate the field in China. Starbucks are located mainly in the central business districts and airports, and the company plans to have 1,500 sites by 2015 (Starbucks). Despite this massive presence, Starbucks constitutes only part of the café-scape in contemporary Chinese cities. There are two other kinds of cafés. One type is usually located in universities or residential areas and is frequented mainly by students or locals working in cultural professions. A representative of this kind is Sculpting in Time Café. In November 1997, two years before the opening of the first Starbucks in Beijing, two newlywed college graduates opened the first small Sculpting in Time Café near Beijing University’s East Gate. This has been expanded into a chain, and boasts 18 branches on the Mainland. (For more about its history, see Sculpting in Time Café). Interestingly, both Starbucks and Sculpting in Time Café acquired their names from literature, Starbucks from Moby Dick, and Sculpting in Time from the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film diary of the same name. For Chinese students of literature and the arts, drinking coffee is less about acquiring more energy to accomplish their work, and more about entering a sensual world, where the aroma of coffee mixes with the sounds from the coffee machine and music, as well as the lighting of the space. More importantly, cafés with this ambience become, in themselves, cultural sites associated with literature, films, and music. Owners of this kind of café are often lovers of foreign literatures, films, and cultures, and their cafés host various cultural events, including forums, book clubs, movie screenings, and music clubs. Generally speaking, coffee served in this kind of café is simpler than in the kind discussed below. This third type of café includes those located in tourist and entertainment sites such as art districts, bar areas, and historical sites, and which are frequented by foreign and native tourists, artists and other cultural workers. If Starbucks cultivates a fast-paced business/professional atmosphere, and Sculpting in Time Cafés an artsy and literary atmosphere, this third kind of café is more like an upscale “bar” with trained baristas serving complicated coffees and emphasising their flavour. These coffee shops are more expensive than the other kinds, with an average price three times that of Starbucks. Currently, cafés of this type are found only in “first-tier” cities and usually located in art districts and tourist areas—such as Beijing’s 798 Art District and Nanluo Guxiang, Shanghai’s Tai Kang Road (a.k.a. “the art street”), and Hangzhou’s Westlake area. While Nestlé and Starbucks use coffee beans grown in Yunnan provinces, these “art cafés” are more inclined to use imported coffee beans from suppliers like Sara Lee. Coffee and Cafés in Contemporary China After just ten years, there are hundreds of cafés in Chinese cities. Why has there been such a demand for coffee or, more accurately, cafés, in such a short period of time? The first reason is the lack of “third space” environments in Mainland China. Before cafés appeared in the late 1990s, stores like KFC (which opened its first store in 1987) and McDonald’s (with its first store opened in 1990) filled this role for urban residents, providing locations where customers could experience Western food, meet friends, work, or read. In fact, KFC and McDonald’s were once very popular with college students looking for a place to study. Both stores had relatively clean food environments and good lighting. They also had air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, which are not provided in most Chinese university dormitories. However, since neither chain was set up to be a café and customers occupying seats for long periods while ordering minimal amounts of food or drink affected profits, staff members began to indirectly ask customers to leave after dining. At the same time, as more people were able to afford to eat at KFC and McDonald’s, their fast foods were also becoming more and more popular, especially among young people. As a consequence, both types of chain restaurant were becoming noisy and crowded and, thus, no longer ideal for reading, studying, or meeting with friends. Although tea has been a traditional drink in Chinese culture, traditional teahouses were expensive places more suitable for business meetings or for the cultural or intellectual elite. Since almost every family owns a tea set and can readily purchase tea, friends and family would usually make and consume tea at home. In recent years, however, new kinds of teahouses have emerged, similar in style to cafés, targeting the younger generation with more affordable prices and a wider range of choices, so the lack of a “third space” does not fully explain the café boom. Another factor affecting the popularity of cafés has been the development and uptake of Internet technology, including the increasing use of laptops and wireless Internet in recent years. The Internet has been available in China since the late 1990s, while computers and then laptops entered ordinary Chinese homes in the early twenty-first century. The IT industry has created not only a new field of research and production, but has also fostered new professions and demands. Particularly, in recent years in Mainland China, a new socially acceptable profession—freelancing in such areas as graphic design, photography, writing, film, music, and the fashion industry—has emerged. Most freelancers’ work is computer- and Internet-based. Cafés provide suitable working space, with wireless service, and the bonus of coffee that is, first of all, somatically stimulating. In addition, the emergence of the creative and cultural industries (which are supported by the Chinese government) has created work for these freelancers and, arguably, an increasing demand for café-based third spaces where such people can meet, talk and work. Furthermore, the flourishing of cafés in first-tier cities is part of the “aesthetic economy” (Lloyd 24) that caters to the making and selling of lifestyle experience. Alongside foreign restaurants, bars, galleries, and design firms, cafés contribute to city branding, and link a city to the global urban network. Cafés, like restaurants, galleries and bars, provide a space for the flow of global commodities, as well as for the human flow of tourists, travelling artists, freelancers, and cultural specialists. Finally, cafés provide a type of service that contributes to friendly owner/waiter-customer relations. During the planned-economy era, most stores and hotels in China were State-owned, staff salaries were not related to individual performance, and indifferent (and even unfriendly) service was common. During the economic reform era, privately owned stores and shops began to replace State-owned ones. At the same time, a large number of people from the countryside flowed into the cities seeking opportunities. Most had little if any professional training and so could only find work in factories or in the service industry. However, most café employees are urban, with better educational backgrounds, and many were already familiar with coffee culture. In addition, café owners, particularly those of places like Sculpting in Time Cafe, often invest in creating a positive, community atmosphere, learning about their customers and sharing personal experiences with their regular clients. This leads to my next point—the generation of the 1980s’ need for a social community. Cafés’ Symbolic Value—Community A demand for a sense of community among the generation of the 1980s is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in China, which paradoxically co-exists with their desire for individualism. Mao Zedong started the “One Child Policy” in 1979 to slow the rapid population growth in China, and the generations born under this policy are often called “the lonely generations,” with both parents working full-time. At the same time, they are “the generation of me,” labelled as spoiled, self-centred, and obsessed with consumption (de Kloet; Liu; Rofel; Wang). The individuals of this generation, now aged in their 20s and 30s, constitute the primary consumers of coffee in China. Whereas individualism is an important value to them, a sense of community is also desirable in order to compensate for their lack of siblings. Furthermore, the 1980s’ generation has also benefitted from the university expansion policy implemented in 1999. Since then, China has witnessed a surge of university students and graduates who not only received scientific and other course-based knowledge, but also had a better chance to be exposed to foreign cultures through their books, music, and movies. With this interesting tension between individualism and collectivism, the atmosphere provided by cafés has fostered a series of curious temporary communities built on cultural and culinary taste. Interestingly, it has become an aspiration of many young college students and graduates to open a community-space style café in a city. One of the best examples is the new Henduoren’s (Many People’s) Café. This was a project initiated by Wen Erniu, a recent college graduate who wanted to open a café in Beijing but did not have sufficient funds to do so. She posted a message on the Internet, asking people to invest a minimum of US$316 to open a café with her. With 78 investors, the café opened in September 2011 in Beijing (see pictures of Henduoren’s Café). In an interview with the China Daily, Wen Erniu stated that, “To open a cafe was a dream of mine, but I could not afford it […] We thought opening a cafe might be many people’s dream […] and we could get together via the Internet to make it come true” (quoted in Liu 2011). Conclusion: Café Culture and (Instant) Coffee in China There is a Chinese saying that, if you hate someone—just persuade him or her to open a coffee shop. Since cafés provide spaces where one can spend a relatively long time for little financial outlay, owners have to increase prices to cover their expenses. This can result in fewer customers. In retaliation, cafés—particularly those with cultural and literary ambience—host cultural events to attract people, and/or they offer food and wine along with coffee. The high prices, however, remain. In fact, the average price of coffee in China is often higher than in Europe and North America. For example, a medium Starbucks’ caffè latte in China averaged around US$4.40 in 2010, according to the price list of a Starbucks outlet in Shanghai—and the prices has recently increased again (Xinhua 2012). This partially explains why instant coffee is still so popular in China. A bag of instant Nestlé coffee cost only some US$0.25 in a Beijing supermarket in 2010, and requires only hot water, which is accessible free almost everywhere in China, in any restaurant, office building, or household. As an habitual, addictive treat, however, coffee has not yet become a customary, let alone necessary, drink for most Chinese. Moreover, while many, especially those of the older generations, could discern the quality and varieties of tea, very few can judge the quality of the coffee served in cafés. As a result, few Mainland Chinese coffee consumers have a purely somatic demand for coffee—craving its smell or taste—and the highly sweetened and creamed instant coffee offered by companies like Nestlé or Maxwell has largely shaped the current Chinese palate for coffee. Ben Highmore has proposed that “food spaces (shops, restaurants and so on) can be seen, for some social agents, as a potential space where new ‘not-me’ worlds are encountered” (396) He continues to expand that “how these potential spaces are negotiated—the various affective registers of experience (joy, aggression, fear)—reflect the multicultural shapes of a culture (its racism, its openness, its acceptance of difference)” (396). Cafés in contemporary China provide spaces where one encounters and constructs new “not-me” worlds, and more importantly, new “with-me” worlds. While café-going communicates an appreciation and desire for new lifestyles and new selves, it can be hoped that in the near future, coffee will also be appreciated for its smell, taste, and other benefits. Of course, it is also necessary that future Chinese coffee consumers also recognise the rich and complex cultural, political, and social issues behind the coffee economy in the era of globalisation. References Byers, Paul [former Managing Director, Sara Lee’s Asia Pacific]. Pers. comm. Apr. 2012. China Beverage News. “Nestlé Acquires 70% Stake in Chinese Mineral Water Producer.” (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://chinabevnews.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/nestle-acquires-70-stake-in-chinese-mineral-water-producer›. Chunzi. 张爱玲地图[The Map of Eileen Chang]. 汉语大词典出版 [Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe], 2003. de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. Dong, Jonathan. “A Caffeinated Timeline: Developing Yunnan’s Coffee Cultivation.” China Brief (2011): 24-26. Highmore, Ben. “Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29.4 (2008): 381-98. ITC (International Trade Center). The Coffee Sector in China: An Overview of Production, Trade And Consumption, 2010. Liu, Kang. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Liu, Zhihu. “From Virtual to Reality.” China Daily (Dec. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2011-12/26/content_14326490.htm›. Lloyd, Richard. Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. London: Routledge, 2006. Lu, Xun. “Geming Kafei Guan [Revolutionary Café]”. San Xian Ji. Taibei Shi: Feng Yun Shi Dai Chu Ban Gong Si: Fa Xing Suo Xue Wen Hua Gong Si, Mingguo 78 (1989): 133-36. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007: 1-30. “Starbucks Celebrates Its 500th Store Opening in Mainland China.” Starbucks Newsroom (Oct. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012. ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=580›. Wang, Jing. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1996. Xinhua. “Starbucks Raises Coffee Prices in China Stores.” Xinhua News (Jan. 2012). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-01/31/c_131384671.htm›. Yuyue. Ed. “On the History of the Western-Style Restaurants: Aileen Chang A Frequent Customer of Kiessling.” China.com.cn (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.china.com.cn/culture/txt/2010-01/30/content_19334964.htm›.

Abstract:

The use of the term authenticity in the social science literature can be rather eclectic at best and unscrupulous at worst. (Vanini, 74)We live in an age of authenticity, according to Charles Taylor, an era which prizes the finding of one’s life “against the demands of external conformity” (67–68). Taylor’s argument is that, correctly practiced, authenticity need not result in individualism or tribalism but rather a generation of people “made more self-responsible” (77).Philip Vanini has surveyed the turn toward authenticity in sociology. He has parsed the word authenticity, and argued that it has been used in three ways—factual, original, and sincere. A failure to attend to these distinctives, mixed with a “paucity of systematic empirical research” has resulted in abstract speculation (75). This article responds to Taylor’s analysis and Vanini’s challenge.My argument utilises Vanini’s theoretical frame—authenticity as factual, original, and sincere—to analyse empirical data gathered in the study of recent religious innovation occurring amongst a set of (“alternative worship”) Christian communities in the United Kingdom. I am drawing upon longitudinal research I have conducted, including participant observation in digital forums from 1997 to the present, along with semi-structured interviews conducted in the United Kingdom in 2001 and 2012.A study of “alternative worship” was deemed significant given such communities’s interaction with contemporary culture, including their use of dance music, multi-media, and social media (Baker, Taylor). Such approaches contrast with other contemporary religious approaches to culture, including a fundamentalist retreat from culture or the maintenance of a “high” culture, and thus inherited patterns of religious expression (Roberts).I argue that the discourse of “alternative worship” deploy authenticity-as-originality as essential to their identity creation. This notion of authenticity is used by these communities to locate themselves culturally (as authentically-original in contemporary cultures), and thus simultaneously to define themselves as marginal from mainstream religious expression.Intriguingly, a decade later, “alternative worship” was appropriated by the mainstream. A new organisation—Fresh Expressions—emerged from within the Church of England, and the Methodist Church in Britain that, as it developed, drew on “alternative worship” for legitimation. A focus on authenticity provides a lens by which to pay particular attention to the narratives offered by social organisations in the processes of innovation. How did the discourse deployed by Fresh Expressions in creating innovation engage “alternative worship” as an existing innovation? How did these “alternative worship” groups, who had found generative energy in their location as an alternative—authentically-original—expression, respond to this appropriation by mainstream religious life?A helpful conversation partner in teasing out the complexity of these moves within contemporary religious innovation is Sarah Thornton. She researched trends in dance clubs, and rave music in Britain, during a similar time period. Thornton highlighted the value of authenticity, which she argued was deployed in club cultures to create “subcultural capital” (98-105). She further explored how the discourses around authenticity were appropriated over time through the complex networks within which popular culture flows (Bennett; Collins; Featherstone; McRobbie; Willis).This article will demonstrate that a similar pattern—using authenticity-as-originality to create “subcultural capital”—was at work in “alternative worship.” Further, the notions of authenticity as factual, original, and sincere are helpful in parsing the complex networks that exist within the domains of religious cultures. This analysis will be two-fold, first as the mainstream appropriates, and second as the “alternative” responds.Thornton emerged “post-Birmingham.” She drew on the scholarship associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, glad of their turn toward popular culture. Nevertheless she considered her work to be distinct. Thornton posited the construction of “taste cultures” through distinctions created by those inside a particular set of signs and symbols. She argued for a networked view of society, one that recognised the complex roles of media and commerce in constructing distinctions and sought a more multi-dimensional frame by which to analyse the interplay between mainstream and marginal.In order to structure my investigation, I am suggesting three stages of development capture the priority, yet complexity, of authenticity in contemporary religious innovation: generation, appropriation, complexification.Generation of Authenticity-as-OriginalityThornton (26, italics original) writes:authenticity is arguably the most important value ascribed to popular music … Music is perceived as authentic when it rings true or feels real, when it has credibility and comes across as genuine. In an age of endless representations and global mediation, the experience of musical authenticity is perceived as a cure both for alienation … and dissimulation.Thornton is arguing that in this manifestation of youth culture, authenticity is valued. Further, authenticity is a perception, attached to phrases like “rings true” and “feels real.” Therefore, authenticity is hard to measure. Perhaps this move is deliberate, an attempt by those inside the “taste culture” to preserve their “subcultural capital,”—their particular sets of distinctions.Thornton’s use of authentic slides between authenticity-as-sincerity and authenticity-as-originality. For example, in the above quote, the language of “true” and “real” is a referencing of authenticity-as-sincerity. However, as Thornton analysed the appropriation of club culture by the mainstream, she is drawing, without stating it clearly, on both authenticity-as-sincerity and authenticity-as-originality.At around the time that Thornton was analysing club cultures, a number of Christian religious groups in the United Kingdom began to incorporate features of club culture into their worship services. Churches began to experiment with services beginning at club times (9.00 pm), the playing of dance music, and the use of “video-jockeying.” According to Roberts many of these worshipping communities “had close links to this movement in dance culture” (15).A discourse of authenticity was used to legitimise such innovation. Consider the description of one worship experience, located in Sheffield, England, known as Nine o’Clock Service (Fox 9-10, italics original).We enter a round, darkened room where there are forty-two television sets and twelve large video screens and projections around the walls—projections of dancing DNA, dancing planets and galaxies and atoms … this was a very friendly place for a generation raised on television and images … these people … are doing it themselves and in the center of the city and in the center of their society: at worship itself.This description makes a number of appeals to authenticity. The phrase “a generation raised on television and images” implies another generation not raised in digitally rich environments. A “subcultural” distinction has been created. The phrase “doing it themselves” suggests that this ‘digital generation’ creates something distinct, an authentic expression of their “taste culture.” The celebration of “doing it for themselves” resonates with Charles Taylor’s analysis of an age of authenticity in which self-discovery is connected with artistic creation (62).The Nine o’Clock Service gained nationwide attention, attracting attendances of over 600 young people. Rogerson described it as “a bold and imaginative attempt at contextual theology … people were attracted to it in the first instance for aesthetic and cultural reasons” (51). The priority on the aesthetic and the cultural, in contrast to the doctrinal, suggests a valuing of authenticity-as-originality.Reading Rogerson alongside Taylor teases out a further nuance in regard to the application of authenticity. Rogerson described the Nine o’Clock Service as offering “an alternative way of living in a materialist and acquisitive world” (50). This resonates with Charles Taylor’s argument that authenticity can be practiced in ways that make people “more self-responsible” (77). It suggests that the authenticity-as-originality expressed by the Nine o’Clock Service not only appealed culturally, but also offered an ethic of authenticity. We will return to this later in my argument.Inspired by the Nine o’Clock Service, other groups in the United Kingdom began to offer a similar experience. According to Adrian Riley (6):The Nine O’clock Service … was the first worshipping community to combine elements of club culture with passionate worship … It pioneered what is commonly known as “alternative worship” … Similar groups were established themselves albeit on a smaller scale.The very term “alternative worship” is significant. Sociologist of religion Abby Day argued that “boundary-marking [creates] an identity” (50). Applying Day, the term “alternative” is being used to create an identity in contrast to the existing, mainstream church. The “digitally rich” are indeed “doing it for themselves.” To be “alternative” is to be authentically-original: to be authentically-original means a participant cannot, by definition, be mainstream.Thornton argued that subcultures needed to define themselves against in order to maintain themselves as “hip” (119). This seems to describe the use of the term “alternative.” Ironically, the mainstream is needed, in order to define against, to create identity by being authentically-original (Kelly).Hence the following claim by an “alternative worship” organiser (Interview G, 2001):People were willing to play around and to say, well who knows what will happen if we run this video clip or commercial next to this sixteenth century religious painting and if we play, you know, Black Flag or some weird band underneath it … And what will it feel like? Well let’s try it and see.Note the link with music (Black Flag, an American hard core punk band formed in 1976), so central to Thornton’s understanding of authenticity in popular youth cultures. Note also the similarity between Thornton’s ascribing of value in words like “rings true” and “feels real,” with words like “feel like” and “try and see.” The word “weird” is also significant. It is deployed as a signifier of authenticity, a sign of “subcultural capital.” It positions them as “alternative,” defined in (musical) distinction from the mainstream.In sum, my argument is that authenticity-as-originality is present in “alternative worship”: in the name, in the ethos of “doing it themselves,” and in the deploying of “subcultural capital” in the legitimation of innovation. All of this has been clarified through conversation with Thornton’s empirical research regarding the value of authenticity in club culture. My analysis of “alternative worship” as a religious innovation is consistent with Taylor’s claim that we inhabit an age of authenticity, one that can be practiced by “people who are made more self-responsible” (77).Mainstream AppropriationIn 2004, the Church of England produced Mission Shaped Church (MSC), a report regarding its future. It included a chapter that described recent religious innovation in England, grouped under twelve headings (alternative worship and base ecclesial communities, café, cell, network and seeker church models, multiple and mid week congregations, new forms of traditional churches, school and community-based initiatives, traditional church plants, youth congregations). The first innovation listed is “alternative worship.”The incoming Archbishop, Rowan Williams, drew on MSC to launch a new organisation. Called Fresh Expressions, over five million pounds was provided by the Church of England to fund an organisation to support this religious innovation.Intriguingly, recognition of authenticity in these “alternative” innovations was evident in the institutional discourse being created. When I interviewed Williams, he spoke of his commitment as a Bishop (Interview 6, 2012):I decided to spend a certain amount of quality time with people on the edge. Consequently when I was asked initially what are my priorities [as Archbishop] I said, “Well, this is what I’ve been watching on the edge … I really want to see how that could impact on the Church of England as a whole.In other words, what was marginal, what had until then generated identity by being authentic in contrast to the mainstream, was now being appropriated by the mainstream “to impact on the Church of England as a whole.” MSC was aware of this complexity. “Alternative worship” was described as containing “a strong desire to be different and is most vocal in its repudiation of existing church” (45). Nevertheless, it was appropriated by the mainstream.My argument has been that “alternative worship” drew on a discourse of authenticity-as-originality. Yet when we turn to analyse mainstream appropriation, we find the definitions of authenticity begin to slide. Authenticity-as-originality is affirmed, while authenticity-as-sincerity is introduced. The MSC affirmed the “ways in which the Church of England has sought to engage with the diverse cultures and networks that are part of contemporary life” (80). It made explicit the connection between originality and authenticity. “Some pioneers and leaders have yearned for a more authentic way of living, being, doing church” (80). This can be read as an affirmation of authenticity-as-originality.Yet MSC also introduced authenticity-as-sincerity as a caution to authenticity-as-originality. “Fresh expressions should not be embraced simply because they are popular and new, but because they are a sign of the work of God and of the kingdom” (80). Thus Fresh Expressions introduced authenticity-as-sincerity (sign of the work of God) and placed it alongside authenticity-as-originality. In so doing, in the shift from “alternative worship” to Fresh Expressions, a space is both conflated (twelve expressions of church) and contested (two notions of authenticity). Conflated, because MSC places alternative worship as one innovation alongside eleven others. Contested because of the introduction of authenticity-as-sincerity alongside the affirming of authenticity-as-originality. What is intriguing is to return to Taylor’s argument for the possibility of an ethic of authenticity in which “people are made more self-responsible” (77). Perhaps the response in MSC arises from the concern described by Taylor, the risk in an age of authenticity of a society that is more individualised and tribal (55-6). To put it in distinctly ecclesiological terms, how can the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic be carried forward if authenticity-as-originality is celebrated at, and by, the margins? Does innovation contribute to more atomised, self-absorbed and fragmented expressions of church?Yet Taylor is adamant that authenticity can be embraced without an inevitable slide in these directions. He argued that humans share a "horizon of significance" in common (52), in which one’s own "identity crucially depends on [one’s] dialogical relations with others" (48). We have already considered Rogerson’s claim that the Nine o’Clock Service offered “an alternative way of living in a materialist and acquisitive world” (50). It embraced a “strong political dimension, and a concern for justice at local and international level” (46). In other words, “alternative worship’s” authenticity-as-originality was surely already an expression of “the kingdom,” one in which “people [were] made more self-responsible” (77) in the sharing of (drawing on Taylor) a "horizon of significance" in the task of identity-formation-in-relationships (52).Yet the placing in MSC of authenticity-as-sincerity alongside authenticity-as-originality could easily have been read by those in “alternative worship” as a failure to recognise their existing practicing of the ethic of authenticity, their embodying of “the kingdom.”Consequent ComplexificationMy research into “alternative worship” is longitudinal. After the launch of Fresh Expressions, I included a new set of interview questions, which sought to clarify how these “alternative worship” communities were impacted upon by the appropriation of “alternative worship” by the mainstream. The responses can be grouped into three categories: minimal impact, a sense of affirmation and a contested complexity.With regard to minimal impact, some “alternative worship” communities perceived the arrival of Fresh Expressions had minimal impact on their shared expression of faith. The following quote was representative: “Has had no impact at all actually. Apart from to be slightly puzzled” (Interview 3, 2012).Others found the advent of Fresh Expressions provided a sense of affirmation. “Fresh expressions is … an enabling concept. It was very powerful” (Focus group 2, 2012). Respondents in this category felt that their innovations within alternative worship had contributed to, or been valued by, the innovation of Fresh Expressions. Interestingly, those whose comments could be grouped in this category had significant “subcultural capital” invested in this mainstream appropriation. Specifically, they now had a vocational role that in some way was connected to Fresh Expressions. In using the term “subcultural capital” I am again drawing on Thornton (98–105), who argued that in the complex networks through which culture flows, certain people, for example DJ’s, have more influence in the ascribing of authenticity. This suggests that “subcultural” capital is also present in religious innovation, with certain individuals finding ways to influence, from the “alternative worship” margin, the narratives of authenticity used in the complex interplay between alternative worship and Fresh Expressions.For others the arrival of Fresh Expressions had resulted in a contested complexity. The following quote was representative: “It’s a crap piece of establishment branding …but then we’re just snobs” (Focus group 3, 2012). This comment returns us to my initial framing of authenticity-as-originality. I would argue that “we’re just snobs” has a similar rhetorical effect as “Black Flag or some weird band.” It is an act of marginal self-location essential in the construction of innovation and identity.This argument is strengthened given the fact that the comment was coming from a community that itself had become perhaps the most recognizable “brand” among “alternative worship.” They have developed their own logo, website, and related online merchandising. This would suggest the concern is not the practice of marketing per se. Rather the concern is that it seems “crap” in relation to authenticity-as-originality, in a loss of aesthetic quality and a blurring of the values of innovation and identity as it related to bold, imaginative, aesthetic, and cultural attempts at contextual theology (Rogerson 51).Returning to Thornton, her research was also longitudinal in that she explored what happened when a song from a club, which had defined itself against the mainstream and as “hip,” suddenly experienced mainstream success (119). What is relevant to this investigation into religious innovation is her argument that in club culture, “selling out” is perceived to have happened only when the marginal community “loses its sense of possession, exclusive ownership and familiar belonging” (124–26).I would suggest that this is what is happening within “alternative worship” in response to the arrival of Fresh Expressions. Both “alternative worship” and Fresh Expressions are religious innovations. But Fresh Expressions defined itself in a way that conflated the space. It meant that the boundary marking so essential to “alternative worship” was lost. Some gained from this. Others struggled with a loss of imaginative and cultural creativity, a softening of authenticity-as-originality.More importantly, the discourse around Fresh Expressions also introduced authenticity-as-sincerity as a value that could be used to contest authenticity-as-originality. Whether intended or not, this also challenged the ethic of authenticity already created by these “alternative worship” communities. Their authenticity-as-originality was already a practicing of an ethic of authenticity. They were already sharing a "horizon of significance" with humanity, entering into “dialogical relations with others" that were a contemporary expression of the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic (Taylor 52, 48). ConclusionIn this article I have analysed the discourse around authenticity as it is manifest within one strand of contemporary religious innovation. Drawing on Vanini, Taylor, and Thornton, I have explored the generative possibilities as media and culture are utilised in an “alternative worship” that is authentically-original. I have outlined the consequences when authenticity-as-originality is appropriated by the mainstream, specifically in the innovation known as Fresh Expressions and the complexity when authenticity-as-sincerity is introduced as a contested value.The value of authenticity has been found to exist in a complex relationship with the ethics of authenticity within one domain of contemporary religious innovation.ReferencesBaker, Jonny. “Alternative Worship and the Significance of Popular Culture.” Honours paper: U of London, 2000.Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place. New York: Palgrave, 2000.Cronshaw, Darren, and Steve Taylor. “The Congregation in a Pluralist Society: Rereading Newbigin for Missional Churches Today.” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 27.2 (2014): 1-24.Day, Abby. Believing in Belonging. Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.Collins, Jim, ed. High-Pop. Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Oxford: Blackwells, 2002.Cray, Graham. Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Culture, London: Church House Publishing, 2004.Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.Fox, Matthew. Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996.Guest, Matthew, and Steve Taylor. “The Post-Evangelical Emerging Church: Innovations in New Zealand and the UK.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 6.1 (2006): 49-64.Howard, Roland. The Rise and Fall of the Nine o’Clock Service. London: Continuum, 1996.Kelly, Gerard. Get a Grip on the Future without Losing Your Hold in the Past. Great Britain: Monarch, 1999.Kelly, Steven. “Book Review. Alt.Culture by Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice.” 20 Aug. 2003. ‹http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/cult.html›.McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.Riley, Adrian. God in the House: UK Club Culture and Spirituality. 1999. 15 Oct. 2003 ‹http://www.btmc.org.auk/altworship/house/›.Roberts, Paul. Alternative Worship in the Church of England. Cambridge: Grove Books, 1999.Rogerson, J. W. “‘The Lord Is here’: The Nine o’Clock Service.” Why Liberal Churches Are Growing. Eds. Ian Markham and Martyn Percy. London: Bloomsbury T & T, 2006. 45-52.Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Taylor, Steve. “Baptist Worship and Contemporary Culture: A New Zealand Case Study.” Interfaces: Baptists and Others. Eds. David Bebbington and Martin Sutherland. Carlisle: Paternoster, 2013. 292-307.Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures. Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: UP New England, 1996.Vanini, Philip. “Authenticity.” Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture. Ed. Dale Southerton. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. 74-76.Willis, Paul E., et al. Common Culture. Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1990.

Abstract:

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basem*nts and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and hom*ogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in>.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/>.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/>.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 733-768.Foege, Alec. “Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 28 Dec. 1994. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-cornell-the-rolling-stone-interview-79108/>.Fricke, David. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-251421/>.Giles, David. “Parasocial Interactions: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (2002): 279-305.Giles, Jeff. “The Poet of Alientation.” Newsweek, 17 Apr. 1994, 4 Sep. 2018 <https://www.newsweek.com/poet-alienation-187124>.Gross, D.M., and S. Scott. Proceding with Caution. Time, 16 July 1990. 3 Sep. 2018 <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,155010,00.html>.Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience” Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992>.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html>.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion>.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf>.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142>.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 <http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/>.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

Abstract:

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

Abstract:

What are the possibilities of a body? This is a question that is answered best by thinking prosthetically. After all, the possibilities of a body extend beyond flesh and bone. Asked another way, one might query: what are the affective capacities of bodies—animal or otherwise? Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari focus on affectivity as capacity, on what the body does or can do; thinking through Baruch Spinoza’s writing on the body, they state, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects” (257). If bodies are defined by their affective capacities, I wonder: how can prosthetics be used to alter dominant and dominating relationships between the human and the non-human animal, particularly as these relationships bear on questions of race? In this essay, I forward a contemporary media installation, “The Slug Princess”, as a productive site for thinking through the prosthetic possibilities around issues of race, animality, and aesthetics. I contend that the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s installation works through uncommon prosthetics to activate what Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming-animal. While animality has historically been mobilized to perpetuate Orientalist logics, I argue that DAE’s becoming-slug rethinks the capacities of the body prosthetically, and in so doing dismantles the hierarchy of the body normativity.The Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) is a collective of artists with international showings co-directed by Haruko Crow Nishimura, originally from Japan, and Joshua Kohl, from the United States. The ensemble is based in Seattle, Washington, USA. The group’s name is a reference to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, Germany, organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party. The exhibition staged 650 works from what Nazi officials referred to as “art stutterers”, the pieces were confiscated from German museums and defined as works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill” (Spotts 163). DAE “selected this politically charged moniker partly in response to the murder in Olympia [Washington] of an Asian American youth by neo-Nazi skinheads” (Frye). DAE’s namesake is thus an embrace of bodies and abilities deemed unworthy by systems of corrupt power. With this in mind, I argue that DAE’s work provides an opportunity to think through intersections of prostheticity, animality, and race.“The Slug Princess” is part of a larger exhibition of their work shown from 19 March to 19 June 2011 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The installation is comprised of two major elements: a crocheted work and a video projection. For me, both are prosthetics.A Crocheted Prosthetic and Orientalist AnimalityThe crocheted garment is not immediately recognizable as a prosthetic. It is displayed on a mannequin that stands mostly erect. The piece, described as a headdress, is however by no means a traditional garment. Yellow spirals and topographies flow and diverge in tangled networks of yarn that sometimes converge into recognizable form. The knit headdress travels in countless directions, somehow assembling as a wearable fibrous entity that covers the mannequin from head to ground, spreading out, away, and behind the figuration of the human. In slumped orbs, green knit “cabbages’ surround the slug princess headdress, exceeding the objects they intend to represent in mass, shape, and affect. In this bustling excess of movement, the headdress hints at how it is more than a costume, but is instead a prosthetic.The video projection makes the prosthetic nature of the crocheted headdress evident. It is a looped performance of Nishimura that runs from ceiling to floor and spans the semi-enclosed space in which it is displayed. In the video, Nishimura walks, then crawls – slowly, awkwardly – through a forest. She also eats whole cabbages, supporting procedure with mouth, foot, and appendage, throwing the function of her body parts into question. The crocheted element is vital to her movement and the perception of her body’s capacities.As Nishimura becomes slug princess, the DAE begins to intervene in complex regimes of racial identification. It is imperative to note that Nishimura’s boy gets caught up in interpretive schemas of Western constructions of Asians as animals. For example, in the early diaspora in the United States, Chinese men were often identified with the figure of the rat in 19th-century political cartoons. Mel Y. Chen points to the ways in which these racialized animalities have long reinforcing the idea of the yellow peril through metaphor (Chen 110-111). These images were instrumental in conjuring fear around the powerfully dehumanizing idea that hordes of rats were infesting national purity. Such fears were significant in leading to the Chinese exclusion acts of the United States and Canada. Western tropes of Asians find traction in animal symbolism. From dragon ladies to butterflies, Asian femininity in both women and men has been captured by simultaneous notions of treachery and passivity. As Nishimura’s body is enabled by prosthetic, it is also caught in a regime of problematic signs. Animal symbolism persists throughout Asian diasporic gender construction and Western fantasies of the East. Rachel C. Lee refers to the “process whereby the human is reduced to the insect, rodent, bird, or microbe” as zoe-ification, which she illustrates as a resolute means of excluding Asian Americans from species-being (Lee Exquisite 48). DAE’s Slug Princess, I argue, joins Lee’s energies herein by providing and performing alternative modes of understanding animality.The stakes of prosthetics in becoming-animal lie in the problem of domination through definition. Orientalist animality functions to devalue Asians as animals, ultimately justifying forms of subordination and exclusion. I want to suggest that becoming-slug, as I will elaborate below, provides a mode of resisting this narrow function of defining bodies by enacting prosthetic process. In doing so, it aligns with the ways in which prosthetics redefine the points of delineation against normativity. As Margarit Shildrick illuminates, “once it is acknowledged that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material technologies constantly disorder our boundaries, either through prosthetic extensions or through the internalization of mechanical parts, it is difficult to maintain that those whose bodies fail to conform to normative standards are less whole or complete than others” (24). DAE’s Slug Princess transmutates how animality functions to Orientalize Asians as the degenerate other, heightening the ways in which prosthetics can resist the racialized ideologies of normative wholeness.Why Prosthetics? Or, a Comparative Case in Aesthetic AnimalityDAE is of course not alone in their animalistic interventions. In order to isolate what I find uniquely productive about DAE’s prosthetic performance, I turn to another artistic alternative to traditional modes of Orientalist animality. Xu Bing’s performance installation “Cultural Animal” (1994) at the Han Mo Art Center in in Beijing, China can serve as a useful foil. “Cultural Animal” featured a live pig and mannequin in positions that evoked queer bestial sexuality. The pig was covered in inked nonsensical Roman letters; the full body of the mannequin was similarly tattooed in jumbled Chinese characters. The piece was a part of a larger project entitled “A Case Study of Transference”. According to Xu’s website, “the intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig toward the mannequin and produce an absurd random drama—an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner” (Xu). The photographs, which were a component of the piece, indeed evoke the difficulty of the concept of transference, imbricating species, languages, and taboos. The piece more generally enacts the unexpected excesses of performance with non-scripted bodies. The pig at times caresses the cheek of the mannequin. The sensuous experience is inked by the cultural confusion that images the seeming sensibility of each language. Amidst the movement of the pig and the rubbings of the ink, the mannequin is motionless, bearing a look of resigned openness. His eyes are closed, with a slight furrowing of the brow and calm downturned lips. The performance piece enacts crossings that reorient the historical symbolic force of racialization and animality. These forms of species and cultural miscegenation evoke for Mel Y. Chen a form of queer relationality that exemplifies “animalities that live together with race and with queerness, the animalities that we might say have crawled into the woodwork and await recognition, and, concurrently, the racialized animalities already here” (104). As such, Chen does the work of pointing out how Xu destabilizes notions of proper boundaries between human and animal, positing a different form of human-animal relationality. In short, Xu’s Cultural Animal chooses relationality. This relationality does not extend the body’s capacities. I argue that by focusing in on the pivotal nature of prosthesis, DAE’s slug activates a becoming-animal that goes beyond relationship, instead rethinking what a body can do.Becoming-Slug: Prosthetics as InterventionBy way of differentiation, how might “The Slug Princess” function beyond symbolic universalism and in excess of human-animal relations? In an effort to understand this distinction, I forward DAE’s installation as a practice of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal is a theoretical intervention in hierarchy, highlighting a minoritarian tactic to resist domination, akin to Shildrick’s description of prosthetics.DAE’s installation enacts becoming-slug, as illustrated in an elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept they argue: “Becoming-animal always involves a pack” “a multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guatttari 239). The banner of becoming-animal is “I am legion”. DAE is and are a propagation of artists working together. They enact legion. Led by a pack of collaborators, DAE engage a range of artists in continual, ongoing, and fluctuating process. Their current collaborators include (and surpass): architect/designer Alan Maskin, costume designer ALenka Loesch, dancer/singer Dohee Lee, performance artist/expressionist/songwriter/shape-shifter Okanomodé, and sound/installation artist Robb Kunz. For the broader exhibition at the Frye, they listed the biographies of fifteen artists and the names of around 200 artists. Yet, it is not the mere number of collaborators that render DAE a multiplicity – it is the collaborative excess of their process that generates potential at the intersection of performance and prosthetic. Notably, it is important that the wearable prosthetic headpiece used in “Slug Princess” was created in collaboration. “The contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 243). Created by Many Greer but worn by Nishimura, it weighs on Nishimura’s body in ways that steer her performance. She is unable to stand erect as the mannequin in the exhibition. The prosthetic changes her capacities in unpredictable ways. The unexpected headdress causes her to hunch over and crawl, pushing her body into slow contact with the earth. As the flowing garment slows her forward progress, it activates new modes of movement. Snagging, and undulating, Nishimura moves slowly over the uncertain terrain of a forest. As Greer’s creation collides with Nishimura’s body and the practice of the dance, they enact becoming-slug. This is to suggest, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s affective understanding of becoming-animal, that prosthetics have a productive role to play in disrupting normative modes of embodiment.Further, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, becoming-animal is non-affiliative (Deleuze and Guattari 238). Becoming-animal is that which is “not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage” (Deleuze and Guattari 233). Likewise, Nishimura’s becoming-slug is neither imitative (305) nor mimetic because it functions in the way of displaced doing through prosthetic process. Deleuze and Guattari describe in the example of Little Hans and his horse, becoming-animal occurs in putting one’s shoes on one’s hands to move, as a dog: “I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy” (258). The headdress engages an active bodily process of moving as a slug, rather than looking like a slug. Nishimura’s body begin as her body human begins, upright, but it is pulled down and made slow by the collaborative force of the wearable piece. As such, DAE enacts “affects that circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse [slug] ‘can do’” (257). This assemblage of affects pushes beyond the limited capacities of the screen, offering new productive entanglements.The Stuplime Loop as ProstheticTo the extent that conceiving of a headdress as a collaborative bodily prosthetic flows from common understandings of prosthetic, the medial interface perhaps stirs up a more foreign example of prosthesis and becoming-animal. The medial performance of DAE’s “The Slug Princess” operates through the video loop, transecting the human, animal, and technological in a way that displaces being in favor of becoming. The looping video creates a spatio-temporal contraction and elongation of the experience of time in relation to viewing. It functions as an experiential prosthetic, reworking the ability to think in a codified manner—altering the capacities of the body. Time play breaks the chronological experience of straight time and time as mastery by turning to the temporal experience as questioning normativity. Specifically, “The Slug Princess” creates productive indeterminacy through what Siane Ngai designates as “stuplimity”. Ngai’s punning contraction of stupidity and sublimity works in relation to Deleuze’s thinking on repetition and difference. Ngai poses the idea of stuplimity as beginning with “the dysphoria of shock and boredom” and culminating “in something like the ‘open feeling’ of ‘resisting being’—an indeterminate affective state that lacks the punctuating ‘point’ of individuated emotion” (284). Ngai characterizes this affecting openness and stupefying: it stops the viewer in their/her/his tracks. This importation of the affective state cannot be overcome through the exercise of reason (270). Departing from Kant’s description of the sublime, Ngai turns to the uglier, less awe-inspiring, and perhaps more debase form of aesthetic encounter. This is the collaboration of the stupid with the sublime. Stuplimity operates outside reason and sublimity but in alliance with their processes. Viewers seem to get “stuck” at “The Slug Princess”, lost in the stuplimity of the loop. Some affect of the looping videos generates not thoughtfulness or reflection, but perhaps cultural stupidity – the relative and temporary cessation or abatement of cultural logics and aesthetic valuations. The video loop comes together with the medial enactment of becoming-slug in such a manner that performs into stuplimity. Stuplimity, in this case, creates an opening of an affectively stupid or illegible (per Xu) space/time alternative being/becoming. The loop is, of course, not unique to the installation and is a common feature of museum pieces. Yet, the performance, the becoming-slug itself, creates sluggishness. Ngai posits that sluggishness works out the boredom of repetition, which I argue is created through the loop of becoming-slug. The slug princess’ slowness, played in the loop creates a “stuplimity [that] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as totality” (271). That is, the loop, by virtue of its sluggishness, opens up becoming-animal not as a finite thing, but as an ongoing, cycling, and thoughtlessly tedious process. DAE’s installation thus demonstrates an attempt to adopt prosthetics to rethink the logics of control and power. In his writing on contemporary shifts in prosthetic function, Paul Preciado argues that digitalization is a core component of the transition from prosthetics to what emerge as “microprosthetic”, in which “power acts through molecules that incorporate themselves into our [bodies]” (78-79). I would like to consider the stuplime loops of becoming-slug to counter what Preciado describes as an “ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols” (33). Emerging in the same fashion as microproesthetics, which function as modes of control, the stuplime loops instead suspend the logics of control and power enabled by dominant modes of microprosthetic technologies. Rather than infesting one’s body with modes of control, the stuplime loops hijack the digital message and present the possibility of thinking otherwise. In her writing on queer cyborgs, Mimi Nguyen argues that “as technologies of the self, prostheses are both literal and discursive in the digital imaginary. They are a means of habitation and transformation, a humanmachine mixture engaged as a site of contest over meanings – of the self and the nonself” (373). Binaries perhaps structure a thinking between human and animal, but prosthetics as process goes beyond the idea of the cyborg as a mixture and maps a new terrain altogether.ReferencesChen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.Frye. “Degenerate Art Ensemble.” Frye Museum. 2017. <http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3816/>.Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nguyen, Mimi. “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space.” American Studies: An Anthology. Eds. Janice A. Radway, Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 281-305.Preciado, Beatriz [Paul]. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitis in the Pharmacop*rnographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Shildrick, Margarit. “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13-29.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 2003.Xu, Bing. “Cultural Animal.” 2017. <http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1994/cultural_animal>.

Abstract:

Introduction The highly contagious COVID-19 virus has presented particularly difficult public policy challenges. The relatively late emergence of an effective treatments and vaccines, the structural stresses on health care systems, the lockdowns and the economic dislocations, the evident structural inequalities in effected societies, as well as the difficulty of prevention have tested social and political cohesion. Moreover, the intrusive nature of many prophylactic measures have led to individual liberty and human rights concerns. As noted by the Victorian (Australia) Ombudsman Report on the COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we may be tempted, during a crisis, to view human rights as expendable in the pursuit of saving human lives. This thinking can lead to dangerous territory. It is not unlawful to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms when there are compelling reasons for doing so; human rights are inherently and inseparably a consideration of human lives. (5) These difficulties have raised issues about the importance of social or community capital in fighting the pandemic. This article discusses the impacts of social and community capital and other factors on the governmental efforts to combat the spread of infectious disease through the maintenance of social distancing and household ‘bubbles’. It argues that the beneficial effects of social and community capital towards fighting the pandemic, such as mutual respect and empathy, which underpins such public health measures as social distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, and lockdowns in the USA, have been undermined as preventive measures because they have been transmogrified to become a salient aspect of the “culture wars” (Peters). In contrast, states that have relatively lower social capital such a China have been able to more effectively arrest transmission of the disease because the government was been able to generate and personify a nationalist response to the virus and thus generate a more robust social consensus regarding the efforts to combat the disease. Social Capital and Culture Wars The response to COVID-19 required individuals, families, communities, and other types of groups to refrain from extensive interaction – to stay in their bubble. In these situations, especially given the asymptomatic nature of many COVID-19 infections and the serious imposition lockdowns and social distancing and isolation, the temptation for individuals to breach public health rules in high. From the perspective of policymakers, the response to fighting COVID-19 is a collective action problem. In studying collective action problems, scholars have paid much attention on the role of social and community capital (Ostrom and Ahn 17-35). Ostrom and Ahn comment that social capital “provides a synthesizing approach to how cultural, social, and institutional aspects of communities of various sizes jointly affect their capacity of dealing with collective-action problems” (24). Social capital is regarded as an evolving social type of cultural trait (f*ckuyama; Guiso et al.). Adger argues that social capital “captures the nature of social relations” and “provides an explanation for how individuals use their relationships to other actors in societies for their own and for the collective good” (387). The most frequently used definition of social capital is the one proffered by Putnam who regards it as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, “Bowling Alone” 65). All these studies suggest that social and community capital has at least two elements: “objective associations” and subjective ties among individuals. Objective associations, or social networks, refer to both formal and informal associations that are formed and engaged in on a voluntary basis by individuals and social groups. Subjective ties or norms, on the other hand, primarily stand for trust and reciprocity (Paxton). High levels of social capital have generally been associated with democratic politics and civil societies whose institutional performance benefits from the coordinated actions and civic culture that has been facilitated by high levels of social capital (Putnam, Democracy 167-9). Alternatively, a “good and fair” state and impartial institutions are important factors in generating and preserving high levels of social capital (Offe 42-87). Yet social capital is not limited to democratic civil societies and research is mixed on whether rising social capital manifests itself in a more vigorous civil society that in turn leads to democratising impulses. Castillo argues that various trust levels for institutions that reinforce submission, hierarchy, and cultural conservatism can be high in authoritarian governments, indicating that high levels of social capital do not necessarily lead to democratic civic societies (Castillo et al.). Roßteutscher concludes after a survey of social capita indicators in authoritarian states that social capital has little effect of democratisation and may in fact reinforce authoritarian rule: in nondemocratic contexts, however, it appears to throw a spanner in the works of democratization. Trust increases the stability of nondemocratic leaderships by generating popular support, by suppressing regime threatening forms of protest activity, and by nourishing undemocratic ideals concerning governance (752). In China, there has been ongoing debate concerning the presence of civil society and the level of social capital found across Chinese society. If one defines civil society as an intermediate associational realm between the state and the family, populated by autonomous organisations which are separate from the state that are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values, it is arguable that the PRC had a significant civil society or social capital in the first few decades after its establishment (White). However, most scholars agree that nascent civil society as well as a more salient social and community capital has emerged in China’s reform era. This was evident after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where the government welcomed community organising and community-driven donation campaigns for a limited period of time, giving the NGO sector and bottom-up social activism a boost, as evidenced in various policy areas such as disaster relief and rural community development (F. Wu 126; Xu 9). Nevertheless, the CCP and the Chinese state have been effective in maintaining significant control over civil society and autonomous groups without attempting to completely eliminate their autonomy or existence. The dramatic economic and social changes that have occurred since the 1978 Opening have unsurprisingly engendered numerous conflicts across the society. In response, the CCP and State have adjusted political economic policies to meet the changing demands of workers, migrants, the unemployed, minorities, farmers, local artisans, entrepreneurs, and the growing middle class. Often the demands arising from these groups have resulted in policy changes, including compensation. In other circ*mstances, where these groups remain dissatisfied, the government will tolerate them (ignore them but allow them to continue in the advocacy), or, when the need arises, supress the disaffected groups (F. Wu 2). At the same time, social organisations and other groups in civil society have often “refrained from open and broad contestation against the regime”, thereby gaining the space and autonomy to achieve the objectives (F. Wu 2). Studies of Chinese social or community capital suggest that a form of modern social capital has gradually emerged as Chinese society has become increasingly modernised and liberalised (despite being non-democratic), and that this social capital has begun to play an important role in shaping social and economic lives at the local level. However, this more modern form of social capital, arising from developmental and social changes, competes with traditional social values and social capital, which stresses parochial and particularistic feelings among known individuals while modern social capital emphasises general trust and reciprocal feelings among both known and unknown individuals. The objective element of these traditional values are those government-sanctioned, formal mass organisations such as Communist Youth and the All-China Federation of Women's Associations, where members are obliged to obey the organisation leadership. The predominant subjective values are parochial and particularistic feelings among individuals who know one another, such as guanxi and zongzu (Chen and Lu, 426). The concept of social capital emphasises that the underlying cooperative values found in individuals and groups within a culture are an important factor in solving collective problems. In contrast, the notion of “culture war” focusses on those values and differences that divide social and cultural groups. Barry defines culture wars as increases in volatility, expansion of polarisation, and conflict between those who are passionate about religiously motivated politics, traditional morality, and anti-intellectualism, and…those who embrace progressive politics, cultural openness, and scientific and modernist orientations. (90) The contemporary culture wars across the world manifest opposition by various groups in society who hold divergent worldviews and ideological positions. Proponents of culture war understand various issues as part of a broader set of religious, political, and moral/normative positions invoked in opposition to “elite”, “liberal”, or “left” ideologies. Within this Manichean universe opposition to such issues as climate change, Black Lives Matter, same sex rights, prison reform, gun control, and immigration becomes framed in binary terms, and infused with a moral sensibility (Chapman 8-10). In many disputes, the culture war often devolves into an epistemological dispute about the efficacy of scientific knowledge and authority, or a dispute between “practical” and theoretical knowledge. In this environment, even facts can become partisan narratives. For these “cultural” disputes are often how electoral prospects (generally right-wing) are advanced; “not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure … is constantly at risk of extinction” (Malik). This “zero-sum” social and policy environment that makes it difficult to compromise and has serious consequences for social stability or government policy, especially in a liberal democratic society. Of course, from the perspective of cultural materialism such a reductionist approach to culture and political and social values is not unexpected. “Culture” is one of the many arenas in which dominant social groups seek to express and reproduce their interests and preferences. “Culture” from this sense is “material” and is ultimately connected to the distribution of power, wealth, and resources in society. As such, the various policy areas that are understood as part of the “culture wars” are another domain where various dominant and subordinate groups and interests engaged in conflict express their values and goals. Yet it is unexpected that despite the pervasiveness of information available to individuals the pool of information consumed by individuals who view the “culture wars” as a touchstone for political behaviour and a narrative to categorise events and facts is relatively closed. This lack of balance has been magnified by social media algorithms, conspiracy-laced talk radio, and a media ecosystem that frames and discusses issues in a manner that elides into an easily understood “culture war” narrative. From this perspective, the groups (generally right-wing or traditionalist) exist within an information bubble that reinforces political, social, and cultural predilections. American and Chinese Reponses to COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in Wuhan in December 2019. Initially unprepared and unwilling to accept the seriousness of the infection, the Chinese government regrouped from early mistakes and essentially controlled transmission in about three months. This positive outcome has been messaged as an exposition of the superiority of the Chinese governmental system and society both domestically and internationally; a positive, even heroic performance that evidences the populist credentials of the Chinese political leadership and demonstrates national excellence. The recently published White Paper entitled “Fighting COVID-19: China in Action” also summarises China’s “strategic achievement” in the simple language of numbers: in a month, the rising spread was contained; in two months, the daily case increase fell to single digits; and in three months, a “decisive victory” was secured in Wuhan City and Hubei Province (Xinhua). This clear articulation of the positive results has rallied political support. Indeed, a recent survey shows that 89 percent of citizens are satisfied with the government’s information dissemination during the pandemic (C Wu). As part of the effort, the government extensively promoted the provision of “political goods”, such as law and order, national unity and pride, and shared values. For example, severe publishments were introduced for violence against medical professionals and police, producing and selling counterfeit medications, raising commodity prices, spreading ‘rumours’, and being uncooperative with quarantine measures (Xu). Additionally, as an extension the popular anti-corruption campaign, many local political leaders were disciplined or received criminal charges for inappropriate behaviour, abuse of power, and corruption during the pandemic (People.cn, 2 Feb. 2020). Chinese state media also described fighting the virus as a global “competition”. In this competition a nation’s “material power” as well as “mental strength”, that calls for the highest level of nation unity and patriotism, is put to the test. This discourse recalled the global competition in light of the national mythology related to the formation of Chinese nation, the historical “hardship”, and the “heroic Chinese people” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). Moreover, as the threat of infection receded, it was emphasised that China “won this competition” and the Chinese people have demonstrated the “great spirit of China” to the world: a result built upon the “heroism of the whole Party, Army, and Chinese people from all ethnic groups” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). In contrast to the Chinese approach of emphasising national public goods as a justification for fighting the virus, the U.S. Trump Administration used nationalism, deflection, and “culture war” discourse to undermine health responses — an unprecedented response in American public health policy. The seriousness of the disease as well as the statistical evidence of its course through the American population was disputed. The President and various supporters raged against the COVID-19 “hoax”, social distancing, and lockdowns, disparaged public health institutions and advice, and encouraged protesters to “liberate” locked-down states (Russonello). “Our federal overlords say ‘no singing’ and ‘no shouting’ on Thanksgiving”, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican of Arizona, wrote as he retweeted a Centers for Disease Control list of Thanksgiving safety tips (Weiner). People were encouraged, by way of the White House and Republican leadership, to ignore health regulations and not to comply with social distancing measures and the wearing of masks (Tracy). This encouragement led to threats against proponents of face masks such as Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s foremost experts on infectious diseases, who required bodyguards because of the many threats on his life. Fauci’s critics — including President Trump — countered Fauci’s promotion of mask wearing by stating accusingly that he once said mask-wearing was not necessary for ordinary people (Kelly). Conspiracy theories as to the safety of vaccinations also grew across the course of the year. As the 2020 election approached, the Administration ramped up efforts to downplay the serious of the virus by identifying it with “the media” and illegitimate “partisan” efforts to undermine the Trump presidency. It also ramped up its criticism of China as the source of the infection. This political self-centeredness undermined state and federal efforts to slow transmission (Shear et al.). At the same time, Trump chided health officials for moving too slowly on vaccine approvals, repeated charges that high infection rates were due to increased testing, and argued that COVID-19 deaths were exaggerated by medical providers for political and financial reasons. These claims were amplified by various conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox News. The result of this “COVID-19 Denialism” and the alternative narrative of COVID-19 policy told through the lens of culture war has resulted in the United States having the highest number of COVID-19 cases, and the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. At the same time, the underlying social consensus and social capital that have historically assisted in generating positive public health outcomes has been significantly eroded. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of U.S. adults who say public health officials such as those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are doing an excellent or good job responding to the outbreak decreased from 79% in March to 63% in August, with an especially sharp decrease among Republicans (Pew Research Center 2020). Social Capital and COVID-19 From the perspective of social or community capital, it could be expected that the American response to the Pandemic would be more effective than the Chinese response. Historically, the United States has had high levels of social capital, a highly developed public health system, and strong governmental capacity. In contrast, China has a relatively high level of governmental and public health capacity, but the level of social capital has been lower and there is a significant presence of traditional values which emphasise parochial and particularistic values. Moreover, the antecedent institutions of social capital, such as weak and inefficient formal institutions (Batjargal et al.), environmental turbulence and resource scarcity along with the transactional nature of guanxi (gift-giving and information exchange and relationship dependence) militate against finding a more effective social and community response to the public health emergency. Yet China’s response has been significantly more successful than the Unites States’. Paradoxically, the American response under the Trump Administration and the Chinese response both relied on an externalisation of the both the threat and the justifications for their particular response. In the American case, President Trump, while downplaying the seriousness of the virus, consistently called it the “China virus” in an effort to deflect responsibly as well as a means to avert attention away from the public health impacts. As recently as 3 January 2021, Trump tweeted that the number of “China Virus” cases and deaths in the U.S. were “far exaggerated”, while critically citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's methodology: “When in doubt, call it COVID-19. Fake News!” (Bacon). The Chinese Government, meanwhile, has pursued a more aggressive foreign policy across the South China Sea, on the frontier in the Indian sub-continent, and against states such as Australia who have criticised the initial Chinese response to COVID-19. To this international criticism, the government reiterated its sovereign rights and emphasised its “victimhood” in the face of “anti-China” foreign forces. Chinese state media also highlighted China as “victim” of the coronavirus, but also as a target of Western “political manoeuvres” when investigating the beginning stages of the pandemic. The major difference, however, is that public health policy in the United States was superimposed on other more fundamental political and cultural cleavages, and part of this externalisation process included the assignation of “otherness” and demonisation of internal political opponents or characterising political opponents as bent on destroying the United States. This assignation of “otherness” to various internal groups is a crucial element in the culture wars. While this may have been inevitable given the increasingly frayed nature of American society post-2008, such a characterisation has been activity pushed by local, state, and national leadership in the Republican Party and the Trump Administration (Vogel et al.). In such circ*mstances, minimising health risks and highlighting civil rights concerns due to public health measures, along with assigning blame to the democratic opposition and foreign states such as China, can have a major impact of public health responses. The result has been that social trust beyond the bubble of one’s immediate circle or those who share similar beliefs is seriously compromised — and the collective action problem presented by COVID-19 remains unsolved. Daniel Aldrich’s study of disasters in Japan, India, and US demonstrates that pre-existing high levels of social capital would lead to stronger resilience and better recovery (Aldrich). Social capital helps coordinate resources and facilitate the reconstruction collectively and therefore would lead to better recovery (Alesch et al.). Yet there has not been much research on how the pool of social capital first came about and how a disaster may affect the creation and store of social capital. Rebecca Solnit has examined five major disasters and describes that after these events, survivors would reach out and work together to confront the challenges they face, therefore increasing the social capital in the community (Solnit). However, there are studies that have concluded that major disasters can damage the social fabric in local communities (Peaco*ck et al.). The COVID-19 epidemic does not have the intensity and suddenness of other disasters but has had significant knock-on effects in increasing or decreasing social capital, depending on the institutional and social responses to the pandemic. In China, it appears that the positive social capital effects have been partially subsumed into a more generalised patriotic or nationalist affirmation of the government’s policy response. Unlike civil society responses to earlier crises, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, there is less evidence of widespread community organisation and response to combat the epidemic at its initial stages. This suggests better institutional responses to the crisis by the government, but also a high degree of porosity between civil society and a national “imagined community” represented by the national state. The result has been an increased legitimacy for the Chinese government. Alternatively, in the United States the transformation of COVID-19 public health policy into a culture war issue has seriously impeded efforts to combat the epidemic in the short term by undermining the social consensus and social capital necessary to fight such a pandemic. Trust in American institutions is historically low, and President Trump’s untrue contention that President Biden’s election was due to “fraud” has further undermined the legitimacy of the American government, as evidenced by the attacks directed at Congress in the U.S. capital on 6 January 2021. As such, the lingering effects the pandemic will have on social, economic, and political institutions will likely reinforce the deep cultural and political cleavages and weaken interpersonal networks in American society. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated global public health and impacted deeply on the world economy. Unsurprisingly, given the serious economic, social, and political consequences, different government responses have been highly politicised. Various quarantine and infection case tracking methods have caused concern over state power intruding into private spheres. The usage of face masks, social distancing rules, and intra-state travel restrictions have aroused passionate debate over public health restrictions, individual liberty, and human rights. Yet underlying public health responses grounded in higher levels of social capital enhance the effectiveness of public health measures. In China, a country that has generally been associated with lower social capital, it is likely that the relatively strong policy response to COVID-19 will both enhance feelings of nationalism and Chinese exceptionalism and help create and increase the store of social capital. 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Abstract:

Stand-up is a global phenomenon. It is Australia’s most significant form of advocatorial theatre and a major platform for challenging stigma and prejudice. In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up is transforming into a more culturally diverse form and extending the spectrum of material addressing human rights. Since the 1980s Australian stand-up routines have moved beyond the old colonial targets of England and America, and Indigenous comics such as Kevin Kopinyeri, Andy Saunders, and Shiralee Hood have gained an established following. Additionally, the turn to Asia is evident not just in trade agreements and the higher education market but also in cultural exchange and in the billing of emerging Asian stand-ups at mainstream events. The major cultural driver for stand-up is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), Australia’s largest cultural event, now over 30 years old, and an important site for dissecting constructs of democracy and nationhood. As John McCallum has observed, popular humour in post-World War II Australia drew on widespread feelings of “displacement, migration and otherness—resonant topics in a country of transplanted people and a dispossessed indigenous population arguing over a distinct Australian identity” (205–06). This essay considers the traditional comic strategies of first and second generation immigrant stand-ups in Australia and compares them with the new wave of post 9/11 Asian-Australian and Middle-Eastern-Australian stand-ups whose personas and interrogations are shifting the paradigm. Self-identifying Muslim stand-ups challenge myths of dominant Australian identity in ways which many still find confronting. Furthermore, the theories of incongruity, superiority, and psychological release re-rehearsed in traditional humour studies, by figures such as Palmer (1994) and Morreall (2009), are predicated on models of humour which do not always serve live performance, especially stand-up with its relational dependence on audience interaction.Stand-ups who immigrated to Australia as children or whose parents immigrated and struggled against adversity are important symbols both of the Australian comedy industry and of a national self-understanding of migrant resilience and making good. Szubanski and Berger hail from earlier waves of European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Szubanski has written eloquently of her complex Irish-Polish heritage and documented how the “hand-me-down trinkets of family and trauma” and “the culture clash of competing responses to calamity” have been integral to the development of her comic success and the making of her Aussie characters (347). Rachel Berger, the child of Polish holocaust survivors, advertises and connects both identities on her LinkedIn page: “After 23 years as a stand-up comedian, growing up with Jewish guilt and refugee parents, Rachel Berger knows more about survival than any idiot attending tribal council on reality TV.”Anh Do, among Australia’s most famous immigrant stand-ups, identifies as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” and arrived as a toddler in 1976. Do’s tale of his family’s survival against the odds and his creation of a persona which constructs the grateful, happy immigrant clown is the staple of his very successful routine and increasingly problematic. It is a testament to the power of Do’s stand-up that many did not perceive the toll of the loss of his birth country; the grinding poverty; and the pain of his father’s alcoholism, violence, and survivor guilt until the publication of Do’s ironically titled memoir The Happiest Refugee. In fact, the memoir draws on many of the trauma narratives that are still part of his set. One of Do’s most legendary routines is the story of his family’s sea journey to Australia, told here on ABC1’s Talking Heads:There were forty of us on a nine metre fishing boat. On day four of the journey we spot another boat. As the boat gets closer we realise it’s a boatload of Thai pirates. Seven men with knives, machetes and guns get on our boat and they take everything. One of the pirates picks up the smallest child, he lifts up the baby and rips open the baby’s nappy and dollars fall out. And the pirate decides to spare the kid’s life. And that’s a good thing cos that’s my little brother Khoa Do who in 2005 became Young Australian of the Year. And we were saved on the fifth day by a big German merchant ship which took us to a refugee camp in Malaysia and we were there for around three months before Australia says, come to Australia. And we’re very glad that happened. So often we heard Mum and Dad say—what a great country. How good is this place? And the other thing—kids, as you grow up, do as much as you can to give back to this great country and to give back to others less fortunate.Do’s strategy is apparently one of genuflection and gratitude, an adoption of what McCallum refers to as an Australian post-war tradition of the comedy of inadequacy and embarrassment (210–14). Journalists certainly like to bill Do as the happy clown, framing articles about him with headlines like Rosemary Neill’s “Laughing through Adversity.” In fact, Do is direct about his gallows humour and his propensity to darkness: his humour, he says, is a means of countering racism, of “being able to win people over who might have been averse to being friends with an Asian bloke,” but Neill does not linger on this, nor on the revelation that Do felt stigmatised by his refugee origins and terrified and shamed by the crippling poverty of his childhood in Australia. In The Happiest Refugee, Do reveals that, for him, the credibility of his routines with predominantly white Australian audiences lies in the crafting of himself as an “Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood” (182). This is not the official narrative that is retold even if it is how Do has endeared himself to Australians, and ridding himself of the happy refugee label may yet prove difficult. Suren Jayemanne is well known for his subtle mockery of multiculturalist rhetoric. In his 2016 MICF show, Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator, Jayemanne played on the supposed contradiction of his Sri Lankan-Malaysian heritage against his teenage years in the wealthy suburb of Malvern in Melbourne, his private schooling, and his obsession with hip hop and black American culture. Jayemanne’s strategy is to gently confound his audiences, leading them slowly up a blind alley. He builds up a picture of how to identify Sri Lankan parents, supposedly Sri Lankan qualities such as an exceptional ability at maths, and Sri Lankan employment ambitions which he argues he fulfilled in becoming an accountant. He then undercuts his story by saying he has recently realised that his suburban background, his numerical abilities, his love of black music, and his rejection of accountancy in favour of comedy, in fact prove conclusively that he has, all along, been white. He also confesses that this is a bruising disappointment. Jayemanne exposes the emptiness of the conceits of white, brown, and black and of invented identity markers and plays on his audiences’ preconceptions through an old storyteller’s device, the shaggy dog story. The different constituencies in his audiences enjoy his trick equally, from quite different perspectives.Diana Nguyen, a second generation Vietnamese stand-up, was both traumatised and politicised by Pauline Hanson when she was a teenager. Hanson described Nguyen’s community in Dandenong as “yellow Asian people” (Filmer). Nguyen’s career as a community development worker combating racism relates directly to her activity as a stand-up: migrant stories are integral to Australian history and Nguyen hypothesises that the “Australian psyche of being invaded or taken over” has reignited over the question of Islamic fundamentalism and expresses her concern to Filmer about the Muslim youths under her care.Nguyen’s alarm about the elision of Islamic radicalism with Muslim culture drives an agenda that has led the new generation of self-identified Muslim stand-ups since 9/11. This post 9/11 world is described by Wajahat as gorged with “exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslim [. . . ] and perpetuated by negative discrimination and the marginalisation and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life in western societies.” In Australia, Aamer Rahman, Muhamed Elleissi, Khaled Khalafalla, and Nazeem Hussain typify this newer, more assertive form of second generation immigrant stand-up—they identify as Muslim (whether religious or not), as brown, and as Australian. They might be said to symbolise a logical response to Ghassan Hage’s famous White Nation (1998), which argues that a white supremacism underlies the mindset of the white elite in Australia. Their positioning is more nuanced than previous generations of stand-up. Nazeem Hussain’s routines mark a transformation in Australian stand-up, as Waleed Aly has argued: “ethnic comedy” has hitherto been about the parading of stereotypes for comfortable, mainstream consumption, about “minstrel characters” [. . .] but Hussain interrogates his audiences in every direction—and aggravates Muslims too. Hussain’s is the world of post 9/11 Australian Muslims. It’s about more than ethnic stereotyping. It’s about being a consistent target of political opportunism, where everyone from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Minister to an otherwise washed-up backbencher with a view on burqas has you in their sights, where bombs detonate in Western capitals and unrelated nations are invaded.Understandably, a prevalent theme among the new wave of Muslim comics, and not just in Australia, is the focus on the reading of Muslims as manifestly linked with Islamic State (IS). Jokes about mistaken identity, plane crashes, suicide bombing, and the Koran feature prominently. English-Pakistani Muslim, Shazia Mirza, gained comedy notoriety in the UK in the wake of 9/11 by introducing her routine with the words: “My name’s Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence” (Bedell). Stand-ups Negin Farsad, Ahmed Ahmed, and Dean Obeidalla are all also activists challenging prevailing myths about Islam, skin colour and terrorism in America. Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed acquired prominence for telling audiences in the infamous Axis of Evil Comedy Tour about how his life had changed much for the worse since 9/11. Ahmed Ahmed was the alias used by one of Osama Bin Laden’s devotees and his life became on ongoing struggle with anti-terrorism officials doing security checks (he was once incarcerated) and with the FBI who were certain that the comedian was among their most wanted terrorists. Similarly, Obeidalla, an Italian-Palestinian-Muslim, notes in his TEDx talk that “If you have a Muslim name, you are probably immune to identity theft.” His narration of a very sudden experience of becoming an object of persecution and of others’ paranoia is symptomatic of a shared understanding of a post 9/11 world among many Muslim comics: “On September 10th 2001 I went to bed as a white American and I woke up an Arab,” says Obeidalla, still dazed from the seismic shift in his life.Hussain and Khalafalla demonstrate a new sophistication and directness in their stand-up, and tackle their majority white audiences head-on. There is no hint of the apologetic or deferential stance performed by Anh Do. Many of the jokes in their routines target controversial or taboo issues, which up until recently were shunned in Australian political debate, or are absent or misrepresented in mainstream media. An Egyptian-Australian born in Saudi Arabia, Khaled Khalafalla arrived on the comedy scene in 2011, was runner-up in RAW, Australia’s most prestigious open mic competition, and in 2013 won the best of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for Devious. Khalafalla’s shows focus on racist stereotypes and identity and he uses a range of Middle Eastern and Indian accents to broach IS recruitment, Muslim cousin marriages, and plane crashes. His 2016 MICF show, Jerk, was a confident and abrasive routine exploring relationships, drug use, the extreme racism of Reclaim Australia rallies, controversial visa checks by Border Force’s Operation Fortitude, and Islamophobia. Within the first minute of his routine, he criticises white people in the audience for their woeful refusal to master Middle Eastern names, calling out to the “brown woman” in the audience for support, before lining up a series of jokes about the (mis)pronunciation of his name. Khalafalla derives his power on stage by what Oliver Double calls “uncovering.” Double contends that “one of the most subversive things stand-up can do is to uncover the unmentionable,” subjects which are difficult or impossible to discuss in everyday conversation or the broadcast media (292). For instance, in Jerk Khalafalla discusses the “whole hating halal movement” in Australia as a metaphor for exposing brutal prejudice: Let me break it down for you. Halal is not voodoo. It’s just a blessing that Muslims do for some things, food amongst other things. But, it’s also a magical spell that turns some people into f*ckwits when they see it. Sometimes people think it’s a thing that can get stuck to your t-shirt . . . like ‘Oh f*ck, I got halal on me’ [Australian accent]. I saw a guy the other day and he was like f*ck halal, it funds terrorism. And I was like, let me show you the true meaning of Islam. I took a lamb chop out of my pocket and threw it in his face. And, he was like Ah, what was that? A lamb chop. Oh, I f*cking love lamb chops. And, I say you fool, it’s halal and he burst into flames.In effect, Khalafalla delivers a contemptuous attack on the white members of his audience, but at the same time his joke relies on those same audience members presuming that they are morally and intellectually superior to the individual who is the butt of the joke. Khalafalla’s considerable charm is a help in this tricky send-up. In 2015 the Australian Department of Defence recognised his symbolic power and invited him to join the Afghanistan Task Force to entertain the troops by providing what Doran describes as “home-grown Australian laughs” (7). On stage in Australia, Khalafalla constructs a persona which is an outsider to the dominant majority and challenges the persecution of Muslim communities. Ironically, on the NATO base, Khalafalla’s act was perceived as representing a diverse but united Australia. McCallum has pointed to such contradictions, moments where white Australia has shown itself to be a “culture which at first authenticates emigrant experience and later abrogates it in times of defiant nationalism” (207). Nazeem Hussain, born in Australia to Sri Lankan parents, is even more confrontational. His stand-up is born of his belief that “comedy protects us from the world around us” and is “an evolutionary defence mechanism” (8–9). His ground-breaking comedy career is embedded in his work as an anti-racism activist and asylum seeker supporter and shaped by his second-generation migrant experiences, law studies, community youth work, and early mentorship by American Muslim comic trio Allah Made Me Funny. He is well-known for his pioneering television successes Legally Brown and Salam Café. In his stand-up, Hussain often dwells witheringly on the failings and peculiarities of white people’s attempts to interact with him. Like all his routines, his sell-out show Fear of the Brown Planet, performed with Aamer Rahman from 2004–2008, explored casual, pathologised racism. Hussain deliberately over-uses the term “white people” in his routines as a provocation and deploys a reverse racism against his majority white audiences, knowing that many will be squirming. “White people ask me how can Muslims have fun if they don’t drink? Muslims have fun! Of course we have fun! You’ve seen us on the news.” For Hussain stand-up is “fundamentally an art of protest,” to be used as “a tool by communities and people with ideas that challenge and provoke the status quo with a spirit of counterculture” (Low 1–3). His larger project is to humanise Muslims to white Australians so that “they see us firstly as human beings” (1–3). Hussain’s 2016 MICF show, Hussain in the Membrane, both satirised media hype and hysterical racism and pushed for a better understanding of the complex problems Muslim communities face in Australia. His show also connected issues to older colonial traditions of racism. In a memorable and beautifully crafted tirade, Hussain inveighed against the 2015 Bendigo riots which occurred after local Muslims lodged an application to Bendigo council to build a mosque in the sleepy Victorian town. [YELLING in an exaggerated Australian accent] No we don’t want Muslims! NO we don’t want Muslims—to come invade Bendigo by application to the local council! That is the most bureaucratic invasion of all times. No place in history has been invaded by lodging an application to a local council. Can you see ISIS running around chasing town planners? Of course not, Muslims like to wait 6–8 months to invade! That’s a polite way to invade. What if white people invaded that way? What a better world we’d be living in. If white people invaded Australia that way, we’d be able to celebrate Australia Day on the same day without so much blood on our hands. What if Captain Cook came to Australia and said [in a British accent] Awe we would like to apply to invade this great land and here is our application. [In an Australian accent] Awe sorry, mate, rejected, but we’ll give you Bendigo.As Waleed Aly sees it, the Australian cultural majority is still “unused to hearing minorities speak with such assertiveness.” Hussain exposes “a binary world where there’s whiteness, and then otherness. Where white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not” (Aly). Hussain certainly speaks as an insider and goes so far as recognising his coloniser’s guilt in relation to indigenous Australians (Tan). Aly well remembers the hate mail he and Hussain received when they worked on Salam Café: “The message was clear. We were outsiders and should behave as such. We were not real Australians. We should know our place, as supplicants, celebrating the nation’s unblemished virtue.” Khalafalla, Rahman, Elleissi, and Hussain make clear that the new wave of comics identify as Muslim and Australian (which they would argue many in the audiences receive as a provocation). They have zero tolerance of racism, their comedy is intimately connected with their political activism, and they have an unapologetically Australian identity. No longer is it a question of whether the white cultural majority in Australia will anoint them as worthy and acceptable citizens, it is a question of whether the audiences can rise to the moral standards of the stand-ups. The power has been switched. For Hussain laughter is about connection: “that person laughs because they appreciate the point and whether or not they accept what was said was valid isn’t important. What matters is, they’ve understood” (Low 5). ReferencesAhmed, Ahmed. “When It Comes to Laughter, We Are All Alike.” TedXDoha (2010). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxDoha-Ahmed-Ahmed-When-it-Co>.Aly, Waleed. “Comment.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Sep. 2013."Anh Do". Talking Heads with Peter Thompson. ABC1. 4 Oct. 2010. Radio.Bedell, Geraldine. “Veiled Humour.” The Guardian (2003). 8 Aug. 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/20/comedy.artsfeatures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>.Berger, Rachel. LinkedIn [Profile page]. 14 June 2016 <http://www.linkedin.com/company/rachel-berger>.Do, Anh. The Happiest Refugee. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010. Doran, Mark. "Service with a Smile: Entertainers Give Troops a Taste of Home.” Air Force 57.21 (2015). 12 June 2016 <http://www.defence.gov.au/Publications/NewsPapers/Raaf/editions/5721/5721.pdf>.Double, Oliver. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Filmer, Natalie. "For Dandenong Comedian and Actress Diana Nguyen The Colour Yellow has a Strong Meaning.” The Herald Sun 3 Sep. 2013.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of a White Supremacy in a Multicultural Age. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998.Hussain, Nazeem. Hussain in the Membrane. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.———. "The Funny Side of 30.” Spectrum. The Age 12 Mar. 2016.Khalafalla, Khaled. Jerk. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.Low, Lian. "Fear of a Brown Planet: Fight the Power with Laughter.” Peril: Asian Australian Arts and Culture (2011). 12 June 2016 <http://peril.com.au/back-editions/edition10/fear-of-a-brown-planet-fight-the-power-with-laughter>. McCallum, John. "Cringe and Strut: Comedy and National Identity in Post-War Australia.” Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference. Ed. Stephen Wagg. New York: Routledge, 1998. Morreall, John. Comic Relief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Neill, Rosemary. "Laughing through Adversity.” The Australian 28 Aug. 2010.Obeidalla, Dean. "Using Stand-Up to Counter Islamophobia.” TedXEast (2012). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxEast-Dean-Obeidalla-Using-S;TEDxEast>.Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Szubanski, Magda. Reckoning. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015. Tan, Monica. "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Allahu Akbar! Nazeem Hussain's Bogan-Muslim Army.” The Guardian 29 Feb. 2016. "Uncle Sam.” Salam Café (2008). 11 June 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQPAJt6caU>.Wajahat, Ali, et al. "Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Center for American Progress (2011). 11 June 2016 <https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc>.

Abstract:

Collectives bring people and their concerns together. In the twenty-first century, this assembly happens across different material and virtual spaces that, together, establish connective layers of society. A kind of politics has emerged that seeks new forms of communication and expression and proposes new modes of (co)existence. Riots in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, the repair of a public village centre, railway workers’ strikes, green activists’ protests, songs in support of tsunami victims… These are some examples of collective actions that unite people and places. But very often these kinds of events and social practices take place and fade away too quickly without visible traces of becoming collectives. This article focuses on the contingent spaces that enable collective action and provide possibilities for “peripheral” concerns and communities to become public. The concept of “diasporas” is widened to permit discussion of how emerging (international) communities make their voices heard through political events. Some theoretical concepts will be illustrated, using two examples of collective action on 1 May 2009 that demonstrate different initiatives concerning the global (economic) crisis. Assembling Collectives and Affective Events Building a house/centre and singing for something: these are examples of practices that bring people and their ideals together in a collective action or event. This article discusses the different communities that evolve within spaces that enable collective action. These communities are formed not only on the basis of nationality, occupation, or race; elements of (temporal) membership are created out of a wide spectrum of affiliations and a sense of solidarity. Hinchliffe (13) argues that collective action can be seen as a collection of affects that link together disparate places and times, and thus the collective is a matter of considerable political interest. The emergent spaces of collective action publicise particular concerns that may connect already existing but (spatially) dispersed communities and diasporas. However, there is a need to discuss the affects, places, and temporalities that make the assemblage of new collectivities possible. The political potential of collective spaces needs careful elaboration in order that such initiatives may continue to grow without extending the influence of existing (capitalist) powers. Various communities connected “glocally” (locally and globally) can call new publics into existence, posing questions to politics which are not yet “of politics” (Thrift 3). Thus collective action can invent new connecting concerns and practices that catalyse (political) change in society. To understand the complex spatiality of collective action and community formations, it is crucial to look at processes of “affect”. Affects occur in society as “in-becoming” atmospheres and “imitation-suggestions” (Brennan 1-10) that stimulate concerns and motivate practices. The “imitation” can also be an invention that creatively binds existing know-how and experiences into a local-social context. Thinking about affects within the spaces of collective action provides a challenge to rethink what is referred to simply as the “social”. Massumi (228) argues that such affects are virtual expressions of the actually existing things that embody them; however, affects such as emotions and feelings are also autonomous to the degree that they exceed the particular body within which they are presently confined. The emerging bodies, or spaces, of collective action thus carry the potential to transform coexistence across both intellectual and physical boundaries, and communication technology has been instrumental in linking the affective spaces of collective action across both time and space. According to Thrift, the collision of different space-times very often provokes a “stutter” in social relations: the jolt which arises from new encounters, new connections, new ways of proceeding. But how can these turbulent spheres and trajectories of collective action be described and discussed? Here the mechanisms of “events” themselves need to be addressed. The “event” represents, abstractly, a spatio-temporal locus where different concerns and practices are encountered and negotiated. “Event” refers to an incoming, or emerging, object (agent) triggering, through various affective responses, new ideas and initiatives (Clark 33). In addition to revolutions or tsunamis, there are also smaller-scale events that change how people live and come together. In this sense, events can be understood to combine individual and social “bodies” within collective action and imaginations. As Appadurai has argued, the imagination is central to all forms of agency, is itself a social practice, and is the key component of our new global order (Appadurai 29-30). Flusty (7) argues that the production of the global is as present in our day-to-day thoughts and actions as it is in the mass movement of capital, information, and populations which means that there should be the potential to include more people in the democratic process (Whatmore). This process can be seen to be a defining characteristic of the term cosmopolitics which Thrift describes as: “one of the best hopes for changing our engagement with the political by simply acknowledging that there is more there” (Thrift 189). For many, these hopes are based on a new kind of telematic connectedness, in which tele- and digital communications represent the beginning of a global networked consciousness based on the continuous exchange of ideas, both cognitive and affective. Examples of Events and Collectives Taking Place on 1 May 2009 The first day in May is traditionally dedicated to working people, and there are many public gatherings to express solidarity with workers and left-wing (“red”) policy. Issues concerning work and various productions are complex, and recently the global economic crisis exposed some weaknesses in neoliberal capitalism. Different participatory/collective actions and spaces are formed to make some common concerns public at the same time in various locations. The two following examples are part of wider “ideoscapes” (official state ideologies and counter-ideologies) (see Appadurai) in action that help to illustrate both the workings of twenty-first century global capitalism and the translocal character of the public concern. EuroMayDay One alternative form of collective action is EuroMayDay, which has taken place on May 1 every year since 2001 in several cities across (mainly Western) Europe. For example, in 2006 a total of about 300,000 young demonstrators took part in EuroMayDay parades in 20 EU cities (Wikipedia). The purpose of this political action is “to fight against the widespread precarisation of youth and the discrimination of migrants in Europe and beyond: no borders, no workfare, no precarity!” (EuroMayDay). This manifesto indicates that the aim of the collective action is to direct public attention to the insecure conditions of immigrants and young people across Europe. These groups may be seen to constitute a kind of European “diasporic collective” in which the whole of Europe is figured as a “problem area” in which unemployment, displacement, and (possibly) destitution threaten millions of lives. In this emerging “glocality”, there is a common, and urgent, need to overcome the boundaries of exclusion. Here, the proposed collective body (EuroMayDay) is described as a process for action, thus inviting translocal public participation. The body has active nodes in (Western) Europe (Bremen, Dortmund, Geneva, Hamburg, Hanau, Lisbon, Lausanne, Malaga, Milan, Palermo, Tübingen, Zürich) and beyond (Tokyo, Toronto, Tsukuba). The collective process marks these cities on the map through a webpage offering contacts with each of the “nodes” in the network. On 1 May 2009, May Day events, or parades, took place in all the cities listed above. The “nodes” of the EuroMayDay process prepared posters and activities following some common lines, although collective action had to be performed locally in every city. By way of example, let’s look at how this collective action realised its potential in Berlin, Germany. The posters (EuroMayDay Berlin, "Call") articulate the oppressive and competitive power of capitalism which affects everyone, everyday, like a machine: it constitutes “the permanent crisis”. One’s actual or potential unemployment and/or immigrant status may cause insecurity about the future. There is also a focus on liminal or transitional time, and a call for a new collectivity to overcome oppressive forces from above that protect the interests of the State and the banks. EuroMayDay thus calls for the weaving together of different forms of resistance against a deeply embedded capitalist system and the bringing together of common concerns for the attention of the general public through the May Day parade. Another poster (EuroMayDay Berlin, "May"), depicting the May Day parade, centres around the word “KRISE?” (“crisis”). The poster ends with an optimistic call to action, expressing a desire to free capitalism from institutional oppression and recreate it in a more humanistic way. Together, these two posters represent fragments of the “ideoscope” informing the wider, collective process. In Berlin in 2009, thousands of people (mostly young) participated in the May Day parade (which started from the public square Bebelplatz), backed by a musical soundtrack (see Rudi). Some people also had posters in their hands, displaying slogans like: “For Human Rights”; “Class Struggle”; “Social Change Not Climate Change”; and “Make Capitalism a Thing of the Past”. Simultaneously, dozens of other similar parades were taking place across the cities of Europe, all bearing “accelerated affective hope” (Rosa) for political change and demanding justice in society. Unfortunately, the May Day parade in Berlin took a violent turn at night, when some demonstrators attacked police and set cars on fire. There were also clashes during demonstrations in Hamburg (Kirschbaum). The media blamed the clashes also on the economic recession and recently dashed hopes for change. The Berlin May Day parade event was covered on the EuroMayDay webpage and on television news. This collective action connected many people; some participated in the parade, and many more saw the clashes and burning cars on their screens. The destructive and critical force of the collective action brought attention to some of the problems associated with youth employment and immigration though, sadly, without offering any concrete proposals for a solution to the problem. The emotional character of the street marches, and later the street fighting, were arguably an important aspect of the collective action inasmuch as they demonstrated the potential for citizens to unite, translocally, around affective as well as material grief (a process that has been given dramatic expression in more recent times with events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria). Further, although the recent May Day events have achieved very little in terms of material results, the network remains active, and further initiatives are likely in the future. “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” On 1 May 2009, about 11,000 people participated in a public “thought-bee” in Estonia (located in north-eastern Europe in the region of the Baltic Sea) and (through the Estonian diaspora) abroad. The “thought-bee” can be understood as a civil society initiative designed to bring people together for discussion and problem-solving with regards to everyday social issues. The concept of the “bee” combines work with pleasure. The bee tradition was practised in old Estonian farming communities, when families in adjacent villages helped one another. Bees were often organised for autumn harvesting, and the intense, communal work was celebrated by offering participants food and drink. Similarly, during the Soviet era, on certain Saturdays there were organised days (obligatory) for collective working (e.g. to reconstruct sites or to pick up litter). Now the “bee” concept has become associated with brainstorming in small groups across the country as well as abroad. The number of participants in the May 1st thought-bee was relatively large, given that Estonia’s total population is only 1.4 million. The funding of the initiative combined public and private sources, e.g. Estonian Civil Society Foundation, the European Commission, and some companies. The information sheet, presented to participants of the May 1st thought-bee, explains the event’s purpose in this way: The main purpose of today’s thought-bee is to initiate as many actions as possible that can change life in Estonia for the better. My Estonia, our more enjoyable and more efficient society, will appear through smaller and bigger thoughts. In the thought-bee we think how to make life better for our own home-place... Let’s think together and do it! (Teeme Ära, "Teeme", translated from Estonian) The civil society event grew out of a collective action on 3 May 2008 to pick up and dispose of litter throughout Estonia. The thought-bee initiative was coordinated by volunteers. The emotional appeal to participate in the thought-bee event on May 1st was presented and circulated in newspapers, radio, television, Internet portals, and e-mails. Famous people called on residents to take part in the public discussion events. Some examples of arguments for the collective activity included the economic crisis, the need for new jobs, self-responsibility, environmental pressures, and the general need to learn and find communal solutions. The thought-bee initiative took place simultaneously in about 500 “thought-halls” all over Estonia and abroad. Small groups of people registered, chose main discussion topics (with many suggestions from organisers of the bee) and made their groups visible as nodes on the “initiative” webpage. Other people had the opportunity of reading several proposals from the various thought-halls and of joining as members of the public brainstorming event on 1 May. The virtual and living map of the halls presented them as (green) nodes with location, topics, members, and discussion leaders. Various sites such as schools, clubs, cultural centres, municipality buildings, and theatres became part of the multiple and synchronous “space-times” within the half-day thought-bee event. Participants in the thought-bee were asked to bring their own food to share and, in some municipalities, open concerts were held to celebrate the day. These practices indicate some continuity with the national tradition of bees, where work has always been combined with pleasure. Most “thought-halls” were located in towns and smaller local centres as well as on several Estonian islands. Moreover, these thought-halls provided for both as face-to-face and online encounters. Further, one English-speaking discussion group was organised in Tallinn so that non-Estonian speakers could also participate. However, the involvement of Russian-speaking people in the initiative remained rather limited. It is important to note that these embodied spaces of participation were also to be found outside of Estonia—in Brussels, Amsterdam, Toronto, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Prague, Baltimore, New York, and San Diego—and, in this way, the Estonian diaspora was also given the opportunity to become involved in the collective action. Following the theories of Thrift and Clark cited at the beginning of this article, it is interesting to see an event in which simultaneously connected places, embodying multiple voices, becomes part of the communal present with a shared vision of the future. The conclusions of each thought-hall discussion group were recorded on video shortly after the event. These videos were made available on the “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” webpage. The most frequently addressed topics of the thought-bee (in order of importance) were: community activities and collaboration; entrepreneurship and new jobs; education, values; free time and sport; regional development; rural life; and the environment and nature conservation (PRAXIS). The participants of the collective action were aware of the importance of local as well as national initiatives as a catalyst for change. The initiative “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” continued after the events of May Day 2009; people discussed issues and suggested proposals through the “initiative” webpage and supported the continuation of the collective action (Teeme Ära, "Description"). Environmental concerns (e.g. planting trees, reducing noise, and packaging waste) appear as important elements in these imaginings along with associated other practices for the improvement of daily life. It is important to understand the thought-bee event as a part of an emerging collective action that started with a simple litter clean-up and grew, through various other successful local community initiatives, into shared visions for a better future predicated upon the principles of glocality and coexistence. The example indicates that (international) NGOs can apply, and also invent, radical information politics to change the terms of debate in a national context by providing a voice for groups and issues that would otherwise remain unheard and unseen (see also Atkinson and Scurrah 236-44). Conclusions The collective actions discussed above have created new publics and contingent spaces to bring additional questions and concerns into politics. In both cases, the potential of “the event” (as theorised in the introduction of this article) came to the foreground, creating an additional international layer of temporal connectivity between many existing social groups such as unemployed young people or members of a village union. These events were both an “outcome” of, and an attempt to change, the involuntary exclusion of certain “peripheral” groups within the melting pot that the European Union has become. As such, they may be thought of as extending the concept of “diasporas” to include emerging platforms of collective action that aim to make problematic issues visible and multiple voices heard across the wider public. This, in turn, illustrates the need to rethink diasporas in the context of the intensive de-territorialisation of human concerns, “space-times and movement-trajectories yet to (be)come” (Braziel and Mannur 18). Both the examples of collective action discussed here campaigned for “changing the world” through a one-day event and may thus be understood in terms of Rosa’s theory of “social acceleration” (Rosa). This theory shows how both to the “contraction of the present” and the general instability of contemporary life have given rise to a newly affective desire to improve life through an expression of the collective will. Such a tendency can clearly take on far more radical forms as has been recently demonstrated by the mass protests and revolts against autocratic ruling powers in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. In this article, however, cosmopolitics is better understood in terms of the particular skills (most evident in the Estonian case) and affective spheres that mobilised in suggestions to bring about local action and global change. Together, these examples of collective action are part of a wider “ideoscape” (Appadurai) trying to reduce the power of capitalism and of the state by encouraging alternative forms of collective action that are not bound up solely with earning money or serving the state as a “salient” citizen. However, it could be argued that “EuroMayDay” is ultimately a reactionary movement used to highlight the oppressive aspects of capitalism without offering clear alternatives. By contrast, “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” has facilitated interactive public discussion and the practice of local skills that have the power to improve everyday life and the environment in a material and quantifiable way. Such changes in collective action also illustrate the speed and “imitative capacity stimulating expressive interactions” that now characterise everyday life (Thrift). Crucially, both these collective events were achieved through rapid advances in communication technologies in recent times; this technology made it possible to spread know-how as well as feelings of solidarity and social contact across the world. Further research on these fascinating developments in g/local politics is clearly urgently needed to help us better understand the changes in collective action currently taking place. Acknowledgements This research was supported by Estonian Science Foundation grant SF0130008s07 and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT). References Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 25-48. Atkinson, Jeffrey, and Martin Scurrah. Globalizing Social Justice: The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Bringing about Social Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur. “Nation, Migration, Globalisation: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 1-18. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. London: Continuum, 2004. Clark, Nigel. “The Play of the World.” Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Eds. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose, and Sarah Whatmore. London: Sage, 2003. 28-46. EuroMayDay. “What Is EuroMayDay?” 23 May 2009. ‹http://www.euromayday.org/about.php›. EuroMayDay Berlin. “Call of May Parade.” 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://maydayberlin.blogsport.de/aufruf/text-only/›. EuroMayDay Berlin. “May Parade Poster.” 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://maydayberlin.blogsport.de/propaganda/›. Flusty, Steven. De-Coca-Colonization. Making the Globe from the Inside Out. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hinchliffe, Steve. Geographies of Nature: Societies, Environments, Ecologies. London: Sage, 2007. Kirschbaum, Erik. “Police Hurt in May Day Clashes in Germany.” Reuters, 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5401UI20090501›. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 217-39. PRAXIS. “Minu Eesti mõttetalgute ideede tähtsamad analüüsitulemused” (Main analysing results about ideas of My Estonia thought-bee). 26 Oct. 2009. ‹http://www.minueesti.ee/index.php?leht=6&mID=949›. Rosa, Hartmut. “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronised High-Speed Society.” Constellations 10 (2003): 1-33. Rudi 5858. “Mayday-Parade-Demo in Berlin 2009.” 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://wn.com/Rudi5858›. Teeme Ära. “Teeme Ära! Minu Eesti” (Let’s Do It! My Estonia). Day Program of 1 May 2009. Printed information sheet, 2009. Teeme Ära. “Description of Preparation and Content of Thought-bee.” 20 Apr. 2009. ‹http://www.minueesti.ee/?leht=321›. Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics and Affect. London: Routledge, 2008. Whatmore, Sarah. “Generating Materials.” Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Eds. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore. London: Sage, 2003. 89-104. Wikipedia. “EuroMayDay.” 23 May 2009. ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroMayDay›.

Abstract:

Introduction Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade, with high profile films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, and An Inconvenient Truth garnering increased attention both at the box office and in the news media. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact. Films are now typically released with websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds, and web videos to increase both reach and impact. This combination of technology and broader audience appeal has given rise to a current landscape in which documentary films are imbedded within coordinated multi-media campaigns. New media have not only opened up new avenues for communicating with audiences, they have also created new opportunities for data collection and analysis of film impacts. A recent report by McKinsey and Company highlighted this potential, introducing and discussing the implications of increasing consumer information being recorded on the Internet as well as through networked sensors in the physical world. As they found: "Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy" (Manyika et al. iv). This data can be mined to learn a great deal about both individual and cultural response to documentary films and the issues they represent. Although film has a rich history in humanities research, this new set of tools enables an empirical approach grounded in the social sciences. However, several researchers across disciplines have noted that limited investigation has been conducted in this area. Although there has always been an emphasis on social impact in film and many filmmakers and scholars have made legitimate (and possibly illegitimate) claims of impact, few have attempted to empirically justify these claims. Over fifteen years ago, noted film scholar Brian Winston commented that "the underlying assumption of most social documentaries—that they shall act as agents of reform and change—is almost never demonstrated" (236). A decade later, Political Scientist David Whiteman repeated this sentiment, arguing that, "despite widespread speculation about the impact of documentaries, the topic has received relatively little systematic attention" ("Evolving"). And earlier this year, the introduction to a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on documentary film stated, "documentary film, despite its growing influence and many impacts, has mostly been overlooked by social scientists studying the media and communication" (Nisbet and Aufderheide 451). Film has been studied extensively as entertainment, as narrative, and as cultural event, but the study of film as an agent of social change is still in its infancy. This paper introduces a systematic approach to measuring the social impact of documentary film aiming to: (1) discuss the context of documentary film and its potential impact; and (2) argue for a social science approach, discussing key issues about conducting such research. Changes in Documentary Practice Documentary film has been used as a tool for promoting social change throughout its history. John Grierson, who coined the term "documentary" in 1926, believed it could be used to influence the ideas and actions of people in ways once reserved for church and school. He presented his thoughts on this emerging genre in his 1932 essay, First Principles of Documentary, saying, "We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form" (97). Richard Barsam further specified the definition of documentary, distinguishing it from non-fiction film, such that all documentaries are non-fiction films but not all non-fiction films are documentaries. He distinguishes documentary from other forms of non-fiction film (i.e. travel films, educational films, newsreels) by its purpose; it is a film with an opinion and a specific message that aims to persuade or influence the audience. And Bill Nichols writes that the definition of documentary may even expand beyond the film itself, defining it as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" (12). Documentary film has undergone many significant changes since its inception, from the heavily staged romanticism movement of the 1920s to the propagandist tradition of governments using film to persuade individuals to support national agendas to the introduction of cinéma vérité in the 1960s and historical documentary in the 1980s (cf. Barnouw). However, the recent upsurge in popularity of documentary media, combined with technological advances of internet and computers have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as both art and agent for social change. One such opportunity is in the creation of film-based social action campaigns. Over the past decade, filmmakers have taken a more active role in promoting social change by coordinating film releases with action campaigns. Companies such as Participant Media (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., etc.) now create "specific social action campaigns for each film and documentary designed to give a voice to issues that resonate in the films" (Participant Media). In addition, a new sector of "social media" consultants are now offering services, including "consultation, strategic planning for alternative distribution, website and social media development, and complete campaign management services to filmmakers to ensure the content of nonfiction media truly meets the intention for change" (Working Films). The emergence of new forms of media and technology are changing our conceptions of both documentary film and social action. Technologies such as podcasts, video blogs, internet radio, social media and network applications, and collaborative web editing "both unsettle and extend concepts and assumptions at the heart of 'documentary' as a practice and as an idea" (Ellsworth). In the past decade, we have seen new forms of documentary creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Likewise, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including "action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels" that often turn into "ongoing 'legacy' programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film's domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows" (Participant Media). This move towards multi-media documentary film is becoming not only commonplace, but expected as a part of filmmaking. NYU film professor and documentary film pioneer George Stoney recently noted, "50 percent of the documentary filmmaker's job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action" (qtd. in Nisbet, "Gasland"). In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, coined the term "transmedia storytelling", which he later defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" ("Transmedia"). When applied to documentary film, it is the elements of the "issue" raised by the film that get dispersed across these channels, coordinating, not just an entertainment experience, but a social action campaign. Dimensions of Evaluation It is not unreasonable to assume that such film campaigns, just like any policy or program, have the possibility to influence viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Measuring this impact has become increasingly important, as funders of documentary and issue-based films want look to understand the "return on investment" of films in terms of social impact so that they can compare them with other projects, including non-media, direct service projects. Although we "feel" like films make a difference to the individuals who also see them in the broader cultures in which they are embedded, measurement and empirical analysis of this impact are vitally important for both providing feedback to filmmakers and funders as well as informing future efforts attempting to leverage film for social change. This type of systematic assessment, or program evaluation, is often discussed in terms of two primary goals—formative (or process) and summative (or impact) evaluation (cf. Muraskin; Trochim and Donnelly). Formative evaluation studies program materials and activities to strengthen a program, and summative evaluation examines program outcomes. In terms of documentary film, these two goals can be described as follows: Formative Evaluation: Informing the Process As programs (broadly defined as an intentional set of activities with the aim of having some specific impact), the people who interact with them, and the cultures they are situated in are constantly changing, program development and evaluation is an ongoing learning cycle. Film campaigns, which are an intentional set of activities with the aim of impacting individual viewers and broader cultures, fit squarely within this purview. Without formulating hypotheses about the relationships between program activities and goals and then collecting and analyzing data during implementation to test them, it is difficult to learn ways to improve programs (or continue doing what works best in the most efficient manner). Attention to this process enables those involved to learn more about, not only what works, but how and why it works and even gain insights about how program outcomes may be affected by changes to resource availability, potential audiences, or infrastructure. Filmmakers are constantly learning and honing their craft and realizing the impact of their practice can help the artistic process. Often faced with tight budgets and timelines, they are forced to confront tradeoffs all the time, in the writing, production and post-production process. Understanding where they are having impact can improve their decision-making, which can help both the individual project and the overall field. Summative Evaluation: Quantifying Impacts Evaluation is used in many different fields to determine whether programs are achieving their intended goals and objectives. It became popular in the 1960s as a way of understanding the impact of the Great Society programs and has continued to grow since that time (Madaus and Stufflebeam). A recent White House memo stated that "rigorous, independent program evaluations can be a key resource in determining whether government programs are achieving their intended outcomes as well as possible and at the lowest possible cost" and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched an initiative to increase the practice of "impact evaluations, or evaluations aimed at determining the causal effects of programs" (Orszag 1). Documentary films, like government programs, generally target a national audience, aim to serve a social purpose, and often do not provide a return on their investment. Participant Media, the most visible and arguably most successful documentary production company in the film industry, made recent headlines for its difficulty in making a profit during its seven-year history (Cieply). Owner and founder Jeff Skoll reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company and CEO James Berk added that the company sometimes measures success, not by profit, but by "whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically" (Cieply). Because of this, documentary projects often rely on grant funding, and are starting to approach funders beyond traditional arts and media sources. "Filmmakers are finding new fiscal and non-fiscal partners, in constituencies that would not traditionally be considered—or consider themselves—media funders or partners" (BRITDOC 6). And funders increasingly expect tangible data about their return on investment. Says Luis Ubiñas, president of Ford Foundation, which recently launched the Just Films Initiative: In these times of global economic uncertainty, with increasing demand for limited philanthropic dollars, assessing our effectiveness is more important than ever. Today, staying on the frontlines of social change means gauging, with thoughtfulness and rigor, the immediate and distant outcomes of our funding. Establishing the need for evaluation is not enough—attention to methodology is also critical. Valid research methodology is a critical component of understanding around the role entertainment can play in impacting social and environmental issues. The following issues are vital to measuring impact. Defining the Project Though this may seem like an obvious step, it is essential to determine the nature of the project so one can create research questions and hypotheses based on a complete understanding of the "treatment". One organization that provides a great example of the integration of documentary film imbedded into a larger campaign or movement is Invisible Children. Founded in 2005, Invisible Children is both a media-based organization as well as an economic development NGO with the goal of raising awareness and meeting the needs of child soldiers and other youth suffering as a result of the ongoing war in northern Uganda. Although Invisible Children began as a documentary film, it has grown into a large non-profit organization with an operating budget of over $8 million and a staff of over a hundred employees and interns throughout the year as well as volunteers in all 50 states and several countries. Invisible Children programming includes films, events, fundraising campaigns, contests, social media platforms, blogs, videos, two national "tours" per year, merchandise, and even a 650-person three-day youth summit in August 2011 called The Fourth Estate. Individually, each of these components might lead to specific outcomes; collectively, they might lead to others. In order to properly assess impacts of the film "project", it is important to take all of these components into consideration and think about who they may impact and how. This informs the research questions, hypotheses, and methods used in evaluation. Film campaigns may even include partnerships with existing social movements and non-profit organizations targeting social change. The American University Center for Social Media concluded in a case study of three issue-based documentary film campaigns: Digital technologies do not replace, but are closely entwined with, longstanding on-the-ground activities of stakeholders and citizens working for social change. Projects like these forge new tools, pipelines, and circuits of circulation in a multiplatform media environment. They help to create sustainable network infrastructures for participatory public media that extend from local communities to transnational circuits and from grassroots communities to policy makers. (Abrash) Expanding the Focus of Impact beyond the Individual A recent focus has shifted the dialogue on film impact. Whiteman ("Theaters") argues that traditional metrics of film "success" tend to focus on studio economic indicators that are far more relevant to large budget films. Current efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size, the author claims, are really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact. He instead stresses the importance of developing a more comprehensive model. His "coalition model" broadens the range and types of impact of film beyond traditional metrics to include the entire filmmaking process, from production to distribution. Whiteman (“Theaters”) argues that a narrow focus on the size of the audience for a film, its box office receipts, and viewers' attitudes does not incorporate the potential reach of a documentary film. Impacts within the coalition model include both individual and policy levels. Individual impacts (with an emphasis on activist groups) include educating members, mobilizing for action, and raising group status; policy includes altering both agenda for and the substance of policy deliberations. The Fledgling Fund (Barrett and Leddy) expanded on this concept and identified five distinct impacts of documentary film campaigns. These potential impacts expand from individual viewers to groups, movements, and eventually to what they call the "ultimate goal" of social change. Each is introduced briefly below. Quality Film. The film itself can be presented as a quality film or media project, creating enjoyment or evoking emotion in the part of audiences. "By this we mean a film that has a compelling narrative that draws viewers in and can engage them in the issue and illustrate complex problems in ways that statistics cannot" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Awareness. Film can increase public awareness by bringing light to issues and stories that may have otherwise been unknown or not often thought about. This is the level of impact that has received the most attention, as films are often discussed in terms of their "educational" value. "A project's ability to raise awareness around a particular issue, since awareness is a critical building block for both individual change and broader social change" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Engagement. Impact, however, need not stop at simply raising public awareness. Engagement "indicates a shift from simply being aware of an issue to acting on this awareness. Were a film and its outreach campaign able to provide an answer to the question 'What can I do?' and more importantly mobilize that individual to act?" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This is where an associated film campaign becomes increasingly important, as transmedia outlets such as Facebook, websites, blogs, etc. can build off the interest and awareness developed through watching a film and provide outlets for viewers channel their constructive efforts. Social Movement. In addition to impacts on individuals, films can also serve to mobilize groups focused on a particular problem. The filmmaker can create a campaign around the film to promote its goals and/or work with existing groups focused on a particular issue, so that the film can be used as a tool for mobilization and collaboration. "Moving beyond measures of impact as they relate to individual awareness and engagement, we look at the project's impact as it relates to the broader social movement … if a project can strengthen the work of key advocacy organizations that have strong commitment to the issues raised in the film" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). Social Change. The final level of impact and "ultimate goal" of an issue-based film is long-term and systemic social change. "While we understand that realizing social change is often a long and complex process, we do believe it is possible and that for some projects and issues there are key indicators of success" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This can take the form of policy or legislative change, passed through film-based lobbying efforts, or shifts in public dialogue and behavior. Legislative change typically takes place beyond the social movement stage, when there is enough support to pressure legislators to change or create policy. Film-inspired activism has been seen in issues ranging from environmental causes such as agriculture (Food Inc.) and toxic products (Blue Vinyl) to social causes such as foreign conflict (Invisible Children) and education (Waiting for Superman). Documentary films can also have a strong influence as media agenda-setters, as films provide dramatic "news pegs" for journalists seeking to either sustain or generation new coverage of an issue (Nisbet "Introduction" 5), such as the media coverage of climate change in conjunction with An Inconvenient Truth. Barrett and Leddy, however, note that not all films target all five impacts and that different films may lead to different impacts. "In some cases we could look to key legislative or policy changes that were driven by, or at least supported by the project... In other cases, we can point to shifts in public dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed" (7). It is possible that specific film and/or campaign characteristics may lead to different impacts; this is a nascent area for research and one with great promise for both practical and theoretical utility. Innovations in Tools and Methods Finally, the selection of tools is a vital component for assessing impact and the new media landscape is enabling innovations in the methods and strategies for program evaluation. Whereas the traditional domain of film impact measurement included box office statistics, focus groups, and exit surveys, innovations in data collection and analysis have expanded the reach of what questions we can ask and how we are able to answer them. For example, press coverage can assist in understanding and measuring the increase in awareness about an issue post-release. Looking directly at web-traffic changes "enables the creation of an information-seeking curve that can define the parameters of a teachable moment" (Hart and Leiserowitz 360). Audience reception can be measured, not only via interviews and focus groups, but also through content and sentiment analysis of web content and online analytics. "Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden" (Manyika et al. 5). These new tools are significantly changing evaluation, expanding what we can learn about the social impacts of film through triangulation of self-report data with measurement of actual behavior in virtual environments. Conclusion The changing media landscape both allows and impels evaluation of film impacts on individual viewers and the broader culture in which they are imbedded. Although such analysis may have previously been limited to box office numbers, critics' reviews, and theater exit surveys, the rise of new media provides both the ability to connect filmmakers, activists, and viewers in new ways and the data in which to study the process. This capability, combined with significant growth in the documentary landscape, suggests a great potential for documentary film to contribute to some of our most pressing social and environmental needs. A social scientific approach, that combines empirical analysis with theory applied from basic science, ensures that impact can be measured and leveraged in a way that is useful for both filmmakers as well as funders. In the end, this attention to impact ensures a continued thriving marketplace for issue-based documentary films in our social landscape. References Abrash, Barbara. "Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement." American University Center for Social Media 21 Apr. 2010. 26 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/›. Aufderheide, Patricia. "The Changing Documentary Marketplace." Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 24-28. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. "Assessing Creative Media's Social Impact." The Fledgling Fund, Dec. 2008. 15 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.thefledglingfund.org/media/research.html›. Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1992. BRITDOC Foundation. The End of the Line: A Social Impact Evaluation. London: Channel 4, 2011. 12 Oct. 2011 ‹http://britdoc.org/news_details/the_social_impact_of_the_end_of_the_line/›. Cieply, Michael. "Uneven Growth for Film Studio with a Message." New York Times 5 Jun. 2011: B1. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Emerging Media and Documentary Practice." The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs. Aug. 2008. 22 Sep. 2011. ‹http://www.gpia.info/node/911›. Grierson, John. "First Principles of Documentary (1932)." Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 97-102. Hart, Philip Solomon and Anthony Leiserowitz. "Finding the Teachable Moment: An Analysis of Information-Seeking Behavior on Global Warming Related Websites during the Release of The Day After Tomorrow." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3.3 (2009): 355-66. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. ———. "Transmedia Storytelling 101." Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 Mar. 2007. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html›. Madaus, George, and Daniel Stufflebeam. "Program Evaluation: A Historical Overview." Evaluation in Education and Human Services 49.1 (2002): 3-18. Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Brad Brown, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Hung Byers. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. May 2011 ‹http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/›. Muraskin, Lana. 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Lisbon, Portugal: Media XXI / Formal, 2009. 299-319. Whiteman, David. "Out of the Theaters and into the Streets: A Coalition Model of the Political Impact of Documentary Film and Video." Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 51-69. ———. "The Evolving Impact of Documentary Film: Sacrifice and the Rise of Issue-Centered Outreach." Post Script 22 Jun. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/5517496-1.html›. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Working Films. "Nonprofits: Working Films." Foundation Source Access 31 May 2011. 5 Oct. 2011 ‹http://access.foundationsource.com/nonprofit/working-films/›.

Abstract:

I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. p*rn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore p*rnographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>