I think mantillas are absolutely beautiful, so I'm wondering if it would be okay for me to incorporate one into a costume? I'm aware that they're part of Spanish culture, so I just want to be sure.

I make phone cases as a hobby and I make matching ones for me and my boyfriend sometimes. For our next theme we had just watched “The Book of Life” and we had the idea to do La Muerte and Xibalba though I’m Filipino and my boyfriend is Ecuadorian, so neither of us are Mexican. Would it be culturally okay to do this?

Hi Yall! So I feel like this is a commonly asked question, but I haven't seen any responses or answers that weren't a few years old, so here it is. How do I start a career or start getting any sort of experience in this field? I'm about to finish my BA (Culture Studies/European Culture), and I have no clue where to look. Because of financial reasons, I can't immediately start a Master's, but I feel like everything I'm looking into requires one. For reference, my interests skew more towards History and culture rather than anthropology. Things like museums, universities, and even government jobs are what I think the next steps would be, but I have no idea... Any advice? (Oh, and in case it is helpful Im from the US but studying in Europe)

I stumbled across several statements in the sub and just wanted to ask out of interest what definition of "cultural appropriation" you have learned / use.

I learned that cultural appropriation is the „title“ of a concept. The concept includes four types of cultural appropriation, of which "cultural exploitation" is one. But many equate this category with "cultural appropriation", and that’s not my understanding. So I’m curious! :)

Literature that we work with at uni:

• Hans Peter Hahn (2011): Antinomies of cultural appropriation, Introduction.
• Richard A. Rogers (2006): From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation.

My friends and I are working on a project that will deal with how social media affects women's view of themselves and of each other and are looking for more material we could read. Does any of you have any recommendations?

The movie Weekend at Bernies involves two employees on a business vacation with their boss. Their boss gets killed in a mob hit, and for complex reasons the two employees have to hide the fact their boss, Bernie, is dead. So they put sunglasses on his corpse and take him for boat rides etc. to make his day seem normal to observers. In typical slapstick fashion, the corpse gets knocked around as the two employees desperately try to hide the fact Bernie's dead.

It's hard to imagine a similar movie being made with a female victim. For some reason men are fair game for physical fodder but not women. I'm not disagreeing with this viewpoint, but I don't know how to explain it. Does it have anything to do with conscription treating men as disposable weapons of war?

Throughout history, the accumulation of wealth has often been intertwined with morally ambiguous or ethically questionable activities. The Sassoon family and Purdue Pharma provide compelling case studies of how fortunes can emerge from controversial enterprises. Both dynasties amassed considerable wealth through the trade of opioids — the Sassoons in the 19th century, and Purdue Pharma in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Despite the social and ethical implications of their business practices, both families sought to reshape their public images through substantial cultural investments, aiming to leave behind a more favorable legacy. This article offers a comparative analysis of these two cases, focusing on their paths to wealth, their involvement in the opioid trade, and their contributions to arts and culture.

It seems like multiverses are becoming so common place in fiction. Movies, books, tv shows, video games, comic books, ect., it seems like everything now has multiple timelines or parrallel universes. Is there any critical explorations of the rise of this trope?

I was 12 years old, we had a "heritage" day. Being in a mostly white school, I was one of the only students with Indian heritage.

My granddad was a Dougla. (Indian/Trinidadian). My grandmother was white, in the 70s she bought a sari to wear to a family wedding.

I had long admired this garment and it was passed to me. I wore it for heritage day, proudly showed off my heritage.

I remember changing back into my uniform in the bathroom and I heard one of the boys saying "can't believe she dressed as a P**i".

I know he had no reason to say that but it has stuck with me. Now I am too scared to wear the sari, not because of what he said, but because I'm scared people will accuse me of cultural appropriation.

I am tan and have some Asian features but generally I am white passing. I'm desperate to embrace what my granddad wanted but I'm scared of being judged by people who don't know better.

“In Rimbaud, I see myself as in a mirror”

— Henry Miller, in Time of the Assassins

The expression of seeing oneself “as in a mirror” is widely considered to have originated in Corinthians 13. In this Biblical passage, Paul describes our knowledge of God as being partial and dim. What we are left with – in order to interpret during our lives – is encoded, unclear, and enigmatic. Whatever humans can find of God in life has been refracted many times over, thus the way that we see ourselves (i.e. God before the revelation) is also refracted. Some translations substitute “mirror” for “glass, dimly”, omitting that self-reflection, but making reference to said muddiness in which we know ourselves. 

Rimbaud is fittingly (considering his idol status) subject to a similar hermeneutical experience. Henry Miller’s study of Rimbaud — Time of the Assassins — is exemplary of such blinded interpretation. Miller clearly adores Rimbaud, yet he can never fully reach him—know him. The author is not an academic in the traditional sense, so it would be expected that such a study is not fully academic in its nature; still, Miller jumps from experience to experience, meanwhile doing his best to grasp Rimbaud. We read about Miller’s experience with the poet, and then the poet’s experience with his life. The study may be better suited to explain what Rimbaud does to even the most apt reader.

At the ripe age of 20, when writing Une Saison en Enfer, the poet wrote of his life with a totality like that of a pensioner on their deathbed. The extended poem – in which he travels through the underworld, rejecting his blood, his virtue, and his sanity – announces his renunciation from his relationship with poet Paul Verlaine, as well as his relation to poetry. For him to adopt such viewpoint is slightly paradoxical: as Une Saison en Enfer was completed, he turned away from literature and began life. It seems as though his spirit – engendered by his twenty years alive – resigned itself to hibernation, while his body lived another seventeen. 

Rimbaud’s late years (his 20s and 30s) were – by most accounts – a bit displeasing to imagine. It is certainly those years that the likes of Patti Smith glorify. Hard to picture that enfant terrible, ogled at by Verlaine, to resign the rest of his life to coffee, gunpowder, and ivory. While Rimbaud was perhaps never the peasant which he was framed to be (any rural person can be a farmer in the eyes of city-dwellers)that Romanticism which he was shrouded in disappears at his estate in Harar. It takes quite a bit of will to imagine his revolt, itself a resignation from rebellion, as brave or transgressive. In The Rebel, Camus writes of this resignation as cowardly, for he succumbed to the material order, deciding to spend the rest of his life as a “bourgeois trafficker”. 

Yet, that inwardly revolt that the poet lived by, for at least the first twenty years of his life, comes to define his work. The Symbolist school, and Rimbaud in particular, were the first to admit the inadequacy of the God-Nature relation. Unsurprisingly, poetry which glorified nature dominated the 17th and 18th centuries. Then, the Impressionists, Transcendentalists, and Romantics had all become insufficient for the nearing of the turn of the century. Christianity had started to fall behind while, at the same time, industrialisation had reduced any discourse about the transcendence of Nature to the background. Ten years after Une Saison en Enfer, Nietzsche would publish Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Some decades later, God would be replaced by the machine. 

Rimbaud existed in that temporality between the emergence of the Machine as God — of that mechanical acceleration — and that last opportunity to find God as present. The Futurists lived to see the machine polished, dynamic in its slick, automated movement. Before that, it was a huffing, smoggy, puttering, and imperfect project. That dandyish, Romantic past had left. Before the future could come, there was a great gulf where the interior revolt had to take place, in order to substitute the lack of the exterior one. 

Such a limbo (purgatory) existed similarly in the popular style of the syntax. Today it seems as though our basis for verse is overly didactic. Somewhere along the 20th century poets came to an agreement that ambiguity and essence would not emerge from excess anymore, but instead from poverty. Such a tradition is arguably deeply American (E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound). Perhaps that dryness and grit that those poets write with is an effort to distinguish themselves from the softer, dandyish European. 

"Enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings, objective description, symbolist poetry tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form which, however, would not be its sole purpose, but furthermore that, while serving to express the Idea in itself, would remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be allowed to be seen deprived of the sumptuous lounge robes of extraneous analogies; because the essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself. So, in this art, the pictures of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves; these are presented as the sensitive appearance destined to represent their esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas."

— Jean Moréas in the Symbolist Manifesto

The Symbolist cause is slightly surprising on paper, it lends itself to seem more radical than we would consider it today. The style is of course loud, bewildering, and slightly occult in its tone. Yet it is much more figurative than more contemporary poetry. Much of the power that the Symbolist verse (and prose) possesses lies beyond that purposeful obfuscation which all poetry — to some extent — aims to imbue. It is rather in its vitality, or drunkenness, that it deserves to distinguish itself from the old ‘educated’ Romantics. 

That vitality is what makes Une Saison en Enfer arguably the greatest work of Rimbaud. Some have advised the reader of Une Saison en Enfer to be in a state of drunkenness to truly live the poetry. Rimbaud translator Paul Schmidt wrote: “My task led me irresistibly from one page to another, and off the page finally altogether. I ran after him. I sought out streets and houses he had lived in. I drank and drugged myself in taverns he had known. My derangements went beyond his, on and on.” Is reading Rimbaud ultimately a chase? Despite his great talents for visual and emotive, affecting writing, the reader is always lagging behind. There is no slow way to read Une Saison en Enfer, even in the title it demands a leaping forward, a quick and frightening descent, followed by an ascent. The poem is certainly interpretable, it is riddled with allegories and mythologies of the pagan and Christian kind.  Yet rather than serving the literary and cultural interpretation, they serve the intuitive (psychological) kind. The analogies, while being outwardly referential, act upon the interior of the reader. At the centre, there remains only Rimbaud and the reader.

For a poet so deeply loved by so many intelligent writers and artists, it seems as though the most common way Rimbaud serves people is through a psychosexual fascination. Somehow that one photo of the poet, at age seventeen, becomes referenced significantly more than any of his verses. When his works are so undecipherable, so abundantly filled with distortion, admirers of his work become forced to resign to idol worship. Seemingly the most appropriate way to love, and learn from Rimbaud.  

“I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

— Arthur Rimbaud

https://open.substack.com/pub/atmidnightalltheagents/p/the-poetry-of-excess?r=2eypst&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I have an Arabic student who is new the US, only speaks Arabic (I’m not sure which country he moved from), but when he sees me in the hallway he smiles and stomps his foot like a soldier. I was just curious if this is a sign of respect? I teach middle schoolers. Thanks!

I see on YouTube and tiktok like when it comes to archer they make the bow of the highest and best quality, same as ink, chalk, food and so much more etc… is it part of their culture respectfully?

Hi all,

I'm looking for a book or scientific studies (ideally both) that discuss the dominant cultural elements of Western society, such as individualism, capitalism and consumerism, anthropocentricity, science/scientism etc.

To clarify, I am not looking for books or studies that discuss one of these elements in detail, but rather those that discuss what the dominant elements of Western society are, and how they influence people's perceptions of and behavior in the world.

I'm also grateful for any thoughts and ideas on how I might come by such information, e.g. through scientific fields that study cultural influences etc.

Thank you in advance!

my boyfriend wrote this substack article and i thought it might be enjoyed here, would love to hear thoughts/feedback on it, check it out if you want to!!

https://open.substack.com/pub/atmidnightalltheagents/p/on-the-fisherman-aesthetic?r=2eypst&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I listen to Nymphet Alumni and Silent Generation and they're my all time favorite podcasts. Alexi on Nympet Alumni and Nathan on Silent Generation both studied visual and critical studies which has left me craving more podcasts from people from this field of study. Does anyone have recommendations?

I'm looking for some writing on the histories, cultural politics, political economy and just general observations on collecting, especially in the current stage of what we might call late capitalism. In particular, I am interested in what happens or how can we understand collecting as a cultural practice when it moves from niche social and cultural circles to the mainstream. I'm most familiar with Pokémon TCG so will briefly use this as a quick example. When I started as a kid in the late 1990s, yes these were made explicitly for collecting but had a very simple value system and rarity, stars and "holos" where the unique ones that were prized the most (though not necessarily in monetary terms; at least not for me as a kid). More recently, this value system expanded drastically, and now you have dozen added markers of value and rarity, ultra rares, super rares "full illustrations" rares etc etc. Add to this the incredible expansion of the industry both in production and consumption and you end up with soooo much collectibles that it appears to defeat the intrinsic point of collecting? An interesting by product is a whole host of resources and guides both written and audio/video on "how to start collecting", recognising that totality is really not an option, or at least not a financially feasible one.

My educated guess would be that this kind of collecting has its historical origins in colonial practices of exploration and theft, later embodied in the 18th century imperial museum or indeed the earlier and more private cabinet of curiosities. How does this logic change in the late 19th, early 20th century with baseball and other sports cards, cards from cigarette packets etc. through to the post-WWII to today?

Any thoughts or reading recommendations would be appreciated!

Hey! I'm a master's student in gender studies, currently gathering material for my thesis, which will focus on the construction of sexual and gender identities in the digital era.

I was wondering if any of you could help me find books, papers, pieces of art, documentaries, websites...or even other subreddits related to new online trands and digital cultures, and queerness.

Thanks!

Hey!

I am conducting research on the theme of public space and I want to include knowledge about illicit drug distribution in my argument.

I have studied cultural theory and I want to present my thoughts and findings around my experiences during Xmas/NYE in a luxury destination for holidays. I am confident (sure) that I could see illicit drug use and distribution there that I consider it an important part of that culture (like every culture but that’s not the topic).

This presentation will be included in a public playlist on different dominant streaming platforms. How can I share personal experiences and observations without being legally vulnerable?

I am not conducting this research while enrolled in a university program. I am doing it independently. And I know that there are so many writers and journalists who have published about this. I just wanna know how I can technically be legally safe.

I am based in Europe. Thanks!

Hi, so just to start with a bit of background on my work so far: I studied zoology in my undergraduate, then did a postgraduate degree in journalism. I now work as an on-ground correspondent in one of the major national newspapers in the country, Hindustan Times. Btw, I am from India and will be considering universities abroad.

I now want to do a master's in culture studies. My future plans include either joining major newspaper or magazine publications and pivot towards science and culture journalism (since I already have a good understanding of science as well), or working for organisations like NatGeo or Discovery or Vogue or New Yorker, or working in the film industry and assist in writing stories with strong cultural influence. But as funding is a big issue and my job prospects matter after I graduate, I am reaching out to anyone out there who would have better insights than me on how to navigate this. If you have any opinions or insights, please feel free to drop a comment.

Thanks in advance!