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CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES The Joint Session for Reanalysing Social and Cultural Concepts / Local Cultures, Political Struggles and Transformations Organiser: Eeva Jokinen and Terence Pang Jokinen, Eeva (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) LIVED EVERYDAY LIFE Everyday life has been both banalised and praised in cultural studies. In sociology, it has often been seen as "the other" counterbalancing work and holiday, or in opposition to the transgressive. Feminist scholars have theorised the everyday as gendered, and shown that the scorn for women and the everyday-like often overlap. Dorothy Smith has shown that everyday life is a problematic, which constitutes a basis for (feminist) sociology. There often seems to be a binary structure in the analyses of everyday life, and moreover, this structure tends take a spatial form. Everyday life is conceptualised as a place. To avoid "over-spatialisation", I discuss Rita Felski's idea to consider everyday life grounded in three facets: time (repetition), space (sense of home) and modality (habit). Furthermore, I suggest that two more facets would be added: configuration (human touch) and permeability (porous). Suoninen, Marja (University of Turku, Finland) THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES TO REGULATING LEISURE: FROM MORAL PANIC TO MORAL REGULATION This paper aims at introducing and comparing two theoretical perspectives that have been used in studying moral discourses on culture. The first one is the perspective of moral panic. It describes situations where the media expresses exaggerated moral outrage over some phenomenon. This perspective includes however some problems or shortcomings in analysing morally toned discourses of leisure. The most serious of these is caused by the presumption of disproportionality essential to the concept, which implies making a negative normative judgement. This is why the theoretical frame of moral regulation is introduced instead. This perspective has some advantages compared to the perspective of moral panic. It does not evaluate campaigns of moral regulation normatively. It is also a dynamic approach which takes into account the complexity of processes of regulation, the roles of various agents of regulation as well as those opposing it, different strategies of regulation and opposing regulation etc. Muecke, Stephen (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) CONTINGENCY IN MADAGASCAR Contingency is that which touches: it is the risk of the event which calls for a singular response. I will describe therefore a new cultural studies method, as I tell a story about travelling in Madagascar. It is a method which abandons the anthropological 'field', 'community', and reconstitutes a social ethic as it stresses links and lines of connection as they weave geographically, linguistically and historically. The traveller moves in a complex system where connections unfold and disperse, then more suddenly knot and bind in rituals which propitiate these ghosts of the ancestors (famadihana). Can there be any consistency in this method alert to the complexity of open systems and what kind of researching subjectivity is thus created through the ethics of contingency? Pang, Terence (Lingnan University Hong Kong) DISCOURSES IN A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT DEBATE: NATIONHOOD, SAFETY AND CONCERN FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS The Daya Bay nuclear power plant debate took place in Hong Kong for two decades until it subsided in recent years, overshadowed by the return of sovereignty to China. Traditional and contemporary discourses of very divergent sources, some imported from overseas, engage in a hegemonic struggle between an establishment formed by the utilities, foreign suppliers, the pro-China press and government, and an opposition consisting of a critical media, environmentalists and democratic forces. The paper will highlight how Confucian discourses mix with populist discourses to fight against Scientistic, Positivist, Chinese Soviet and capitalist discourses. The impact of the debate on current political ideologies in Hong Kong will also be examined. Iosub Caras, Adriana Simona (University of Bucharest, Romania) THE DISAPPEARANCE OF A CULTURE IN ROMANIA A lot of Jews and Saxons of Transylvania has left Romania since 1947. Nowadays their number is insignificant and their immigration has increased after 1989. If Jews were known as the best in the trade and intellectual fields, the Saxons of Transylvania were excellent craftsmen in Romania, before the second world war. They took away not only the economic aspects, but the cultural ones as well. Yiddish disappeared completely and German is very seldom heard in Transylvania. Many reasons have been given to explain this phenomenon, but I think that the consequences are more important to be discussed. By consequences, I mean not only the economic, social and political ones, but also the psychological, cultural, and linguistic ones (from a pragmatic, semiotic, and intercultural point of view). Abdullah, Amini Amir and Omar, Siti Zobidah (Department of General Studies, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia) THE PROBLEM OF PLURALISM IN MALAYSIA As far as the ethnic breakdown of the Malaysian plural society is concerned, 13.61 million of the population identified themselves as sons of the soil (Bumiputera), 5.6 million as Chinese, 1.61 million as Indians and 0.7 as "others" while 1.74 millions classifies themselves as non-citizens. Two major factors have contributed to the complex communal problems in Malaysia. The first, started in the early nineteenth century, the British encouraged a massive influx of Indians and Chinese into the country. The second factor was the British policy of divide and rule, which separated the major ethnic groups and gave rise to different patterns of residence and division of labour on racial lines. However, those factors are not always relevant today. With the transformation of the society and modernization, some other variables should be considered in order to examine the problem of pluralism such as racial inequality, discrimination, politicization of ethnic differences, political interest, narrow nationalism, materialism and others. Ramizuddin, Ahmed and Hossain, Md. (DCY; Development Council for Youths, Bangladesh) THE CURSE OF CHILD MARRIAGE Societies in South Asia including Bangladesh still continue to support the idea that girls should marry at or soon after puberty Rather they look upon marriage as a family building strategy, an economic arrangement or away to protect girl from unwelcome sexual advances. There has been virtually no attempt to examine the practice as a human rights violation in itself. Children and teen-age married at ages well below the legal minimum become statically invisible as " children". Cultural norms seem to prevail over the law. One of the main problems arising out of early marriage is that it extended a woman's reproductive span, thereby contributing to large family size. The right to free and full consent to a marriage is recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In many subsequent-consent that can not be "free and full" when at least one partner is very immature. |