Space Time And Culture

Interculturality has been one of key concepts in phenomenological literature. It seeks to clarify the philosophical basis for intercultural exchange within the horizon of our life-world. The essays in this volume focus on the themes around space, time and culture from the perspectives of Chinese and Western phenomenologists. Though the discussions begin with classical phenomenological texts in Husserl, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, they extend to the problems of Daoism and Buddhism, as well as to sociology and analytic philosophy. The collection of this volume is a fruitful result of inter-cultural exchange of phenomenology.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION From about 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone, electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time. Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. This overview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, and magazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare. While exploring transformed spatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between the prominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the death of God. This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally to have influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to havestructured the Cubist war that followed.

This volume explores the constitutive role played by space in the performance of Kutiyattam. The only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam is distinctive in terms of its performance conventions and its unique culture of extensive elaboration and interpretation. Drawing upon the concepts of phenomenology on the processes of perception, particularly on the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it analyses the role of space in the communicative structures of performance of Kutiyattam and its contribution to the production of meaning in theatre, especially in the context of contemporary theatre. The book explores the theatrical event as a phenomenon that comes into existence through a triangular relationship among the ‘ways of being’ of the performers, the ‘ways of seeing’ of the audience, and the space which brings them together. Based on this formulation, Kutiyattam is approached as a ‘theatre of elaboration,’ made possible by the ‘intimate,’ ‘proximal’ ways of seeing of the audience, in the particular theatrical space of the kūttampalaṃs, the temple theatres, where Kutiyattam has customarily been performed for more than five centuries. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural anthropology, phenomenology and South Asian studies.

This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction. The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic Diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.

All cultures and times have their own notions of time and space. Being one of the fundamental ideas in every society they influence virtually every aspect of society. In this book the authors explain the notions of time and space in China, how culturally concrete and particularly Chinese they are and how significant such Chinese cultural-ness of these notions is. Seventeen scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have treated topics within this general perspective in a comprehensive way.

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, Culture, and Cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

Over the past 10 to 15 years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. Here, Peter Merriman provides a contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place.

This book engages with the experience of space and time in youth cultures across the world. Putting together contemporary case studies on young cosmopolitans, young glocals and young protesters in cities on five continents, it analyzes new agoras in global cities.