20 September 2009

The Origins of Anything

This post takes on the originality of phenomena, cultures and products.

2 comments:

Dahl og Uhre arkitekter said...

Miia-Liina
We appreciate your drawings trying to carve out how ideas and events travel the worlds, locate, are being transformed and appear in new versions. One year ago, when we received the 1.prize in the Øresund visions 2040 we attended a lecture by one of our guests in the mosaic, Jørgen Primdahl, prof. and researcher on the effect of global farming and global markets in Danish agriculture. He refered to Manuel Castels in his research. You may well now that Castels travelled the worlds in five years before he wrote his acclaimed book on global impact and all its aspects.
If you go to this website, http://northernexperiments.0047.org/, you will find a marvellous work on the IKEA global Kingdom, located to the Northern regions, done by the artist Arvid Sveen

KE+K

Unknown said...

Your discussion about originality of a culture when placed in a new setting has made me think about the multicultural society in Malmö.

I have been pondering about Rosengård and how it is so easy for us to describe something unfamiliar as something homogenous when it is really not. Within Rosengård for example, 60% of the population is born abroad and 111 countries are represented. I wonder if it might benefit the prosess of discussing Rosengård to see the phenomena rising there as something swedish rather than something foreign.

Also, to distinguish between and accomodate for the differences within "easy-to-regard-as-but-not-really-homogenous" becomes rather meaningless: That would mean 111 categories. It might be more rational to consider the inhabitants in Rosengård as individuals rather than members of an ethnic minority?

When discussing culture and ethnicity one can define culture as something that manifests ethnicity. And one can further divide between the cultural content of an ethnicity and the strategies for ethnic self-identification. A research carried out in Great Britain in 1997 shows how these two aspects were intimately connected among 1st generation immigrants, whereas in the second generation ethnicity had more importance as a symbol than anything else. In parcticality their cultural behaviour did not differ much from that of Britons of the same age. (Modood et al. (1997:337))

The reading of Bateson has cast another light on this topic through his definition of social ecology. He regards the development of subsystems within civilisation as something that eats up flexibility and there for must be controlled. Malmö has now it's bridge to Europe. How does the bridge from Rosengård to Malmö look?