Acculturation

Soqotra Island, the Arab Middle East largest island, is home to 50 000 speakers of Soqoṭri, which is a non-Arabic Semitic pre-literate language. Soqotrans are undergoing a dual incorporation process: The Yemeni government’s consolidation of the islanders’ politico-cultural integration into the national society, and the United Nations-led internationalization of the island’s economy through an environmental conservation and ecotourism development regime. This dual incorporation process has engendered the gradual replacement of the Soqoṭri language through a combination of involuntary and voluntary inducements: The political push of Arabic and the economic pull of English. The article focuses on the state induced dilemmas of language choice through a discussion of the typological spectrum of polarized linguistic allegiances that are engendering a process of communal cultural disaffiliation.

"Tableware, Local Identity and Choice: Hellenistic Sardis in context.

Pottery distribution patterns are often taken for granted and seen as self-explanatory. Interpretations usually focus on trade and economy. Most research concentrates on the similarities between sites, e.g. the presence of a certain ware or shape, whereas distributional differences have received less attention. This paper adopts a different view and analyses the tableware of Hellenistic Sardis from the perspective of local consumers.

Tableware distribution patterns are not coincidental, on the contrary, they reflect the choices of individuals and communities. By zooming in on Hellenistic Sardis this paper shows that local producers and consumers were making different choices than contemporaries elsewhere. It is shown that these choices are reflective not only of the opportunities available to Sardian consumers but equally reflect the identity of the community as a whole and its engagement with the wider Hellenistic world.
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The nature and extent of heritage language1 use is an important concern for scholars of the Indian diaspora. This chapter examines the ways in which second-generation Indian parents in the United Kingdom are experiencing the transmission of heritage languages to their offspring. Based on empirical findings, the chapter provides an authoritative account of the linguistic transmission experiences of Indian parents living in a land where they continue to be perceived and marginalised as the ‘other’. It is argued that although there is increasing research evidence into major strides being made by British Indians in a number of important arenas such as education, employment/business, and public life; their experiences of parenting and family life have received scant attention. This chapter makes an important contribution to address that gap by exploring the perceptions of ‘ordinary’ Indian parents about the crucial but challenging aspect of being a parent in a diasporic context. In particular, parental views and experiences about their children’s acquisition of heritage languages is explored against the backdrop of contextual factors such the social and political discourse on race and ethnicity, and racial and ethnic identity.

"The power of iconic media content promulgated through the linked auspices of converged media may be stronger than any single media creation/distribution point. This may be producing a gestalt effect: rendering its final, repetitive, digital ubiquity more exponential in consequences from the sum of its parts than from any individual medium on its own. Apart from a handful of philosophers and media theorists focused on the effects of violence on television, there is little consideration being given to the integrated study of information access and the effects of incessant media play of repetitious media iconics, which are most often highly-charged artifacts of symbolic and transcendent elements that act as agents of strong psychosocial influence and impact.

These media iconics are huge audience generators, and springboards for access and subscription. The space occupied by the global media as multinational conglomerates is the binary opposite of the space occupied by terrorists as rogue, rhizomic wanderers, and the rest of the globe’s inhabitants are caught in between the two. We are caught between their oppositional ideologies, between their tactical methods, and between an extreme proposition that the two are in collusion: between their parasitic, symbiotic relationship and between their dependence upon one another.

While icons of war have played an extremely important role in media propaganda strategies (McLuhan, 1964), media iconics recently generated from terrorism have also officially established their ground in mainstream global media but with much stronger force. And it is not just the news media that terrorists use as new media for their free propaganda distribution, but the entire domain of mass media (Tuman, 2003). McLuhan dedicated an essay to the power of icons expressed through electronic media and claimed that the power of the East in warfare was rooted in the ancient culture of the mosaic, which was a concept that children of electronic cultures cannot comprehend.

For McLuhan, Russia carried out the threat of global war with little more than iconic symbols that spoke to its people -- and the global village -- as those symbols emboldened an electrifying persona on the video screen. The West struggled to do likewise. News is economically and digitally being transformed into converged media as an eventual determinant and evangelical source for profitable media iconics usage.

Today iconic power is shifting between electronic and digital media, from the realm of the real to the virtual. Religious cultures rooted in iconography are primarily digitally empowered, unified, and validated through a virtual ‘hypericon’ as it globally resonates with ubiquity across televisions and computer screens worldwide.

This research provides rhetorical comparison and analysis of three separate, select past iconic media events that crossed between television and the Internet through primary media conglomerate channels and are now relegated to the digital archives. It considers power and efficacy of these media iconics: when they occurred vs. their remaining, sustainment today. Its contribution to the STS field is its relevance in understanding some of the psychosocial cultural impacts that converging global iconic media put on viewer and audience."

""The recent publication of the family tomb, no. 1 at Achziv in northern Israel, makes it possible to relate the Phoenician homeland to several archaeological contexts along the shores of the Mediterranean during the tenth century BC. In this paper four of these contexts are examined because of their connotations:
1. The oldest layer, Phase 1, of the Phoenician family Tomb no. 1 at Achziv dated to the tenth century BC
2. Toumba Tomb 79 at Lefkandi in Euboea (Greece), dated around 900 BC
3. The Town Deposit at Huelva having an average radiocarbon date from 930 to 830 BC
4. The River Deposit at Huelva with a tenth century BC date
These contexts illustrate the scale of the Orientalising phenomenon in the Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age. It is concluded that the Phoenicians crossed the whole Mediterranean and beyond from the tenth century BC onwards.""

This paper explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed-heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers and parents with mixed-heritage participated in a community arts project that made them deliberate, construct and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalised ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation and culture. The paper concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.

""More than a dozen of Montefortino and two Novo Mesto type helmets were found in the North Pontic and Azov area. Most of them were found occasionally, while some of the helmets came from the undefined votive complexes and the Sarmatian burials. The most common point of view states that the helmets appeared in the region during the Mithridatic wars, possibly after the raids of Sarmatian mercenaries in Galatia (Raev, Simonenko, Treister 1993). Recently this point of view had been reviewed (Zaitsev 2007).
In the article some inaccuracies in previous interpretations were revealed. It is stated that an emergence of the earliest Montefortino (A and B types) helmets from Bilen’ke (fig. 2) and Marjivka (Ukraine) may be explained in the context of Celtic military activity in the Lower Danube and North-West Pontic area possibly in the mid-3rd c. BC or later. On the other hand most of the late Montefortino type helmets reached the North Pontic area due to the contacts between local barbarian population and Rome either in time of the Mithridatic wars or during the conflict between the Bosporan kingdom and Roman Empire in 45-49 AD.
It is pointed out that the two Novo Mesto type helmets from the Sarmatian burials of Boiko-Ponura (fig. 3) and Yashkul (Russian Federation) appeared in the region due to the Celtic mercenaries in the army of Mithridates VI Eupator (Appian. Mithr. 111). Such helmets were produced during the 1st c. BC by the Celtic Taurisci and there are only a few Novo Mesto type helmets coming from outside the Middle Danube region (Mihaljevic Dizdar 2007). It is likely that after the death of Mithridates VI his Celtic mercenaries melted into the nearby barbarian population and the findings of late La Téne weaponry from the North-Eastern part of the Black sea littoral may indicate this process.
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The political and spatial reorganization brought about by the progressive consolidation of the Spanish Estado de las Autonomías (State of Autonomies) is in line with a model of 'multiple ethnoterritorial concurrence'. This model relates sociopolitical sub-state ethnic mobilization to the competitive interplay among Spanish regions and nationalities pursuing political and economic power, as well as the achievement of the legitimation for their institutional development. Ten 'axioms' 'premises', 'principles', and 'rules' are identified as being mainly responsible for setting the conceptual boundaries of the type of plural competition and solidarity put into play in decentralized Spain.

"A 15-month national research study of the effectiveness of cross-cultural training (CCT) in the Australian public and community sectors has produced statistically significant evidence that CCT is of
direct benefit to employees, their organisations and their clients.

The study, which involved a review of the literature, consultations with 195 stakeholders and five surveys involving 718 managers, trainers and participants, has also identified policy, planning and performance issues regarding the future provision of CCT."

In the face of crusades, conversions, and expulsions, Muslims and their communities survived to thrive for over 500 years in medieval Europe. This comprehensive new study explores how the presence of Islamic minorities transformed Europe in everything from architecture to cook- ing, literature to science, and served as a stimulus for Christian society to define itself. Combining a series of regional studies, Brian Catlos com- pares the varied experiences of Muslims across Iberia, Southern Italy, the Crusader Kingdoms, and Hungary to examine those ideologies that informed their experiences, their place in society, and their sense of themselves as Muslims and as members of multi-confessional societies. This is a pioneering new narrative of the history of medieval and early modern Europe from the perspective of Islamic minorities; one which is not, as we might first assume, driven by ideology, isolation, and decline, but instead one in which successful communities persisted because they remained actively integrated within the larger Christian and Jewish soci- eties in which they lived.