Is there something morally wrong with cultural appropriation in the arts? I argue that the little philosophical work on this topic has been overly dismissive of moral objections to cultural appropriation. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophers working on epistemic injustice have developed powerful conceptual tools that can aid in our understanding of objections that have been levied by other scholars and artists. I then consider the relationship between these objections and the harms of cultural essentialism. I argue (...) that focusing on the systematic nature of appropriative harms may allow us to sidestep the problem of essentialism, but not without cost. (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the (...) institutional environments of cultural studies; and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

Now, for the first time, a philosopher undertakes a systematic investigation of the moral and aesthetic issues to which cultural appropriation gives rise. Cultural appropriation is a pervasive feature of the contemporary world Young offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the moral and aesthetic issues to which cultural appropriation gives rise Tackles head on the thorny issues arising from the clash and integration of cultures and their artifacts Questions considered include: “Can cultural appropriation result in (...) the production of aesthetically successful works of art?” and “Is cultural appropriation in the arts morally objectionable?” Part of the highly regarded New Directions in Aesthetics series. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

We analyze ethical policies of firms in industrialized countries and try to find out whether culture is a factor that plays a significant role in explaining country differences. We look into the firm’s human rights policy, its governance of bribery and corruption, and the comprehensiveness, implementation and communication of its codes of ethics. We use a dataset on ethical policies of almost 2,700 firms in 24 countries. We find that there are significant differences among ethical policies of firms headquartered in (...) different countries. When we associate these ethical policies with Hofstede’s cultural indicators, we find that individualism and uncertainty avoidance are positively associated with a firm’s ethical policies, whereas masculinity and power distance are negatively related to these policies. (shrink)

This paper is a cross-cultural examination of the development of hunting skills and the implications for the debate on the role of learning in the evolution of human life history patterns. While life history theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the evolution of the human life course, other schools, such as cultural transmission and social learning theory, also provide theoretical insights. These disparate theories are reviewed, and alternative and exclusive predictions are identified. This study (...) of cross-cultural regularities in how children learn hunting skills, based on the ethnographic literature on traditional hunters, complements existing empirical work and highlights future areas for investigation. (shrink)

I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms (...) of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk. (shrink)

Trolley problems have been used in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments and behavior. Most of this research has focused on people from the West, with implicit assumptions that moral intuitions should generalize and that moral psychology is universal. However, cultural differences may be associated with differences in moral judgments and behavior. We operationalized a trolley problem in the laboratory, with economic incentives and real-life consequences, and compared British and Chinese samples on moral (...) behavior and judgment. We found that Chinese participants were less willing to sacrifice one person to save five others, and less likely to consider such an action to be right. In a second study using three scenarios, including the standard scenario where lives are threatened by an on-coming train, fewer Chinese than British participants were willing to take action and sacrifice one to save five, and this cultural difference was more pronounced when the consequences were less severe than death. (shrink)

한국사회는 다문화사회(Multi-cultural Society)가 형성되면서 새로운 사회적 갈등이 생겨났으며, 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위한 다양한 다문화 정책 등이 필요하다. 따라서 본 논문은 다문화사회에 진입한 한국사회의 다문화갈등을 해결하려는 중요한 방법의 하나가 다문화교육이라고 보고, 다문화교육의 여러 범위 가운데 하나의 문화적 소 통방법과 원리를 모색해 보고 그 의미를 찾아보는 데 그 목적이 있다. 미래의 다문화사회는 여러 가지 국제적 환경에 따라 더 복잡해지는데 이러한 상황에 대 비하는 새로운 다문화주의를 모색해야 하기 때문이다. 이 연구에서는 다문화를 이해하는 언어적 문화적 소통을 위한 새로운 방법을 위해 다음과 같이 구체적으로 (...) 살펴보았다. 먼저 제1장에서는 우리나라의 다문화의 양태와 추이를 분석하였다. 제2장에서는 우리나라 다문 화사회를 구성하고 있는 문제의 특성을 살펴보았다. 제3장에서는 간문화주의(inter-culturalism) 의 개요를 살펴보고, 이 간문화주의를 바탕으로 할 수 있는 문화소통의 방법을 다루었다. 이상의 연구를 통하여 미래 다문화 교육의 한 부분인 문화적 소통을 살펴본 내용은 한 국의 다문화주의의 발전과 연구에 다음 몇 가지 면에서 그 효용성을 찾을 수 있을 것이다. 먼저, 다문화주의의 새로운 이론 정립과 구체적 실천성을 높일 것이다. 다음으로 정부와 지방자치단체의 종합적이고 실질적인 실행 시스템의 확립에 도움을 줄 수 있을 것이다. 마 지막으로 문화적 소통을 위한 통합적 목표의 정립과 건강한 집단지성을 형성하는데 필요 한 가치로서 상생(相生)과 중용(中庸)의 의미를 되살려 볼 수 있을 것이다. 본 논문에서 언급한 문화적 소통의 방법은 우리의 전통적 가치와 문화를 창조적으로 더 발전시키는 하 나의 전환점이 될 수 있을 것이다. (shrink)

RESUMEN El Servicio de Extensión Bibliotecaria es el medio adecuado que tiene la biblioteca para expandirse hacia la comunidad, de esa forma permite que aquellos usuarios que no la visitan hagan uso de sus servicios y documentos. Sin embargo, pocos conocen su historia y evolución a través del tiempo. Se muestra una revisión bibliográfica y el estado actual de este servicio. Los elementos incluidos en esta recolección abarcan publicaciones periódicas, sitios web, revistas electrónicas, publicados entre el siglo XVIII y el (...) presente. El documento pretende brindar una aproximación histórica al servicio de extensión bibliotecaria en las bibliotecas. ABSTRACT The Library Extension Service is the appropriate method a library has to expand into the community in a way that users who don’t visit it use its services and documents. However, just a few people know its history and development through time. A bibliographic review is shown along with the current state of this service. The elements included in it cover regular publications, web sites and electronic journals published from the XVIII century to the present time. The paper expects to provide a historical approach to the library extension service in libraries. (shrink)

Centering on the cultural transformations of China since late 1970s and covering a diverse of topics in the field, this collection of articles presents a multi-dimensional narrative on the dynamics, dilemmas and characteristics involving this giant process.

Book Information Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights. By Ayelet Shachar. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 2001. Pp. xiv + 193. Hardback, Aus.$140. Paperback, $48.95.

AimThe article presents the results of a study of psychological factors of consumer loyalty concerning electric vehicles. An electric scooter was used as an example of an electric vehicle. The study involved a total of 165 people in China and 150 people in Russia. The study aimed to compare the psychological characteristics of Russian and Chinese consumers based on their attitudes toward an innovative product such as the electric scooter.Hypotheses The identity of Russian and Chinese consumers and the perceived individuality (...) of the product differ significantly; The proximity of the consumer's identity and the image of the product enhances the positive attitude toward the product; Risk strategies of consumer behavior of Chinese and Russians differ.MethodsThe questionnaire included the scales: “Measuring brand personality” by J. Aaker, “Measuring consumer identity” elaborated by Morozova and Antononva, The risk behavior scale by Vasilenko, Tkachenko.Results The first hypothesis was confirmed: there were revealed differences in the consumer behavior of the respondents of these two groups concerning in their self-perception, as well as in the perception of electric scooters. The Russians perceive an electric scooter as energetic, young, extravagant, modern, and unusual; the Chinese are down-to-earth, family-oriented, real. The hypothesis that the correlation of the consumer's identity and the individuality of the product is one of the psychological factors that determine the consumer's loyalty to a product is also confirmed. The Chinese consumers' identity is more close to the product individuality and their loyalty to the product is higher. Risk strategies of consumer behavior of Chinese and Russians significantly differ in terms of satisfaction with choosing of vehicle, the frequency of its use, and the importance of family approval of the choice of vehicle. The results can be used in the marketing strategy development. From the scientifical perspective, these results contribute to an understanding of the consumer loyalty mechanisms associated with consumer identity. (shrink)

Recent work in psychology on ‘cultural cognition’ suggests that our cultural background drives our attitudes towards a range of politically contentious issues in science such as global warming. This work is part of a more general attempt to investigate the ways in which our wants, wishes and desires impact on our assessments of information, events and theories. Put crudely, the idea is that we conform our assessments of the evidence for and against scientific theories with clear political relevance (...) to our pre-existing political beliefs and convictions. In this paper I explore the epistemological consequences of cultural cognition. What does it mean for the rationality of our beliefs about issues such as global warming? I argue for an unsettling conclusion. Not only are those on the ‘political right’ who reject the scientific consensus on issues like global warming unjustified in doing so, some of those on the ‘political left’ who accept the consensus are also unjustified in doing so. I finish by addressing the practical implications of my conclusions. (shrink)