David Ewick



 

Privileged at the Margins:
Critical Theory and Cultural Change (Abstract)

David Ewick and Modjtaba Sadria
Chuo University, Tokyo

This paper develops the thesis that cultural change emerges from within contexts in which new meaning has been created, and that the power to create meaning does not, as is usually supposed, lie within the established order of a cultural, social, or political system but rather at its peripheries, borders, and margins. The understanding is that the central structures of a system are held together by a tightly intertwined, powerful, and normative network of texts and interests that limit rather than facilitate the freedom to create meaning, and that it is rather at the peripheries, where the entrenched structures of power are not so thick, that the possibility of the creation of meaning is rich.

The model in this way proposes that cultural change is effected by those who have the capabilities of the elite but no illusion of power, those who have developed the capacities of the centre but who choose to work at the margins. The paper will address the ways this understanding differs from neo-Marxist conceptions of political action, fifty years of development theory, and mainstream understandings of globalization, and will draw upon data from across the range of the social and human sciences.

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Outline of the paper as presented @ EACLAS, ‘Sharing Places: Searching for Common Ground in a World of Continuing Exclusion’, University of Malta, 21 ~ 26 March 2005:

1. Abstract: Centres, margins, and networks of meaning

2. Motivations and methods

3. The ‘culture concept’

4. The hegemony of the few

5. Representations of the subaltern

6. Big stories and little stories in East Asia

7. Subaltern knowledge and cultural change


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