Session 2: Contemporary Identity
5th Global Conference
Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
Scottish Dancing and Patterns of Gender Identity
Sergey Alferov
UKA (United Kingdom Alliance of Professional Teachers of Dancing and Kindred Arts), Moscow, Russia
The paper focuses on several gender identity patterns implicitly present and/or applicable to various existing forms of traditional Scottish dancing. Dwelling on participant observation of Scottish dance communities worldwide, the author tries to find out whether gender identity patterns (i.e., ways of thinking and perceiving reality) are relevant to understanding or describing current situation there. The paper applies semiotic methods to most existing forms of Scottish dance regarding the latter as an issue of choreography, dance history, cultural anthropology etc. The main purpose of the work remains, after all, general and theoretic. Taking various dance forms as an example, the author tends to map the field for further research of contemporary identity thinking and its relevance to current gender, social and cultural phenomena as well as to the life of different social and cultural groups nowadays and in the past.
Evidence provided in the paper leads the author to a conclusion that identity thinking has been generally overused when dealing with complicated social realia such as traditional dance forms and practices. Identity thinking, or ‘semiotic labeling’, when applied to gender issues in Scottish dancing, proves to be ambiguous, sometimes vague, and quite often misleading. Important and convenient a perceptive tool identification might be, it should be considered carefully and applied with accuracy, taking its epistemological limitations into account. The relevance of identity thinking proves to be highly dependent on circumstances it is used in and therefore can never be taken for granted.
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Who are we?: The Rediscovery of Hong Kong Identities in the Disappearing Architecture
Ho Hon Leung
Chair of Sociology Department; Chair of Center for Social, Science Research at SUNY College at Oneonta, State University of New York College at Oneonta, USA
The return of the Hong Kong sovereignty back to China in 1997 provides a timely case study to explore how the sudden change of identity of a place is de/re/constructed through the contested architectural space. We theorize that architecture is a sign that is read and interpreted through which its functions and meanings are evoked in the context of social, political, economic changes of the place. This paper analyzes this identity construction discourse in the landscape of architecture in Hong Kong. We examine how the decision making and the process of de/re/constructing two contested architectural sites (the Queen’s Pier and the Wan Chai Market) for city redevelopment reflect the convoluted relations between the national identity (China) and local identities (Hong Kong). Series of protests, including hunger strike, could not save the Queen’s Pier which bears heavy colonial sentiment and was demolished in 2008. The people won the case for the outdoor Wan Chai Market but the Bauhaus style indoor market could not survive. The paper argues that the final fate of the two sites is a result of a series of political struggle between the state and the citizens. The analysis of the negotiation of the identities is based on the views reported and portrayed in the media such as news, films, video clips on YouTube, the printed materials for the protests, the court decisions, and interviews in the field. Through the close comparison of the discourse of these two cases, we can gain a valuable insight into the intertwining relation between ethno-cultural identity and architecture, and the paper concludes: 1) architecture provides an excellent symbolic and visual testimony to document the fluidity of place identity construction; and 2) the dynamics of identity searching reveals the complex issues of place representation and the ownership of the city.
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A Barbarian as a Metaphor of an Ethnic Identification in Russian Discourse
Sergey Yakushenkov
Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
It is well known that the metaphor of Barbarian since the Ancient Greeks was used to define ethnic groups living outside the borders of the Greek states. It was an antonym for civilized member of Greek polis. The term defined a savage, wild, cruel person.
This meaning has almost universal character and can me met in different times and among different ethnic groups. A good example of this metaphor is the Chinese politics that formed under a strong pressure of the same concept which named all peoples outside the Chinese stated as barbarians and only Chinese citizens were called civilized. These criteria were used even for Europeans who reached Chinese shores in 15 century.
But the Russian discourse had a large scale of meaning of this metaphor. The image of barbarians has still different connotations in Russian public life. From the one had it has the same meaning defining non-Russian or non-orthodox Christian confessions. At the same time the metaphor Barbarian in the beginning of the 20 century was used widely to define Russians by some Russian poets as Valeriy Brusov or Viacheslav Ivanov. It lost traditional negative meaning, getting some positive or optimistic characteristics as a symbol of future changes and transformations. The symbols of wildness, savageness and destruction were re-worked by some Russian poets and writes and were express in the image of Scythians. It influenced a lot many literary circles in Russia and was expressed clearly in Alexander Block’s “Scythians” to define Russians with some messianic messages. This transformation of the word into ethnic self-identification marker shifts it usage from outer spaces to inner.
At the same time the metaphor of Barbarian is used now in Russian discourse to define the Stranger. This makes a strong contradiction to the previous Russian tradition of the 20th century.
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