Explores the history and lingering effects of governmental reform of Chinese theater, post-1949

Gale Researcher Guide for: Transforming Tradition: Ralph Ellison is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Sorin argues that, from colonial times to the present, "acculturation" and not "assimilation" has best described the experience of Jewish Americans.

Transforming Tradition offers the first serious look at folksong revivals, vibrant meldings of popular and folk culture that captured public awareness in the 1950s and 1960s. Best remembered for such songs as "Tom Dooley" and for performers like the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez, the revival of that era gave rise to hootenannies, coffeehouses, and blues and bluegrass festivals, sowing a legacy of popular interest that lives today. Many of the contributors to this volume were themselves performers in folksong revivals; today they are scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American and Canadian cultural history. As both insiders and analysts they bring unique perspectives and new insights to the study of revivals. In his introduction, Neil Rosenberg explores central issues such as the history of folksong revivals, stereotypes of "folksingers," connections between scholarship and popularization, meanings of the word "revival," questions of authenticity and the invention of culture, and issues surrounding reflexive scholarship. The individual studies are divided into three sections. The first covers the "Great Boom" revival of the late '50s and early '60s, and the next approaches the revival as a self-contained social culture with its own "new aesthetic" and in-group values. The last looks at revival activities in systems of musical culture including the blues, old-time fiddling, Northumbrian piping, and bluegrass, with particular emphasis on perceptions of insider and outsider roles. The contributors display keen awareness of how their own perceptions have been shaped by their early, more subjective involvement. For example, Archie Green explores his service as faculty guru to the Campus Folksong Club at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 1960s. Kenneth S. Goldstein considers how intellectual issues of the "great boom" shaped his work for recording companies. Sheldon Posen uses autobiography as ethnography to explain what happened to him when he moved from revival to academe. And Toru Mitsui explains how and why American country old-time, and bluegrass music became popular in Japan.

The Argobba are an ethnic and religious minority in southeastern Wallo and northeastern Sawa. Despite living in harsh environments and menace from more dominant ethnic groups, they have for centuries maintained their agricultural activity, trader and weaver identity, and religious unity.At present they are undergoing rapid cultural change, and are caught up in a tension between encapsulation and the struggle for the survival of Argobba cultural tradition and political position in what once was a strategic location. This book presents a perceptive historical and cultural analysis of change and continuity, looks at how the Argobba define and redefine their agricultural and commercial ways of living as a response to threats from Oromo migration, Amhara settler penetration and Adal aggression, and examines the past and present condition of Argobba social and economic transformation in north-central Ethiopia.

Travel and tourism have a long association with the notion of transformation, both in terms of self and social collectives. What is surprising, however, is that this association has, on the whole, remained relatively underexplored and unchallenged, with little in the way of a corpus of academic literature surrounding these themes. Instead, much of the literature to date has focused upon describing and categorising tourism and travel experiences from a supply-side perspective, with travellers themselves defined in terms of their motivations and interests. While the tourism field can lay claim to several significant milestone contributions, there have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues arising from the travel/transformation nexus. The opportunity to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of transformation through travel has thus far been missed. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, literary scholars and heritage researchers, this volume explores what it means to transform through travel in a modern, mobile world. In doing so, it draws upon a wide variety of traveller perspectives - including tourists, backpackers, lifestyle travellers, migrants, refugees, nomads, walkers, writers, poets, virtual travellers and cosmetic surgery patients - to unpack a cultural phenomenon that has captured the imagination since the very first works of Western literature.

A rare look into the traditional ways of creating the beautiful masks that have brought such admiration to the Native American carvers of the Pacific Northwest. Each step to carving such a mask is illustrated and described in this book.

Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art approaches tradition and transculturality in religious art from an Orthodox perspective that defines tradition as a dynamic field of exchanges and synergies between iconographic types and their variants. Relying on a new ontology of iconographic types, it explores one of the most significant ascetical and eschatological Christian images, the King of Glory (Man of Sorrows). This icon of the dead-living Christ originated in Byzantium, migrated west, and was promoted in the New World by Franciscan and Dominican missions. Themes include tensions between Byzantine and Latin spiritualities of penance and salvation, the participation of the body and gender in deification, and the theological plasticity of the Christian imaginary. Primitivist tendencies in Christian eschatology and modernism place avant-garde interest in New Mexican santos and Greek icons in tradition.