SBS Learn hosts educational materials for schools linked to Australian Curriculum and SBS programming. It is the educational arm of the wider SBS Outreach initiative to extend the reach and impact of documentaries, dramas, sport, news and current affairs, radio, and interactive content in a learning environment.
Teaching respect in the workplace and building trust for managers and employees. Create a respectful workplace and culture of respect.
Intercultural Communication provides a critical introduction to the dynamic arena of communication across different cultural and social strata. Throughout this book, topics are revisited, extended, interwoven, and deconstructed, with the reader's understanding strengthened by tasks and follow-up questions. The fourth edition of this popular textbook has been updated to feature: ■ new readings by Kwame Antony Appiah, Yoshitaka Miike, Edward Ademolu and Siobhan Warrington, Helena Liu, and Michael Zirulnik and Mark Orbe, which reflect the most recent developments in the field; ■ refreshed and expanded examples and tasks including new material on an Asiacentric approach to intercultural communication, selfies as a global discourse, the impact on intercultural communication of English as a lingua franca in multinational organisations, and representations of Africa in charity media campaigns; ■ extended discussions of topics including intercultural training, voluntourism, challenging essentialism in business contexts, and intersectional approaches to identity; ■ revised further reading suggestions. Written by experienced teachers and researchers in the field, this fourth edition of Intercultural Communication is an essential textbook for advanced students studying this topic.
Our “The World of Work” student workbook is the perfect resource for students who want to delve deep into the most important aspects of the modern workplace. Spanning approximately 40 pages, the workbook offers detailed explanations on topics such as work-life balance, digital communication, language barriers, and the
Early calls for creating electronic forms of social resistance coincidence almost exactly with the emergence of the world wide web. In 1994, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) published The Electronic Disturbance , which began with this urgent call: The rules of cultural and political resistance have dramatically changed. The revolution in technology brought about by the rapid development of the computer and video has created a new geography of power relations. […] The new geography is a virtual geography, and the core of political and cultural resistance must assert itself in this electronic space. [1] That same year, the First International WWW Conference was held in Geneva; Mosaic, precursor of the Netscape Navigator web browser, was only a year old and its usage limited to computer scientists; finally, in 1994 there were scarcely a thousand sites on the web, whereas by 1999, there were over 9 million. [2] Today, the web has become dominated by e-commerce sites, while links to the entirety of CAE’s seminal text can be found in the resource section of www.thehacktivist.com, a site dedicated solely to facilitating electronic disturbances. Over the past several years, I have been studying cases of hacktivism or electronic civil disobedience. ‘Hacktivism’ refers to the emergence of political activism within digital environments, primarily but not exclusively, the Internet. My goal has been to theorise the performance of hacktivism, thus connecting my study of electronic civil disobedience to my ongoing performance research. This research, however, extends beyond the kind of performance most familiar to artists and cultural theorists. That is, while I’m interested in cultural performances such as performance art and political theatre, I’ve also focused on the relationships between cultural performance and two other types of performance, such as those found in ‘high performance’ technologies and ‘peak performance’ organisations. And beyond these three performances (cultural, organisational, and technological), I’m most interested in performance as the defining modality of power in contemporary society. [3] I’ll speak more about these two areas of research in a moment, but let me begin in the middle, as it were, by discussing ‘machinic performance’, a concept I will use to connect the two areas. I must ask for the reader’s patience here, as I’ll be using the terms ‘machine’ and ‘performance’ in fairly unusual ways. What is machinic performance? In a short text called ‘Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring-Machines’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari give an account of something they call the ‘machinic’. Deleuze and Guattari write that the object is no longer to compare humans and machines in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the one for the other, but to bring them into communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combine with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other humans. [4] Because the machinic cuts across people and mechanisms, the authors distinguish it from the mechanical and the technological per se. A horse, a rider, and a stirrup formed a powerful machine in the age of Gengis Khan; in the modern era, a machine made of iron ore, workers and factories defined the industrial age. In both cases, specific machines came to co-ordinate a wide range of existence. Today, the machinic can perhaps best be seen in interface design and the study of socio-technical systems. In both these areas, the stress lies not so much in adapting technologies to humans or humans to technologies, but rather in creating performances that stretch across different systems. I will define machinic performances as arising whenever different processes ‘recur’ or communicate across diverse systems, thereby creating performances that escape subjective control and even objective analysis. Machinic performances do not occur at discrete performative sites; instead, their occurrence is distributed. They happen at multiple sites through multiple agents, both human and technological. Machinic performances pose a real challenge to study, for to research a machinic performance is perhaps to become part of it. However, there are several paradigms of performance research we can draw upon to help us. Here I must try to condense my research into the relation of cultural, organisational, and technological performance. Let me begin with cultural performance, which has been studied for decades by Performance Studies scholars. Forms of cultural performance include theatre, ritual, performance art, popular entertainment and folklore, all of which centre around human performance. Cultural performances actualise or embody larger symbolic systems at particular times and places. Though cultural performances can support or maintain such symbolic systems, Performance Studies scholars tend to emphasise their transgressive or subversive potential, their ability to seize symbolic elements from their normative systems, critique and rearrange them, and then reinsert them back into society. Now, it was with some surprise, and then growing amazement, that I discovered another paradigm of human performance. I refer here to organisational performance, which includes the work performed by individual labourers, small work teams, and even entire institutions. On an intimate level, employees are routinely subjected to annual performance reviews of their work. On a larger scale, the Clinton administration in 1993 established the National Performance Review, a government-wide evaluation of organisational efficiency and waste. Elsewhere, I’ve shown that ‘Performance Management’ represents a paradigm away from Taylorism or Scientific Management; while the former stressed rationality and corporate mono-culturalism, the latter stresses creativity and cultural diversity. [5] Nonetheless, in contrast to the transgressivity of cultural performances, organisational performances obviously tend to be highly normative. For a long time I called this paradigm of organisational performance ‘high performance’.[6] But gradually I came to realise that the term ‘high performance’ actually originated in yet another paradigm of research, that of technological performance. In the 1950s, ‘high performance’ became a common criteria used to evaluate materials and systems in the military and aerospace industries. In short, research of technological performance took off during the Cold War; its launch pad was America’s military-industrial-academic complex, the triangle of military agencies, industry contractors, and research universities.[7] Today, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know about high performance: there are high performance cars, computers, and stereo systems. Indeed, most consumer appliances come with brochures detailing the devices’ ‘performance specifications’. By combining the often divergent perspectives of cultural, organisational and technological performance, we can get other angles on this thing I’m calling ‘machinic performance’. Divergent perspectives are needed because machinic performances involve conflicting grids of power. From my research, I’ve identified three distinct challenges of performative power: 1. the challenge of efficacy , the ability of cultural performances to maintain or transform social structures; 2. the challenge of efficiency , the ‘minimaxing’ of organisational inputs and outputs; and finally 3. the challenge of effectiveness , the optimising of technological functionalities (such as speed, accuracy, weight etc.) With machinic performances, these demands for efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness can and regularly do come into conflict. I realised this when I discovered The Challenger Launch Decision , a landmark study of the 1986 shuttle disaster, written by sociologist Diane Vaughan. What’s striking about Vaughan’s study is that it focuses on three different types of imperatives that influenced the fateful decision to launch the shuttle. Significantly, Vaughan calls these imperatives ‘performance pressures’. These performance pressures are: 1. the political pressures of maintaining NASA’s image in Congress, in the country, and around the entire world; 2. the organisational pressures exerted by the NASA hierarchy; and 3. the technical pressures presented by the O-rings themselves. [8] We can easily recognise the imperatives of efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness within the three pressures described by Vaughan. Organisationally, technologically and culturally, the entire Challenger mission was characterised by multiple and conflicting demands to perform—or else. Challenger constitutes a machinic performance. Again, machinic performances involve multiple agents and multiple performative sites. They set up recurrent communication between diverse systems, and they unfold under multiple performance pressures. Now that we have some insight into machinic performances, let me turn to the other term in my title, ‘hacktivism’, and do so by looking at a high-stakes case of machinic performance. In late November, 1999, an online theatre of war was gearing up. I refer here to TOYWAR, an incident of electronic civil disobedience that pitted an online European art group called ‘etoy’ against an online American toy company called ‘eToys’. The background is this: the art group etoy had been around since 1994; its website etoy.com since 1995. The art group is known for its performance and digital projects, having won a prestigious Ars Electronica prize in 1996. On the other side, the toy company started in 1996 and launched its site, etoys.com, in 1997. It went public in 1999, and by November of that year its stock sold around $60/share, giving it a total market capitalisation worth about $6 billion. Though they shared very similar names and website addresses, etoy and eToys lived in peaceful co-existence until the summer of 1999, when a young boy visited the art site thinking it was the e-commerce site. Trying to open an animation file, he got a message that said: ‘get the fucking Flash plug-in’. He asked his family what this meant. Soon after, his irate grandfather contacted the toy company demanding an explanation. The toy company in turn contacted the art group and tried unsuccessfully to purchase the domain name. A legal battle ensued, with the toy company suing etoy for trademark violations in September. At the end of November, the art group also received a court injunction from the Los Angeles Superior Court, fining it $10,000 a day as long as etoy.com remained up. The artists immediately closed down the url and moved the site to another address. This was the beginning of TOYWAR. Fighting back against the strong-arm practices of the toy company, etoy was joined by RTMark and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. RTMark is an online clearinghouse for anti-corporate activism, while the Electronic Disturbance Theatre or EDT has created software for conducting ‘virtual sit-ins’ using common web-browsers. It’s important to note here that while common ‘hackers’ (or ‘crackers’, as programming hackers like to call them) take aim at technical systems, the hacktivist’s primary goal is to hack the social groups attached to specific systems Over the next two months, etoy, RTMark, and EDT used the Internet to protest the actions of the eToys corporation. They employed tactics drawn from traditional civil disobedience, converting them into the 1s and 0s of digital technologies. RTMark created an etoy,FUND, allowing online users to ‘invest’ or donate money to assist the artists. Email campaigns were launched to eToys’ investors and officials, as well as the online and print press. Small traditional protests took place outside offices and courthouses, but the most effective tactic was the virtual sit that took place from 15-25 December. At the height of the holiday season, people around the world could log on to EDT’s site at specified times to participate in a ‘denial of service’ attack on eToys’ web site. The attack consisted of repeating requesting non-existent files from the eToys’ server. As a ‘pure’ e-commerce company, the site was the toy firm’s only store, so tying up its web traffic effectively shut down the business for hours every day for ten consecutive days. The toy company countered by persuading service providers to cut off etoy’s email and to shut down the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s website. However, EDT had set up mirror sites around the world, keeping the virtual sit-in going. In the end, the art group prevailed. Their site is back up, the lawsuit was dropped, and the injunction lifted. The toy company even agreed to pay the legal fees of the artists. In this hacktivist battle between a small art group and a big e-commerce company, the little guy won and big business lost. From late November to late December of 1999, eToys lost around $4 billion in market capitalisation. Whether all or even most of this loss was due to TOYWAR is debatable, but there’s little doubt it had some effect. (Amidst the subsequent crash of the dot.com economy, eToys laid off its entire workforce, and in February 2001, the toy company declared it would officially close down that April.) I’d like to look at both eToys and etoy as machinic performances, starting with the toy company. E-commerce sites have been called ’selling systems’, and etoys.com was a prime example.[9] Using digital technologies, it brought together buyers and sellers and sought to create unique ‘user experiences’. It allowed users to browse through products, learn about the organisation, and make purchases—all online. If someone wanted to, they could even invest in eToys stock. Though we might think the art site is totally different, there are some striking similarities. The etoy.com site also uses digital technologies to design unique online experiences between buyers and sellers. It allows users to browse through etoy.PRODUCTS, learn about the etoy.BUSINESSPLAN, and make purchases online. If someone wants to, they can even invest in etoy.SHARES. One thing that has struck me in my research of machinic performance is how technological, organisational, and cultural performances can embed themselves within one another, how the values of efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness can enter into different arrangements. This is precisely where the machinic performances of etoy and eToys differ. With eToys, organisational goals of efficiency/profitability guide the underlying business plan, the co-ordination of capital, labour and resources necessary for conducting toy sales over the web. Values of technological effectiveness guide the building of back-end servers and databases. On the front end, cultural values of creativity and expression are mobilised through marketing, branding and interface design techniques that create ’significant user experiences’ between customers and toy company. A very different arrangement is at work with the art group etoy. Here cultural values of creativity and expression are embodied in music files and graphical artwork, as well as documents of performance events. Values of technical effectiveness and organisational efficiency are certainly parodied and mocked; but at the same time they are effectively and efficiently deployed through these very parodies. That etoy has a website at all attests the group’s investment in technological effectiveness, and despite their parodying of bureaucracy’s more sinister effects, the success of etoy in mounting a worldwide act of hacktivism shows their organisational savvy. The art group creates ’significant user experiences’, though the users, the experiences and the significance vary radically from those of eToys. We often hear of the recombinant use of image and text in both modern and postmodern art; what we have here are recombinant performances produced by artists and business people alike. In the information/service economy, companies are increasingly turning to cultural performance for models of collaboration and for building and maintaining their customer bases. At the same time, artist and activist groups have known for a long time that small and large scale collaborations can benefit from organisational theory. We can think here of Meyerhold’s use of Scientific Management to invent a revolutionary theatre of ‘biomechanics’ in the early twentieth century.[10] Likewise, in such hacktivist groups as RTMark and EDT, organizational processes are utilized even as they are parodied and critiqued. Etoy and eToys can thus be understood as two machinic performances. Both extend across social and technical spheres, but each consists of radically different arrangements of performative values. With eToys, cultural and technological concerns serve organisational goals. Artists and writers, programmers and engineers work almost exclusively for the goal of making profits. With etoy, organisational and technological concerns serve broader cultural goals: to make art that challenges the world of business and technology by retooling the very practices of business and technology. These two machines collided, however, when their performances were short-circuited by a youngster surfing the web. The result was identity crisis, brand confusion, experience overload. The two performances merged, and for a time, formed an even greater machine: TOYWAR.[11] I want to conclude by looking at hacktivism and machinic performance from yet another angle. I began by suggesting that two areas where the machinic was most visible are interface design and the study of socio-technical systems. In new media, interface design primarily concerns discrete human-computer interactions, such as occurs in front of an ATM machine or on a web page. In my interface design courses, we focus on how the user experience is shaped by the design and architecture of information. The machinic performance is precisely the interaction between an individual and a PC or other device, each providing the other with information, inputs, and outputs. From another perspective, however, we can say that all human-computer interactions are actually close-ups of larger socio-technical systems. It’s not simply one person standing at an ATM machine: it’s a customer base interacting with a financial institution, or even a whole client sector interacting with a multinational banking industry. The study of socio-technical systems can be found in the field of science studies or the sociology of technologies. Vaughan’s Challenger Launch Decision is one such study, as is Bruno Latour’s ARAMIS or the Love of Technology and Donald MacKenzie’s Inventing Accuracy . The former is a study of a defunct transporation system; the latter a sociology of guided nuclear missiles.[12] Socio-technical systems perform machinically: they entail communication across diverse structures and processes, and their ‘events’ are not confined to discrete times and places, but are instead distributed across many performative sites. But Deleuze and Guattari, to return to the text I cited earlier, also distinguish ’social technical machines’ from ‘desiring-machines’. For them, the difference between the two is not one of scale. Socio-technical machines can’t be reduced to large machines or machines used by large number of people. Nor can desiring-machines be reduced to gadgets or machines used only by small groups. Furthermore, socio-technical machines cannot be characterised as ‘practical’ and desiring-machines as ‘impractical’ or simply whimsical. Why not? Because socio-technical and desiring machines are the same machines —or rather, they are the same machines performing under different conditions. Deleuze and Guattari write: Desiring-machines are not in our heads, in our imagination, they are inside the social and technical machines themselves . Our relationship with machines is not a relationship of invention or of imitation; we are not the cerebral fathers, nor the disciplined sons of the machine. It is a relationship of peopling: we populate the social technical machines with desiring-machines, and we have no alternative. We are obliged to say at the same time: social technical machines are only conglomerates of desiring-machines under molar conditions that are historically determined; desiring-machines are social and technical machines restored to their determinant molecular conditions.[13] By molar conditions, Deleuze and Guattari mean that socio-technical machines tend to be rigid, centralised, and governed by binary oppositions, whereas molecular desiring-machines are supple, decentralised, and attuned to much more subtle differences. Now, before we quickly condemn socio-technical machines as machinic performances of power and jump to champion desiring-machines as performances of resistance and liberation, we should realise that the difference between socio-technical and desiring machines points to the difference between two types of power. It’s the difference, say, between the official power structure of an organisation and the informal power alliances found within that very same institution. It’s the difference between what an organisational chart shows and what goes on in the hallways and backrooms. In A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari thus distinguish between macropolitics and micropolitics, just as they distinguish between State fascism and microfascisms.[14] Macropolitics are found in socio-technical machines, micropolitics in desiring-machines. What about hacktivism? What is its relationship to socio-technical and desiring machines? Again, it would be all too easy, indeed, all too human, to see hacktivist groups as small desiring-machines battling against large socio-technical systems. There’s little doubt that hacktivism is most often aimed at socio-technical systems, but normative desiring-machines pose just as serious a risk. Not only are the normative desiring machines within socio-technical systems very hard to identify without extensive fieldwork, but they can also spring up within hacktivist groups themselves. I’ve just introduced the concept of ‘normative desiring-machines’ because I think the machinic performance of hacktivism strive to be mutant desiring-machines, machines that connect different spheres of knowledge and practice. Critical Art Ensemble writes that in an activist cell, the schism between knowledge and technical ability […] must be closed. A shared political perspective should be the glue that binds the parts […]. Avoid consensus through similarity of skills, since in order to be useful, different skills must be represented. Activist, theorist, artist, hacker, and even a lawyer, would be a good combination of talents—knowledge and practice should mix. And one shouldn’t dismiss the bureaucrat either, for ‘the authoritarian fetish for efficiency is an ally that cannot be underestimated.[15] From this perspective, the machinic performance of hacktivist groups involves creating mutant desiring machines that cut across different technological and social systems. The challenge lies in forging alliances, not so much against socio-technical machines, but within them, seeking out and making connections with mutant elements already at work within them, while at the same time guarding against the microfacsisms that inhabit activist groups of the Right and even, at times, the Left. Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches courses in performance studies and civil disobedience. His works include Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Routledge 2001), the essays “Democracy’s Performance,” “Laurie Anderson for Dummies,” and “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, etoys, and TOYWAR,” and a 1996 broadcast commemoration of the 1986 shuttle disaster titled “CINC: A Challenger Radio Drama.” Jon’s texts have been translated into Croatian, French, German, Japanese, Polish, and Portugese. Endnotes (Note: a version of this text was delivered at the colloquium Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology and the Body , held at Penn State University, USA in October 2000. It is published for the first time here.) [1] Critical Art Ensemble. The Electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994), 3. Though this small manifesto, known as TED to many of its readers, was published a decade ago, it seems a century has past—and indeed one has. Since TED ’s publication, the World Wide Web has emerged; the dot.com and IT boom came and then really went boom; the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals were exposed; al Qaeda attacked the US, which in turn invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; the US Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act and, though Act II has stalled, its component parts are entering into effect through non-legislative means; George W. Bush has been re-elected; the Asian tsunami has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands. The work of CAE has evolved, shifting to another area of critical concern, bio-engineering. Here the group has recently run headlong into what one might call ‘hysterrorism’, a certain US hysteria over terrorism. The details of this storyread like a Kafka parable. One day, CAE co-founder Steve Kurtz awakes to find that his wife Hope has passed away in their Buffalo, New York, home. He calls for an ambulance, and upon arrival, the EMS personnel notice lab equipment, equipment used by CAE in its bio-art installations. It is quickly determined that Hope has died from cardiac arrest, but authorities call in the FBI and a HAZMAT (hazardous material) team, while the local news media spin stories of chemical agents, secret labs and bioterrorism. The house is quarantined, the streets blocked off, and Steve K. is detained by the FBI, who seize his computer, manuscripts and art materials. The HAZMAT team finds a strain of the bacteria Serratia marcescens , commonly used in high school chemistry classes—and used precisely because it is non-lethal and poses no biological threat. The authorities having no legal basis to hold him, Steve K. walks out of detention. Nonetheless, they keep his possessions, convene a grand jury, subpoena witnesses, and eventually bring charges— only not for bio-terrorism or biological weapons, but for mail fraud, the government charging that Steve Kurtz had illegally used the postal system to obtain the bacteria. Paradoxically, this charge of mail fraud, though much less serious, may be much easier to convict on, and the maximum prison sentence is twenty years. At the time of writing—1 February 2005—he is scheduled for a March 2 hearing. For additional information and ways to support Steve Kurtz and CAE, visit the CAE Defense Fund site at http://www.caedefensefund.org>. [2] Sources: ‘A Little History of the World Wide Web’, World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org/History.htm) and ‘Internet Usage and Growth Statistics’, S.E.O. Technologies (www.jhemans.powerup.com.au/internet_statistics/Internet_usage.htm). [3] The framework of this research can be found in my Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001). [4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ‘Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines’, trans. Robert Hurley, in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), 120-1. [5] See McKenzie, Perform or Else , Chapter 2. [6] See McKenzie, ‘Virtual Reality: Performance, Immersion, and the Thaw’, The Drama Review 38:4 (Winter 1994), 83-106. [7] See William J. Fulbright. ‘The War and Its Effects: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex’, Super-State: Readings in the Military-Industrial Complex, ed. Herbert I. Schiller. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1970). [8] Diane Vaughan. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 220. [9] See Steve Bodow. ‘Attention Internet Shoppers: E-Commerce and the Structure of the Store in Cyberspace’, in Websights: The Future of Business and Design on the Internet ed. Katherine Nelson (New York: RC Publications, 2000), 134-51. [10] See Joseph Roach. ‘The Future That Worked’, Theatre 28, no. 2 (1998),19-26. [11] For additional insight into TOYWAR, see Electronic Disturbance Theatre Hacktivism: Network_Art_Activism ed. Ricardo Dominguez ( Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, forthcoming). [12] See Bruno Latour, ARAMIS or the Love of Technology , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). [13] Deleuze and Guattari. ‘Balance-Sheet Program’, 137-8. [14] Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , vol. II trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 214-15. [15] Critical Art Ensemble. Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1996), 23, 25. Above essay reproduced from: http://www.foraysforyou.com/public/performanceparadigm/journal/issue-1/articles/hacktivism-and-machinic-performance/
Through interpersonal communication, people talk to each other and share thoughts and emotions. Communication can be both verbal and non-verbal.
Designed as an all-in-one guide, this practical, concise, and easy-to-use text is meant for courses offering instruction to students who are training to become language teachers in North America and abroad. Using practical examples, integrated tasks, sample activities and lessons, and review questions, the text introduces readers to key topics including course design, lesson planning, and classroom management. It also identifies how to teach speaking, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, with special attention to language acquisition and intercultural communication. This book was previously self-published as Teaching English: A Practical Guide, which won the 2017 TESL Canada Innovation Award for Teaching Training Resource Materials. This edition has been well updated and includes a new section on using technology in the classroom, expanded coverage of assessment, and new questions and suggested further readings in each chapter. | Author: Graeme Ching | Publisher: Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. | Publication Date: Dec 09, 2019 | Number of Pages: 378 pages | Language: English | Binding: Paperback | ISBN-10: 1773381369 | ISBN-13: 9781773381367
Let’s get to know Japan! This worksheet includes 22 pages with a great variety of activities and exercises about Japan. The materials have informative exercises about the things that Japan is famous for, such as samurai, mount Fuji, sushi, ninja, manga, and many other things! Crosswords, word searches, puzzles and other kinds of activities are included to make it a fun and interesting class. The answers and an answer sheet are included. GOOGLE SLIDES AND FILLABLE PDF VERSIONS INCLUDED! Overview: Page 1-2: Introduction Page 3-4: Geography Page 5-7: History Page 8-9: Ninja & Samurai Page 10-12: Culture Page 13-14: Traditions Page 15-16: Food Page 17-18: Martial Arts Page 19-20: Attractions Page 21-22: Reflection The following questions are just a few examples of the topics addressed in this unit: - What is Manga? - What is the difference between kendo, sumo, judo, jiu jitsu and karate? - What is the difference between a samurai and a ninja? - What are shoguns? - What is Shintoism? - What is pachinko? - What are Geishas? - What different kinds of Japanese food are there? - What is a Kimono? You might also like these worksheets: Japan (Fun stuff for elementary grades) India (country study) China (country study) North Korea (country study) Russia (country study) South Korea (country study) Keywords: Japan, country study, printable, Google Slides, Yen, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Honshu, Mount Fuji, volcanoes, emperors, Ainu, Yamato, shogun, samurai, ninja, Tokugawa shogunate, Meiji restoration, Pearl Harbor, kimono, Shintoism, Sumo, Jiu-jitsu, kendo, karate, pachinko, manga, geisha, origami, sushi, ramen.
You probably do these things all the time, but abroad, they could get you into trouble.
Exploring Intercultural Communication investigates the role of language in intercultural communication, paying particular attention to the interplay between cultural diversity and language practice. This second edition increases and updates the coverage on emerging key topics, including symbolic power, communicative turbulence, conversational inequality, stereotypes, racism, Nationality and Ethnicity talk and the impact and role of technology in intercultural communication. Including global examples from a range of genres, this book is an indispensable resource for students taking language and intercultural communication modules within applied linguistics, TESOL, education or communication studies courses.
Study abroad programs have proven beneficial for both the international student as well as the domestic community and school population interacting with the student. In an effort to promote cultural awareness, intercultural communications as well as opportunities for future study abroad program success, universities must take care to provide international students with the resources necessary to succeed while studying abroad. Campus Support Services, Programs, and Policies for International Students explores the role of university administration in successful implementation, regulation, and support of study abroad experiences. Highlighting essential topics relating to legal issues, safety concerns, curriculum development, and intercultural communication, this research-based publication is an ideal reference source for university administrators, school counselors, policymakers, and researchers interested in study abroad program implementation, regulation, and success factors at the administrative level.
Free to use unconscious bias quiz for giving inclusive leadership and management workshop and classroom training for employees.
Complaints about the authoritarian tyranny of campus activists are seriously exaggerated…
Visit profiles to view data profiles and issue briefs from the series Challenges for the 21st Century: Chronic and Disabling Conditions as well as data profiles on young retirees and older workers. The increasing diversity of the nation brings opportunities and challenges for health care providers, health care systems, and policy makers to create and […]
A new study suggests that we punish people who haven’t directly wronged us to signal our own trustworthiness.
The Culture and Diversity: Personal Identity PowerPoint was created to help give students an understanding of the factors that contribute to the development of their own personal identity. The below factors such and how these factors affect personal identity are discussed.: ✓ Heritage ✓ Family Culture and Values ✓ Character, Gender ✓ Race and Ethnicity ✓ Life Experiences ✓ Age ✓ Religious Beliefs ✓ Personality and Abilities Additionally, there are 16 questions which can be used as whole group, small group or partner discussion prompts or as writing assignments to help students gain a deeper understanding of their own personal identity. Also included are resources and conversation extenders in selected slides in the notes sections. Related Products ⭐ Acceptance and Diversity Bulletin Board Classroom Decor ⭐ BE Growth Mindset and Motivational Inspirational Bulletin Board Classroom Decor ⭐ Cultural and Diversity Awareness Bundle ⭐ Cultural Diversity and Tolerance ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ If you love this product, please consider leaving some feedback. It's always very much appreciated! By leaving feedback on your purchases, you can build up credits to use towards a discount on future TPT purchases (from any seller on TPT)! If you want to keep up to date with my sales, new resources, freebies and so much more click the green ★ under my store name! ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ Let's stay connected! Please consider liking my page on Facebook for the latest updates: The Sunny Sunshine Student Support Store ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ Please know that I spend a lot of time researching, creating, writing, and proofreading my work. However, typos or grammatical errors still sometimes occur. Please let me know if you find a typo or feel that a correction is needed, by emailing me at [email protected] I value your input to make my products the highest quality possible. Thank you in advance for your help and support! ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
\"This book is a production of the discipline of intercultural communication aiming to bridge intercultural communication research with the emerging new media studies. It facilitates comprehensive analysis, providing the necessary power to research the relationships between culture and new media through a positive, effective, and transformational analysis that brings both fields together\"--\nOver one billion people access the internet worldwide, and new problems of language, security, and culture accompany this access. To foster productive and effective communication, it becomes imperative to understand people's different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as their value systems. Reconceptualizing New Media and Intercultural Communication in a Networked Society is a critical scholarly resource that addresses the need for understanding the complex connections between culture and new media. Featuring a broad range of topics such as social presence, crisis communication, and hyperpersonal communication model, this book is geared towards academicians, researchers, professionals, practitioners, and students seeking current research on the discipline of intercultural communication and new media.
Teachers are cultural informants. The resources teachers use and their interactions with students convey meanings that are both linguistic and cultural. It is important for ESOL teachers to guide students toward integrated intercultural/language learning that will carry them through diverse life experiences. This book goes beyond theoretical discussions and provides concrete methods for integrating intercultural communicative competence into the language classroom through its inclusion of practical examples, engaging activities, and real-life case studies. Develop both the consciousness and the practical skills required to navigate the increasingly intercultural English learning classroom. Explore the topics of Intercultural Communication and Teaching Culturally Diverse Learners; The Role of Intercultural Communicative Competence in Language Teaching and Learning; Teacher as a Cultural Informant and Classroom Strategist; English for Academic Purposes Programs and Cultural Expectations; Employment Preparation Programs and Cultural Integration; and Technology and Computer-Mediated Intercultural Communication. **This title also includes a companion website with online resources.**
How To Deal With Culture Shock According to Wikipedia, culture shock refers to “the anxiety and feelings (of surprise, disorientation, uncertainty, confusion, etc.) felt when people have to operate within a different and unknown culture
New data illustrate how deeply entrenched the racial wealth gap is. The reasons traverse the historical and deliberate exclusion of people of color from economic institutions and government programs.
Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process is divided into two sections. The first half deals with the structure and the role of symbolism in Ndembu rituals, and the second, forming the main theoretical argument of the book, meditates on the relationship between the concepts of liminality and communitas that arise from his analysis of rituals, and their codependence with the concept of structure. Briefly stated, communitas and structure are two opposed yet mutually necessary modes of social life: the concept of structure is defined as “society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’” (96) Communitas, on the other hand, is defined as “society as an unstructured or rudimentary structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.” (96) For Turner, societies must maintain a balance between communitas and structure in order to survive, generally taking the form of a cycle where structure is temporarily suspended during rituals that reignite a sense of communitas in various ways depending on the type of ritual. I’ll fill in these definitions soon, but this is the general direction his philosophical musings take. Victor Turner’s understanding of ritual relies heavily on the theoretical framework developed by Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 book The Rites of Passage, so it’s helpful to lay this out up front. Van Gennep articulates a tripartite analytic framework describing the structure and progression of rituals: 1) Separation from everyday activities, social relations, and/or cultural conditions, undertaken as a response to some crisis, either in an individual’s life or in the life of a society, where the individual or group undergoing the ritual suspends their involvement in everyday social life. 2) Liminality, the result of the exit from normal social life and the entrance into a threshold phase where everyday notions of identity, time, and space are suspended. During the liminal phase, ritual participants engage in mimetic activity reenacting the crisis motivating the ritual. In so doing, the structures of everyday social life are both given a mythical explanation and justification and also challenged, or to use van Gennep’s terms, in the liminal phase “structure” and “anti-structure” are simultaneously enacted. 3) Reintegration or reincorporation of the individual or group back into normal social life, but more deeply than before. Having confronted both the justification for and the problems arising from social structures and practices, ritual practitioners reenter society with a clearer understanding of the norms and obligations incumbent upon them, and of their role in society. Crises are brought about by “every change of place, state, social position and age,” (van Gennep, quoted in Turner, 94) undergone either by an individual (eg. coming-of-age, marriage, assumption of a social or political station, death, etc.), a group within society (eg. a birth or death within the family), or the society as a whole (eg. war, the harvest, changes in leadership, etc.). For van Gennep, all rituals share this general structure, which effectively integrates individual life processes and social events into a unified framework that fosters social stability and cultural vitality. Chapters 1 and 2: “Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death,” and “Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual” These first two chapters are mostly dedicated to in-depth analyses of particular Ndembu rituals, so I decided to ignore the argumentative and descriptive structure of these chapters and focus on his main theoretical points. If you want more detail on Ndembu rituals, ask me: The Importance of Studying Religious Rituals in Social Science – Turner criticizes just about every social scientist he can think of for either ignoring religious ritual entirely in their analysis or engaging in inadequate analysis of it. Social scientists studying Central Africa have altogether ignored the central importance of rituals in understanding tribal societies, while other anthropologists, even those who dedicated their lives to studying religion (some of the highlights of this list include Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Freud, and Weber) and recognize its importance in social life, explain (and ultimately explain away) religious rituals by regarding them as “the product of psychological or sociological causes of the most diverse and even conflicting types, denying to them any preterhuman origin.” (4) Turner argues that this mode of explanation is implicitly theological, interpreting “primitive” religions as reflections of socioeconomic or psychological factors. Turner, on the other hand, recognizes that “religious beliefs and practices are something more than ‘grotesque’ reflection or expressions of economic, political, and social relationships; rather are they coming to be seen as decisive keys to the understanding of how people think and feel about those relationships, and about the natural and social environments in which they operate.” (6) A society’s religion is its repository of values and ways of interpreting not only their individual and social lives, but also their universal relationship with nature. The Practice of Ethnography – Turner also criticizes ethnographers who engage in field work solely to conduct quantitative studies on social practices. Turner begins studying the Ndembu tribe in this way, but consistently feels that “I was always on the outside looking in, even when I became comfortable in my use of the vernacular. […] Eventually, I was forced to recognize that if I wanted to know what even a segment of Ndembu culture was really about, I would have to overcome my prejudice against ritual and start to investigate it.” (7) In order to understand how Ndembu culture functions and what its meaning is, Turner realizes that he has to discover what a ritual’s “movements and words mean to them,” and so engages in a series of interviews with the local Chief Ikelenge, and both ritual specialists and ordinary practitioners to discover their interpretations of each aspect of a ritual. Turner looks for patterns and consistencies between different accounts, and eventually is able to articulate the “standardized hermeneutics of Ndembu culture,” the ways the Ndembu people understand their ritual and the meaning they attribute to it (9). Rituals as Responses to Social Crises – A ritual is required either when a social norm is violated or when different social norms come into conflict with each other. For instance, female infertility is explained in Ndembu culture by the contradiction between two obligations incumbent upon married women: to stay with and please her husband, and to honor her maternal village, as the Ndembu practice matrilineal descent. Infertility is understood as the wife’s obeying her husband to too great an extent and moving away from her maternal village, thereby angering the spirits of her maternal forebears who consider their daughter to have abandoned them, and who thus curse her with the physical malady of infertility. The Isoma ritual resolves this crisis between social obligations placed upon the wife by enacting a healing ceremony where the woman (a) proceeds away from an ikela (hole in the ground) representing death and witchcraft and towards an ikela representing health, restoring her fertility. The woman in this procession (b) walks from one ikela to the other through a ditch in the ground, representing the power of death and her ancestors’ shades, and ends with her rising out of the burrow, representing her liberation from the power of her forebears. Around the burrow on the left are female adepts (past Isoma veterans) and on the right male adepts (men whose wives are Isoma veterans), and the woman in her procession (c) walks between these groups, representing her balancing of the contradictory obligations placed upon her by her male husband and her female ancestors. Symbols – The hermeneutics of rituals are expressed in symbols. Turner defines symbols expansively as the “basic building-blocks, the ‘molecules,’ of ritual,” (14) since in Ndembu ritual “almost every article used, every gesture employed, every song or prayer, every unit of space and time, by convention stands for something other than itself,” and the Ndembu practitioners are well aware of this (15) A symbol for Turner has three separate but closely related properties: 1) Condensation – one concept represents many things at the same time. For instance, in the Ndembu Isoma ritual, the binary of red rooster/white hen represents oppositions such as death/life, blood/water, hot/cold, while a white rooster/red hen represents female/male, novices/adepts, ghosts/living, among others. These associations need not be logically related, and can even be contradictory. 2) Unification of disparate referents – built on the property of condensation, symbols are able to represent concepts drawn from different “domains of social experience and ethical classification.” (52) So again, the opposition white rooster/red hen can simultaneously represent concepts drawn from sexual, political, familial, and individual growth experiences. 3) Polarization of meaning – A symbol’s different referents unite concepts drawn from (a) physiological and (b) social and moral experience. For instance, the mudyi tree represents breast milk and matriliny, while the mukula tree represents blood from circumcision and masculine maturity. Symbols thus “unite the organic with the sociomoral order, proclaiming their ultimate religious unity, over and above conflicts between and within these orders.” (52) If the organization of symbols in terms of binary oppositions sounds a bit Lévi-Straussian, it should. A single symbol (ie. red hen) represents a host of concepts from different spheres of experience and forms of classification, organizing the totality of social experience into a unified (if sometimes paradoxical) schema, lending it coherence and intelligibility. Symbols are organized in terms of binary pairs that also organize thought. There are, though, a few key differences between Turner and Lévi-Strauss. First, Turner argues that symbols and binary oppositions only appear “as the confrontation of sensorily perceptible objects,” rather than that of axioms or concepts that underlie the meaning of objects (42). In other words, while for Lévi-Strauss binary oppositions are oppositions between concepts that transcend any given application in a ritual or myth but act as their organizing principles almost as a set of unwritten rules unconsciously circumscribing a culture’s thought-patterns, for Turner oppositions between concepts are revealed within ritual contexts by the ways different objects are interpreted and understood when placed in relation to each other. Symbols are physical objects or actions that represent different aspects of daily life and give them coherence as elements of a unified framework within the context of a myth. Second, Lévi-Strauss argues that symbols are solely cognitive classifications for experiences, whereas Turner believes that symbols have an emotional or evocative aspect as well. The emotions encountered in people’s life-experiences are evoked by and channeled into ritual symbols, such that not only can people experience joy in a ritual, but also so that negative emotions such as hate, fear, and grief, can be given a safe outlet that doesn’t threaten actual social unrest. Therefore, “the whole person, not just the Ndembu ‘mind,’ is existentially involved in the life or death issues” symbols represent (43). Ritual Space – Once practitioners enter the liminal phase of ritual, ordinary conceptions of space are abandoned. Ritual space is organized by binary oppositions articulated along three axes: longitudinal (backwards/forwards), latitudinal (right/left), and altitudinal (up/down). As seen above in the Isoma ritual, each spatial axis represents a different element of the actions required to resolve the wife’s crisis, and symbols have different meanings when placed along each different axis. For instance, the white hen/red rooster in the latitudinal axis represents women/men, in the altitudinal axis it represents ancestral spirits/living people. Symbols gain their multivocality through representing aspects of each spatial axis, and space is organized in rituals in terms of the symbols lying along each axis. Chapter 3: “Liminality and Communitas” As individuals enter into rituals, they become “liminal entities,” and thus gain special attributes while losing their normal identities. First, liminal entities lose their identity as defined by social structure: they have “no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system – in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands.” (95) Liminal entities have no social identity, but are rather united as equals within the ritual context as uniquely lowly beings who are utterly obedient to their ritual instructors or masters. This is especially noticeable in situations where liminal entities are undergoing a transition towards a higher social status. In Ndembu chieftain rituals, for instance, the future chieftain is, the night before his accession to his new office, portrayed as a slave and is submitted to the abuse and arbitrary power of the entire community, forced to undergo violent and humiliating abuse. This treatment, far from being a gratuitous display of hatred by the weak, in fact has a formative function. The future chieftain in his liminal state learns the true meaning of arbitrary authority and abuse of power, and in suffering this violence displays the self-mastery and control over vicious characteristics such as greed, pride, and anger, required to perform his duties as a good ruler. Thus, following van Gennep’s formula, the liminal entity is reintegrated into social life with a deeper understanding of his obligations as chieftain. Second, united as abased equals, liminal beings also gain a peculiar status recognized as both sacred and dangerous. As they leave social structure, liminal beings encounter each other for the first time as social equals, stripped of the social identities which previously divided them, “giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society.” (97) This bond between equals without status, what Turner terms communitas, is often associated with a sacred status attained by individuals who “(1) fall in the interstices of social structure, (2) are on its margins, or (3) occupy its lower rungs.” (125) Communitas is constructed by individuals who are marginal or weak figures in society, and whose special social bond hence falls outside of normal social relations. This gives rise to a society’s recognition of communitas and the liminal beings out of whom communitas is constructed as simultaneously sacred and dangerous. Liminal beings possess what Turner calls “the mystical powers of the weak,” or magical powers and sacred potency attributed to those who lack social influence and political power (109). Turner notes a number of instances across cultures where marginal or weak figures such as strangers, foolish people, women, millenarians, and even hippies, while socially separated and even at times ostracized, possess peculiar spiritual capacities and powers. At the same time, however, as these groups fall outside of social characterizations and structures, the rest of society looks upon them with suspicion and fear, such that liminal states are surrounded with “prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions.” (109) Referencing Mary Douglas, Turner argues that liminal entities and the communitas that arises around them challenge social boundaries and classifications, thus being labeled “polluting” or “dangerous” and become surrounded by restrictions and taboos strictly regulating where and when communitas can occur. Chapter 4: “Communitas: Model and Process” Here Turner describes in full the opposition between structure and communitas. Structure and communitas are two models of social organization, normatively describing opposed forms of social identity and practice of social interaction. Structure as a model describes society as a “system of social positions,” based on socioeconomic or political status (131). Individual identity within structure is based on an individual’s status, role, or occupation within society, along with their standing relative to other individuals within society. In essence, structure describes society as it normally exists in light of socioeconomic and political realities, with divided segments or hierarchies that separate individuals from one another and give them regulated and mutually recognized identities. Structure’s model of regulated identity is complemented by regulated forms of relationships that exist between individuals. Certain acceptable forms of interaction are prescribed for relationships between peers and between superiors and inferiors that delimit and regulate social interaction and exchange. Communitas, on the other hand, describes relationships “between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals.” (131) In communitas, individuals lack social identities and therefore confront each other as concrete, unique, and equal individuals. Without a regulated form of social identity, communitas also lacks a regulated form of human interaction. Turner makes use of the spontaneous form of interaction and community Martin Buber describes in his book I and Thou. Whereas structure is governed by norms and institutions, in communitas individuals are engaged in a “direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities.” (132) However, communitas is also fragile. As a spontaneous and immediate form of social organization, communitas eventually succumbs to the pragmatic requirements of social life, thereby becoming structure once again. Turner therefore differentiates three types of communitas: 1) Existential or Spontaneous Communitas – this is the communitas that arises among concrete individuals when social structure is abandoned, generally within liminal situations such as rituals. 2) Normative Communitas – communitas that has evolved into a type of social system due to “the influence of time, the need to mobilize and organize resources, and the necessity for social control among the members of the group in pursuance of these goals,” (132) but still retains the influence and purpose of achieving existential communitas. This often occurs when sectarian schisms separate originally unified movements, prompting individuals to exert top-down control over the different sub-movements, creating social structures. Two examples Turner gives of this history are the Franciscan Order and Caitanya’s Vaisnava bhakti movement. 3) Ideological Communitas – utopian models for societies that permit permanent communitas. Utopias are visions of social structures that embody the “optimal social conditions under which such experiences [of communitas] might be expected to flourish and multiply.” (132) These utopian communities are very rarely implemented (one example he gives is that of groups organized around an apocalyptic revelation), and when they are they invariably fail due to the base necessities of replicating biological and social life within a community (as a professor once said to me, “all utopias fail when deciding who has to take out the trash and who has to clean the bathroom”). The ideal type of communitas is existential communitas, the state where liminal beings confront each other without such dividing factors as social position, private property, rank, age, often times sex or race, instead embodying universal principles of justice, solidarity, and equality before a deity. Individuals therefore exist in a state of perfect equality, giving rise to community based on Buber’s “essential We,” or “a community of several independent persons, who have a self and self-responsibility.” (Buber, quoted in Turner, 137) There is an existential aspect to Buber’s We: as social structures are abandoned, the interests and divided consciousness of individuals under structure also departs, allowing for individuals to experience the independent being of each other. Individuals no longer recognize each other in terms of themselves and their own identities (eg. I am your boss; you are thus my underling, etc.), but rather allow others’ uniqueness to present itself independently. For Turner, this We relationship between equal individuals who appreciate and respect each other’s uniqueness is the quintessential social experience arising out of liminal states. The necessities of practical existence, however, inevitably assert themselves, forcing even individuals within conditions of communitas to recreate a form of structure. From the perspective of existential communitas, this necessity appears as a degeneration, a sliding of ideal spontaneous community back into regulated and structured social life, but Turner suggests that communitas also exercises a restorative or regenerative function upon the individuals within these shifting forms of community. In communitas individuals experience ecstasy, standing “outside of the totality of structural positions one normally occupies in a social system.” (138) Turner argues that communitas and structure are best conceived as opposed but alternating phases in a functioning society’s life. During periods where communitas predominates, individuals liberate themselves from the difficulties of living within social structures, thus experiencing power and joy with a magical quality, giving rise to symbolic thought, art, and religion. In other words, the generalized social bond existing between individuals during periods of communitas provides vitality to a culture and restores the sense of unity that makes possible social life. Both structure and communitas require each other to exist: without communitas, structure’s regulated patterns of social interaction and inequality eventually deteriorate and give rise to tensions between groups, and without structure communitas cannot reproduce life. Turner therefore concludes that “spontaneous communitas is nature in dialogue with structure,” or that the two models of social existence are required in order to maintain social life (140). Chapter 5: “Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal” To return to some of the themes elucidated in Chapters 1 and 2, Turner argues that the communitas created within rituals is a way of revitalizing social structures in light of a crisis they experience. For instance, in the Ndembu Isoma ritual, communitas is created in the process of healing the wife’s infertility, allowing her to reestablish normal social relations with both her husband and her matrilineal village and ancestors. Contradictions within structure are thereby resolved through the ritual enactment of the tension. Ritual, however, can also serve as a platform to critique social structure, as well as providing an outlet for the resentments that build up as a result of inequalities. In no case is social structure actually threatened, but liminality can suspend social structure in certain ways that ameliorate the negative aspects of structure. Turner therefore differentiates two types of liminality and the rituals in which they are found: 1) Liminality that characterizes rituals of status elevation – a ritual subject becomes a liminal entity when irreversibly raising their position within social structure. 2) Liminality that characterizes rituals of status reversal – collective calendrical rituals that generally correspond to some point in the seasonal cycle are characterized by a reversal of social relations, where those who normally hold low status within social structure become for a time authorities over those who are normally superior, who in turn have to accept ritual degradation. An instance of a ritual of status elevation we have already seen is the Ndembu chieftain ritual, where the man who is about to become chieftain must submit to communal abuse. Individuals who are undergoing critical points of transition in their biographies, including birth, puberty, marriage, death, entry into certain organizations, and political status elevation, are subjected to ritual abasement. For individuals to raise their status, Turner argues that in ritual they must become “some kind of human prima materia, divested of specific form and reduced to a condition that, although it is still social, is without or beneath all accepted forms of status. The implication is that for an individual to go higher on the status ladder, he must go lower than the status ladder.” (170) As we saw earlier, the point is that individuals, when raising social position, gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of that position by confronting the possible abuses of that condition (eg. the Chieftain experiencing the abuse of power), thereby gaining a deeper understanding of that transition’s ethical significance. Calendrical rites are often associated with points on the harvest cycle, when the society undergoes a crisis regarding whether it will be able to reproduce biological life and thus social structure as well. At the time when social structure is reproduced, the inequalities and tensions latent within that structure are most keenly felt, so a kind of ritual release is used to allow for social life to continue. Turner uses an argument of Anna Freud’s to demonstrate how rituals of status reversal have this releasing function. The weak mimic those who cause them fear as a defense mechanism against the object of their fear, such that they are “unconsciously identifying themselves with the very powers that deeply threaten them, and, by a species of jujitsu, enhancing their own powers by the very power that threatens to enfeeble them.” (174) Children, for instance, mimic their parents, particularly the punitive aspects of their personality, as a way of domesticating the fear their authoritarian parents inspire. In rituals of status reversal, then, social underlings mimic their superiors as a way of domesticating the resentment they feel over their conditions of inequality, using a panoply of symbolic devices such as masks and animal representations of their superiors to mock them and/or deny their humanity, thereby debasing them. At the same time, the inferiors also engage in illicit behavior, temporarily mimicking their superiors in an exaggerated fashion to symbolically balance the normal hierarchies that divide societies. In so doing, inferiors gain the “mystical powers of the weak” described above to temporarily balance social hierarchies, while releasing their resentments. The essential aspects of social inequalities, however, are not challenged. Social rank is reversed, not eliminated, such that the idea of hierarchy is retained even within ritual, while the caricatured representation of the strong and the ritual enactment of illicit behavior reaffirms “the reasonableness of everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates in society,” thereby recreating the roles and social relations involved in structure (176). In rituals of status reversal, a type of communitas is created not only between different groups of inferiors, but throughout the society. By mocking the superiors, the inferiors bring the strong down to their level at the bottom of the social ladder, causing the superiors to “merge with the masses, or even to be symbolically at least regarded as the servants of the masses. […] For here too there is not only reversal but leveling, since the incumbent of each status with an excess of rights is bullied by one with a deficiency of rights. What is left is a kind of social average, or something like the neutral position in a gear box, from which it is possible to proceed in different direction and at different speeds in a new bout of movement.” (202) Rituals of status reversal essentially wipe the social slate clean, allowing for normal social hierarchies to continue without the tensions that build up as a result of them. Conclusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLOuPqG2DY4 (Note: A lot of the last two chapters are filled with different examples Turner gives of rituals embodying the types of liminality and communitas he has been describing. For space purposes, I haven’t included these, but if you want some, ask me.)
H. Richard Milner's new book helps educators understand how to incorporate talk of race, class and inequality into their lessons.
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How immigration and cultural values affect what people do with their faces
Writing qualitative research is a complex activity. Yet there is relatively little research about novices' experiences in learning to write this genre. The purp...
Children's picture books that dismantle cultural food shaming and racism against American Asian & Pacific Islanders.
A projected 50.7 million pre-K-12 students will return to the classroom in U.S. public schools this fall. As the school year gets underway, read key findings about America’s students and their experiences.
Students taught with a social justice framework will ideally have a stronger sense of what is just and fair and choose careers and lifestyles that support their communities. Over time, students look at current and historical events-even their own actions-through the lens of social justice, promoting better decision-making. Building trust impacts the bottom line for global companies, and multilingual communication is a core pillar for effective growth. It is essential to promote this trust through social justice and educate learners on intercultural and multilingual communication. The Handbook of Research on Fostering Social Justice Through Intercultural and Multilingual Communication explores innovative teaching, learning, and assessment practices that foster social justice and enhance intercultural and multilingual communication in primary, secondary, post-secondary, and higher education. It demonstrates the value of adopting a social justice lens in education by broadening and strengthening the evidence base of the impact that this can make for students, educators, and society as a whole. Covering topics such as game-based assessment, social adaptation, and plurilingual classroom citizenship, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, librarians, pre-service teachers, teacher educators, government officials, educational managers, linguists, researchers, and academicians.