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List of figures. List of tables. Preface Introduction: Britain in the Modern World Peter Childs and Mike Storry 1. Places and Peoples: Nation and Region Peter Childs 2. Education, Work and Leisure Mike Storry 3. Gender, Sex, and the Family Roberta Garrett 4. Youth Culture and Style Jo Croft 5. Class and Politics Frank McDonough 6. Ethnicity and Language Gerry Smyth 7. Religion and Heritage Edmund Cusick. Conclusion: Britain Towards the Future Peter Childs and Mike Storry

During the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998), paramilitary groups were supported and sustained by a sociocultural apparatus that helped legitimise their position within the community and disseminate their political message. From the use of flags and murals, to loyalist and republican parades, working-class vernacular culture revealed who was in control of various districts within the Province. For many working-class Protestants, loyalist songs were a key component of this culture, connecting the past and the present. Unlike the better-known marching band scene, which is a huge public spectacle, the loyalist song scene is much more private. Performed in a closed setting, within local bars and clubs, loyalist songs are reproduced for internal consumption rather than outward expression. Yet, in addition to celebrating a particular loyalist culture, such songs also serve an important function in authenticating and legitimising paramilitary groups, connecting them to older organisations, whose legacy they draw upon. This paper focuses on one such song, exploring how ‘The Ballad of Billy McFadzean’ is used to connect the Ulster Volunteer Force of the 1960s onwards, with the 1913 organisation of the same name. In so doing, the paper attempts to illustrate the political utility of song and how songs can be used to launder and legitimise conflict, as well as those engaged in political violence.

Focusing on the ritual of the Commending of the Souls in Penha Garcia (Portugal), this article analyzes how its recasting as heritage is re-inventing a declining rurality and aiding an uncertain future. A renewed vernacular engagement with the ritual, along with the local use of heritage policy to render it intangible heritage is 1) generating a vernacularization of Portuguese Catholicism (analogous to “religious pluralization”), and 2) construing heritage-making as an efficacious technique of religious belief. This article argues that the collective engagement of local actors in the processes of vernacularization and transforming of this ritual into heritage is (re-)enchanting the virtuosity of their local religiosity, which embodies and suspends a structural uncertainty.

After the Protectorate ended in Tunisia, ethnography, a discipline disowned by local academics for being too primitive to analyse the fast-changing nature of the country, was recuperated in the mid...

Patterson and Fosse's 2015 collection The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth represents a significant provocation to our understanding of persistent racial inequalities amongst African American youth, raising important questions around the relationship between culture, identities and racialized structures. This short article takes a comparative perspective, exploring race, culture and identity from a British standpoint, and highlights some of the dangers of privileging an overly cultural account of racialized inequality. It argues for the inextricability of structure and culture, and for the necessity of a deeper engagement with the historical, political and social dynamics through which culture comes to matter.

"No ideas but in things": how does William Carlos Williams's famous dictum strike us now, in the age of new materialisms, object-oriented ontologies, and a turn to "vernacular" aesthetics in modernist studies?1 Williams's poetic imperative concerning the object has come to be associated with late modernism: the poem that contains this line, "A Sort of a Song," first appeared in Williams's The Wedge (1944), and variations of the line recur in Book One of Paterson (1946). Yet given that Williams wrote "A Sort of a Song" in the late 1920s, one might also wonder how its thesis concerning "things" relates to this earlier moment in Williams's developing poetics. Indeed, as I will argue, this poetic pronouncement is no mere prelude to Williams's later commitment to the object-world. Rather, beginning from Spring and AH (1923), Williams's 1920s writing already signals his interest in an emerging conflict concerning the object, as modernist "things" begin to contest or converse with new "ideas" surrounding their modernized production. In this era of Taylorism and Fordism, changes in the value, authenticity, constitution, destruction, and reproduction of material culture render "objects" a category in socio-political flux. Modernism, having fostered antipathy to bourgeois objects of art, becomes increasingly keen to replace these passe artifacts of cultural capital with vernacular "things." This renaissance of the thing-whether in its radically machinic, domestic, avant-garde, populist, or kitsch iterations-both encompasses and exceeds a reflection of commodity-forms within the aesthetic imagination. Reading Spring and All as a meditation on the object's technological modernization reveals crucial valences shaping and informing Williams's modernist aspirations to renovate the aesthetic production of objects.Attending increasingly to vernacular forms, American modernism in particular valorizes new modes of attention emerging from the era's unprecedented remaking of the object-world. We might say that the modernist project seeks to intensify not only the status of objects but also what the category of "the object" can contain. In the 1920s, as the optic and the poetics of modernist aesthetics shift toward the vernacular, Williams's artistic labors-as editor of Contact, as poet, and as critic-devote themselves to new techniques for encountering the mediating power of objects. Yet important ambivalences and overdeterminations emerge from these efforts, ambiguities which will concern our argument here. In vernacular culture, as in Williams's 1920s work, the newly uncertain fate of mediated and mediating objects manifests within an aesthetic dimension; yet this aesthetic dimension cannot and must not be separated from its technological preconditions. One such technologically informed trope for representing vernacular life occurs in Williams's experimental prose text The Great American Novel (published the same year as Spring and All). In an overdetermined metaphor of object and process, Williams draws on photography's vernacular ethos of objectivity to assert that "America is a mass of pulp, a jelly, a sensitive plate ready to take whatever print you want to put on it." Commenting on the raw kinetics of this objective political force, Williams concludes, "We have only mass movement like a sea" (I 175).This photographic imaginary of American "masses" crystalizes two forms of ambiguity: while blurring the lines between artifact (photograph) and technique (photography), the image simultaneously naturalizes American mass movements, problematically demoting their political interventions to accidental, protean, non-rational forces. Here, an arrest of specificity in relation to "mass" vernacular life parallels a suspended figuration: between objects as products and objects as technologies. What is the relation between these two forms of ambiguity? Whether the American "mass" actively photographs or is a photograph of its surrounding conditions remains deliberately unresolved. …

Recent cultural geographic research, located at a variety of settings (laboratory, clinic, battlefield, container port), has emphasized culture’s productive dimensions through studies of the linked construction of nature, culture, and technologies. In this second of three reports, I examine a range of scholarship that asks in different ways what it means to be formative in the production of nature, and I discuss the implications of recent efforts to rethink culture as a form of productivity. Some of this formative cultural work is scientific and intellectual, and geographers have sought to understand the practices of scientists, medical researchers, folklorists, and others engaged in the work of producing new objects of nature, culture, and the human body. Their work suggests that science and other modern forms of expertise perform a peculiar kind of cultural work in the production of nature, carving out and occupying positions of privileged, albeit still contested, ontological actors. I also note recent efforts to reconceptualize broad categories of space, surface, and ‘land’ around similarly generative cultures of knowledge and innovation, reflecting related ontological concerns for engaging with culture, ‘culturing’, and cultivation as productive processes. I argue that questions of technology remain inseparably tied to constructions of nature, and that technology still has much to disclose in terms of its cultural geographies.

Folk culture has often been regarded as a niche within the cultural field, implying that it is not the real thing, not “quality” culture. In order to get a better understanding of this part of American culture, the article presents an analysis of the Folklife Center News from 1984 to 2011. It documents a rich heritage of material and immaterial culture within different communities and groups. A major share of the articles is about folk music. The 1976 Public Law 94-201 greatly facilitated the preservation and dissemination of America's folk art and cultural heritage. Equally important are all the individuals who for decades created it.

This article addresses an omission in the currently brief body of work on antisemitism in football and contributes to and advances wider sociological debates in the sub-disciplines of race and ethnicity, religion, linguistics and sport. The article examines antisemitic discourse in English football and in doing so, explains the different uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in the vernacular culture of fans. While many conceive of ‘Yid’ as an ethnic epithet, fans of Tottenham Hotspur – Gentiles and Jews – have appropriated and embraced the term, using it to deflect the antisemitic abuse they are targeted with due to their ‘Jewish identity’. The study maps the contested uses of ‘Yid’ on a continuum to explain and demarcate between the nuanced forms of antisemitism in football. It makes central the cultural context in which ‘Yid’ is used, together with the intent underpinning its use, since epithets and slurs are not simply determined by their lexical form.

The article considers the problem of the learner's cultural identity in acquiring a foreign language. An attempt is made to prove the relevance of this problem to the ongoing period of neoglobalization of languages and cultures. The research encompasses a theoretical analysis of the "third culture" phenomenon combined with the studies of cultural identity of English language learners, including an opinion poll among Russian students of English. The article concludes with the idea that cultural identity in English language teaching can be viewed as an intrapersonal process. Cultural identity can serve the purpose of training students to exercise tolerance for other cultures across diversities and differences.

The basic questions which stem from theoretical inquiry into popular culture can be summed up as follows: whose culture is this and in what way should it be approached. The first question connotes human groups within and for which forms of popular culture are produced and by which pop-culture is consumed. The answer to the other question meanwhile concerns the disciplines which aspire toward the study of popular culture and the constitution of theoretical positions and methods for such an undertaking. In this paper I will consider the emergence and articulation of anthropological interest in popular culture, especially with regard to considerations of popular culture from the perspective of culture studies. As the basic area of the anthropological study of popular culture I will postulate the cultural communication which is realized through the forms of the latter.

Drawing upon his knowledge and understanding of literature, book culture, and vernacular culture of pre-modern China, Glen Dudbridge offers, in his unique reading of Kuang-i chi 廣異記 (The great book of marvels), insights into the religious experiences of lay society individuals of eighth century China. However, an inquisitive reader must ask the following questions: Can Kuang-i chi , a medieval collection of tales of encounters with the other world by the minor T’ang Dynasty official Tai Fu 戴孚 (fl. 760-780, chin-shih 757), be used for the purpose of the study of religious culture? How? and to what extent? What approaches would be effective in inquiring such a text and what kinds of conclusions can be drawn? Though not explicitly setting forth these questions, Dudbridge’s work serves as answers to them through explicitly defining the nature of Kuang-i chi to his study, discarding conventional categories and establishing new ones in his analysis, and associating Kuang-i chi to the “vernacular,” instead of official, or “centralized,” religious culture (p.63-4). Using a sharp historical focus on the collection, Dudbridge concentrates on the dynamics of change in religious practices of T’ang Dynasty that is rooted and reflected in such a vernacular religious culture....

Recognition of Detroit's place in United States history has tended to range from the sensational, such as the two major racial explosions of 1943 and 1967, to the symbolic as in the case of the depression-era struggles of the United Auto Workers, or the 1970s-era deindustrialization. For African Americans in many U.S. cities, Detroit stands in for economic and social processes happening to them elsewhere, To be sure, Detroit has been the site of race riots and labor strikes, but African Americans' participation in these episodes should be seen in the context of the city's long, proud history of sheltering fugitives of the slave regime, educating the free black population, and producing employment, housing, and educational opportunities for southern black migrants and their children. In other words, conflict is not the only lens for viewing black Detroit; community is a powerful lens as well. (1) Within the history of Jazz, as historian Robin D. G. Kelley argues, there is "a general inability to recognize 'community'--a musician's community, a dancer's community, an African American community, and various overlapping communities that make up the world of jazz." Heeding Kelley's reminder that "new ideas come out of collective work, improvisation, and competition, but also from musicians educating each other," this essay focuses on a generational cohort of Jazz instrumentalists and vocalists who created a musically rigorous, but historically underappreciated Bebop scene in the 1940s and 1950s. (2) By continuing and expanding a tradition of communal values, sustained study, collective creativity, and improvisational individuality, these Detroit beboppers enriched and extended African American expressive culture and the world of music. For the most part, Detroit enters African American cultural history through the entrepreneurial figure of Barry Gordy, his successful black capitalist enterprise, the Motown Record Company, and its slick, soulful "Sound of Young America." As Suzanne Smith demonstrates, the signature Motown sound was tied both to the automobile industry, with the rhythms of the factory floor inspiring the beats of "Hitsville, U.S.A.," and to the larger history of sacred Gospel and secular Blues music. (3) In the matter of Jazz, however, Detroit is often passed by as scholars trace north-south itineraries from New Orleans to Kansas City and Chicago, and east-west circuits from New York to Los Angeles. Yet Detroit has something to tell us about Jazz as a communal, participatory art, just as Jazz has something to tell us about the quotidian experiences of black Detroit. Specifically, examining the rise of Bebop in Detroit sheds light on the intellectual character of working-class cultural production by African American creative personalities, musicians, artists, educators, mentors, and critics. In short, digging deeper into Jazz, rather than the Blues or Motown, yields new insights into Detroit, just as paying greater attention to Detroit expands the social geography of Jazz music, and reveals new facets of African American vernacular culture. In a speech in 1941 Duke Ellington declared that African Americans had ''recreated in America the desire for true democracy, freedom for all, the brotherhood of man, principles on which this country had been founded." Eric Porter argued that Bebop musicians ''refused" to play the entertainer role of "Uncle Tom," and they sought "to escape the stereotypes and audience expectations of the past," while maintaining an "aversion to musical boundaries." (4) The Bebop movement favored experimental small combos over commercial big bands in an industry that perpetuated an unfair racial differential in terms of musicians' wages, employment opportunities, and critical accolades. As Amiri Baraka argued, "liberal" white music critics, acting as patronizing cultural gatekeepers by privileging bourgeois cultural norms, "descended on the new music with a fanatical fury." (5) Frank Kofsky saw "Jazz criticism as social control," and "the Jazz revolution, in its social aspect," as "an indictment of the very inequalities of class and race that have given these critics their privileged position. …

The notion of culture has loomed large in discourses and polemics regarding European integration and immigration in the European framework. While culture, as in fundamental cultural difference, is identified as the source of contemporary political quandaries, its incarnation as intercultural dialogue is conceived as their solution. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the arts settings of Berlin and Istanbul, this article elucidates how this type of "culture talk" intersects with recent cultural policy formations in the European Union and the national arenas of Germany and Turkey. Much of the political productivity of culture arises from a constant slippage between the different, often contradictory, meanings accorded to the culture-concept. This extension of the "rhetoric of culture" engenders a shift from a governance of culture to one through culture by relaying an array of pressing political concerns from the realm of social and economic policy to that of culture in the sense of artistic expression.

Prior to the emergence of the engine, the horse reigned supreme. It provided the power for transport and to work the land. Horsemen were the most important people in the community, and were very proud of their identity, which they expressed by wearing a special type of clothing. This was a three-piece suit, bespoke made to their requirements. This suit represents an indigenous, vernacular taste, transmitted entirely through oral tradition, and is not the result of factory design. It evolved entirely out of spoken culture, and this paper is based entirely on research from oral sources in Co. Suffolk. It is concerned with the style, the fabric and the specific details if a distinctive form of dress worn by horsemen, and with similar garments found in two other 'horse' cultures, travellers and horsemen in the East End of London in the early 1900s.

Holger Henke and Karl-Heinz Magister (eds.), Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2008. 407 pp. The 15 essays of Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean investigate how globalization and transnationalism construct and shape the making of "vernacular" cultures in the transnational Caribbean communities in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. Rather than the narrowly defined "Caribbean," the book interests itself in the broader, more complex notion of the " trans-Caribbean," which, as Anton Allahar mentions in the preface, " invite[s] a host of other social, political, and intellectual entanglements that speak to diasporas within diasporas" (x). Some of the significant questions that the contributors pose include: What happens to local cultures when individuals who carry various ethnic, political, and class backgrounds as well as different premigration histories get transplanted physically or virtually in different diasporic places? How are cultural and gender identities affected by the increasing movements of populations and ideas across borders? How are transnational practices reflected in literary writing? In the introduction, Henke and Magister define "the vernacular" as diverse cultural expressions that are entrenched in the popular and indigenous spheres, rather than in the official "high" culture. The book offers a broad range of case studies and analyses of vernacular culture in the realms of music, religion, oral productions such as gossip and oral poetry, gender relations, and cyberculture, with focuses on various transnational spaces such as Puerto Rico, Guyana, New York, Surinam, and the Netherlands. One of the chief assets of Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean probably lies in its pluri-disciplinary dimension, with essays in anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, cultural studies, and sexual and gender studies. This plurality of voices is also evidenced by the volume's international team of authors-scholars active in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. This book is most obviously valuable for Caribbeanists, as it provides fine ethnographies of various trans-Caribbean communities and socio-cultural trends in the 20th and 21th centuries, as well as useful analyses of literary texts that pertain to Caribbean transnationalism. Yet, its authors foster discussions grounded in theories of globalization, transnationalism, creolization, and feminism that could be very beneficial to non-Caribbeanists as well. Part 1 focuses on the transnational re-creation of "home" and family relations, with essays by Nierkerk, Sutton, and Schmidt. Nierkerk's and Sutton's are ethnographic contributions based on research conducted in the late 1990s. While Nierkerk investigates the ways in which Afro-Surinamese and Indo-Surinamese adapt differently to the Netherlands based on each ethnic group's migration histories and socio-economic place both in Surinam and the Netherlands, Sutton focuses on family reunion rituals held in Trinidad, Grenada, and Barbados by second-generation migrants living in the United States and England. Schmidt's contribution offers a more theoretical approach: Building upon concepts of creolization and mestizaje, as well as Levi-Strauss's concept of "bricolage," she introduces the useful notion of "polyphonic bricolage" which stresses the multivocal quality of cultural construction where different, equivalent discourses get continually exchanged in a permanent process of mixture and interpretations. While the concept is interesting, as it stresses the complexity of Caribbean transnational identifications and the necessity to move away from simplistic national boundaries to understand what cultural performance and identities mean for specific individuals based on their personal histories and interactions with their surroundings, it probably does not advance the established concepts of creolization and mestizaje to the degree that Schmidt contends since both creolization and mestizaje already encapsulate notions of dialogical change. …

This paper focuses on an evening event at the Community Centre, Jacksdale, Nottinghamshire, UK in 2001 featuring a group called The Chase, performing folk music and dance from France and other European countries. It raises a series of issues concerning the relationships between folk culture and modern everyday life. These questions intersect with debates concerning authenticity, tradition, working-class culture, community and sense of place. The paper develops the concept of vernacular culture within a dynamic and plural conception of place as a means of theoretically locating folk music within modern everyday life.

Hua, Shiping (ed). Chinese Political Culture: 1989–2000. Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001. xv, 370 pp. US$29.95, paper. Lam, Wai-man. Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong: The P...

The analogy of linguistic creolization to cultural creolization is examined with reference to the evolution, form, style, and performance of zydeco music and related community aesthetic expressions among rural African-French Louisiana Creoles. The expressive culture demonstrates African, European, and Native sources both conserved and transformed in this New World setting where Creole is a local group identity. The processes observed in this particular creole culture are extended and appli to other aspects offolk and vernacular culture in America and world-wide-with the implication that cultural creolization is the central process in the maintenance and evolution of culture and cultures globally. Originally presented as a keynote address framed and punctuated by musical examples, this essay is offered in a manner that attempts to maintain its oral character. Discussion of the musical examples is augmented with selections on the web at www.americanroutes.org under the heading "Deep Routes."

The maturation of regional perspectives, and the accompanying development of distinct regional identities based on landscape, is a story that lies at the heart of Canadian history. With time and experience, people gradually came to think of the east shore of Georgian Bay - an archipelago known as the "Thirty Thousand Islands" - as a separate place, distinct even from adjacent sections of the Great Lakes and Ontario's "near north." This essay looks at this process of adaptation from three angles. Artists and writers struggle to create a language appropriate to the place, most famously in works by the Group of Seven. Residents on the islands developed a community identity that emphasized the differences and practical concerns of life in a rugged maritime environment. As this Shield landscape became laden with nationalist meaning, however, place-specific images like the leaning pine were exported as generic symbols of the northland. La maturation de perspectives regionales et le developpement d'identites regionales distinctes fondees sur le paysage sont au coeur de l'histoire canadienne. Avec le temps et de la pratique, les gens ont commence a considerer la rive est de la baie Georgienne - un archipel connu sous le nom des > - comme un lieu distinct et separe meme de sections adjacentes des Grands Lacs et du > de l'Ontario. Cet article examine ce processus d'adaptation sous trois angles. Les artistes et les ecrivains ont mis beaucoup d'energie a essayer de creer un langage approprie a l'endroit, specialement dans les oeuvres du Groupe des Sept. Les residents des files ont developpe une identite communautaire qui met l'accent sur les differences et les problemes pratiques d'une existence dans un milieu maritime austere. Lorsque ce paysage du bouclier est devenu un symbole de nationalisme toutefois, des images reliees a cet endroit, comme le pin penchant, ont ete exportees comme des symboles generiques des regions nordiques. On a sunny day in March of 1936, artist Doris McCarthy sat in London's Hyde Park, surrounded by the pale beauty of an English spring, filled with "homesickness for our dear north country," as she wrote in her journal: "This morning I felt what exile could be, how I would cry with longing for the feel of a paddle in my hand, the warmth of flat Georgian Bay rocks, the cool ripple of blue water" (196). Why did the young Canadian think of Georgian Bay at that moment? Why did a regional landscape symbolize, for her, the essence of Canada? McCarthy was not alone in thinking of Georgian Bay as both a particular place and a national symbol. The story of how such a dual identity was constructed for the Bay touches on some fundamental questions in Canadian history. Why do cultural values get attached to certain landscapes? How do regional differences develop within a larger political framework? What role do regional landscapes play in national culture? This essay explores the process of regional definition on three levels. First, it looks at how writers and artists struggled to adapt familiar imperial frameworks - in this case, the Romantic language of nature - to new local experience. Next, it traces the emergence of regional identity in vernacular culture: how those in the landscape defined among themselves boundaries for Georgian Bay as a distinct place. Finally, it shows how a regional landscape can be invested with national meaning and marketed to a larger audience - a fascinating cultural dimension of federalism. On these three levels, Georgian Bay offers insights into the chronology of Canadian culture as a whole. By virtue of its size, location and historical identity, Georgian Bay is arguably the sixth Great Lake. It angles northeast alongside Lake Huron for 200 kilometres, separated by the limestone ridge of the Niagara Escarpment running through the Bruce Peninsula and Manitoulin Island. The Bay's shoreline is a geological composite. …

Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (2010), x + 277 (University of California Press, Berkeley, £27.95/$40.00). The social history of language and...

In spite of the heritage of cultural orientation the mainstream psychology accords only a peripheral place to culture in the study of behaviour. In its practice it became culture blind as well as culture bound. Experimental psychology eclipsed culture. However, as humans are natural and cultural beings there is need to have a culturally rooted psychology. The cross- culture psychology has recognised this and different kinds of culturally relevant studies have been undertaken. They vary with reference to the entry of culture in the psychological arena. Now culture is being treated as a system having bi-directional influences. Recent works from non-western cultures have increasingly shown the relevance of culture in understanding psychological processes.

The history of intellectual interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries between scholars of vernacular culture and educational reformers remains a lacuna in the discipline of folklore. This examination of educational reforms brought on by the introduction and spread of schooling for peasant children raises issues of how folklorists should intervene and how to judge the complicated effects of those interventions.

Compares naming practices in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean and in Afro-American culture. Author asks how one is to interpret multiple identities and the parallel practice of taking over the names of the powerful as is common in both Afro-creole and Afro-American culture. He argues that Afro-creole culture is not a culture of resistance but an oppositional culture. It is a subaltern culture in part derived from a dominant culture which it can only oppose from within.

This article examines the current state of cultural studies. It argues for the need to delimit the field of cultural studies, proposing that the specificity of cultural studies as a way of politicizing theory and theorizing politics is given by its radical contextuality. It then goes on to consider some of the challenges that the contemporary context poses to cultural studies, and which cultural studies has been largely unable to address. It suggests that this failure may be due to the modernist inheritance of cultural studies, and begins to offer a genealogy of the category of culture. Specifically, it looks at the relationship of culture, mediation and signification and proposes the need for a non-mediational theory of culture.

This paper examines how ethnic Dutch residents of two old neighborhoods in the city of Rotterdam use the notion of “culture” when they talk and argue among themselves about the multi‐ethnic area they live in. Some of the ways in which culture as a discourse is used are outlined and some of the possible effects such a discourse may have are discussed. It is shown that the term culture is used in a self‐evident and self‐sufficient way as a commonplace. In addition, most of the inhabitants use a reified and essentialistic notion of culture for constructing “us” and “them” distinctions. Cultural differences are evaluated in favor of one's own group and used for arguing for the incompatibility of cultural groups. Three conceptualizations of culture can be distinguished. All three have the effect of “blaming the victim,” but each attributes a different degree of blame to immigrant groups: culture as heritage, culture as doctrine, and culture as mentality. The notion of culture is used flexibly and in a self‐ser...

(1997). Cultural politics and the politics of culture. Identities: Vol. 4, The Politics of Culture, pp. 1-7.

That acculturation or culture change is a basic tenent of all archaeological study, I think is an undisputable fact. However, archaeological culture change is usually treated in one of two ways. Sometimes the concept of change, or the apparent lack of it, is treated rather offhandedly as an absolute: culture changed, or did not change, period. Here there is concern with only those items that changed or did not change; a part, in other words, but not the whole culture. This is a short-cut which does not tell the whole story. More often, where an archaeological sequence is described with considerable continuity, material culture change is detailed at great length in terms of contrasting percentages, with little or no conceptual recognization of the new combinations of cultural traits at different points of the continuum as new cultural entities. The view here is that continuity of old or very slowly changing items is almighty and little concern is given to the change represented by new items in the culture. Again, this is a partial view of culture. A more productive viewpoint is one which presents a balanced perspective of culture, which takes into account not only changing cultural attributes, but the non-changing ones and also the new cultural features.

▪ Abstract This review contrasts the relative lack of interest in “popular culture” within anthropology with the close, increasingly critical attention this concept has received within cultural studies. Rejecting both a production-oriented model of a manipulative mass culture imposed from above and a reception-oriented model of an expressive culture of the people, cultural studies scholars broke with essentialized conceptions and redefined the popular in Gramscian terms, as a zone of contestation, a site where the struggle for hegemony unfolds. The review uses this approach to relate the production of popular culture to class formation in the United States. Against overemphasis on the ideological effectivity of popular culture and a revisionist tendency to redefine it in affirmative, politically essentialized terms, the review suggests that contradictions and instabilities characterize all stages of the popular cultural circuit: commodity, text, and lived culture.

This article begins by suggesting three ways of approaching transnational migrant “culture” that evade the charge of essentialism. It then explores comparatively a range of ethnographic examples of immigrant cultural celebrations, starting with an analysis of homemaking and translocated migrant domestic rituals, from seasonal holidays to weddings, sacrifices, and offerings. Collective public festivals, street processions, and carnivals that inscribe immigrants' presence on their new places of settlement are discussed next. Finally, the article explores the aesthetic products of diaspora, both imported and created, and considers scholarly debates on cultural hybridity and hyphenated, multiple, and situated cultural identities.

Throughout this chapter, Eglinton continues to advocate a relational approach to studying young people’s use of visual material culture (VMC) – an approach which conceives of youth, VMC, and aspects of local place in continuous interaction. Providing a brief map of the ways in which youth engagement with VMC has been explored in visual art education and in youth cultural studies broadly, the author goes on to describe a conceptual framework which at once envisions identities, VMC, and local places as dynamic rather than static forms and describes and supports the examination of the relationship among these aspects. To develop this framework, Eglinton draws on ideas from ‘reconstructive postmodernism’ (Gablik S, The reenchantment of art. Thames and Hudson, New York, 1991), human geography (e.g. Massey D, Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In: Bird J, Curtis B, Putnam T, Robertson G, Tickner L (eds) Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change, Routledge, London, pp 59–69, 1993), cultural psychology and sociocultural theories (e.g. Cole M, Cultural psychology: a once and future discipline. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996), and sociocultural anthropology (Holland D, Lachicotte W, Skinner D, Cain C, Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998). The author also continues to emphasise the importance of a multi-sited ethnographic approach to inquiry: an approach which places emphasis on the intersection or space where youth, VMC, and local places meet and which starts with the experiences of youth themselves.

This chapter is a preliminary exploration of the links between three layers of ver- nacular religion and the experiences underlying them: Italian vernacular religion and healing, Italian American versions of these customs, and Stregheria-, or Italian American revival Witchcraft,1 a Neo-Pagan religion practiced by second-, third- and fourth-generation Italian Americans seeking new ways to connect with spirituality and construct ethnic identity. I argue that Italian vernacular religion was linked to a number of geographic, economic, religious, and social factors that were particular to the regions and towns in which it developed, but also partook of a broader cosmol- ogy that I am calling “the enchanted worldview.” In this chapter, I will outline some of the parameters of this worldview and sketch its particulars, especially in the areas of vernacular healing, magic, and witchcraft. I also propose that American scholars reconsider historical approaches to the study of tradition, especially when these can shed light on how traditions change over time to incorporate elements from elite and ecclesiastical cultures. This is the first step of a much broader study in which I hope to examine each of these aspects of Italian vernacular culture in greater detail. It grows out of my previous research on Italian religious festivals, Italian American ethnicity, and the reclamation of European folklore by contemporary Pagan religions.