英租威海卫的外来法、本土法与民间法

在民法典呼之欲出的今天,无需民法典却并不妨碍其现代化步伐的威海卫深陷对于“民法典情结”中的中国法学来说不啻构成一个颇为不利的历史反例。应当认真对待的是:普通法的地方法制经验是否或应当如何具有普适性?中国化是外来法“在中国”的基本方式。而如何中国化,则涉及本土法和民间法的有关问题。英租威海卫的中国法律及习惯是在具体的司法过程中被发明出来的,对于这种被称之为“中国法律及习惯”的赝品,与其用本土法不如用“民间法”加以概括或许更具解释力,亦更能在法理上反映外来政权、外来法与本土社会、本土法之间的历史关系。     

浅谈高校音乐教师的素养

高校音乐教师不但需要有正确的艺术观点,掌握过硬的专业知识与技能,还要勇于创新,不断改进教学方法,提高教学效果。     

民间文学艺术作品的立法保护

随着社会的发展,我国民间文学艺术作品的保护得到越来越大的重视,拟就内涵、保护中存在的问题及解决的办法予以分析,希望能够为我国民间文学艺术相关制度的出台有所裨益。     

解决民间纠纷的立场定位与路径选择——从两则案例说起

民间纠纷的解决影响到我国法治的建设与和谐社会的构建。解决民间纠纷应当根据现代法治的精神和理念,兼顾社会的复杂性和“地方知识”的特殊性,通过国家法和民间法的理性沟通实现二者在解决民间纠纷中的妥协、让步、合作与支持,建立起多元化的纠纷解决机制。     

民间法司法运用的价值

将民间法引入司法审判,首先面临的一个前提性的问题是对民间法司法运用的价值进行论证。司法的场域运行表明民间法在司法中强有力的存在,与此同时,由于和谐社会命题的提出以及对司法解决纠纷功能的重视,民间法司法运用的价值不是被夸大了,而是还没有得到充分的挖掘。在司法实践中,民间法的价值具体体现在:有利于规范法官的自由裁量权;有利于实现案结事了,推进和谐司法;有利于顺应主体社会生活的权利要求,维护法律权威;有利于实现有效的社会治理,达致善治。     

Disempowering Music: The Amandla! Documentary and Other Conservative Musical Projects

Scholars of black South African popular music have established important connections between music and society. Lara Allen’s studies of pennywhistle-kwela, Christopher Ballantine’s research on marabi and African jazz/mbaqanga,and David Coplan’s social history of black city music, among others, have underwritten the new literature in South African musicology and cultural studies. Previous neglect of black popular culture has made oral testimony crucial to the writing of these musical pasts. Recent investigations in the field, which are preoccupied with the articulation of black struggle to music, and the expression of struggle through music, have adopted a more popular format. Within these, the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are integral, as is Lee Hirsch’s documentary film, Amandla!. The popularity of these studies and their subjects, and their foregrounded debt to oral testimony and veneration of ‘the Struggle’ has tended to foreclose scrutiny of their representational politics. This article questions whether their homological substitution of music and musicians for anti-apartheid struggles in a postapartheid South Africa enables the radical stories they would tell of that past.     

On Music,Censorship, and Globalization

Malik Bendjelloul’s music documentary, Searching for Sugar Man (2012), uses the narrative of its central figure, American rock “n” roll musician Sixto Rodriguez, to allegorize South Africa’s emergence from censorship and isolationism to a post-apartheid and increasingly transnational dispensation. I look at the cultural politics of apartheid-era censorship in attempt to account for Rodriguez’s cult appeal in South Africa, despite his artistic shortcomings and his obscurity in the USA. I then focus on the film’s final concert sequence, featuring Rodriguez’s first South African performance, which Bendjelloul subtly positions as a moment of celebration over the new possibilities enabled by the demise of apartheid and the rise of an increasingly integrated global culture.     

Arts Organizations and Branding: Creating a New Joint Brand for Three Arts Organizations

This article investigates brand architecture by analyzing stakeholder perceptions of brand images when a new joint brand is created for the existing brands of three arts organizations. The theoretical framework is based on previous literature on brand architecture and brand image. The empirical study is based on a quantitative, 418-respondent survey among stakeholders of these three arts organizations. The study makes two major theoretical contributions. First, the results show that the new joint brand can be endorsed by the existing sub-brands, contrary to brand-architecture literature. Second, even in the case of a new brand, stakeholders perceive the functional attributes as important.     

“Don’t Frack with Our Karoo”: Water,Landscape, and Congregational Song in Kroonvale,South Africa

There is a new environmental threat to the South African Karoo region in the form of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) for natural gas reserves buried deep underground. In this article, I use the issue of fracking in the Karoo to investigate the power of this landscape over its people and focus particularly on the question of how the cultural traditions of the Karoo would be affected. In contrast, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that landscape exerts a relatively weak power over its residents. My work serves as a critique of theories that see landscape as exerting only marginal influence over people. I argue that not only does landscape exert a palpable power over its inhabitants, but also that landscape affects the musical traditions of these residents and, ultimately, the configuration of the Karoo soundscape. To investigate this, I draw on my research of music in three churches with coloured people’s membership in the town of Graaff-Reinet and examine this tradition in the context of its surrounding landscape.     

State,identity, and the politics of music: Eurovision and nation-building in Azerbaijan

Albeit often – and fairly – degraded in the world of high culture as a populist and politicized representation of music, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) – by sheer virtue of the populist and politicized nature of its essence – stands among the most consequential cultural encounters to which post-independence Azerbaijan has been exposed, in that the extent to which Baku's victory in the ESC-2011 – and the further developments this victory has generated – can potentially impact on, and contribute to, the very process of nation-building and national identity formation, with which this post-Soviet Muslim-majority country is currently struggling, is unparalleled by any of the state's earlier encounters of the kind. This paper focuses on, and examines, four intimately related ways in which the ESC and Azerbaijan's successful involvement with the latter worked to interfere with the country's nation-building: as a dubious factor in the evolution of the Western sense of self among Azerbaijanis; as a unifying force within the structure of the country's rapidly maturing civil society; as a medium working to open up a channel through which Western popular cultural elements could interfere with the evolving dynamics of, and work to globalize, indeed de-endogenize, indigenous Azerbaijani culture, on one hand, and unify the discursive realm within which the country's cultural domain is to further evolve, on the other; and, finally, as an important element serving to decouple the evolving processes within the country's cultural domain from the unfolding dynamics of conflict settlement and hence conducive to the diversification of public discourse in Azerbaijan.