Статті в журналах з теми "Ritual reinvention"

The main objective of this study is to examine the Islamic and Malay elements that are acculturated in the Dabus dance ritual of Perak, Malaysia. The focused group of this study is the Dabus of Tanjung Bidara village, estimated to have been established since the 1818s. However, throughout that time, the perception of the Malay community has not been strong yet, specifically regarding the ritual relationship of the Dabus dance with Islamic values. In fact, not infrequently, Dabus dance rituals are seen as contradicting the values of Islam itself. It is even seen over as skewed by some of the Malay community. However, in terms of history, meaning, practice, and ritual function, the Dabus dance itself cannot be separated from Islam. The study was designed as a field study. The data collected is qualitative and analysed critically using ritual theory, cultural symbols, and acculturation. Data was collected through interviews, field observations, and documents. Other data sources include a review of text, photos, videos, and relevant articles. The findings show that 1) the process of Malay-Islamic acculturation in Dabus dance rituals has been since the arrival of Dabus dance in the Malay peninsula and continues until now; 2) one of the most significant Islamic-Malay acculturation methods and strategies is the reinvention of the Dabus dance over time; 3) Islamic-Malay acculturation includes not only physical forms (forms, structures, and ritual elements) but also non-physical aspects (doa, zikir, selawat, berzanji, belief).

This article builds a framework for the analysis of the Inka Empire’s (1400–1532 CE) expansion in the Peruvian highlands. Drawing from recent archaeological excavations at the site of Canchaje (Huarochirí), I propose that the Inka built upon cultural familiarities between them and their subjects by using ritual emplacements (rock outcrops and plazas) as arenas of mediation. At the same time, the construction of mutual legibility enabled subjected communities to maintain and redefine their cultural practices in ways that survived the Inka Empire. By recasting the Inka from foreign conqueror to new kin within local ritual systems, the people of Huarochirí reinvented their traditions to garner political agency. Using archaeological data and colonial-period documents, I show that local agency informed empire-building, leading to the reinvention of local traditions. Ultimately, my work shows how mutual legibility was built on the ground while exploring specific instances of negotiation through ritual.

The essay explores the connection between a family's history and a traditional holiday recipe. Kieflies, or kifli, are Hungarian walnut crescents baked by the author's family at Christmas. The tradition of baking kiflis, like the family itself, has no clear, authentic origin myth; rather, the passage of the ritual from one generation to the next is marked by distortion and reinvention: the mystery of the family's Hungarian Jewish origins; the development of a non-consanguineous lineage, from Irish daughters-in-law to Korean adoptees; and the strategies of evasion, survival, storytelling, adaption, and imagination that both obscure and enrich the ritual. The author has assumed the role of kieflie-baker to her adoptive family, applying her own innovations and interpretations to the tradition, as her mother, aunt, grandmother, and great-aunts did before her.

This article examines how pilgrimages are constructed as a shared ritual of seeking sacred traces, thus creating and reproducing the sacred landscape. It studies an annual event with three connected Finnish Karelian Orthodox processions as a pilgrimage from an anthropological perspective. The event combines various motives, goals, and participants through a similar construction of the sacred landscape, with rituals of nding and creating the sacred in and for the landscape with personal experiences and stories of the imagined past. These processions, one of which crosses the border with modern Russia, attract participants motivated by both religious and heritage tourism. The article draws inspiration from Laura Stark’s notion of a ‘cult of traces’ and engages with pilgrimage studies and theories to offer an analysis of how various acts such as religious rituals, storytelling, and taking pictures are combined in the reproduction and reinvention of the imagined past and the creation of a marked meaningful present to construct and sustain a sacred landscape, thus forming a pilgrimage.

This paper examines the cultural repertoires of the youthful, ‘militant’ faction of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC) in Nigeria, pointing to ways in which violence and ritual can be interpreted both as an instrumentally rational strategy of power struggle and as a form of symbolic action with cultural meanings. The OPC case strongly challenges the bifurcation of tradition and modernity, given the way the group appropriate culture in negotiating Yoruba identity, while also retaining democratic rhetoric. It argues that the activities of the OPC constitute not stable, bounded manifestations of culture, but rather fluid, ambivalent and paradoxical ethnic-power relations and formations.

Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.

Abstract The Renaissance Superstructure charts the sixteenth-century reinvention of what Morgan Ng calls the superstructure: a typology of elevated defensive corridors that emerged during the Middle Ages and once traversed many European cities. Not unlike private helicopters today, such pathways afforded rulers secure and privileged mobility, enabling them to travel between their urban and extramural strongholds while remaining high above the chaos of the street. Against all odds, superstructures continued to thrive well into the early modern period, despite their military vulnerability in the age of artillery warfare. By morphing from utilitarian defenses into monumental systems of circulation, they served the rising bureaucratic, ritual, and symbolic demands of absolutist courts. The unlikely survival of an obsolescent architecture opens a window onto the complex dynamics of technical evolution and cultural change.

The development of Christianity as a non-Western religion since the middle of the 20th century has generated changes that distinguish it from the expressions of faith inherited from the West. Christian religious innovation and new ways of expressing the faith have become the hallmarks of African Christianity. One way in which these religious changes are discernible is the use of “signs and tokens”, that is, physical substances that in the hands of religious functionaries acquire a sacramental value and that for example serves as support to the sorts of interventionist ministries associated with Pentecostal/charismatic ministries. A classic example of the new sacramental substances is the widespread use of the anointing oil. The anointing oil has become an important “point of contact” in African Christian rituals of healing and supernatural interventions. The use of oil for anointing is not necessarily new in the historic Christian traditions. However, in contemporary African Christianity, it has been reinvented and instituted in healing and deliverance and exorcism rituals that go beyond what was familiar in the older religious traditions. In this essay, we reflect on new sacraments also re-designated as signs and tokens such as the reinvention of the anointing oil as a therapeutic substance in contemporary forms of African Christianity. The new ritual order and the perception of sacraments as therapeutic substances helps us to understand what non-Western Christians, through popular religious innovations, consider important in a faith whose liturgical standards were originally set by Western missionaries.

AbstractThis article discusses the significance of dress codes and clothing in postcolonial Myanmar’s successive legislatures. Burmese representatives have since the 1950s been strongly encouraged to wear dignified garb and non-Western dress when carrying out their duties in parliament. What does it tell us? The contribution of this study based on field interviews and the analysis of newspaper reports and parliamentary procedures, is threefold. It first sheds light on Myanmar’s understudied parliamentary history and some of its startling institutional continuities despite decades of military rule. It then shows how the fashioning and reinvention of traditional attires by Burmese parliamentarians has accelerated the pace of decolonisation, while serving as an effective tool of representation. Lastly, it argues that the ritual of dress in parliament has contributed to a persistent reification of identities, thereby reinforcing the politicisation of ethnicity in an already fragmented Myanmar society.

This article explores recent ritual developments in the Iranian religious culture honouring Ali-Asqar (d. 680 CE), the infant son of Imam Husayn. In 2003, a new ritual, the Husayni Infancy Conference, was introduced. The ritual is the only public Muharram assembly dedicated to women and their infants. Based on observation and interviews, I identify ritual transformations, terms of institutionalisation, and the staging of rituals and their structure, and I also examine the objectives behind the Conference from the perspectives of the organisers and participants. I argue that the organisers seek to promote new interpretations of the significance of the Battle of Karbala. This objective is shared by some participants whereas many continue to seek out traditional reasons to commemorate the Battle, such as receiving God’s blessings. Attending large ritual gatherings also offers opportunities for socialising and empowerment.

Многие традиционные религиозные праздники на Сицилии несут в себе символизм, связанный с идеей плодородия растительности и человека, возвращения жизни и изобилия, и демонстрируют временную связь с производственными циклами основных сельскохозяйственных культур. Такие символические и временные связи особенно очевидны в случае трапез, устраиваемых по обету в праздник святого Иосифа (19 марта). Виды и форма блюд, приготовляемых по этому случаю, театрализованные элементы обрядов, сопровождающих «священную» трапезу, реальные и виртуальные участники этих обрядов (Святое Семейство, апостолы, так называемые «вирджинедди», «старички») ясно отсылают к системе аграрно-хтонических представлений, свойственных многим европейским и средиземноморским крестьянским культурам. Кроме того, время, когда отмечается праздник, имеет очевидную связь с весной и прорастанием пшеницы, отражая потребность в критический момент в защите сверхъестественных сил, проявляющих, несмотря на внешнюю христианскую коннотацию, хтонический и связанный с потусторонним миром характер. Numerous traditional Sicilian religious festivals have a symbolism related to plant and human fruitfulness and to the return of life and abundance and they reveal a temporal connection with the productive cycles of the main agricultural products. These symbolic and temporal connections are particularly evident in the case of votive banquets set up for Saint Joseph (March 19). The types and forms of foods prepared, performative moments that accompany the sacred meal, and the ritual actors who consume it (the Holy Family, the apostles, the virgineddi [small virgins], the vicchiareddi [little old men]) clearly refer to an agrarian-chthonic ideology typical to numerous Euro-Mediterranean peasant cultures. Moreover, the time when the festival is celebrated has an evident relationship with the spring and the germination of crops and reflects the desire that this critical moment be protected by supernatural forces that, despite the surface Christian references, are rooted in chthonic beliefs connected to the aft erlife.

Over the past few decades, a flood of historical scholarship has been spawned by the groundbreaking works of Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and others who have illustrated how a host of traditions were creations invented in the recent past to inform modern identities. The rituals of the British monarchy, the trappings of Scottish Highland culture, and many other traditions were revealed to have anything but ancient origins. Examination of such inventions, Hobsbawm argued, provided, among other things, a means to observe broader historical shifts. The intention of this article is not to illustrate another example of a tradition invented in the recent past. Rather, it seeks to examine how longer-standing traditions have been subject to related processes of reinvention. Some recent work, even if not written to theorize on reinvention, could be read through such a lens. Work in memory studies, for example, has shown how broad notions of national, regional, or local “tradition” could be reshaped based on how and which historical events were remembered. Works on “sites of memory” have similarly shown how conceptions of traditional objects and places can shift due to the fluctuation of memories attached to them. Beyond memory studies, scholars of theological traditions, often confronted with themes of universal truth and intergenerational change, have also produced works that could be viewed through the prism of reinvention. Kurt Schori demonstrates, for example, how the transmission of theological tradition through the written word could lead to submerged reformulation as different generations constructed linguistic meanings according to temporally specific circumstances. While such work could be read through the lens of reinvention, I would argue that more explicit consideration of the dynamics of reinvention is needed both to expand our knowledge of such processes and to develop theoretical models that characterize its diverse occurrences. I would also suggest, as Hobsbawm does with invented traditions, that examination of reinvention provides a means to lay bare symptoms of broader historical shifts.

The rising importance of the tea business among the Bulang people of Yunnan province, Southwest China, is intimately linked to Theravada Buddhist ideologies and practices. Non-reciprocal merit-making provides a sense of control, and this is particularly important in an increasingly uncertain economic environment. More and more people were ready to engage in high-risk trading, and new rituals emerged precisely at a time when profit margins increased rapidly. The reinvention of local rituals helped people to control risk-taking and to morally legitimize ambiguous market behavior. The result is strong synergies between the ways uncertainty and risk are being addressed in the tea economy and in local religious practice: economic processes are changing religious practices just as much as religious practices are making a difference in economic behavior.

La masacre de Bojayá ocurrió en el 2002 en la cuenca media del río Atrato (Pacífico colombiano) y produjo la muerte masiva, violenta y privada de ritual de aproximadamente 98 personas. Por más de 18 años los familiares y la comunidad atrateña han buscado que sus seres queridos fallecidos a causa de este crimen de lesa humanidad habiten la vida de los vivos como ancestros y ángeles protectores. Para ello realizaron, reinventaron y crearon prácticas rituales que han supuesto la expansión temporal de su ejecución, la agencia del saber mortuorio de los expertos locales y el diálogo e interpelación con prácticas rituales foráneas. Este artículo presenta una etnografía sobre el entretejido ritual agenciado para que esos difuntos lleguen a puerto seguro y puedan descansar en paz.

Carnival as a research object has been studied from a multiplicity of perspectives: folklore studies, European ethnology, social and cultural anthropology, history, sociology, etc. Each of these disciplines has enriched the literature by focusing on different aspects of the event, such as its participatory nature, its transformative potential (at an individual or collective level), and its political dimension broadly conceived. The present article reviews this scholarship and uses it to analyze the contemporary Parisian Carnival, which has tried to revive the nineteenth-century Promenade du Boeuf Gras tradition on a local and translocal level through its creative collaboration with the carnival of Cherbourg, Normandy. I argue that, through satire and other politicized carnival rituals, the recent protagonists of Parisian Carnival (Les Fumantes de Pantruche) have reinvented the festivities and influenced Norman Carnival, thus extending the boundaries of belonging in both cities.

La infancia es el lugar privilegiado de la memoria, lugar donde Carlos Fajardo Fajardo, de la mano de su conmovedor libro Ínsula del viento, ejerce un ritual de escritura evocativa, depositaria ella de acontecimientos que se actualizan, recrean o se reinventan por medio de la expresión poética que es una fábrica del tiempo. Construye para tan esmerado ceremonial una ínsula, un dominio personal, sobre cuyo territorio gobierna su imaginación, espacio que podrá ser también la casa inmortal o el patio, la patria pequeña, mundo misterioso, espiritual y en cuyos linderos habita el asombro.

This study argues against the common perception that the Qing court theatre was a closed cultural institution. It suggests that this theatre developed in conjunction with popular performance traditions outside the court that were stimulated by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Through close readings of a set of ceremonial dramas (yidian xi) commissioned by the Empress for the birthday celebrations of imperial family members, this essay explores the aesthetic transition from ritual to entertainment in this particular genre. It shows how as Empress Dowager Cixi indulged in her personal fantasies, the court theatre altered. These new plays initiated a paradigm shift from choreographed pageantry to an actor-centered stage, and as such indicate Cixi’s important role in the transformation of ceremonial court theatre.

This article examines how the artists Marina Abramović and Mladen Miljanović appre-hend the terms Balkan and Europe as frameworks for understanding the post-communist transition in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Abramović’s representations of pagan sex rituals in Balkan Erotic Epic (2005) and tombstone engravings in Miljanović’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (2013) capture what I describe as “halfway traditions”: cultural practices that simultaneously problematize the normative teleology of the Balkans moving away from primitivism and toward the civilization of Europe, and act as parodies of the nationalist reinvention of tradition. By highlighting “halfway tradition” as the symbol of the post-communist transitional state and a disruptive by-product of transition, Abramović and Miljanović critique ethno-nationalist politics of death and sex, and articulate an “in between” temporality that disrupts the teleology of transition.

While the Reformation has, from the very beginning, been seen as a drama which drew its cast from every sphere of society, the Counter-Reformation was until recently considered the project of elites. Even those who sought to write the social history of the Catholic reform movement allocated to “the people” the role of resisting the course of change rather than contributing to the transformation of early modern Catholicism. Swimming against this tide, a succession of local case studies, focusing in particular on rituals and objects, has demonstrated the manifold ways in which men and women of all social backgrounds participated in the reinvention of Roman Catholicism. This paper considers new emphases in the social and cultural history of the Counter-Reformation, and asks whether there remains a place for thinking about the age of reform in terms of discipline and confessionalization.

This paper explores memory and surrogation in the geographic and historical revisions/reinventions created within the practice of capoeira angola in Brazil. Employing Joseph Roach's discussion of circum-Atlantic memory, the author analyzes how angoleiros/as, the practitioners of capoeira angola, look back to Africa for an origin, while at the same time carving out an empowered space in Brazil through movement and song, ritual and play. Using Diana Taylor's concepts of archive and repertoire, the paper examines how angoleiros/as reject the Brazilian archive and claim agency by becoming the protagonists of history through the music and movement of capoeira. The author examine the word “vagrancy” (vadiagem) in the context of capoeira angola and relate it to Saidiya Hartman's discussion of postemancipation vagrancy laws and “indebted servitude,” proposing that vadiagem, re-appropriated by angoleiros/as to refer to the practice of capoeira, becomes symbolic of capoeira's subversion: it both remembers a past of persecution and challenges the capitalist hegemony by underscoring capoeira's nonproductivity.

Resumen. El presente trabajo se encamina a analizar los procesos de construcción de las identidades sociales en los niveles regionales. A propósito del cruce entre identidades y territorio, y valiéndose del análisis de un ritual (la Fiesta de la Vendimia, Mendoza, Argentina), el artículo da cuentade los recuerdos y olvidos estratégicos que emergen en ese particular contexto y se pregunta por los dispositivos que hacen que primen unas —y no otras— versiones sobre las identidades regionales. En este contexto se persiguen dos objetivos: 1) analizar cómo se reinventan y cargan de valor y sentido lasidentidades regionales —en este caso la de los mendocinos— y 2) analizar cómo se reproduce (reafirma, recrea y sostiene) la “identidad regional imaginada”.Abstract. The present study analyzes the processes of social identity formation at the regional level. The linking of identities with territory and the analysis of a traditional ritual (the “Fiesta de la Vendimia” —Wine harvest Festival—, Mendoza, Argentina) offers an account of the strategic memories and forgetfulness triggered in that context, and the question arises as to which factors favor the prevalence ofcertain regional identities over other versions. In this sense, there are two major objectives: 1) to analyze how regional identities are reinvented and how they are charges with value and meaning, in this case the identity of Mendoza people, and 2) to analyze how that “imagined regional identity” is reproduced (reasserted, recreated and sustained).

harati Mukherjee’s novel, Jasmine, discusses gender discrimination and Jasmine’s docile integration into a new culture. Mukherjee expresses the unpleasant realities of the immigrant diaspora, such as identity breakdown, homelessness, and displacement. In Indian patriarchal culture, where males are the narrators and voices are heard, women are blamed for a variety of traditions and rituals. The complicated social structure controlled by Indian patriarchal society, which may also be a significant driver of her economic well-being and therefore affect identity development, is one facet of the protagonist’s experiences. This limits the protagonist’s ability to express herself freely. Jasmine, the protagonist, challenges the concept of gender and reinvents her life to become more American by attempting to adopt a new identity in America. As Jasmine embarks on a voyage of self-discovery, each change in her personality is accompanied by a new moniker that a male character gives her. This article contends that Jasmine, the primary character, depicts a strong immigrant woman who battles marginalization in India and by mainstream white American culture and is compelled to move between identities. She bravely and tenaciously searches for a new self and identity in America until she discovers a way of living that fulfils her.

Abstract In the last ten years, Indian cinema has envisaged culinary spaces as patriarchal structures embedded with the hegemonic practices of the family. Subsequently, Indian cinematic spaces have wielded the kitchens of the Indian subcontinent to interrogate the issues related to gender, identity, culture, and the nation through its visual spaces. The culinary is politicized; the domestic space that has depicted hegemonic masculinity and intersectionality for centuries has been analyzed, exposed, and reimagined in movies like Stanley Ka Dabba (Hindi, 2011), The Lunchbox (Hindi, 2013), Kaaka Muttai (Tamil, 2014), Aamis (Assamese, 2019), and The Great Indian Kitchen (Malayalam, 2021). These movies constantly interrogate and challenge the gender roles and performances prevalent in Indian kitchens. The act of cooking, an agent of a woman's creative expression, has long been understood as an act where food preparations become rituals and performances, and kitchen spaces become a prison house for women. These movies question the power relations which overlay the culinary preparation and consumption in kitchen spaces and thereby mimic the manifestation of gender politics and power play. With the increasing patrilocal families, especially in India, cooking is no more an art or a technique but a bonded labour. This paper investigates the practical ways in which the movies lay bare the issues related to the manifestation of gender identity and the representation of the hegemonic other by reimagining, reinventing and redefining culinary spaces.

The article juxtaposes the lived realities and perceptions of a hijra gharana connected to a dargah (shrine of a revered religious figure belonging to the Sufi tradition) in a North Indian city, Narayanpura. It addresses how a hijra community interacts and develops interpersonal relationships with their non-hijra neighbours, devotees and shopkeepers, thereby engendering hijra selfhood. The potent element of symbolism enunciated through mythology, rituals and festivals becomes pertinent in constructing and authenticating the hijra identity. Concomitantly, the spiritual pursuits of these groups are intertwined with their material interests in constructing their complex universe. The monument provides a site where shared connotations for each section of people connected to the dargah, hailing from different cultural, religious and gender orientations, are invigorated. The dargah is, therefore, not only part of the religious system, but it is a system in itself. Data for this article have been accumulated through limited participant observation, unobstructed conversations and narratives of the interlocutors.

This research was motivated by the formation of a conservative attitude and consistency of the Tengger Wonokitri tribe in carrying out traditional rituals and living habits according to ancestral teachings. This consistent life attitude is influenced by the existence of the dukun Pandhita who is known as the leader of traditional rituals. Moreover, Dukun Pandhita gives social control to his community. In the reality of Tengger tribe Wonokitri's life, people face the influence of modernity and tourism. Therefore, local cultural preservation efforts are essential to do. This study aims to determine and describe the role of the dukun Pandhita in social control as an effort to preserve the local culture of the Tengger tribe in Wonokitri Village. By using qualitative research methods and ethnographic approaches, researcher gain the data. The technique used to determine the informant is the snowball technique. The results showed, in the effort to preserve the local culture, Pandhita shamans planted value and preventive through traditional rituals and daily living habits. Besides, there are efforts to repress social control in the form of planting cultural values to uphold the law of Karma Pala. Keywords: Dukun Pandhita, Tengger tribe, Preservation of Local Culture. Referensi: Hidayat, K & Widjanarko, P. 2008. Reinventing Indonesia Menemukan Kembali Masa Depan Bangsa Jakarta:Mizan M.S, Basrowi. 2005. Pengantar Sosiologi. Bogor:Ghalia Indonesia Poloma, M. M. 2010. Sosiologi Kontemporer.Jakarta: Rajawali Pers. Ritzer, G. 2001. Sosiologi Ilmu Berparadigma Ganda.Jakarta: PT Rajawali Press Sutarto. Ayu. 2007. Saya Orang Tengger Saya Punya Agama. Jember. Kompyawisda Jatim. Zaitun. 2016. Sosiologi Pendidikan (Teori dan Aplikasi). Pekanbaru: Kreasi Edukasi. Profil Desa Wonokitri tahun 2018 Moeis, Syarif. (2008). Strukur Kekuasaan: Kekuasaan, Wewenang dan Kepemimpinan. Bandung. Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia. [27-07-2019]

This article analyzes the emperorship of Sigismund (1368–1437) as a particular configuration of rule in the fifteenth century. Research on the medieval Holy Roman Empire in the Latin West has traditionally focused on the great emperors from the ninth century to the thirteenth. In contrast, imperial coronations and imperial rule in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have received much less attention. The article first presents the structural features of the Holy Roman Empire and then focuses on the significant changes to this structure in the late Middle Ages. Discontinuities made imperial rule the exception rather than the rule. Long intervals between imperial coronations always required reinventions of traditions, which led to situational negotiations among popes, authorized cardinals, and emperors. In 1433, Sigismund was the first emperor since 1220 to receive his coronation from the pope himself in Rome. The article makes it clear that Sigismund was a master in the creation of new rituals and symbols. During his reign, the imagery of the empire expanded significantly. Alongside unity (unitas) came diversity (diversitas). The article shows how differently the imperial coronation of 1433 was perceived and narrated by contemporaries in Italy and Germany.

Santiago de Compostela is an iconic place. From the 9th century through to the present day the city has acted as the final destination of a major pilgrimage route named after it. In the article we ask ourselves how the contemporary reinvention of the pilgrimage and pilgrimages on the Way of St. James has boosted tourism development in the city. Development has been concentrated in the historic city centre and in the area around the cathedral. The importance of tourism has transformed the significance of the city itself, which acquires a magical component as a place of arrival and encounter for all kinds of visitors. The historic city has been set up in the 20th century as a destination for the Way and for cultural tourism. The buildings, particularly those connected with the pilgrimage route, become highly attractive and symbolic places and tourists carry out a number of rituals in them. They travel and enjoy Santiago as a unique experience. The study of tourism and of the tourist transformation of Santiago de Compostela is undertaken using a qualitative and quantitative method. The article analyses the heritage and symbolic value of the historic centre, together with the growth of its tourism activities. Numerical data are also provided on the perceptions and behaviour of visitors using surveys carried out by the city's Tourism Observatory.

Andegna (The First) was developed and performed during the fall and winter of 2009–10 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This article examines the complex social, political, and cultural contexts that informed the training, workshops, and process of creating an ensemble and performance in a time of national transformation. Urbanization and the crossing currents of Africa, Islam, Christian Orthodoxy, capitalism, the West, and technology prompted the re-conceptualization of performance, its function, and expression. In this article Thomas Riccio highlights the methodologies of reinventing an indigenous performance that is respectful of local traditions yet contemporary and accessible. He discusses how performance provides a forum for revealing social, political, and cultural trauma, and itself becomes an act of affirmation – an assertion of protest and healing that makes visible, immediate, and tactile the histories and unresolved issues haunting modern Ethiopia. Thomas Riccio, is Professor of Performance and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, having previously been Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, Resident Director and Dramaturg, the Cleveland Play House, Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre, Visiting Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam and the Korean National University for the Arts, and Artistic Director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska Native performance group. He has worked extensively in the area of indigenous performance, ritual, and shamanism, conducting workshops, research, and devising numerous performances in Africa, Russia, Siberia, Korea, China, Vietnam, and Alaska. He was declared a ‘Cultural Hero’ of the Sakha Republic in central Siberia.

AbstractWhile change and flexibility in ritual practices and traditions have been in some sense constitutive elements of Hmong religion, the religious landscape of the contemporary Hmong diaspora is marked by dramatic changes of an altogether new scale. These include the proliferation of a wide range of competing millenarian movements. Leaders of these movements vie for recognition by casting traditional Hmong ritual practice in a way that allows them to convey their ritual innovations as more authentic than traditional religious forms, underwritten by a genuine mandate of heaven. This requires religious activists to decouple the indexical relationship between traditional ritual and its objects (ancestors and a prosperous future) in order to forge new semiotic relationships between new ritual canons, orthographies, and the future of Hmong society. Hmong millenarian activism challenges conventional notions of ‘conversion’ and ‘proselytizing’, both because the intended audience is limited to fellow Hmong, and because the suasive practices in which these activists engage are actively trying to rework semiotic connections within a broadly shared Hmong matrix of meaning.

This article maps the vital debate on Prosperity Gospel in Africa and its relevance for socioeconomic change. Prosperity Gospel centres mainly on speech acts surrounding faith, wealth and victory, combined with ritual enactments around secondary evidences of divine blessings. Claiming this-worldly success and material well-being as signs of grace it has captured public spheres and has created African religio-scapes of prosperity. The survey on the socioeconomics of African prosperity-oriented Pentecostalism firstly traces the historic genealogy of Prosperity Gospel as transposable message. It appears as a generic formula in paradigmatic reinventions of Pentecostalism in post-second and/or cold war America and in its globalisation in postcolonial Africa. The double resignification of Pentecostal theology - a rereading of ‘mammon’ alongside a new ethic of being in the world - relates to the question of socioeconomic agency. Academic discourse connects Prosperity Gospel social capital with interpretations of its ritual texture thriving around rituals of tithings and offerings. Prosperity Gospel economies are profiled as forms of sacral consumption or sacrificial economy, or else as Pentecostal kleptocracy. Contrarily Prosperity Gospel is portrayed as a variant and porter of African social change. The contextualisation of Prosperity Gospel highlights diverse social agency in different milieus. Rural and peri-urban theologies of survival differ from urban progressive and metropolitan business management Prosperity Gospel. The findings defy generalised views on Prosperity Gospel socioeconomics. African Prosperity Gospel indicates a transformative potential in immediate social relationships, whereas claims of impacting structural parameters of society remain, with a few exceptions, part of Pentecostal imagination.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt our lives in unimagined ways, families are reinventing daily rituals, and this is likely true for musical rituals. This study explored how parents with young children used recorded music in their everyday lives during the pandemic. Mothers (N = 19) of child(ren) aged 18 months to 5 years living in the United States played the role of home DJ over a period of one week by strategically crafting the sonic home environment, based on resources provided by the authors, in response to their children’s mood and state. Using a newly developed data collection tool, inspired by the Experience Sampling Method, a total of 197 episodes were collected about children’s engagement with recorded music. Findings showed that while mothers utilized music to fulfill various emotional needs, they tended to use it to maintain or reinforce their child’s positive mood rather than to improve a negative mood. Also, mothers’ reports suggested various ways that young children engaged with music, being aligned with the multimodal nature of their musical experiences. Lastly, mothers reported that their strategic approaches to use recorded music seemed to help their children feel less distressed and happier, and this, in turn, aided in the reduction of some of the burdens associated with parenting.

In "On Being Ill" Virginia Woolf asks why novelists have routinely preferred certain emotions over illness for driving plot. They have canonized passions as much as plotlines: love motivates protagonists; jealousy sustains entire trilogies; loneliness wins our sympathy, but illness almost never drives an epic. Illness does, in fact, have thematic potential: the ill could be catalysts for climax because they are direct. "A childish outspokenness [exists] in illness; things are said, truths blurted out" (13). Because the sick already foresee their deaths, they invest less in the future but want more from the moment. They would find strong antagonists in their already-canonical opposites, the Vigorous. Why couldn't "The Good and the Bad" give way to "The Healthy and the Diseased"? Woolf wants to direct our attention, at least, to this possibility. She does also admit to the impracticality of reinventing our methods of interpretation. We inhabit ideologies, as Slavoj Zizek later tells us in different words. Woolf herself avoids the technical, impersonal term "ideology" but, I will argue, she develops a model of the rules that circumscribe her culture. She argues that interpretive strategies for literary and daily events motivate each other: we have come to expect a rise and fall, a tragedy and dénouement, in our lives and our books. I suggest not only that she describes ideology but that she also prefigures what could be called a modern strategy of escape: she suggests we can only figure the boundaries of ideology by performing our victimization to them. Woolf begins by offering exaggerated versions of the existing categories of the "healthy" and "sick." She positions herself - as an author of a sane, or comprehensible, text - on the side of the healthy. She finally performs a seemingly self-conscious failure by slipping onto the side of the diseased. Here she enacts the martyrdom that Slavoj Zizek has elsewhere argued is the sole way to gesture outside of symbolic systems we inhabit. Woolf and Zizek's models diverge in argumentative style but converge in an emphasis on the sick. Both suggest the sick have sole, limited access to pre-symbolic instincts, if not to pre-symbolic thinking. Both suggest communities sustain ideology through a refusal to incorporate moments of disjunction or trauma into the public stories they create. Healthy subjects refuse the destruction of extreme surprise; only the sick lack the energy necessary for the same sustained self-preservation. Woolf especially credits biology for the difference. The ill have unique access to unconventional ideas not because of intelligence or a passionate decision, but because they lack the physical resources for sustaining a public story. Of course this biological binary also partially restricts Woolf to one side of the divide: as long as she sustains a literary dialogue, she contributes to the very literary conventions that model public myth. All acts of communication (literary and other) help sustain ideology, which is simply the story that can elicit understanding between healthy members of a community. "The army of the upright marches to battle," Woolf writes (16): bakers, shoemakers, politicians, and even allegedly racial philosophers play the roles needed to allow a joint drama to run fluidly. "In health [a constant] pretence [is] kept up" (14); ultimately only when we radically, biologically change - when "the bed is called for [and we] cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright [- can] we become deserters" (14), which is also precisely why Woolf's "we" here is performative. She voices transgression while surrendering her claims to it. With "we" she recovers pre-symbolic instinct: "…still we must wriggle. We can not stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds" (17). She sometimes suggests ideology is less universal than contingently psychological: We simply want our life stories, like some long book we have started to read, to keep making the sense we have invested in. Zizek in turn consistently insists on an impermeable division between ideology and what lies beyond it. He would agree with Woolf that by merely partaking in language games, we confirm and sustain a dominant symbolic order. But Zizek harbors less hope for "escape." He argues that linguistic systems necessarily commit their inhabitants to boundaries. Language is the structure of ideology, which always successfully hides its secret, Lacan's objet petit a, within it. Symbolic systems, and the political systems that use them to instate their control, avoid the central lack, even though efforts at "avoidance" are actually unnecessary. The objet petit a is defined precisely as that surplus that escapes signification. To mention the unmentionable is already impossible. Zizek's subjects sustain public myth merely by acting sane: "Our belief is already materialized in the external ritual; in other words, we already believe unconsciously" (Object 43). Even political revolutionaries who attempt resistance contribute to a public story by weighing in on one side of an existing dichotomy. Zizek explains that the Jacobites failed because they failed to rethink the system they inhabited. They severed the head of a King instead of convincing themselves that the king was a mere human being. Admitting to the terms of monarchy meant preserving the system; and ultimately, whoever fights or argues within a system preserves some of its foundations. Zizek's model does echo Woolf's when he states that only the sick escape the cycle of perpetuity: "The subject who thinks he can avoid this paradox and really have a free choice is a psychotic subject….who is not really caught up in the signifying network" (Object 166). Those who can 'think new' are those who misread language altogether. Having established the division common to both theorists, Woolf finds herself in an impasse. She leaves herself no room for intellectual reinvention. In the end of her essay, she drops her own voice to point to someone else's work. She offers us Augustus Hare and titles him a second life-model alongside the Sick, as the Untalented. The untalented and sick relate because both fail through biological limitation; both escape genre by a natural inability to produce it. So Woolf makes a strange rhetorical move, devoting an unbalanced last fourth of her essay to summarizing Hare's bad novel, The Story of Two Noble Lives. She ends her own work with a book she says "flounders" (20); Hare's story is sick in temper, or poorly edited; he describes insignificancies when he needs clarity. She finishes on her own descriptive word, "agony," describing Hare's own suffering heroine. This final imbalance marks Woolf's refusal to finish, and it finds an important companion strategy in her choice of words. Woolf's rhetorical move here recurs often in her speeches, which benefit from the verbal play. She picks a central term that falls short of its alleged duty (here, "Illness"; in "Craftsmanship," it was "words"). She positions the refrain as if it fully encompassed the central subject of her work and positions herself as the narrator who wants to speak merely about "illness." Of course, as said, Woolf is actually talking about more than the status of the sick in literature in "On Being Ill." She is trying to suggest several possible avenues to the unexpected. She nonetheless launches the essay pretending to be talking about the ill, and throughout continues to enact her own satisfaction with the subject. Zizek clarifies again: Woolf shows some complicity in ideology by performing a game she knows to be flawed but "proceeds as if [she] did not know" (For 53). Zizek characterizes the members of any ideology by that schizophrenia: subjects know that prevailing assumptions are flawed but proceed as if they did not know. A subject would never be able to claim that 'the objet petit a lies here' or that, 'the emperor is wearing no clothes,' because the nudity or lack at the center of a symbolic system is actually defined by its inaccessibility. Efforts to name the objet petit a might, at best, shift its location. This division inherent to ideology - between knowledge and the inability to change - is also our only potential insight into its failures. We cannot unravel a story while we partake in it; we can only reinvest in its existing terms. But Zizek suggests we might be able to signify a flaw by becoming martyrs to the system we inhabit. A martyr like Socrates performs his complicity within a system but then falls victim to it, silently revealing the flaw at the center of the system that condemns him. Both Zizek and Henry Sussman mention Socrates as a subject who performs an ironic martyrdom: He refuses to fight or take sides in Athenian law but allows the performance of his failure to explain what he can not fully say, himself. Woolf becomes a similar sort of martyr when she silently surrenders to the failure of her central term. She sets the scene for her own failure, which Zizek calls the "'dramatization' [which] gives the lie to the theoretical position by bringing out its implicit presuppositions" (For 42). Woolf's refusal to note the limitations of her central term also strengthens the effect of her failure by allowing the reader to work for her own discoveries. The reader feels more allegiance to what she uncovers herself than to the issues Woolf directly develops (like the status of the sick in the canon; our forced sympathies, etc..). The reader who privately interprets also encounters a certain subtlety in the text that strengthens her relationship to her discoveries. Woolf's central term, "illness," is - however incomplete - actually not so distant from the central idea of the essay. Woolf does not use the term overtly ironically or even as a metaphor to speak of a distinct second topic. "Illness" is in fact almost sufficient for Woolf's central idea. And even though we are left to note the gap between that term in the title and the developing ideas, Woolf's emphatic embrace of the word does not entail overt acting on her part. She performs and does not perform. She, even more importantly, refuses to acknowledge her performance, leaving us to trust our own instincts in a new interpretation. The decision to trust our own interpretation is hard: with even a slight shift in our ideas about the history of reading (imagining Woolf's Victorian residue, her faith in the very language she struggles to rework), her intent looms impossibly distant. We might imagine Woolf's own complicity with her central term. Like this, she becomes Zizek's "master," a self-satisfied leader who looks away from us. We are attracted by her distraction but are suspended in our desire to know what she keeps from us. On the one hand we can guess that Woolf is satisfied with her terms. On the other hand, we note her failure and are excited by a search for her unspoken frustration. Woolf's final silence excites us to independent imagination (why doesn't she criticize her terms?). We experience a free-falling freedom that would not have come through a direct explanation of language. Woolf can find no perfect central term; she motions towards the flaws in all central terms, and somehow comments on the impossibility of health. References Woolf, Virginia. The Moment: And Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948. Sussman, Henry. The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press,1982. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991.

IntroductionContemporary theorisations of family often present change in marriage as an icon of deinstitutionalisation (Cherlin). This idea, widely discussed in sociology, has been deepened and extended by Giddens, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Beck-Gernsheim and Bauman, considered to be the main architects of the individualisation, detraditionalisation and risk theses (Brannen and Nielsen). According to these authors, contemporary family is an ephemeral, fluid, and fragilereality, and weakening as a traditional institution. At the same time, and partly as a result of the changes to this institution, there has been a rise in the individual’s capacity to reflect on and choose their own life, to the point that living a life of their own becomes the individual’s defining injunction. Based on an in-depth and detailed analysis of a number of young Portuguese people’s accounts of their entry into conjugality, this paper seeks to unveil some of the hidden constraints which persist despite this claim to individualisation. Whilst individuals incorporate a personalised narrative in their construction of that “special day” – stressing the performance of the wedding they wanted, in the way they chose – these data show the continuing influence of the family on individual decisions (e.g. to marry or not to marry, and how to marry). These empirical findings thus contribute to the recent body of literature complexifying the individualisation and detraditionalisation theses (Smart and Shipman, Gross, Smart, Eldén).Using Sociology to Unveil Individualisation’s Hidden ConstraintsThis discussion of contemporary marriages is driven by empirical data from a sociological qualitative study based on episodic interviews (Flick, An Introduction to Qualitative Research and The Episodic Interview). This research (Costa) was developed in 2009 and aimed at an in-depth understanding of family practices (Morgan, Risk and Family Practices, Family Connections and Rethinking Family Practices), specifically family rituals (Bossard and Boll, Imber-Black and Roberts, Wolin and Bennett). Using a theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss), accounts were collected from 30 middle-class individuals, both men and women, living in an urban medium-sized city (Évora) in the south of Portugal (southern Europe), and with at least one small child between the age of 3 and 14 years old. Confidentiality and anonymity were maintained, and all names used in this paper are pseudonyms. For the purposes of this paper, I focus only on the women’s accounts. On the one hand, particularly for them, socialisation and media culture helped to consolidate a social representation around the wedding (Gillis, Marriages of the Mind); on the other hand, their more exhaustive descriptions of the wedding day allow better for examining the hidden constraints to individualisation. Data were coded and analysed through a thematic and structural content analysis (Bardin). The analysis of emerging themes and issues regarding the diverse ways of entering into conjugality was primarily assisted by qualitative software (NVivo, QSR International) and then presented in the form of contextualised narratives. Using a sociological perspective, the themes presented below illustrate the major conclusions of this study. Big Decisions: To Marry or Not to Marry? How to Marry?At the core of the decision of whether “to marry or not to marry?” and “how to marry?,” one can find multiple and complex arguments, which go beyond simplistic justifications based exclusively on the couple’s decision (Chesser; Maillochnon and Castrén). Women in particular display an awareness of the ways in which their decisions regarding marriage are crossed by the will, desires or preferences of the parents or in-laws. This was the case of Maria dos Anjos, married at the age of 26:It was a choice of the two of us [to marry]. Not an imposition. I didn’t care whether we were married by church or not… and there were times when I even put forward the possibility of a simple civil marriage. However, my parents really liked that I got married by the church. I'm not sure if this is due to tradition, if… and... they talked about it… and I also thought it was beautiful... it was a beautiful party... the dress, all that fantasy... and I really loved marrying in the church... so it became a strong possibility when we began to think about it [to get marry]… The argument that two people might marry because of or also to please the parents or in-laws explains, at least partially, a certain pressure that the fiancées feel before marriage to marry “in a certain way.” Filipa, who dated for ten years, lived the wedding day like “the realisation of a childhood’s dream.” The satisfaction she obtained was shared with her parents and in-laws:To marry in the church, with the wedding dress, and everything else... My mother in-law is a religious person too, right? So we felt that we both like it, the two of us, my mother, my mother-in-law, they would also like it, so we decided to marry in the church. To do the parents’ will is to meet the expectations around a “beautiful” wedding, but sometimes also to fulfil the marriage that the parents did not have. Lurdes is an only daughter, married at the age of 29. She argues that “marriage should be primarily significant for those who actually marry, not the parents or in-laws”. Yet, that was not her case: For us, maybe it was not so important; the paper signed, the ceremony in the church… maybe the two of us made it for our parents. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have fun [...] and I don’t mean by this that it was a sacrifice, or a hardship […] My mother had no more daughters, and had a great will to marry her only daughter in the church. My mother was not married by the church, but was only married by civil registry. She never managed to convince my dad to get married by the church. And perhaps it was a bit... to project on me what she had not done! Despite her having the will to do but did not achieve it. And maybe I made her wish come true; I realise that she had that desire, a great desire that her daughter would marry in the church. For me, it was not a problem. So, we finally did agree and married in the church. The family of origin thus clearly has a great influence over some of the big decisions associated with marriage, such as whether to get married at all, and whether to involve the church in the process.Small decisions: It Is All about Details! The intrusion of the family of origin is also felt on the apparently more individual decisions as the choice of the dress or several other details concerning the organisation of the ceremony and the party (Chesser, Leeds-Hurwitz). The wedding dress is a good example of how women in particular perceive a certain pressure for conformity and subjection to buy it or choose it “in a certain way.” Silvia, who married at age 23, remembers: I married with a traditional wedding dress, even though I did not want to. I took a long veil, yet I did not want it... because at the time... I wanted to take a short dress... my mum thought I should not... because my mother did not marry in a wedding dress, did not marry in the church, she was already pregnant at the time and so on [downgrade of the tone] so she made pressure so that I was dressed properly.Precisely in order to run away from these impositions, some women admit having bought the dress alone, almost secretly. Maria dos Anjos, for example, chose and bought the wedding dress alone so that she did not have to give in to pressure from anyone: I really enjoyed it! I took a wedding dress... I was the one who chose it; I went to buy it myself, with my own money. I said to myself ‘the wedding dress, I will choose it; I will not be constrained by... I will not take my godmother and then think’... oh... I knew that if I did it, I would have to submit a little to her likes and dislikes… no! So I went to choose the dress alone. The girl who was in the shop was an acquaintance of mine, I tried a lot of them, and when I tried that one, I said to myself ‘this is it!’ and so it was the one!The position of the spouses in the sibling group also has an effect on numerous decisions that fiancées must make in the lead-up to the wedding. Raquel, who felt this pressure before marriage, attributed it to a large extent to the fact that her husband is an only child: Pressure in the sense that João [her husband]... he is an only child, right? So… his parents were always very concerned with certain things. And... everybody... even little things that had no importance, they wanted to decide on that! […] There are a lot of things that have to be decided, a lot of detail and… what I really think is that it is a really unique day, and it's all very important and all that but... but... then each one gives his/her opinion... And ‘I want this,’ ‘I want that,’ ‘I want the other’… it's too much; it's a lot of pressure... to manage... on one side, on the other side… because to try not to hurt vulnerabilities ends up being... crazy. Completely! Those fifteen days before... I think they are... they are a little crazy!Seemingly unimportant details (such as the fact that the mother did not marry in a wedding dress) end up becoming major arguments behind the suggestions or impositions made by both parents and in-laws in relation to decisions surrounding their children’s weddings.(Un)important Decisions: The Guest List The parents of the couple are often heavily involved in the planning of the wedding partly because, although the day is officially about the bride and groom, it is also the way that the parents share this important milestone with their family and friends (Pleck, Kalmijn, Maillochnon and Castrén). Interviewees say it is “easy” to decide on the guest list, since, at first glance arguments behind the most significant family relatives and friends to be present on the wedding day have to do with proximity, relationality and pleasure or happiness in sharing the moment. Nevertheless, it can be a hard task for couples to implement the criteria of proximity in the selection of guests as initially planned. In cases where the family is larger and there are economic constraints, it is common for fiancées to feel some unpleasantness from those relatives who would like to have been invited and were not. In other cases, parents, closer to the extended family, are the ones who produce this tension. On the one hand, they feel the need to justify to some relatives the choices of their adult children who did not include them in the guest list; on the other hand, they are forced to accept the fact that that decision lies with the couple. When planning the marriage of Dora, her mother at one point said something like “[…] ‘but my aunt invited us to her wedding and now...’” Dora understood the suspension of the sentence as a subtle pressure from her mother, although, for her, the question was indeed a very simple one: I give a lot of importance to the people who are with me on a day-to-day basis and that really are with me in good and bad times. [...] It happened. It was easy. For me, it was [laughs]. To my way of thinking it was. It cost my parents. However, not to me [laughs]. It cost me nothing! When the family is larger – but when there are no economic constraints which limit the number of guests – it is more common that weddings are bigger. In these circumstances, it is also more common to have a certain meddling from the families of origin encouraging couples to include the guests of the parents. Teresa admits this is precisely what happened with her: It was not so difficult because we were not also so limited. […] We left everything to the satisfaction of all. […] there were many people who were distant relatives, whom I was not close to. It didn’t really matter to me whether those people were present or not. It had more to do with the will of my parents. And usually we were also invited to those people’s weddings, so maybe it was also because of that… In some other cases there is a kind of agreement between parents and adult children, which allows both to invite “whoever they want”. This is the case of Marina, who had 194 guests “on her side,” against around 70 invited by her husband: I invited more people than him. Why? Well... I could count on my parents, right? And what my parents told me was: ‘you invite whoever you want!’. So, I invited my friends, and some other people I was not as close to, but who my parents wanted me to invite, right? […] but ok, they made a point of inviting them, and since they did not impose any financial limits, instead, they said to me ‘invite whoever you want to’, and we invited... For me, it was a ‘deal.’ I was indifferent about it [laughs]. Marina admits that she made a “deal” with her parents. By letting them pay the costs, she gave tacit consent that they could invite those who they wanted, even if it was the case those guests “didn’t relate to [her] at all.” At the wedding of Raquel, the fact that “there is family that [only her] parents were keen on inviting” was one of the main points of contention between her parents and the couple. The indignation was greater since it was “your [their own, not the parent’s] wedding” and they were being pressed to include people who they “hardly knew,” and with whom they “had no connection”: There were people who came who I did not know even who they were! Never seen them anywhere... but ok, my parents were keen on inviting some people, because they know them and all that... and then... it went into widening, extending and then... it ended up with more than one hundred guests […] we wanted it to be more intimate, more... with closer people… but it was not! The engaged couple thus recognises the importance of the parents’ guests. As one of the interviewees points out, the question is not so much the imposition of the will of the parents, rather the recognition of the importance of certain guests because “they are important to the parents.” Thus, the importance of these guests is not directly measured by the couple, but indirectly by being part of the importance that parents give them.Counter-Decisions: Narratives from the Inside Out Joana, a first daughter, “felt in her skin” the “punishment” for not having succumbed to the pressure she felt over her decision to marry. She told us she had her teenage dreams; however, as she grew older she identified herself less and less with the wedding ceremony. Moreover, with the death of her grandmother, who was especially meaningful to her, “it no longer made sense” to arrange that kind of ceremony since it would always be “incomplete” without her presence. Her boyfriend also did not urge that they marry, instead preferring to live in a de facto union. Joana felt strongly the pressure to take on a role that her parents and in-laws wanted: on the one hand, because she was “a girl, and the oldest daughter;” on the other hand, because her mother-in-law insisted since she had not saw her other daughter to get marry in church, as she was only civilly married. In fact, Joana could marry in church because she had been educated in the Catholic religion and met all the formal requirements to perform a religious marriage: I was the person who was prepared to move forward with this. And I did not! I'm not sorry. I don’t regret it at all! Although not regretted, Joana felt “very deeply” the gap between the expectations of her parents and the direction that she decided to give to her life when she told her parents she did not wanted to marry. She had the same boyfriend since adolescence, whom she moved in with on a New Year's Day at the age of 27. On that evening she organised a small party in the house they had rented and furnished, and stayed there for good. The mother “never forgave her.” The following year, when her sister got married, Joana “had the punishment” of, in the eyes of the mother, “not having done the right thing”: one thing I would have loved to have was a nightshirt [old piece of clothing, handmade] of my grandmother [...] But my mother kept the nightshirt and gave it to my sister on the day she married! My sister also loved my grandmother..., but she didn’t have the same emotional bond that I had with her! So, I got hurt. Honestly, I got! And the day of my sister's wedding for me it was full of surprises... This episode is particularly revealing of how Joana experienced the disappointment that caused to her parents for not having married: I did not have the faintest idea that she [her mother] was going to do that... Yet she kept it [the nightshirt]! [...] She kept it, and then she gave it to my sister! [...] It was my grandmother’s! And then I said, ‘but I was the first to get married!’ And it was I who had a closer relationship with my grandmother. I found it very unfair! [...] Joana sees this wedding gift as “a prize”: It was... she [her sister] was awarded because ‘you did the right thing,’ ‘you got married,’ ‘you had done it with all the pomp ... so take this [the nightshirt], that was of your grandmother!’ The day of her sister's wedding would still hold another surprise for Joana, that one coming from her father. She remembers always seeing at home a bottle of aged whiskey that her father “kept for the first daughter who gets to marry.” I did not get married, right? And... and it was sad to see that day and get the bottle open, the bottle that was proudly kept untouched for many years until the first daughter to marry... Whilst most women admit to have given in to pressure from parents and in-laws, Joana’s example demonstrates another side – emotionally painful – of those who did not conform to marry or to marry in a certain way.Conclusion Based on empirical research on marriages as a family ritual, I have argued that behind representations and discourses of a wedding “of our own,” quite often individuals grant the importance, of, and sometimes they are even pressured by, their families of origin (e.g. parents and in-laws). At the crossroad of tradition and modernity, this pressure is pervasive from the most important to the most apparently trivial decisions or details concerning the mise en scène of the ritual elements chosen to give a symbolic meaning to the ceremony and party (Chesser, Leeds-Hurwitz).Empirical findings and data discussion thus confirm and reinforce the high symbolic value that, despite all the changes weddings, still assume in contemporary society (Berger and Kellner, Segalen and Gillis, A World of their Own Making, Our Virtual Families and Marriages of the Mind). The power and influence of the size and density of the families of origin is not a part of history left behind by the processes of individualization and detraditionalization; rather, families continue to play a central role in structuring the actual options behind the anticipation, planning, and organisation of the wedding. This demonstrates that the reality of contemporary relationality is vastly more textured (Smart) than the normative generalisations of the individualisation and detraditionalisation theses imply, and suggests that in contemplating contemporary marriage conventions, the overt claims to individual choice and autonomy should be be contextualised by the variety of relationships the bride and groom participate in. References Bardin, Laurence. L’Analyse de Contenu. Paris: PUF, 1977. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Beck, Ulrich, and Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth. The Normal Chaos of Love. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth. Reinventing the Family: In search of New Lifestyles. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Berger, Peter, and Kellner, Hansfried. “Marriage and the constitution of reality.” Diogenes 46 (1964): 1–24. Bossard, James, and Boll, Eleanor. Ritual in Family Living – A Contemporary Study. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1950. Brannen, Julia, and Nielsen, Ann. “Individualisation, Choice and Structure: a Discussion of Current Trends in Sociological Analysis.” The Sociological Review 53.3 (2005): 412–28. Cherlin, Andrew. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004): 848–861. Chesser, Barbara Jo. “Analysis of Wedding Rituals: An Attempt to Make Weddings More Meaningful.” Family Relations 29.2 1980): 204—09. Costa, Rosalina. Pequenos e Grandes Dias: os Rituais na Construção da Família Contemporânea [Small and Big Days. The Rituals Constructing Contemporay Families]. PhD Thesis in Social Sciences – specialization ‘General Sociology’. University of Lisbon: Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL), 2011 ‹http://hdl.handle.net/10451/4770›. Eldén, Sara. “Scripts for the ‘Good Couple’: Individualization and the Reproduction of Gender Inequality.” Acta Sociologica 55.1 (2012): 3–18. Flick, Uwe. An Introduction to Qualitative Research. 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Gross, Neil. “The Detraditionalization of Intimacy Reconsidered.” Sociological Theory 23.3 (2005): 286–311. Imber-Black, Evan, and Roberts, Janine. Rituals for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing, and Changing our Lives and our Relationships. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Kalmijn, Matthijs. “Marriage Rituals as Reinforcers of Role Transitions: an Analysis of Wedding in the Netherlands.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004): 582–94. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. “Making Marriage Visible: Wedding Anniversaries as the Public Component of Private Relationships.” Text 25.5 (2005): 595–631. Maillochnon, Florence, and Castrén, Anna-Maija. “Making Family at a Wedding: Bilateral Kinship and Equality.” Families and Kinship in Contemporary Europe. Ed. Ritta Jallinoja, and Eric D. Widmer. Hampshire: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2011. 31–44. Morgan, David. “Risk and Family Practices: Accounting for Change and Fluidity in Family Life.” The New Family?. Ed. Elisabeth B. Silva, and Carol Smart. 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Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. 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Füssel, Marian / Antje Kuhle / Michael Stolz (Hrsg.), Höfe und Experten. Relationen von Macht und Wissen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Göttingen 2018, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 228 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Alexander Querengässer, Leipzig) Fertig, Christine / Margareth Lanzinger (Hrsg.), Beziehungen – Vernetzungen – Konflikte. Perspektiven Historischer Verwandtschaftsforschung, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2016, Böhlau, 286 S. / Abb., € 35,00. (Simon Teuscher, Zürich) Geest, Paul van/ Marcel Poorthuis / Els Rose (Hrsg.), Sanctifying Texts, Transforming Rituals. Encounters in Liturgical Studies. Essays in Honour of Gerard A. M. Rouwhorst (Brill’s Studies in Catholic Theology, 5), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XL u. 489 S. / Abb., € 145,00. (Martin Lüstraeten, Mainz) Kallestrup, Louise Nyholm / Raisa M. Toivo (Hrsg.), Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic), Cham 2017, Palgrave Macmillan, XVII u. 349 S. / Abb., £ 63,00. (Vitali Byl, Greifswald) Grüne, Niels / Jonas Hübner / Gerhard Siegl (Hrsg.), Ländliche Gemeingüter. Kollektive Ressourcennutzung in der europäischen Agrarwirtschaft / Rural Commons. Collective Use of Resources in the European Agrarian Economy (Jahrbuch für Geschichte des ländlichen Raums, 2015), Innsbruck / Wien / Bozen 2016, StudienVerlag, 310 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Christine Fertig, Münster) Wilson, Peter H., The Holy Roman Empire. A Thousand Years of Europe’s History, [London] 2016, Allan Lane, XII u. 941 S. / Abb., £ 14,99. (Alexander Jendorff, Gießen) Krischer, André (Hrsg.), Stadtgeschichte (Basistexte Frühe Neuzeit, 4), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, 260 S. / Abb., € 24,00. (Nicolas Rügge, Hannover) Fouquet, Gerhard / Jan Hirschbiegel / Sven Rabeler (Hrsg.), Residenzstädte der Vormoderne. Umrisse eines europäischen Phänomens. 1. Symposium des Projekts „Residenzstädte im Alten Reich (1300 – 1800)“ der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Kiel, 13.–16. September 2014 (Residenzenforschung. Neue Folge: Stadt und Hof, 2), Ostfildern 2016, Thorbecke, 501 S. / Abb., € 79,00. (Michel Pauly, Luxemburg) Lau, Thomas / Helge Wittmann (Hrsg.), Reichsstadt im Religionskonflikt. 4. Tagung des Mühlhäuser Arbeitskreises für Reichsstadtgeschichte, Mühlhausen 8. bis 10. Februar 2016 (Studien zur Reichsstadtgeschichte, 4), Petersberg 2017, Imhof, 400 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Stephanie Armer, Nürnberg) Universitätsarchiv Heidelberg durch Heike Hawicks u. Ingo Runde / Historischer Verein zur Förderung der internationalen Calvinismusforschung e. V. / Kurpfälzisches Museum der Stadt Heidelberg (Hrsg.), Päpste – Kurfürsten – Professoren – Reformatoren. Heidelberg und der Heilige Stuhl von den Reformkonzilien des Mittelalters zur Reformation. Begleitband zur Ausstellung im Kurpfälzischen Museum der Stadt Heidelberg, 21. Mai bis 22. Oktober 2017, Ubstadt-Weiher [u. a.] 2017, Verlag Regionalkultur, 120 S. / Abb., € 14,00. (Anuschka Holste-Massoth, Heidelberg) Buchet, Christian / Michel Balard (Hrsg.), The Sea in History / La Mer dans lʼHistoire, [Bd. 2:] The Medieval World / Le Moyen Âge, Woodbridge 2017, Boydell Press, XXX u. 1052 S. / Abb., £ 125,00. (Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, Odense) Scholl, Christian / Torben R. Gebhardt / Jan Clauß (Hrsg.), Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages, Frankfurt a. M. [u. a.] 2017, Lang, 379 S. / Abb., € 66,95. (Linda Dohmen, Bonn) Connell, Charles W., Popular Opinion in the Middle Ages. Channeling Public Ideas and Attitudes (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 18), Berlin / Boston 2016, de Gruyter, XVIII u. 347 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Heike Johanna Mierau, Erlangen) Netherton, Robin / Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Hrsg.), Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Bd. 13, Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, Boydell Press, XIII u. 161 S. / Abb., £ 40,00. (Angela Huang, Lübeck) Kirsch, Mona, Das allgemeine Konzil im Spätmittelalter. Organisation – Verhandlungen – Rituale (Heidelberger Abhandlungen zur Mittleren und Neueren Geschichte, 21), Heidelberg 2016, Universitätsverlag Winter, 655 S., € 68,00. (Johannes Helmrath, Berlin) Burton, Janet / Karen Stöber (Hrsg.), Women in the Medieval Monastic World (Medieval Monastic Studies, 1), Turnhout 2015, Brepols, VIII u. 377 S. / Abb., € 90,00. (Cristina Andenna, Dresden) Baker, John, The Reinvention of Magna Carta 1216 – 1616 (Cambridge Studies in English Legal History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2017, Cambridge University Press, XLIX u. 570 S., £ 120,00. (Andreas Pečar, Halle a. d. Saale) Bünz, Enno (Hrsg.), Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig, Bd. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zur Reformation, Leipzig 2015, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1055 S. / Abb., € 49,00. (Christian Speer, Halle a. d. S.) Kinne, Hermann, Das (exemte) Bistum Meißen 1: Das Kollegiatstift St. Petri zu Bautzen von der Gründung bis 1569 (Germania Sacra. Dritte Folge, 7), Berlin / Boston 2014, de Gruyter, XII u. 1062 S., € 169,95. (Ulrike Siewert, Chemnitz) Bauch, Martin / Julia Burkhardt / Tomáš Gaudek / Václav Žůrek (Hrsg.), Heilige, Helden, Wüteriche. Herrschaftsstile der Luxemburger (1308 – 1437) (Forschungen zur Kaiser- und Papstgeschichte des Mittelalters, 41), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 449 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Lenka Bobkova, Prag) Voigt, Dieter, Die Augsburger Baumeisterbücher des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 Bde., Bd. 1: Darstellung; Bd. 2: Transkriptionen (Veröffentlichungen der Schwäbischen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Reihe 1: Studien zur Geschichte des Bayerischen Schwabens, 43), Augsburg 2017, Wißner, XII u. 228 S. / Abb. / CD-ROM (Bd. 1); X u. 906 S. (Bd. 2), € 65,00. 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Weinstraße 2016, Selbstverlag der Stiftung zur Förderung der pfälzischen Geschichtsforschung, X u. 366 S., € 59,00. (Gabriel Zeilinger, Kiel) Förschler, Silke / Anne Mariss (Hrsg.), Akteure, Tiere, Dinge. Verfahrensweisen der Naturgeschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 258 S. / Abb., € 35,00. (Isabelle Schürch, Bern) Rediker, Marcus, Gesetzlose des Atlantiks. Piraten und rebellische Seeleute in der frühen Neuzeit, übers. v. Max Henninger u. Sabine Bartel (Kritik &amp; Utopie), Wien 2017, Mandelbaum, 310 S., € 18,00. (Magnus Ressel, Frankfurt a. M.) Forrestal, Alison / Seán A. Smith (Hrsg.), The Frontiers of Mission. Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism (Catholic Christendom, 1300 – 1700), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XI u. 202 S. / Abb., € 110,00; als Brill MyBook € 25,00. (Irina Pawlowsky, Tübingen) Graf, Joel, Die Inquisition und ausländische Protestanten in Spanisch-Amerika (1560 – 1770). 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(Christina Vanja, Kassel) Mączak, Antoni, Eine Kutsche ist wie eine Straßendirne … Reisekultur im Alten Europa. Aus dem Polnischen von Reinhard Fischer und Peter O. Loew (Polen in Europa), Paderborn 2017, Schöningh, 237 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Benjamin Müsegades, Heidelberg) Garner, Guillaume (Hrsg.), Die Ökonomie des Privilegs, Westeuropa 16.–19. Jahrhundert / Lʼéconomie du privilège, Europe occidentale XVIe-XIXe siècles (Studien zu Policey, Kriminalitätsgeschichte und Konfliktregulierung), Frankfurt a. M. 2016, Klostermann, VII u. 523 S. / graph. Darst., € 79,00. (Rachel Renault, Le Mans) Gemeine Bescheide, Teil 1: Reichskammergericht 1497 – 1805, hrsg. v. Peter Oestmann (Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, 63.1), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2013, Böhlau, VI u. 802 S., € 79,90. (Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Essen) Gemeine Bescheide, Teil 2: Reichshofrat 1613 – 1798, hrsg. v. 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(Pauline Puppel, Berlin) Onnekink, David, Reinterpreting the Dutch Forty Years War, 1672 – 1713, Palgrave Pivot 2016, London, VIII u. 138 S., £ 37,99. (Johannes Arndt, Münster) Froide, Amy M., Silent Partners. Women as Public Investors during Britainʼs Financial Revolution, 1690 – 1750, Oxford / New York 2017, Oxford University Press, VI u. 225 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Philipp R. Rössner, Manchester) Mulsow, Martin / Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen / Helmut Zedelmaier (Hrsg.), Christoph August Heumann (1681 – 1764). Gelehrte Praxis zwischen christlichem Humanismus und Aufklärung (Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 12), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, XVI u. 265 S. / Abb., € 54,00. (Claire Gantet, Fribourg/Freiburg) Harding, Elizabeth (Hrsg.), Kalkulierte Gelehrsamkeit. Zur Ökonomisierung der Universitäten im 18. Jahrhundert (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 148), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 300 S. / Abb., € 62,00. (Andrea Thiele, Halle a. d. S.) 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Eine Biographie, Beck 2017, München, 253 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal) Home, Roderick W. / Isabel M. Malaquias / Manuel F. Thomaz (Hrsg.), For the Love of Science. The Correspondence of J. H. de Magellan (1722 – 1790), 2 Bde., Bern [u. a.] 2017, Lang, 2002 S. / Abb., € 228,95. (Lisa Dannenberg-Markel, Aachen) Wendt-Sellin, Ulrike, Herzogin Luise Friederike von Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1722 – 1791). Ein Leben zwischen Pflicht, Pläsir und Pragmatismus (Quellen und Studien aus den Landesarchiven Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns, 19), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 468 S. / Abb., € 60,00. (Britta Kägler, Trondheim) Oehler, Johanna, „Abroad at Göttingen“. Britische Studenten als Akteure des Kultur- und Wissenstransfers 1735 bis 1806 (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 289), Göttingen 2016, Wallstein, 478 S. / graph. Darst., € 39,90. (Michael Schaich, London) Düwel, Sven, Ad bellum Sacri Romano-Germanici Imperii solenne decernendum: Die Reichskriegserklärung gegen Brandenburg-Preußen im Jahr 1757. Das Verfahren der „preußischen Befehdungssache“ 1756/57 zwischen Immerwährendem Reichstag und Wiener Reichsbehörden, 2 Teilbde., Münster 2016, Lit, 985 S. / Abb., € 79,90 (Bd. 3 als Download beim Verlag erhältlich). (Martin Fimpel, Wolfenbüttel) Pufelska, Agnieszka, Der bessere Nachbar? Das polnische Preußenbild zwischen Politik und Kulturtransfer (1765 – 1795), Berlin / Boston 2017, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VIII u. 439 S., € 74,95. (Maciej Ptaszyński, Warschau) Herfurth, Stefan, Freiheit in Schwedisch-Pommern. Entwicklung, Verbreitung und Rezeption des Freiheitsbegriffs im südlichen Ostseeraum zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Moderne europäische Geschichte, 14), Göttingen 2017, Wallstein, 262 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Axel Flügel, Bielefeld) Boie, Heinrich Christian / Luise Justine Mejer, Briefwechsel 1776 – 1786, hrsg. v. Regina Nörtemann in Zusammenarbeit mit Johanna Egger, 4 Bde. im Schuber, Bd. 1: Juni 1776 – Juni 1782; Bd. 2: Juli 1782 – Juni 1784; Bd. 3: Juli 1784 – Juli 1786; Bd. 4: Kommentar, Göttingen 2016, Wallstein, 612 S. (Bd. 1); 608 S. (Bd. 2); 571 S. (Bd. 3); 846 S. / Abb. (Bd. 4), € 149,00. (Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Berlin / Münster) Poniatowski, Fürst Stanisław, Tagebuch einer Reise durch die deutschen Länder im Jahre 1784. Aus dem Manuskript übers. u. hrsg. v. Ingo Pfeifer, Halle a. d. S. 2017, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 269 S., € 24,95. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Blaufarb, Rafe, The Great Demarcation. The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property, New York 2016, Oxford University Press, XIV u. 282 S., £ 47,99. (Moritz Isenmann, Köln) Behringer, Wolfgang, Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer. Wie ein Vulkan die Welt in die Krise stürzte, 4. Aufl., München 2016, Beck, 398 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Wolfgang Reinhard, Freiburg i. Br.) Die Tagebücher des Ludwig Freiherrn Vincke 1789 – 1844, Bd. 10: 1830 – 1839, bearb. v. Heide Barmeyer-Hartlieb (Veröffentlichungen des Vereins für Geschichte und Altertumskunde Westfalens, Abt. Münster, 10; Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 45; Veröffentlichungen des Landesarchivs Nordrhein-Westfalen, 69), Münster 2018, Aschendorff, 949 S. / Abb., € 88,00. (Heinz Duchhardt, Mainz)

Introduction Australia’s mobile communications industry has been slower to embrace the convergence of digital communication technology compared to other areas of the Asia-Pacific region, in particular Japan. However, the introduction of new mobile networks and spread of broadband (albeit still limited in some areas) has given Australians opportunities to experience the new technosocial communications. As a result mobile communication resources have become embedded within a sociocultural infrastructure that is at once mobile, personalised and consumerist. This paper examines how the iGeneration (or ‘Internet Generation’, those born in the first half of the 1980s and who were the first to grow up in a networked and communications media driven society) of young Australians have taken up and embraced the mobile technologies as part of their everyday sociability. This journal issue is concerned to understand the significance of the convergence of mobile media. In this paper ‘mobile’ is taken to refer to the range of digital media that are owned and used by the iGeneration. These can include mobile phones, laptops, computers alongside an array of other digital social software and Web 2.0 resources such as email, Social Networking Systems (SNS), e.g. Facebook, that enable individuals to situate themselves and communicate across their social networks. The discussion that follows will touch on all of these mobile communication resources. It is argued that these should be seen as more than technical tools, as they offer a constant ‘tether’ to personalised and intimate connections (Ito et al, 2005). This in itself is significant because the emphasis is on a digitally mobile and connected sociability rather than any single device or piece of software. It will be concluded that this connected sociability means that for the iGeneration there is a seamless movement across what has been previously depicted as an off/online and disembodied dichotomy. Researching the iGeneration The paper draws on the data from 40 in-depth and open-ended interviews with undergraduate students who were in the last term of their first year at University in Australia in 2006. The conventions of anonymity have been followed to ensure that no individual may be identified. All interviews were digitally recorded (with permission) and detailed analysis undertaken utilising AtlasTi. The analysis involved identifying themes and issues as they emerged from reading and re-reading of the data. This group was chosen as they had established non-university social networks and new connections amongst university peers. The focus on what constitutes one of the more privileged sections of young people in terms of education, if not material resources, is appropriate in a study that seeks to explore those who are likely to be able to take advantage of innovative communications technology. Extracts from the interview data for this paper, are not intended to be representative, but rather are used for illustrative purposes. Mobile Life The diffusion of communications media has become ubiquitous amongst the iGeneration who are socially, temporally and spatially mobile and likely to immerse themselves in their social connections. This is a generation that has been said to “inhabit a different world” (Muller), where seemingly unregulated flows of information and methods of staying in touch with others ‘situate’ social lives as part of mobile sociability. Part of this more mobile sociability is the crossover between global and localised connections. Indeed, globalisation theorists have emphasised how the world is characterised by the flows of such information. Urry has paid particular attention to the forms of mobility that take place in a society characterised by the exchange and sharing of information and communication practices. This paper has a narrower focus and is concerned with what might be thought of as ‘local’ communicative practices between people situated in the same city and at the same, but dispersed, institutions. Mobile communications technology takes on an increasingly ‘invisible’ sociotechnological power that underlies the structure and shapes the experience of everyday sociability and relationships (Graham). Identified as “Digital Natives” by Prensky these individuals ‘thrive’ on their constant connectivity to one another. The following quote reflects the sentiments of many of the students interviewed: I would never be without my phone, or at least having some way of being in touch with my friends. People tend to have ties everywhere now and I find that I am always in touch at the click of a button anytime. (Jon) Key to social interaction for the iGeneration is to be constantly ‘switched on’ and available to others. Significantly, the mediated aspects of mobile technology means that social connections are valued for their ‘liveness’, whereby interactions are expected to take place in ‘real time’. In this way the iGeneration have become both the producers and consumers of ‘live’ content where personal engagements are ‘active’. This ensures that individuals are (and are seen to be) socially and digitally engaged. The new social practices that form part of an ‘on-the-go’ and ‘ever-current’ lifestyle means that to be ‘in touch’ has taken on a new symbolic and social form. All 40 of the students interviewed mentioned that they could not ‘imagine’ being detached from their social networks, or without some form of communication device on their person. The relationship between previously defined on and offline lives, or ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ situations are not separate entities in this context. Instead they are inextricably linked together as the individual is continually socially connected. Individuals are part of a constant present-ness and engagement to what is experienced as a lived or ‘worldspace’, rather than static ‘real’/’virtual’ world duality (Steinberg cited by White). As a result members of the iGeneration have to maintain two active and dynamic social presences, one that is ‘real’ world and the other that is virtual. They are always ‘situated’ in both their embodied and disembodied digital lives, and yet this is a duality that many do not consciously recognise as they move ‘seamlessly’ across different venues for sociability. In order to remain ‘up-to-date’ communication strategies are employed, as one student explained: Things are changing so fast, like you go away for just one day and you are just so out of the loop, things change continually and it’s nice to be part of that. It’s hard if you miss a message because then you are behind and don’t know what’s going on… you have to continue to make the effort if you want to stay in touch. (Kim) In Goffman’s classic analysis of face-to-face interaction he revealed the complexity of social communication and the nuanced use of ‘props’ and ‘backstage work’. In a similar fashion the mediated and real time interaction amongst the iGeneration is full of symbolic meanings and rituals. Ironically in what is often thought of as a disembodied sociability, where time and place cease to matter, it is the immediacy or live presence that is valued. Thus social life rotates around the emergence of a set of continually updated communications between individuals. Social relationships are ‘reworked’ as mobile communications introduces a new layer of social connectiveness. The process of communicating with someone is not just about what is expressed, but includes a set of subjective meanings as to the ‘whom’ an individual is and value of a relationship. Successful communication and development of relations through technology require the engagement of the self with shared social conventions and representations. Mobile technology has enabled a whole generation to mobilise relationships and connections whilst ‘on the move’ in a way that strengthen social bonds and facilitates a sense of social connectedness (Wei and Lo). Getting to Know Each Other For members of the iGeneration traditional forms of social meetings, and indeed settings, have become modified to take into account constant social connectivity. Students employ technologies to provide new ways of ‘getting-to-know’ others and to develop relationships. In particular, SNS is used to find out about potential new friends by drawing on the profiles and connections that are displayed on resources such as Facebook. Profiles involve the creation of a virtual ‘identity’ that represents an individual and may include digital photographs, music, a detailed self-description, lists of interests and of other ‘friends’ etc. Sites such as Facebook are popular because (at the time the research was undertaken) they require an email address from an academic institution in order to join. Consequently, users trusted the information displayed on these sites and rarely questioned whether the descriptions that they read were accurate (Jones and Soltren). Not only would it be seen as breaking communicative norms to, for example fabricate an identity on Facebook, it would also be a fabrication that would be difficult to maintain across the various media that are in use. Indeed it would be ultimately pointless in terms of a sociability that moves across media and between the virtual and non-virtual domains. Such sites are geared to the student population and it is often taken-for-granted that amongst students that they will have a Facebook profile. Reflecting this university clubs and societies distribute notices of events and so forth through Facebook. Individual profiles may also display mobile phone numbers and other points of contact so that the online descriptions of the self are linked to other forms of connection. As this Melbourne student explains, these resources provide new means of ‘getting to know’ others. The way in is different now if you are getting to know someone, before maybe you went out a few times and got to know their circle of friends, but now you can check out their MySpace profile, or send them a message on Facebook BEFORE you meet up. Just by messaging each other you know that there’s no awkwardness or danger of gaps in conversation before you get together. (Tom) In effect the individual is digitally represented in a range of digital spaces so that a stranger can imagine or construct a sense of the ‘real’ person without ‘knowing’ or engaging with them. Such imaginings represent an important means of being on familiar terms with others and the ‘social value’ or individuals ‘place’ within a social network (Gotved). In the early stages of becoming acquainted with someone the status of the individual was related to the how frequently they were contacted and the form of interaction that took place. As noted earlier Goffman’s (1978 [1959]) work is useful as social ceremonies and rules for interaction can be detected although these are often taken-for-granted unless people are prompted to talk about how they communicate with others. They are perhaps best exemplified by the following descriptions from students talking about how they ‘got-to-know’ one another at the beginning of the university term: When you are getting to know someone it’s interesting to see if they’ll message you or call, then your like ‘oh he’s a caller’ and can go from there. (Emma) If I don’t know the person well I like to text, I am not good on the phone and so it creates a way to say ‘hi’ without the danger of awkward gaps. Then you find yourself messaging back and forth and can meet up later… (Katie) You have to play to their agenda otherwise you never hook up. (Stu) Instant messaging like on MSN or texts or whatever totally helps with getting to know someone. Before you meet up you can find out whether you’ll get on or not and whether it’s worth you while meeting up. Kind of like a filtering process. (Dan) This mediated process may involve text messages, emails and mobile calls before individuals meet offline. Members of the iGeneration therefore use an integrated set of devices and software resources to initiate and maintain friendship networks. In effect the often-rich descriptions created in SNS reflect a visualisation of what Bourdieu has described as ‘habitus’. This notion of habitus, that can basically be seen as set of acquired dispositions is appropriate, as “when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water” ... it takes the world about itself for granted” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 127). This neatly describes how the iGeneration incorporates mobile communications technology into their everyday lives. An Etiquette for Mobility The ‘rules’, attitudes and expectations, that come into play as part of these new mobile communication practices continue to remain tied to a recognised and preconceived social ordering. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of this kind of mobile communication is the adherence to a set of social rules through which individuals continually control the process of interaction itself. This includes for example, the pace of communication, when to text, to make a voice call, or to email, and so forth. Galloway has argued that there is a “decidedly playful” aspect to mobile interaction. However, a range of communicative strategies underwrites this ‘play’ as periods of non-contactability have to be ‘justified’ or explained. If such episodes are not explained these can become problematic, generate misunderstandings or cause anxieties within networks and emergent relationships. Indeed, the “simple fact of carrying a mobile phone generates in the carrier the expectation of being immediately available” (Licoppe and Heurtin 100). For this reason a sense of disappointment, or cause for concern, may be experienced if an individual receives for example no text messages for a period of time. Amongst those students who were in regular contact with one other a set of what can be thought of as ‘communicative regimes’ is negotiated. These arise out of social practices for connectivity that are part of virtual and face-to-face meetings. Such negotiations may be largely implicit but occur out of a shared sense of ‘knowing’ the other. Actions or non-actions such as not answering a voice call or responding to a message straight away can be seen as a social distancing. For example, a student talked about how he always immediately returned a text message to his housemate because “it was expected” and to delay a response without an explanation would not be seen as an appropriate response to a “close mate” (Riley). Consequently communication regimes are developed around relationships and may be layered in terms of status within a peer group. For the iGeneration such practices reflect what in pervious times would have been thought of as etiquette. It is interesting to note that at the time of writing this paper there were 11 global groups with some 2,870 members on Facebook dedicated to what is described as ‘Facebook etiquette’. Conclusion A purpose of this paper is to suggest that recent changes in the provision of information and communications services in Australia have created new opportunities for an iGeneration to incorporate the technologies within their everyday lives. There are similarities here with the practices found amongst young people in Japan, South Korea and other counties that have some of the most advanced publicly available communications infrastructures (Ito et al). It is worth noting that 3rd Generation mobile phones, and video technologies are less common in Australia, hence future convergence remains open to speculation and dependent upon improved network infrastructures and marketing. The emphasis in Australia is on the seamless use of different mobile communications technologies and the embedding of these within broader social practices. The convenience and ‘pocketability’ of communications devices has become one of the most important innovations for an iGeneration that desires communication, information and entertainment accessible in the palm of their hand, a first step “towards a digital paradise” (Standage). However, care has to be taken to differentiate between media and marketing hype and actual social practices. Commentaries and research in the early days of the Internet tended to focus on the possibilities it offered to escape the fleshy body through the screen into new identities, genders and bodily forms (Turkle; Haraway). While there are resources such as Second Life that provide a means to escape form the embodied self the main concern of the iGeneration is to promote sociability across the digital and real worlds. One reinforces and reflects the other so that the virtual self is always anchored in the embodied self. It is the convergence of the self through such representations that whilst not exactly embodied in a physical sense refer to a ‘real’ physicality and presence. This suggest that in terms of social practices for the iGeneration the virtual/place dichotomy is unhelpful and as Daniel Miller and Don Slater note “we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces” (5). The convergence of mobile communicative resources highlighted in this paper and their embodiment into social practices suggests that users may have little more to gain in terms of sociability from, for example, streaming video on mobile phones. The emotive experience of being ‘in touch’ with one another remains a fundamental amongst the iGeneration who draw upon a range of mobile media and social software to form and sustain interactions. Such connections are conducted through a more or less nuanced set of communicative regimes that move across what for them is a seamless landscape of mediated and off line resources and relationships. References Bourdieu, Pierre, and L. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978 [1959]. Gotved, S. “Time and Space in Cyber Social Reality.” New Media and Society 8.3 (2006): 467-486. Graham, S. “Beyond the ‘Dazzling Light’: From Dreams of Transcendence to the ‘Remediation’.” New Media Society 6 (2004): 16-25. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. Personal, Portable Pedestrian. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Harvey Jones, H., and J.H. Soltren. “Facebook: Threats to Privacy.” MIT, Dec. 2005. 6 Feb. 2007 http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6.805/student-papers/fall05-papers/ facebook.pdf>. Licoppe, Christian, and J.P. Heurtin. “Managing One’s Availability to Telephone Communication through Mobile Phones.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 5 (201): 99-108. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Muller, D. “Y Bother? This Generation Inhabits a Different World.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 Oct. 2006. Prensky, M. “The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native.” Marcprensky.com 2004. 2 Jan. 2007 http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp>. Standage, T. “Your Television Is Ringing.” The Economist: A Special Report on the Future of Telecoms. 14-20 Oct. 2006. Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Urry, John. “Mobile Sociology.” British Journal of Sociology 51.1 (2000): 185-203. White, M. “Television and Internet Differences by Design.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12.3 (2006): 341-355. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hardey, Mariann. "Going Live: Converging Mobile Technology and the Sociability of the iGeneration." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/09-hardey.php>. APA Style Hardey, M. (Mar. 2007) "Going Live: Converging Mobile Technology and the Sociability of the iGeneration," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/09-hardey.php>.

Introduction What French food is would seem to be an unproblematic idea. Depending on one’s taste and familiarity, a croissant, or snails, might spring to mind. Those who are a little more intimate with French cuisine might suggest the taste of a coq au vin or ratatouille, and fewer still might suggest tarte flambée or cancoillotte. Whatever the relative popularity of the dish or food, the French culinary tradition is arguably so familiar and, indeed, loved around the world that almost everyone could name one or two French culinary objects. Moreover, as the (self-proclaimed) leader of Western cuisine, the style and taste epitomised by French cuisine and the associated dining experience are also arguably some of the most attractive aspects of French gastronomy. From this perspective, where French cuisine appears to be so familiar to the non-French, seeking to define what constitutes a French meal could seem to be an inane exercise. Nonetheless, in 2010, the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires (not officially translated), under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, put forward the nomination file “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” to UNESCO, defining in clear terms a particular image of French taste, in a bid to have the meal recognised as part of the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. With the number of specifically culinary elements protected by UNESCO more than doubling with the 2013 session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and with a further two in line for protection in the 2014 session, it would seem that an examination of these protected culinary traditions is in order. Rather than focusing on the problems associated with creating an intangible heritage list (Kurin; Smith and Akagawa), this article proposes an analysis of one nomination file, “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” and the ideas which structure it. More specifically, this article will investigate how the idea of taste is deployed in the document from two different yet interconnected points of view. That is, taste as the faculty of discerning what is aesthetically excellent, and taste in its more literal gustative sense. This study will demonstrate how these two ideas of taste are used to create a problematic notion of French culinary identity, which by focusing on the framework of local (terroir) taste seeks to define national taste. By specifically citing local food stuffs (produits du terroir) and practices as well as French Republicanism in the formation of this identity, I argue that the nomination file eschews problems of cultural difference. As a result, “non-French food” and the associated identities it embodies, inherent in contemporary multicultural societies such as France with its large immigrant population, are incorporated into a cohesive, singular, culinary identity. French taste, then, is represented as uniform and embodied by the shared love of the French “art of good eating and drinking”. “Intangible” Versus “Tangible” Cultural Heritage: A Brief Overview The Intangible Cultural Heritage list was created to compliment UNESCO’s Tangible Cultural Heritage, that is, the famous World Heritage, list, which focuses on places of unique heritage. The Intangible Cultural Heritage list, for its part, concentrates on: traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts (“What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?”) An examination of the elements which have been admitted to UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage shows that there is a clear preference for traditional dances and songs. The culinary plays a very small role in the almost 300 elements currently protected by UNESCO. With the recent inscription of several additional, specifically culinary elements in December 2013, the number has more doubled but still remains low at ten elements. Out of the ten, only two of them seek to protect a cooking style: the “Mediterranean Diet” and “Traditional Mexican cuisine—ancestral, ongoing community culture, the Michoacán paradigm.” The other elements are specific culinary objects, such as Gingerbread from Northern Croatia, or culinary events, for instance the “Commemoration feast of the finding of the True Holy Cross of Christ in Ethiopia.” “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” belongs to the latter category, however is somewhat different since it is not an annual event and can take place at any time of the year as it is not related to a season or historical event. What really distinguishes the French document from the others on the list, however, is its emphasis on the idea of taste, which connects it to a long history of writing about taste in French cuisine, including of course Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. In order to describe exactly what constitutes “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” the authors refer frequently to two coextensive conceptions of taste, proposing that the taste of the meal is both a question of flavor and the aesthetic qualities of the diner as a whole. Whilst these ideas concerning the place of taste in French gastronomy appear to share numerous similarities to those elaborated in Brillat-Savarin’s work, I will focus on the way the conceptions of taste discussed in the dossier are used to formulate French identity. Taste: An Aesthetic Judgment, An Art When considering “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” the closeness of the two ideas of aesthetic taste and gustative taste is perhaps clearer in French: the French verb dresser can be used to describe setting the table, an important aspect of the gastronomic meal, and arranging food on a plate. This link to aesthetics is important and in the nomination file the Gastronomic Meal of the French is taken as representative of the height of the French “art of good eating and drinking.” In the terms of the document the authors define the meal as “a festive meal bringing people together for an occasion to enjoy the art of good eating and drinking” (“Nomination file” 3). In evoking art here, they stress the importance that aesthetics play in the design of this meal. For them, the culinary art of the gastronomic meal involves both aesthetic and gustative concerns, since in order for the guests to savour the meal, the hosts must think as much about the delectability of their dishes as the classic French taste they must demonstrate in their table decoration and discussion about the food which they prepare. The participants’ conversation about the food during the meal and their comportment at the table are important elements of this taste, since they reinforce and aestheticize the dining experience. Moreover, both the host and guests must use “codified gestures” and certain expressions to discuss what they are eating and drinking so as to display by means of specific vocabulary that they are enjoying the meal (5). The art of conversation, then, is important in accomplishing one of the goals of the gastronomic meal, that being to share “the pleasure of taste” (8). The nomination file lists the gastronomic meal’s specific rites as involving the “setting [of] a beautiful table, the order of courses, food and wine pairing, [and] conversation about the dishes” (3). By listing these elements in this order, the authors highlight that aesthetic and gustative concerns are interrelated and equally important. What is more, just as the decoration of a table and conversing about the dishes could be seen to be arts in the largest sense of the term, so too should “the order of the courses” and the “food and wine pairing” be understood to be a question of aesthetic judgment. In other words, the role of these rites in the gastronomic meal is as much to reinforce the sophisticated aesthetics of the hosts’ meal as to delight the taste buds of the guests. The prominent role of the aestheticization of taste in the gastronomic meal is made even clearer elsewhere in the document when the authors specify how the table should be laid for a gastronomic meal. They write that this should be done according to the: classic French taste, based on symmetry that fans out from the centre and including a tablecloth, artistically folded napkins, objects whose shapes are appropriate for each course and designed to enhance tastes; and, depending on the circumstance, between two and five glasses, several plates and utensils, and sometimes a written menu. (5) Here the aesthetics of the table are not simply meant to be appreciated visually, but supposed to support and “enhance tastes”. The two forms of taste, then, are clearly complementary ingredients in the successful hosting of a gastronomic meal and hosts should pay equal attention to both. The authors state that the extra care paid to the aesthetics of the meal is meant to honour the guests and differentiate the meal from a standard, everyday meal (5). Since the two ideas of taste intersect, it naturally follows that the choice of the culinary products for the meal also contributes to the goal of creating a special dining experience. Taste as Gustative Experience, The Terroir For the authors, the French palate is not unified by a canon of specific dishes, but a shared “vision of eating well” (3). This collective vision encompasses several different ideas, including the structure of the meal, the recipes used and the choice of products. Just as with the aesthetic concerns above regarding table arrangements, the authors are quite particular about the configuration of the meal. For them, the gastronomic meal must respect the same structure: beginning with the apéritif (drinks before the meal) and ending with liqueurs, containing in between at least four successive courses, namely a starter, fish and/or meat with vegetables, cheese and dessert, the courses possibly numbering five or six depending on the occasion. (5) The structure of the meal is supposed to highlight the quality of the good products that the host has obtained and exhibit how their flavours go well together (5). In terms of the exact recipes used in the meal, the host might call upon a “repertoire of codified recipes” (3) in order to honour the shared “vision of eating well”. So deeply ingrained is this shared vision in the French psyche that the authors do not need to specify what the recipes are, and even go so far as to claim that the unknown list is “constantly growing” (5). This undefined catalogue of recipes and shared “vision of eating well,” then, arguably represent a banal form of national culinary identity, since these culinary practices constitute a “form of life, which is daily lived” (Billig 69) by the nation without being specified. More important than the recipes, however, is the “search for good products” (3). The hunt for good products begins with seeking out “local food products available at markets […] since they have a high cultural value” (6). The authors argue that the importance attached to these products symbolises the French commitment to non-standardised food products and “quality in terms of taste, nutrition and food safety” (6). The height of gustative taste is represented by the use of these local food products (produits du terroir) since they provide evidence of the hosts’ “knowledge of the characteristics of local production areas” (2). Just as above with the aesthetic concerns of the meal, when discussing one idea of taste, the other is never far away. In this case, the hosts’ knowledge of the local products, used in crafting the gustative experience, is meant to contribute the art of conversation which takes place during the meal. The hosts’ gustative and aesthetic tastes are on display and under analysis at every point in the meal. For the authors of the nomination file, then, French gustative taste is ruled by the idea of terroir. Successfully holding a gastronomic meal means that the hosts must be intimately familiar with France’s geography and the local products of France and use this knowledge to choose the right products. All of these very specific ideas concerning the aesthetic and gustative tastes illustrated in the document, then, raise interesting questions about inclusion and exclusion in the notion of French culinary identity they embody. Whose Taste Is It? So far I have argued that taste is the central preoccupation of the nomination file, which governs both aesthetic and gustative choices a host makes when organizing and holding a gastronomic meal. This discussion has elided some of the questions raised by the document’s definitions of taste, most notably the problem of whose taste is defined by the document. One possible response to this question is provided in quite clear terms by the document itself, when the authors talk about the antecedent of the current meal. For them, the meal evolved out of the values exemplified by “the high-society meal, transmitted through revolutionary France [and which] inspired working-class practices” (5). This reference to revolutionary French values reveals how the authors’ arguments about taste are informed by the values of the French Republic, a powerful notion in discussions about French national identity. As numerous critics have contended, the status of France as a republic significantly impacts on how national identity is constructed (McCaffrey), since it is conceived of through the idea of citizenship. Put simply, being a French citizen means that, for the state, one’s position as a citizen takes precedence over any cultural particularisms or clan and family solidarities (Jennings). To put it another way, whilst the individual person displays specificities, the citizen demonstrates the universal values held by all citizens of the French state (Schnapper). Citizenship is a political matter and any aspect of one’s private life is irrelevant to the state’s treatment of its citizens. In ignoring any particularisms that a citizen may have, French Republicanism seeks to universalise all values held by its citizens, simultaneously providing a common shared identity and a means to exclude anyone who fails to commit to these ideals. As Jennings has pointed out elsewhere, these Republican ideals have an interesting effect on how one considers French national identity in the contemporary diverse society that is France, since “despite an astonishing level of cultural and ethnic diversity, France has seen itself as and has sought to become a monocultural society” (575). In terms of the French culinary practices discussed here the associated problems with French Republicanism are clear, for such a “mono-culinary” representation of French foodways would potentially lead to significant portions of the population being left out of any such definition. Given the document’s reference to the Republic, the universalizing force displayed in the nomination file cannot simply be considered the result of the structure of UNESCO’s bureaucratic file, but should instead be understood as the expression of French Republican ideas of identity. Here it is the quality of local ingredients (produits du terroir) which characterise the universal pleasure of taste and the appreciation of local farming practices (terroirs) that the authors seek to elevate in the face of any imported tastes concurrently practised in France. The fact that the universal claims made in the French document are specific to it, and not inherent of UNESCO’s form, is evident when examining other nomination files, such as the traditional Mexican cuisine dossier. Whilst the Mexican dossier argues that the cuisine offers a “comprehensive cultural model” (4), its authors talk instead of communities whose identities display “distinct yet shared features, all of them together [making] for a flourishing cuisine throughout the country” (12). The Mexican file, thus, recognises that diversity is an integral part of its culinary model. For the French dossier, on the other hand, the Republican ideas are made patent by the authors’ insistence upon the homogenous nature of these culinary practices and tastes. They assert, for instance, that the meal is a “very popular practice, with which all French people are familiar” (3); that it displays a “homogeneity in the whole community” (3); that it embodies a “social practice […] associated with a shared vision of eating well” (3); and that it is part of a “shared history and that it carries the values on which French culture is based” (5). The authors also reference a small survey to support this supposition in which an incredible 95.7 per cent of respondents consider “the gastronomic meal to be part of their heritage and identity” (10). Furthermore they claim that the gastronomic meal transcends local customs, generations, social class and opinions, and adapts to religious and philosophical beliefs. Its values take in diversity and strengthen feelings of belonging for participants in the gastronomic meal. (5) This quotation demonstrates the Republic’s ability to transform the particular into the general, the individual into citizen. Here this transformative ability is seen in the authors’ assertion that the Gastronomic Meal of the French cuts across “local customs” and “social classes” to bring people together and reinforce the sense of a united nation. With this insistent discourse that the meal is unanimously accepted, understood, and practised by the entire nation, despite one’s particularisms, the authors of the file demonstrate how they seek to universalise the meal. The meal should no longer be considered as an object, for the authors seek to promote it to the status of a national myth which is deeply rooted in the national psyche, echoing the nation’s motto of “One Republic/cuisine united and indivisible for everyone.” The Republican nature of the universal tastes represented in the document is further reinforced when the authors emphasise the role of the State and its education system in ensuring that the right taste prevails. Just as many critics discussing the Republic regard the French education system’s role as one which constructs citizens (Janey), equipping them with the appropriate national values, the authors of nomination file argue that good taste is of national significance and ought to be taught in the education system. For them, this taste should be imparted to students in primary schools by regularly preparing and consuming meals so as to instruct them in “the rites of the gastronomic meal, including the choice of the right products” (8). The idea of the right taste is further impressed upon students through the annual “Taste Week” in which “educational activities on nutrition and the development of taste […] essential to maintaining the rites of the element [take place in schools]” (7). These activities include instruction in “the combining of flavours, pleasure of taste, choice of the right product, conversation and gastronomic discourse” (7). For those not at school, the “choice of the right product” (14) mentioned here is facilitated through yet another state sanctioned source of taste, the Inventory of Traditional Food and Agricultural Know-how. Conclusion The “Gastronomic Meal of the French” defines national culinary identity by combining several different ideas together. On one level, the authors draw together Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” and Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism.” They argue that there exists a state approved, written form this identity which is intimately linked to the French Republic and its history (Anderson), whilst also contending that the food practices are so well-known that they are banal facets of everyday lived experience (Billig). On another level, they draw these assertions regarding national identity together through the notion of taste, which the authors stress is integral to French culinary identity. In terms of gustative taste, the preference for terroir in the document points to how the local is used as a “conduit toward national self-understanding” (Gerson 215). Yet this approach leads to a problematic relationship between local and national concerns, which ought to be seen as part of a larger issue concerning the link between Republican values and the disciplining of French culinary identity and space. What it is tempting to ask—and the present paper is just the beginning—is how do state sanctioned bodies, like the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires combined with brotherhoods (confréries) and local organisations mentioned in the nomination file as well as the system of Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, come together to discipline French culinary identity and taste? The examination of the present document seems to suggest that Republican Universalism is one key ingredient in this act of discipline. The hesitation between asserting a cohesive, national culinary identity whilst at the same time recognising the “diversity of traditions foods and cuisines” (5), appears to be representative of the hesitation in political discourse apparent in the modern Republic. The tensions exposed in this document are being played out in the policies concerning decentralisation and recognition to a certain extent of regional minorities in France. As Schnapper puts it, the great problem which the Republic currently faces is how can the state reconcile “the absolute of citizenship—the Republic—with the legitimate expression of particularistic allegiances in conformity with democratic values” (quoted, Jennings 152). Ultimately, what “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” shows is how pertinent Republican ideas still are in France, since, despite claims of a crisis in Republican values and the current debates in French parliament, they remain important in any consideration of French identity, not only in the political spectrum, but also in everyday cultural objects like food. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Gerson, Stéphane. “The Local.” The French Republic: History, Values, Debate. Eds. Edward Berensen, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. London: Cornell UP, 2011. 213–20. Janey, Brigitte. “Frenchness in Perspective(s).” Hexagonal Varitations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France. Eds Jo McCormack, Murray Pratt, and Alistair Rolls. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011. 57–78. Jennings, Jeremy. “Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 575–98. Jennings, Jeremy. “Universalism.” The French Republic: History, Values, Debate. Eds. Edward Berensen, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. London: Cornell UP, 2011. Kurin, Richard, “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: A Critical Appraisal.” Museum International 56.1/2 (2004): 66–77. McCaffrey, Edna. The Gay Republic: Sexuality, Citizenship and Subversion in France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Schnapper, Domonique. La Communauté des Citoyens. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa. Intangible Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2008. UNESCO. “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” UNESCO, Culture Section 17 Oct. 2003. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention›. UNESCO. “Dossier de Candidature : Le Repas Gastronomique des Français.” UNESCO, Culture Section. Nov. 2010. 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00437›. UNESCO. “Nomination File: The Gastronomic Meal of the French.” UNESCO, Culture Section Nov. 2010. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00437›. UNESCO. “Nomination File: Traditional Mexican Cuisine—Ancestral, Ongoing Community Culture, the Michoacán Paradigm.” UNESCO, Culture Section Nov. 2010. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00400›. UNESCO. “What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” UNESCO, Culture Section n.d. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00002›.

Cultural Studies has tended to prioritise the domain of leisure and consumption over work as an area for meaning making, in many ways defining everyday life in opposition to work. Greg Noble, a cultural researcher who examined work in the context of the early computerisation of Australian universities made the point that "discussions of everyday life often make the mistake of assuming that everyday life equates with home and family life, or leisure" (87). This article argues for the need within Cultural Studies to focus on work and media as a research area of everyday life. With the growth of flexible and creative labour and the widespread uptake of an array of new media technologies used for work, traditional ways to identify and measure the space and time of work have become increasingly flawed, with implications for how we account for work and negotiate its boundaries. New approaches are needed to address the complex media environments and technological practices that are an increasing part of contemporary working life. Cultural Studies can make a significant impact towards this research agenda by offering new ways to analyse the complex interrelations of space, time and technology in everyday work practice. To further this goal, a new material practices account of work termed Officing is introduced, developed through my doctoral research on professionals' daily use of information and communication technology (ICT). This approach builds on the key cultural concepts of "bricolage" and "appropriation" combined with the idea of "articulation work" proposed by Anselm Strauss, to support the analysis of the office workplace as a contingent and provisional arrangement or process. Officing has a number of benefits as a framework for analysing the nature of work in a highly mediated world. Highlighting the labour that goes into stabilising work platforms makes it possible to assess the claims of productivity and improved work-life balance brought about by new mobile media technologies; to identify previously unidentified sources of time pressure, overwork and intensification and ultimately, to contribute to the design of more sustainable work environments. The Turn Away from Work Work held a central position in social and cultural analysis in the first half of the twentieth century but as Strangleman observed, there was a marked shift away from the study of work from the mid 1970s (3.1). Much of the impulse for this shift came from critiques of the over-emphasis on relations of production and the workplace as the main source of meaning and value (5.1). In line with this position, feminist researchers challenged the traditional division of labour into paid and unpaid work, arguing that this division sustained the false perception of domestic work as non-productive (cf. Delphy; Folbre). Accompanying these critiques were significant changes in work itself, as traditional jobs literally began to disappear with the decline of manufacturing in industrialised countries (6.1). With the turn away from work in academia and the changes in the nature of work, attention shifted to the realm of the market and consumption. One of the important contributions of Cultural Studies has been the focus on the role of the consumer in driving social and technological change and processes of identity formation. Yet, it is a major problem that work is largely marginalised in cultural research of everyday life, especially since, in most industrialised nations, we are working in new ways, in rapidly changing conditions and more than ever before. Research shows that in Australia there has been a steady increase in the average hours of paid work and Australians are working harder (cf. Watson, Buchanan, Campbell and Briggs; Edwards and Wajcman). In the 2008 Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) Skinner and Pocock found around 55 per cent of employees frequently felt rushed or pressed for time and this was associated with long working hours, work overload and an overall poor work–life interaction (8). These trends have coincided with long-term changes in the type and location of work. In Australia, like many other developed countries, information-based occupations have taken over manufacturing jobs and there has been an increase in part-time and casual work (cf. Watson et al.). Many employees now conduct work outside of the traditional workplace, with the ABS reporting that in 2008, 24 per cent of employees worked at least some hours at home. Many social analysts have explained the rise of casual and flexible labour as related to the transition to global capitalism driven by the expansion of networked information processes (cf. Castells; Van Dijk). This shift is not simply that more workers are producing ideas and information but that the previously separated spheres of production and consumption have blurred (cf. Ritzer and Jurgenson). With this, entirely new industries have sprung up, predicated on the often unpaid for creative labour of individuals, including users of media technologies. A growing chorus of writers are now pointing out that a fragmented, polarised and complex picture is emerging of this so-called "new economy", with significant implications for the quality of work (cf. Edwards and Wajcman; Fudge and Owens; Huws). Indeed, some claim that new conditions of insecure and poor quality employment or "precarious work" are fast becoming the norm. Moreover, this longer-term pattern runs parallel to the production of a multitude of new mobile media technologies, first taken up by professionals and then by the mainstream, challenging the notion that activities are bound to any particular place or time. Reinvigorating Work in Social and Cultural Analysis There are moves to reposition social and cultural analysis to respond to these various trends. Work-life balance is an example of a research and policy area that has emerged since the 1990s. The boundary between the household and the outside world has also been subject to scrutiny by cultural researchers, and these critically examine the intersection between work and consumption, gender and care (cf. Nippert-Eng; Sorenson and Lie; Noble and Lupton, "Consuming" and "Mine"; Lally). These responses are examples of a shift away from what Urry has dubbed "structures and stable organisations" to a concern with flows, movements and the blurring of boundaries between life spheres (5). In a similar vein, researchers recently have proposed alternative ways to describe the changing times and places of employment. In their study of UK professionals, Felstead, Jewson and Walters proposed a model of "plural workscapes" to explain a major shift in the spatial organisation of work (23). Mobility theorists Sheller and Urry have called for the need to "develop a more dynamic conceptualisation of the fluidities and mobilities that have increasingly hybridised the public and private" (113). All of this literature has reinforced a growing concern that in the face of new patterns of production and consumption and with the rise of complex media environments, traditional models and measures of space and time are inadequate to account for contemporary work. Analyses that rely on conventional measures of work based on hourly units clearly point to an increase in the volume of work, the speed of work and to the collision (cf. Pocock) of work and life but fall down in accounting for the complex and often contradictory role of technology. Media technologies are "Janus-faced" as Michael Arnold has suggested, referring to the two-faced Roman god to foreground the contradictory effects at the centre of all technologies (232). Wajcman notes this paradox in her research on mobile media and time, pointing out that mobile phones are just as likely to "save" time as to "consume" it (15). It was precisely this problematic of the complex interactions of the space, time and technology of work that was at stake in my research on the daily use of ICT by professional workers. In the context of changes to the location, activity and meaning of work, and with the multiplying array of old and new media technologies used by workers, how can the boundary and scope of work be determined? What are the implications of these shifting grounds for the experience and quality of work? Officing: A Material Practices Account of Office Work In the remaining article I introduce some of the key ideas and principles of a material practices account developed in my PhD, Officing: Professionals' Daily ICT Use and the Changing Space and Time of Work. This research took place between 2006 and 2007 focusing in-depth on the daily technology practices of twenty professional workers in a municipal council in Sydney and a unit of a global telecommunication company taking part in a trial of a new smart phone. Officing builds on efforts to develop a more accurate account of the space and time of work bringing into play the complex and highly mediated environment in which work takes place. It extends more recent practice-based, actor-network and cultural approaches that have, for some time, been moving towards a more co-constitutive and process-oriented approach to media and technology in society. Turning first to "bricolage" from the French bricole meaning something small and handmade, bricolage refers to the ways that individuals and groups borrow from existing cultural forms and meanings to create new uses, meanings and identities. Initially proposed by Levi-Strauss and then taken up by de Certeau, bricolage has been a useful concept within subculture and lifestyle studies to reveal the creative work performed on signs and meaning systems in forming cultural identities (cf. O'Sullivan et al.). Bricolage is also an important concept for understanding how meanings and uses are inscribed into forms in use rather than being read or activated off their design. This is the process of appropriation, through which both the object and the person are mutually shaped and users gain a sense of control and ownership (cf. Noble and Lupton; Lally; Silverstone and Haddon). The concept of bricolage highlights the improvisational qualities of appropriation and its status as work. A bricoleur is thus a person who constructs new meanings and forms by drawing on and assembling a wide range of resources at hand, sourced from multiple spheres of life. One of the problems with how bricolage and appropriation has been applied to date, notwithstanding the priority given to the domestic sphere, is the tendency to grant individuals and collectives too much control to stabilise the meanings and purposes of technologies. This problem is evident in the research drawing on the framework of "domestication" (cf. Silverstone and Haddon). In practice, the sheer volume of technologically-related issues encountered on a daily basis and the accompanying sense of frustration indicates there is no inevitable drift towards stability, nor are problems merely aberrational or trivial. Instead, daily limits to agency and attempts to overcome these are points at which meanings as well as uses are re-articulated and potentially re-invented. This is where "articulation work" comes in. Initially put forward by Anselm Strauss in 1985, articulation work has become an established analytical tool for informing technology design processes in such fields as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Workplace Studies. In these, articulation work is narrowly defined to refer to the real time activities of cooperative work. It includes dealing with contingencies, keeping technologies and systems working and making adjustments to accommodate for problems (Suchman "Supporting", 407). In combination with naturalistic investigations, this concept has facilitated engagement with the increasingly complex technological and media environments of work. It has been a powerful tool for highlighting practices deemed unimportant but which are nevertheless crucial for getting work done. Articulation work, however, has the potential to be applied in a broader sense to explain the significance of the instability of technologies and the efforts to overcome these as transformative in themselves, part of the ongoing process of appropriation that goes well beyond individual tasks or technologies. With clear correspondences to actor-network theory, this expanded definition provides the basis for a new understanding of the office as a temporary and provisional condition of stability achieved through the daily creative and improvisational activities of workers. The office, then, is dependent on and inextricably bound up in its ongoing articulation and crucially, is not bound to a particular place or time. In the context of the large-scale transformations in work already discussed, this expanded definition of articulation work helps to; firstly, address how work is re-organised and re-rationalised through changes to the material conditions of work; secondly, identify the ongoing articulations that this entails and thirdly; understand the role of these articulations in the construction of the space and time of work. This expanded definition is achieved in the newly developed concept of officing. Officing describes a form of labour directed towards the production of a stable office platform. Significantly, one of the main characteristics of this work is that it often goes undetected by organisations as well as by the workers that perform it. As explained later, its "invisibility" is in part a function of its embodiment but also relates to the boundless nature of officing, taking place both inside and outside the workplace, in or out of work time. Officing is made up of a set of interwoven activities of three main types: connecting, synchronising and configuring. Connecting can be understood as aligning technical and social relations for the performance of work at a set time. Synchronising brings together and coordinates different times and temporal demands, for example, the time of "work" with "life" or the time "out in the field" with time "in the workplace". Configuring prepares the space of work, making a single technology or media environment work to some planned action or existing pattern of activity. To give an example of connecting: in the Citizens' Service Centre of the Council, Danielle's morning rituals involved a series of connections even before her work of advising customers begins: My day: get in, sit down, turn on the computer and then slowly open each software program that I will need to use…turn on the phone, key in my password, turn on the headphones and sit there and wait for the calls! (Humphry Officing, 123) These connections not only set up and initiate the performance of work but also mark Danielle's presence in her office. Through these activities, which in practice overlap and blur, the space and time of the office comes to appear as a somewhat separate and mostly invisible structure or infrastructure. The work that goes into making the office stable takes place around the boundary of work with implications for how this boundary is constituted. These efforts do not cluster around boundaries in any simple sense but become part of the process of boundary making, contributing to the construction of categories such as "work" and "life". So, for example, for staff in the smart phone trial, the phone had become their main source of information and communication. Turning their smart phone off, or losing connectivity had ramifications that cascaded throughout their lifeworld. On the one hand, this lead to the breakdown of the distinction between "work" and "life" and a sense of "ever-presence", requiring constant and vigilant "boundary work" (cf. Nippert-Eng). On the other hand, this same state also enabled workers to respond to demands in their own time and across multiple boundaries, giving workers a sense of flexibility, control and of being "in sync". Connecting, configuring and synchronising are activities performed by bodies, producing an embodied transformation. In the tradition of phenomenology, most notably in the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and more recently Ihde, embodiment is used to explain the relationship between subjects and objects. This concept has since been developed to be understood as not residing in the body but as spread through social, material and discursive arrangements (cf. Haraway, "Situated" and Simians; Henke; Suchman, "Figuring"). Tracing efforts towards making the office stable is thus a way of uncovering how the body, as a constitutive part of a larger arrangement or network, is formed through embodiment, how it gains its competencies, social meanings and ultimately, how workers gain a sense of what it means to be a professional. So, in the smart phone trial, staff managed their connections by replying immediately to their voice, text and data messages. This immediacy not only acted as proof of their presence in the office. It also signalled their commitment to their office: their active participation and value to the organisation and their readiness to perform when called on. Importantly, this embodied transformation also helps to explain how officing becomes an example of "invisible work" (cf. Star and Strauss). Acts of connecting, synchronising and configuring become constituted and forgotten in and through bodies, spaces and times. Through their repeated performance these acts become habits, a transparent means through which the environment of work is navigated in the form of skills and techniques, configurations and routines. In conclusion, researching work in contemporary societies means confronting its marginalisation within cultural research and developing ways to comprehend and measure the interaction of space, time and the ever-multiplying array of media technologies. Officing provides a way to do this by shifting to an understanding of the workplace as a contingent product of work itself. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the creative and ongoing work of individuals on their media infrastructures. It also helps to identify and describe work activities that are not neatly contained in a workplace, thus adding to their invisibility. The invisibility of these practices can have significant impacts on workers: magnifying feelings of time pressure and a need to work faster, longer and harder even as discrete technologies are utilised to save time. In this way, officing exposes some of the additional contributions to the changing experience and quality of work as well as to the construction of everyday domains. Officing supports an evaluation of claims of productivity and work-life balance in relation to new media technologies. In the smart phone trial, contrary to an assumed increase in productivity, mobility of work was achieved at the expense of productivity. Making the mobile office stable—getting it up and running, keeping it working in changing environments and meeting expectations of speed and connectivity—took up time, resulting in an overall productivity loss and demanding more "boundary work". In spite of their adaptability and flexibility, staff tended to overwork to counteract this loss. This represented a major shift in the burden of effort in the production of office forms away from the organisation and towards the individual. Finally, though not addressed here in any detail, officing could conceivably have practical uses for designing more sustainable office environments that better support the work process and the balance of work and life. Thus, by accounting more accurately for the resource requirements of work, organisations can reduce the daily effort, space and time taken up by employees on their work environments. In any case, what is clear, is the ongoing need to continue a cultural research agenda on work—to address the connections between transformations in work and the myriad material practices that individuals perform in going about their daily work. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231–56. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 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