Search results for "kult"

Tibetan Cultural Identity in Nepal: Change, Preservation, Prospects

2016

In the difficult circumstances of institutional discrimination and political pressure, the Tibetan minority in Nepal negotiate their identity with utmost communicative resourcefulness, tying their values to universal ethics. They resort to their spiritual heritage in their daily intercultural encounters, seeing it mostly as an essential mindset. Developing intercultural personhood through universalization does not challenge identity salience, if one’s culture is adhered to consciously. The respondents are optimistic about preserving their culture, provided the positive factors, such as community living and cultural education, persist. The obstacles are seen in materialistic influences, glob…

Editorial

2023

Struggle and banality of belonging to Europe. Cultural Europeanization from the perspective of the Central and East European citizens

2023

The European Union (EU) has developed cultural policy initiatives that seek to promote cultural Europeanization with the purpose of constructing European identity narratives and facilitating citizens’ sense of belonging to Europe and the EU. The article focuses on the citizens’ perspective to cultural Europeanization through ethnographic research on one central action in the EU cultural policy, European Heritage Label (EHL). We analyse the interviews conducted in selected EHL sites with Central and East European (CEE) citizens who were visiting the sites as well as with cultural heritage practitioners working at three EHL sites located in CEE countries. We ask how the practitioners and the …

EU heritage diplomacy : entangled external and internal cultural relations

2022

Cultural heritage is an expanding yet contested area of EU policymaking, which has recently been identified as an instrument for EU international cultural relations. In this article, drawing from critical heritage studies and recent scholarship on heritage diplomacy, we see external and internal cultural relations as blurred and deeply entangled in EU heritage policies. Empirically, we focus on the European Heritage Label (EHL), a central EU heritage policy instrument. We explore how heritage practitioners at selected EHL sites and EU heritage policymakers understand and give meanings to international cultural relations and explain the role of cultural heritage in diplomatic endeavours. Our…

Banal Sustainability : Renewing the Cultural Norm of Not Wasting Food

2022

Recently food waste has been raised as a major sustainability problem: roughly one third of the food produced globally ends up lost or wasted. This article investigates how people attach meaning to food waste reduction, based on eight individual interviews conducted with people met at a consumer education event in Helsinki in 2017. It is shown how the traditional cultural norm of not wasting food is reproduced in discourse on thrift and frugality and renewed by research-based arguments from circular economy discourse and environmental and sustainability discourse. It is proposed that the interplay of discourses merge into what Lars Kaijser calls banal sustainability: the complicated issue o…

Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq

2021

The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, ra…

The Scent of a Book : The Book and the Environments of Reading

2020

Decolonising European minds through Heritage

2019

By analysing three museums exhibition, this article investigates how the history of European colonialism is approached in an attempt to identify potential for decolonising European minds. The case studies consist of a temporary exhibition (2016–2017) concerning German colonialism at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin; the permanent exhibition of the House of European History in Brussels and the permanent exhibition of the Sagres Promontory (Portugal), a heritage site related to the conquest of the Americas. The analysis will focus on three aspects: 1) acknowledgement of connections between colonial histories and their contemporary influences in and for Europe; 2) the role of histor…

Editorial: Ethnological Knowledge

2019

STTEPping in the right direction? Western classical music in an orchestral programme for disadvantaged African youth

2008

This article looks at STTEP, an outreach project currently housed at the University of Pretoria, which concentrates on the teaching of western orchestral instruments, plus background areas such as music theory, to disadvantaged children and youth from a variety of townships around Pretoria, South Africa. STTEP’s direction can well be described as ‘right’ – pupils are already surrounded by all kinds of global phenomena, and their formal music studies in western classical music are not making them forget their roots. In fact, the contrary has been found to be the case and some interesting cultural fusions are already seen – always a sign of a living culture.