ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHINESE OPERA IN SINGAPORE

This article weaves the trajectory of Chinese opera in Singapore with the country's political development. Starting in 1965, the year of Singapore's independence, it attempts to debunk the myth that national culture is resistant to global culture by describing the state's systematic erosion of local culture. From the late 1970s onward, with economic progress, state fears of “Westernisation” led to a centring of Chinese culture in national culture; this was followed by a mini-revival of Chinese opera that coincided with the emergence of Confucian ethics as national discourse and as a culturalist explanation for the “Asian miracle” of the 1980s. This article shows that globalisation's effect on local cultures is not a straightforward process. Instead, it is a complex relationship where the flourishing of a local culture depends on the changing recognition and valuation of cultural identities, ethnicity, and language as cultural capital. This in turn implicates the structural features of national policies and globalisation processes that determine the recognition and valuation of this cultural capital. The use of “cultural capital” as a conceptual tool to isolate the cultural and social components of Chinese opera demonstrates that a local culture flourishes or withers according to the effects of globalisation and national policies on such cultural and social factors.     

TEXTURES OF THE MODERN: VIENNESE CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL HISTORY AND URBAN STUDIES

The following essay recapitulates the findings of a research project on Viennese modernity, which since 1995 has involved a group of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and sociologists examining the different phases in the history of the city in the twentieth century from a transdisciplinary perspective. The point of departure for the project was its participants' dissatisfaction with a myopic image of twentieth-century Vienna increasingly constricted to literary and aesthetic practices, which has focused on the ‘golden age’ of high culture in the Habsburg capital of the fin-de-siècle while omitting crucial periods of the city's history, in particular the political and cultural crisis between 1918 and 1938, and the phase of material and cultural reconstruction after the ‘collapse of civilization’ that was Nazism.     

Confucius or Mozart? Community Cultural Wealth and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants

Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.     

Scale and periodicities of recorded music consumption: reconciling Bourdieu's theory of taste with facts

Recent data show that middle class consumers have an omnivorous pattern of consumption or tastes, contrary to Bourdieu's predictions of a snob pattern of consumption. To explore the implications of Bourdieu's framework for omnivorousness further, we make use of the anthropological view of consumption to analyse Spaniards' musical tastes and consumption. Results showed a variety of omnivorous patterns of musical consumption associated with upscale consumers: a higher position on the social ladder was linked to more omnivorous tastes and greater use of technologies that free the consumer from fixed periodicities in music consumption. We found that different types (economic, social and cultural) and levels of capital do configure subjects' structural constraints and hence, their tastes in musical genres and the technological media used to consume them. Consequently, the combination of all three types of capital helps to explain the omnivorous consumption (elitist but inclusive as well) of upscale consumers.     

THE ROLE OF PARENTS IN THE MAINTENANCE OF SECOND GENERATION VIETNAMESE CULTURAL BEHAVIORS

Although previous research shows that biculturalism is adaptive for the children of immigrants, in the United States there is a great deal of pressure for assimilation. This study examines whether parents who model cultural behaviors and encourage interaction with co-ethnics increase the likelihood that their adult children will engage in cultural behaviors. Data are from a survey of second generation Vietnamese members between the ages of 18 and 30 (N=66) living in Atlanta. Results indicate parents' cultural behaviors (speaking and reading) affect adult children's cultural skills and the ethnic composition of their social networks enhances the likelihood that their children's networks are ethnically based. Moreover, the parents' influence is direct, not mediated by children's social networks. Mothers exert stronger influence than fathers, but respondents' own gender does not predict cultural retention. We discuss results in terms of implications for maintaining ethnic cultures in a context that encourages assimilation.     

'SALSA NO TIENE FRONTERA': ORQUESTA DE LA LUZ AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF POPULAR MUSIC

This article discusses key dynamics in the globalization of popular music, more specifically the interplay between technology, social and commercial structure, and meaningful sound forms. It analyses Orquesta de la Luz, an all-Japanese salsa band, as an example of the transgression of ethnic, geographical, linguistic and national boundaries of Latin American music. The band demonstrated the intertwined nature of the global and the local, in addition to the historical formation of modern Japanese culture. Their worldwide fame derived from their musicianship, their synchronicity with the world music boom, and finally the diffusion of digital technology in popular music production and consumption. This article argues that economic and technological conditions are as much constitutive of the band's unique practices as are aesthetic ones. It then goes on to question the dichotomies, ‘universalism vs. particularism’ and ‘creativity vs. copy’. This discussion builds towards an examination of the relationship between purist aesthetics (hyperrealism) and the Japanese concept/method of learning; it also explores the notion of cultural authenticity that located the activities of the band. Paradoxically, Orquesta de la Luz demonstrated that Japanization does not necessarily imply synthesis with vernacular elements for purist musicians. Theoretically, this ‘becoming Other’ reveals a parallel capacity for self-exoticization and self-orientalization with respect to Japanese identities. Orquesta de la Luz's musical search for the roots of otherness is closely tied with the feeling among many Japanese youth for the loss of Japan's ‘genuine’ cultural identity. Another focus of this study, then, is to shed light on the relevance of exoticism in the band's foreign reception and to assess their Latino image in the Japanese context.     

COMPARATIVE EVIDENCE OF INEQUALITY IN CULTURAL PREFERENCES GENDER,CLASS, AND FAMILY STATUS

ABSTRACT

In a recent work, Erik Olin Wright proposed using the word clender to designate the interaction term between class and gender, emphasizing that class and gender interact in generating effects that are supplemental to their independent effects. This article reports the application of Wright's suggestion to the empirical example of cultural consumption in estimating the interactive effect of class and gender on cultural consumption in five countries. The empirical application presented here also considered interactions between gender and family status. The findings revealed three interesting variants in the way clender works: (1) a disadvantaged consumption score for women of the lower classes in Italy and Sweden; (2) an advantage in cultural consumption for women of the upper classes in West Germany and the United States; (3) no cultural consumption differences between men and women of different classes in Israel. The interaction between gender and family status was also manifested in different ways in the different cases. This article adds to the literature that juxtaposes gender and class within the sociology of consumption and draws new connections between social and cultural boundaries based on an international comparison.     

THE RISE OF THE ECLECTIC CULTURAL CONSUMER IN DENMARK, 1964–2004

Existing research on cultural stratification and consumption patterns rarely presents a cross‐time comparative perspective and rarely goes back before the 1980s. This article employs a unique series of surveys on cultural participation collected in Denmark over the period 1964–2004 to map the historical development of three distinct cultural consumption groups (eclectic, moderate, limited) also identified in previous research. We report two major findings. First, the eclectic (or “omnivorous”) cultural consumption group existed as far back as the 1960s and has since the 1980s comprised about 10 percent of the Danish population. Second, the major stratification variables—income, education, and social class—are strong predictors of cultural eclecticism in Denmark, and the predictive power of these stratification variables appears not to have declined in any substantive way over the past 40 years.     

WHOS EMMA AND THE LIMITS OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Cultural studies is a response to political crisis: it is the institutional memory of failed revolutions. Can cultural studies move beyond memory to action? This article describes the writer's involvement in a non-profit, volunteer-run punk storefront in Toronto.     

PUBLIC PEDAGOGY AS CULTURAL POLITICS: STUART HALL AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURE

This article argues that Stuart Hall's work provides an important theoretical framework for developing an expanded notion of public pedagogy, for making the pedagogical central to any understanding of political agency, and for addressing the primacy of public pedagogy and cultural politics in any viable theory of social change. Hall's work becomes particularly important not only in making education crucial to the practice of cultural studies, but also in providing a theoretical and political corrective to recent attacks on cultural politics, which cut across ideological lines and include theorists as politically diverse as Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin.     

Cultural transmission,educational attainment and social mobility

This paper examines the relationship between cultural socialisation, educational attainment and intergenerational social mobility. Picking up on debates about the transmission of cultural capital and social advantage, we use data from the Taking Part Survey of England to analyse how far socialisation into cultural activities and encouragement play a role in educational attainment, intergenerational mobility and in the reproduction of class. This survey has unprecedented data on whether respondents had been taken to museums/art galleries, theatre/dance/classical music performances, sites of historic interest, and libraries when they were growing up. This is buttressed by information on how much parents or other adults encouraged the respondents to read books or to be creatively active in different domains of the arts, literature and music. Using these rich measures of childhood socialisation, we can show that part of the effect of parental class on educational attainment is due to the transmission of this kind of cultural capital. Moreover, this transmission also has a direct effect on the level of educational attainment. In a similar fashion, respondents who have experienced a higher intensity of cultural socialisation are more likely to be upwardly mobile, and likewise, cultural transmission has a positive effect on the prevention of downward mobility among service class children. These results are discussed in the light of current issues in British mobility research and its treatment of cultural aspects of class and mobility.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF CULTURAL THEORY TO UNDERSTANDING THE EMBEDDEDNESS OF ARGUMENTS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

The aim of this article is to explore the contribution of cultural theory to understanding the embeddedness of arguments in the implementation process. The application of cultural theory to studies of implementation entails investigating the implementation of reforms as different normative arguments pursuing different organizational solutions. Institutional theory posits that implementation of reforms in organizations depends on how well the values defending the reform match the basic values of the organization. Cultural theory contributes to institutional theory in two ways: firstly, cultural theory is an instrument for investigating the values that defend the reform; secondly, cultural theory posits that an organization consists of more than one value base. Consequently, cultural theory does not offer a fixed prediction concerning the outcome of implementation.     

BEYOND THE BIBLE AND THE CROSS: A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF CHINESE ELDERS' PARTICIPATION IN CHRISTIAN CONGREGATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

Mainland Chinese elders constitute a unique group in popular Christian participation and conversion. This work aims to explore the social contexts and cultural facets of Mainland Chinese elders' Christian practice in the United States. Based on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 20 Mainland Chinese elders as well as participant observation at selected congregational settings, this study suggests that the existing theories on aging and religion as well as religious practice among immigrants are inadequate to explain Chinese elderly immigrants' participation in Christian congregations in the U.S. Instead, social isolation and lack of social support system resulting from immigration and aging process serve as the major drive for the elders to pursue social and cultural recognition from Chinese Christian gatherings. Besides religious services, social service functions of churches and opportunities for fellowship are other factors that explain Chinese elders' church involvement. In conclusion, we argue that social and cultural services are needed to particularly assist Chinese seniors to adjust and adapt to their elderly lives in the host country.     

INTERFACING FEMINISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN HONG KONG: A CASE OF EVERYDAY LIFE POLITICS

Cultural studies, as a cultural and political re-articulation of common sense, knowledge and community practices, aims at opening up new cultural space for criticisms, reflections and action. Originating from the women' movement and later flourishing in the academy as well, feminism espouses similar aims to cultural studies. Both cultural studies and feminist/gender studies have a strong sense of intervening into everyday life politics. This paper is an attempt to discuss how feminism and cultural studies interface with each other, largely based on examples of gender-related everyday life politics taken from the feminist movement in Hong Kong. It will examine issues concerning the conflict of consumption and female subjectivities, the reconceptualization of home and housewives, and the representation of everyday life for women and history writing. It is argued that by blurring, negotiating or deconstructing the boundary or division between positions, identities and domains–such as subject and object, housewives and workers, private and public, personal and political, consumption and production–the re-articulation of knowledge about ‘victim’, ‘exploitation’, ‘home’ and ‘history’ in the feminist movement will not only provide the movement with new impetus and insight to reconsider its strategies in fighting for more cultural, social and economic space for women and other marginal groups at large in Hong Kong, but will also ‘metabolize’ the newly developed discipline of cultural studies in Hong Kong by providing a platform to strengthen the dynamic arm of cultural studies education and research. Based on her feminist and teaching experiences in Hong Kong, the author has highlighted activism and pedagogy as the two important dimensions of feminism and cultural studies in this paper.     

ALL INDUSTRIES ARE CULTURAL

While the conceptual categories of cultural industries and cultural consumption have been useful tools that have yielded valuable insights in a number of studies, they, nevertheless, pose certain problems. This text argues how their usage, in fact, obstructs certain research possibilities. Highlighting the ‘cultural’ character of certain specific industries and forms of consumption can also limit, if not impede altogether, the possibilities of analyzing other industries and forms of consumption from a cultural perspective. Doing away with such categories may open new possibilities for analysis and research. The main focus of this text is the category of ‘cultural industries’ though it also refers in passing to the complementary category of ‘cultural consumption.’     

Distinctions in the making: A theoretical discussion of youth and cultural capital

The aim of this paper is to address the dynamics of contemporary cultural capital by interrogating what counts for young people as valuable cultural resources. Considerable support is given in later scholarship for Bourdieu’s model of the social space, as the overall volume of economic and cultural capital combined is regularly found to be the most important axis of opposition, just as in Bourdieu’s work Distinction. Yet, while Bourdieu found the second axis to be structured by an opposition between those with cultural rather than economic capital, and vice versa, many later studies instead find oppositions between the young and the old to structure the second axis. Up till now, this finding has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we hold that considering age-related inequalities offers a powerful way of interpreting recent developments in order to understand the changing stakes of cultural capital, and also their interaction with the intensification of inequalities in economic capital. After a theoretical clarification of the relationship between cultural capital and youth, we will synthesise research on young people and explore the significance of youthful cultural consumption. We will pragmatically focus on the 15–30 years old and put a particular accent on Norwegian studies in our review, as they are the most sophisticated in this genre. Four areas are explored: the restricted role of classical culture; the appeal of popular culture; digital distinctions, and moral-political positions as markers of distinction.     

SWITCHING REGRESSION ESTIMATES OF THE INTERGENERATIONAL PERSISTENCE OF CONSUMPTION

The influential economic theory of intergenerational transfers predicts a negative connection between credit constraints and intergenerational mobility of consumption. Existing work has used bequest receipt to signal a parent's access to credit markets when investing in his children's human capital. However, measurement error in bequest receipt generates misclassification error and, in turn, attenuation bias. Employing switching regressions with imperfect sample separation to deal with this error, we show that the intergenerational persistence of consumption in the United States for credit constrained families is much higher than that for unconstrained families, contrary to what the theory implies. This means that children from constrained families are more likely to have consumption levels similar to those of their parents than children from unconstrained families. Our results are robust to the choice of bequest variables and other predictive variables in the switching equation. (JEL C13, D12, E21, J62)     

CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND THE STUDY OF DEVIANCE

In this work I argue that the study of deviance as distinct from crime is no longer a productive specialty in sociology. I attribute the cause of the demise of the field to its over reliance on the assumption of cultural relativity. In contrast to the relativist position, I argue that behavior that causes harm will be more likely to be condemned by public opinion and that there will be less variation in attitudes toward behaviors that cause more harm. Using data from the General Social Survey, I find support for the hypothesis that a “deviant” sexual behavior that can have a victim, extramarital sex, will be more consensually condemned than “deviant” sexual behaviors that do not have victims, premarital sex and homosexual sex. I recommend that future research focus on the study of values, as the validity of cultural relativity can be empirically evaluated.