scholarly journals When Ghanaian Traditional Songs become Modern: Cultural Replication of the Traditional Responsible Woman in the Modern Gold Digger Woman

2020 ◽  
pp. 136-150
Author(s):  
PETER ARHTUR ◽  
CONFIDENCE GBLOLO SANKA
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Community Power ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Power Construction ◽  
Meaning Change ◽  
Traditional Songs ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
Song Texts

The fluidity of the text allows a mode of textual constitution by the user. Through an ethnographic research and a performance/literary analysis, this paper, interrogates the Akan patriarchal power construction which takes advantage of the fluidity of text. The paper investigates this cultural phenomenon by examining the replication of the traditional “bragorͻ” song texts in modern popular highlife and hiplife song texts. The Akan patriarchal community constructs power by manipulating the codes in the original “bragorͻ” song text and that this manipulation is possible because the copy of the original “bragorͻ” text develops ideological shift through a process of meaning change, a change that is closely related to Akan gender power relations. The Akan patriarchal community therefore uses the fluidity of the text as a resource to maintain power over the woman. A very interesting aspect pertaining to this development is that this power manipulation disguises itself in modern popular songs which are normally not taken serious by the Ghanaian intelligentsia. And so, though very compelling this power construction may be, it manages to stay away from both academic and public discourses and thus grows bigger and bigger with time without being noticed. The paper recommends that educational planners should seriously add the study of contemporary culture and what it holds for the development of Ghana to both the senior high and tertiary curricula. Keywords: Fluidity of Text, Ethnographic Research, Akan Patriarchal Community, Power Construction and Modern Gold Digger.

Virtues of Renewal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Bilbro
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Industrial Culture ◽  
All Solutions ◽  
Sustainable Culture ◽  
Wendell Berry ◽  
Oil Rig

Over the past fifty years, Wendell Berry has been arguing that our most pressing ecological and cultural need is a renewed formal intelligence. Such an intelligence does not look for big, one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather, it discerns and fosters patterns of health. When W. H. Auden famously declared that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he was correct that poetry, like the other arts, doesn’t coerce matter in the way that a tractor or an oil rig or a bomb does. Yet poetry is “a way of happening,” its beauty shaping readers’ imaginations to better perceive and understand formal patterns. Such formative work fosters the deep, lasting change needed to cultivate a more sustainable culture and economy. In particular, Berry’s literary forms embody and cultivate virtues of renewal. Though our contemporary culture fears and shuns death, natural ecosystems provide a model in which death feeds new life and healthy human communities follow an analogous order. Cultures maintain such a sustainable order by practicing virtues of renewal, virtues that stand in sharp contrast to the techniques of control preferred by our industrial culture. Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, this book argues that Berry’s literary forms shape his readers to desire and practice these virtues of renewal. Poetry can’t magically create a healthy economy, but Berry’s poetry, essays, and fiction cultivate the kind of imaginative, virtuous people who can, as he puts it, “practice resurrection.”

The Quiet Rehabilitation of the Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular Music and its Critics

Slavic Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Song Texts ◽  
The Revolution

A recent collection of Soviet song texts differs from its many predecessors in one interesting respect. It contains Pavel German’s “Pesnia o kirpichnom zavode,“ better known as “Kirpichiki,” one of the most popular songs of the late 1920s, and a song that for decades symbolized the survival of petit-bourgeois tastes andposhlosfafter the Revolution. This quiet rehabilitation can serve as the occasion to examine an aspect of Soviet cultural history that is rarely discussed outside the USSR, namely, the beginnings of Soviet popular music.

scholarly journals Reading Minor Characters: An English Literary Society and Its Culture of Investigation

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Reed
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Anthropological Theory

This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson's novels. It places Alex Woloch's literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.

scholarly journals Manx traditional songs, rhymes and chants in the repertoire of the last native Manx speakers

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Broderick
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Formal Context ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Concise Overview ◽  
Traditional Songs ◽  
First Time ◽  
Linguistic Material ◽  
Morphological Assessment ◽  
Song Texts

The following collection of Manx traditional songs and song-fragments derives from a series of scientific surveys on obsolescence in Manx Gaelic from native Manx speakers undertaken in Man between the years 1886 and 1972. These surveys involved the gathering of linguistic material, whether through phonetic notation of textual readings or questioning, formal questionnaires, and / or sound-recordings, in order to enable a phonological and morphological assessment of the state of Manx Gaelic at the time. Such material also included connected prose-texts in the form of stories and anecdotes, as well as lyric-texts consisting exclusively of traditional songs, rhymes, chants, etc., either complete or in fragmentary form. Though it will be seen that many of the song-texts exist only in fragmentary form, this does not necessarily mean that the informant could not have given more. The reasons for this may be multiple: e.g. the unusual circumstances of the recordings. i.e., in the formal context of an interviewer-interviewee interface whereby the interviewee would likely not have been fully at ease. Nevertheless, the material available to us today is in my view sufficient to give us a good idea of what the informants could offer. The song-texts gathered from the last native Manx speakers are brought together for the first time to enable a concise overview.

scholarly journals Królewna Śnieżka i płeć kulturowa (Lustereczko powiedz przecie, kto jest najpiękniejszy w świecie?)

1970 ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Gromkowska-Melosik
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Women's Identity ◽  
Snow White ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Patriarchal Power

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of Snow White myth in contemporary culture in the relation to the changing concepts of femininity and masculinity. The Author takes into account several contexts of this issue. First, it can be understood in the terms of patriarchal power over women’s identity and body. Also, the author analyses the Snow White in a light of girl’s socialization into passive roles. In the article feminist interpretation of Snow White are also reconstructed. The different versions of Snow White fable are confronted with the various kinds of relations between women and men in contemporary society.

scholarly journals Risky health-related behaviours among school-aged adolescents: a rational ‘consumer’ choice?

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-223
Author(s):  
Jane E.K. Hartley
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Choice ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Health Related ◽  
The Media ◽  
Health Related Behaviour ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Within the contemporary culture of consumption, school-aged adolescents, though neither waged nor salaried producers, are nevertheless treated by the media and the advertisers as if they are active consumers who are engaged in the project of the self. For those adolescents who lack the financial resources to ‘buy into’ this culture, anxiety may ensue. In order to ease this anxiety, and to acquire social status, some – not all – may make the ‘rational’ ‘consumer’ choice to engage in risky health-related behaviour. In situ ethnographic research is needed in order to complement and inform the existing survey-based evidence on the relationship between economic status and health-related behaviour among school-aged adolescents as they deal with the pressures of consumerism.

scholarly journals Metamodern Gaming: Literary Analysis of The Last of Us

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 246-259
Author(s):  
Simon Radchenko
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Text Study

Among numerous ways to describe the culture and literature after postmodernism metamodern is becoming more and more popular. Its main features – oscillation, affect, desire for structure and (re)construction etc. – appear in many products of contemporary culture. This article reflects the endeavour to apply metamodernism and its trends to the literary analysis of cybertext. Crucial trends of metamodernism are briefly described and implemented in the analysis of a video game. The features of cybertext that influence the analysis are considered. All these instruments were used to show the metamodern nature of the game by Naughty Dog, The Last of Us (2013). The article attempts to analyze a cybertext through the methods of literary analysis and reveal metamodern ideas in The Last of Us using main metamodern categories as a tool for text study.

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