Modern technologies in representation and preservation of the Kola Sami ethnic culture

The paper is based on the latest comprehensive study of representations of the Sami people in Murmansk Region. The aim of the article is to describe and analyse the representations, which are considered as a product of the sociocultural practices which use specific technologies. The latter are regarded as methods and tools of practices aimed at preservation of ethnic culture, including its construction. The subject of this study is textual, visual, objective and animated forms of representations of the Sami culture, as well as interactive and other tech-nologies for imaging and branding of Murmansk Region, preservation of cultural heritage of the Sami, and market-ing of regional and ethnic products. For the first time, regional sociocultural practices of actualization and conser-vation of the tangible and intangible heritage have been analyzed using materials of the Kola Sami culture. The study involved ethnographic field research methods, content analysis of regional printed and network media, de-scription of expositions of the regional ethnographic museums, Sami private collections and archives. The analy-sis was based on the framework of constructivism methodology of ethnic studies, actor-network theory, sociology of things and memory studies. It has been determined that museums and mass media appear as collective au-thors of representations. The main commissioner of the technologies of representation and preservation of ethnic and cultural heritage of the Kola Sami of Murmansk Region is the regional government, which uses public and media practices as a managerial tool for the economic and social development of the Region. In the context of development of the ethnocultural tourism, the Sami historical and cultural heritage acts as a very attractive touris-tic resource which requires new sociocultural technologies, such as various forms of visualization and objectifica-tion of ethnic cultural elements, museumification and commercialization of material objects, symbolization and branding of the Sami culture. Sami self-presentations dominate in modern public space and discourse since 2010. At the same time, heteroethnic presentations demonstrate sustainable linguistic modes to describe and to portray Kola Sami people. Construction of cultural models results in reformatting of the Sami ethnic culture, changes of functionality of its elements, and appearance of new ethnocultural forms.

Indigenous Surveillance Cinema: Indian Education and the Truant On-Screen

Recent Indigenous boarding school movies have emphasized representations of surveillance together with the “living dead” as a central motif. After a brief review of surveillance in Indian education, this essay examines a cycle of films—The Only Good Indian (2009), Savage (2009), The Dead Can’t Dance (2010), Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), and SNIP (2016)—wherein the practices and technologies of surveillance mediate a dynamic interplay between settler educational institutions and the Native runaway or truant. These films converge a popular undead motif with this longstanding genre figure of resistance by Native/First Nations children to settler systems of administration, drawing on its literary formation that extends back to the first Indigenous writing on federal Indian education. Within this larger field of what we may call Indigenous surveillance cinema, discourses of bureaucratic rationality frame the figure of the truant. These films articulate the ways that representational practices ranging from literacy to cinema uphold systems of identification by which administrative surveillance of Indigenous people continues. Cinematic representations of the supervision of Indigenous bodies recall settler-colonialism’s mobilization of an array of early surveillance technologies for the assimilation of Native children. In this context, the watchful eye of the teacher—a proxy for administrative media—suggests a deeper embedding in settler systems of control. A visual poetics of truancy emerges in Indigenous surveillance cinema, as the truant figure operates dialectically with settler surveillance. The truant spatializes settler management and surveillance in her desire to escape cultural conversion at the hands of these proliferating technologies of representation.

Conclusion

This conclusion explores how the Korean War has been monumentalized in South Korean cultural memory since the end of the era of military dictatorships by analyzing the War Memorial of Korea, which opened in 1994, and the emergence of Korean cinematic blockbusters (as a component of hallyu). These cultural objects are indicative of how digital and film technologies have fundamentally structured the public forms of memory that have taken shape in that country. They also reveal how such rememberings, which express a desire for reconciliation with the North, also give voice to a reconstituted South Korean nationalism. While moving somewhat past the virulent anti-Communism of the Cold War era, the new story of the Korean War that has emerged still is a nationalist expression of soft power, paying tribute to South Korea’s emergence as an economic power that can purportedly negotiate the exigencies and crises wrought by globalization and neoliberalism through its mastery of both military technology and technologies of representation. Nonetheless, the war memorial and films like Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War enable a significant reckoning with the complicity of both South Korean and US military forces and political leaders in the violence that erupted during the Korean War.

Literacy: A Literary History

Literacy is a measure of being literate, of the ability to read and write. The central activity of the humanities—its shared discipline—literacy has become one of its most powerful and diffuse metaphors, becoming a broadly applied metaphor representing a fluency, a competency, or a skill in manipulating information. The word “literacy” is of recent coinage, being little more than a century old. Reading and writing, or effectively using letters (the word at the root of literacy), are ancient skills, but the word “literacy” likely springs from and reflects the emergence of mass public education at the end of the 19th and the turn of the 20th century. In this sense, then “literacy” measures personal and demographic development. Literacy is mimetic. It is synesthetic—in some languages, it means hearing sounds (the phonemes) in what is seen (the letters); in others, it means linking a symbol to the thing symbolized. Although a recent word, “literacy” depends upon the emergence of symbolic sign systems in ancient times. Written symbolic systems, by contrast, are relatively recent developments in human history. But they bear a more complicated relationship to the spoken language, being in part a representation of it (and thus a recording of its contents) while also offering a representation of the world, the referent: that is, literacy involves an awareness of the representation of the world. Reading and writing are tied to millennia of changes in technologies of representation. As a term denoting fluidity with letters, literacy has a history and a geography that follow the development and movement of a phonetic alphabetic and subsequent systems of writing. If the alphabet encodes a shift from orality to literacy, HTML encodes a shift from verbal literacy to a kind of numerical literacy not yet theorized.

Towards an ‘information technocracy’: discourses of London’s post-referendum real estate markets

This chapter is a study of the ways in which property development elites use particular techniques and technologies of representation to create development real estate markets in the United Kingdom. It compares the construction of post-Brexit vote narratives of investment landscapes and opportunities in London and the North-East. London's real estate market is considered the leading destination for global capital flows into commercial real estate in the United Kingdom, and therefore it becomes the centrepiece of an evolving socio-technical system. The chapter specifically looks at the media narratives disseminated by real estate market agents in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in London. It does so in order to question the role of media exposure and private consultancy firms and reflects on the way specialist expert knowledge is publicly disseminated to directly shape public opinion and, indirectly, real estate decision-making.

Palatium Vetus in Alessandria

The book “Palatium Vetus: The broletto recovered in the heart of Alessandria” is the theoretical, scientific and cognitive achievement of the complex restoration and enhancement, that have returned to the building its role of town prominent features, one of the main focal points of its architectural and urban history. The volume is presented as a result of a large-scale cultural relationship, created and programmed between the ‘Palazzo del governatore' of Alessandria and the Politecnico di Torino. The use of innovative technologies of representation, aimed to combine – also edited in new forms – the concept of 'Digital History', constitute a useful opportunity of welding between the correctness of the contents, the scientific-disciplinary outcome and the divulgative effectiveness. The 'Virtual Communication' becomes a media that clarifies the new role of the restored building as cultural center, able to revamp the image of the entire local community.

Palatium Vetus in Alessandria

The book “Palatium Vetus: The broletto recovered in the heart of Alessandria” is the theoretical, scientific and cognitive achievement of the complex restoration and enhancement, that have returned to the building its role of town prominent features, one of the main focal points of its architectural and urban history. The volume is presented as a result of a large-scale cultural relationship, created and programmed between the ‘Palazzo del governatore' of Alessandria and the Politecnico di Torino. The use of innovative technologies of representation, aimed to combine – also edited in new forms – the concept of 'Digital History', constitute a useful opportunity of welding between the correctness of the contents, the scientific-disciplinary outcome and the divulgative effectiveness. The 'Virtual Communication' becomes a media that clarifies the new role of the restored building as cultural center, able to revamp the image of the entire local community.

Levels of life: Modernity and modernism in David Malouf's Fly Away Peter

David Malouf's novel Fly Away Peter (1982) uses modernist techniques to describe the impact of modernity on the emergent Australian nation. At its centre is the country lad Jim Saddler, who dies in the industrialised battlefield in France. His fate is entwined with that of his friend Ashley Crowther, who inherits his family's property, and whose embrace of modernity includes a determination to preserve the land and its wildlife. Ashley recognises the value of Jim's instinctive connection with the natural world, and his knowledge of, and fascination with, birds. This fascination aligns Jim with the photographer Imogen Harcourt. Miss Harcourt is a modern woman, using the new technologies of representation to record the natural world, its movement and change. At the novella's end, it is Imogen who turns her lens towards a new future, as her grief for Jim is transfigured through an epiphanic vision of a surfer riding the waves to the beach.