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arthistoriansdiary · 11 months ago

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Fringe

Rebecca Belmore, Fringe (2007). Photography printed on canvas. Global Contemporary Art.

Rebecca Belmore's Fringe is a deeply moving and thought-provoking piece that addresses themes of trauma, healing, and history, particularly in the context of indigenous peoples and women. This analysis delves into the various elements that make Fringe a significant work in contemporary art.

Artistic Concept: Fringe is a striking piece, depicting a life-sized photograph of a reclining Indigenous woman, her back turned to the viewer. A striking feature of the work is a large wound on her back, from which red threads resembling blood, or perhaps fringe, flow down. This wound and its vivid depiction are central to understanding the piece's emotional and historical depth.

Symbolism and Representation: The wound in Fringe is symbolic of the historical and ongoing trauma experienced by Indigenous communities, particularly the women. It speaks to the violence inflicted upon these communities and the scars – both physical and emotional – that they bear. The flowing threads can be interpreted as a symbol of bleeding, representing ongoing pain, or as fringe, suggesting a cultural connection and resilience.

Medium and Technique: Belmore's choice of medium – photography printed on canvas, with the addition of the three-dimensional element of the threads – bridges traditional and contemporary art forms. The use of these materials emphasizes the raw and tactile nature of the subject matter, making it both visually striking and emotionally resonant.

Contextual Importance: Fringe is not just a piece of art; it is a statement about the resilience and suffering of Indigenous peoples. In the context of Belmore's broader work, which often tackles issues of social and political importance, Fringe stands out as a particularly poignant commentary on the intersection of gender, history, and colonialism.

Reflecting on Trauma and Resilience: How does Fringe by Rebecca Belmore resonate with your understanding of art as a medium for addressing historical and cultural trauma? What emotions or thoughts does this piece evoke in you about the experiences of Indigenous peoples?

#RebeccaBelmore #Fringe #IndigenousArt #ContemporaryArt #ArtAndHistory #CulturalTrauma #ArtAsActivism #CanadianArt #IndigenousVoices #ArtisticExpression #WomenInArt #HistoricalArt #ArtBlogger #ArtForChange

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insteadhere · 5 years ago

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Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia

While in a ‘let me share parts of articles I love’, here are some excerpts from one of my favourite pieces from the past year or so:

Robert J. Brulle & Kari Marie Norgaard (2019): Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia, Environmental Politics

Overall, the way they theorize ‘social inertia’ and even resistance to action w.r.t. climate change also applies very well to a variety of issues we’re dealing with today.

While in a ‘let me share parts of articles I love’, here are some excerpts from one of my favourite pieces from the past year or so:

Robert J. Brulle & Kari Marie Norgaard (2019): Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia, Environmental Politics

Overall, the way they theorize ‘social inertia’ and even resistance to action w.r.t. climate change also applies very well to a variety of issues we’re dealing with today.

ABSTRACT

The failure of societies to respond in a concerted, meaningful way to climate change is a core concern of the social science climate literature. Existing explanations of social inertia display little coherence. Here, a theoretical approach is suggested that integrates disparate perspectives on social inertia regarding climate change. Climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma. The threat of cultural trauma is met with resistance and attempts to restore and maintain the status quo. Thus, efforts to avoid large-scale social changes associated with climate change constitute an effort to avoid cultural trauma, and result in social inertia regarding climate change at individual, institutional, and societal levels. Existing approaches to social inertia are reviewed. An intellectual framework utilizing the work of Pierre Bourdieu is proposed to integrate these different levels of social interaction. Social processes that maintain social order and thus avoid cultural trauma create social inertia regarding climate change.

There has been insufficient mobilization and engagement to affect the level of public urgency and even interest that the predictions of climate scientists would warrant. Rather, efforts to address climate change have encountered substantial social inertia, the interrelated cultural, institutional, and individual processes that inhibit actions to address this pressing issue. Why is this?

The failure to realistically address climate change is a dominant theme across the social science literature. However, explanations for social inertia vary widely across disciplines and remain piecemeal, and the interdisciplin- ary conversation remains dominated by natural science and economic perspectives. As shown by Brulle and Dunlap (2015, p. 5–14), these approaches suffer from substantial limitations. What has emerged is, by and large, a confused mixture of disciplinary perspectives that fails to cohere into a comprehensive approach capable of explaining the present paralysis or guiding future action. Extending earlier attempts to develop a comprehensive approach to understanding social inertia (see Leahy et al. 2010), we seek here to develop a conceptual framework and theoretical argument to explain the interrelated social processes that drive different levels of cultural inertia on climate change.

We focus our theoretical examination on the notion of avoidance of cultural trauma. Cultural trauma is a social process that involves the sys- tematic disruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subject to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in pro- found challenges to routine, taken-for-granted ways of interacting (Alexander 2004, 2012, Sztompka 2004). We argue that climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma in two senses. First, the unusual natural events linked to climate change, such as fire and flood, can serve as a direct disruption of social practice and thus create potentially traumatic outcomes. Second, climate change constitutes a profound symbolic challenge to the existing social order and is thus a potentially traumatic threat (Zizek 2010, p. 326–327, Hamilton 2012, p. 728). This is because the social con-struction of climate change as a collective concern challenges the underlying narratives of collective identity and invokes a symbolic process of meaning construction based on a new narrative of the social order. The risk of cultural trauma is met with resistance and attempts to restore and maintain the status quo. These actions to avoid cultural trauma result in social inertia on climate change at the individual, institutional, and societal levels.

Cultural trauma and social change

Given the interlocking operation of cultural order and social reproduction, social transformation is for the most part an incremental process. However, societies can experience periods of social destabilization that take the form of cultural traumas. Cultural trauma is a social process that involves the systematic disruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subject to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in pro- found challenges to routine ways of interacting, which are normally taken for granted (Alexander 2004, 2012, Sztompka 2004).

There are two related approaches to understanding the development of cultural trauma. The first is centered on the occurrence of major disruptive events. For Sztompka (2004, p. 164) cultural traumas are events or situa- tions that produce ‘dislocations in the routine, accustomed ways of acting or thinking’. They occur when members of a specific social group are subjected to an event that creates an indelible impression and shifts the group consciousness fundamentally, such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Additionally, environmental events exert a prolonged and cumula- tive pressure that can eventually reach a point where it induces cultural trauma (Sztompka 2004, p. 158). Eyerman (2015, p. 9) expands this per- spective by showing that the failure of a meaningful response to Hurricane Katrina undermined citizens’ expectations of government protection and thus led to a cultural trauma among those most impacted. While examining different types of events, both authors center on external phenomena as driving forces behind the creation of cultural trauma.

A second approach developed primarily by Alexander (2004, 2012), centers on the social construction of a cultural trauma. For Alexander, events in themselves do not create cultural traumas. Rather, cultural traumas are socially constructed narratives that challenge the existing social order and notions of collective identity. They take the form of a narrative of ‘some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’ (Alexander 2012, p. 16). This alternative narrative challenges the taken-for-granted narrative, leading to a symbolic struggle. In this process, the nature of dominant cultural beliefs is brought into question, and these challenges to the cultural system are then reflected in ongoing institutional interactions and at the everyday level of the habitus. They serve to dislocate the social reality that anchors individual identities and social interactions. Thus in this perspective, cultural traumas are not attributable to a particular event, but to how that event is perceived and reflected in collective understandings of the event (Alexander 2004, p. 10).

In both perspectives, cultural traumas can be seen as a systematic dis- ruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subjected to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in profound challenges to routine ways of interacting. In response, new cultural per- spectives and regimes of practice develop and expand (Sztompka 2004, p. 194), these changes in turn precipitate clashes between cultural practices of the adherents socialized in the old and new cultural systems. These clashes produce disruptions across all levels of the social order, leading to cultural transformation (Sztompka 2004, p. 194, Eyerman 2015).

Climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma as defined by both theories. First, the unusual natural events linked to climate change can serve as a direct disruption of social practice and thus potentially create cultural trauma. Eyerman’s (2015) analysis shows how the failure of an adequate government response to Hurricane Katrina led to the creation of cultural trauma among severely impacted populations.

Second, climate change has provoked an alternative narrative to the continuation of business as usual. Advanced by climate scientists, this climate change narrative describes the massive damage caused by carbon emissions to both humans and natural systems. This narrative also demands profound changes in the practices connected to carbon emissions and, as used in the Climate Justice discourse, reparations for damages caused by fossil fuel use. Thus the alternative narrative of climate change constitutes a fundamental challenge to the existing social order and has the potential to emerge as a major cultural trauma (Zizek 2010, p. 326–327, Hamilton 2012, p. 728). In a highly incisive analysis, Smith and Howe (2015) see the climate change symbolic contest as a social drama. This symbolic struggle builds on Alexander’s (2012, p. 16) insight about the social construction of climate change as a potential cultural trauma. Smith and Howe (2015) demonstrate that the intensely emotional debate about climate change is an effort to construct and advance a new narrative that would bring about a severe dislocation of existing social practice. This alternative narrative is opposed by efforts to avoid large-scale social changes and thus maintain the status quo.

#culturaltrauma #theory #environmental activism

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