cultural

by Anthony Dosseto, Katharine Haynes, Leanne Brook, Victor Channell, The Conversation Slow, cool burns are safe for onlookers. Credit: Ulladulla Local Aboriginal Land Council Imagine a landscape shaped by fire, not as a destructive force but as a life-giving tool. That's the reality in Australia, where Indigenous communities have long understood the intricate relationship…

Born in 1987, Kayus Bankole lived in the US and Nigeria before moving back to his native Edinburgh for high school, where he met Alloysious Massaquoi. With Graham “G” Hastings they formed the hip-hop trio Young Fathers, releasing their debut album Dead in 2014, which went on to win the Mercury prize. They have since released albums White Men Are Black Men Too, Cocoa Sugar and last year’s Heavy Heavy. He lives in Edinburgh. Young Fathers (performing with the NIA community choir) headline the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival,…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A study published in the International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management has provided new insights into the influence of cultural values and ethnic identity on consumer attitudes towards global brands in India. Harsandaldeep Kaur and Pranay Moktan of the University School of Financial Studies at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, Punjab, hoped to fill the gaps in our…

A four-day cultural event celebrating 300 years of poet Mir Taqi Mir was held at the India International Centre in Delhi from February 15-18. ‘Meer ki Dilli, Shahjahanabad: The Evolving City’, organised by Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), honoured the city’s rich poetic heritage and traced the ways in which the idea of Delhi as a political, cultural and civilisational hub has evolved through the ages. The different sessions, whose titles were taken from Mir’s poetry, had historians, artists, writers and scholars talking…

Web novels are a unique form of literature that has been popular on the Chinese internet for much of the last two decades: long stories that are written and posted chapter by chapter every day. Each chapter can be read in less than 10 minutes, but installments will keep being added for months if not years. Readers become avid fans, waiting for the new chapter to come out every day and paying a few cents to access it. While some talented Chinese book authors got their big break by writing web novels, the majority of…

This research took place as part of a project to study the diversity of open access and common pool resources in Pemba, Tanzania. Credit: Omar Ameri Machano Community-based natural resource management has been dominated for several decades by the design principles of Nobel Prize laureate Elinor Ostrom. These principles provide guidelines for improving the governance of resource systems, from small-scale forest management groups…

In the golden age of California’s movie palaces, these expansive theaters – with their fine art deco interiors, towering facades and flashing marquees – were designed to make guests feel like royalty. Thousands dressed up to go to the movies during the 1930s, often multiple times a week, lining up around the block to see the latest pictures. The theaters were temples, made to feel eternal – proof that cinema was the height of entertainment, and always would be. But, of course, it wasn’t. Over 100 years, many of the most…

The authors shift each Natural Geographic Area's (NGA) time series with respect to a single anchor time, so that all 23 NGAs can be visualized at once. The first principle component, denoted by SPC1 is a component with almost equal contributions from all nine complexity characteristics. Credit: Tobias Wand and Daniel Hoyer Are cultural evolution rates similar across human societies? The emerging field of Cliodynamics uses…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain More than 6.6 million refugees live in camps located largely in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In these camp communities, unique cultural practices can arise. In our new research, we found the oral histories and healing practices of the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal changed over the decades they spent in camps. In…

Simulated "mobility highways" of farmer-herder interactions overlaid with the geolocated archaeological sites dated between ca. 3600 and 2200 before present. Credit: Xinzhou Chen The 1 million-square-mile Tibetan Plateau—often called the "roof of the world"—is the highest landmass in the world, averaging 14,000 feet in altitude. Despite the extreme environment, humans have been permanent inhabitants there since prehistoric…