"Kawaii" is a Japanese word that denotes "cute," "lovable," or "charming" although it does not have exactly the same meaning as those adjectives. This book proposes engineering methodologies for systematic measurement of the affective perception of kawaii, by using virtual reality and biological signals, and discusses the effectiveness of kawaii engineering for designing industrial products and services. Kawaii can draw sympathy from people and can embody a special kind of cute design, which reduces fear and makes dull information more acceptable and appealing. Following the introduction of the background of kawaii engineering in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 describe experiments on the systematic measurement and evaluation methods for kawaii products and affective evaluation experiments. Chapter 4 proposes a mathematical model to identify the physical attributes that determine kawaii in motion. Chapters 5 and 6 explain research that uses biological signals and eye-tracking. After a brief survey of psychological research on kawaii and cuteness in Chapter 7, Chapters 8 and 9 introduce the use of spoons designed to stimulate the appetite of the elderly and the practical implementation of an emotion-driven camera. Chapters 10-14 explain experimental research that examines kawaii perception of people from various cultural backgrounds. Kawaii Engineering will appeal to those who work on affective computing, product design, user experience design, virtual reality, and biological signals.

The purpose of this volume is to broaden scholars' analytical perspective by placing the creative industries in frameworks that compare and contrast them with other kinds of entities, organizations, and social forms that mix creativity and production. In other words, this volume aims to set out an emerging agenda for the study of creativity in the cultural and media industries. Although this work focuses on the media and cultural industries, they are investigated in the context of other groups and organizations connecting forms of creativity with an explicit emphasis on turning ideas into concrete practices and products. The originality of this book lies in (1) presenting a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that develops a new framework and analytical concepts to understand the notion of creativity in the media and cultural industries, and (2) providing a series of fresh empirically based studies of the process of creativity in fields such as advertising, fashion, animation, and pop culture. This comparative move is taken in order to generate new insights about the particular features of the creative industries and new questions for future analysis.

This book guides the reader through the many complications and contradictions that characterize popular contestation today, focusing on its socio-political, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions. The volume recognizes that the same media and creative strategies can be used to pursue very different causes, as the anti-gay marriage Manif Pour Tous movement in France makes clear. The contributors are scholars from the humanities and social sciences, who analyze protests in particular regions, including Egypt, Iran, Australia, France, Spain, Greece, and Hong Kong, and transnational protests such as the NSA-leaks and the mobilization of migrants and refugees. Not only the specificity of these protest movements is examined, but also their tendency to connect and influence each other, as well as the central, often ambiguous role global digital platforms play in this.

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminality-identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither-caused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fiction-both their structure and their intentionality-Liminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernandez Cubas, Javier Marias, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.

This book discusses globalization trends and influences on traditional African oral literary performance and the direction that Ilorin oral art is forced to take by the changes of the twenty-first century electronic age. It seeks a new definition of contemporary African bourgeois in terms of its global reach, imitation of foreign forms and collaboration with the owners of the primary agencies. Additionally, it makes a case that African global lords or new bourgeoisie who are largely products of the new global capital and multinational corporations' socio-political and cultural influences fashion their tastes after western cultures as portrayed in the digital realm.

This book provides a systematic study of the political, economic, cultural, and educational changes that have taken place in China since 1978, and examines the impacts of these changes on the Chinese people's thinking and behavior. Jing Lin traces the gradual change of the Chinese from obedient, unquestioning citizens to critical and intelligent thinkers. She points out that with the more relaxed political and economic environment the Chinese people have gone through a period of reflection on their communist past, which has resulted in a new sense of identity and a more independent spirit. The book also looks at how the Chinese have begun to learn from other countries, resulting in an ongoing desire for openness and democracy.

This book analyzes how contemporary popular films with fantastic themes, including Candyman, Frozen, The Cabin in the Woods, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, cultivate neoliberal subjectivities. These films promise dramatic change, but they too often deliver more of the same. Although proponents maintain the illusion that the militant enforcement of freemarket economics will resolve racism, climate change, and imperialism, their magical thinking actually fuels the crises. Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism explores the ways in which the visual economies of Hollywood fantasy compliment this particular political economy.

This book addresses a variety of topics within the growing discipline of Archaeoastronomy, focusing especially on Archaeoastronomy in Sicily and the Mediterranean and Cultural Astronomy. A further priority is discussion of the astronomical and statistical methods used today to ascertain the degree of reliability of the chronological and cultural definition of sites and artifacts of archaeoastronomical interest. The contributions were all delivered at the XVth Congress of the Italian Society of Archaeoastronomy (SIA), held under the rubric "The Light, the Stones and the Sacred" - a theme inspired by the International Year of Light 2015, organized by UNESCO. The full meaning of many ancient monuments can only be understood by examining their relation to light, given the effects that light radiation produces in "interacting" with lithic structures. Moreover, in addition to manifestations of the sacred through the medium of light (hierophanies), there are many ties between temples, tombs, megalithic structures, and the architecture of almost all ages and cultures and our star, the Sun. Readers will find the book to be a source of fascinating insights based on synergies between the disciplines of archaeology and astronomy.

Sketching and carving both visualize and memorize a given image, but within Nowau culture the manner in which this is achieved in a canoe prowboard is entirely different than in a conventional drawing. When studying the impressive ceremonial canoes of Kitawa, in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, G.M.G. Scoditti became struck by the absolute predominance of the artist's mind in the process of creating images: all its stages, its uncertainties and experimentation, must unfold within its silent, rarefied space. Only once fully formed can the image be revealed to the village in material form. Reflecting on the absence of orthographic writing within Nowau culture, and finding parallels with poetic and musical composition, Scoditti gained further insight into the Nowau processes of creation through the critiques the Kitawan carvers made of his own fieldwork sketchbooks. Spurred on by their curiosity, the anthropologist handed over his art materials to the master carvers to make their own drawings on paper or cardboard. Traditional pigments used on the polychrome canoe prowboards were added to the unfamiliar media of watercolour, acrylic, coloured pencils and ballpoint pen. Three-dimensional ornamentation became two-dimensional as images of self-decoration and huts were added to those of prowboards. This exercise was all the more fascinating given the prohibition of drawing on the surface of the wood before carving. On return to Italy, further graphic dialogues unfolded when an architect and an artist from the tradition of Italian Abstraction responded with their own intriguingly different interpretations of the canoe prowboard and its relationship to the Nautilus shell. All these drawings are brought together in this book, along with Scoditti's own sketches from fieldwork and ethnographic collections in Newcastle upon Tyne and Rome. 'The fieldworker's or museum ethnographer's sketches are never going to be quite the same. Through the double filter of Kitawan philosophy and Scoditti's ruminations, the apparently simple triad of sketch - drawing - carving opens out into a discourse on the creative mind. The Kitawan creator - here primarily the male carver - does not have to demonstrate how he creates, and what springs from these pages have a fascination of their own. Several distinctive hands, Kitawan and Italian, reflect from different interpretive and professional vantage points on the very process of drawing through doing exactly that, drawing. The result are images that delight and challenge, sensitively assembled, beautifully reproduced. An extraordinary record of creativity, and a rare corpus of visual memorials.' - Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are deeply entangled with the family metaphor. For example, by examining the re-signification of the "angel in the house" and the deviant woman in the context of unstable or contingent masculinities and across discourses of class and nation, the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of British cultural constructions in the long nineteenth century. The central idea is to unearth the historical roots of the family metaphor in the construction of national and imperial ideologies, and to uncover the interests served by its specific discursive formation. The book explores both male and female stereotypes, enabling a more perceptive comparison, enriched with a nuanced reflection on the construction and social function of class.

Examining corporeal expressions of indigenousness from an historical perspective, this book highlights the development of cultural hybridity in New Zealand via the popular performing arts, contributing new understandings of racial, ethnic, and gender identities through performance. The author offers an insightful and welcome examination of New Zealand performing arts via case studies of drama, music, and dance, performed both domestically and internationally. As these examples show, notions of modern New Zealand were shaped and understood in the creation and reception of popular culture. Highlighting embodied indigenous cultures of the past provides a new interpretation of the development of New Zealand's cultural history and adds an unexplored dimension in understanding the relationships between M?ori (indigenous New Zealander) and P?keh? (non-M?ori) throughout the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries.

This edited volume provides a long-overdue synthesis of the current directions in culture theory and represents some of the very best in ongoing research. Here, culture theory is rendered as a jigsaw puzzle: the book identifies where current research fits together, the as yet missing pieces, and the straight edges that frame the bigger picture. These framing ideas are two: Roy D'Andrade's concept of lifeworlds-adapted from phenomenology yet groundbreaking in its own right-and new thinking about internalization, a concept much used in anthropology but routinely left unpacked. At its heart, this book is an incisive, insightful collection of contributions which will surely guide and support those who seek to further the study of culture.

This book starts with four aspects - subject's cognition, way of thinking, political value and ideology, conducts comparative studies on political culture. Amid using the concept of political culture in western academic circles, it makes comprehensive supplement for this concept, and put forward an updated concept of political culture which is more localized. This new concept, on the grounds of the comparison with political system, takes political culture as the subjective side of political system and incorporates ideology into political culture, thus undoubtedly enriching our knowledge of political culture. On the basis of clarifying the concept of political culture and establishing the comparative dimension of it, this book widely refers to the outlooks of individuals, nations, society and power of political cognition; the modes of objectives, directions and methods of political ideas; democratic awareness, legal concept and system selection of political value; as well as liberalism and republicanism, etc. All these bring substantial benefits to promoting and deepening the comparative studies on political culture. This book can not only be used for the teaching undergraduate and graduates who major in Politics, but also used as the reference book for politics academic research.

This collection of original, interdisciplinary essays addresses the work of Monty Python members beyond the comedy show, films, and live performances. These men are prolific creators in a variety of artistic realms beyond the confines of the comedy troupe. Their work as individuals, before and after coming together as Monty Python, demonstrates a restless curiosity about culture that embraces absurdity but seldom becomes cynical. Python members collectively and individually create unique approaches to theatre, film, video games, comic books, business training videos and more. Python Beyond Python increases our understanding of this often neglected work and the meanings of Monty Python.

Immigrants from South Asian countries are among the fastest growing segment of our population. This work, designed for students and interested readers, provides the first in-depth examination of recent South Asian immigrant groups--their history and background, current facts, comparative cultures, and contributions to contemporary American life. Groups discussed include Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, and Afghans. The topics covered include patterns of immigration, adaption to American life and work, cultural traditions, religious traditions, women's roles, the family, adolescence, and dating and marriage. Controversial questions are examined: Does the American political economy welcome or exploit South Asian immigrants? Are American and South Asian values compatible? Leonard shows how the American social, religious, and cultural landscape looks to these immigrants and the contributions they make to it, and she outlines the experiences and views of the various South Asian groups. Statistics and tables provide information on migration, population, income, and employment. Biographical profiles of noted South Asian Americans, a glossary of terms, and selected maps and photos complete the text.

The opening chapter introduces the reader to South Asian history, culture, and politics, material on which the rest of the book draws because of its continuing relevance to South Asians settled in the United States. Leonard provides a fascinating look at the early South Asian immigrant Punjabi Mexican American community whose second and third generations are grappling with the issue of being Mexican, Hindu, and American. A comparative examination of immigrant groups from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan illuminates the similarities and differences of their rich cultural and religious traditions, the social fabric of their communities, and how these immigrants have adapted to American life. Leonard looks closely at the diversity of cultural traditions--music, dance, poetry, foods, fashion, yoga, fine arts, entertainment, and literature--and how these traditions have changed in the United States. Keeping the family together is important to these immigrants. Leonard examines family issues, second generation identities, adolescence, making marriages, and wedding traditions. This work provides a wealth of information for students and interested readers to help them understand South Asian immigrant life, culture, and contributions to American life.

This book presents new perspectives on Southeast Asia using cases from a range of ethnic groups, cultures and histories, written by scholars from different ethnicities, generations, disciplines and scientific traditions. It examines various research trajectories, engaging with epistemological debates on the 'global' and 'local', on 'insiders' and 'outsiders', and the role played by personal experiences in the collection and analysis of empirical data. The volume provides subjects for debate rarely addressed in formal approaches to data gathering and analysis. Rather than grappling with the usual methodological building blocks of research training, it focuses on neglected issues in the research experience including chance, error, coincidence, mishap, dead ends, silence, secrets, improvisation, remembering, digital challenges and shifting tracks. Fieldwork and the Self is relevant to academics and researchers from universities and international organisations who are engaged in teaching and learning in area studies and social science research methods. "A rich and compelling set of writings about fieldwork in, and beyond, Southeast Asia". - Lyn Parker, Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia "A must-read for all, especially emerging scholars on Southeast Asia, and a refreshing read for critical 'old hands' on the region". - Abdul Rahman Embong, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia "An impressive collection of essays by two academics who have devoted their academic life to anthropological fieldwork in Southeast Asia". - Shamsul A.B., Distinguished Professor and UNESCO Chair, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia "The contributors share an unquenchable and passionate curiosity for Southeast Asia. They have survived the uncertainties and disillusionment of their fieldwork and remained first-grade scholars". - Marie-Sybille de Vienne, Professor, National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, Paris "A penetrating reflection on current social science research on Southeast Asia". - Hans-Dieter Evers, Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow, University of Bonn

In the final years of the Soviet Union and into the 1990s, Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel at an unprecedented rate, bringing about profound changes in Israeli society and the way immigrants understood their own identity. In this volume ex-Soviets in Israel reflect on their immigration experiences, allowing readers to explore this transitional cultural group directly through immigrants' thoughts, memories, and feelings, rather than physical artifacts like magazines, films, or books. Drawing on their fieldwork as well as on analyses of the Russian-language Israeli media and Internet forums, Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaya present a collage of cultural and folk traditions--from Slavic to Soviet, Jewish, and Muslim--to demonstrate that the mythology of Soviet Jews in Israel is still in the making. The authors begin by discussing their research strategies, explaining the sources used as material for the study, and analyzing the demographic profile of the immigrants interviewed for the project. Chapters use immigrants' personal recollections to both find fragments of Jewish tradition that survived despite the assimilation policy in the USSR and show how traditional folk perception of the Other affected immigrants' interaction with members of their receiving society. The authors also investigate how immigrants' perception of time and space affected their integration, consider the mythology of Fate and Lucky Coincidences as a means of fighting immigrant stress, examine folk-linguistics and the role of the lay-person's view of languages in the life of the immigrant community, and analyze the transformation of folklore genres and images of the country of origin under new conditions. As the biggest immigration wave from a single country in Israel's history, the ex-Soviet Jews make a fascinating case study for a variety of disciplines. Ex-Soviets in Israel will be of interest to scholars who work in Jewish and immigration studies, modern folklore, anthropology, and sociolinguistics.

This edited collection takes a timely and comprehensive approach to understanding Turkey's television, which has become a global growth industry in the last decade, by reconsidering its geopolitics within both national and transnational contexts. The Turkish television industry along with audiences and content are contextualised within the socio-cultural and historical developments of global neoliberalism, transnational flows, the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and Islamism. Moving away from Anglo-American perspectives, the book analyzes both local and global processes of television production and consumption while taking into consideration the dynamics distinctive to Turkey, such as ethnic and gender identity politics, media policies and regulations, and rising nationalistic sentiments.

In tracing the process through which monuments give rise to collective memories, this path-breaking book emphasizes that memorials are not just inert and amnesiac spaces upon which individuals may graft their ever-shifting memories. To the contrary, the materiality of monuments can be seen to elicit a particular collective mode of remembering which shapes the consumption of the past as a shared cultural form of memory. In a variety of disciplines over the past decade, attention has moved away from the oral tradition of memory to the interplay between social remembering and object worlds. But research is very sketchy in this area and the materiality of monuments has tended to be ignored within anthropological literature, compared to the amount of attention given to commemorative practice. Art and architectural history, on the other hand, have been much interested in memorial representation through objects, but have paid scant attention to issues of social memory. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary in scope, this book fills this gap and addresses topics ranging from material objects to physical space; from the contemporary to the historical; and from 'high art' to memorials outside the category of art altogether. In so doing, it represents a significant contribution to an emerging field.

Material religion is a rapidly growing field, and this volume offers an accessible, critical entry into these new areas of research. Each "key term" uses case studies and is accompanied by a color image - an object, practice, space, or site. The entries cut across geographies, histories, and traditions, offering a versatile and engaging text for the classroom. Key topics covered include: - Icon, ritual, magic, gender, race - Sacred, spirit, technology, - Space, belief, body, brain - Taste, touch, smell, sound, vision Each entry demonstrates in clear and jargon-free prose how the key term figures prominently in understanding the materiality of religion. Written by leading international scholars, all entries are linked by the ways materiality stands at the forefront of the understanding of religion, whether that comes from humanistic, social scientific, artistic, curatorial, or other perspectives. Brent Plate brings his expertise and extensive teaching experience to the comprehensive introduction which introduces students to the themes and methods of the material cultural study of religion. Key Terms in Material Religion provides a much-needed resource for courses on theory and method in religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and the ever-increasing number of courses focused on material religion.

The words and grammatical structure of a given language are the most basic building blocks of thought and communication; they reflect the ways speakers conceptualize themselves and their world and communicate with others. Since language reflects a culture's biases and inequities, a socially constructed, gendered power differential between men and women may lead each to have very different relationships to language. The essays in this collection explore some of the ways in which power and its expression (or repression) is gendered. The contributors seek to discover contexts and patterns within which power is articulated, reproduced, and ultimately transformed. While some contributors provide primarily descriptive examinations of presumed gender differences, others seek to critique or deconstruct these supposed meanings associated with gender and power relationships. An important collection for scholars and researchers involved with communication and with gender issues.

This book gathers together essays written by leading scholars of adaptation studies to explore the full range of practices and issues currently of concern in the field. The chapters demonstrate how content and messaging are shared across an increasing number of platforms, whose interrelationships have become as intriguing as they are complex. Recognizing that a signature feature of contemporary culture is the convergence of different forms of media, the contributors of this book argue that adaptation studies has emerged as a key discipline that, unlike traditional literary and art criticism, is capable of identifying and analyzing the relations between source texts and adaptations created from them. Adaptation scholars have come to understand that these relations not only play out in individual case histories but are also institutional, and this collection shows how adaptation plays a key role in the functioning of cinema, television, art, and print media. The volume is essential reading for all those interested both in adaptation studies and also in the complex forms of intermediality that define contemporary culture in the 21st century.

This book narrates the extraordinary growth in the study of Arabic in England from the late sixteenth century, when it was almost non-existent, to the end of the seventeenth. By its high point around 1666, England was pre-eminent among European countries in the study of Arabic. Permanent Chairs of Arabic had been established at Oxford and Cambridge, and specialized presses in Oxford and London had produced Arabic works. The Professor at Oxford, Edward Pococke, was recognized as the foremost scholar in the field in Europe, and a great collection of Arabic manuscripts, begun by Archbishop Laud, was being built up at Oxford. In this masterly and original study, Professor Toomer gives the first detailed account of this process, set against the religious and political background in England and Europe. He shows how trade with the Ottoman Empire and mistrust of Islam influenced the study of Arabic. Finally, he traces the course and causes of the drastic decline in Arabic studies towards the end of the century.

This truly unique volume brings together theoretical discussions of liberalizations with studies focused on literature, theatre and the visual arts. To the analysis of developments in selected Eastern European regions is added a historical dimension through discussions of the alternation of liberalization and repression in authoritarian European states from the eighteenth century onwards.

How do technological and cultural developments interact to affect consumption? What do ways of using household goods in specific historical contexts tell us about individual and collective identities? Do changes in consumption patterns emancipate social groups or reinforce existing structures of power?
The 'economic miracle' experienced by West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s had profound effects on everyday life and gender relations. This book reflects the growing need for historical research on leisure and consumption in the modern period and provides a very entertaining and carefully researched study of ideas about women, men, housework, consumption, and modernity. It contrasts the virtual reality presented by advertisements with the important qualitative changes in household appliances and how they affected everyday life and gender roles. New products claimed to make housework easier, but the idea of substituting money for labor contrasted with the ideal of the thrifty, hard-working housewife and a clear division of gender roles. The author examines a broad range of issues encompassing the transformation of household appliances from luxuries to necessities, the threat of consumer debt, men and housework, women and technology, and labor and leisure in the modern household.
This timely book represents a significant contribution to the following areas: material culture, German history, women's history, sociology, media/cultural studies and anthropology.