Globalizing heritage: world heritage as a manifestation of modernism and the challenge from the periphery

Government efforts to protect monuments and sites of cultural heritage value have gone on for many centuries. The distinctive new chapter that
the 20th Century brought to cultural heritage protection was the establishment of a globalized effort over and above the work of nation states, This led to a new cultural heritage bureaucracy at the international level, the development of new sets of 'universal' standards, and a new set of places deemed to be of world heritage significance, All of this was done in the spirit of goodwill and optimism that infused the modem movement and that made possible the establishment of the so-called Bretton Woods organizations such as the United Nations as well as the parallel organizations specifically dealing with Cultural Heritage - UNESCO, ICOMOS, ICOM and ICCROM, In recent decades cultural relativists have challenged the drive towards uniformity implicit in the global activities of the modernist organizations, and various parts of the periphery have reacted against aspects of the global cultural heritage approach, The Venice Charter is no longer regarded as the single, universal way to conserve heritage places. It has been replaced or supplemented in large parts of the world by alternatives and modifications such as the Nara Document and Burra Charter. If it is no longer acceptable to provide a universal answer to the question of how do we identify and save heritage, the challenge of the 21st Century is to make the most of the complexity of standards that now exists.

Perspectives on culture : meeting points and divergences

In a post-modern world of diversity, difference and melting social, political, economic and cultural boundaries, there is a fundamental tension between the preservation of cultural identity and the cultural homogenisation that defines a globalised world.

This paper reports on a collaborative, international study between researchers in Thailand, Japan and Australia which examines perceptions of conceptual differences and meeting points in the cultural views of their three communities of teachers. In doing so, it attempts to move beyond post-modernism and the reality of globalism by proposing a new methodology for facilitating intercultural understanding.

Sickness ruins the complexion, breeding disappears without gold: culture and the i nterpretation of illness among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia

The interpretation of illness and its meaning to individuals and groups is largely a product of culture and is based on shared experience, historical significance, and the social function of individuals in the community. West Sumatra, like many parts of Indonesia, has experienced rapid development and modernization since the nation achieved independence in 1945 and is currently 12 years into Regional Autonomy, a dramatic shift in national administration from a highly centralized system to one which devolved authority to the level of district or municipal government. These changes have brought Indonesians into contact with an increasingly globalized culture and have put pressure on traditional institutions and practices. This is especially significant in the area of health, where considerable tension exists between the allopathic conceptualization of health (as espoused by health care professionals in the formal sector) and traditional interpretations of health that derive from a traditional cultural and linguistic frame of reference. This paper, based on fieldwork in the Indonesian region of Tanah Datar, West Sumatra, describes the impact of cultural and linguistic factors on the interpretation of illness among rural residents and elucidates the growing impact of multiple systems of meaning in local understanding of health.

The experience of old age in West Sumatra, Indonesia: Culture shift and cultural consonance in the modern era

The past four decades have seen enormous social change in Indonesia as the nation continues to experience rapid urbanization and social pressures in the globalized economy that have led to tensions between traditional cultures and the modern mainstream around the nation. This cultural shift has been felt strongly in West Sumatra, a region of Indonesia inhabited almost entirely by members of the matrilineal Minangkabau ethnic group. While the traditional social values of the area remain strong, they are eroding, and the Minang are becoming more like other Indonesians in terms of their family structure, occupations, and lifestyle. This has had a significant impact on the experience of old age as social and culture change has affected the traditional matrilineal structures that supported and ensured care for the elderly in past generations. This paper will describe the ways in which traditional institutions accommodated older individuals and describe how these systems have changed in the present day. Case studies across generations will be presented to illustrate the ways in which traditional matrilineal social structures are, and have been, perceived in the context of aging. Further, the paper will describe what this means for the elderly and their families in terms of cultural consonance in today’s society, and discussion will focus on the changing experience of old age in a society in transition against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and modernization.

Scientists and the cultural politics of academic disciplines in late 19th-century Germany: Emil Du Bois-Reymond and the controversy over the role of the cultural sciences

This article is concerned with interactions between the natural and the human sciences. It examines a specific late 19th-century episode in their relationship and argues that the schism between the two branches of knowledge was due to cognitive factors, but consolidated through the social dynamics of institutionalized disciplines. It contends that the assignment of a social function to the human sciences to compensate for the self-destructive tendencies inherent in the technological society was expressed even by those, at the end of the 19th century, who were fervent advocates of a science- and technology-driven modernization.

Modern dance, domestic life and civil society

In her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2000) Seyla Benhabib uses the concept of an ‘alternative genealogy of modernity’ to help her both to understand Arendt’s political philosophy and to rethink the potential for civil society to become a progressive political force at the beginning of the twenty first century. The idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity refers to a heterogeneity of social and political forms, spaces and acts that might be used to remap and redefine a modernity whose dominant topology has been shaped by the binary division between so-called public and private spheres. Alternative modernities have already been elaborated and explored from a range of different perspectives including feminist and postcolonial ones: for example, in Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity (1995) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe (2000). In this paper I want to elaborate upon the idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity from my perspective as a dancer. Thinking through the sociality of art and, more specifically, of some historical dance-making practices can make visible alternative spaces and processes of the (potentially) political. In the West, the modes of art-making form part of an as yet not fully explored arena of the social and of social practices. Modernist and Romantic ideologies have tended to preclude attention to the specific sociabilities of art-making. On the one hand Modernist ideology and art discourses have promoted the idea of an art work’s ‘autonomy’: its radical separation from the social relationships, the bodies and the conditions of its making. On the other hand Romantic ideology, still pervasive in popular conceptions of art practices, construes creation as interiority and individualistic expression. Socialist feminist and Marxist discussions of art have emphasized the social conditions of art-making but these have tended to be concerned with the social inequalities instituted within the public/private split rather than seeking to destabilize that division itself by posing questions of differences within the social. In my discussion below I draw on aspects of early modern dance practice and creation in taking up Benhabib’s concern to mobilise an alternative genealogy of modernity towards a renewal and reactivation of civic life. This project involves unsettling clear distinctions between the so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ but, at the same time, as Benhabib cautions ‘the binarity of public and private spheres must be reconstructed and not merely rejected’. (2000:2006)

Rhetoric versus practice: 'limits' in early modernism

This paper looks at the relationship between rhetoric and practice in the early days of Modernism in Europe by two proponents, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos. It interprets their 'discrepancies' not so much as limits but different forms of rhetoric.

A new roadmap to life: media, culture, and modernity in the United Arab Emirates

Critical to the vision of a new United Arab Emirates is an educated, skilled workforce that fuels the intelligent growth needed in a knowledge-based economy. As the country begins developing its version of that economy, the mediated, transparent environment fundamental to this process will carry with it new visions of (and possibilities for) living life. If peaceful change is to be achieved, a transitional generation faces the conundrum of adapting the best that modernity can offer while retaining the best of tradition. As have others, this study suggests two things: that (1) media literacy, growing in part from education, is correlated with urbanization and a changing infrastructure, and that (2) media in all its forms is inseparable from the outcome of this drive to modernization.

'Don't be a smart arse': Young workers, individualization, and an ethic of enterprise in Jamie's Kitchen

In Jamie’s Kitchen the high profile celebrity chef Jamie Oliver set out to transform a group of unemployed young Londoners into the enterprising, ideal worker of 21st century flexible capitalism. The paper will argue that this reality TV series provides a means to explore key features of new work regimes. We will analyse particular aspects of the increasingly powerful individualising and normalising processes shaping the lifeworlds of young workers in a globalising risk society. Processes that require those who wish to be positively identified as entrepreneurial to do particular sorts of work on themselves; or suffer the consequences.
Drawing on Foucault’s later work on the care of the self, and the  individualization theses of the reflexive modernization literature, we identify and analyse the forms of personhood that various institutions, organisations and individuals seek to encourage in young workers; and the ways in which institutionalised risk environments increasingly individualise the risks and uncertainties associated with labour market participation. The paper argues that our understandings of what it means to be a worker of the world, are being rearticulated around the idea that we are free to choose. And we must exercise this freedom – reap its rewards, carry its obligations – as individuals.

In dialogue with A.D. Hope: dialogue three: politics and poetics of Australian literature

[Hope was largely responsible for the inclusion of Australian Literature as a separate subject of study in universities. Yet his role in debates on modernism in the Australian context was controversial and he remains one of the main figures who fought for a particular kind of poetry that he saw some modernist methods, experiments, and theories destroying. Dialogue Three aims to hear his side of the story as Hope has become, in many circles, the embodiment of what is euphemistically called ‘the dead white male,’ a title attributed to him long before his actual death in July 2000. Is it the case that Hope’s opposition to ‘free verse’ or his view that men and women know separate metaphysical worldviews or his poetic focus upon European philosophical and literary traditions are sexist, obsolete, or reactionary?
See Dialogue One for details of the following exchange.]

Evolutionary approach to revising modernization theory : an introduction to the credible polity

The future global distribution of the political regimes of countries, just like that of their economic incomes, displays a surprising tendency for polarization into only two clubs of convergence at the extrema. This, in itself, is a persuasive reason to analyze afresh the logical validity of an endogenous theory for political and economic development inherent in modernization theory. I suggest how adopting a simple evolutionary game theoretic view on the subject allows an explanation for these parallel clubs of convergence in political regimes and economic income within the framework of existing research in democratization theory. I also suggest how instrumental action can be methodically introduced into such a setup using learning strategies adopted by political actors. These strategies, based on the first principles of political competition, are motivated by introducing the theoretical concept of a Credible Polity.